Dramatic opinions and essays by G. Bernard Shaw; containing as well A word on the Dramatic opinions and essays, of G. Bernard Shaw

University of California • Berkeley

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LUCILE HEMING KOSHLAND

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DANIEL EDWARD KOSHLAND

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DRAMATIC
OPINIONS
AND ESSAYS

DRAMATIC OPINIONS
AND ESSAYS BY G. BER-
NARD SHAW

CONTAINING AS WELL

A WORD ON THE DRAMATIC
OPINIONS AND ESSAYS OF G. BER-
NARD SHAW BY JAMES HUNEKER

VOLUME TWO

NEW YORK: BRENTANO'S
MCMVI

Copyright^ igo6

By Brentano's

Published October, /god

CONTENTS

Volume II

PAOB

The New Magda and The New Cyprienne . . i

Miss Nethersole and Mrs. Kendal .... lo

Some Other Critics 19

The Second Dating of Sheridan 28

"The Spacious Times'' 36

Daly Undaunted 43

Blaming The Bard 51

Morris as Actor and Dramatist 60 «

The Red Robe 70

On Deadheads and Other Matters .... 79

Ibsen Ahead ! 87

Peer Gynt in Paris 95

Little Eyolf 106

Tou JOURS Shakespeare 116

Ibsen Without Tears 122

Richard Himself Again ........ 131

Better than Shakespeare 140

Satan Saved at Last 145

The New Ibsen Play 154

V

Contents

PAOB

Olivia ; . . 162

Mr. Wilson Barrett as the Messiah . . . 170

For England, Home and Beauty 178

The Echegaray Matinees 186

Gallery Rowdyism 195

Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen 203

Shakespeare in Manchester 210

Meredith on Comedy 219

Mr. Pinero on Turning Forty 228

Madame Sans-Gene 238

John Gabriel Borkman ' . 245

A Doll's House Again 255

Ibsen Triumphant 263

Mainly About Shakespeare 272

Robertson Redivivus 281

Lorenzaccio . 287

Ghosts at the Jubilee 295

Mr. Grundy's Improvements on Dumas . . . 304

"Hamlet" 313

At Several Theatres 323

The Theatres 331

Romance in its Last Ditch 339

Vegetarian and Arboreal 349

Chin Chon Chino 357

Shakespeare and Mr. Barrie 362

On Pleasure Bent 37^

A Breath from the Spanish Main .... 380

Hamlet Revisited 3^7

vi

Contents

PAOB

Peace and Good Will to Managers .... 392

Tappertit on C^sar 397

Mr. Pinero's Past 406

Beaumont and Fletcher 414

Shakespeare's Merry Gentlemen 418

The Drama in Hoxton 4^5

Mr. Charles Frohman's Mission 434

The Drama Purified 439

Kate Terry 444

Van Am burgh Revived 451

G. B. S. Vivisected 459

Valedictory 464

vil

DRAMATIC
OPINIONS
AND ESSAYS

THE NEW MAGDA AND THE NEW
CYPRIENNE

Magda: a play in four acts. Translated by Louis
N. Parker from Hermann Sudermann's "Home."
Lyceum Theatre, 3 June, 1896.
The Queen's Proctor: a comedy in three acts.
Adapted by Herman Merivale from "Divorgons," by
Victorien Sardou and E. de Najac Royalty Theatre,
2 June, 1896.

IN ALi^ the arts there is a distinction between the mere
physical artistic faculty, consisting of a very fine
sense of color, form, tone, rhythmic movement, and
so on, and that supreme sense of humanity which alone
can raise the art work created by the physical artistic
faculties into a convincing presentment of life. Take the
art of acting, for instance. The physically gifted actor
can fill in a conventional artistic outline with great charm.
He — or she (I really mean she, as will appear presently)
— can move exquisitely within the prescribed orbit of a
dance, can ring out the measure of a line of blank verse
to a hair's-breadth, can devise a dress well and wear it
beautifully, can, in short, carry out with infinite fascina-
tion the design of any dramatic work that aims at sen-
suous and romantic beauty alone. But present this same
fascinating actress with a work to the execution of which
the sense of humanity is the only clue, in which there is
no verse to guide the voice and no dance to guide the
body, in which every line must appear ponderously dull
and insignificant unless its truth as the utterance of a
deeply moved human soul can be made apparent, in which
the epicurean admiration of her as an exquisite appari-
tion, heightened, of course, by sex attraction, can be but

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

a trifling element in the deep sympathy with her as a
fellow-creature which is produced by a great dramatist's
revelation of ourselves to our own consciousness through
her part, and then you may very possibly see your be-
witching artist making a quite childish failure on the very
boards where a little while before she was disputing the
crown of her profession with the greatest actresses in the
world.

If you doubt me, then do you, if you have had the good
fortune to see Mrs. Patrick Campbell play Militza in
"For the Crown" like an embodied picture or poem of
the decorative romantic type, now go and see her play
Magda. And go soon; for the play will not run long:
human nature will not endure such a spectacle for many
weeks. That is not the fault of the play, which does not
fail until she kills it. At the end of the first act, before
Magda appears, the applause has a rising flood in it which
shows that the house is caught by the promise of the
drama. Ten minutes after Mrs. Campbell's entry it is
all over : thenceforward the applause, though complimen-
tary and copious, is from the lips outward. The first-
night audience had for the most part seen Bernhardt and
Duse in the part, and knew what could be done with it.
Nobody, I presume, was so foolishly unreasonable as to
expect anything approaching the wonderful impersona-
tion by Duse at Drury Lane, when she first played the
part here last year. Mrs. Campbell has not lived long
enough to get as much work crammed into her entire
repertory as Duse gets into every ten minutes of her
Magda. Nor has she had sufficient stage experience to
polish off the part with the businesslike competence of the
golden Sarah, coming down with her infallible stroke on
every good stage point in the dialogue, and never letting

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the play drag for an instant. But even if the audience
had never seen either Bernhardt or Duse, it could not
have mistaken Mrs. Campbell for a competent Magda,
although it might very possibly have mistaken the play
for a dull and prosy one. The fact is, if Mrs. Campbell's
irresistible physical gifts and her cunning eye for surface
effects had only allowed her to look as silly as she really
was in the part (and in one or two passages she very
nearly achieved this), her failure would have been as
obvious to the greenest novice in the house as it was to
me. Take such a dramatic moment, for instance, as that
in which Magda receives, first the card, and then the visit
of Von Keller, the runaway father of her child. Let us
leave Duse's incomparable acting of that scene out of the
question, even if it is impossible to forget it. But with
Mrs. Campbell it was not merely a falling short of Duse
that one had to complain of. She literally did nothing.
From the point at which Miss Caldwell, as the servant,
brought in the card, to the point at which Magda, her
emotion mastered, good-humoredly shakes hands with the
fellow (how capitally vulgarly Sarah did that!), Mrs.
Campbell did not display as much feeling as an ordinary
woman of fifty does at the arrival of the postman.
Whether her nonenity at this point was the paralysis of
a novice who does not know how to express what she
feels, or whether it was the vacuity of a woman who does
not feel at all, I cannot determine. The result was that
the audience did not realise that anything particular was
supposed to be happening; and those who had seen the
play before wondered why it should be so much less in-
telligible in English than in a foreign language.

Let me give one other instance. Quite the easiest line
in the piece is the prima donna's remark, when she hears

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

about Marie^s lieutenant lover, "A lieutenant! with us
it's always a tenor." Mrs. Campbell actually succeeded in
delivering that speech without making anyone smile. At
the other end of the compass of the piece we have the
terrible line which strikes the Colonel dead at the end —
"How do you know that he was the only one? (meaning
"How do you know that this man Von Keller, whom you
want me to marry to make an honest woman of me, is
the only man who has been my lover?"). Mrs. Campbell
made an obvious attempt to do something with this line
at the last moment. But there is nothing to be done with
it except prepare its effect by acting before hand so as to
make the situation live, and then let it do its own work.
Between these two failures I can recall no success; in-
deed, I can hardly recall any effort that went far enough
to expose Mrs. Campbell to the risk of active failure.
Although she was apparently doing her best with the
part, her best let its best slip by her, and only retained
its commonplaces.

The part of Magda is no doubt one in which a young
actress may very well be excused for failing. But from
the broad point of view of our national interest in art,
it is necessary, when work of the class of Sudermann's
is in question, to insist on the claim of the public to
have the best dramas of the day presented in English
by the fittest talent. Mrs. Campbell was entitled to her
turn; but now that it is clear that the part does not
suit her, are we to have it locked up lest any other
actress should demonstrate that it can be done better?
Are we to have no chance of seeing how it would come
out in the hands of the actresses who have shown a spe-
cial aptitude for this class of . work ? Miss Elizabeth
Robins would certainly tlot play Militza half as effect-

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ively as Mrs. Campbell; but can it be doubted by any
one who has seen her play Hilda Wangel that she would
play Magda, especially in the self-assertive scenes, twenty
times better than Mrs. Campbell? Miss Robins can
assert herself more youthfully, and pity herself more
pathetically, than any actress on our stage. Doubtless
she might fail to convince us in the sympathetic, grandly
maternal phases of the character, but what about Miss
Janet Achurch for that side of it? Miss Achurch, with
no copyright monopoly of "A Doll's House," has never
been approached as Nora Helmer: Mrs. Campbell's at-
tempt at Magda is the merest baby-play in comparison
with that performance. These able and energetic women
who pioneered the new movement have had, so far,
little to repay them except unlimited opportunities of
looking on at fashionable dramas, in which placidly pretty
and pleasant actresses enjoy a heyday of popular success
by exhibiting themselves in expensive frocks, and going
amiably through half a dozen tricks which they probably
amuse themselves by teaching to their poodles when they
are at a loss for something better to do. The managers
are quite right to keep actresses of the calibre of Miss
Achurch and Miss Robins out of such business: they
would be more likely to knock an ordinary fashionable
play to pieces than to become popular pets in it — after
all, one does not want a Great Western locomotive to
carry one's afternoon tea upstairs. But if the managers
are going in for Sudermann and Ibsen, and serious work
generally, then in the name of common sense let them
show us something more of the people who have proved
themselves able to handle such work, and keep their
pretty dolls for dolls' work.

However, if Mrs. Patrick Campbell has just shown

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

that she is not yet a great actress, she is at any rate
an artist; and nobody can complain of her having tried
Magda, if only there is no attempt to prevent others
from trying also. The circumstances were not alto-
gether favorable to her. It is true that she was sup-
ported by the best Pastor Hefferdingh we have seen —
Mr. Forbes Robertson was admirable in the character;
but the all-important Colonel Schwartze was disastrous:
Mr. Fernandez exhibited every quality of the old actor
except the quality of being able to understand his part.
Miss Alice Mansfield, as the agitated aunt, forgot that
she was playing first-class drama in the Lyceum Theatre,
and treated us to the grimaces and burlesque prolonga-
tions of her words with which she is accustomed to raise
a laugh in farcical comedies. And Mr. Gillmore, as
Lieutenant Max, had not a touch of the smart German
subaltern about him. Otherwise there was nothing to
complain of. Mr. Scott Buist, whose success as Tes-
man in "Hedda Gabler" has taught him the value of
thoroughly modern parts, did not, especially in the ear-
lier scenes, adapt himself sufficiently to the large size
of the theatre, nor could he surpass the inimitable Von
Keller of Sarah Bernhardt's company; but, for all that,
he understood the part and played it excellently. Miss
Brooke's Marie was spoiled by Mrs. Campbell's Magda.
She conveyed the impression of being a respectable young
woman, with a rather loose and good-for-nothing kind
of sister, instead of being clearly weaker in her conven-
tionality than Magda in her independence.

Mr. Herman Merivale's adaptation of "Divorgons"
began by putting me out of temper. First, we had the
inevitable two servants gossiping about their employers'
affairs, their pretended function being to expound the

6

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

plot, their real one to bore the audience sufficiently to
make the principles doubly welcome when they arrive.
Why do not those ridiculous people in the gallery who
persist in hissing the author when all the mischief is
over make themselves useful by venting their destructive
rage on those two Sardovian servants? Then the super-
numerary persons — the visitors, and so on — were tire-
some, and did not know how to behave themselves as
people behave in country houses. I do not recommend
the manners of a dull country house to actors and
actresses in private life: I am well aware that there is
no time for them in London, even if they were admirable
in themselves ; but I do suggest that it is a wasteful mis-
take to spend a good deal of money in mounting a coun-
try-house scene realistically, and then spoil all the illu-
sion by the gush and rush, the violent interest in every-
thing and the eagerly false goodfellowship so character-
istic of theatrical at-homes, and so markedly foreign to
county society. Then, again, Cyprienne, instead of be-
ing translated into her English equivalent, became a
purely fantastic person, nominally an Italian lady married
to an English squire, but really a purely imaginary incar-
nation of the pet qualities of her sex. The Italian pre-
text involved that most exasperating of all theatrical fol-
lies and nuisances, the pet resource of the spurious actor
who goes to his make-up box for character and to some
mimic's trick for his speech, a stage foreign accent. At
the end of the first act I was in the worst possible temper
with the whole performance, the more so as the incident
of the electric bell all but missed fire, partly because the
bell, far from being startling, was hardly audible, and
partly because the two performers, instead of stopping
paralysed, and letting the very funny effect make itself

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

(as it always does in this way infallibly with Chaumont) ,
tried to work it up with excited action and speeches,
which, of course, simply distracted attention from it.

But I was unable to maintain this unfavorable atti-
tude. The shelter of a furze bush will give courage to
a soldier under fire; and it may be that the tiny shelter
from a too ladylike self-consciousness afforded by the
foreign accent made Miss Violet Vanbrugh reckless. At
all events she let herself go to such purpose that before
the second act was over she had completely changed her
professional standing. I asked myself could this be the
same lady who was lately ambling and undulating, with
the most acutely intentional archness and grace, through
"The Chili Widow," and being admired and tolerated as
a popular hostess rather than nailing the attention and
interest of her audience as an actress. At that time I
should have abandoned hope of Miss Vanbrugh as a
comedian but for my recollection of a certain burlesque
of "The Master Builder," in which — again, observe, hav-
ing an excuse for letting herself go — she impressed me
prodigiously. I suspect that Miss Vanbrugh has hitherto
lamed herself by trying to arrive at Miss Ellen Terry's
secret from without inward, instead of working out her
own secret from within outward. However that may
be, the position into which she sprang last Tuesday, with
the most decisive success, is that of Mrs. Kendal, which,
owing to the prolonged epidemic of handsome idiocy
among our leading ladies, and sentimental inanity among
our authors, has been vacant for a ridiculously long
period. "The Queen's Proctor" is now the most amusing
play in London: it is worth going to for nothing else
than to hear Miss Vanbrugh protes^i, "It is not jealousy,
but c — uriosity." Mr. Bourchier, a born actor, and in

8

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

fact the only first-rate light comedian of his generation
(the rest either cannot make us laugh or can do nothing
else), plays to Miss Violet Vanbrugh as perhaps only
a husband can play to his wife — at least with the un-
mixed approbation of the British public. Although the
first act of the piece has been sacrificed somewhat in the
adaptation, the adapting device employed in it enables
the succeeding acts to follow the original in all its
witty liveliness. And now that Mr. Bourchier has got
a real play and a real part, he no longer trifles with his
work. I was never convinced before Tuesday night that
his career as a manager was assured ; but now that Mrs.
Bourchier's genius has got loose with such astonishing
and delightful suddenness, and he is attacking his own
work seriously, the prospects of the combination appear
to be unlimited. There is some capital playing in the
piece by Mr. W. G. Elliot as Caesar Borgia (our old
friend Adhemar), Mr. Hendrie, and Mr. Kinghorne, who
is pathetically funny (much the finest way of being fun-
ny) as a Scotch waiter. I congratulate Mr. Bourchier
heartily on his first genuine success.

MISS NETHERSOLE AND MRS.
KENDAL

Carmen: a dramatic version of Prosper Merimee's

novel. By Henry Hamilton. In four acts. Gaiety

Theatre, 6 June, 1896,

The Wanderer from Venus; or, Twenty-four Hours

with an Angel: a new and original fanciful comedy.

By Robert Buchanan and Charles Marlowe. New

Grand Theatre, Croydon, 8 June, 1896.

The Greatest of These — : — ; a play in four acts.

By Sydney Grundy. Garrick Theatre, 10 June, 1896.

I AM ordinarily a patient man and a culpably indulgent
critic ; but I fear I must ask the responsible parties,
whoever they are, what they mean by this "Carmen"
business at the Gaiety Theatre ? Are we to have no credit
in London for knowing, I will not say fine art from fash-
ionable art, because that we unfortunately do not know,
but at least fashionable art from unfashionable? We
may be vague in our notions of the difference between
a thirteenth-century church and a seventeenth-century
one, a costume designed by a comic-opera costumier and
one painted by Benozzo Gozzoli, a Leadenhall Press book
and a Kelmscott Press one, or a Mrs. Ebbsmith and a
Magda; but at all events we can distinguish between
Kensington Palace Gardens or Fitz John's Avenue and
the Old Kent Road, between a suit turned out by a
Savile Row tailor and one purchased at a Jamaica Road
slopshop, between the "Century Magazine" and a broad-
sheet of ballads, and between Mrs. Ebbsmith and Maria
Martin, the heroine of "The Murder in the Red Barn."

10

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Why, then, attempt to put us oflF, at the height of the
season, with such a piece of work as this new version of
"Carmen"? I am too good-natured to deHberately set
to work to convey an adequate notion of what a very
poor, cheap, tawdry business it is; but some idea of the
class of audience to which it has been written down may
perhaps be gathered from the fact that when Carmen is
cajoling the dragoon in the first act, she repeatedly turns
to the audience — the London audience — and remarks,
aside, "He thinks I am in earnest" or the like, lest we,
unsophisticated yokels as we are, might possibly be misled
by her arts into accepting her as the sympathetic heroine.
The dialogue only rises, not without effort, to the point
of making the bare story intelligible to those of us who
know the opera by heart already. I say the opera; for
the description of the work as "a dramatic version of
Prosper Merimee's novel" is quite misleading. If it were
not for the first scene of the second act — which ought
to be cut out — nobody could possibly suspect the author
of having ever read a line of Merimee. The true original
is, of course, the libretto; and all the departures made
from its scenario are blunders. The superfluous scene
just mentioned could only be rendered endurable by very
expressive physical acting on the parts of Carmen and
Jose. But the author has so little stagecraft that he makes
it take place in the dark, where, accordingly, it is not
endurable. Again, in the tavern scene, Dolores-Michaela
enters and makes an appeal to Carmen's better nature!
And Carmen, after being stabbed, and dying a screaming,
gurgling, rattling, "realistic" death, compounded of all
the stage colics and convulsions ever imagined, suddenly
comes to life and dies over again in the older operatic
manner, like Edgardo in "Lucia," warbling "I love you,

II

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I love you." What is a critic expected to say to such
folly?

The execution of this tedious, inept, absurd, and at its
most characteristic moments positively asinine play only
emphasized its defects. In the course of my musical ex-
periences I have seen a great many Carmens. The earlier
^nes aimed at something like the Carmen of Merimee,
the gipsy of a gentleman's imagination, a Carmen with
holes in her stockings, ready to beg, steal, fight, or trade
with her own person as a matter of course, but still a
Carmen with her point of honor, scandalized and angry
because Jose jealously killed her hideous old husband
with a knife thrust instead of buying her from him in
the correct gipsy manner for a few shillings, and brave
to grandeur in confronting her death, brought on her,
not by the extravagance of her own misconduct, but by
the morbid constitutional jealousy of the melancholy
l_ hidalgo-dragoon. When Trebelli played the part, for
instance, there was not the slightest hint in her per-
formance of the influence of that naturalistic movement
which was presently to turn Carmen into a disorderly,
lascivious, good-for-nothing factory girl. There was
nothing of it even in Selina Dolaro*s Carmen, except that
the assumption of one of Trebelli's parts by an opera-
boufFe artist was itself a sign of the times. The first
prima donna who definitely substituted the Zola Carmen
for the Merimee Carmen was Marie Roze, who never
did anything quite competently, and yet could coax the
public to come to see her do everything incompetently.
One forgave her Carmen as one forgives Manon Lescaut :
whatever else she may have been, she was lovable. The
next notable Carmen was Giulia Ravogli. Nobody but
she has given us the free, roving, open-air Carmen, strong

12

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of body, prompt of hand, genuinely and not ignobly con-
temptuous of civilization. But Ravogli, though she played
to every turn of the orchestra with a masterly under-
standing of the score, and a precision and punctuality of
pantomimic action which I have never seen surpassed
either by the best French performers in ballet of the
"Enfant Prodigue" type, or by such German Wagnerian
artists as Alvary in "Siegfried," was too roughly real
and powerful for what is at best but a delicately flimsy
little opera; and the part was left to the pretty pettish-
nesses and ladylike superficialities of Miss Zelie de Lus-
san until Calve took it up. Calve, an artist of geniusj
divested Carmen of the last rag of romance and respect-
ability: it is not possible to describe in decent language
what a rapscallion she made of her. But the comedy of
her audacities was irresistible. Her lewd grin at the
officer after her arrest, the hitch of the dress by which
she exhibited her ankle and defined the outline of her
voluptuous figure for his inspection; her contemptuous
lack of all interest in Michaela's face, followed by a
jealous inspection of the exuberance of her hips ; her self-
satisfied glance at her own figure from the same point of
view in the looking-glass in the second act when she
heard Jose approaching: all these strokes were not only
so many instantaneous dramas in themselves, taking you
every time into the heart of the character, but were ex-
ecuted with such genuine artistic force that you could
no more help enjoying them than you could help en-
joying the sottishnesses of Falstaff if only Falstaff were
played by a great comedian. Calve wasted no romantic
flattery on her Carmen — allowed her no courage,
nothing but rowdiness, no heart, no worth, no positive
vice even beyond what her taste for coarse pleasures

13

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

might lead her to ; and she made her die with such fright-
ful art that when the last flopping, reeling, disorganized
movement had died out of her, you felt that there was
nothing lying there but a lump of carrion. Here you had
no mere monkey mimicry of this or that antic of a street
girl, but great acting in all its qualities, interpretation,
invention, selection, creation, and fine execution, with the
true tragi-comic force behind it. And yet it was hard
to forgive Calve for the performance, since the achieve-
ment, though striking enough, was, for an artist of her
gifts, too cheap to counterbalance the degradation of her
beauty and the throwing away of her skill on a study
from vulgar life which was, after all, quite foreign to
I the work on which she imposed it.

Miss Olga Nethersole, in her attempt to exploit the
reputation which all these opera-singers have made for
Carmen, is too heavily handicapped by the inevitable com-
parison with them. If her acting version had been made
by a dramatist capable of supplying an equivalent for
the charm and distinction of Merimee's narrative or the
delicate romance of Bizet*s music; or if she herself, by
insight, humor, and finesse of execution, were able to
impose on the piece, such as it is, a fascinating, quasi-
realistic character-fantasy of the Macaire order, she
might possibly have made the play tolerable after the
opera. But none of these conditions are fulfilled for her.
She has the staginess of an old actress with the inexpert-
ness of a young one; her Carmen ridiculously combines
the realistic sordidness and vulgarity of a dissolute rag-
picker with the old-fashioned modish airs and graces, the
mantilla, comb, fan, castanets and dancing-shoes of the
stage Spanish gipsies whom our grandmothers admired;
and she has not a spark of humor. Her vocal accomplish-

14

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ments are so slender that, instead of genuinely speaking,
like her colleague, Miss Alexes Leighton, she intones in
the manner of some of our naturally voiceless melodra-
matic actors ; but being unable to complete their effective
simulation of a powerful voice by copying their sharp,
athletic articulation, she relies rather on mere inflexions,
which are intolerably monotonous, and too feeble to send
even her vowels clearly across the footlights. Her facial
play, obscured by a heavily blackleaded impressionist
make-up, seems limited to a couple of expressions : No. i,
drawn mouth and jaw, with stretched, staring eyes for
tragic presentiment of fate ; No. 2, for seduction, a smile
with the eyes exactly as before and the lips strongly re-
tracted to display the lower teeth, both effects being put
on and off suddenly like masks. In short, judged by this
performance, Miss Nethersole is not yet even a proficient
actress, much less a great one. Why, then, it may be
asked, have we heard so much of her Carmen ? I can only
answer that those who really want to know had better
go and see it. Acting is not the only spectacle that people
will stop to look at, though it is the only one with which
I am concerned here.

I note with satisfaction that the suburban theatre has
now advanced another step. On Monday a new play
by Mr. Robert Buchanan and his collaborator, "Charles
Marlowe," was produced at the new theatre at Croydon
— a theatre which is to some of our Strand theatres as
a Pullman drawing-room car is to an old second-class
carriage — with a company which includes Miss Kate
Rorke, Mr. Oswald Yorke, Mr. Beauchamp, Mr. Anson,
Miss Eva Moore, and Miss Vera Beringer. The band
played the inevitable overture to "Raymond" and Mr.
German's dances, for all the world as if we were at the

15

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Vaudeville. I paid three shillings for a stall, and two-
pence for a programme. Add to this the price of a first-
class return ticket from London, three and sixpence (and
you are under no compulsion to travel first class if second
or third will satisfy your sense of dignity), and the visit
to the Croydon Theatre costs three and tenpence less than
the bare price of a stall in the Strand. And as Miss Kate
Rorke not only plays the part of an angel in her most
touching manner, but flies bodily up to heaven at the
end of the play, to the intense astonishment of the most
hardened playgoers, there is something sensational to talk
about afterwards. The play is a variation on the Pyg-
malion and Galatea theme. It is full of commonplace
ready-made phrases to which Mr. Buchanan could easily
have given distinction and felicity if he were not abso-
lutely the laziest and most perfunctory workman in the
entire universe, save only when he is writing letters to
the papers, rehabilitating Satan, or committing literary
assault and battery on somebody whose works he has
not read. I cannot help suspecting that even the trouble
of finding the familiar subject was saved him by a chance
glimpse of some review of Mr. Wells' last story but one.
Yet the play holds your attention and makes you believe
in it: the born storyteller's imagination is in it unmis-
takably, and saves it from the just retribution provoked
by the author's lack of a good craftsman's conscience.

Mrs. Kendal should really be more cautious than she
was at the Garrick on Wednesday night. When you feed
a starving castaway you do not give him a full meal at
once : you accustom him gradually to food by giving him
small doses of soup. Mrs. Kendal, forgetting that Lon-
don playgoers have been starved for years in the matter
of acting, inconsiderately gave them more in the first ten

i6

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

minutes than they have had in the last five years, with the
result that the poor wretches became hysterical, and
vented their applause in sobs and shrieks. And yet in
the old days at the St. James's they would have taken it
all as a matter of course, and perhaps grumbled at the
play into the bargain. Mrs. Kendal is actually better
than ever, now that the pretty ladylike drama of her
earlier triumphs is as obsolete as croquet. It is true that
in spite of being on her guard in London, she occasionally
throws a word at the heads of the audience in such a
declamatory way as to raise a mild suspicion that she has
perhaps not been wasting her finest methods on the less
cultivated sections of the American nation. But her finish
of execution, her individuality and charm of style, her
appetizingly witty conception of her eflFects, her mastery
of her art and of herself — that mastery for which her
amateurish successors are trying to substitute mere
abandonment — are all there, making her still supreme
among English actresses in high comedy, whilst even in
cheap sentiment, for which she has too much brains and
character, and in which, consequently, her methods are
entirely artificial, the artifice is so skilful and so sym-
pathetic that she makes her audience cry with the greatest
ease. Some years ago there was a tendency to mistake
the wearing out of the "Scrap of Paper"-cum-"Iron-
master" repertory for the wearing out of Mrs. Kendal's
long success and great prestige. For my part, I see no
reason to doubt that if she can only be convinced that
London is as tired of that repertory as she is herself
(which is probably putting the case strongly), the most
serious part of her career may be beginning instead of
ending.
As to Mr. Grundy's piece, it has the advantage of being

17

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

violently polemical and didactic ; and there is nothing the
British public loves better in a play, provided, of course,

that it is also dramatic. "The Greatest of These "

is dramatic up to the brief but unbearable fourth act,
which drops all semblance of drama and is simply and
frankly nothing but the chairman's superfluous summing
up of the discussion. Ten years ago this play, with its
open preaching of the rights of humanity as against
virtues, religions, respectabilities, and other manufactured
goods — especially the provincial varieties — would have
ranked as an insanity only fit for the Independent Theatre.
To-day, after Ibsen and Nietzsche, the only objection to
it is that it is rather too crude, parochial, and old-fash-
ioned an expression of an inspiriting and universal philos-
ophy; and it went down, accordingly, like one of Dr.
Watts's hymns. The general presentation of the piece
was so far inevitably false as a picture of English pro-
vincial society that Mrs. Kendal was a great deal too
clever for Warminster, the atmosphere being that of
South Kensington or Regent's Park rather than of Salis-
bury Plain; but, subject to this qualification, the manage-
ment was first-rate. Miss Nellie Campbell's Grace
Armitage was a good piece of professional work — even
the brilliant successes of nowadays are seldom that — and
Mr. Nutcombe Gould and Mr. Kemble were well within
their powers in the other parts. Mr. Rodney Edgcumbe,
no doubt, shocked the principals by describing himself as
"stowny browk"; but they will soon get used to that.
They have probably found out already that any sort of
diction is considered good enough for the stage nowa-
days. As to Mr. Kendal, one can only give him the old
advice — ^get divorced. He is a capital comedian; and
yet in the whole course of this play he can only steal one

i8

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

laugh in the first act. For the rest, he outrages his nature
and genius faithfully in support of his wife in a hopeless
part ; and the audience, if not delighted, is at least moved
by the melancholy dignity of the sacrifice.

SOME OTHER CRITICS

Dramatic Essays. By John Forster and George
Henry Lewes. Reprinted from the "Examiner"
(1835-38) and "The Leader" (1850-54). With Notes
and an Introduction by William Archer and Robert
Lowe. London: Walter Scott. 1896.
ManCselle Nitouche: a musical comedy in three acts
by MM. Meilhac, Millaud, and Herve. Royal Court
Theatre, i June, 1896.

THE rate of production at the theatres has been so
rapid lately that I am conscious of putting off my
remarks on performances just as I habitually put
off answering letters, in the hope that the march of events
will presently save me the trouble of dealing with them.
My labors, it must be remembered, are the labors of*
Sisyphus : every week I roll my heavy stone to the top of
the hill; and every week I find it at the bottom again.
To the public the tumbling down of the stone is the point
of the whole business: they like to see it plunging and
bounding and racing in a flying cloud of dust, blackening
the eyes of a beautiful actress here and catching an
eminent actor-manager in the wind there, flattening out
dramatists, demolishing theatres, and generally taking a
great deal on itself, considering its size. But the worst
of it (from my point of view) is that when it is all over
I am the only person who is a penny the worse. The

19

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

actresses are as beautiful and popular as ever ; the actor-
managers wallow in the profits of the plays I have de-
nounced; the dramatists receive redoubled commissions;
the theatres reopen with programmes foolisher than be-
fore; and nothing remains of my toy avalanche but the
stone at my feet to be rolled up again before the fatigue
(^of the last heave is out of my bones. Sometimes I ask
myself whether anybody ever reads critical articles —
whether the whole thing is not a mere editorial illusion,
a superstition from the purely academic origin of critical
journalism. That I, under the compulsion of my daily
needs, should face the weekly task of writing these col-
umns is intelligible enough; but that you, reader (if you
exist), should under no compulsion at all face the weekly
task of reading them merely to keep me in bread and
butter is an amazing, incredible thing to me. Yet people
do it. They not only want to hear me chattering about
Mrs. Patrick Campbell, but actually to hear the ghosts
of Forster and Lewes chattering about the ghosts of
Macready and Forrest, Charles Kean and Rachel. Here
is Mr. Walter Scott, a publisher who knows by experience
what the public will stand in this way, issuing a handsome
three-and-sixpenny volume of the "Examiner" and
"Leader" articles of these dead and gone critics, edited
by Mr. Robert Lowe and my colleague, Mr. William
Archer, who has his own stone to roll up every week.
The book contains no portrait of Forster: perhaps the
editors thought that Dickens ^s word-picture of him as
"a harbitrary gent" could not be improved on ; but there
is a photograph of Lewes which suggests to me the fear-
ful question, "Are we at all like that?"

I recommend the series of dramatic essays of which
this book is the third volume to all actors who pretend to

20

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

be indifferent to the opinion of such persons as myself;
for it proves beyond contradiction that the actor who^
desires enduring fame must seek it at the hands of the
critic, and not of the casual playgoer. Money and ap-
plause he may have in plenty from the contemporary
mob ; but posterity can only see him through the spectacles
of the elect: if he displease them, his credit will be in-
terred with his bones. The world believes Edmund Kean
to have been a much greater actor than Junius Brutus
Booth solely because Hazlitt thought so. Its belief in the
inferiority of Forrest to Macready is not its own opinion,
but Forster's. The one failure of Giarles Kean's life that
matters now is his failure to impress Lewes in anything
higher than melodrama. Some day they will reprint my
articles ; and then what will all your puffs and long runs
and photographs and papered houses and cheap successes
avail you, O lovely leading ladies and well-tailored actor-
managers? The twentieth century, if it concerns itself
about either of us, will see you as I see you. Therefore
study my tastes, flatter me, bribe me, and see that your
acting-managers are conscious of my existence and im-
pressed with my importance. ^

Both Lewes and Forster had the cardinal faculty of
the critic: they could really and objectively see the stage;
and they could analyse what they saw there. In this
respect Forster is as good as Hazlitt or Lewes: he is a
first-rate demonstrator, and can take an actor to pieces
and put him together again as well as anybody. But his
outlook on the general human life in relation to which
the theatre must always be judged, is not so lofty, keen,
and free-minded as that of Hazlitt, who was something
of a genius; and he had not Lewes's variety of culture^
flexibility, and fun. I consider that Lewes in some

21

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

respects anticipated me, especially in his free use of vul-
garity and impudence whenever they happened to be the
proper tools for his job. He had the rare gift of integrity
as a critic. When he was at his business, he seldom re-
membered that he was a gentleman or a scholar. In this
he showed himself a true craftsman, intent on making
the measurements and analyses of his criticism as ac-
curate, and their expression as clear and vivid, as possible,
instead of allowing himself to be distracted by the vanity
of playing the elegant man of letters, or writing with
perfect good taste, or hinting in every line that he was
\ above his work. In exacting all this from himself, and
taking his revenge by expressing his most labored con-
clusions with a levity that gave them the air of being the
unpremeditated whimsicalities of a man who had per-
versely taken to writing about the theatre for the sake
of the jest latent in his own outrageous unfitness for it,
Lewes rolled his stone up the hill quite in the modern
manner of Mr. Walkley, dissembling its huge weight,
and apparently kicking it at random hither and thither
in pure wantonness. In fact, he reminds Mr. William
Archer of a writer called "Corno di Bassetto,"* who was
supposed — among other impostures — to have introduced
this style of writing when Mr. T. P. O'Connor invented
the halfpenny evening paper in 1888. But these articles
of Lewes's are miles beyond the crudities of Di Bassetto,
though the combination of a laborious criticism with a
recklessly flippant manner is the same in both. Lewes,
by the way, like Bassetto, was a musical critic. He was
an adventurous person as critics go ; for he not only wrote
philosophical treatises and feuilletons, but went on the
stage, and was denounced by Barry Sullivan as "a poor

•G.B.S. himself.

22

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

creature," perhaps for the feebleness of his execution,
but perhaps also a little because he tried to get away from
the superhuman style of Barry into the path since opened
up by Irving. He also wrote plays of the kind which,
as a critic, he particularly disliked. And he was given
to singing — nothing will ever persuade me that a certain
passage in "The Impressions of Theophrastus Such"
about an amatuer vocalist who would persist in wrecking
himself on "O Ruddier than the Cherry" does not refer
to Lewes. Finally he was rash enough to contract a
morganatic union with the most famous woman writer
of his day, a novelist, thereby allowing his miserable af-
fections to triumph over his critical instincts (which he
appears, however, to have sometimes indulged clandes-
tinely in spite of himself) ; and so, having devoted some
years to remonstrating with people who persisted in ad-
dressing the famous novelist by her maiden name instead
of as "Mrs. Lewes," he perished after proving conclu-
sively In his own person that "womanly self-sacrifice" is
an essentially manly weakness. The history of that in-
teresting union yet remains to be written. Neither cynic
nor heroine worshipper will ever do it justice ; but George
Eliot at least paid it the widow's compliment of marrying
again, though she did not select a critic this time. These
and other features of Lewes's career are dealt with from
the point of view of the general reader in Mr. Archer's
very interesting forty pages of introduction. From my
personal point of view, they are, on the whole, a solemn
warning. I shall not marry, morganatically or otherwise.
Eminent lady novelists will please accept this notice.

Miss May Yohe might, I think, have given us some-
thing fresher at the Court Theatre than a revival of
"Mam'zelle Nitouche." I take it that Miss Yohe is not

23

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

now living by her profession and compelled to accept
what engagements may come her way, leaving to her
managers the responsibility of choosing the piece. She
is, is she not, in an independent position, gained by al-
liance with the British aristocracy, and subject to all the
social responsibilities attaching to that sort of independ-
ence? These responsibilities do not, of course, demand
that she should share in the patriarchal administration
of the family estate if she is driven by irresistible instincts
to seek her natural activity on the stage as an artist.
Nobody can object to that alternative course, nor to her
subsidizing the theatre out of her revenues — ^not earned,
be it remembered, by herself, but derived at some point
or other from the nation's industries. Clearly the revenues
and the artistic activity cannot honorably be wasted on
unworthy or stale entertainments merely, as the profes-
sional phrase goes, to give the manageress a show. If
a lady wants nothing more than that, she must conform
to social discipline and take her show in the prescribed
ladylike way, either plastering herself with diamonds and
sitting in an opera-box like a wax-figure in a jeweller's
shop window, or dressing herself prettily and driving up
and down the Row in the afternoon to be stared at by all
the world and his wife. Whether in sanctioning the nec-
essary expenditure for this purpose the nation makes a
wise bargain or not, shall not be discussed here. Suffice
it to say that it is an extremely liberal one for the lady,
and need not be enlarged so as to include appearances on
the stage as well as in the auditorium and in the Row.
For just consider what would happen if acting under pro-
fessional conditions became as fashionable as cycling.
We should have every theatre in London taken at ex-
travagant rents by fashionable amateurs; and art would

H

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

be banished to the suburbs and the provinces. If, how-
ever, a lady comes forward to supersede the ordinary
commercial manager out of pure love of the theatre and
a determination to rescue the lighter forms of musical
art from the rowdiness and indecency which popular
gagging comedians have been allowed to introduce into
it of late years, then she is within the sphere of her most
serious social duties as much as if she were interesting
herself in orphanages and hospitals. This, I take it, is
the honorable contstruction to which Miss May Yohe's
enterprise is entitled prima facie.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to feel that the Court
performance bears out such a view. Miss May Yohe is
too clever — too much the expert professional — to be dis-
missed as a stage-struck fashionable amateur ; but, on the
other hand, there is nothing either in "Mam'zelle Ni-
touche" nor in the style of its performance to explain
why any lady should step out of the aristocratic sphere to
produce it. I noticed that Mr. Mackinder, an agile and
clever comedian who sedulously cultivates the style of
Mr. Arthur Roberts, permitted himself, in the first act,
to interrupt Miss Haydon with a quip which might pos-
sibly have made a schoolboy grin, but which was dis-
respectful to the audience, to his fellow-artists, to Miss
Yohe as the responsible manager, to his art, and to him-
self. In the green-rooms of some music-halls they post
a notice warning performers not to interpolate any ob-
jectionable pleasantries into their songs and dialogue on
pain of instant concelling of their engagement. It seems
time to post this notice in all our comic opera houses
except the Savoy. When a lady who bears a title in
private life undertakes the management of a West-end
theatre, one hopes that there, at least, no such precaution

25

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

could be necessary ; and yet, as I have said, Mr. Mackin-
der had not been ten minutes on the stage before he im-
provised a jest that made every decent person in the
theatre shiver, and did it, too, in perfect good faith, with
a hardworking desire to show his smartness and make his
part "go." For the rest, there was nothing to complain
of, and nothing to admire particularly. Miss Florence
Levey gave us a very lively and confident imitation — ^but
only an imitation — of a skilled dancer and singer. Mr.
Tapley, whom I can remember when he was a tenor, can
still inflect certain falsetto tones sufiSciently to be called,
by a stretch of compliment, a tenorino. Miss Yohe's own
extraordinary artificial contralto had so little tone on the
first night that it was largely mistaken for an attack of
hoarseness; and her sentimental song, with its aborted
cadence which sought to make a merit and a feature of
its own weakness, was only encored, not quite intention-
ally, out of politeness. Her sustaining power seems gone :
she breathes after every little pharse, and so cannot
handle a melody in her old broad, rich manner ; but doubt-
less the remedy for this is a mere matter of getting into
condition. As a comic actress she has improved since the
days of "Little Christopher Columbus" ; and the personal
charm and gay grace of movement, with the suggestion
of suppressed wildness beneath them, are all there still,
with more than their original bloom on them. But with
every possible abuse of the indulgence of which Miss
Yohe can always count on more than her fair share, it
is impossible to say that she removes the impression that
the day for opera-bouffe has gone by. Opera-bouffe is
dramatically and musically too trivial for modern taste
in opera; and in spectacle, variety, and novelty it cannot
compete with the string of music-hall turns disguised as

26

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

"musical comedy" now in vogue. Besides, even our
modern music-hall songs and the orchestral "melodrame"
which accompanies our acrobats are symphonic in con-
struction and Wagnerian in breadth and richness com-
pared to the couplets and quadrilles of Offenbach and
Lecocq ; although it is true, all the same, that Offenbach's
score of "La Grande Duchesse" and its libretto are clas-
sics compared to anything we seem able to turn out nowa-
days. Still, if "La Grande Duchesse" had been entrusted
to a mere comic-song tune compiler and a brace of face-
tious bar-loafers, it would have been none the more up
to date now in dramatic weight and musical richness.
Miss Yohe had better order a libretto from a witty dram-
atist and a score from a clever musician, both in touch
with the humor of the day, and try her luck with that.
She will only waste her time and money if she tries back
to cast-off favorites.

By the way, this is musical criticism : why am I writing
it? Why do they not send my colleague J. F. R. to these
things? How stale it all seems! how hopeless! how
heavily the stone of Sisyphus goes up along this track in
the hot weather I

27

THE SECOND DATING OF SHERIDAN

The School for Scandal. By Sheridan. Lyceum
Theatre, 20 June, 1896.

IT IS impossible to see "The School for Scandal" with-
out beginning to moralize. I am going to moralize :
let the reader skip if he will.
As the world goes on, manners, customs, and morals
change their aspect with revolutionary completeness,
whilst man remains almost the same. Honor and de-
cency, coats and shirts, cleanliness and politeness, eating
and drinking, may persist as names ; but the actual habits
which the names denote alter so much that no century
would tolerate those of its forerunner or successor. Com-
pare the gentleman of Sheridan's time with the gentle-
man of to-day. What a change in all that is distinctively
gentlemanly! — the dress, the hair, the watch-chain, the
manners, the point of honor, the meals, the ablutions,
and so on ! Yet strip the twain, and they are as like as
two eggs: maroon them on Juan Fernandez, and what
difference will there be between their habits and those of
Robinson Crusoe? Nevertheless, men do change, not
only in what they think and what they do, but in what
they are. Sometimes they change, just like their fash-
ions, by the abolition of one sort and color of man and
the substitution of another — white for black or yellow
for red, white being the height of fashion with us. But
they also change by slow development of the same kind
of man ; so that whilst the difference between the institu-
tions of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries may be
as complete as the difference between a horse and a

28

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

bicycle, the difference between the men of those periods
is only a trifling increment of efficiency, not nearly so
great as that which differentiated Shakespeare from the
average Elizabethan. That is why Shakespeare's plays,
though obsolete as representations of fashion and man-
ners, are still far ahead of the public as dramatic studies
of humanity.

But I must cut my argument more finely than this.
To say that fashions change more rapidly than men is
a very crude statement of extremes. Everything has its
own rate of change. Fashions change more quickly than
manners, manners more quickly than morals, morals more
quickly than passions, and, in general, the conscious, rea-
sonable, intellectual life more quickly than the instinctive,
wilful, affectionate one. The dramatist who deals with
the irony and humor of the relatively durable sides of life,
or with their pity and terror, is the one whose comedies
and tragedies will last longest — sometimes so long as to
lead a book-struck generation to dub him "Immortal,"
and proclaim him as "not for an age, but for all time."
Fashionable dramatists begin to "date," as the critics call
it, in a few years : the accusation is rife at present against
the earlier plays of Pinero and Grundy, though it is due
to these gentlemen to observe that Shakespeare's plays
must have "dated" far more when they were from twenty
to a hundred years old than they have done since the
world gave up expecting them to mirror the passing hour.
When "Caste" and "Diplomacy" were fresh, "London
Assurance" had begun to date most horribly: nowadays
"Caste" and "Diplomacy" date like the day-be fore-yester-
day's tinned salmon; whereas if "London Assurance"
were revived (and I beg that nothing of the kind be at-
tempted), there would be no more question of dating

29

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

about it than about the plays of Garrick or Tobin or Mrs.
CentUvre.

But now observe the consequences, as to this dating
business, of the fact that morals change more slowly than
costumes and manners, and instincts and passions than
morals. It follows, does it not, that every "immortal"
play will run the following course? First, like "London
Assurance," its manners and fashions will begin to date.
If its matter is deep enough to tide it over this danger,
it will come into repute again, like the comedies of
Sheridan or Goldsmith, as a modern classic. But after
some time — some centuries, perhaps — it will begin to date
again in point of its ethical conception. Yet if it deals
so powerfully with the instincts and passions of humanity
as to survive this also, it will again regain its place, this
time as an antique classic, especially if it tells a capital
story. It is impossible now to read, without a curdling
of the blood and a bristling of the hair, the frightful but
dramatically most powerful speech which David, on his
death-bed, delivers to his son about the old enemy whom
he had himself sworn to spare. "Thou art a wise man
and knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him ; but his
hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood."
Odysseus, proud of outwitting all men at cheating and
lying, and intensely relishing the blood of Penelope's
suitors, is equally outside our morality. So is Punch.
But David and Ulysses, like Punch and Judy, will survive
for many a long day yet. Not until the change has
reached our instincts and passions will their stories begin
to "date" again for the last time before their final ob-
solescence.

I have been led into this investigation of "dating" by
the fact that "The School for Scandal," which has got

30

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

over its first attack of that complaint so triumphantly that
its obsolete costumes and manners positively heighten its
attraction, dated very perceptibly last Saturday night at
the Lyceum in point of morals. Its thesis of the supe-
riority of the good-natured libertine to the ill-natured
formalist and hypocrite may pass, though it is only a
dramatization of "Tom Jones," and hardly demurs to the
old morality further than to demonstrate that a bad man
is not so bad as a worse. But there is an ancient and
fishlike smell about the "villainy" of Joseph and the lady-
likeness of Lady Teazle. If you want to bring "The
School for Scandal" up to date, you must make Charles
a woman, and Joseph a perfectly sincere moralist. Then
you will be in the atmosphere of Ibsen and of "The

Greatest of All These " at once. And it is because

there is no sort of hint of this now familiar atmosphere —
because Joseph's virtue is a pretence instead of a reality,
and because the women in the play are set apart and re-
garded as absolutely outside the region of free judgment
in which the men act, that the play, as aforesaid, "dates."
Formerly, nothing shocked us in the screen scene ex-
cept Charles' caddishness in making fun of Sir Peter and
his wife under very painful circumstances. But, after all,
Charles was not so bad as Hamlet rallying Ophelia at
the play or Mercutio chaffing the Nurse. What now jars
on us is the caddishness of Lady Teazle, whose conduct
for the first time begins to strike us as it would if it were
the conduct of a man in the like circumstances. Society
forbids a man to compromise a woman; but it also re-
quires him, if he nevertheless does compromise her, to
accept as one of the consequences of his action the obliga-
tion not to betray her, even if he has to go into the wit-
ness-box and swear to her innocence. Suppose Lady

31

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Teazle, on being surprised by Sir Peter in Joseph's rooms,
had invented a plausible excuse, and had asked Joseph
to confirm her. Suppose Joseph had thereupon said, "No,
it is false, every word. My slumbering conscience
awakens; and I return to the sacred path of truth and
duty. Your wife. Sir Peter, is an abandoned woman who
came here to tempt me from the path of honor. But for
your arrival I might have fallen ; but now I see the black-
ness of her conduct in all its infamy; and I ask you to
pardon me, and to accept the sincerity of my contrition
as a pledge for my future good conduct." Would any
extremity of blackballing, cutting, even kicking, be con-
sidered too severe for the man who should try to extricate
himself at the expense of his accomplice in that straight-
forward manner? And yet that is exactly what Lady
Teazle does without the least misgiving on the part of
the dramatist as to the entire approval and sympathy of
the audience. In this, as far as I am concerned, the dram-
atist is mistaken, and the play consequently dates. I
cannot for the life of me see why it is less dishonorable
ior a woman to kiss and tell than a man. It is some-
times said that the social consequences of exposure are
worse for a woman than for a man ; but that is certainly
not the case in these days of Parnell overthrows and
ruinous damages, whatever it may have been in the time
of Sheridan — and the commonplace assumptions with
regard to that period are probably as erroneous as those
current about our own. At all events, when a married
woman comes to a man's rooms with the deliberate inten-
tion of enjoying a little gallantry, and, on being caught,
pleads for sympathy and forgiveness as an innocent young
creature misled and seduced by a villain, she strikes a
blow at the very foundations of immorality.

32

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

The fact that this is not altogether a wise thing to do
— that artificial systems of morality, like other dangerous
engines, explode when they are worked at high pressure
without safety-valves — was cynically admitted in Sher-
idan's time with regard to men, and sentimentally repu-
diated with regard to women. But now see what has
happened. A terrible, gifted person, a woman speaking
for women, Madame Sarah Grand to wit, has arisen to
insist that if the morality of her sex can do without safety-
valves, so can the morality of "the stronger sex," and to
demand that the man shall come to the woman exactly
as moral as he insists that she shall come to him. And,
of course, not a soul dares deny that claim. On the other
hand, the fact that there is an obvious alternative way
out of the difficulty does not escape those to whom Ma-
dame Sarah Grand's position is a reductio ad absurdum
of our whole moral system; and accordingly we have
Mrs. Kendal asking every night at the Garrick why Man
— meaning Woman — should be so much more moral than
God. As for me, it is not my business as a dramatic
critic to pursue the controversy: it concerns mc only as
the explanation of how Lady Teazle's position is changed
by the arrival of audiences who read edition after edi-
tion of "The Heavenly Twins," and who nightly applaud
the point made by the author of "The Greatest of These

." Whether they are for greater rigor with the

novelist, or for greater charity with the dramatist, they
are equally learning to drop the old fast-and-loose system
of a masculine morality for the man and a feminine
morality for the woman, and to apply instead a human
standard impartially to both sexes. And so "The School
for Scandal" dates on the Woman Question almost as
badly as "The Taming of the Shrew."

33

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

That the play is well acted goes without saying.
Sheridan wrote for the actor as Handel wrote for the
singer, setting him a combination of strokes which, how-
ever difficult some of them may be to execute finely, are
familiar to all practised actors as the strokes which ex-
perience has shown to be proper to the nature and capac-
ity of the stage-player as a dramatic instrument. With
Sheridan you are never in the plight of the gentleman
who stamped on a sheet of Beethoven's music in a rage,
declaring that what cannot be played should not be writ-
ten. That difficulty exists to-day with Ibsen, who abounds
in passages that our actors do not know how to play;
but "The School for Scandal" is like "Acis and Galatea" :
you may have the voice and the skill for it or you may
not (probably not) ; but at all events you are never in
doubt as to how it ought to be done. To see Mr. William
Farren play Sir Peter after a long round of modern
"character acting" is like hearing Santley sing "Nasce
al bosco" after a seasonful of goat-bleating Spanish tenors
and tremulous French baritones shattering themselves on
passionately sentimental dithyrambs by Massenet and
Saint-Saens. Mr. Forbes Robertson is an excellent
Joseph Surface. He gets at the centre of the part by
catching its heartlessness and insincerity, from which his
good looks acquire a subtle ghastliness, his grace a taint
of artifice, and all the pictorial qualities which make him
so admirable as a saint or mediaeval hero an ironical play
which has the most delicate hypocritical eflfect. Mr. Fred
Terry not only acts as Charles Surface, but acts well. I
do not expect this statement to be believed in view of
such prior achievements of his as "A Leader of Men,"
"The Home Secretary," and so forth; but I am bound
to report what I saw. Mr. Terry has grown softer—

34

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

fatter, if he will excuse the remark; and he has caught
some of the ways of Miss Julia Neilson, the total result
being to make his playing more effeminate than it used
to be ; but it cannot be denied that he plays Charles Sur-
face with a vivacity and a pleasant adipose grace that has
nothing of the stickishness of his modern Bond Street
style about it. Mrs. Patrick Campbell struck me as being
exactly right, for modern purposes, in her performance.
In the fourth act she was Lady Teazle, and not an actress
using the screen scene as a platform for a powerful but
misplaced display of intense emotional acting. No doubt
an actress — if she is able to do it — is greatly tempted to
say to Joseph Surface "I think we had better leave honor
out of the question" with all the dignity and depth of
Imogen rebuking lachimo, and to reveal herself,, when
the screen falls, as a woman of the richest nature trag-
ically awakened for the first time to its full significance.
In ten years' time we shall have Mrs. Campbell doing
this as unscrupulously as Miss Rehan or any other past-
mistress of her art does it now. But it is not the play :
it upsets the balance of the comedy and belittles Sir Peter.
Nothing deeper is wanted than commonplace thoughtless-
ness, good-nature, and a girl's revulsion of feeling at
the end; and this Mrs. Patrick Campbell gives prettily
and without exaggeration, with the result that the comedy
is seen in its true proportions for the first time within the
memory of this generation. It may be held, of course,
that the play has only been kept alive by overacting that
particular scene ; but this view is not borne out by a gen-
eral comparison of the effect of the Daly and the Lyceum
revivals. On Miss Rose Leclercq, Mr. Cyril Maude,
and Mr. Edward Righton as Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin
Backbite, and Sir Oliver, I need not waste compliments :

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

their success was a foregone conclusion. Maria was
hardly in Miss Brooke's line; but then Maria is not in
anybody's line. Mr. Forbes Robertson's reception was
extraordinarily enthusiastic. It is evident that the failure
of "Magda" and the escapade of "Michael" have not
shaken his popularity, whatever else it may have cost
him. Towards Mrs. Campbell, however, there was a dis-
position to be comparatively sane and critical as well as
very friendly. I attribute this, not to any improvement
in the public brain, but to a make-up which, though clev-
erly in character with Lady Teazle, hid all the magnetic
fascination of Paula Tanqueray and Fedora.

"THE SPACIOUS TIMES''

Doctor Faustus. By Christopher Marlowe. Acted
by members of the Shakespeare Reading Society at
St. George's Hall, on a stage after the model of the
Fortune Playhouse, 2 July, 1896.

MR. William Poel, in drawing up an announce-
ment of the last exploit of the Elizabethan Stage
Society, had no difficulty in citing a number of
eminent authorities as to the superlative merits of Chris-
topher Marlowe. The dotage of Charles Lamb on the
subject of the Elizabethan dramatists has found many
fimitators, notably Mr. Swinburne, who expresses in verse
what he finds in books as passionately as a poet expresses
what he finds in life. Among them, it appears, is a Mr.
■^G. B. Shaw, in quoting whom Mr. Poel was supposed
by many persons to be quoting me. But though I share
the gentleman's initials, I do not share his views. He

56

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

can admire a fool: I cannot, even when his folly not
only expresses itself in blank verse, but actually invents
that art form for the purpose. I admit that Marlowe^
blank verse has charm of color and movement; and I
know only too well how its romantic march caught the
literary imagination and founded that barren and horrible
worship of blank verse for its own sake which has since
desolated and laid waste the dramatic poetry of England.
But the fellow was a fool for all that He often reminds
me, in his abysmally inferior way, of Rossini. Rossini
had just the same trick of beginning with a magnificently
impressive exordium, apparently pregnant with the most
tragic developments, and presently lapsing into arrant
triviality. But Rossini lapses amusingly; writes "Ex-
cusez du peu" at the double bar which separates the
sublime from the ridiculous; and is gay, tuneful and
clever in his frivolity. Marlowe, the moment the ex-
haustion of the im^native fit deprives him of the power
of raving, becomes childish in thought, vulgar and
wooden in humor, and stupid in his attempts at invention.
He is the true Elizabethan blank-verse beast, itching to
frighten other people with the superstitious terrors and
cruelties in which he does not himself believe, and wal-
lowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and
strenuous animal passion as only literary men do when
they become thoroughly depraved by solitary work, sed-
entary cowardice, and starvation of the sympathetic
centres. It is not surprising to learn that Marlowe was
stabbed in a tavern brawl: what would be utterly un-
believable would be his having succeeded in stabbing any
one else. On paper the whole obscene crew of these blank-
verse rhetoricians could outdare Lucifer himself: Nature
can produce no murderer cruel enough for Webster, nor

17

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

any hero bully enough for Chapman, devout disciples,
both of them, of Kit Marlowe. But you do not believe
in their martial ardor as you believe in the valor of Sidney
or Cervantes. One calls the Elizabethan dramatists im-
aginative, as one might say the same of a man in delirium
tremens; but even that flatters them; for whereas the
drinker can imagine rats and snakes and beetles which
have some sort of resemblance to real ones, your typical
Elizabethan heroes of the mighty line, having neither the
eyes to see anything real nor the brains to observe it,
could no more conceive a natural or convincing stage
figure than a blind man can conceive a rainb6w or a deaf
one the sound of an orchestra. Such success as they have
had is the success which any fluent braggart and liar
may secure in a pothouse. Their swagger and fustian,
and their scraps of Cicero and Aristotle, passed for poetry
and learning in their own day because their public was
Philistine and ignorant. To-day, without having by any
means lost this advantage, they enjoy in addition the
quaintness of their obsolescence, and, above all, the
splendor of the light reflected on them from the reputa-
tion of Shakespeare. Without that light they would now
be as invisible as they are insufferable. In condemning
them indiscriminately, I am only doing what Time would
have done if Shakespeare had not rescued them. I am
quite aware that they did not get their reputations for
nothing ; that there were degrees of badness among them ;
that Greene was really amusing, Marston spirited and
silly-clever, Cyril Tourneur able to string together lines
of which any couple picked out and quoted separately
might pass as a fragment of a real organic poem, and so
on. Even the brutish pedant Jonson was not heartless,
and could turn out prettily affectionate verses and fool-

38

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ishly affectionate criticisms; whilst the plausible firm of
Beaumont and Fletcher, humbugs as they were, could
produce plays which were, all things considered, not
worse than 'The Lady of Lyons." But these distinctions
are not worth making now. There is much variety in
a dust-heap, even when the rag-picker is done with it;
but we throw it indiscrimiminately into the "destructor" ^
for all that. There is only one use left for the Elizabethan
dramatists, and that is the purification of Shakespeare's
reputation from its spurious elements. Just as you can
cure people of talking patronizingly about "Mozartian
melody" by showing them that the tunes they imagine
to be his distinctive characteristic were the commonplaces
of his time, so it is possible, perhaps, to cure people of
admiring, as distinctively characteristic of Shakespeare,
the false, forced rhetoric, the callous sensation-mongering
in murder and lust, the ghosts and combats, and the
venal expenditure of all the treasures of his genius on
the bedizenment of plays which are, as wholes, stupid
toys. When Sir Henry Irving presently revives "Cym-
beline" at the Lyceum, the numerous descendants of the
learned Shakespearean enthusiast who went down on his
knees and kissed the Ireland forgeries will see no dif-
ference between the great dramatist who changed Imogen
from a mere name in a story to a living woman, and the
manager-showman who exhibited her with the gory trunk
of a newly beheaded man in her arms. But why should
we, the heirs of so many greater ages, with the dramatic
poems of Goethe and Ibsen in our hands, and the music
of a great dynasty of musicians, from Bach to Wagner,
in our ears — why should we waste our time on the rank
and file of the Elizabethans, or encourage foolish modern
persons to imitate them, or talk about Shakespeare as if*

39

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

his moral platitudes, his jingo claptraps, his tavern pleas-
antries, his bombast and drivel, and his incapacity for
following up the scraps of philosophy he stole so aptly,
were as admirable as the mastery of poetic speech, the
feeling for nature, and the knack of character-drawing,
fun, and heart wisdom which he was ready, like a true
son of the theatre, to prostitute to any subject, any oc-
casion, and any theatrical employment? The fact is, we
are growing out of Shakespeare. Byron declined to put
up with his reputation at the beginning of the nineteenth
century; and now, at the beginning of the twentieth, he
is nothing but a household pet. His characters still live ;
his word pictures of woodland and wayside still give us
a Bank-holiday breath of country air; his verse still
charms us ; his sublimities still stir us ; the commonplaces
and trumperies of the wisdom which age and experience
bring to all of us are still expressed by him better than by
anybody else ; but we have nothing to hope from him and
nothing to learn from him — not even how to write plays,
though he does that so much better than most modern
dramatists. And if this is true of Shakespeare, what is
to be said of Kit Marlowe?

Kit Marlowe, however, did not bore me at St. George's
Hall as he has always bored me when I have tried to read
him without skipping. The more I see of these per-
formances by the Elizabethan Stage Society, the more I
am convinced that their method of presenting an Eliza-
bethan play is not only the right method for that partic-
ular sort of play, but that any play performed on a plat-
form amidst the audience gets closer home to its hearers
than when it is presented as a picture framed by a pro-
scenium. Also, that we are less conscious of the artificial-
ity of the stage when a few well-understood conventions,

40

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

adroitly handled, are substituted for attempts at an im-
possible scenic verisimilitude. All the old-fashioned tale
of-adventure plays, with their frequent changes of scene,
and all the new problem plays, with their intense in-
timacies, should be done in this way.

The E. S. S. made very free with "Doctor Faustus."
Their devils, Baliol and Belcher to wit, were not theat-
rical devils with huge pasteboard heads, but pictorial
Temptation-of-St.-Anthony devils such as Martin Schon-
gauer drew. The angels were Florentine fifteenth-cen-
tury angels, with their draperies sewn into Botticellian
folds and tucks. The Emperor's bodyguard had Max-
imilianesque uniforms copied from Holbein. Mephis-
tophilis made his first appearance as Mr. Joseph Pennell's
favorite devil from the roof of Notre Dame, and, when
commanded to appear as a Franciscan friar, still pro-
claimed his modernity by wearing an electric bulb in his
cowl. The Seven Deadly Sins were tout ce qu'il y a de
plus fin de siecle, the five worst of them being so attractive
that they got rounds of applause on the strength of their
appearance alone. In short, Mr. William Poel gave us
an artistic rather than a literal presentation of Elizabethan
conditions, the result being, as always happens in such
cases, that the picture of the past was really a picture of
the future. For which result he is, in my judgment, to
be highly praised. The performance was a wonder of
artistic discipline in this lawless age. It is true, since
the performers were only three or four instead of fifty
times as skilful as ordinary professional actors, that Mr.
Poel has had to give up all impetuosity and spontaneity
of execution, and to have the work done very slowly and
carefully. But it is to be noted that even Marlowe, treated
in this thorough way, is not tedious; whereas Shake

41

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

speare, rattled and rushed and spouted and clattered
through in the ordinary professional manner, all but kills
the audience with tedium. For instance, Mephistophilis
was as joyless and leaden as a devil need be — it was clear
that no stage-manager had ever exhorted him, like a
lagging horse, to get the long speeches over as fast as
possible, old chap — and yet he never for a moment bored
us as Prince Hal and Poins bore us at the Haymarket.
The actor who hurries reminds the spectators of the flight
of time, which it is his business to make them forget.
Twenty years ago the symphonies of Beethoven used to
be rushed through in London with the sole object of
shortening the agony of the audience. They were then
highly unpopular. When Richter arrived he took the
opposite point of view, playing them so as to prolong the
delight of the audience; and Mottl dwells more lovingly
on Wagner than Richter does on Beethoven. The result
is that Beethoven and Wagner are now popular. Mr.
Poel has proved that the same result will be attained as
soon as blank-verse plays are produced under the control
of managers who like them, instead of openly and shame-
lessly treating them as inflictions to be curtailed to the
utmost. The representation at St. George's Hall went
without a hitch from beginning to end, a miracle of dil-
igent preparedness. Mr. Mannering, as Faustus, had
the longest and the hardest task; and he performed it
conscientiously, punctually, and well. The others did no
less with what they had to do. The relief of seeing actors
come on the stage with the simplicity and abnegation of
children, instead of bounding on to an enthusiastic recep-
tion with the "Here I am again" expression of the pop-
ular favorites of the ordinary stage, is hardly to be de-
scribed. Our professional actors are now looked at by

4a

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the public from behind the scenes; and they accept that
situation and glory in it for the sake of the "personal
popularity" it involves. What a gigantic reform Mr.
Poel will make if his Elizabethan Stage should lead to
such a novelty as a theatre to which people go to see the
play instead of to see the cast!

DALY UNDAUNTED

The Countess Gucki: an entirely new comedy in

three acts, adapted from the original of Franz von

Schoenthan by Augustin Daly. Comedy Theatre, ii

July, 1896.

The Liar: a comedy in two acts, by Samuel Foote.

Royalty Theatre, 9 July, 1896. (A Revival.)

The Honorable Member: a new three-act comedy

drama by A. W. Gattie. Court Theatre, 14 July,

1896.

OMr. Daly ! Unfortunate Mr. Daly ! What a
play! And we are actually assured that "The
Countess Gucki" was received with delight in
America I Well, perhaps it is true. After all, it may very
well be that a nation plunged by its political circumstances
into the study of tracts on bi-metallism may have found
this "entirely new comedy" quite a page of romance after
so many pages of the ratio between gold and silver. But
in London, at the end of a season of undistracted gaiety,
it is about as interesting as a second-hand ball dress of
the last season but ten. When the curtain goes up, we
are in Carlsbad in 18 19, talking glibly about Goethe and
Beethoven for the sake of local and temporal color. Two

43

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

young lovers, who provide what one may call the mel-
ancholy relief to Miss Rehan, enter upon a maddeningly
tedious exposition of the relationship and movements of
a number of persons with long German titles. As none
of these people have anything to do with the play as
subsequently developed, the audience is perhaps expected
to discover, when the curtain falls, that the exposition
was a practical joke at their expense, and to go home
laughing good-humoredly at their own discomfiture. But
I was far too broken-spirited for any such merriment.
These wretched lovers are supposed to be a dull, timid
couple, too shy to come to the point; and as the luckless
artists who impersonate them have no comic power, they
present the pair with such conscientious seriousness that
reality itself could produce nothing more insufferably
tiresome. At last Miss Rehan appears, her entry being
worked up with music — O Mr. Daly, Mr. Daly, when
will you learn the time of day in London? — in a hideous
Madame de Stael costume which emphasizes the fact that
Miss Rehan, a woman in the prime of life with a splendid
physique, is so careless of her bodily training that she
looks as old as I do. She, too, talks about Goethe and
Beethoven, and, having the merest chambermaid's part,
proceeds heartlessly to exhibit a selection of strokes and
touches broken off from the old parts in which she has so
often enchanted us. This rifling of the cherished trophies
of her art to make a miserable bag of tricks for a part
and a play which the meekest leading lady in London
would rebel against, was to me downright sacrilege: I
leave Miss Rehan to defend it if she can. The play, such
as it is, begins with the entry of a gigantic coxcomb who
lays siege to the ladies of the household in a manner
meant by the dramatist to be engaging and interesting.

44

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

In real life a barmaid would rebuke his intolerable gal-
lantries : on the stage Miss Rehan is supposed to be fas-
cinated by them. Later on comes the one feeble morsel
of stale sentiment which saves the play from the summary
damnation it, deserves. An old General, the coxcomb's
uncle, loved the Countess Gucki when she was sixteen.
They meet again: the General still cherishes his old
romance : the lady is touched by his devotion. The dram-
atist thrusts this ready-made piece of pathos in your
face as artlessly as a village boy thrusts a turnip-headed
bogie ; but like the bogie, it has its effect on simple folk ;
and Miss Rehan, with callous cleverness, turns on one of
her best "Twelfth Night" effects, and arrests the senti-
mental moment with a power which, wasted on such
trivial stuff, is positively cynical and shocking. But this
oasis is soon left behind. The old General, not having
a line that is worth speaking, looks solemn and kisses
Miss Rehan's hand five or six times every minute; the
coxcomb suddenly takes the part of circus clown, and,
in pretended transports of jealousy, thrusts a map be-
tween the pair, and shifts it up and down whilst they
dodge him by trying to see one another over or under it.
But, well as we by this time know Mr. Daly's idea of
high comedy, I doubt if I shall be believed if I describe
the play too closely. The whole affair, as a comedy
presented at a West End house to a London audience by
a manager "starring" a first-rate actress, ought to be
incredible — ought to indicate that the manager is in his
second childhood. But I suppose it only indicates that
audiences are in their first childhood. If it pays, I have
no more to say.

Mr. Lewis and Mrs. Gilbert, like Miss Rehan, are still
faithful to Mr. Daly, in spite of his wasting their talent

45

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

on trash utterly unworthy of them. Remonstrance, I
suppose, is useless. At best it could only drive Mr. Daly
into another of his fricassees of Shakespeare.

Mr. Bourchier's revival of "The Liar" produced an
effect out of all proportion to the merits of the play by
the contrast between Foote's clever dialogue and the wit-
lessness of our contemporary drama. The part of Young
Wilding gives no trouble to a comedian of Mr. Bour-
chier's address; and Mr. Hendrie as Old Wilding was
equal to the occasion; but the rest clowned in the most
graceless amateur fashion. The very commonplaces of
deportment are vanishing from the stage. The women
cannot even make a curtsey : they sit down on their heels
with a flop and a smirk, and think that that is what Mr.
Turveydrop taught their grandmothers. Even Miss Irene
Vanbrugh is far too off-hand and easily self-satisfied.
Actors, it seems to me, will not be persuaded nowadays
to begin at the right end of their profession. Instead of
acquiring the cultivated speech, gesture, movement, and
personality which distinguish acting as a fine art from
acting in the ordinary sense in which everybody acts,
they dismiss it as a mere word which signifies to be, to
do, or to suffer, like Lindley Murray's verb, and proceed
to inflame their imaginations with romantic literature and
green-room journalism until such time as their great op-
portunity will come. Off the stage, be it observed, people
are now better trained physically than they ever were
before, and therefore more impatient of exhibitions of
ugliness and clumsiness. Any good dancing-master could
take half a dozen ordinary active young ladies and gen-
tlemen, and in four lessons make them go through the
whole stage business of "The Liar" much more hand-
somely than the Royalty company. It is a great pity that

46

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

all actors and actresses are not presented at Court: it
would force them, for once in their lives at least, to study
the pageantry of their profession, instead of idly nursing
their ambitions, and dreaming of "conceptions" which
they could not execute if they were put to the proof.

"The Honorable Member," produced at a matinee at
the Court last Tuesday, is a remarkable play ; not because
the author, Mr. Gattie, is either a great dramatic poet or
even, so far, a finished playwright ; but because he seems
conversant with ethical, social, and political ideas which
have been fermenting for the last fifteen years in Eng-
land and America, and which have considerably modified
the assumptions upon which writers of penny novelettes
and fashionable dramas depend for popular sympathy.
The social judgments pronounced in the play are un-
mistakably those of reaction against unsocial commercial-
ism and political party service, with here and there a
touch of the cultured variety of anarchism. The hero is
openly impatient of the scruples the heroine makes about
going to live with him, she being unfortunately married
to a felon. "You say it is wrong," he says: "what you
mean is that some person in a horsehair wig will show
that it is against the law." When some one takes a high
moral tone against betting, he uses up the point made in
Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe's essays, that a life in-
surance is a pure bet made by the insurance company with
the person insured. A dramatist who has read Mr.
Donisthorpe comes as a refreshing surprise in a theatrical
generation which pouts at Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's
plays because their ideas are as modern as those of Pusey
and Maurice, Ruskin and Dickens. I suggest, however,
to Mr. Gattie that people's ideas, however useful they
may be for embroidery, especially in passages of comedy,

47

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

are not the true stuff of drama, which is always the naive
feeling underlying the ideas. As one who has had some-
what exceptional opportunities of observing the world
in which these new ideas are current, I can testify that
they afford no clue to the individual character of the
person holding them. A Socialist view of industrial ques-
tions, and an Individualist view of certain moral ques-
tions, may strongly differentiate the rising public man of
to-day from the rising public man of twenty-five years
ago, but not one rising public man of to-day from another
rising public man of to-day. I know a dozen men who
talk and think just as Mr. Gattie's editor-hero talks and
thinks; but they differ from one another as widely as
Pistol differs from Hamlet. The same thing is true of
the Liberal- Capitalist persons who talk and think just
the other way: they differ as widely as Mr. Gladstone
differs from Mr. Jabez Balfour. I quite see that since
we shall always have a dozen dramatists who can handle
conventions for every one who can handle character, we
are coming fast to a melodramatic formula in which the
villain shall be a bad employer and the hero a Socialist ;
but that formula is no truer to life than the old one in
which the villain was a lawyer and the hero a Jack Tar.
It is less than four years since the Independent Theatre,
then in desperate straits for a play of native growth, ex-
tracted from my dust-heap of forgotten MSS. a play
called "Widowers' Houses," in which I brought on the
stage the slum landlord and domineering employer who
is, in private life, a scrupulously respectable gentleman.
Also his bullied, sweated rent-collector. Take "Widowers'
Houses" ; cut out the passages which convict the audience
of being just as responsible for the slums as the landlord
is ; make the hero a ranting Socialist instead of a perfectly

48

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

commonplace young gentleman; make the heroine an
angel instead of her father's daughter only one genera-
tion removed from the wash-tub; and you have the suc-
cessful melodrama of to-morrow. Mr. Gattie, who prob-
ably never saw my play, has taken a long step in this
direction. His Samuel Ditherby, M.P., bullying the rent-
wretched clerk, Beamer, is my Sartorius bullying the
collector Lickcheese; and the relationship is emphasized
by the fact that just as my play was rescued from the
fury of an outraged public by Mr. James Welch's creation
of Lickcheese, "The Honorable Member" was helped
through an intolerably hot July afternoon by the same
actor's impersonation of Beamer. Unfortunately for Mr.
Welch, the third act of "Widowers' Houses" presented
Lickcheese in a comic aspect, and so left an impression
that Mr. Welch had made his great hit in a comic part.
But, though Mr. Welch has a considerable power of being
funny, he has done no purely comic part that half a dozen
other comedians could not do as well or better ; whereas
his power of pathos in realism — a power which is suf-
ficient to awaken the sympathy and hush the attention of
the whole house before he utters a word — distinguishes
him from every other actor in his line on our stage; en-
titles him, indeed, to. rank as an actor of genius. His
Petkoff in "Arms and the Man," and his postboy in
"Rosemary," are all very well ; but what difficulty would
there be in replacing him in either part? But his first
entry and scene as Lickcheese, his curate in "Alan's
Wife," and this new part of Beamer — all pathetic work —
which of our actors could touch them after him ? Beamer
is technically even a greater triumph than Lickcheese, be-
cause— though I say it who should not — the author has
been less considerate to the actor. Mr. Welch's exit in

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

dead silence in the first act of "Widowers' Houses"
brought down the house; but it was bound to do so if
only (a large "if," I admit) the actor had driven home
the preceding scene up to the hilt. But Beamer has to
turn at the door and deliver what I take to be one of the
most dangerous exit speeches ever penned, being nothing
less than "Curse you ! Curse you ! Damn you to hell !"
That speech is one of the author's mistakes; but Mr.
Welch pulled it through so successfully that his exit was
again the hit of the piece. Surely it cannot take our
managers more than another twenty years — or, say,
twenty-five — to realize that the parts for Mr. Welch are
strong and real pathetic parts instead of silly clowning
ones.

Here, then, we have the popular elements in Sartorius
and Lickcheese, with an angel heroine of the unjustly
accused variety, and a hero who, if not aggressively a
Socialist, is a high-toned young man of the American
ethical sort, ready to try the same experiment of living
down prejudice that George Henry Lewes tried with
George Eliot. The plot is very old and simple — "La
Gazza Ladra" over again, except that it is Beamer instead
of a magpie who brings the heroine under suspicion of
stealing the family diamonds. The audience swallowed
all the heterodox sentiments as if they were the platitudes
of an archbishop. The play might be lightened and
smartened considerably by the excision of a number of
bits and scraps which, good enough for conversation, are
not good enough for drama. Miss Madge Mcintosh
played the heroine so naturally that she was neither more
nor less interesting than if the play had been real. This
is more than I could say for all actresses; but I do not
mean it as a compliment for all that. Unless an actress

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

can be at least ten times as interesting as a real lady,
why should she leave the drawing-room and go on the
stage ? Mr. Graham Brown's impersonation of the plain-
clothes policeman was a clever bit of mimicry. The other
parts were in familiar hands — those of Mr. Anson, Mrs.
Edmund Phelps, Mr. Bernage, and Mr. Scott Buist.

BLAMING THE BARD

Cymheline. By Shakespeare. Lyceum Theatre, 22
September, 1896.

I CONFESS to a difficulty in feeling civilized just at
present. Flying from the country, where the gen-
tlemen of England are in an ecstasy of chicken-
butchering, I return to town to find the higher wits as-
sembled at a play three hundred years old, in which the
sensation scene exhibits a woman waking up to find her
husband reposing gorily in her arms with his head cut
off.

Pray understand, therefore, that I do not defend
"Cymbeline." It is for the most part stagey trash of the
lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written,
throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of
thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish,
offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.
There are moments when one asks despairingly why our**^
stage should ever have been cursed with this "immortal"
pilferer of other men's stories and ideas, with his mon-
strous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to
commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club
would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his senten-
tious combination of ready reflection with complete intel-
lectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting
out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, ex-
cept when he solemnly says something so transcendently
platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers can-
not bring themselves to believe that so great a man really
meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single
exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even
Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I
despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against
his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally
reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief
to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing
as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of
understanding any less obvious form of indignity. To
read "Cymbeline" and to think of Goethe, of Wagner, of
Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied modera-
tion of statement which years of public responsibility as
a journalist have made almost second nature in me.

But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot
enjoy Shakespeare. He has outlasted thousands of abler
thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more. His gift of
telling a story (provided some one else told it to him
first) ; his enormous power over language, as conspicuous
in his senseless and silly abuse of it as in his miracles
of expression ; his humor ; his sense of idiosyncratic char-
acter ; and his prodigious fund of that vital energy which
is, it seems, the true differentiating property behind the
faculties, good, bad, or indifferent, of the man of genius,
enable him to entertain us so effectively that the im-

52

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

aginary scenes and people he has created become more
real to us than our actual life — at least, until our knowl-
edge and grip of actual life begins to deepen and glow-
beyond the common. When I was twenty I knew every-
body in Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Abhorson, much
more intimately than I knew my living contemporaries;
and to this day, if the name of Pistol or Polonius catches
my eye in a newspaper, I turn to the passage with more
curiosity than if the name were that of — but perhaps I
had better not mention any one in particular. i

How many new acquaintances, then, do you make in
reading "Cymbeline," provided you have the patience to
break your way into it through all the fustian, and are
old enough to be free from the modern idea that Cym-
beline must be the name of a cosmetic and Imogen of
the latest scientific discovery in the nature of a hitherto
unknown gas ? Cymbeline is nothing ; his queen nothing,
though some attempt is made to justify her description
as "a woman that bears all down with her brain" ; Post-
humus, nothing— most fortunately, as otherwise he would
be an unendurably contemptible hound ; Belarius, nothing
— at least, not after Kent in "King Lear" (just as the
Queen is nothing after Lady Macbeth) ; lachimo, not
much — only a diabolus ex machind made plausible; and
Pisanio, less than lachimo. On the other hand, we have
Qoten, the prince of numbskulls, whose part, indecencies
and all, is a literary masterpiece from the first line to the
last; the two princes — fine presentments of that im-
pressive and generous myth, the noble savage; Caius
Lucius, the Roman general, urbane among the barbarians ;
and, above all, Imogen. But do, please, remember that
there are two Imogens. One is a solemn and elaborate
example of what, in Shakespeare's opinion, a real lady

53

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ought to be. With this unspeakable person virtuous in-
dignation is chronic. Her object in life is to vindicate her
own propriety and to suspect everybody else's, especially
her husband's. Like Lothaw in the jeweller's shop in
Bret Harte's burlesque novel, she cannot be left alone
with unconsidered trifles of portable silver without offi-
ciously assuring the proprietors that she has stolen
naught, nor would not, though she had found gold
strewed i' the floor. Her fertility and spontaneity in
nasty ideas is not to be described : there is hardly a speech
in her part that you can read without wincing. But this
Imogen has another one tied to her with ropes of blank
verse (which can fortunately be cut) — the Imogen of
Shakespeare's genius, an enchanting person of the most
delicate sensitiveness, full of sudden transitions from
ecstasies of tenderness to transports of childish rage, and
reckless of consequences in both, instantly hurt and in-
stantly appeased, and of the highest breeding and courage.
But for this Imogen, "Cymbeline" would stand about as
much chance of being revived now as "Titus Andronicus."
The instinctive Imogen, like the real live part of the
rest of the play, has to be disentangled from a mass of
stuff which, though it might be recited with effect and
appropriateness by young amateurs at a performance by
the Elizabethan Stage Society, is absolutely unactable and
unutterable in the modern theatre, where a direct illusion
of reality is aimed at, and where the repugnance of the
best actors to play false passages is practically insuper-
able. For the purposes of the Lyceum, therefore, "Cym-
beline" had to be cut, and cut liberally. Not that there
was any reason to apprehend that the manager would
flinch from the operation: quite the contrary. In a true
H'epublic of art Sir Henry Irving would ere this have ex-

54

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

piated his acting versions on the scaffold. He does not
merely cut plays : he disembowels them. In "Cymbeline"^
he has quite surpassed himself by extirpating the antiph-
onal third verse of the famous dirge. A man who
would do that would do anything — cut the coda out of
the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or
shorten one of Velasquez's Philips into a kitcat to make
it fit over his drawing-room mantelpiece. The grotesque
character tracery of Cloten's lines, which is surely not
beyond the appreciation of an age educated by Steven-
son, is defaced with Cromwellian ruthlessness ; and the
patriotic scene, with the Queen's great speech about the
natural bravery of our isle, magnificent in its Walkiiren-
ritt swing, is shorn away, though it might easily have
been introduced in the Garden scene. And yet, long
screeds of rubbish about "slander, whose edge is sharper
than the sword," and so on, are preserved with super-
stitious veneration.

This curious want of connoisseurship in literature
would disable Sir Henry Irving seriously if he were an
interpretative actor. But it is, happily, the fault of a
great quality — the creative quality. A prodigious deal of^
nonsense has been written about Sir Henry Irving's con-
ception of this, that, and the other Shakespearean char-
acter. The truth is that he has never in his life conceived
or interpreted the characters of any author except him-
self. He is really as incapable of acting another man's
play as Wagner was of setting another man's libretto;
and he should, like Wagner, have written his plays for
himself. But as he did not find himself out until it was
too late for him to learn that supplementary trade, he
was compelled to use other men's plays as the framework J
for his own creations. His first great success in this sort

55

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of adaptation was with the "Merchant of Venice." There
was no question then of a bad Shylock or a good Shylock :
he was simply not Shylock at all; and when his own
creation came into conflict with Shakespeare's, as it did
quite openly in the Trial scene, he simply played in flat
contradiction of the lines, and positively acted Shake-
speare off the stage. This was an original policy, and an
intensely interesting one from the critical point of view ;
but it was obvious that its difficulty must increase with
the vividness and force of the dramatist's creation.
Shakespeare at his highest pitch cannot be set aside by
any mortal actor, however gifted; and when Sir Henry
Irving tried to interpolate a most singular and fantastic
notion of an old man between the lines of a fearfully
mutilated acting version of "King Lear," he was smashed.
On the other hand, in plays by persons of no importance,
where the dramatist's part of the business is the merest
trash, his creative activity is unhampered and uncontra-
dicted ; and the author's futility is the opportunity for the
actor's masterpiece. Now I have already described Shake-
speare's lachimo as little better than any of the lay figures
in "Cymbeline" — a mere diabolus ex machina. But
Irving's lachimo is a very different affair. It is a new
and independent creation. I knew Shakespeare's play
inside and out before last Tuesday ; but this lachimo was
quite fresh and novel to me. I witnessed it with un-
qualified delight : it was no vulgar bagful of "points," but
a true impersonation, unbroken in its life-current from
end to end, varied on the surface with the finest comedy,
and without a single lapse in the sustained beauty of its
execution. It is only after such work that an artist can
with perfect naturalness and dignity address himself to
his audience as "their faithful and loving servant"; and

56

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I wish I could add that the audience had an equal right
to offer him their applause as a worthy acknowledgment
of his merit. But when a house distributes its officious
first-night plaudits impartially between the fine artist and
the blunderer who roars a few lines violently and rushes
off the stage after compressing the entire art of How
Not to Act into five intolerable minutes, it had better be
told to reserve its impertinent and obstreperous demon-
strations until it has learnt to bestow them with some sort
of discrimination. Our first-night people mean well, and
will, no doubt, accept my assurance that they are donkeys
with all possible good humor ; but they should remember
that to applaud for the sake of applauding, as schoolboys
will cheer for the sake of cheering, is to destroy our own
power of complimenting those who, as the greatest among
us, are the servants of all the rest.

Over the performances of the other gentlemen in the
cast let me skate as lightly as possible. Mr. Norman
Forbes's Cloten, though a fatuous idiot rather than the
brawny "beefwitted" fool whom Shakespeare took from
his own Ajax in "Troilus and Cressida," is effective and
amusing, so that one feels acutely the mangling of his
part, especially the cutting of that immortal musical crit-
icism if his upon the serenade. Mr. Gordon Craig and
Mr. Webster are desperate failures as the two noble
savages. They are as spirited and picturesque as pos-
sible; but every pose, every flirt of their elfin locks, pro-
claims the wild freedom of Bedford Park. They recite
the poor maimed dirge admirably, Mr. Craig being the
more musical of the twain; and Mr. Webster's sword-
and-cudgel fight with Cloten is very lively ; but their utter
deficiency in the grave, rather sombre, uncivilized prime-
val strength and Mohican dignity so finely suggested by

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Shakespeare, takes all the ballast out of the fourth act,
and combines with the inappropriate prettiness and sun-
niness of the landscape scenery to most cruelly handicap
Miss Ellen Terry in the crucial scene of her awakening
by the side of the flower-decked corpse — a scene which,
without every accessory to heighten its mystery, terror,
and pathos, is utterly and heart-breakingly impossible for
any actress, even if she were Duse, Ristori, Mrs. Siddons,
and Miss Terry rolled into one. When I saw this gross
and palpable oversight, and heard people talking about
the Lyceum stage management as superb, I with difficulty
restrained myself from tearing out my hair in handfuls
and scattering it with imprecations to the four winds.
That cave of the three mountaineers wants nothing but
a trellised porch, a bamboo bicycle, and a nice little bed
of standard roses, to complete its absurdity.

With Mr. Frederic Robinson as Belarius, and Mr.
Tyars as Pisanio, there is no reasonable fault to find, ex-
cept that they might, perhaps, be a little brighter with
advantage ; and of the rest of their male colleagues I think
I shall ask to be allowed to say nothing at all, even at
the cost of omitting a tribute to Mr. Fuller Mellish's dis-
creet impersonation of the harmless necessary Philario.
There remains Miss Genevieve Ward, whose part, with
the "Neptune's park" speech lopped off, was not worth
her playing, and Miss Ellen Terry, who invariably fas-
cinates me so much that I have not the smallest confidence
in my own judgment respecting her. There was no Bed-
ford Park about the effect she made as she stepped into
the King's garden; still less any of the atmosphere of
ancient Britain. At the first glance, we were in the Italian
fifteenth century ; and the house, unversed in the cinque-
cento, but dazzled all the same, proceeded to roar until

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

it stopped from exhaustion. There is one scene in
"Cymbeline," the one in which Imogen receives the sum-
mons to *'that same blessed Milford," which might have
been written for Miss Terry, so perfectly does its in-
nocent rapture and frank gladness fit into her hand. Her
repulse of lachimo brought down the house as a matter
of course, though I am convinced that the older Shake-
speareans present had a vague impression that it could
not be properly done except by a stout, turnip-headed
matron, with her black hair folded smoothly over her
ears and secured in a classic bun. Miss Terry had ev-
idently cut her own part; at all events the odious Mrs.
Grundyish Imogen had been dissected out of it so skil-
fully that it went without a single jar. The circumstances
under which she was asked to play the fourth act were,
as I have explained, impossible. To wake up in the
gloom amid the wolf and robber-haunted mountain
gorges which formed the Welsh mountains of Shake-
speare's imagination in the days before the Great Western
existed is one thing : to wake up at about three on a nice
Bank-holiday afternoon in a charming spot near the valley
of the Wye is quite another. With all her force, Miss
Terry gave us faithfully the whole process which Shake^
speare has presented with such dramatic cunning-
Imogen's bewilderment, between dream and waking, as
to where she is; the vague discerning of some strange
bedfellow there; the wondering examination of the
flowers with which he is so oddly covered; the frightful
discovery of blood on the flowers, with the hideous climax
that the man is headless and that his clothes are her hus-
band's; and it was all ruined by that blazing, idiotic,
prosaic sunlight in which everything leapt to the eye at
once, rendering the mystery and the slowly growing clear-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ness of perception incredible and unintelligible, and spoil-
ing a scene which, properly stage-managed, would have
been a triumph of histrionic intelligence. Cannot some-
body be hanged for this? — men perish every week for
lesser crimes. What consolation is it to me that Miss
Terry, playing with infinite charm and delicacy of appeal,
made up her lost ground in other directions, and had
more than as much success as the roaring gallery could
feel the want of?

MORRIS AS ACTOR AND DRAMATIST

10 October, i8p6,

AMONG the many articles which have been written
about William Morris during the past week, I
have seen none which deal with him as dramatist
and actor. Yet I have been present at a play by William
Morris ; and I have seen him act, and act, too, much bet-
ter than an average professional of the twenty-pound a
week class. I need therefore make no apology for making
him the subject of an article on the theatre.

Morris was a quite unaffected and accessible person.
All and sundry were welcome to know him to the full
extent of their capacity for such acquaintance (which
was usually not saying much) as far as a busy and sen-
sitive man could make himself common property without
intolerable boredom and waste of time. Even to the
Press, which was generally — ^hless its innocence I^ither
ignorantly insolent to him or fatuously patronizing, as if
he were some delightful curio, appreciable only by per-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

sons of taste and fancy, he was willing to be helpful.
Journalist though I am, he put up with me with the
friendliest patience, though I am afraid I must sometimes
have been a fearful trial to him.

I need hardly say that I have often talked copiously to
him on many of his favorite subjects, especially the ar-
tistic subjects. What is more to the point, he has oc-
casionally talked to me about them. No art was indif-
ferent to him. He declared that nobody could pass a
picture without looking at it — that even a smoky cracked
old mezzotint in a pawnbroker's window would stop you
for at least a moment. Some idiot, I notice, takes it on
himself to assure the world that he had no musical sense.
As a matter of fact, he had a perfect ear, a most musical
singing voice, and so fine a sense of beauty in sound (as
in everything else) that he could not endure the clatter
of the pianoforte or the squalling and shouting of the
average singer. When I told him that the Amsterdam
choir, brought over here by M. de Lange, had discovered
the secret of the beauty of mediaeval music, and sang it
with surpassing excellence, he was full of regret for hav-
ing missed it; and the viol concerts of M. Dolmetsch
pleased him greatly. Indeed once, during his illness,
when M. Dolmetsch played him some really beautiful
music on a really beautiful instrument, he was quite over-
come by it. I once urged him to revive the manufacture
of musical instruments and rescue us from the vulgar
handsomeness of the trade articles with which our or-
chestras are equipped; and he was by no means averse
to the idea, having always, he avowed, thought he should
like to make a good fiddle. Only neither in music nor
in anything else could you engage him in any sort of
intellectual dilettantism : he would not waste his time and

6i

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

energy on the curiosities and fashions of art, but went
straight to its highest point in the direct and simple
production of beauty. He was ultra-modern — not merely
up to date, but far ahead of it : his wall papers, his hang-
ings, his tapestries, and his printed books have the twen-
tieth century in every touch of them; whilst as to his
prose word-weaving, our worn-out nineteenth-century
Macaulayese is rancid by comparison. He started from
the thirteenth century simply because he wished to start
from the most advanced point instead of from the most
backward one — say 1850 or thereabout. When people
called him "archaic," he explained, with the indulgence
of perfect knowledge, that they were fools, only they did
not know it. In short, the man was a complete artist,
who became great by a pre-eminent sense of beauty, and
practical ability enough (and to spare) to give effect to it.
And yet — and yet — and yet — ! I am sorry to have to
say it; but I never could induce him to take the smallest
interest in the contemporary theatrical routine of the
Strand. As far as I am aware, I share with Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones the distinction of being the only modern
dramatist whose plays were witnessed by him (except
"Charley's Aunt," which bored him) ; and I greatly fear
that neither of us dare claim his visits as a spontaneous
act of homage to modern acting and the modern drama.
Now, when Morris would not take an interest in any-
thing, and would not talk about it — and his capacity for
this sort of resistance, both passive and active, was re-
markably obstinate — it generally meant that he had made
up his mind, on good grounds, that it was not worth
talking about. A man's mouth may be shut and his
mind closed much more effectually by his knowing all
about a subject than by his knowing nothing about it;

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and whenever Morris suddenly developed a downright
mulishness about anything, it was a sure sign that he
knew it through and through and had quarrelled with
it. Thus, when an enthusiast for some fashionable move-
ment or reaction in art would force it into the conversa-
tion, he would often behave so as to convey an impression
of invincible prejudice and intolerant ignorance, and so
get rid of it. But later on he would let slip something
that showed, in a flash, that he had taken in the whole
movement at its very first demonstration, and had neither
prejudices nor illusions about it. When you knew the
subject yourself, and could see beyond it and around it,
putting it in its proper place and accepting its limits, he
would talk fast enough about it; but it did not amuse
him to allow novices to break a lance with him, because
he had no special facility for brilliant critical demonstra-
tion, and required too much patience for his work to
waste any of it on idle discussions. Consequently there
was a certain intellectual roguery about him of which his
intimate friends were very well aware; so that if a sub-
ject was thrust on him, the aggressor was sure to be
ridiculously taken in if he did not calculate on Morris's
knowing much more about it than he pretended to.

On the subject of the theatre, an enthusiastic young
first-nighter would probably have given Morris up, after
the first attempt to gather his opinion of "The Second
Mrs. Tanqueray," as an ordinary citizen who had never
formed the habit of playgoing, and neither knew nor
cared anything about the theatre except as a treat for
children once a year during the pantomime season. But
Morris would have written for the stage if there had
been any stage that a poet and artist could write for.
When the Socialist League once proposed to raise the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

wind by a dramatic entertainment, and suggested that
he should provide the play, he set to at once and provided
it. And what kind of play was it ? Was it a miracle play
on the lines of those scenes in the Towneley mysteries
between the "shepherds abiding in the field," which he
used to quote with great relish as his idea of a good bit
of comedy? Not at all: it was a topical extravaganza,
entitled "Nupkins Awakened," the chief "character parts"
being Sir Peter Edlin, Tennyson, and an imaginary Arch-
bishop of Canterbury. Sir Peter owed the compliment
to his activity at that time in sending Socialists to prison
on charges of "obstruction," which was always proved
by getting a policeman to swear that if any passer-by or
vehicle had wished to pass over the particular spot in a
thoroughfare on which the speaker or his audience hap-
pened to be standing, their presence would have ob-
structed him. This contention, which was regarded as
quite sensible and unanswerable by the newspapers of the
day, was put into a nutshell in the course of Sir Peter's
summing-up in the play. "In fact, gentlemen, it is a mat-
ter of grave doubt whether we are not all of us con-
tinually committing this offence from our cradles to our
graves." This speech, which the real Sir Peter of course
never made, though he certainly would have done so had
he had wit enough to see the absurdity of solemnly send-
ing a man to prison for two months because another man
could not walk through him — especially when it would
have been so easy to lock him up for three on some re-
spectable pretext — will probably keep Sir Peter's memory
green when all his actual judicial utterances are forgot-
ten. As to Tennyson, Morris took a Socialist who hap-
pened to combine the right sort of beard with a melan-
choly temperament; and drilled him in a certain portent-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ous incivility of speech which, taken with the quality of
his remarks, threw a light on Morris's opinion of Tenny-
son which was all the more instructive because he de-
lighted in Tennyson's verse as keenly as Wagner de-
lighted in the music of Mendelssohn, whose credit for
qualities of larger scope he, nevertheless, wrote down
and destroyed. Morris played the ideal Archbishop him-
self. He made no attempt to make up the part in the
ordinary stage fashion. He always contended that no
more was necessary for stage illusion than some distinct
conventional symbol, such as a halo for a saint, a crook
for a bishop, or, if you liked, a cloak and dagger for the
villain, and a red wig for the comedian! A pair of clerical
bands and black stockings proclaimed the archbishop:
the rest he did by obliterating his humor and intelligence,
and presenting his own person to the audience like a
lantern with the light blown out, with a dull absorption
in his own dignity which several minutes ol the wildest
screaming laughter at him when he entered could not
disturb. I laugh|ed immoderately myself; and I can still
see quite clearly the long top floor of that warehouse in
the Farringdon Road as I saw it in glimpses between
my paroxysms, with Morris gravely on the stage in his
bands at one end ; Mrs. Stillman, a tall and beautiful fig-
ure, rising like a delicate spire above a skyline of city
chimney-pots at the other; and a motley sea of rolling,
wallowing, guflfawing Socialists between. There has
been no other such successful first night within living
memory, I believe; but I only remember one dramatic
critic who took care to be present — Mr. William Archer.
Morris was so interested by his experiment in this sort
of composition that he for some time talked of trying
his hand at a serious drama, and would no doubt have

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

done it had there been any practical occasion for it, or
any means of consummating* it by stage representation
under proper conditions without spending more time on
the job than it was worth. Later, at one of the annual
festivities of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, he
played the old gentleman in the bath-chair in a short
piece called "The Duchess of Bayswater" (not by him-
self), which once served its turn at the Haymarket as a
curtain raiser. It was impossible for such a born teller
and devourer of stories as he was to be indifferent to an
art which is nothing more than the most vivid and real
of all ways of story-telling. No man would more will-
ingly have seen his figures move and heard their voices
than he.

Why, then, did he so seldom go to the theatre? Well,
come, gentle reader, why doesn't anybody go to the
theatre? Do you suppose that even I would go to the
theatre twice a year except on business? You would
never dream of asking why Morris did not read penny
novelettes, or hang his rooms with Christmas-number
chromolithographs. We have no theatre for men like
Morris: indeed, we have no theatre for quite ordinary
cultivated people. I am a person of fairly catholic in-
terests: it is my, privilege to enjoy the acquaintance of a
few representative people in various vortices of culture.
I know some of the most active-minded and intelligent of
the workers in social and political reform. They read
stories with an avidity that amazes me; but they don't
go to the theatre. I know the people who are struggling
for the regeneration of the arts and crafts. They don't
go to the theatre. I know people who amuse their leisure
with edition after edition of the novels of Mrs. Humphry
Ward, Madame Sarah Grand, and Mr. Harold Frederic,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and who could not for their lives struggle through two
chapters of Miss Corelli, Mr. Rider Haggard, or Mr. Hall
Caine. They don't go to the theatre. I know the lovers
of music who support the Richter and Mottl concerts and
go to Bayreuth if they can afford it. They don't go to
the theatre. I know the staff of this paper. It doesn't
go to the theatre — even the musical critic is an incorrigible
shirk when his duties involve a visit thither. Nobody
goes to the theatre except the people who also go to
Madame Tussaud's. Nobody writes for it, unless he is
hopelessly stage struck and cannot help himself. It has
no share in the leadership of thought: it does not even
reflect its current. It does not create beauty: it apes
fashion. It does not produce personal skill: our actors
and actresses, with the exception of a few persons with
natural gifts and graces, mostly miscultivated or half
cultivated, are simply the middle-class section of the
residuum. The curt insult with which Matthew Arnold
dismissed it from consideration found it and left it utterly
defenceless. And yet you ask n.j why Morris did not
go to the theatre. In the name of common sense, why
should he have gone?

When I say these things to stupid people, they have
a feeble way of retorting, "What about the Lyceum?"
That is just the question I have been asking for years;
and the reply always is that the Lyceum is occupied ex-
clusively with the works of a sixteenth-seventeenth cen-
tury author, in whose social views no educated ana capable
person to-day has the faintest interest, and whose art is
partly so villainously artificial and foolish as to produce
no effect on a thirteenth-twentieth century artist like
Morris except one of impatience and discomfort, and
partly so fine as to defy satisfactory treatment at a the-

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atre where there are only two competent performers, who
are neither of them in their proper element in the seven-
teenth century. Morris was willing to go to a street
corner and tell the people something that they very badly
needed to be told, even when he could depend on being
arrested by a policeman for his trouble ; but he drew the
line at fashionably modernized Shakespeare. If you had
told him what a pretty fifteenth-century picture Miss
Terry makes in her flower wreath in Cymbeline's garden,
you might have induced him to peep for a moment at
that; but the first blast of the queen's rhetoric would
have sent him flying into the fresh air again. You could
not persuade Morris that he was being amused when he
was, as a matter of fact, being bored ; and you could not
persuade him that music was harmonious by playing it
on vulgar instruments, or that verse was verse when ut-
tered by people with either no delivery at all or the de-
livery of an auctioneer or toastmaster. In short, you
could not induce him to accept ugliness as art, no matter
how brilliant, how fashionable, how sentimental, or how
intellectually interesting you might make it. And you
certainly could not palm off a mess of Tappertitian senti-
ment daubed over some sham love affair on him as a good
story. This, alas! is as much as to say that you could
not induce him to spend his evenings at a modern theatre.
And yet he was not in the least an Impossibilist : he rev-
elled in Dickens and the elder Dumas; he was enthu-
siastic about the acting of Robson, and greatly admired
Jefferson ; if he had started a Kelmscott Theatre instead
of the Kelmscott Press, I am quite confident that in a
few months, without going half a mile afield for his com-
pany, he would have produced work that would within
ten years have affected every theatre in Europe, from

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

London to St. Petersburg, and from New York to Alex-
andria. At all events, I should be glad to hear any gen-
tleman point out an instance in which he undertook to
find the way, and did not make us come along with him.
We kicked and screamed, it is true: some of our poor
obituarists kicked and screamed — even brayed — at his
funeral the other day; but we have had to come along.
No man was more liberal in his attempts to improve Mor-
ris's mind than I was ; but I always found that, in so far
as I was not making a most horrible idiot of myself out
of misknowledge (I could forgive myself for pure igno-
rance), he could afford to listen to me with the patience
of a man who had taught my teachers. There were
people whom we tried to run him down with — Tennysons,
Swinburnes, and so on; but their opinions about things
did not make any difference. Morris's did.

^

I

THE RED ROBE

Under the Red Robe: a romantic play in four acts,
adapted by Edward Rose from the novel by Stanley
Weyman. Haymarket Theatre, October 17, 1896.

IF THE people who delight in the romances of Mr.
Stanley Weyman and the detective stories of Mr.
Conan Doyle belonged to the same social stratum as
those who formerly read "Les Trois Mousquetaires" and
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," I should conclude
that we were in a period of precipitous degeneration. I
was brought up, romantically speaking, on D'Artagnan
and Bussy d'Amboise; and I cannot say that I find Gil
de Berault in any way up to their standard; whilst the
descent from that ingenious automaton. Detective Dupin,
to such a prince of duffers and dullards as Sherlock
Holmes is one which, after a couple of attempts, I have
g^ven up as impossible. I therefore approach "Under
the Red Robe" full of prejudice against it. The very
name appears to me a fatuity: it suggests a companion
piece to "The White Silk Dress."

On the other hand, it is impossible to feel ill-disposed
towards the new Haymarket enterprise. Mr. Harrison's
management at the Lyceum was exceptionally brilliant,
even among first-class managements. Mr. Cyril Maude
and Miss Winifred Emery are among the most solidly
popular of those happy couples who, by giving the sanc-
tion of an irreproachable domesticity to the wickedest of
the arts, hallow the dissipations of the respectable London
playgoer. Besides, I, as critic-dramatist, notoriously

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

have a corrupt personal motive for doing all I can to
enhance the prestige of the Maude-Harrison combination,
and making success a matter of course at the Haymarket.
On the whole, I think my prejudice is sufficiently balanced
by my prepossession to allow me to proceed to the
slaughter with a plausible pretence of openmindedness.

I began by reading the book — a better policy on the
whole than the alternative one of making a merit of being
in the dark about it. I thought it puerile to the uttermost
publishable extreme of jejuniority. It is not without a
painful effort that I can bring myself to confess even now
that when I was fourteen, some of the romances I wove
for myself may have presented me in the character of a
dark-souled villain with a gorgeous female passionately
denouncing me as "Spy !" "Traitor !" "Villain !" and then
remorsefully worshipping me for some act of transcend-
ent magnanimity on my part. But when I was fourteen
boys had to keep these audacious imaginings to them-
selves on pain of intolerable ridicule. Since then the New
Public has been manufactured under the Education Act ;
and nowadays there is a fortune for the literary boy of
fourteen, or even the literary adult who can remember
vividly what a fool he was at that age.

I do not know how old Mr. Stanley Weyman is, but
I can certify most positively that his Gil de Berault and
Renee de Cocheforet are nothing but the dark-souled vil-
lain-hero and the gorgeous female aforesaid, and that
the old situation between them has accumulated nothing
round it but a few commonplace duels and adventures,
with a very feeble composite photograph of the Richelieus
of Dumas and Lytton, and a bold annexation of the
Lyttonian incident of the Cardinal pretending to send the
hero to execution whilst really sending him to the arms
of his lady love.

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Mr. Edward Rose, in dramatizing such a novel, had to
dramatize situation without character — rthat is, to make
bricks without straw. Worse than that, he had to dram-
atize a situation the boyishness of which must become so
flagrantly obvious to the wise under the searching glare
of the footlights, that his only hope of acceptance lay in
the as yet unfathomed abysses of the literary infancy of
the New Public. Whether that public will support him
is exactly what we are all wondering at present. As for
me, I am getting on in life ; I used to make my bread by
my wit, and now have to make it by my reputation for
wit; and I simply cannot afford to pretend that "Under
the Red Robe" as a play has any charm for me. As a
novel, I can pass my idle hour with it, just as Bismarck
used to pass his with the police novels of Du Boisgobey ;
for, after all, Mr. Stanley Weyman is a bit of a story-
teller— is, indeed, a rather concise and forcible narrator;
and his books serve when the newspaper becomes un-
endurable. But as a play, involving the effort of making
up one's mind to go to the theatre, booking one's seat,
going out at night, and so on — no, thank you. At least,
not unless the adapter and the performers create some
attraction not to be found in the book.

I must sorrowfully add that, for me at least, that at-
traction is not forthcoming; and I can only hope that
the villain-hero and the gorgeous female may pull the
play through and cover my disparagements with shame.
Even if I accept the romance on its own ground, I have
still to complain that the conventions of the theatre pre-
vent Mr. Rose from faithfully carrying out the concep-
tion of the villain-hero. In the first chapter of the novel
there is no mistake about the darkness of Gil de Berault's
soul. He rooks an English lad by watching his cards in

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

a mirror. A duel follows, in which, just as the lad per-
ceives that he is hopelessly overmatched, an accident
places his antagonist at his mercy. Being too young to
understand that if you fight at all, you must fight to win,
he refuses to avail himself of what he conceives as an
unfair advantage. Gilt teaches him not to confuse poetry
with business by promptly running him through, and
only escapes being lynched by the crowd through the most
liberal exercise of his accomplishments as a bully. At
the Haymarket all this is nonsensed by an endeavor to
steer between Mr. Stanley Weyman's rights as author
of the story and the prescriptive right of the leading actor
to fight popularly and heroically against heavy odds. The
Englishman is a giant and a swashbuckler. Instead of
sparing Gil when he slips and falls, he rushes to make an
end of him, and has his thrust parried by a miracle of
address on the part of the prostrate hero, quite in the
manner of the combat between the two Master Crimim-
leses. Then the adapter suddenly returns to the book;
so that a gallant Frenchman, who, in the presence of a
French crowd, has just fought and beaten a gigantic Eng-
lish bully of extra-special insular arrogance, is frantically
mobbed by that French crowd for his behavior. In the
interval between the first and second acts I asked several
persons who had not read the book whether they could
understand the behavior of the crowd. They were all,
of course, completely bewildered by it.

Yet this first act is lucidity itself compared to the sec-
ond, in which the necessity for collecting under one roof
and into half an hour's time the incidents scattered by
Mr. Weyman over many leagues and many days has
driven Mr. Rose into desperate courses. In the novel
Renee convicts Gil of spying by luring him to dog her

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

for miles round the country, and then lying low for him
round a corner. The Haymarket stage not being large
enough for a paper chase, Mr. Rose has been driven to
make Renee have Gil locked into his bedroom on the top-
floor, and then catch him emerging deceitfully from the
chimney (Mr. Waring calls it a secret passage; but the
original conception is too obvious) on the ground-floor.
Furthermore, Gil, instead of accidentally finding the
diamonds in the street, breaks open the knife-drawer in
the sideboard with his dagger, and steals them from that
eligible hiding-place, declaring that "he never betrays the
hand that pays him," a piece of morality — borrowed from
the bravo in "Le Roi s'amuse" — which plunges the au-
dience into deeper bewilderment every time Mr. Waring
reiterates it. When at last the gorgeous female gets her
chance to heap her disdain on his head, the audience,
though prepared for a good deal, is not more prepared
for that than for anything else, and is too broken in spirit
to rise to the situation. Not until the second scene of the
third act does Gil at last make up his mind to be a hero ;
and the house, with a gasp of relief, exclaims, "Now we
know where we are," and settles down to enjoy itself
without further misgivings as to the relevance of the
Tennysonian couplet on the playbill:

"His honor rooted in dishonor stood;
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."

I suggest that a happier selection would have been the
epitaph which Jo Gargery could not aflford to have cut
on his father's tomb :

"But whatsome'er the failings on his part,
Remember, reader, he were that good in his heart"

74

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

As to the acting, it must be remembered that there is
not the ghost of a character in the whole story. When
this is allowed for, it will be admitted that the perform-
ance is a joyful sight. On the whole, I think I preferred
— on the score of conciseness — Mr. Holman Clark's im-
personation of Clon, the servant whose tongue had been
cut out, and who made me regret occasionally that the
same operation had not been performed on the others.
Next to him my favorite was Mr. Cyril Maude, who
wisely resolved that, since he could not make sense of his
part, he would at any rate make fun of it. He frankly
made Captain Larolle a pantaloon, and a very amusing
pantaloon too. Judge, then, of the dismay of the audience
when, before the play was half over, Clon suddenly seized
Captain Larolle round the waist, and rolled with him over
a fearful precipice. For a moment we all had a desperate
hope that Mr. Maude would bounce up through a star
trap at the other side of the stage ; take a harlequin's leap
through the first-floor window of the chateau; and roll
out again through the letter-box, closely pursued by Clon ;
but it was not to be : Captain Larolle was gone for ever ;
and I, for one, spent the rest of the evening lamenting his
premature decease.

Mr. Waring's task was, on the whole, the easiest.
When an actor has been condemned for years to move
about the stage in ugly Bond Street tailorings, producing
an effect of suppressed emotion by his anxiety to avoid
creasing them, the effect of suddenly letting him loose
as a swordsman in a picturesque costume is dazzling,
astonishing, breath-bereaving. Here is Mr. Waring, who
has created Torvald Helmer and Master Builder Solness
in England, and who has played a dozen other parts at
least better than this Gil de Berault; and yet, solely be-

75

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

cause he has exchanged the costume of a funeral mute
for that of a cavalier, and fights a duel instead of handing
his overcoat to a valet (always a most important incident
in a coat-and-waist-coat play), he is suddenly hailed as
a man who, after a meritorious but uneventful apprentice-
ship, has suddenly burst on the world as a great actor.
Oh, the New Public ! the New Public ! indifferent or un-
comfortable over fine work : enthusiastic over cheap jobs !
Of course Mr. Waring does the thing on his head, so to
speak ; but how can I compliment an actor who has done
what he has done on stuff like that?

Miss Winifred Emery has no such advantage as Mr.
Waring. For a man, a Louis Treize costume is a miracle
of elegance and romantic fascination compared to the
costume of to-day ; but the woman's costume of that time
is too matronly for modern ideas of active womanhood.
And then not only is the part an unblushingly bad one,
limited to the merest mechanical feeding of the play with
its one situation, but its verbal style is of that artificial
kind which Miss Emery positively refuses (quite rightly)
to take seriously. Unfortunately, nothing will cure Mr.
Rose of this style. He writes it exactly as he might col-
lect miniatures and snuffboxes ; and I am convinced that
in his heart he longs to make Miss Emery play in feathers
and a train held up by two black boys. He sticks in
gratuitous asides as pure curiosities, and occasionally goes
the length of a bit of Shakespeare — for instance, "You're
mad to say so," when the burglary is discovered. My
personal regard for Mr. Rose changes into malevolent
exasperation under this treatment, especially when Miss
Winifred Emery acts as the executioner. For when it
comes to tall talk and sham antique. Miss Emery takes
an attitude which is intolerably humiliating to any sen-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

sitive playgoer. The actress who consummated her repu-
tation in "The Benefit of the Doubt" disappears; and in
her place we have a cold, disgusted lady indulging an
audience of foolish grown-up men with an exhibition for
which she does not disguise her contempt. If one could
detect the smallest gleam of humorous enjoyment in her
delivery of the obsolete stageynesses of Bazilide and
Renee, one could accept them as burlesque; but no such
relenting is anywhere apparent. Even before she speaks,
when she acknowledges her enthusiastic reception with
that little catch of the lip and suffusion of the eye which
is one of her most irresistible effects, there is scorn in her
nostril. As she goes on she makes me feel indescribably
abject: if her glance accidentally lights anywhere near
me, I instinctively dive under the stall in front, and make
a miserable pretence of having dropped something. If
only I could get up and assure her that I at least am not
taken in by such trash, and am wholly innocent of the
folly of the rest of my crawling sex, it would be a relief
to me ; but she unnerves me so that I dare not. She threw
the business of Renee de Cocheforet to that silly audience
as she might have fluiig a bone to a troublesome dog;
and they wagged their tails, and licked her hands, and
yelped, and gobbled it as if it were the choicest morsel
they had ever tasted, even from her. After all, why
should she waste good acting on such baby-gabies ?

In the scenic department some special effects of light-
ing were tried ; but on the first night they were not quite
up to the Bayreuth standard, though no doubt they are
by this time working smoothly. The plan of representing
firelight in an interior by making the footlights jump
needs a more complete concealment of the gas flames —
especially for people who are nervous about fire. In

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the decorations of the second act, instead of actual suits
of armor, painted canvas profiles are used, perhaps in
compliance with the demands of Mr. Rose for something
old-fashioned. This seems to me to be mere atavism;
but it does not matter much. The orchestra, which was
put out of sight in Mr. Tree's time, is now put out of
hearing. There has been a valuable addition to the depth
of the stage; and very effective use is made of it in the
last act. That reminds me, by the way, of Richelieu,
which gave Mr. Sydney Valentine an opening for a bit
of acting which was duly received as an astonishing
rarity. Mr. Bernard Gould, made up as a Constable of
France of the rugged warrior type, persuaded the au-
dience that he had a fine part, mainly by dint of conceal-
ing the fact that he privately knew better.

Altogether, a silly piece of business. Probably it will
run for two seasons at least.

TH

ON DEADHEADS AND OTHER
MATTERS

Love in Idleness: an original comedy in three acts.

By Louis N. Parker and Edward J. Goodman.

Terry's Theatre, 21 October, 1896.

His Little Dodge: a comedy in three acts. By Justin

Huntly McCarthy. From *Xe Systeme Ribadier," by

MM. Georges Feydeau and Maurice Hennequin.

Royalty Theatre, 24 October, 1896.

The Storm: a play in one act and two tableaux. By

Ian Robertson. Royalty Theatre, 24 October, 1896.

WHY must a farcical comedy always break down
in the third act? One way of answering is
to question the fact, citing "Pink Dominos"
as an example of a three-act farcical comedy in which
the third act was the best of the three. But what "Pink
Dominos" really proved was that three acts of farce is
too much for human endurance, no matter how bril-
liantly it may be kept going to the end. The public is
apt to believe that it cannot have too much of a good
thing. I remember stealing about four dozen apples from
the orchard of a relative when I was a small boy, and
retiring to a loft with a confederate to eat them. But
when I had eaten eighteen I found, though I was still
in robust health, that it was better ftm to pelt the hens
with the remaining apples than to continue the banquet.
Many grown persons have made cognate miscalculations.
I have known a man, during the craze for "Nancy Lee,"
engage a street piano to play it continuously for two
hours. I have known another bribe a hairdresser to brush
his hair by machinery for an unlimited period. Both

79

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

these voluptuaries, of course, discovered that the art of
torture is the art of prolonging, not agony, but ecstasy.
If we were to represent theatrical sensation by graphic
curves in the manner of Jevons, we should find that the
more acute the sensation, the more rapidly does its curve
of enjoyment descend and dive into the negative. This
is specially true of the enjoyment to be derived from
farcical comedy. It is an unsympathetic enjoyment, and
therefore an abuse of nature. The very dullest drama in
five acts that ever attained for half a moment to some
stir of feeling, leaves the spectator, however it may have
bored him, happier and fresher than three acts of farcical
comedy at which he has been worried into laughing in-
cessantly with an empty heart. Mind, I am not moralizing
about farcical comedy : I am simply giving the observed
physical facts concerning it. In this clinical spirit I have
over and over again warned the dramatist and the mana-
ger not to dwell too long on galvanic substitutes for
genuine vivacity. When the vogue of farcical comedy
was at its utmost, Mr. Gilbert applied its galvanic methods
to public life and fashion instead of merely to clandestine
sprees and adulterous intrigues. But he tried it cautiously
in one act at first, and never ventured on more than two,
with lavish allurements of song, dance, and spectacle to
give it life and color, in spite of which the two acts al-
ways proved quite enough. The fact is, the end of the
second act is the point at which the spectators usually
realize that the friendly interest in the persons of the
drama which sustained them, and gave generosity and
humanity to their merriment during the earlier scenes, is
entirely undeserved, and that the pretty husband and
handsome wife are the merest marionettes with witty
dialogue stuck into their mouths. The worst thing that

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

can happen in a play is that the people with whom the
audience makes friends at first should disappoint it after-
wards. Mr. Gilbert carried this disappointment further:
he would put forward a paradox which at first promised
to be one of those humane truths which so many modem
men of fine spiritual insight, from William Blake onward,
have worded so as to flash out their contradiction of some
weighty rule of our systematized morality, and would
then let it slip through his fingers, leaving nothing but
a mechanical topsy-turvitude. Farcical comedy combines
the two disappointments. Its philosophy is as much a
sham as its humanity.

"His Little Dodge" is no exception to the two-act rule.
At the outset Miss Ellis JeflFreys, suddenly developing a
delightful talent for comedy, succeeds in winning all
possible charm of expectation and indulgent interest for
Lady Miranda. Mr. Weedon Grossmith, by a piece of
acting so masterly in its combination of irresistibly comic
effect with complete matter-of-courseness (there is not
the faintest touch of grotesque in his dress, face, voice,
or gesture from one end of the piece to the other) that
I have seen nothing so artistic of its kind since Jefferson
was here, filled us with the liveliest curiosity about the
Honorable Mandeville Hobb. Mr. Fred Terry, as Sir
Hercules, was genial enough to engage our good will;
and Mr. Maltby, with his comic conviction, and his un-
failing appreciation of the right dramatic point of his
part, made himself more than welcome. For a moment
we were cheated into believing that we had met some
real and likeable people ; and nobody could deny that the
play was outrageously funny. But our disenchantment
was all the more irritating. The moment it became ap-
parent that all these interesting and promising people

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

were only puppets in a piece of farcical clockwork, the
old disappointment, the old worry, the old rather peevish
impatience with the remaining turns of the mechanism
set in. A genuine dramatic development, founded on our
interest in Lady Miranda as suggested to us by Miss
Jeffreys in the first act, would have been followed with
the most expectant attention ; but hope changed to weary
disgust when her husband picked up a waistcoat strap,
and accused her of an intrigue with the gardener, whose
waistcoat was deficient in that particular.

In "Love in Idleness" there is no such mistake as this.
Mr. Parker knows only too well the value of an affec-
tionate relation between the audience and the persons of
the drama. Mortimer Pendlebury, the hero, is a lovable
nincompoop, who muddles the affairs of all his friends,
but so endears himself to Providence by his goodhearted-
ness that they muddle themselves right again in the most
cheerful way imaginable, and unite him to his long lost
love, a nice old lady in lavender, impersonated by Miss
Bella Pateman. Mr. Edward Terry, in a popular and not
particularly trying part, hits the character exactly, and
plays not only with comic force, but with tact and delicacy.
But the acting success of the play is Mr. de Lange's fire-
eating French Colonel, a perfectly original, absolutely
convincing, and extremely funny version of a part which,
in any other hands, would have come out the most hack-
neyed stuff in the world. It is not often that two such
impersonations as Pendlebury and Gondinot are to be
seen at the same theatre ; and if there is such a thing still
surviving in London as an unprofessional connoisseur
of acting, he will do well to see "Love in Idleness" for
their sakes.

By the way, I forgot that "His Little Dodge" is pre-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ceded at the Royalty by a new piece called "The Storm,"
by Mr. Ian Robertson. It is like an adaptation of a sen-
timental Academy picture.

Mr. Alexander has been driven to take the Royalty as
a chapel of ease to the St. James's by "The Prisoner of
Zenda," which is now a permanent institution, like Ma-
dame Tussaud's. I saw it again the other night; and
after "The Red Robe" I do not hesitate to pronounce it a
perfectly delectable play. It has gained greatly in smooth-
ness and charm since its first representation, except in the
prologue, which is stagey and overplayed. Mr. Alexander
as Rassendyl is as fresh as paint: so is Mr. Vernon as
Sapt. Mr. H. B. Irving now plays Hentzau, and enjoys
himself immensely over it, after his manner. He is, per-
haps, our ablest exponent of acting as an amusement for
young gentlemen, as his father is our ablest exponent of
acting as a fine art and serious profession. Miss Julia
Neilson now plays Flavia, and is a little less the princess
and more the actress than Miss Millard. Mr. Aubrey
Smith, as the black Elphberg, suffices in place of Mr.
Waring, who was wasted on it ; but the new Mayor's wife
is hardly as fascinating as Miss Olga Brandon. Miss
Ellis Jeffreys has made so brilliant a success in comedy
at the Royalty, thereby very happily confirming the
opinion of her real strength which I ventured upon when
Mr. Pinero miscast her in "Mrs. Ebbsmith," that she can
afford to forgive me if I confess that her Antoinette de
Mauban struck me as being the very worst piece of acting
an artist of her ability could conceivably perpetrate.

I am afraid Mrs. Kendal's opinion of the Press will not
be improved by the printing of a letter of hers which was
obviously not intended for publication. However, the
blunder has incidentally done a public service by making

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

known Mrs. Kendal's very sensible opinion that critics
should pay for their seats. Of course they should: the
complimentary invitation system is pure, unmitigated, in-
defensible corruption and blackmail, and nothing else.
But are we alone to blame in the matter? When the
manp^ers abolish fees they put in their programmes a re-
quest that the public will not persist in offering them.
Why then do they not only bribe me, but force me to ac-
cept the bribe? I must attend on the first night. If I try
to book a stall as a member of the general public, I am
told that there are none to be disposed of, all being re-
served for invited guests, including the press. If I declare
my identity, I am immediately accommodated, but not
allowed to pay. From time to time we have virtuous
announcements from beginners that they are going to do
away with the system and pay for all their seats. That
only proves that they are beginners, and are either making
a virtue of necessity, or else are too inexperienced to
know how the invitation system works. The public may
take it that for the present it is practically compulsory.
All that can be said for it is that it is at least an improve-
ment on the abominable old system of "orders," under
which newspapers claimed and exercised the right to
give orders of admission to the theatres to any one they
pleased, the recipients being mostly tradesmen adverti-
sing in their papers. Nowadays, if an editor wants a free
seat, he has to ask the manager for it ; and some editors,
I regret to say, still place themselves under heavy obliga-
tions to managers in this way. There are many papers
just worth a ticket from the point of view of the ex-
perienced acting-manager if they deluge the house with
constant and fulsome praise ; and this is largely supplied
by young men for no other consideration than the first-

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night stall, the result being, of course, a mass of corrupt
puffery for which the complimentary Press ticket is solely
responsible. Need I add that the personal position of a
critic under the system is by no means a satisfactory one ?
Under some managements he can always feel secure of
his footing as at least the guest of a gentleman — though
even that is a false position for him ; but he cannot con-
fine himself to theatres so managed. I remember on one
occasion, at no less a place than the Royal Italian Opera,
a certain State official, well known and respected as a
scholarly musician and writer on music, pitched into the
Opera in the columns of this journal. Some time after-
wards he appeared at Covent Garden in the box of a
critic of the first standing, representing a very eminent
daily paper. Sir Augustus Harris promptly objected to
his complimentary box being used to harbor audacious
persons who found fault with him. Of course the em-
inent daily paper immediately bought its box and went
over the eminent impresario like a steam-roller; but the
incident shows how little a manager who is also a man
of the world is disposed to admit the independence of the
critic as long as he has to oblige him. It is easy to say
that it is a "mutual convenience"; but, in fact, it is a
mutual inconvenience. If the incident just narrated had
occurred at an ordinary theatre, where the necessary sort
of seat for a critic is not always to be obtained on a first
night for money, instead of at the Opera, where seats can
practically always be bought, the manager might have
seriously inconvenienced the critic, especially as the paper
was a daily one, by boycotting him.

Let me mention another more recent and equally sig-
nificant incident. At a first night last week a popular
young actor of juvenile parts, in a theatre which he has

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himself managed, went out between the acts into the hall,
which was crowded with critics, and announced in a loud
voice, with indignant earnestness, that he had just seen
no less revolting a spectacle than the critic of a leading
newspaper walking into "the stalls of a London theatre"
not in evening dress. He added many passionate expres-
sions of his disgust for the benefit of the company, at
least half a dozen of whom, including myself, wore simply
the dress in which statesmen address public meetings and
gentlemen go to church. And yet I rather sympathized
with his irritation. The theatrical deadhead gets his
ticket on the implied condition that he "dresses the house."
If he comes in morning dress, or allows the ladies who
accompany him to look dowdy, he is struck off the free-
list. To this actor-manager we critics were not his fel-
low-guests, but simply deadheads whose business it was
to "dress the house" and write puffs. What else do we
get our free tickets for? Frankly, I don't know. If a
critic is an honest critic, he will write the same notice from
a purchased seat as from a presented one. He is not free
to stay away if he is not invited : a newspaper must notice
a new play, just as much as it must notice an election.
He keeps money out of the house by occupying a seat
that would otherwise be sold to the public: therefore he
costs the management half a guinea. As I have said, he
cannot help himself; but that does not alter the fact, or
make it less mischievous. Mrs. Kendal, who thinks we
should pay for our tickets, is quite right; the impetuous
ex-manager who thinks we should dress resplendently in
return for our free tickets is quite right; and we are ab-
solutely and defencelessly in the wrong.
As to the remedy, I shall deal with that another time.

86

IBSEN AHEAD!

Donna Diana: a poetical comedy in four acts.
Adapted, and to a great extent rewritten, from the
German version of Moreto's "El Desden con el
Desden," by Westland Marston. Special revival
Prince of Wales Theatre, 4 November, 1896.

FEW performances have struck such terror into me
as that of Westland Marston's "Donna Diana" on
Wednesday afternoon. Hitherto I have looked
tranquilly on at such reversions to the classically romantic
style which held the English stage from the time of Otway
to that of Sheridan Knowles and Westland Marston, be-
cause the trick of its execution had been so completely lost
that the performances were usually as senselessly ridic-
ulous as an attempt to give one of Hasse's operas at Bay-
reuth with Sucher and Vogl in the principal parts would
be. But such occasions have always provoked the dis-
quieting reflection that since it is quite certain Mrs. Sid-
dons produced extraordinary effects in such plays in times
when they were, except in point of ceremonious manners,
just as remote from real life as they are at present, there
must clearly be some way of attacking them so as to get
hold of an audience and escape all suggestion of derision.
And on that came the threatening thought — suppose this
way should be rediscovered, could any mortal power pre-
vent the plays coming back to their kingdom and resu-
ming their rightful supremacy ? I say rightful ; for they
have irresistible credentials in their staginess. The the-
atrical imagination, the love of the boards, produced this
art and nursed it. When it was at his height the touches
of nature in Shakespeare were not endured : the passages

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were altered and the events reshaped until they were of
a piece with the pure-bred drama engendered solely by
the passion of the stage-struck, uncrossed by nature, char-
acter, poetry, philosophy, social criticism, or any other
alien stock. Stage kings and queens, stage lovers, stage
tyrants, stage parents, stage villains and stage heroes were
alone to be found in it ; and, naturally, they alone were fit
for the stage or in their proper place there. Generations
of shallow critics, mostly amateurs, have laughed at
Partridge for admiring the King in "Hamlet" more than
Hamlet himself (with Garrick in the part), because "any
one could see that the King was an actor." But surely
Partridge was right. He went to the theatre to see, not
a real limited monarch, but a stage king, speaking as
Partridges like to hear a king speaking, and able to have
people's heads cut off, or to browbeat treason from behind
an invisible hedge of majestically asserted divinity. Field-
ing misunderstood the matter because in a world of Field-
ings there would be neither kings nor Partridges. It is
all very well for Hamlet to declare that the business of
the theatre is to hold the mirror up to nature. He is al-
lowed to do it out of respect for the bard, just as he is
allowed to say to a minor actor, "Do not saw the air
thus," though he has himself been sawing the air all the
evening, and the unfortunate minor actor has hardly had
the chance of cutting a chip off with a penknife. But
everybody knows perfectly well that the function of the
theatre is to realize for the spectators certain pictures
which their imagination craves for, the said pictures being
fantastic as the dreams of Alnaschar. Nature is only
brought in as an accomplice in the illusion : for example,
the actress puts rouge on her cheek instead of burnt cork
because it looks more natural ; but the moment the illusion

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IS sacrificed to nature, the house is up in arms and the play
is chivied from the stage. I began my own dramatic
career by writing plays in which I faithfully held the
mirror up to nature. They are much admired in private
reading by social reformers, industrial investigators, and
revolted daughters ; but on one of them being rashly ex-
hibited behind the footlights, it was received with a par-
oxysm of execration, whilst the mere perusal of the others
induces loathing in every person, including myself, in
whom the theatrical instinct flourishes in its integrity.
Shakespeare made exactly one attempt, in "Troilus and
Cressida," to hold the mirror up to nature ; and he prob-
ably nearly ruined himself by it. At all events, he never
did it again ; and practical experience of what was really
popular in the rest of his plays led to "Venice Preserved"
and "Donna Diana." It was the stagey element that held
the stage, not the natural element. In this way, too, the
style of execution proper to these plays, an excessively
stagey style, was evolved and perfected, the "palmy days"
being the days when nature, except as a means of illusion,
had totally vanished from both plays and acting. I need
not tell over again the story of the late eclipse of the
stagey drama during the quarter-century beginning with
the success of Robertson, who, by changing the costume
and the form of dialogue, and taking the Du Maurieresque,
or garden party, plane, introduced a style of execution
which effectually broke the tradition of stagey acting,
and has left us at the present moment with a rising gen-
eration of actors who do not know their business. But
ever since the garden-party play suddenly weakened and
gave way to "The Sign of the Cross" and "The Red
Robe" — ever since Mr. Lewis Waller as Hotspur, Mr.
Alexander as King Rassendyl, and Mr. Waring as Gil

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de Berault have suddenly soared from a position of gen-
eral esteem as well-tailored sticks into enthusiastic repute
as vigorous and imaginative actors — it has become only
too probable that the genuine old stagey drama only needs
for its revival artists who, either by instinct or under the
guidance of the Nestors of the profession, shall hit on the
right method of execution.

Judge, then, of my consternation when Miss Violet
Vanbrugh, with Nestor Hermann Vezin looking on from
a box, and officially announced as the artistic counsellor
of the management, attacked the part of Donna Diana in
Westland Marston's obsolete play with the superbly
charged bearing, the picturesque plastique, and the im-
passioned declamation which one associates with the Sid-
dons school ! More terrifying still, the play began to live
and move under this treatment. Cold drops stood on
my brow as, turning to Mr. Archer, whose gloomy and
bodeful eye seemed to look through and through Donna
Diana to immeasurable disaster beyond, I said, "If this
succeeds, we shall have the whole Siddons repertory back
again." And, in a way, it did succeed. If Westland
Marston had been a trifle less tamely sensible and sedately
literary, and if the rest of the company had been able to
play up to Miss Vanbrugh's pitch, it might have succeeded
with frightful completeness. Fortunately none of the
others quite attained the palmy plane. Mr. Vibart's defiant
convexity of attitude had not the true classic balance — in
fact, there were moments when his keeping any balance
at all seemed to disprove gravitation. Mr. Bourchier, if
one must be quite frank, is spreading himself at the waist
so rapidly that he is losing his smartness and vocal res-
onance, and will, at his present rate of expansion, be fit
for no part except Falstaff in a few years more. The

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actor who drinks is in a bad way ; but the actor who eats
is lost. Why, with such excellent domestic influences
around him, is Mr. Bourchier not restrained from the
pleasures of the table ? He has also a trick of dashing at
the end of a speech so impetuously that he is carried fully
three words into the next before he can stop himself. If
he has to say "How do you do? Glad to see you. Is
your mother quite well?" it comes out thus: — "How do
you do glad to. See you is your mother. Quite well."
All of which, though alleviated by tunics, tights and blank
verse, is the harder to bear because Mr. Bourchier would
be one of our best comedians if only he would exact that
much, and nothing less, from himself. Mr. Elliot, cheered
to find the old style looking up again, played Perin with
excellent discretion — was, indeed, the only male member
of the cast who materially helped the play ; and Mr. King-
horne, though seemingly more bewildered than encour-
aged by the setting back of the clock, took his turn as
"the sovereign duke of Barcelona" like a man to whom
such crazy adventures had once been quite familiar. Miss
Irene Vanbrugh, as the malapert waiting wench who, ever
since the spacious times of great Elizabeth, has been the
genteel blankversemonger's notion of comic relief, ful-
filled her doom with a not too ghastly sprightliness ; but
the other ladies were out of the question : they had not a
touch of the requisite carriage and style, and presented
themselves as two shapeless anachronisms, like a couple
of English housemaids at the Court of Spain. Let us by
all means congratulate ourselves to the full on the fact
that our young actresses are at least not stagey; but let
us also be careful not to confuse the actress who knows
too much to be stagey with the actress who does not know
enough.

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For the rest, all I can say is that I was glad to look
again on the front scenes of my youth, and to see Miss
Vanbrugh, after announcing her skill as a lute player,
appear with an imitation lyre, wrenched from the pedals
of an old-fashioned grand piano, and gracefully pluck
with her jewelled fingers at four brass bars about an
eighth of an inch thick. If Miss Vanbrugh will apply to
Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, he will, I have no doubt, be glad
to show her a real lute. She can return the service by
showing him how very effective a pretty woman looks
when she is playing it the right way. Though, indeed,
that can be learnt from so many fifteenth-century painters
that the wonder is that Miss Vanbrugh should not know
all about it.

What, then, is to be the end of all this revival of
staginess? Is the mirror never again to be held up to
nature in the theatre? Do not be alarmed, pious play-
goer: people get tired of everything, and of nothing
sooner than of what they most like. They will soon begin
to loathe these romantic dreams of theirs, and crave to
be tormented, vivisected, lectured, sermonized, appalled
by the truths which they passionately denounce as mon-
strosities. Already, on the very top of the wave of stage
illusion, rises Ibsen, with his mercilessly set mouth and
seer's forehead, menacing us with a new play. Where-
upon we realize how we have shirked the last one — how
we have put off the torture of "Little Eyolf" as one puts
off a visit to the dentist. But the torture tempts us in spite
of ourselves ; we feel that it must be gone through with ;
and now, accordingly, comes Miss Hedda Hilda Gabler
Wangel Robins, christened Elizabeth, and bids us not
only prepare to be tortured, but subscribe to enable her
to buy the rack. A monstrous proposition, but one that has

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been instantly embraced. No sooner was it made than
Mrs. Patrick Campbell volunteered for the Ratwife, the
smallest part in "Little Eyolf," consisting of a couple of
dozen speeches in the first act only. (Clever Mrs. Pat!
is is, between ourselves, the most fascinating page of
the play.) Miss Janet Achurch, the original and only
Nora Helmer, jumped at the appalling part of Rita, whom
nobody else on the stage dare tackle, for all her "gold
and green forests." The subscriptions poured in so fast
that the rack is now ready, and the executioners are
practising so that no pang may miss a moan of its utmost
excruciation. Miss Robins herself will play Asta, the
sympathetic sister without whom, I verily believe, human
nature could not bear this most horrible play. The per-
formances are announced to take place on successive after-
noons from the 23rd to the 27th inclusive, at the Avenue
Theatre; and there is a sort of hideous humor in the
addition that if three people wish to get racked together,
they can secure that privilege in the stalls at eight shillings
apiece, provided they apply before the subscription closes
on the 1 6th.

It will be remarked as a significant fact that though
the women's parts in "Little Eyolf" have attracted a
volunteer cast which no expenditure could better — enor-
mously the strongest that has ever been brought to bear
in England on an Ibsen play — we do not hear of eminent
actors volunteering for the part of Allmers (to be played,
I understand, by M. Courtenay Thorpe, whose Oswald,
in "Ghosts," made an impression in America). The reason
is that the actor who plays the man's part in Ibsen has
to go under the harrow equally with the audience, suffer-
ing the shameful extremity of a weak soul stripped naked
before an audience looking to him for heroism. Women

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do not mind ill usage so much, because the strongest posi-
tion for a woman is that of a victim: besides, Ibsen is
evidently highly susceptible to women, on which account
they will forgive him anything, even such remorseless
brutalities as Rita's reproach to her husband for his in-
difference to his conjugal privileges: "There stood your
champagne ; but you tasted it .not," which would be an
outrage if it were not a masterstroke. Apart from the
sensational scene of the drowning of Little Eyolf at the
end of the first act, the theatre and its characteristic im-
aginings are ruthlessly set aside for the relentless holding
up of the mirror to Nature as seen under Ibsen rays that
pierce our most secret cupboards and reveal the grin of
the skeleton there. The remorseless exposure and analysis
of the marriage founded on passion and beauty and gold
and green forests, the identity of its love with the cruellest
hate, and of this same hate with the affection excited by
the child (the "Kreutzer Sonata" theme), goes on, with-
out the smallest concession to the claims of staginess, until
the pair are finally dismissed, somewhat tritely, to cure
themselves as best they can by sea air and work in an
orphanage. Yes, we shall have rare afternoons at the
Avenue Theatre. If we do not get our eight shillings'
worth of anguish it will not be Ibsen's fault.

Oddly enough. Miss Robins announces that the profits
of the torture chamber will go towards a fund, under
distinguished auditorship, for the performance of other
plays, the first being the ultra-romantic, ultra-stagey,
"Mariana" of Echegaray. When, on the publication of
that play by Mr. Fisher Unwin, I urged its suitability for
production, nobody would believe me, because events had
not then proved the sagacity of my repeated assertions
that the public were tired of tailormade plays, and were

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ripe for a revival of color and cx>stume ; and now, alas !
my prophecies are forgotten in the excitement created by
their fulfilment. That is the tragedy of my career. I shall
die as I have lived, poor and unlucky, because I am like
a clock that goes fast: I always strike twelve an hour
before noon.

PEER GYNT IN PARIS

Peer Gynt: a dramatic poem in five acts, by Henrik
Ibsen. Theatre de I'CEuvre (Theatre de la Nou-
veautc, Rue Blanche, Paris). 12 November, 1896.
Peer Gynt: translated into French prose, with a few
passages in rhymed metre, by M. le Comte Prozor,
in "La Nouvelle Revue," 15 May and i and 15 June,
1896.

Peer Gynt: a metrical translation into English by
Charles and William Archer. London : Walter Scott.
1892.

THE humiliation of the English stage is now com-
plete. Paris, that belated capital which makes the
intelligent Englishman imagine himself back in
the Dublin or Edinburgh of the eighteenth century, has
been beforehand with us in producing "Peer Gynt."
Within five months of its revelation in France through the
Comte Prozor's translation, it has been produced by a
French actor-manager who did not play the principal part
himself, but undertook two minor ones which were not
even mentioned in the programme. We have had the much
more complete translation of Messrs. William and Charles
Archer in our hands for four years; and we may con-

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fidently expect the first performance in 1920 or there-
abouts, with much trumpeting of the novelty of the piece
and the daring of the manager.

f "Peer Gynt" will finally smash anti-Ibsenism in Europe,
because Peer is everybody's hero. He has the same effect
on the imagination that Hamlet, Faust, and Mozart's Don
Juan have had. Thousands of people who will never read
another line of Ibsen will read "Peer Gynt" again and
again; and millions will be conscious of him as part of
the poetic currency of the world without reading him at
all. The witches in "Macbeth," the ghost in "Hamlet,"
the statue in "Don Juan," and Mephistopheles, will not
be more familiar to the twentieth century than the Boyg,
the Button Moulder, the Strange Passenger, and the Lean
Person. It is of no use to argue about it ; nobody who is
susceptible to legendary poetry can escape the spell if
he once opens the book, or — as I can now affirm from
experience — if he once sees even the shabbiest representa-
tion of a few scenes from it. Take the most conscientious
anti-Ibsenite you can find, and let him enlarge to his
heart's content on the defects of Ibsen. Then ask him
what about "Peer Gynt.'^ He will instantly protest that
you have hit him unfairly — that "Peer Gynt" must be left
out of the controversy. I hereby challenge any man in
England with a reputation to lose to deny that "Peer
Gynt" is not one of his own and the world's very choicest
treasures in its kind. Mind, gentlemen, I do not want
to know whether "Peer Gynt" is right or wrong, good
art or bad art : the question is whether you can get away
from it — whether you ever had the same sensation before
in reading a dramatic poem — whether you ever had even
a kindred sensation except from the work of men whose
greatness is now beyond question. The only people who

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have escaped the spell which, for good or evil, pleasurably
or painfully, Ibsen's dramas cast on the imagination, are
either those light-hearted paragraphists who gather their
ideas by listening to one another braying, or else those
who are taken out of their depth by Ibsen exactly as the
music-hall amateur is taken out of his depth by Beethoven.^

The Parisian production has been undertaken by M.
LvUgne Poe, of the Theatre de I'CEuvre, whose perform-
ances of Ibsen and Maeterlinck here are well remembered.
He used the translation by the Comte Prozor, which ap-
peared in "La Nouvelle Revue," chiefly in prose, but with
a few irresistibly metrical passages done into rhymed
verse. Unfortunately, it was incomplete, especially in the
fourth and fifth acts. The Saeter girls were omitted.
The Anitra episode was represented by only one scene.
The first part of the soliloquy before Memnon's statue
was dovetailed into the last half of the soliloquy before
the Sphinx, as if the two monuments were one and the
same. In the fifth act the Strange Passenger and the
Lean Person (the devil) were altogether sacrificed; and
the Button Moulder's explanation to Peer of what "being
oneself" really means was cut out of his part — an inde-
fensibly stupid mutilation. The episode of the man who
cuts off his finger, with his funeral in the last act, as well
as the auction scene which follows, also vanished. M.
Lugne Poe, in his acting version, restored the Strange
Passenger's first entrance on board the ship ; but in other
respects he took the Prozor version with all its omissions,
and cut it down still more. For instance, all the Egyptian
scenes, Memnon, Sphinx, pyramids, Begriffenfeldt, Cairo
madhouse and all, went at one slash. The scene in the
water after the shipwreck, where Peer pushes the un-
fortunate cook off the capsized boat, but holds him up by

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the hair for a moment to allow him to pray without elicit-
ing anything more to the purpose than "Give us this day
our daily bread," was cut, with, of course, the vital episode
of the second appearance of the Strange Passenger. As
the performance nevertheless lasted nearly four hours —
including, however, a good deal of silly encoring of
Grieg's music, and some avoidable intervals between the
scenes — extensive curtailment was inevitable, a complete
representation being only possible under Bayreuth con-
ditions.

There was only one instance of deliberate melodramatic
vulgarization of the poem. In the fourth act, after Peer
has made a hopeless donkey of himself with his Hottentot
Venus, and been tricked and robbed by her, he argues his
way in his usual fashion back into his own self-respect,
arriving in about three minutes at the point of saying,

"It's excusable, sure, if I hold up my head
And feel my worth as the man, Peer Gynt,
Also called Human-life's Emperor."

At this point Ibsen introduces the short scene in which
we see the woman whom Peer has deserted, and who is
faithfully waiting for him in the north, sitting outside the
old hut in the sunshine, spinning and tending her goats,
and singing her song of blessing on the absent man. Now
it is of the essence of the contrast that Peer, excellently
qualified at this moment, not to be the hero of Solveig's
affectionate faith, but to make an intoxicating success in
London at a Metropole banquet as a Nitrate King or big
showman, should never think of her (though he is con-
stantly recalling, more or less inaccurately, all sorts of
scraps of his old experiences, including his amours with
the Green Clad one), but should go on to the climax of

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his coronation by the lunatic Begriffenfeldt as "Emperor
of Himself" with a straw crown in the Cairo bedlam. I
regret to say that M. Lugne Poe so completely missed
Ibsen's intention here, that he made Peer go to sleep a
propos de bottes; darkened the stage; and exhibited
Solveig to him as a dream vision in the conventional
Drury Lane fourth-act style. For which, in my opinion'
(which is softened by the most friendly personal disposi-
tion towards M. Poe), he ought to have been gently led^
away and guillotined. It is quite clear that Peer Gynt
remains absolutely unredeemed all through this elderly
period of his career ; and even when we meet him in the
last act returning to Norway an old man, he is still the
same clever, vain, greedy, sentimental, rather fascinating
braggart and egoist. When the ship runs down a boat
he frantically denounces the inhumanity of the cook and
sailors because they will not accept his money to risk their
lives in an attempt to save the drowning men. Immedi-
ately after, when the ship is wrecked, he drowns the cook
to save his own life without a moment's remorse. Then
up comes the Strange Passenger out of the depths to ask
him whether he has never even once — say once in six
months — felt that strange sense (that occasionally des-
perately dangerous sense, as Ibsen well knows) for which
we have dozens of old creed names — "divine grace," "the
fear of God," "conviction of sin," and so on — but no quite
satisfactory modern one. Peer no more understands what
he means than if he were an average London journalist.
His glimpse of the fact that the Strange Passenger is
not, as he at first feared, the devil, but rather a divine
messenger, simply relieves his terror. In the country
graveyard where, chancing on the funeral of the hero of
the chopped finger, a man completely the reverse of him-

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self, he hears the priest's tribute to the character of the
deceased, he says: —

"I could almost believe it was I that slept
And heard in a vision my panegyric."

In these scenes, in the one at the auction, in the wood
where, comparing himself to the wild onion he is eating,
he strips off the successive layers to find the core of it,
and, finding that it is all layers and no core, exclaims,
"Nature is witty," there is no sign of the final catastrophe
except a certain growing desperation, an ironical finding
of himself out, which makes a wonderful emotional under-
current through the play in this act. It is not until he
stumbles on the hut, and hears the woman singling in it,
that the blow falls, and for the first time the mysterious
sense mentioned by the Strange Passenger seizes him.
With this point rightly brought out, the symbolism of the
following scenes becomes more vivid and real than all the
real horses and real water ever lavished on a popular
melodrama. Peer's wild run through the night over the
charred heath, stumbling over the threadballs and broken
straws, dripped upon by the dewdrops, pelted by the
withered leaves that are all that is left of the songs he
should have sung, the tears he should have wept, the
beliefs he should have proclaimed, the deeds he should
have achieved, is fantastic only in so far as it deals with
realities that cannot be presented prosaically. As the
divine case against Peer is followed up, the interest ac-
cumulates in a way that no Adelphi court-martial can even
suggest. The reappearance of the Strange Passenger as
the Button Moulder commissioned to melt up Peer in his
casting ladle as so much unindividualized raw material;
Peer's frantic attempts to prove that he has always been

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pre-eminently himself, and his calling as a witness the
old beggared Troll king, who testifies, on the contrary,
that Peer is a mere troll, shrunk into nothing by the troll
principle of being sufficient to himself; Peer's change of
ground, and his attempt to escape even into hell by prov-
ing that he had at least risen to some sort of individuality
as a great sinner, only to have his poor little list of sins
(among which he never dreams of mentioning his deser-
tion of Solveig — the only sin big enough to save him)
contemptuously rejected by the devil as not worth wast-
ing brimstone on; and his final conviction and despair,
from which he is only rescued by the discovery of "Peer
Gynt as himself" in the faith, hope, and love of the blind
old woman who takes him to her arms: all this deadly
earnest is handled witli such ironic vivacity, such grimly
intimate humor, and finally with such tragic pathos, that
it excites, impresses, and touches even those whom it ut-
terly bewilders. Indeed, the ending is highly popular,
since it can so easily be taken as implying the pretty
middle-class doctrine that all moral difficulties find their
solution in love as the highest of all things — a doctrine
which, after several years' attentive observation, and a
few careful personal experiments, I take to be the utmost
attainable extreme of nonsensical wickedness and folly.
The real Ibsenist solution is, of course, that there is no
"solution" at all, any more than there is a philosopher's
stone.

At the L'CEuvre performance, this trial of a sinner was
very concisely summarized; but the point of it was by
no means entirely missed. The Strange Passenger re-
ceived a round of applause ; the Button Moulder was ap-
preciated; and the demonstration elicited by the climax
of Peer Gynt's burst of despair, "Qu'on trace ces mots

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

sur ma tombe : Ci-git personne," showed how effectually
Ibsen, at his most abstract point, can draw blood even
from a congenitally unmetaphysical nation, to which the
play seems as much a mixture of sentiment and stage
diablerie as "Faust" seemed to Gounod. Two other scenes
moved the audience deeply. One was where Solveig joins
Peer in the mountains, and is left by him with the words,
"Be my way long or short, you must wait for me" ; and
the other, which produced a tremendous effect — we should
have "Peer Gynt" in London this season if any of our
actor-managers had been there to witness it — ^the death
of Peer's mother. The rest was listened to with alert
interest and occasional amazement, which was not always
Ibsen's fault. Only one scene — that with the Boyg —
failed, because it was totally unintelligible. It was pre-
sented as a continuation of the Dovre scene — in itself
puzzling enough; and the audience stared in wonder at
a pitchy dark stage, with Peer howling, a strange voice
squealing behind the scenes, a woman calling at intervals,
and not a word that any one could catch. It was let pass
with politely smothered laughter as a characteristic Ibsen
insanity; though whether this verdict would have been
materially changed if the dialogue had been clearly fol-
lowed is an open question; for the Boyg (called "Le
Tordu" by the Comte Prozor, and "Le Tortueux" in the
playbill), having elusiveness as his natural speciality, is
particularly hard to lay hold of in the disguise of an
allegory.

As to the performance, I am not sure that I know how
good the actors were ; for Ibsen's grip of humanity is so
powerful that almost any presentable performer can count
on a degree of illusion in his parts which Duse herself
failed to produce when she tried Shakespeare. To say

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that Deval did not exhaust his opportunity as Peer is only
to say that he is not quite the greatest tragic, comic, and
character actor in the world. He misunderstood the
chronology of the play, and made Peer no older on the
ship than in Morocco, whilst in the last scene he made
him a doddering centenarian. He spoiled the famous
comment on the blowing up of the yacht, "Grod takes
fatherly thought for my personal weal ; but economical ! —
no, that he isn't," by an untimely stage fall ; but otherwise
he managed the part intelligently and played with spirit
and feeling. Albert-Mayer played no less than four parts :
the Boyg, Aslak the Smith, the Strange Passenger, and
the Button Moulder, and was good in all, bar the Boyg.
Lugne Poe himself played two parts, Solveig's father and
the travelling Englishman, Mr. Cotton. Mr. Cotton was
immense. He was a fair, healthy, good-looking young
man, rather heavy in hand, stiflF with a quiet determination
to hold his own among that gang of damned foreigners,
and speaking French with an accent which made it a joy
to hear him say "C'est trop dire" ("Say trow deah," with
the tongue kept carefully back from the teeth). He cer-
tainly did infinite credit to the activity and accuracy of
Lugne Poe's observation during his visit to this country.
Suzanne Auclaire, who will be vividly remembered by all
those who saw her here as Hilda Wangel in "The Master
Builder," was cast for Solveig, not altogether wisely, I
think, as the part is too grave and maternal for her. In
the last scene, which she chanted in a golden voice very
much a la Bernhardt, she did not represent Solveig as
blind, nor did her make-up suggest anything more than
a dark Southern woman of about forty-two, although
Peer was clearly at least ninety-nine, and by no means
young for his age : in fact, he might have been the original

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pilgrim with the white locks flowing. Her naive charm
carried her well through the youthful scenes ; but on the
whole she was a little afraid of the part, and certainly did
not make the most of it. Madame Barbieri, as Aase, was
too much the stage crone ; but she probably had no alter-
native to that or betraying her real age, which was much
too young. She must have been abundantly satisfied with
the overwhelming effect of her death scene. The only
altogether inefficient member of the cast was the Green
Clad One, who did not understand her part, and did not
attend to Ibsen's directions. And the Brat, unfortunately,
was a rather pretty child, very inadequately disfigured
by a dab of burnt cork on the cheek.

Many thousand pounds might be lavished on the
scenery and mounting of "Peer Gynt." M. Lugne Poe
can hardly have lavished twenty pounds on it. Peer
Gynt's costume as the Prophet was of the Dumb Crambo
order : his caftan was an old dressing-gown, and his tur-
ban, though authentic, hardly new. There was no horse
and — to my bitter disappointment — no pig. A few panto-
mime masks, with allfours and tails, furnished forth the
trolls in the Dovre scene ; and the explosion of the yacht
was represented by somebody upsetting a chair in the
wing. Anitra, with black curtains of hair transfixed by
peonies over each ear, a whited face, and a general air of
being made up with the most desperate inadequacy of
person and wardrobe after Mrs. Patrick Campbell's Juliet,
insisted upon an encore for a dance which M. Fouquier,
of the "Figaro," described, without exaggeration, as "les
contorsions d'un lievre qui a regu un coup de feu dans les
reins." And yet this performance took place in a theatre
nearly as large as Drury Lane, completely filled with an
audience of much the same class as one sees here at a

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Richter concert. Miss Robins would not dream of present-
ing "Little Eyolf" at the Avenue Theatre next week so
cheaply. But it mattered very little. M. Lugne Poe
showed in London that he could catch more of the at-
mosphere of a poetic play with the most primitive ar-
rangements than some of our managers succeed in doing
at a ruinous outlay. Of course the characteristic Northern
hardheaded, hardfisted humor, the Northern power of
presenting the deepest truths in the most homely gro-
tesques, was missed: M Poe, with all his realism, could
no more help presenting the play sentimentally and sub-
limely than M. Lamoureux can help conducting the over-
ture to "Tannhauser" as if it were the "Marseillaise" ; but
the universality of Ibsen makes his plays come home to
all nations ; and Peer Gynt is just as good a Frenchman
as a Norwegian, just as Dr. Stockman is as intelligible
in Bermondsey or Bournemouth as he is in his native
town.

I have to express my obligation to the editor of "La
Nouvelle Revue" for very kindly lending me his private
copy of the numbers containing the Prozor translation.
Otherwise I must have gone without, as the rest of the
edition was sold out immediately after the performance.

K>5

LITTLE EYOLF

Little Eyolf: a play in three acts, by Henrik Ibsen.
Avenue Theatre, 23 November, 1896.

THE happiest and truest epithet that has yet been
appHed to the Ibsen drama in this country came
from Mr. Clement Scott when he said that Ibsen
was "suburban." That is the whole secret of it. If Mr.
Scott had only embraced his discovery instead of quarrel-
ling with it, what splendid Ibsen critic he would have
made ! Suburbanity at present means modern civilization.
The active, germinating life in the households of to-day
cannot be typified by an aristocratic hero, an ingenuous
heroine, a gentleman-forger abetted by an Artful Dodger,
and a parlormaid who takes half-sovereigns and kisses
from the male visitors. Such interiors exist on the stage,
and nowhere else: therefore the only people who are ac-
customed to them and at home in them are the dramatic
critics. But if you ask me where you can find the Helmer
household, the Allmers household, the Solness household,
the Rosmer household, and all the other Ibsen households,
I reply, "Jump out of a train anywhere between Wimble-
don and Haslemere ; walk into the first villa you come to ;
and there you are." Indeed you need not go so far:
Hampstead, Maida Vale, or West Kensington will serve
your turn ; but it is as well to remind people that the true
suburbs are now the forty-mile radius, and that Camber-
well and Brixton are no longer the suburbs, but the over-
flow of Gower Street — the genteel slums, in short. And
this suburban life, except in so far as it is totally vegetable
and undramatic, is the life depicted by Ibsen. Doubtless

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some ol our critics are quite sincere in thinking it a vulgar
life, in considering the conversations which men hold with
their wives in it improper, in finding its psychology puz-
zling and unfamiliar, and in forgetting that its book-
shelves and its music cabinets are laden with works which
did not exist for them, and which are the daily bread of
young women educated very differently from the sisters
and wives of their day. No wonder they are not at ease
in an atmosphere of ideas and assumptions and attitudes
which seem to them bewildering, morbid, affected, ex-
travagant, and altogether incredible as the common cur-
rency of suburban life. But Ibsen knows better. His
suburban drama is the inevitable outcome of a suburban
civilization (meaning a civilization that appreciates fresh
air) ; arrd the true explanation of Hedda Gabler's vogue
is that given by Mr. Grant Allen — "I take her in to dinner
twice a week."

Another change that the critics have failed to reckon
with is the change in fiction. Byron remarked that

"Romances paint at full length people's wooings,
But only give a bust of marriages."

That was true enough in the days of Sir Walter Scott,
when a betrothed heroine with the slightest knowledge of
what marriage meant would have shocked the public as
much as the same ignorance to-day would strike it as
tragic if real, and indecent if simulated. The result was
that the romancer, when he came to a love scene, had to
frankly ask his "gentle reader" to allow him to omit the
conversation as being necessarily too idiotic to interest
any one. We have fortunately long passed out of that
stage in novels. By the time we had reached "Vanity

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Fair" and "Middlemarch" — both pretty old and prim
stories now — marriage had become the starting point of
our romances. Love is as much the romancer's theme as
ever ; but married love and the courtships of young people
who are appalled by the problems of life and motherhood
have left the governesses and curates, the Amandas and
Tom Joneses of other days, far out of sight. Ten years
ago the stage was as far behind Sir Walter Scott as he is
behind Madame Sarah Grand. But when Ibsen took it
by the scruff of the neck just as Wagner took the Opera,
then, willy nilly, it had to come along. And now what
are the critics going to do? The Ibsen drama is pre-
eminently the drama of marriage. If dramatic criticism
receives it in the spirit of the nurse's husband in "Romeo
and Juliet," if it grins and makes remarks about "the
secrets of the alcove," if it pours forth columns which are
half pornographic pleasantry and the other half sham
propriety, then the end will be, not in the least that Ibsen
will be banned, but that dramatic criticism will cease to
be read. And what a frightful blow that would be to
English culture!

"Little Eyolf" is an extraordinarily powerful play, al-
though none of the characters are as fascinatingly in-
dividualized as Solness or Rosmer, Hedda or Nora. The
theme is a marriage — an ideal marriage from the sub-
urban point of view. A young gentleman, a student and
an idealist, is compelled to drudge at teaching to support
himself. He meets a beautiful young woman. They fall
in love with one another; and by the greatest piece of
luck in the world (suburbanly considered) she has plenty
of money. Thus is he set free by his marriage to live
his own life in his own way. That is just where an or-
dinary play leaves off, and just where an Ibsen play

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

begins. The husband begins to make those discoveries
which everybody makes, except, apparently, the dramatic
critics. First, that love, instead of being a perfectly
homogeneous, unchanging, unending passion, is of all
things the most mutable. It will pass through several
well-marked stages in a single evening, and, whilst seem-
ing to slip back to the old starting point the next evening,
will yet not slip quite back ; so that in the course of years
it will appear that the moods of an evening were the
anticipation of the evolution of a lifetime. But the evolu-
tion does not occur in different people at the same time
or in the same order. Consequently the hero of "Little
Eyolf," being an imaginative, nervous, thoughful person,
finds that he has had enough of caresses, and wants to
dream alone among the mountain peaks and solitudes,
whilst his wife, a warm-blooded creature, has only found
her love intensified to a fiercely jealous covetousness of
him. His main refuge from this devouring passion is
in his peacefully affectionate relations with his sister, and
in certain suburban dreams very common among literary
amateurs living on their wives' incomes : to wit, forming
the mind and character of his child, and writing a great
book (on "Human Responsibility" if you please). Of
course the wife, in her jealousy, hates the sister, hates
the child, hates the book, hates her husband for making
her jealous of them, and hates herself for her hatreds
with the frightful logic of greedy, insatiable love. Enter
then our old friend, Ibsen's divine messenger. The Rat-
wife, alias the Strange Passenger, alias the Button
Moulder, alias Ulrik Brendel, comes in to ask whether
there are any little gnawing things there of which she can
rid the house. They do not understand — the divine mes-
senger in Ibsen never is understood, especially by the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

critics. So the little gnawing thing in the house — the
child — follows the Ratwife and is drowned, leaving the
pair awakened by the blow to a frightful consciousness of
themselves, the woman as a mere animal, the man as a
moonstruck nincompoop, keeping up appearances as a
suburban lady and gentleman with nothing to do but
enjoy themselves. Even the sister has discovered now
that she is not really a sister — also a not unprecedented
suburban possibility — and sees that the passionate stage
is ahead of her too; so, though she loves the husband,
she has to get out of his way by the pre-eminently sub-
urban expedient of marrying a man whom she does not
love, and who, like Rita, is warm-blooded and bent on
the undivided, unshared possession of the object of his
passion. At last the love of the woman passes out of the
passionate stage; and immediately, with the practical
sense of her sex, she proposes, not to go up into the
mountains or to write amateur treatises, but to occupy
herself with her duties as landed proprietress, instead of
merely spending the revenues of her property in keeping
a monogamic harem. The gentleman asks to be allowed
to lend a hand ; and immediately the storm subsides, easily
enough, leaving the couple on solid ground. This is the
play, as actual and near to us as the Brighton and South
Coast Railway — this is the mercilessly heart-searching
sermon, touching all of us somewhere, and some of us
everywhere, which we, the critics, have summed up as
"secrets of the alcove." Our cheeks, whose whiteness
Mr. Arthur Roberts has assailed in vain, have mantled
at "the coarseness and vulgarity which are noted char-
acteristics of the author" (I am quoting, with awe, my
fastidiously high-toned colleague of the "Standard").
And yet the divine messenger only meant to make us

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ashamed of ourselves. That is the way divine messengers
always do muddle their business.

The performance was of course a very remarkable one.
When, in a cast of five, you have the three best yet dis-
covered actresses of their generation, you naturally look
for something extraordinary. Miss Achurch was the
only one who ran any risk of failure. The Ratwife and
Asta are excellent parts; but they are not arduous ones.
Rita, on the other hand, is one of the heaviest ever writ-
ten: any single act of it would exhaust an actress of no
more than ordinary resources. But Miss Achurch was
more than equal to the occasion. Her power seemed to
grow with its own expenditure. The terrible outburst at
the end of the first act did not leave a scrape on her
voice (which appears to have the compass of a military
band) and threw her into victorious action in that tearing
second act instead of wrecking her. She played with all
her old originality and success, and with more than her
old authority over her audience. She had to speak some
dangerous lines — alines of a kind that usually find out the
vulgar spots in an audience and give an excuse for a
laugh — but nobody laughed or wanted to laugh at Miss
Achurch. "There stood your champagne ; but you tasted
it not," neither shirked nor slurred, but driven home to
the last syllable, did not elicit an audible breath from a
completely dominated audience. Later on I confess I lost
sight of Rita a little in studying the surprising capacity
Miss Achurch showed as a. dramatic instrument. For the
first time one clearly saw the superfluity of power and
the vehemence of intelligence which make her often so
reckless as to the beauty of her methods of expression.
As Rita she produced almost every sound that a big
himian voice can, from a creak like the opening of a rusty

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

canal lock to a melodius tenor note that the most robust
Siegfried might have envied. She looked at one moment
like a young, well-dressed, very pretty woman : at another
she was like a desperate creature just fished dripping out
of the river by the Thames police. Yet another moment,
and she was the incarnation of impetuous, ungovernable
strength. Her face was sometimes winsome, sometimes
listlessly wretched, sometimes like the head of a statue
of Victory, sometimes suffused, horrible, threatening, like
Bellona or Medusa. She would cross from left to right
like a queen, and from right to left with, so to speak, her
toes turned in, her hair coming down, and her slippers
coming off. A more utter recklessness, not only of fash-
ion, but of beauty, could hardly be imagined: beauty to
Miss Achurch is only one effect among others to be
produced, not a condition of all effects. But then she
can do what our beautiful actresses cannot do: she can
attain the force and terror of Sarah Bernhardt's most
vehement explosions without Sarah's violence and aban-
donment, and with every appearance of having reserves
of power still held in restraint. With all her cleverness
as a realistic actress she must be classed technically as a
heroic actress; and I very much doubt whether we shall
see her often until she comes into the field with a reper-
tory as highly specialized as that of Sir Henry Irving or
Duse. For it is so clear that she would act an average
London success to pieces and play an average actor-mana-
ger off the stage, that we need not expect to see much of
her as that useful and pretty auxiliary, a leading lady.

Being myself a devotee of the beautiful school, I like
being enchanted by Mrs. Patrick Campbell better than
being frightened, harrowed, astonished, conscience-
stricken, devastated, and dreadfully delighted in general

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by Miss Achurch's untamed genius. I have seen Mrs.
Campbell play the Ratwife twice, once quite enchantmgly,
and once most disappointingly. On the first occasion
Mrs. Campbell divined that she was no village harridan,
but the messenger of heaven. She played supernaturally,
beautifully : the first notes of her voice came as from the
spheres into all that suburban prose: she played to the
child with a witchery that might have drawn him not only
into the sea, but into her very bosom. Nothing jarred
except her obedience to Ibsen's stage direction in saying
"Down where all the rats are" harshly, instead of getting
the eflFect, in harmony with her own inspired reading, by
the most magical tenderness. The next time, to my un-
speakable fury, she amused herself by playing like any
melodramatic old woman, a profanation for which, whilst
my critical life lasts, never will I forgive her. Of Miss
Robins's Asta it is difficult to say much, since the part,
played as she plays it, does not exhibit anything like the
full extent of her powers. Asta is a study of a tempera-
ment— the quiet, affectionate, enduring, reassuring, faith-
ful, domestic temperament. That is not in the least Miss
Robins's temperament: she is nervous, restless, intensely
self-conscious, eagerly energetic. In parts which do not
enable her to let herself loose in this, her natural way,
she falls back on pathos, on mute misery, on a certain
delicate plaintive note in her voice and grace in her
bearing which appeal to our sympathy and pity without
realizing any individuality for us. She gave us, with
instinctive tact and refinement, the "niceness," the con-
siderateness, the ladylikeness, which differentiate Asta
from the wilful, passionate, somewhat brutal Rita. Per-
haps only an American playing against an Englishwoman
could have done it so discriminately ; but beyond this and

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the pathos there was nothing: Asta was only a picture,
and, Hke a picture, did not develop. The picture, being
sympathetic and pretty, has been much admired; but
those who have not seen Miss Robins play Hilda Wangel
have no idea of what she is like when she really acts her
part instead of merely giving an urbanely pictorial rep-
resentation of it. As to Allmers, how could he recom-
mend himself to spectators who saw in him everything
that they are ashamed of in themselves ? Mr. Courtenay
Thorpe played very intelligently, which, for such a part,
and in such a play, is saying a good deal; but he was
hampered a little by the change from the small and in-
timate auditorium in which he has been accustomed to
play Ibsen, to the Avenue, which ingeniously combines
the acoustic difficulties of a large theatre with the pecu-
niary capacity of a small one. Master Stewart Dawson,
as Eyolf, was one of the best actors in the company. Mr.
Lowne, as Borgheim, was as much out of tone as a Leader
sunset in a Rembrandt picture — no fault of his, of course
(the audience evidently liked him), but still a blemish on
the play.

And this brings me to a final criticism. The moment
I put myself into my old attitude as musical critic, I at
once perceive that the performance, as a whole, was an
unsatisfactory one. You may remonstrate, and ask me
how I can say so after admitting that the performers
showed such extraordinary talent — even genius. It is
very simple, nevertheless. Suppose you take Isaye, Sara-
sate, Joachim, and Hofmann, and tumble them all to-
gether to give a scratch performance of one of Bee-
thoven's posthumous quartets at some benefit concert.
Suppose you also take the two De Reszkes, Calve, and
Miss Eames, and set them tc? sing a glee under the same

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circumstances. They will all show prodigious individual
talent ; but the resultant performances of the quartet and
glee will be inferior, as wholes, to that of an ordinary-
glee club or group of musicians who have practised for
years together. The Avenue performance was a parallel
case. There was nothing like the atmosphere which
Lugne Poe got in "Rosmersholm." Miss Achurch man-
aged to play the second act as if she had played it every
week for twenty years; but otherwise the performance,
interesting as it was, was none the less a scratch one. If
only the company could keep together for a while! But
perhaps that is too much to hope for at present, though it
is encouraging to see that the performances are to be
continued next week, the five matinees — all crowded, by
the way — having by no means exhausted the demand for
places.

Several performances during the past fortnight remain
to be chronicled ; but Ibsen will have his due ; and he has
not left me room enough to do justice to any one else
this week.

"5

TOUJOURS SHAKESPEARE

As You Like It. St. James's Theatre, 2 December,
1896.

THE irony of Fate prevails at the St. James's The-
atre. For years we have been urging the mana-
gers to give us Shakespeare's plays as he wrote
them, playing them intelligently and enjoyingly as pleas-
ant stories, instead of mutilating them, altering them,
and celebrating them as superstitious rites. After three
hundred years Mr. George Alexander has taken us at
our words, as far as the clock permits, and given us "As
You Like It" at full four hours' length. And, alas! it
is just too late: the Bard gets his chance at the moment
when his obsolescence has become unendurable. Never-
theless, we were right ; for this production of Mr. Alex-
ander's, though the longest, is infinitely the least tedious,
and, in those parts which depend on the management, the
most delightful I have seen. But yet, what a play! It
was in "As You Like It" that the sententious William
first began to openly exploit the fondness of the British
Public for sham moralizing and stage "philosophy." It
contains one passage that specially exasperates me.
Jaques, who spends his time, like Hamlet, in vainly em-
ulating the wisdom of Sancho Panza, comes in laughing
in a superior manner because he has met a fool in the
forest, who

"Says very wisely, It is ten o'clock.
Thus we may see [quoth he] how the world wags.
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine ;
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven.
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe ;
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale."

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Now, considering that this fool's platitude is precisely
the "philosophy" of Hamlet, Macbeth ("To-morrow and
to-morrow and to-morrow," &c.), Prospero, and the rest
of them, there is something unendurably aggravating in^
Shakespeare giving himself airs with Touchstone, as if
he, the immortal, ever, even at his sublimest, had any-j
thing different or better to say himself. Later on he
misses a great chance. Nothing is more significant than
the statement that "all the world's a stage." The whole
world is ruled by theatrical illusion. Between the Caesars,
the emperors, the Christian heroes, the Grand Old Men,
the kings, prophets, saints, heroes and judges, of the
newspapers and the popular imagination, and the actual
Juliuses, Napoleons, Gordons, Gladstones, and so on,
there is the same difference as between Hamlet and Sir
Henry Irving. The case is not one of fanciful similitude,
but of identity. The great critics are those who penetrate
and understand the illusion : the great men are those who,
as dramatists planning the development of nations, or as
actors carrying out the drama, are behind the scenes of •
the world instead of gaping and gushing in the audito-
rium after paying their taxes at the doors. And yet
Shakespeare, with the rarest opportunities of observing
this, lets his pregnant metaphor slip, and, with his usual
incapacity for pursuing any idea, wanders off into a
grandmotherly Elizabethan edition of the advertisement
of Cassell's "Popular Educator." How anybody over
the age of seven can take any interest in a literary toy
so silly in its conceit and common in its ideas as the
Seven Ages of Man passes my understanding. Even
the great metaphor itself is inaccurately expressed; for
the world is a playhouse, not merely a stage ; and Shake-
speare might have said so without making his blank verse

"7

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

scan any worse than Richard's exclamation, "All the
world to nothing !"

And then Touchstone, with his rare jests about the
knight that swore by his honor they were good pan-
cakes! Who would endure such humor from any one
but Shakespeare? — an Eskimo would demand his money
back if a modern author offered him such fare. And the
comfortable old Duke, symbolical of the British villa
dweller, who likes to find "sermons in stones and good
in everything," and then to have a good dinner! This
unvenerable impostor, expanding on his mixed diet of
pious twaddle and venison, rouses my worst passions,
^ven when Shakespeare, in his efforts to be a social
philosopher, does rise for an instant to the level of a
sixth-rate Kingsley, his solemn self-complacency infu-
I riates me. And yet, so wonderful is his art, that it is not
easy to disentangle what is unbearable from what is ir-
resistible. Orlando one moment says :

"Whate'er you are
That in this desert inaccessible
Under the shade of melancholy boughs
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time,"

which, though it indicates a thoroughly unhealthy imag-
ination, and would have been impossible to, for instance,
Chaucer, is yet magically fine of its kind. The next
moment he tacks on lines which would have revolted Mr.
Pecksniff :

"If ever you have looked on better days.
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,

[How perfectly the atmosphere of the rented
pew is caught in this incredible line!]
If ever sat at any good man's feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped — "

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I really shall get sick if I quote any more of it. Was
ever such canting, snivelling, hypocritical unctuousness
exuded by an actor anxious to show that he was above
his profession, and was a thoroughly respectable man in
private life? Why cannot all this putrescence be cut out?
of the play, and only the vital parts — the genuine story-
telling, the fun, the poetry, the drama, be retained?
Simply because, if nothing were left of Shakespeare but
his genius, our Shakespearolaters would miss all that
they admire in him.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the fascination of
"As You Like It" is still very great. It has the over-
whelming advantage of being written for the most part
in prose instead of in blank verse, which any fool can
write. And such prose! The first scene alone, with its
energy of exposition, each phrase driving its meaning
and feeling in up to the head at one brief, sure stroke, is
worth ten acts of the ordinary Elizabethan sing-song.
It cannot be said that the blank verse is reserved for
those passages which demand a loftier expression, since
Le Beau and Corin drop into it, like Mr. Silas Wegg, on
the most inadequate provocation ; but at least there is not
much of it. The popularity of Rosalind is due to three
main causes. First, she only speaks blank verse for a
few minutes. Second, she only wears a skirt for a few
minutes (and the dismal effect of the change at the end
to the wedding-dress ought to convert the stupidest
champion of petticoats to rational dress). Third, she
makes love to the man mstead of waiting for the man to
make love to her — a piece of natural history which has
kept Shakespeare's heroines alive, whilst generations of
properly governessed young ladies, taught to say "No"
three times at least, have miserably perished.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

The performance at the St. Jameses is in some respects
very good and in no respect very bad or even indifferent.
Miss Neilson's Rosalind will not bear criticism for a
moment; and yet the total effect is pardonable, and even
pleasant. She bungles speech after speech; and her at-
tacks of Miss Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell
are acute, sudden and numerous ; but her personal charm
carries her through ; and her song is a great success :
besides, who ever failed, or could fail, as Rosalind ? Miss
Fay Davis is the best Celia I ever saw, and Miss Dorothea
Baird the prettiest Phoebe, though her part is too much
cut to give her any chance of acting. Miss Kate Phillips
is an appallingly artificial Audrey; for, her style being
either smart or nothing, her conscientious efforts to be
lumpish land her in the impossible. And then, what is
that artistically metropolitan complexion doing in the
Forest of Arden?

Ass as Jaques is, Mr. W. H. Vernon made him more
tolerable than I can remember him. Every successive
production at the St. James's leaves one with a greater
admiration than before for Mr. Vernon's talent. That
servile apostle of working-class Thrift and Teetotalism
(O William Shakespeare, Esquire, you who died drunk,
WHAT a moral chap you were !) hight Adam, was made
about twenty years too old by Mr. Loraine, who, on the
other hand, made a charming point by bidding farewell
to the old home with a smile instead of the conventional
tear. Mr. Fernandez impersonated the banished Duke
as well as it is in the nature of Jaques's Boswell to be
impersonated ; Mr. H. B. Irving plays Oliver very much
as anybody else would play lago, yet with his faults on
the right side; Mr. Vincent retains his lawful speeches
(usually purloined by Jaques) as the First Lord; and

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Mr. Esmond tries the picturesque, attitudinizing, gal-
vanic, Bedford Park style on Touchstone, worrying all
effect out of the good lines, but worrying some into the
bad ones. Mr. Wheeler, as Charles, catches the profes-
sional manner very happily; and the wrestling bout is
far and away the best I have seen on the stage. To me,
the wrestling is always the main attraction of an "As
You Like It" performance, since it is so much easier to
find a man who knows how to wrestle than one who
knows how to act. Mr. Alexander's Orlando I should
like to see again later on. The qualities he showed in it
were those which go without saying in his case ; and now
that he has disposed of the really big achievement of
producing the play with an artistic intelligence and a
practical ability never, as far as my experience goes, ap-
plied to it before, he will have time to elaborate a part
lying easily within his powers, and already very attract-
ively played by him. There are ten other gentlemen in
the cast; but I can only mention Mr. Aubrey Smith,
whose appearance as "the humorous Duke" (which Mr.
Vincent Sternroyd, as Le Beau, seemed to understand as
a duke with a sense of humor, like Mr. Gilbert's Mikado)
was so magnificent that it taxed all his powers to live up
to his own aspect.

The scene where the two boys come in and sing "It
was a lover and his lass" to Touchstone has been restored
by Mr. Alexander with such success that I am inclined
to declare it the most delightful moment in the whole
representation. Mr. Edward German has rearranged his
"Henry VIII." music for the masque of Hymen at the
end. Hymen, beauteous to gorgeousness, is impersonated
by Miss Opp.

The production at this Christmas season could not be

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more timely. The children will find the virtue of Adam
and the philosophy of Jaques just the thing for them;
whilst their elders will be delighted by the pageantry and
the wrestling.

IBSEN WITHOUT TEARS

12 December, i8p6.

*' T iTTLE Eyolf," which began at the Avenue Theatre
I only the other day as an artistic forlorn hope led
'L' by Miss Elizabeth Robins, has been promoted
into a full-blown fashionable theatrical speculation, with
a "Morocco Bound" syndicate in the background, un-
limited starring and bill-posting, and everything complete.
The syndicate promptly set to work to show us how
Ibsen should really be done. They found the whole
thing wrong from the root up. The silly Ibsen people
had put Miss Achurch, an Ibsenite actress, into the lead-
ing part, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a fashionable
actress, into a minor one. This was soon set right. Miss
Achurch was got rid of altogether, ' and her part trans-
ferred to Mrs. Campbell. Miss Robins, though tainted
with Ibsenism, was retained, but only, I presume, be-
cause, having command of the stage-right in the play,
she could not be replaced — say by Miss Maude Millett —
without her own consent. The rest of the arrangements
are economical rather than fashionable, the syndicate, to
all appearance, being, like most syndicates, an associa-
tion for the purpose of getting money rather than sup-
plying it.

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Mrs. Patrick Campbell has entered thoroughly into the
spirit of the alterations. She has seen how unladylike,
how disturbing, how full of horror even, the part of Rita
Allmers is, acted as Miss Achurch acted it. And she has
remedied this with a completeness that leaves nothing to
be desired — or perhaps only one thing. Was there not
a Mr. Arcedeckne who, when Thackeray took to lectur-
ing, said, "Have a piano, Thack"? Well, Rita Allmers
wants a piano. Mrs. Tanqueray had one, and played it
so beautifully that I have been her infatuated slave ever
since. There need be no difficulty about the matter: the
breezy Borgheim has only to say, "Now that Alfred is
back, Mrs. Allmers, won't you give us that study for the
left hand we are all so fond of?" and there you are.
However, even without the piano, Mrs. Campbell suc-
ceeded wonderfully in eliminating all unpleasantness
from the play. She looked charming; and her dresses
were beyond reproach: she carried a mortgage on the
"gold and green forests" on her back. Her performance
was infinitely reassuring and pretty: its note was, "You
silly people: what are you making all this fuss about?
The secret of life is charm and self-possession, and not
tantrums about drowned children." The famous line
"There stood your champagne; but you tasted it not,"
was no longer a "secret of the alcove," but a good-
humored, mock petulant remonstrance with a man whom
there was no pleasing in the matter of wine. There was
not a taste of nasty jealousy : this Rita tolerated her dear
old stupid's preoccupation with Asta and Eyolf and his
books as any sensible (or insensible) woman would.
Goodness gracious, I thought, what things that evil-
minded Miss Achurch did read into this harmless play!
And how nicely Mrs. Campbell took the drowning of the

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child! Just a pretty waving of the fingers, a moderate
scream as if she had very nearly walked on a tin tack, and
it was all over, without tears, without pain, without more
fuss than if she had broken the glass of her watch.

At this rate, it was not long before Rita thoroughly
gained the sympathy of the audience. We felt that if
she could only get rid of that ridiculous, sentimental Asta
(Miss Robins, blind to the object lesson before her, per-
sisted in acting Ibsenitically), and induce her fussing,
self-conscious, probably underbred husband not to cry
for spilt milk, she would be as happy as any lady in the
land. Unfortunately, the behavior of Mr. Allmers be-
came more and more intolerable as the second act pro-
gressed, though he could not exhaust Rita's patient, slily
humorous tolerance. As usual, he wanted to know
whether she would like to go and drown herself ; and the
sweet, cool way in which she answered, "Oh, I don't
know, Alfred. No: I think I should have to stay here
with you — a litt-h while" was a lesson to all wives. What
a contrast to Miss Achurch, who so unnecessarily filled
the stage with the terror of death in this passage ! This
is what comes of exaggeration, of over-acting, of for-
getting that people go to the theatre to be amused, and
not to be upset! When Allmers shook his fist at his
beautiful wife — O unworthy the name of Briton! — and
shouted "You are the guilty one in this," her silent dig-
nity overwhelmed him. Nothing could have been in bet-
ter taste than her description of the pretty way in which
her child had lain in the water when he was drowned —
his mother's son all over. All the pain was taken out
of it by the way it was approached. "I got Borgheim
to go down to the pier with me [so nice of Borgheim,
dear fellow!]." "And what," interrupts the stupid

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Allmers, "did you want there?" Rita gave a little laugh
at his obtuseness, a laugh which meant "Why, you dear
silly," before she replied, "To question the boys as to
how it happened." After all, it is these Ibsenite people
that create the objections to Ibsen. If Mrs. Campbell
had played Rita from the first, not a word would have
been said against the play ; and the whole business would
have been quietly over and the theatre closed by this
time. But nothing would serve them but their Miss
Achurch ; and so, instead of a pretty arrangement of the
"Eyolf" theme for boudoir pianette, we had it flung to
the "Gotterdammerung" orchestra, and blared right into
our shrinking souls.

In the third act, the smoothness of the proceedings was
somewhat marred by the fact that Mrs. Campbell, not
knowing her words, had to stop acting and frankly bring
the book on the stage and read from it. Now Mrs.
Campbell reads very clearly and nicely ; and the result of
course was that the Ibsenite atmosphere began to assert
itself, just as it would if the play were read aloud in a
private room. However, that has been remedied, no
doubt, by this time; and the public may rely on an un-
interruptedly quiet evening.

The main drawback is that it is impossible not to feel
that Mrs. Campbell's Rita, with all her x:harm, is terribly
hampered by the unsultability of the words Ibsen and
Mr. Archer have put into her mouth. They, were all very
well for Miss Achurch, who perhaps, if the truth were
known, arranged her acting to suit them; but they are
forced, strained, out of tune in all sorts of ways in the
mouth of Mrs. Campbell's latest creation. Why cannot
the dialogue be adapted to her requirements and har-
monized with her playing, say by Mr. William Black?

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Ibsen is of no use when anything really ladylike is
wanted: you might as well put Beethoven to compose
Chaminades. It is true that no man can look at the new
Rita without wishing that Heaven had sent him just such
a wife, whereas the boldest man would hardly have en-
vied Allmers the other Rita if Miss Achurch had allowed
him a moment's leisure for such impertinent speculations ;
but all the same, the evenings at the Avenue Theatre are
likely to be a little launguid. I had rather look at a
beautiful picture than be flogged, as a general thing ; but
if I were offered my choice between looking at the most
beautiful picture in the world continuously for a fort-
night and submitting to, say, a dozen, I think I should
choose the flogging. For just the same reason, if I had
to choose between seeing Miss Achurch's Rita again,
with all its turns of beauty and flashes of grandeur ob-
literated, and nothing left but its insane jealousy, its
agonizing horror, its lacerating remorse, and its mad-
dening unrest, the alternative being another two hours'
contemplation of uneventful feminine fascination as per-
sonified by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, I should go like a
lamb to the slaughter. I prefer Mrs. Campbell's Rita to
' her photograph, because it moves and talks; but other-
wise there is not so much difference as I expected. Mrs.
Campbell, as Magda, could do nothing with a public
spoiled by Duse. I greatly fear she will do even less, as
Rita, with a public spoiled by Miss Achurch.

The representation generally is considerably affected
in its scale and effect by the change of Ritas. Mr.
Courtenay Thorpe, who, though playing con tutta la
forsa, could hardly avoid seeming to underact with Miss
Achurch, has now considerable difficulty in avoiding
overacting, since he cannot be even earnest and anxious

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

without producing an effect of being good-humoredly
laughed at by Mrs. Campbell. Miss Robins, as Asta, has
improved greatly on the genteel misery of the first night.
She has got complete hold of the part ; and although her
old fault of resorting to the lachrymose for all sorts of
pathetic expression produces something of its old monot-
ony, and the voice clings to one delicate register until the
effect verges on affectation, yet Asta comes out as a
distinct person about whose history the audience has
learnt something, and not as an actress delivering a string
of lines and making a number of points more or less
effectively. The difficulty is that in this cheap edition
of "Little Eyolf" Asta, instead of being the tranquillizing
element, becomes the centre of disturbance; so that the
conduct of Allmers in turning for the sake of peace and
quietness from his pretty, coaxing, soothing wife to his
agitated high-strung sister becomes nonsensical. I
pointed out after the first performance that Miss Robins
had not really succeeded in making Asta a peacemaker;
but beside Miss Achurch she easily seemed gentle, whereas
beside Mrs. Campbell she seems a volcano. It is only
necessary to recall her playing of the frightful ending to
the first act of "Alan's Wife," and compare it with Mrs.
Campbell's finish to the first act of "Little Eyolf," to
realize the preposterousness of their relative positions in
the cast. Mrs. Campbell's old part of the Ratwife is now
played by Miss Florence Farr. Miss Farr deserves more
public sympathy than any of the other Ibsenite actresses ;
for they have only damaged themselves professionally
by appearing in Ibsen's plays, whereas Miss Farr has
complicated her difficulties by appearing in mine as well.
Further, instead of either devoting herself to the most
personally exacting of all the arts or else letting it alone?

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Miss Farr has written clever novels and erudite works
on Babylonish lore; has managed a theatre capably for
a season; and has only occasionally acted. For an oc-
casional actress she has been rather successful once or
twice in producing singular effects in singular parts — ^her
Rebecca in "Rosmersholm" was remarkable and promis-
ing— ^but she has not pursued her art with sufficient con-
stancy to attain any authoritative power of carrying out
her conceptions, which are, besides, only skin deep. Her
Ratwife is a favorable example of her power of producing
a certain strangeness of effect; but it is somewhat dis-
counted by want of sustained grip in the execution. Miss
Farr will perhaps remedy this if she can find time enough
to spare fromi her other interests to attend to it. The
rest of the cast is as before. One has no longer any real
belief in the drowning of Master Stewart Dawson, thanks
to the gentle method of Mrs. Campbell. Mr. Lowne's
sensible, healthy superiority to all this morbid Ibsen stuff
is greatly reinforced now that Rita takes things nicely
and easily.

I cannot help thinking it a great pity that the Avenue
enterprise, just as it seemed to be capturing that after-
noon classical concert public to which I have always
looked for the regeneration of the classical drama,
should have paid the penalty of its success by the usual
evolution into what is evidently half a timid speculation
in a "catch-on," and half an attempt to slacken the rate
at which the Avenue Theatre is eating its head off in
rent. That evolution of course at once found out the
utter incoherence of the enterprise. The original pro-
duction, undertaken largely at Miss Robins*s individual
risk, was for the benefit of a vaguely announced Fund,
as to the constitution and purpose of which no informa-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

tion was forthcoming, except that it proposed to produce
Echegaray's "Mariana," with Miss Robins in the title-
part. But neither Miss Robins's nor anyone else's inter-
ests in this fund seem to have been secured in any way.
The considerable profit of the first week of "Little Eyolf"
may, for all that is guaranteed to the contrary, be devoted
to the production of an opera, a shadow play from Paris,
or a drama in which neither Miss Robins nor any of
those who have worked with her may be offered any part
or share whatever. There is already just such a fund in
existence in the treasury of the Independent Theatre,
which strove hard to obtain "Little Eyolf" for production,
and which actually guaranteed part of the booking at
the Avenue. But here the same difficulty arose. Miss
Achurch would no doubt have trusted the Independent,
for the excellent reason that her husband is one of the
directors; but no other artist playing for it would have
had the smallest security that, had its fortunes been es-
tablished through their efforts, they would ever have been
cast for a part in its future productions. On the other
hand, Miss Achurch had no hold on the new fund, which
had specially declared its intention of supporting Miss
Robins. This has not prevented the production of "Little
Eyolf," though it has greatly delayed it; for everybody
finally threw security to the winds, and played by friendly
arrangement on such terms as were possible. As it
happened, there was a substantial profit, and it all went
to the Fund. Naturally, however, when the enterprise
entered upon a purely commercial phase, the artists at
once refused to work for the profit of a syndicate on the
enthusiastic terms (or no terms) on which they had
worked for Ibsen, and for one another. The syndicate,
on the other hand, had no idea of wasting so expensive

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

a star as Mrs. Patrick Campbell on a small part that
could be filled for a few pounds, when they could trans-
fer her to the leading part and save Miss Achurch's sal-
ary. If they could have substituted an inferior artist
for Miss Robins, they could have effected a still further
saving, relying on Mrs. Pat to draw full houses ; but that
was made impossible by Miss Robins's power over the
stage-right. Consequently, the only sufferer was Miss
Achurch; but it is impossible for Miss Robins and Mrs.
Campbell not to feel that the same thing might have hap-
pened to them if there had been no stage-right, and if
the syndicate had realized that, when it comes to Ibsen,
Miss Achurch is a surer card to play than Mrs. Campbell.
Under these circumstances, what likelihood is there
of the experiment being resumed or repeated on its old
basis? Miss Robins will probably think twice before
she creates Mariana without some security that, if she
succeeds, the part will not immediately be handed over
to Miss Winifred Emery or Miss Julia Neilson. Miss
Achurch, triumphantly as she has come out of the com-
parison with her successor, is not likely to forget her
lesson. Mrs. Campbell's willingness to enlist in forlorn
hopes in the humblest capacity may not improbably be
received in future as Laocoon recei/ed the offer of the
wooden horse. I do not presume to meddle in the affairs
of all these actors and authors, patrons and enthusiasts,
subscribers and guarantors, though this is quite as much
my business as theirs; but after some years* intimate
experience of the results of unorganized Ibsenism, I
venture to suggest that it would be well to have some
equitable form of theatrical organization ready to deal
with Ibsen's new play, on the translation of which Mr.
Archer is already at work.

130

RICHARD HIMSELF AGAIN

Richard III. Lyceum Theatre, 19 December, 1896.

THE world being yet little better than a mischievous
schoolboy, I am afraid it cannot be denied that
"Punch and Judy" holds the field still as the
most popular of dramatic entertainments. And of all
its versions, except those which are quite above the head
of the man in the street, Shakespeare's "Richard III."
is the best. It has abundant deviltry, humor, and char-
acter, presented with luxuriant energy of diction in the
simplest form of blank verse; Shakespeare revels in it
with just the sort of artistic unconscionableness that
fits the theme. Richard is the prince of Punches; he
delights Man by provoking God, and dies unrepentant
and game to the last. His incongruous conventional ap-
pendages, such as the Punch hump, the conscience, the
fear of ghosts, all impart a spice of outrageousness
which leaves nothing lacking to the fun of the enter-
tainment, except the solemnity of those spectators who
feel bound to take the affair as a profound and subtle
historic study.

Punch, whether as Jingle, Macaire, Mephistopheles,
or Richard, has always been a favorite part with Sir
Henry Irving. The craftily mischievous, the sardonically
impudent, tickle him immensely, besides providing him
with a welcome relief from the gravity of his serious
impersonations. As Richard he drops Punch after the
coronation scene, which, in deference to stage tradition,
he makes a turning-point at which the virtuoso in mis-
chief, having achieved his ambition, becomes a savage

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

at bay. I do not see why this should be. In the tent
scene, Richard says:

"There is no creature loves me;
And if I die no soul will pity me."

Macbeth repeats this patch of pathos, and immediately
proceeds to pity himself unstintedly over it; but Richard
no sooner catches the sentimental cadence of his own
voice than the mocker in him is awakened at once, and
he adds, quite in Punch's vein,

"Nay, wherefore should they? since ^hat I myself
Find in myself no pity for myself."

Sir Henry Irving omits these lines, because he plays, as
he always does, for a pathetically sublime ending. But
we have seen the sublime ending before pretty often;
and this time it robs us of such strokes as Richard's
aristocratically cynical private encouragement to his en-
tourage of peers : —

"Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on; join bravely; let us to't pell-mell.
If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to hell."

followed by his amusingly blackguardly public address
to the rank and Ale,<iuite in the vein of the famous and
more successful appeal to the British troops in the Pen-
insula. "Will you that are Englishmen fed on beef let

yourselves be licked like a lot of Spaniards fed on

oranges?'' Despair, one feels, could bring to Punch-
Richard nothing but the exultation of one who loved de-
struction better than even victory; and the exclamation

"A thousand hearts are great within my bosom"
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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

is not the expression of a hero's courage, but the evil
ecstasy of the destroyer as he finds himself, after a weak,
piping time of peace, back at last in his native element.
Sir Henry Irving's acting edition of the play is so
enormously superior to Gibber's, that a playgoer brought
up, as I was, on the old version must needs find an over-
whelming satisfaction in it. Not that I object to the
particular lines which are now always flung in poor
Gibber's face. "Off with his head: so much for Buck-
ingham!" is just as worthy of Shakespeare as "I'll hear
no more. Die, prophet, in thy speech," and distinctly
better than "Off with his son George's head."

"Hark! the shrill trumpet sounds. To horse! Away!
My soul's in arms, and eager for the fray"

is ridiculed because Gibber wrote it; but I cannot for
the life of me see that it is inferior to

"Go muster men. My counsel is my shield.
We must be brief when traitors brave the field."

"Richard's himself again" is capital of its kind. If you
object to that kind, the objection is stronger against
Shakespeare, who set Gibber the example, and was pro-
claimed immortal for it, than against an unfortunate
actor who would never have dreamt of inventing the
art of rhetorical balderdash for himself. The plain rea-
son why the public for so many generations could see
no difference in merit between the famous Gibber points
and

"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

was that there was no difference to see. When it came
to fustian. Jack was as good as his master.

The real objection to Gibber's version is that it is

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

what we call a "one man show." Shakespeare, having
no room in a play so full of action for more than one
real part, surrounded it with figures whose historic titles
and splendid dresses, helped by a line or two at the
right moment, impose on our imagination sufficiently to
make us see the whole Court of Edward IV. If Has-
tings, Stanley, the "jockey of Norfolk," the "deep re-
volving witty Buckingham," and the rest, only bear them-
selves with sufficient address not to absolutely contradict
the dramatist's suggestion of them, the audience will
receive enough impression of their reality, and even of
their importance, to give Richard an air of moving in a
Court as the King's brother. But Cibber could not bear
M^hat any one on the stage should have an air of impor-
tance except himself: if the subordinate members of the
company could not act so well as he, it seemed to him,
not 'that it was his business as the presenter of a play
to conceal their deficiencies, but that the first principles
of justice and fair dealing demanded before all things
that his superiority should be made evident to the public.
(And there are not half a dozen leading actors on tlie
stage to-day who would not take precisely that view of
1^ the situation.) Consequently he handled "Richard III.'*
so as to make every other actor in it obviously ridiculous
and insignificant, except only that Henry VI., in the first
act, was allowed to win the pity of the audience in order
that the effect might be the greater when Richard stabbed
him. No actor could have produced more completely,
exactly, and forcibly the effect aimed at by Cibber than
Barry Sullivan, the one actor who kept Cibber's Richard
on the stage during the present half-century. But it
was an exhibition, not a play. Barry Sullivan was full
of force, and very clever: if his powers had been less

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

exclusively of the infernal order, or if he had devoted
himself to the drama instead of devoting the drama to
himself as a mere means of self-assertion, one might have
said more for him. He managed to make the audience
believe in Richard; but as he could not make it believe
in the others, and probably did not want to, they de-
stroyed the illusion almost as fast as he created it. This
is why Gibber's Richard though it is so simple that the
character plays itself as unmistakably as the blank verse
speaks itself, can only be made endurable by an actor
of exceptional personal force. The second and third acts
at the Lyceum, with their atmosphere of Court faction
and their presentation before the audience of Edward
and Clarence, make all the difference between the two
versions.

But the Lyceum has by no means emancipated itself
from superstition — even gross superstition. Italian opera
itself could go no further in folly than the exhibition of
a pretty and popular young actress in tights as Prince
Edward. No doubt we were glad to see Miss Lena Ash-
well — for the matter of that we should have been glad
to see Mrs. John Wood as the other prince — but from
the moment she came on the stage all serious historical
illusion necessarily vanished, and was replaced by the
most extreme form of theatrical convention. Probably
Sir Henry Irving cast Miss Ashwell for the part be-
cause he has not followed her career since she played
Elaine in "King Arthur." She was then weak, timid,
subordinate, with an insignificant presence and a voice
which, contrasted as it was with Miss Terry's, could
only be described — if one had the heart to do it — as a
squawl. Since then she has developed precipitously. If
any sort of success had been possible for the plays in

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

which she has appeared this year at the Duke of York's
and Shaftesbury Theatres, she would have received a
large share of the credit of it. Even in "Carmen," when,
perhaps for the sake of auld lang syne, she squawled and
stood on the tips of her heels for the last time (let us
hope), her scene with the dragoon in the first act was
the one memorable moment in the whole of that dis-
astrous business. She now returns to the Lyceum stage
as an actress of mark, strong in womanly charm, and
not in the least the sort of person whose sex is so little
emphasized that it can be hidden by a doublet and hose.
You might as well put forward Miss Ada Rehan as a
boy. Nothing can be more absurd than the spectacle of
Sir Henry Irving elaborately playing the uncle to his
little nephew when he is obviously addressing a fine
young woman in rational dress who is very thoroughly
her own mistress, and treads the boards with no little
authority and assurance as one of the younger genera-
tion knocking vigorously at the door. Miss Ashwell
makes short work of the sleepiness of the Lyceum ; and
though I tak^ urgent exception to her latest technical
theory, which is, that the bridge of the nose is the seat
of facial expression, I admit that she does all that can
be" done to reconcile us to the burlesque of her appear-
ance in a part that should have been played by a boy.

Another mistake in the casting of the play was Mr.
Gordon Craig's Edward IV. As Henry VI., Mr. Craig,
who wasted his delicacy on the wrong part, would have
been perfect. Henry not being available, he might have
played Richmond with a considerable air of being a young
Henry VII. But as Edward he was incredible: one felt
that Richard would have had him out of the way years
ago if Margaret had not saved him the trouble by van-

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quishing him at Tewkesbury. Shakespeare took plenty
of pains with the strong ruffian of the York family: his
part in "Henry VI." makes it quite clear why he held his
own both in and out of doors. The remedy for the mis-
fit lay ready to the manager's hand. Mr. Cooper, his too
burly Richmond, showed what a capital Edward he
would have made when he turned at the entrance to his
tent, and said, with the set air of a man not accustomed
to be trifled with,

"O Thou, whose captain I account myself.
Look on my forces with a gracious eye,
Or you will have me to reckon with afterwards."

The last line was not actually spoken by Mr. Cooper;
but he looked it, exactly as Edward IV. might have done.
As to Sir Henry Irving's own performance, I am not
prepared to judge it, in point of execution, by what he
did on the first night. He was best in the Court scenes.
In the heavy single-handed scenes which Cibber loved,
he was not, as it seemed to me, answering his helm sat-
isfactorily ; and he was occasionally a little out of temper
with his own nervous condition. He made some odd slips
in the text, notably by repeatedly substituting "you" for
*T" — for instance, "Shine out, fair sun, till you have
bought a glass." Once he inadvertently electrified the
house by very unexpectedly asking Miss Milton to get
further up the stage in the blank verse and penetrating
tones of Richard. Finally, the worry of playing against
the vein tired him. In the tent and battle scenes his ex-
haustion was too genuine to be quite acceptable as part
of the play. The fight was, perhaps, a relief to his feel-
ings; but to me the spectacle of Mr. Cooper pretending
to pass his sword three times through Richard's body,

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as if a man could be run through as easily as a cuttle-fish,
was neither credible nor impressive. The attempt to make
a stage combat look as imposing as Hazlitt's description
of the death of Edmund Kean's Richard reads, is hope-
less. If Kean were to return to life and do the combat
for us, we should very likely find it as absurd as his habit
of lying down on a sofa when he was too tired or too
drunk to keep his feet during the final scenes.

Further, it seems to me that Sir Henry Irving should
either cast the play to suit his acting or else modify his
acting to suit the cast. His playing, in the scene with
Lady Anne — which, though a Punch scene, is Punch on
the "Don Giovanni" plane — was a flat contradiction, not
only of the letter of the lines, but of their spirit and feel
ing as conveyed unmistakably by their cadence. This,
however, we are used to: Sir Henry Irving never did
and never will make use of a play otherwise than as a
vehicle for some fantastic creation of his own. But if
we are not to have the tears, the passion, the tenderness,
the transport of dissimulation which alone can make the
upshot credible — if the woman is to be openly teased and
insulted, mocked, and disgusted, all through the scene
as well as in the first "keen encounter of their wits,"
why not have Lady Anne presented as a weak, childish-
witted, mesmerized creature, instead of as that most awful
embodiment of virtue and decorum, the intellectual Amer-
ican lady ? Poor Miss Julia Arthur honestly did her best
to act the part as she found it in Shakespeare; and if
Richard had done the same she would have come oflf
with credit. But how could she play to a Richard who
would not utter a single tone to which any woman's
heart could respond? She could not very well box the

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actor-manager's ears, and walk off; but really she de-
serves some credit for refraining from that extreme rem-
edy. She partly had her revenge when she left the stage ;
for Richard, after playing the scene with her as if he
were a Houns ditch salesman cheating a factory girl over
a pair of second-hand stockings, naturally could not reach
the raptures of the tremendous outburst of elation be-
ginning .

"Was ever woman in this humor wooed? '
Was ever woman in this humor won?"

One felt inclined to answer, "Never, I assure you," and
make an end of the scene there and then. I am prepared
to admit that the creations of Sir Henry Irving's imag-
ination are sometimes — in the case of his lachimo, for
example — better than those of the dramatists whom he
is supposed to interpret. But what he did in this scene,
as well as in the opening soliloquy, was child's play com-
pared to what Shakespeare meant him to do.

The rest of the performance was — well, it was Lyceum
Shakespeare. Miss Genevieve Ward was, of course, a
very capable Margaret; but she missed the one touch-
stone passage in a very easy part — ^the tenderness of the
appeal to Buckingham. Mr. Macklin, equally of course,
had no trouble wath Buckingham; but he did not give
us that moment which makes Richard say: —

"None are for me
That look into me with considerate eyes."

Messrs. Norman Forbes and W. Farren (junior) played
the murderers in the true Shakespearean manner: that
is, as if they had come straight out of the pantomime of
"The Babes in the Wood" ; and Clarence recited his dream

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as if he were an elocutionary coroner summing up. The
rest were respectably dull, except Mr. Gordon Craig,
Miss Lena Ashwell, and, in a page's part, Miss Edith
Craig, the only member of the company before whom
the manager visibly quails.

BETTER THAN SHAKESPEARE

The Pilgrim's Progress: a mystery play, with
music, in four acts, by G. G. Collingham; founded
on John Bunyan's immortal allegory. Olympic
Theatre, 24 December, 1896.

WHEN I saw a stage version of "The Pilgrim's
Progress" announced for production, I
shook my head, knowing that Bunyan is far
too great a dramatist for our theatre, which has never
been resolute enough even in its lewdness and venality to
win the respect and interest which positive, powerful
wickedness always engages, much less the services of
rmen of heroic conviction. Its greatest catch, Shake-
speare, wrote for the theatre because, with extraordinary
artistic powers, he understood nothing and believed noth-
ing. Thirty-six big plays in five blank verse acts, and
(as Mr. Ruskin, I think, once pointed out) not a single
hero! Only one man in them all who believes in life,
enjoys life, thinks life worth living, and has a sincere,
unrhetorical tear dropped over his deathbed, and that
man— Falstaff! What a crew they are — these Saturday
to Monday athletic stockbroker Orlandos, these villains,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

fools, clowns, drunkards, cowards, intriguers, fighters,
lovers, patriots, hypochondriacs who mistake themselves
(and are mistaken by the author) for philosophers,
princes without any sense of public duty, futile pessimists
who imagine they are confronting a barren and unmean-
ing world when they are only contemplating their own
worthlessness, self-seekers of all kinds, keenly observed
and masterfully drawn from the romantic-commercial i
point of view. Once or twice we scent among them an
anticipation of the crudest side of Ibsen's polemics on the
Woman Question, as in "All's Well that Ends Well,"
where the man cuts as meanly selfish a figure beside his
enlightened lady doctor wife as Helmer beside Nora ; or
in "Cymbeline," where Posthumus, having, as he believes,
killed his wife for inconstancy, speculates for a moment
on what his life would have been worth if the same stand-
ard of continence had been applied to himself. And
certainly no modern study of the voluptuous tempera-
ment, and the spurious heroism and heroinism which its
ecstasies produce, can add much to "Antony and Cleo-
patra," unless it were some sense of the spuriousness on
the author's part. But search for statesmanship, or even
citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material
or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a de-
cent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith,
hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qual-
ities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair
made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness
covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of
blank verse.

All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan,
to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and natur-
ally. The world was to him a more terrible place than

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at
the end of which a man might look not only forward to
the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: — "Tho'
with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not
repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where
I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in
my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that
can get them." The heart vibrates like a bell to such an
utterance as this: to turn from it to "Out, out, brief
candle," and "The rest is silence," and "We are such stuff
as dreams are made on ; and our little life is rounded by a
sleep" is to turn from life, strength, resolution, morning
air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken night-
mare.

Let us descend now to the lower ground where
Shakespeare is not disabled by this inferiority in energy
and elevation of spirit. Take one of his big fighting
scenes, and compare its blank verse, in point of mere
rhetorical strenuousness, with Bunyan's prose. Mac-
beth's famous cue for the fight with Macduff runs thus : —

"Yet I will try the last: before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries Hold, enough I"

Turn from this jingle, dramatically right in feeling, but
silly and resourceless in thought and expression, to
Apollyon's cue for the fight in the Valley of Humiliation :
"I am void of fear in this matter. Prepare thyself to die ;
for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no
farther: here will I spill thy soul." This is the same
thing done masterly. Apart from its superior grandeur,
force, and appropriateness, it is better clap-trap and in-
finitely better word-music.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Shakespeare, fond as he is of describing fights, has
hardly ever sufficient energy or reaHty of imagination
to finish without betraying the paper origin of his fancies
by dragging in something classical in the style of the
Cyclops' hammer falling "on Mar's armor, forged for
proof eterne." Hear how Bunyan does it: "I fought
till my sword did cleave to my hand ; and when they were
joined together as if the sword grew out of my arm;
and when the blood run thorow my fingers, then I fought
with most courage." Nowhere in all Shakespeare is there
a touch like that of the blood running down through the
man's fingers, and his courage rising to passion at it.
Even in mere technical adaptation to the art of the actor,
Bunyan's dramatic speeches are as good as Shakespeare's
tirades. Only a trained dramatic speaker can appreciate
the terse manageableness and effectiveness of such a
speech as this, with its grandiose exordium, followed up
by its pointed question and its stern threat: "By this I
perceive thou art one of my subjects ; for all that country
is mine, and I am the Prince and the God of it. How is
it then that thou hast ran away from thy King? Were it
not that I hope thou mayst do me more service, I would
strike thee now at one blow to the ground." Here there
is no raving and swearing and rhyming and classical
allusion. The sentences go straight to their mark; and
their concluding phrases soar like the sunrise, or swing
and drop like a hammer, just as the actor wants them.

I might multiply these instances by the dozen; but I
had rather leave dramatic students to compare the two
authors at first-hand. In an article on Bunyan lately
published in the "Contemporary Review" — the only arti-
cle worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank
you; I am quite familiar with Macaulay's patronizing

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") — Mr. Richard
Heath, the historian of the Anabaptists, shows how
Bunyan learnt his lesson, not only from his own rough
pilgrimage through life, but from the tradition of many
an actual journey from real Cities of Destruction (under
Alva), with Interpreters' houses and convey of Great-
hearts all complete. Against such a man what chance
had our poor immortal William, with his "little Latin"
(would it had been less, like his Greek!), his heathen
mythology, his Plutarch, his Bocaccio, his Holinshed, his
circle of London literary wits, soddening their minds
with books and their nerves with alcohol (quite like us),
and all the rest of his Strand and Fleet Street surround-
ings, activities, and interests, social and professional,
mentionable and unmentionable? Let us applaud him,
in due measure, in that he came out of it no blackguardly
Bohemian, but a thoroughly respectable snob; raised the
desperation and cynicism of its outlook to something like
sublimity in his tragedies; dramatized its morbid, self-
centered passions and its feeble and shallow speculations
with all the force that was in them; disinfected it by
copious doses of romantic poetry, fun, and common-sense ;
and gave to its perpetual sex-obsession the relief of indi-
vidual character and feminine winsomeness. Also — if
you are a sufficiently good Whig — that after incarnating
the spirit of the whole epoch which began with the six-
teenth century and is ending (I hope) with the nine-
teenth, he is still the idol of all well-read children. But
as he never thought a noble life worth living or a great
work worth doing, because the commercial profit-and-loss
sheet showed that the one did not bring happiness nor the
other money, he never struck the great vein — the vein in
which Bunyan told of that "man of a very stout counte-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

nance" who went up to the keeper of the book of Hfe
and said, not "Out, out, brief candle," but "Set down
my name, sir," and immediately fell on the armed men
and cut his way into heaven after receiving and giving
many wounds.

SATAN SAVED AT LAST

The Sorrows of Satan: a play in four acts. Adapted
by Herbert Woodgate and Paul M. Berton from
the famous novel of that name, by Marie Corelli.
Shaftesbury Theatre, 9 January, 1897.

I WISH this invertebrate generation would make up
4gi .him». -,The Norwegians, we learn from Ibsen's
Cits mind either to believe in the devil or disbelieve
Brand, prefer an easygoing God, whom they can get
round, and who does not mean half what he says when
he is angry. I have always thought that there is a good
deal to be said for this amiable theology; but when it
comes to the devil, I claim, like Brand, **all or nothing."
A snivelling, remorseful devil, with his heart in the right
place, sneaking about the area railings of heaven in the
hope that he will presently be let in and forgiven, is an
abomination to me. The Lean Person in "Peer Gynt,"
whose occupation was gone because men sinned so half-
heartedly that nobody was worth damning, gained my
sympathy at once. But a devil who is himself half-hearted
— whose feud with heaven is the silliest sort of lover's
quarrel — who believes that he is in the wrong and God
in the rigt^ — pahl He reminds me of those Sunday

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

School teachers who cannot keep from drinking and
gambling, though they believe in teetotalism and long
to be the most respectable men in the parish; I cannot
conceive how such a creature can charm the imagination
of Miss Marie Corelli. It will be admitted that she is
not easy to please when fashionable women and jour-
nalists are in question. Then why let the devil off so
cheaply ?

Let me not, however, dismiss "The Sorrows of Satan"
too cavalierly; for I take Miss Marie Corelli to be one
of the most sincere and independent writers at present
before the public. Early in 1886, when she made her
mark for the first time with "A Romance of Two
Worlds," she took her stand boldly as the apostle of ro-
mantic religion. "Believe," she said, "in anything or
everything miraculous and glorious — the utmost reach
of your faith can with difficulty grasp the majestic reality
and perfection of everything you can see, desire, or imag-
ine." Here we have that sure mark of romantic religion
— the glorification of the miraculous. Again, "walking
on the sea can be accomplished now by anyone who has
cultivated sufficient inner force." Two years later, "A
Romance of Two Worlds" was prefaced by a list of tes-
timonials from persons who had found salvation in the
"Electric Christianity" of the novel. Lest any one should
suppose that "Electric Christianity" was a fictitious re-
ligion. Miss Corelli took the opportunity to say of it,
"Its tenets are completely borne out by the New Testa-
ment, which sacred little book [italics mine], however,
has much of its mystical and true meaning obscured now-
adays through the indifference of those who read and
the apathy of those who hear. . . . My creed has
its foundation in Christ alone . . . only Christ,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

only the old old story of Divine love and sacrifice. . . .
The proof of the theories set forth in the Romance is, as
I have stated, easily to be found in the New Testament.
. I merely endeavored to slightly shadow forth
the miraculous powers which I know are bestowed on
those who truly love and understand the teachings of
Christ.'' The miraculous powers, I may mention, in-
cluded making trips round the solar system, living for
ever, seeming to improvise on the pianoforte by playing
at the dictation of angels, knocking people down with
electric shocks at will and without apparatus, painting
pictures in luminous paint, and cognate marvels. When
I say that Miss Corelli is sincere, I of course do not mean
that she has ever acted on the assumption that her **re-
ligion" is real. But when she takes up her pen, she
imagines it to be real, because she has a prodigiously
copious and fluent imagination, without, as far as I have
been able to ascertain, the knowledge, the training, the
observation, the critical faculty, the humor, or any other
of the acquirements and qualities which compel ordinary
people to distinguish in some measure (and in some
measure only ; for the best of us is not wholly un-Corel-
lian) between what they may sanely believe and what
they would like to believe. Great works in fiction are the
arduous victories of great minds over great imaginations :
Miss Corelli's works are the cheap victories of a profuse
imagination over an apparently commonplace and care-
lessly cultivated mind. The story of the Passion in the
New Testament not being imaginative enough for her,
and quite superfluously thoughtful and realistic, she re-
wrote it to her taste ; and the huge circulation of her ver-
sion shows that, to the minds of her readers, she consid-
erably improved it. Having made this success with the

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/ Y^ Dramatic Opinions and Essays

heri of "Barabbas," she next turned her attention to
Sawn, taking all the meaning out of him, but lavishing
imagination on him until he shone all over with stage
fire. I do not complain of the process : I neither grudge
Miss Corelli to her disciples nor her disciples to Miss
Corelli; but I must warn my readers that nothing that I
have to say about the play must be taken as implying that
it is possible, real, or philosophically coherent.

Let me now come down from my high horse, and take
the play on its own ground. The romantic imagination
is the most unoriginative, uncreative faculty in the
world, an original romance being simply an old situation
shown from a new point of view. As John Gabriel Bork-
man says, "the eye, born anew, transforms the old
action." Miss Corelli's eye, not having been born anew,
transforms nothing. Only, it was born recently enough
to have fallen on the music dramas of Wagner; and just
as she gave us, in "Thelma," a version of the scene in
"Die Walkiire" where Brynhild warns Siegmund of his
approaching death, so in "The Sorrows of Satan" she
reproduces Vanderdecken, the man whose sentence of
damnation will be cancelled if he can find one soul faith-
ful to the death. Wagner's Vanderdecken is redeemed
by a woman ; but Miss Corelli, belonging to that sex her-
self, knows better, and makes the redeemer a man. I am
bound to say that after the most attentive study of the
performance I am unable to report the logical connexion
between the drowning of Geoffrey Tempest in the ship-
wreck of Satan- Vanderdecken-Rimanez' yacht in the Ant-
arctic circle, and the immediate ascension to heaven of
Satan in a suit of armor ; but I have no doubt it is ex-
plained in the novel: at all events, the situation at the
end of the "Flying Dutchman," with the ship sinking, and

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the redeemed man rising from the sea in glory, is quite
recognizable. It seems hard that Geoffrey Tempest
should be left in the cold water ; but the spectacle of Sa-
tan ascending in the fifteenth-century splendor, with his
arm round a gentleman in shirt and trousers, evidently
would not do; so poetic justice has to be sacrificed to
stage effect.

The most forcible scene in the play is that in the fourth
act, where the villain of the piece, Lady Sybil, plays false
to her trusting husband by trying to seduce the virtuous
demon. In an ordinary man-made play the villain would
be a man and the sympathetic personages women; but
as "The Sorrows of Satan" are woman-made, the sexes
are reversed. This novelty is heightened by the operatic
culture of the author, which enables her to blend the ex-
tremity of modern fashionableness with tiie extremity of
mediaeval superstition, in the assured foreknowledge that
the public will not only stand it but like it. All the essen-
tials of the church scene from Gounod's "Faust" are in
that fourth act, with even some of the accessories — the
organ, for instance. The scene succeeds, as certain other
scraps of the play succeed, because Miss Corelli has the
courage and intensity of her imagination. This does not,
of course, save her from absurdity — indeed it rather tends
to involve her in it — ^but absurdity is the one thing that
does not matter on the stage, provided it is not psycho-
logical absurdity. Still, a dramatist had better not abuse
his immunity from common sense. It is true that if a
man goes into the National Gallery, and raises the ob-
jection that all these pretended figures and landscapes
and interiors are nothing but canvas and colored clay,
there is nothing for it but to conduct him to the entrance
and shoot him gently over the balustrade into the prosaic

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

street. All the same, the more completely a painter can
make us overlook that objection the better. Miss Co-
relli is apt to forget this. The introduction of a devil
in footman's livery passed off excellently; but when he
subsequently turned his hand to steering the yacht, and
adopted a cardinal's costume as the most convenient for
that duty, I confess I began to realize what a chance the
management lost in not securing Mr. Harry Nicholls for
that part. The young nobleman who played baccarat so
prodigally did not shatter my illusions until he suddenly
staked his soul, at which point I missed Meyerbeer's
"Robert le Diable" music rather badly. On the other
hand, I have no objection whatever to Satan, after elab-
orately disguising himself as a modern chevalier d'indus-
trie, giving himself away by occasional flashes of light-
ning. Without them the audience would not know that
he was the devil: besides, it reminds one of Edmund
Kean.

These, however, are trifles: any play can be ridiculed
by simply refusing to accept its descriptive conventions.
But, as I have said, a play need not be morally absurd.
Real life, in spite of the efforts of States, Churches, and
individuals to reduce its haphazards to order, is morally
absurd for the most part: Prometheus gains but little
on Jupiter; and his defeats are the staple of tragedy.
It is the privilege of the drama to make life intelligible,
at least hypothetically, by introducing moral design into
it, even if that design be only to show that moral design
is an illusion, a demonstration which cannot be made
without some counter-demonstration of the laws of life
with which it clashes. If the dramatist repudiates moral
interest, and elects to depend on humor, sensuousness and
romance, all the more must he accept the moral conven-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

tions which have become normal on the stage. Now Miss
Corelli has flatly no humor — positively none at all. She
is, in a very bookish way, abundantly sensuous and ro-
mantic; but she vehemently repudiates the conventional
moral basis, professing, for instance, a loathing for the
normal course of fashionable society, with its marriage
market, its spiritual callousness, and its hunt for pleas-
ure and money. But if Miss Corelli did not herself live
in the idlest of all worlds, the world of dreams and books
(so idle that people do not even learn to ride and shoot
and sin in it), she would know that it is vain to protest
against a necessary institution, however corrupt, until
you have an efficient and convincing substitute ready.
"Electric Christianity" (symbolized in the play by Satan's
flashes of lightning) will not convince anybody with a
reasonablely hard head on his or her shoulders that it
is an efficient substitute even for the morals of Mayfair.
The play is morally absurd from beginning to end. Satan
is represented, not as the enemy of God, but as his vic-
tim and moral superior: nevertheless he worships God
and is rewarded by reconciliation with him. He is neither
Lucifer nor Prometheus, but a sham revolutionist bidding
for a seat in the Cabinet. Lady Sybil is stigmatized as a
"wanton" because she marries for money; but the man
who buys her in the marriage market quite openly by
offering to take "The Hall, Willowsmere," if she will
marry him, as a set-off to the disagreeableness of living
with a man she does not care for, not only passes without
reproach, an3 is permitted to strike virtuous attitudes at
her expense, but actually has his death accepted as a
sufficient atonement to redeem the devil. Please observe
that he is thereby placed above Christ, whose atonement
and resistance to the temptation in the desert were inef-

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fectual as far as Satan was concerned. At the same time
we are permitted to take to our bosoms an American girl,
because, to gratify her Poppa's love of a title without
forfeiting her own self-respect, she has heroically refused
a silly young Duke and married a venal old Earl. Fur-
ther, the parade of contempt for wealth and fashion is
accompanied by the rigid exclusion of all second-class,
poor or lowly persons from the play except in the capac-
ity of servants. The male characters are a Prince, a
millionaire, an Earl, a Viscount, a Duke, and a Baronet,
with their servants, two caricatured solicitors and a pub-
lisher being introduced for a moment to be laughed at
for their vulgarity. The feminine side is supplied by
Lady Sybil, Lady Mary, Miss Charlotte Fitzroy (who,
lest her name should fail to inspire awe, is carefully in-
troduced as "Lord Elton's sister-in-law"), a millionairess,
a Duchess, one vulgar but only momentary landlady, and
Mavis Clare. Mavis Clare might be Miss Corelli herself,
so haughtily does she scorn the minions of fashion and
worms of the hour (as Silas Wegg put it) who provide
her with the only society she seems to care for.

The adaptation from Miss Corelli's novel has been
made by Messrs. Herbert Woodgate and Paul Berton.
I nevertheless hold Miss Corelli responsible for it. She
is quite as capable of dramatizing her novels as any one
who is likely to save her the trouble; and a little work
in this direction would do her no harm. A good deal
of the dialogue is redundant, slovenly, and full of reach-
me-down phrases which vulgarize every scene in which
the author has not been stirred up by strong feeling.
Most of the critics of whose hostility Miss Corelli com-
plains so bitterly cowld teach her to double the distinction
of her style in ten lessons. No doubt she could return

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the compliment by elevating their imaginations; so the
lessons could be arranged on reciprocal terms.

The play has not called forth any great display of act-
ing at the Shaftesbury. Mr. Lewis Waller, by a touch
or two on his eyebrows, makes himself passably like the
famous devil on the roof of Notre Dame, and keeps up
appearances so well that he appears to be talking impres-
sively and cleverly even when he is observing at a gar-
den party that "the man who pretends to understand
women betrays the first symptoms of insanity." Mr.
Yorke Stephens, with unquenchable politeness and unas-
sailable style, fulfils his obligations to Miss Corelli and
the audience most scrupulously, but with the air of a
man who has resolved to shoot himself the moment the
curtain is down. He lacks that priceless gift of stupid-
ity which prevents most leading men from knowing a
bad part from a good one; and so, though he plays
Geoffrey Tempest expertly, he cannot wallow in him as
a worse actor might. His address never fails him; but
as he is essentially a sceptical actor, his function of the
Redeemer of Satan does not seem to impress him ; and
there is a remarkably reassuring ring in his "O Lucio,
Lucio, my heart is broken !" Miss Granville would do
very well as Lady Sybil if only she were trained hard
enough to get the requisite force of execution and to
maintain her grip firmly all through. As it is, she hardly
gets beyond a string of creditable attempts to act. The
other parts are of no great importance.

There is a play without words at the Prince of Wales'
Theatre, entitled "A Pierrot's Dream," about which I
have more to say than there is room for this week.
Meanwhile I may admit that I found it a very delectable
entertainment, Mile. Fitini's Pierrot having a quite pecul-

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iar charm in addition to the accompHshments which one
expects as a matter of course from Pierrots. Rossi's
Pochinet, in a rougher way, is also excellent.

THE NEW IBSEN PLAY

John Gabriel Borkman: a play in four acts. By
Henrik Ibsen. Translated by William Archer. Lon-
don : Heinemann. 1897.

THE appearance some weeks ago in these columns
of a review of the original Norwegian edition of
Ibsen's new play, "J^^i^ Gabriel Borkman," re-
lieves me from repeating here what I have said elsewhere
concerning Mr. William Archer's English version. In
fact, the time for reviewing it has gone by : all who care
about Ibsen have by this time pounced on the new volume,
and ascertained for themselves what it is like. The only
point worth discussing now is the play's chances of per-
formance.

Everybody knows what happened to "Little Eyolf."
None of our managers would touch it; and it was not
until the situation was made very pressing indeed by the
advent of the proof-sheets of its successor that it was
produced. As it happened, a certain section of the public
— much the same section, I take it, as that which supplies
the audiences for our orchestral concerts — jumped at the
opportunity ; and the experiment, in its original modesty,
proved handsomely remunerative. Then commercial en-
terprise, always dreaming of "catches-on," long runs,
and "silver mines," attempted to exploit the occasion in

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the usual way, and of course made an inglorious mess of
it. A fashionable run of one of Ibsen's dramatic studies
of modern society is about as feasible as a fashionable
run of Beethoven's posthumous quartets. A late Ibsen
play will not bring in twenty thousand pounds: it will
only bring in fifteen hundred or two thousand. On the
other hand, the play which may bring in twenty thousand
pounds also may, and in nine cases out of ten does, bring
in less than half its very heavy expenses; whereas the
expenses of an Ibsen play, including a rate of profit for
the entrepreneur which would be considered handsome
in any ordinary non-speculative business, can be kept
well within its practically certain returns, not to mention
a high degree of artistic credit and satisfaction to all con-
cerned. Under these circumstances it can hardly be con-
tended that Ibsen's plays are not worth producing. In
legitimate theatrical business Ibsen is as safe and profit-
able as Beethoven and Wagner in legitimate musical
business.

Then, it will be asked, why do not the syndicates and
managers take up Ibsen? As to the syndicates, the an-
swer is simple. Enterprises with prospects limited to a
profit of a few hundred pounds on a capital of a thousand
do not require syndicates to finance them. An energetic
individual enthusiast and a subscription can get over the
business difficulties. The formation of a wealthy syn-
dicate to produce a "Little Eyolf" would be like the pro-
motion of a joint-stock company to sweep a crossing.
As to the managers, there are various reasons. First,
there is the inevitable snobbery of the fashionable actor-
manager's position, which makes him ashamed to produce
a play without spending more on the stage mounting
alone than an Ibsen play will bring in. Second, our

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managers, having for the most part only a dealer's knowl-
edge of art, cannot appreciate a new line of goods.

It is clear that the first objection will have to be got
over somehow. If every manager considers it due to him-
self to produce nothing cheaper than "The Prisoner of
Zenda," not to mention the splendors of the Lyceum, then
good-bye to high dramatic art. The managers will,
perhaps, retort that if high dramatic art means Ib-
sen, then they ask for nothing better than to get rid of
it. I am too polite to reply, bluntly, that high dramatic
art does mean Ibsen ; that Ibsen's plays are at this moment
the head of the dramatic body ; and that though an actor-
manager can, and often does, do without a head, dramatic
art cannot. Already Ibsen is a European power: this
new play has been awaited for two years, and is now
being discussed and assimilated into the consciousness of
the age with an interest which no political or pontifical
utterance can command. Wagner himself did not attain
such a position during his lifetime, because he was re-
garded merely as a musician — much the same thing as
regarding Shakespeare merely as a grammarian. Ibsen
is translated promptly enough nowadays; yet no matter
how rapidly the translation comes on the heel of the orig-
inal, newspapers cannot wait for it: detailed accounts
based on the Norwegian text, and even on stolen glimpses
of the proof-sheets, fly through the world from column
to column as if the play were an Anglo-American arbitra-
tion treaty. Sometimes a foolish actor informs the public
that Ibsen is a noisome nuisance. The public instantly
loses whatever respect it may previously have had, not
only for that foolish actor's critical opinion, but for his
good sense. But if Ibsen were to visit London, and ex-
press his opinion of our English theatre — as Wagner ex-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

pressed his opinion of the Philharmonic Society, for
example — our actors and managers would go down to
posterity as exactly such persons as Ibsen described them.
He is master of the situation, this man of genius; and
when we complain that he does not share our trumpery
little notions of life and society; that the themes that
make us whine and wince have no terrors for him, but
infinite interest; and that he is far above the barmaid's
and shop superintendent's obligation to be agreeable to
Tom, E)ick and Harry (which naturally convinces Tom,
Dick and Harry that he is no gentleman), we are not
making out a case against him, but simply stating the
grounds of his eminence. When any person objects to
an Ibsen play because it does not hold the mirror up to
his own mind, I can only remind him that a horse might
make exactly the same objection. For my own part, I do
not endorse all Ibsen's views : I even prefer my own
plays to his in some respects ; but I hope I know a great
man from a little one as far as my comprehension of such
things goes. Criticism may be pardoned for every mis-
take except that of not knowing a man of rank in lit-
erature when it meets one.

It is quite evident, then, that Ibsen can do without the
managers. There remains the question: Can they do
without Ibsen? And it is certainly astounding how long
English stupidity can stave off foreign genius. It took
Mozart's "Don Giovanni," the greatest opera in the world,
guaranteed by contemporary critics to be void of melody
and overwhelmed with noisy orchestration, thirty years
to reach London; and Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde"
made its way last year into the repertory of our Royal
Italian Opera thirty-eight years after its composition. But
even at this moderate rate of progress Ibsen may be re-

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garded as fairly due by this time. The play which stands
out among his works as an ideal Lyceum piece, "The
Pretenders," was his tenth play; and yet it was written
thirty-four years ago. 'Teer Gynt" is over thirty. Why,
even "A Doll's House" is eighteen years old. These fig-
ures are significant, because there is an enormous dif-
ference between the eflFect of Ibsen's ideas on his own
contemporaries and on those who might be his sons and
grandsons. Take my own case. I am a middle-aged, old-
fashioned person. But I was only two years old when
"The Vikings at Helgeland" was written. Now, con-
sidering that "Little Eyolf," written only a couple of years
ago, already attracts an audience sufficiently numerous to
pay for its production with a handsome little profit, is it
to be believed that playgoers from ten to twenty -years
younger than I am are not yet ready for at least the great
spectacular dramas, charged with romantic grandeur and
religious sentiment, which Ibsen wrote between 1855 (the
date of "Lady Inger") and 1866 (the date of "Peer
Gynt") ?

But alas! our managers are older in their ideas than
Ibsen^s grandmother. It is Sir Henry Irving's business,
as the official head of his profession — tu Fas voiihi,
Georges Dandin — ^to keep before us the noble side of that
movement in dramatic art of which "The Sign of the
Cross" and "The Sorrows of Satan" are the cheap and
popular manifestations. But how can he bring his trans-
figurations and fantasies to bear on the realities of the
modern school? They have no more to do with Ibsen
than with Shakespeare or any other author save only
Henry Irving himself. His theatre is not really a theatre
at all: an accident has just demonstrated that nobody will
go there to see a play, especially a play by Shakespeare !

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

They go only to see Sir Henry Irving or Miss Ellen
Terry. When he sprains his knee and Miss Terry flies
south, leaving only Shakespeare and the Lyceum com-
pany— O that company! — in possession, the theatre be-
comes a desert : Shakespeare will not pay for gas enough
to see him by. Back comes Miss Terry ; up goes Shake-
speare, Wills, Sardou, anybody; the public rallies; and
by the time the sprain is cured, all will be well. No : the
Lyceum is incorrigible: its debt to modem dramatic art
is now too far in arrear ever to be paid. After all, why,
after inventing a distinct genre of art, and an undeniably
fascinating one at that, should Sir Henry Irving now
place himself at the disposition of Ibsen, and become the
Exponent of Another on the stage which he has hitherto
trodden as the Self-Expounded? Why should Miss
Terry, whom we have adored under all sorts of delicious,
nonsensical disguises, loving especially those which made
her most herself, turn mere actress, and be transformed
by Norwegian enchantments into an embodiment of those
inmost reproaches of conscience which we now go to the
Lyceum to forget? It is all very well for Mr. Walkley
to point out that Sir Henry Irving, Miss Ellen Terry and
Miss Genevieve Ward would exactly suit the parts of
Borkman, Ella and Gunhild in the new play; but what
Sir Henry Irving wants to know is not whether he would
suit the part, since he has good reason to consider himself
actor enough to be able to suit many parts not worth his
playing, but whether the part would suit him, which is
quite another affair. That is the true centripetal force
that keeps Ibsen off the stage.

Unfortunately, when we give up the Lyceum, we give
up the only theatre of classic pretensions, officially rec-
ognized as such, in London. Mr. Oscar Barrett, when

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the details of his next pantomime are disposed of, might
conceivably try one of the big spectacular Ibsen plays at
Drury Lane ; but the experiment would be more of a new
departure for him and for the theatre than for Sir Henry
Irving and the Lyceum. Mr. Wyndham acts better than
anybody else ; he makes his company act better than any
other company — so well that they occasionally act him
off his own stage for months together; and he has not
only the cleverness of the successful actor-manager, which
is seldom more than the craft of an ordinary brain stim-
ulated to the utmost by an overwhelming professional
instinct, but the genuine ability of a good head, available
for all purposes. But the pre-Ibsenite drama, played as
he plays it, will last Mr. Wyndham's time ; and the public
mind still copes with the Ibsenite view of life too slowly
and clumsily for the Criterion. The most humorous pas-
sages of Ibsen's work — three-fourths of "The Wild
Duck," for instance — still seem to the public as puzzling,
humiliating, and disconcerting as a joke always does to
people who cannot see it. Comedy must be instantly and
vividly intelligible or it is lost : it must therefore proceed
on a thoroughly established intellectual understanding
between the author and the audience — an understanding
which does not yet exist between Ibsen and our playgoing
public. But tragedy, like Handel's "darkness that might
be felt," is none the worse theatrically for being intel-
lectually obscure and oppressive. The pathos of Hedwig
Ekdal's suicide or Little Eyolf's death is quite independ-
ent of any "explanation" of the play ; but most of the fun
of Hjalmar Ekdal, Gregers Werle, Relling, Molvik and
Gina, to an audience still dominated by conventional
ideals, must be as imperceptible, except when it hurts, as
it is to Hjalmar himself. This puts the comedy houses

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

out of the question, and leaves us with only Mr. Alex-
ander and Mr, Tree to look to. Both of them have been
more enterprising than the public had any right to expect
them to be. Mr. Tree actually produced "An Enemy of
The People" ; but I doubt if he has ever realized that his
Stockman, though humorous and entertaining in its way,
was, as a character creation, the polar opposite of Ibsen's
Stocknlan. None the less, Mr. Tree's notion of feeding
the popular drama with ideas, and gradually educating
the public, by classical matinees, financed by the spoils of
the popular plays in the evening bill, seems to have been
the right one. Mr. Alexander's attempts to run "Guy
Domville" and "The Divided Way" fairly proved that
such plays should not be substituted for "The Prisoner
of Zenda" and Shakespeare ; for I submit that we do not
want to suppress either Rose-Hope or Shakespeare, and
that we can spare Sudermann, Ibsen, and Mr. Henry
James from the footlights better than we could spare the
entertainments which please everybody. But why not
have both? If Mr. Alexander, instead of handing over
"Magda" to fail in the evening bill at another theatre,
had produced it and "Sodom's Ende" and so forth at a
series of matinees of the "Saturday Pop" class, financing
them from the exchequer of the kingdom of Ruritania,
and aiming solely at the nourishment of the drama and
the prevention of stagnation in public taste, he might have
laid the foundations of a genuine classic theatre, in which
th^ cultivated people who never dream of going to the
theatre now would take their boxes and stalls by the
season, and the hundred thousand people who go to the
St. James's twice a year would be represented financially
by four thousand going once a week.

At all events, the time for forlorn hopes has gone by.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I observe by the publishers' columns that Mr. Charles
Charrington, the only stage-manager of genius the new
movement has produced, and quite its farthest-seeing
pioneer, has taken to literature. Miss Janet Achurch has
relapsed into Shakespeare, and is going to play Cleopatra
at the forthcoming Calvertian revival in Manchester, after
which I invite her to look Ibsen in the face again if she
can. Miss Robins is devoting the spoils of "Little Eyolf"
to Echegaray's "Mariana," which must, for business
reasons, be produced very soon. There are no signs of
a fresh campaign on Miss Farr's part. The only other
Ibsenite enthusiast is Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who is busy
studying Emma Hamilton, the heroine of "the celestial
bed," which will, I trust, figure duly in the forthcoming
Nelson drama at the Avenue.

Altogether, the prospects of a speedy performance of
"John Gabriel Borkman" are not too promising.

OLIVIA

Olivia: a play in four acts. By the late W. G. Wills.
Founded on an episode in "The Vicar of Wakefield."
Revival. Lyceum Theatre, 30 January, 1897.

THE world changes so rapidly nowadays that I
hardly dare speak to my juniors of the things that
won my affections when I was a sceptical, imper-
turbable, hard-headed young man of twenty-three or
thereabouts. Now that I am an impressionable, excitable,
sentimental — if I were a woman everybody would say
hysterical — party on the wrong side of forty, I am con-
scious of being in danger of making myself ridiculous

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

unless I confine my public expressions of enthusiasm to
great works which are still before their time. That Qf
why, when "Olivia" was revived at the Lyceum last
Saturday, I blessed the modern custom of darkening the
auditorium during the performance, since it enabled me
to cry secretly. I wonder what our playgoing freshmen j
think of "Olivia." I do not, of course, mean what they
think of its opening by the descent of two persons to the
footlights to carry on an expository conversation begin-
ning, "It is now twenty-five years since, &c.," nor the
antediluvian asides of the "I do but dissemble" order in
Thornhill's part, at which the gallery burst out laughing.
These things are the mere fashions of the play, not the
life of it. And it is concerning the life of it that I ask
how the young people who see it to-day for the first time
as I saw it nearly twenty years ago at the old Court
Theatre feel about it.

I must reply that I have not the least idea. For what
has this generation in common with me, or with "Olivia,"
or with Goldsmith? The first book I ever possessed was
a Bible bound in black leather with gilt metal rims and
a clasp, slightly larger than my sisters' Bibles because I
was a boy, and was therefore fitted with a bigger Bible,
precisely as I was fitted with bigger boots. In spite of
the trouble taken to impress me with the duty of reading
it (with the natural result of filling me with a conviction
that such an occupation must be almost as disagreeable
as going to church), I acquired a considerable familiarity
with it, and indeed once read the Old Testament and the
four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire
to do what nobody else had done. A sense of the sanctity
of clergymen, and the holiness of Sunday, Easter and
Christmas — sanctity and holiness meaning to me a sort

163

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of reasonlessly inhibitory condition in which it was wrong
to do what I Hked and especially meritorious to make
myself miserable — was imbibed by me, not from what is
called a strict bringing-up (which, as may be guessed by
my readers, I happily escaped), but straight from the
social atmosphere. And as that atmosphere was much
like the atmosphere of "Olivia," I breathe it as one to
the manner born.

The question is, then, has that atmosphere changed so
much that the play is only half comprehensible to the
younger spectators ? That there is a considerable change
I cannot doubt; for I find that if I mention Adam and
Eve, or Cain and Abel, to people of adequate modem
equipment under thirty, they do not know what I am
talking about. The Scriptural literary style which fas-
cinated Wills as it fascinated Scott is to them quaint and
artificial. Think of the difference between the present
Bishop of London's History of the Popes and anything
that the Vicar of Wakefield could have conceived or writ-
ten! Think of the eldest daughters of our two-horse-
carriage vicars going out, as female dons with Newnham
degrees, to teach the granddaughters of ladies shame-
facedly conscious of having been educated much as Mrs.
Primrose was; and ponder well whether such domestic
incidents can give any clue to poor Olivia going off by
coach to be "companion" to "some old tabby" in York-
shire, and — most monstrous of all — previously presenting
her brothers with her Prayer-book and her "Pilgrim's
Progress," and making them promise to pray for her
every night at their mother's knee. Read "The Woman
Who Did," bearing in mind its large circulation and the
total failure of the attempt to work up the slightest public
feeling against it ; and then consider how obsolescent must

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

be that part of the interest of "OHvia" which depends on
her sense of a frightful gulf between her moral position
as a legally married woman and that in which she feels
herself when she is told that the legal part of the ceremony
was not valid. Take, too, that old notion of the home as
a sort of prison in which the parents kept their children
locked up under their authority, and from which, there-
fore, a daughter who wished to marry without their leave
had to escape through the window as from the Bastille!
Must not this conception, which alone can g^ve any reality
to the elopement of Olivia, be very historical and abstract
to the class of people to whom a leading London theatre
might be expected to appeal? It is easy for me, taught
my letters as I was by a governess who might have been
Mrs. Primrose herself, to understand the Wakefield vic-
arage ; but what I want to know is, can it carry any con-
viction to people who are a generation ahead of me in
years, and a century in nursery civilization ?

If I, drowning the Lyceum carpet with tears, may be
taken as one extreme of the playgoing body, and a modern
lady who, when I mentioned the play the other day, dis-
missed it with entire conviction as "beneath contempt,"
as the other, I am curious to see whether the majority of
those between us are sufficiently near my end to produce
a renewal of the old success. If not, the fault must lie
with the rate of social progress ; for "Olivia" is by a very
great deal the best nineteenth-century play in the Lyceum
repertory ; and it has never been better acted. The Ellen
Terry of 1897 is beyond all comparison a better Olivia
than the Ellen Terry of 1885. The enchanting delicacy
and charm with which she first stooped to folly at the
old Court Theatre was obscured at the Lyceum, partly,
perhaps, by a certain wrathful energy of developed phys-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ical power, pride, strength and success in the actress, but
certainly, as I shall presently show, by the Lyceum con-
ditions. To-iay the conditions are altered; the vanities
have passed away with the water under the bridges ; and
the delicacy and charm have returned. We have the
original Olivia again, in appearance not discoverably a
week older, and much idealized and softened by the dis-
use of the mere brute force of tears and grief, which
Miss Terry formerly employed so unscrupulously in the
scene of the presents and of the elopement that she made
the audience positively howl with anguish. She now
plays these scenes with infinite mercy and art, the effect,
though less hysterical, being deeper, whilst the balance
of the second act is for the first time properly adjusted.
The third act should be seen by all those who know Ellen
Terry only by her efforts to extract a precarious sus-
tenance for her reputation from Shakespeare: it will
teach them what an artist we have thrown to our national
theatrical Minotaur. When I think of the originality
fand modernity of the talent she revealed twenty years
ago, and of its remorseless waste ever since in "support-
ing" an actor who prefers "The Iron Chest" to Ibsen,
my regard for Sir Henry Irving cannot blind me to the
fact that it would have been better for us twenty-five
years ago to have tied him up in a sack with every exist-
ing copy of the works of Shakespeare, and dropped him
vinto the crater of the nearest volcano. It really serves
him right that his Vicar is far surpassed by Mr. Hermann
Vezin's. I do not forget that there never was a more
beautiful, a more dignified, a more polished, a more cul-
tivated, a more perfectly mannered Vicar than Sir Henry
Irving's. He annihilated Thornhill, and scored off every-
body else, by sheer force of behavior. When, on receiv-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ing that letter that looked like a notice of distraint for
rent, he said, with memorable charm of diction, "The
law never enters the poor man's house save as an op-
pressor," it was difficult to refrain from jumping on the
stage and saying, "Heaven bless you, sir, why don't you
go to London and start a proprietary chapel ? You would
be an enormous success there." There is nothing of this
about the Vezin Vicar. To Farmer Flamborough he may
be a fine gentleman ; but to Thornhill he is a very simple
one. To the innkeeper he is a prodigy of learning; but
out in the world, looking for his daughter, his strength
lies only in the pathos of his anxious perseverance. He
scores off nobody except in his quaint theological disputa-
tion with the Presbyterian; but he makes Thornhill
ashamed by not scoring off him. It is the appeal of his
humanity and not the beauty of his style that carries him
through ; and his idolatry of his daughter is unselfish and
fatherly, just as her affection for him is at last touched
with a motherly instinct which his unworldly helplessness
rouses in her. Handling the part skilfully and sincerely
from this point of view, Mr. Hermann Vezin brings the
play back to life on the boards where Sir Henry Irving,
by making it the occasion of an exhibition of extraor-
dinary refinement of execution and personality, very
nearly killed it as a drama. In the third act, by appeal-
ing to our admiration and artistic appreciation instead of
to our belief and human sympathy. Sir Henry Irving
made Olivia an orphan. In the famous passage where
the Vicar tries to reprove his daughter, and is choked by
the surge of his affection for her, he reproved Olivia like
a saint and then embraced her like a lover. With Mr.
Vezin the reproof is a pitiful stammering failure: its
break-down is neither an "effect" nor a surprise: it is

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

foreseen as inevitable from the first, and comes as Nature*s
ordained relief when the sympathy is strained to bursting
point. Mr. Vezin's entry in this scene is very pathetic.
His face is the face of a man who has been disappointed
to the very heart every day for months ; and his hungry
look round, half longing, half anticipating another dis-
appointment, gives just the right cue for his attitude to-
wards Thornhill, to whom he says, "I forget you," not in
conscious dignity and judgment, but as if he meant,
"Have I, who forget myself, any heart to remember you
whilst my daughter is missing?" When a good scene is
taken in this way, the very accessories become eloquent,
like the decent poverty of Mr. Vezin's brown overcoat.
Sir Henry Irving, not satisfied to be so plain a person as
the Vicar of Wakefield, gave us something much finer
and more distinguished, the beauty of which had to stand
as a substitute for the pathos of those parts of the play
which it destroyed. Mr. Vezin takes his part for better
for worse, and fits himself faithfully into it. The result
can only be appreciated by those whose memory is good
enough to compare the eflfect of the third act in 1885 and
to-day. Also, to weigh Olivia with the Vicar right against
Olivia with the Vicar wrong. I purposely force the com-
parison between the two treatments because it is a typical
one. The history of the Lyceum, with its twenty years'
steady cultivation of the actor as a personal force, and
its utter neglect of the drama, is the history of the English
stage during that period. Those twenty years have raised
the social status oi the theatrical profession, and cul-
minated in the official recognition of our chief actor as
the peer of the President of the Royal Academy and the
figureheads of the other arts. And now I, being a dram-
atist and not an actor, want to know when the drama is

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to have its turn. I do not suggest that G. B. S. should
condescend to become K. C. B. ; but I do confidently affirm
that if the actors think they can do without the drama,
they are most prodigiously mistaken. The huge relief
with which I found myself turning from "Olivia" as an
effective exhibition of the extraordinary accomplishments
of Sir Henry Irving to "Olivia" as a naturally acted story
has opened my eyes to the extent to which I have been
sinking the true dramatic critic in the connoisseur in
virtuosity, and forgetting what they were doing at the
Lyceum in the contemplation of how they were doing it.
Henceforth I shall harden my heart as Wagner hardened
his heart against Italian singing, and hold diction, deport-
ment, sentiment, personality and character as dust in the
balance against the play and the credibility of its repre-
sentation.

The rest of the company, not supporting, but supported
hy Mr. Vezin and Miss Terry — ^thereby reverting to the
true artistic relation between the principal parts and the
minor ones — appear to great advantage. Only, one misses
Mr. Terriss as Thornhill, since Mr. Cooper cannot remake
himself so completely as to give much point to Olivia's
line, once so eflfective, "As you stand there flicking your
boot, you look the very picture of vain indifference." Mr.
Norman Forbes does not resume his old part of Moses,
which is now played by Mr. Martin Harvey. Mr. Mack-
lin as Burchell and Mr. Sam Johnson as Farmer Flam-
borough, Master Stewart Dawson and Miss Valli Valli
as Dick and Bill, and Miss Julia Arthur as Sophia, all
fall admirably into their places. Miss Maud Milton is
a notably good Mrs. Primrose : her share in the scene of
the pistols, which attains a most moving effect, could not
have been better. Miss Edith Craig makes a resplendent

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Bohemian Girl of the gipsy, the effect being very nearly
operatic. Miss Craig may have studied her part from
the life; but if so, I should be glad to know where, so
that I may instantly ride off to have my fortune told by
the original.

MR. WILSON BARRETT AS THE
MESSIAH

The Daughters of Babylon: a play in four acts. By
Wilson Barrett. Lyric Theatre, 6 February, 1897.

MR. Wilson Barrett, responding to the editor of
the *' Academy," has just declared that his fa-
vorite books in 1896 were the Bible and Shake-
speare. No less might have been expected from a mana-
ger who has combined piety with business so successfully
as the author of "The Sign of the Cross." Isaiah has
especially taken hold of his imagination. No doubt when
he read, "Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have
enough; and they are shepherds that cannot understand:
they all look to their own way, every one for his gain,
from his quarter," he recognized in Isaiah the makings
of a first-rate dramatic critic. But what touched him
most was the familiar "He shall feed his flock like a
shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and
carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that
are with young." If Mr. Barrett had been a musician,
like Handel, he would have wanted to set that text to
music. Being an actor, he "saw himself in the part," and
could not rest until he had gathered a lamb with his arm

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and carried it on to the stage in "The Daughters of
Babylon." The imagined effect was not quite reaHzed
on the first night, partly, no doubt, because Mr. Edward
Jones, the conductor of the band, omitted to accompany
the entry with the obvious Handelian theme, and perhaps
partly because the lamb proved unworthy of the con-
fidence placed by Mr. Barrett in its good manners. But
the strongest reason was that metaphor is not drama, nor
tableau vivant acting. I hold Mr. Wilson Barrett in high
esteem as a stage manager and actor ; and I have no doubt
that Mr. Wilson Barrett would allow that I am a fairly
competent workman with my pen. But when he takes
up the tools of my craft and tries his hand at dramatic
literature, he produces exactly the same effect on me as
I should produce on him if I were to try my hand at
playing Othello. A man cannot be everything. To write
in any style at all requires a good many years practice:
to write in the Scriptural style well enough to be able
to incorporate actual passages from the Authorized Ver-
sion of the Bible without producing the effect of patching
a shabby pair of trousers with snippets of fifteenth-cen-
tury Venetian brocade, requires not only literary skill of
the most expert kind, but a special technical gift, such as
Stevenson had, for imitating the turn of classical styles.
Mr. Wilson Barrett is here fairly entitled to interrupt
me by saying, "Do not waste your time in telling me what
I know already. I grant it all. But I have reverently
submitted my qualifications to expert opinion. Miss
Marie Corelli, the most famous writer of the day, whose
prodigious success has earned her the envious hate of
the poor journeymen of literature to whom she will not
even deign to send review copies of her books, tells me
that I have 'the unpurchasable gift of genius' ; that my

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

language is 'choice and scholarly'; that I *could win the
laurels of the poet had I not opted for those of the
dramatist'; that I have power and passion, orchidacity
and flamboyancy; and that my 'Babylon' is better than
The Sign of the Cross/ which was not only enormously
successful, but was approved by the clerical profession,
to whom Greek and Hebrew are as mother tongues. Who
are you, pray, Mr. Saturday Reviewer, that I should set
this mass of disinterested authority beneath your possibly
envious disparagements ?"

This is altogether unanswerable as far as the weight
of authority is concerned. I confess that I am in an in-
finitesimal minority, and that my motives are by no means
above suspicion. Therefore I must either hold my tongue
or else rewrite the play to show how it ought to be done.
Such a demonstration is beyond my means, unless a public
subscription be raised to remunerate my toil; but I do
not mind giving a sample or two. Suppose I were to tell
Mr. Wilson Barrett that among the many judicial ut-
terances in the Bible, by Solomon, Festus, Felix, Pilate,
and others, I had found such a remark as "The evidence
against thee is but slight," would he not burst out laugh-
ing at me for my ridiculous mixture of modern Old Bailey
English with the obsolete fashion of using the second
person singular? Yet he has used that very phrase in
"The Daughters of Babylon." Pray observe that I should
not at all object to the wording of the whole drama in
the most modern vernacular, even if it were carried to
the extent of making the Babylonian idol seller talk like
a coster. But modern vernacular seasoned with thees
and thous and haths and whithers to make it sound per-
adventurously archaic is another matter. Let us have
"There is not sufficient evidence against you," or else let

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

us talk loftily of accusation and testimony, not of cases
and evidence. Again, there is not, as far as I can re-
member, any account of an auction in the Bible; but if
there were I should unhesitatingly reject it as apocryphal
if one of the parties, instead of saying "Who is he that
biddeth against me for this woman?" were to exclaim,
"I demand to know the name of my opponent," which
is Mr. Barrett's authorized version. If he had made
Jediah say, "May I ask who the gentleman is?" that
would have been perfectly allowable; but the phrase as
it stands belongs neither to Christy's nor to the literary
convention of the ideal Babylon: it is the ineptitude of
an amateur. And would it not have been easier to write
"The nether milestone is not so hard," than "The nether
milestone is tender in comparison"? As to "We have
wandered from the object of our visit, my lord," I really
give it up in despair, and intemperately affirm that the
man who, with a dozen tolerably congruous locutions
ready to his hand, could select that absurdly incongruous
one, does not know the Bible from "Bow Bells."

Miss Marie Corelli, who finds Mr. Barrett's phrases
"choice and scholarly," gets over the difficulty of de-
scribing Ishtar in the blunt language of Scripture, by
calling her, very choicely, "the Queen of the Half World
of Babylon" — ^five words for one. Ishtar is very bitter
throughout the play concerning the ferocity of the Jewish
law to women. Yet we find Lemuel, in the true spirit of
a British tar, saying, "I will not harm thee, who art —
whate'er thy sins — a Woman." I could not give a better
example of the way in which the actor-dramatist will for-
get everything else, drama, commonsense, and all, the
moment an opening for some hackneyed stage effect,
chivalrous pose, or sympathy-catching platitude occurs
to him.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

"The Daughters of Babylon," then, is not Hkely to
please critics who can write; for nothing antagonizes a
good workman so much as bad workmanship in his own
craft. It will encounter also a prejudice against his ex-
ploitation of the conception of religious art held by the
average English citizen. Against that prejudice, however,
I am prepared to defend it warmly. I cannot for the life
of me understand why Mr. Wilson Barrett should not do
what Ary Scheffer and Miiller, Sir Noel Paton and Mr.
Goodall, Mr. Herbert Schmalz and the publishers of the
Dore Bible, not to mention Miss Corelli herself, are doing,
or have been doing, all through the century without pro-
test. For my part, whilst, as a Superior Person, I reserve
the right to look down on such conceptions of religion
as Caesar might have looked down at a toy soldier, yet
the advance from the exploitation of illiterate and foolish
melodramatic conventions in which nobody believes, to
that of a sentiment which is a living contemporary reality,
and which identifies the stage at last with popular artistic,
literary and musical culture (such as it is), is to me more
momentous than the production of "Jo^^^ Gabriel Bork-
man" at the Lyceum would be. Mr. Wilson Barrett has
found that he can always bring down the house with a
hymn : the first act of "The Daughters of Babylon," after
driving the audience nearly to melancholy madness by
its dulness, is triumphantly saved in that way. Well,
any one who takes a walk round London on Sunday even-
ing will find, at innumerable street corners, little bands
of thoroughly respectable citizens, with their wives and
daughters, standing in a circle and singing hymns. It
is not a fashionable thing to do — not even a conventional
thing to do : they do it because they believe in it. And
pray why is that part of their lives not to find expression

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

in dramatic art as it finds expression, unchallenged, in
all the other fine arts ? Are we to drive Mr. Wilson Bar-
rett back from his texts, his plagal cadences, and his
stage pictures from the Illustrated Bible, to "Arrest that
man: he is a murderer," or "Release that man: he is
in-know-scent," or "Richard Dastardson: you shall rre-
pent-er that-er b-er-low"? The pity is that Mr. Wilson
Barrett does not go further and gratify his very evident
desire to impersonate the Messiah without any sort of
circumlocution or disguise. That we shall have Passion
Plays in the London theatres as surely as we shall some
day have "Parsifal" has for a long time past been as
certain as any development under the sun can be; and
the sooner the better. I have travelled all the way to
Ober-Ammergau to see a Passion Play which was fi-
nanced in the usual manner by a syndicate of Viennese
Jews. Why should not the people who cannot go so far
have a Passion Play performed for them in Shaftesbury
Avenue ? The fact that they want it is proved, I take it,
by the success of "Barabbas." Depend on it, we shall
see Mr. Wilson Barrett crucified yet; and the eflfect will
be, not to debase religion, but to elevate the theatre, which
has hitherto been allowed to ridicule religion but not to
celebrate it, just as it has been allowed to jest indecently
with sex questions but not to treat them seriously.

As it is, "The Daughters of Babylon" suffers a good
deal from our religious prudery. Mr. Wilson Barrett
underplays his part to an extent quite unaccountable on
the face of it, the fact being that he plays, not Lemuel,
but the Messiah disguised as Lemuel, and therefore ex-
cludes all fear, passion and perplexity from his concep-
tion, retaining only moral indignation for strong eflfects,
and falling back at other times on superhuman serenity,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

indulgence, pity and prophetic sadness. In short, he is
playing a part which he did not venture to write; and
the result is that the part he did write is sacrificed with-
out any apparent compensation. It is dangerous for an
actor to mean one part whilst playing another, unless
the audience is thoroughly in the secret; and it is quite
fatal for an author to mean one play and write another.
There was no such want of directness in "The Sign of
the Cross." In it the Christian scenes were as straight-
forward as the Roman ones; and Marcus Superbus was
meant for Marcus Superbus and nobody else. In "The
Daughters of Babylon" the Jewish scenes are symbolic;
and though the Babylonian scenes are straightforward
enough (and therefore much more effective), they are
pervaded by the symbolic Lemuel, who lets them down
dramatically every time he enters. With this doubleness
of purpose at the heart of it, the play may succeed as a
spectacle and a rite; but it will not succeed as a melo-
drama.

Like all plays under Mr. Barrett's management, "The
Daughters of Babylon" is excellently produced. The
scene painters are the heroes of the occasion. Mr. Telbin's
grove standing among the cornfields on a hilly plain, and
Mr. Hann's view of Babylon by night, in the Dore style,
are specially effective ; and the tents of Israel on the hill-
side make a pretty bit of landscape in Mr. Ryan's "Judg-
ment Seat by the City of Zoar," in which, however, the
necessity for making the judgment seat "practicable" left
it impossible for the artist to do quite as much as Mr.
Telbin. The cast, consisting of thirty-three persons, all
of them encouraged and worked up as if they were
principals — a feature for which Mr. Wilson Barrett, as
manager, can hardly have too much credit — must be con-

176

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

tent for the most part with a general compliment, the
names being too many for mention. Mr. Franklin Mc-
Leay's Jediah bears traces of the epilepsy of Nero, an
inevitable consequence of a whole year's run of convul-
sions; but he again makes his mark as an actor of ex-
ceptional interest and promise, who should be seen in a
part sufficiently like himself to be played without the
somewhat violent disguises he assumes at the Lyric. Mr.
Ambrose Manning, as Alorus the Affable, has the only
one of the long parts which is not occasionally tedious,
a result largely due to his judgment in completely throw-
ing over the stagy style which all the rest frankly adopt.
Mr. Charles Hudson also contrives to emerge into some
sort of particularity ; but the other sixteen gentlemen defy
distinction, except, perhaps, the fat Babylonian execu-
tioner, Mr. George Bernage, whose comfortable appear-
ance is so little suited to his occupation as chief baker
at the Nebuchadnezzaresque fiery furnace that his fear-
somest utterances provoke roars of laughter. Miss Maud
Jeffries appears to much advantage in rational dress in
the Babylonian scenes. She makes Elna much more in-
teresting than that whited wall the Christian Martyr in
"The Sign of the Cross," and seems to have the American
intelligence, character and humor, without the American
lack of vitality. Indeed, her appearance in the first scene
of the second act is the beginning of the play, as far as
any dramatic thrill is concerned. Miss Lily Hanbury,
specially engaged to be orchidaceous and flamboyant as
the Improper Person of Babylon, and wholly guiltless of
the least aptitude for the part, honestly gives as much
physical energy to the delivery of the lines as she can,
and is very like a pet lamb pretending to be a lioness.
When Lemuel decided to let his sweetheart, himself, and

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

all his faithful confederates be baked in the fiery furnace
sooner than accept her proffered affection, the sympathy
of the audience departed from him for ever. So did
mine ; but, all the same, I beg Miss Hanbury not to imag-
ine, whatever the gallery may think, that she has learnt
to act heavy parts merely because she has picked up the
mere mechanics of ranting. And I implore her not to
talk about "the lor of Babylon." The quarter-century
during which Sir Henry Irving has been attacking his
initial vowels with a more than German scrupulousness
should surely by this time have made it possible for a
leading actress to pronounce two consecutive vowels
without putting an "r" between them.

The musical arrangements are so lavish as to include
a performance of Max Bruch's "Kol Nidrei" (familiar
as a violincello piece) between the first and second acts,
by a Dutch solo violinist of distinction, M. Henri Seiffert.

FOR ENGLAND, HOME AND BEAUTY

Nelson's Enchantress: a new play in four acts, by
Risden Home. Avenue Theatre, ii February, 1897.

I AM beginning seriously to believe that Woman is
going to regenerate the world after all. Here is a
dramatist, the daughter of an admiral who was
midshipman to Hardy, who was captain to Nelson, who
committed adultery with Lady Hamilton, who was noto-
riously a polyandrist. And what is her verdict on Lady
Hamilton ? Simply that what the conventional male dram-
atist would call her "impurity" was an entirely respect-

i;8

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

able, lovable, natural feature of her character, inseparably
bound up with the qualities which made her the favorite
friend of England's favorite hero. There is no apology
made for this view, no consciousness betrayed at any point
that there is, or ever was, a general assumption that it is
an improper view. There you have your Ermna Hart,
in the first act the mistress of Greville, in the second re-
pudiated by Greville and promptly transferring her affec-
tion to his uncle, in the third married to the uncle and
falling in love with another man (a married man), and
in the fourth living with this man during his wife's life-
time, and parting from him at his death with all the hon-
ors of a wife. There is no more question raised as to the
propriety of it all than as to Imogen's virtue in repulsing
lachimo. An American poetess, Mrs. Charlotte Stetson
Perkins, has described, in biting little verses, how she
met a Prejudice; reasoned with it, remonstrated with it,
satirized it, ridiculed it, appealed to its feelings, exhausted
every argument and every blandishment on it without
moving it an inch ; and finally "just walked through it."
A better practical instance of this could hardly be found
than "Nelson's Enchantress." Ibsen argues with our
prejudices — makes them, in fact, the subject of his plays.
Result : we almost tear him to pieces, and shut our theatre
doors as tight as we can against him. "Risden Home"
walks through our prejudices straight on to the stage ; and
nobody dares even whisper that Emma is not an edifying
example for the young girl of fifteen. Only, in the House
of Commons a solitary Admiral wants the licence of the
theatre withdrawn for its presumption in touching on the
morals of the quarter-deck. What does this simple salt
suppose would have happened to the theatre if it had told
the whole truth on the subject?

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

In order to realize what a terrible person the New
Woman is, it is necessary to compare "Nelson's Enchant
ress" with that ruthlessly orthodox book, "The Heavenly
Twins." It is true that Madame Sarah Grand, though a
New Woman, will connive at no triflings with "purity"
in its sense of monogamy. But mark the consequence.
She will tolerate no Emma Harts; but she will tolerate
no Nelsons either. She says, in effect, "Granted, gen-
tlemen, that we are to come to you untouched and un-
spotted, to whom, pray, are we to bring our purity ? To
what the streets have left of your purity, perhaps? No,
thank you : if we are to be certified pure, you shall be so
certified too : wholesome husbands are as important to us
as wholesome wives are to you." We all remember the
frantic fury of the men, their savage denunciations of
Madame Sarah Grand, and the instant and huge success
of her book. There was only one possible defence against
it; and that was to boldly deny that there was anything
unwholesome in the incontinences of men — nay, to ap-
peal to the popular instinct in defence of the virility, the
good-heartedness, and the lovable humanity of Tom
Jones. Alas for male hypocrisy ! No sooner has the ex-
pected popular response come than another New Woman
promptly assumes that what is lovable in Tom Jones is
lovable in Sophia Western also, and presents us with an
ultra-sympathetic Enchantress heroine who is an arrant
libertine. The dilemma is a pretty one. For my part, I
am a man ; and Madame Grand's solution fills me with dis-
may. What I should like, of course, would be the main-
tenance of two distinct classes of women, the one polyan-
drous and disreputable and the other monogamous and
reputable. I could then have my fill of polygamy among
the polyandrous ones with the certainty that I could hand

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

them over to the police if they annoyed me after I had
become tired of them, at which date I could marry one
of the monogamous ones and live happily ever afterwards.
But if a woman were to say such a thing as this about
men I should be shocked ; and of late years it has begun
to dawn on me that perhaps when men say it (or worse
still, act on it without confessing to it) women may be
disgusted. Now it is a very serious thing for Man to be
an object of disgust to Woman, on whom from his cradle
to his grave he is as dependent as a child on its nurse.
I would cheerfully accept the unpopularity of Guy Fawkes
if the only alternative were to be generally suspected by
women of nasty ideas about them: consequently I am
forced to reconsider my position. If I must choose be-
tween accepting for myself the asceticism which I have
hitherto light-heartedly demanded from all respectable
women, and extending my full respect and tolerance to
women who live as freely as "Nelson's Enchantress,"
why then — ^but space presses, and this is not dramatic
criticism. To business!

It is a pity that the Nelson of the play is a mere wax-
work Nelson. The real man would have been an extraor-
dinarily interesting hero. Nelson was no nice, cultured
gentleman. He started sailoring and living on a scorbutic
diet of "salt horse" at twelve ; was senior officer of an ex-
pedition and captain of a 44-gun ship when he was
twenty-two; and was admiral in command of a fleet in
one of the greatest naval engagements of modern times
when he was forty. Could any character actor hit off the
amphibiousness of such a person, and yet present to us
also the inveterately theatrical hero who ordered his en-
gagements like an actor-manager, made his signals to the
whole British public, and wrote prayers for publication in

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the style of "The Sign of the Cross" instead of offering
them up to the god of battles. With consummate profes-
sional skill founded on an apprenticeship that began in
his childhood, having officers to match and hardy and able
crews, and fighting against comparative amateurs at a
time when the average French physique had been driven
far below the average English one by the age of starva-
tion that led to the burning of the chateaux and the Revo-
lution, he solemnly devoted himself to destruction in every
engagement as if he were leading a forlorn hope, and
won not only on the odds, but on the boldest presumption
on the odds. When he was victorious, he insisted on the
fullest measure of glory, and would bear malice if the
paltriest detail of his honors — the Mansion House dinner,
for example — were omitted. When he was beaten, which
usually happened promptly enough when he made a shore
attack, he denied it and raged like a schoolboy, vowing
what he would do to his adversary the next time he caught
him. He always played even his most heroic antagonists
off the stage. At the battle of the Nile, Brueys, the
French admiral, hopelessly outmanoeuvred and outfought,
refused to strike his colors and fought until the sea swal-
lowed him and his defeat. Nothing could be more heroic.
Nelson, on the other hand, was knocked silly, and re-
mained more or less so for about three years, disobeying
orders and luxuriating with Lady Hamilton, to the scandal
of all Europe. And yet who in England even mentions
the brave Brueys or that nasty knock on the head ? As to
Nelson's private conduct, he, sailor-like, married a widow
on a foreign station ; pensioned her off handsomely when
she objected to his putting another woman in her place;
and finally set up a menage a trots with Sir William and
Lady Hamilton, the two men being deeply attached to

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

one another and to the lady, and the lady polyandrously
attached to both of them. The only child of this "group
marriage" was Nelson's, and not the lawful husband's.
Pray what would you say, pious reader, if this were the
story of the hero of an Ibsen play instead of the perfectly
well known, and carefully never told, story of England's
pet hero?

"Risden Home," I regret to say, does not rise to the
occasion. Though she deals with Lady Hamilton like a
New Woman, she deals with Nelson like a Married one,
taking good care that he shall not set a bad example to
husbands. She first gives us a momentary glimpse of
Captain Horatio Nelson as an interesting and elegant
young man, who could not possibly have ever suffered
from scurvy. She introduces him again as Admiral Nel-
son immediately after the battle of the Nile, with two
eyes and an undamaged scalp. Lady Hamilton does not
make a scene by crying "O my God !" and fainting on his
breast. On the contrary, in a recklessly unhistorical con-
versation, they both confess their love and part for ever,
to the entire satisfaction of the moral instincts of the
British public. Everything having thus been done in
proper form, Nelson is made Duke of Bronte for the Nile
victory instead of for hanging Carracciolo ; the remainder
of Sir William Hamilton's lifetime is tactfully passed
over; the existence of Lady Nelson and little Horatia is
politely ignored ; and Nelson is not reintroduced until his
brief stay at Merton on the eve of Trafalgar. The fact
that he has only just returned trom spending two years
very contentedly on board ship away from his Enchantress
is not insisted on. He recites his Wilson-Barrettian
prayer ; parts from the heartbroken Emma ; and is pres-
ently seen by her in a vision, dying in the cockpit of the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

"Victory," and — considerate to the last of the interests
of morality in the theatre — discreetly omitting his recom-
mendation of his illegitimate daughter to his country's
care.

Need I add, as to Emma herself, that we are spared
all evidence of the fact that Greville only allowed her
i20 a year to dress on and pay her personal expenses;
of her change from a sylph to a Fat Lady before the
Nile episode; and the incorrigible cabotinage which in-
spired her first meeting with Nelson, her poses plastiques,
and her habit, after Nelson's death, of going to concerts
and fainting publicly whenever Braham was announced
to sing " 'Twas in Trafalgar's Bay." In short, the Em-
ma of the play is an altogether imaginary person histor-
ically, but a real person humanly; whereas the Nelson,
equally remote from history, is a pure heroic convention.
It still remains true that the British public is incapable
of admiring a real great man, and insists on having in^his
place the foolish image they suppose a great man to be.

Under such restrictions no author can be genuinely
dramatic. "Risden Home" has had no chance except in
the Greville episode of the first act; and this is of quite
extraordinary merit as plays go nowadays. Greville is
drawn as only a woman could draw him. Although the
character sketches certainly lack the vividness, and the
dialogue lacks the force and the independence of literary
forms and conventions which a more practised hand could
have given them, yet they are several knots ahead of
average contemporary dramatic fiction. The literary
power displayed is, after Mr. Wilson Barrett and Miss
Corelli, positively classical; and the author has plenty of
scenic instinct. We have probably not heard the last of
"Risden Home."

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in a wig so carefully modelled
on that head of hair which is one of Miss Elizabeth Rob-
ins's most notable graces that for a moment I could
hardly decide whether I was looking at Miss Robins
made up like Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. Campbell made up
like Miss Robins, is a charming Lady Hamilton. She
even acts occasionally, and that by no means badly. In
the first scene, her delivery of the long speech to Gre-
ville — an excellently written speech for stage use — is
delivered as a schoolgirl repeats her catechism : its happy
indifference of manner and glib utterance almost unhinged
my reason. But in the scene of the breach with Greville
she played excellently; and the rest of her part, though
often underdone, was not ill done — sometimes very much
the reverse — and always gracefully and happily done.
Mr. Forbes Robertson, as the waxwork Nelson, has no
difficulty in producing the necessary effect, and giving
it more interest than it has any right to expect. Mr.
Nutcombe Gould plays Sir William Hamilton; Mr. Ben
Greet, Romney ; and Mr. Sydney Brough, Sir John Tre-
vor. The mounting is all that can be desired, except that
the studies in Romney's studio are absurdly made to
resemble the well-known portraits of the real Lady Ham-
ilton instead of Mrs. Campbell.

X85

THE ECHEGARAY MATINEES

Mariana. By Jose Echegaray. Translated by James
Graham. Court Theatre, 22 February, 1897.

IT IS now nearly two years since I pointed out, on the
publication of Mr. James Graham's translations of
Echegaray, that "Mariana" was pre-eminently a
play for an actress-manageress to snap up. The only
person who appreciated the opportunity in this country
was Miss Elizabeth Robins. Mr. Daly, on the other side
of the Atlantic, tried to secure the play for Miss Ada
Rehan; but early as Mr. Daly gets up in the morning.
Miss Robins gets up earlier: otherwise we might have
had "Mariana," touched up in Mr. Daly's best Shake-
spearean style, at the Comedy last season instead of
"Countess Gucki."

The weakness of "Mariana" lies in the unconvincing
effect of the disclosure which brings about the catas-
trophe. When a circumstance that matters very little to
us is magnified for stage purposes into an affair of life
and death, the resultant drama must needs be purely sen-
sational: it cannot touch our consciences as they are
touched by plays in which the motives are as real to us
as the actions. If the atmosphere of "Mariana" were
thoroughly conventional and old-fashioned, or if Mari-
ana were presented at first as a fanatical idealist on the
subject of "honor," like Ruy Gomez in "Hernani," or
Don Pablo, we might feel with her that all was lost when
she discovered in her chosen Daniel the son of the man
with whom her mother had eloped, even though that cir-

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cumstance does not involve the remotest consanguinity
between them. But since she is introduced as the most
wayward and wilful of modern women, moving in a by
no means serious set, the fanatical action she takes is to
a Londoner neither inevitable nor natural. For us there
are only two objections to Daniel. The first — ^that it
would be very embarrassing to meet his father — is trivial,
and might be got over simply by refusing to meet him.
The other — the repulsion created by the idea of DanieFs
close relationship to the man she loathes — is credible and
sufficient enough; but it is quite incompatible with the
persistence of such an ardent affection for him that she
can only fortify herself against his fascination by marry-
ing a murderously jealous and straitlaced man for whom
she does not care. In short, the discovery either produces
a revulsion of feeling against Daniel or it does not. If
it does, the monstrous step of marrying Pablo is unnec-
essary ; if not, Mariana is hardly the woman to allow a
convention to stand between her and her lover. At all
events, it seems to me that the motive of the catastrophe,
however plausible it may be in Spain, is forced and the-
atrical in London; that the situation at the end of the
third act is unconvincing; and that Englishwomen will
never be able to look at Mariana and say, "But for the
grace of God, there go I," as they do at Ibsen's plays.
But with this reservation, the play is a masterly one.
Not only have we in it an eminent degree of dramatic wit,
imagination, sense of idiosyncrasy, and power over words
(these qualifications are perhaps still expected from dram-
atists in Spain), but we have the drawing-room presented
from the point of view of a man of the world in the
largest sense. The average British play purveyor, who
knows what a greengrocer is like, and knows what a

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

stockbroker or editor is like, and can imagine what a
duke is like, and cannot imagine what a Cabinet Minister
is like; who has been once to the private view at the
Academy in the year when his own portrait was exhib-
ited there, and once to the Albert Hall to hear Albani in
"Elijah,'' and once to the Opera to hear "Carmen," and
has cultivated himself into a perfect museum of chatty
ignorances of big subjects, is beside Echegaray what a
beadle is beside an ambassador. Echegaray was a Cab-
inet Minister himself before the vicissitudes to which that
position generally leads in Spain drove him, at forty-two,
to turn his mind in exile to dramatic authorship. When
you consider what a parochially insular person even
Thackeray was, and how immeasurably most of our
dramatists fall short of Thackeray in width of social hor-
izon, you will be prepared for the effect of superiority
Echegaray produces as a man who comprehends his
world, and knows society not as any diner-out or May-
fair butler knows it, but as a capable statesman knows it.
The performance on Monday last began unhappily.
In the first act everybody seemed afraid to do more than
hurry half-heartedly over an exposition which required
ease, leisure, confidence, and brightness of comedy style
to make it acceptable. In the preliminary conversation
between Clara and Trinidad, Miss Sitgreaves and Miss
Mary Keegan, though neither of them is a novice, were
so ill at ease that we hardly dared look at them ; and their
relief when Mr. Hermann Vezin and Mr. Martin Harvey
came to keep them in countenance was obvious and heart-
felt. Yet, later on. Miss Sitgreaves, who is unmistakably
a clever actress, made quite a hit; and Miss Keegan
walked in beauty like the night with more than her cus-
tomary aplomb. Even Miss Robins had to force her

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way in grey desperation through the first act until quite
near the end, when Mr. Irving's fervor and a few lucky
signs from the audience that the play was fastening upon
them got the performance under way at last. Thereafter
all went well. Miss Robins and Mr. Hermann Vezin
carried the representation in the second act to a point
at which even the picked part of the audience were re-
assured and satisfied, and the ordinary part became rue-
fully respectful, and perhaps even wondered whether it
might not be the right thing, after all, to enjoy this sort
of play more than looking at a tailor's advertisement maP
king sentimental remarks to a milliner's advertisement in
the middle of an upholsterer's and decorator's advertise- .
ment. However, much as I enjoyed Mr. Hermann Vezin s
performance as Don Felipe, I must tell him in a friendly
way that his style of acting will not do for the stage of
to-day. He makes two cardinal mistakes. The first is
that he accepts as the first condition of an impersonation
that it should be credibly verisimilar. He is wrong: he
should first make himself totally incredible and impossi-
ble, and then, having fascinated the audience by an effect
of singularity and monstrosity, heighten that effect by
such appropriate proceedings as the part will lend itself
to without absolute disaster. Second, he should remem-
ber that acting will no more go down without plenty of
sentiment smeared all over it than a picture will without
plenty of varnish. His matter-of-fact sensible ways in
matter-of-fact sensible passages will not do: he should,
either by thinking of his own greatness for half an hour
in his dressing-room, or, if he has neither patience nor
vanity enough for that, by a simple internal application
of alcohol, work himself into a somnambulistic, hysterical,
maudlin condition in which the most commonplace re-

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mark will seem fraught with emotions from the very
ocean-bed of solemnity and pathos. That is the way to
convince our Partridges that you are a real actor. How-
ever, it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good ; and,
as I happen to appreciate Mr. Vezin's rational style of
acting, and to have a quite unspeakable contempt for the
sleepwalking, drunken style, I hail Mr. Vezin's rare ap-
pearances with great enjoyment and relief. I wonder,
by the way, why the possession of skill and good sense
should be so fatal to an actor or actress as it is at present.
Why do we never see Mr. Vezin or Mr. William Farren
except when a revival of "The School for Scandal" or
"Olivia" makes them absolutely indispensable? Why is
it morally certain that if Mr. Hare had not gone into
management, we should for years past have heard of
him, without ever seeing him, as everybody's dearest
friend, only so "dry," so "unlucky," so any-excuse-for-
engaging-some-third-rate-nonentity-in-his-place, that he
would be only a name to young playgoers? Why would
Sir Henry Irving and Mr. Wyndham vanish instantly
from the stage if they did not hold their places by the
strong hand as managers? I said I wondered at these
things; but that was only a manner of speaking, for I
think I know the reasons well enough. They will be
found in my autobiography, which will be published
fifty years after my death.

Well, as I have intimated, Mr. Vezin was an excellent
Felipe, and in fact secured the success of the play by
his support to Mariana in the critical second act. But
Miss Robins would, I think, have succeeded at this point
triumphantly, support or no support; for the scene is
not only a most penetrating one, but it demands exactly
those qualities in which her strength lies, notably an in-

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tensity in sympathizing with herself which reminds one
of "David Copperfield." The parallel will bear pursuing
by those who are interested in arriving at a clear estimate
of Miss Robins's peculiar assortment of efficiencies and
deficiencies — an assortment commoner off the stage than
on it. For instance, she fails as Mariana just where
Dickens would have failed if he had attempted to draw
such a character: that is, in conveying the least impres-
sion of her impulsive rapture of love for Daniel. Almost
any woman on the stage, from the most naive little ani-
mal in our musical farces up to the heartwise Miss Ellen
Terry, could have played better to Daniel than Miss Rob-
ins did. Her love scenes have some scanty flashes of mis-
chievous humor in them, of vanity, of curiosity of a
vivisectionist kind — in short, of the egotistical, cruel
side of the romantic instinct; but of its altruistic, affec-
tionate side they have not a ray or beam. Only once did
a genuine sympathetic impulse show itself; and that was
not to Daniel, but to the foster-father, Felipe. Yet Miss
Robins played the lover very industriously. She rose,
and turned away, and changed chairs, and was troubled
and tranquil, grave and gay, by turns, and gave flowers
from her bosom, all most painstakingly. Being unable
to put her heart into the work and let it direct her eyes,
she laid muscular hold of the eyes at first hand and
worked them from the outside for all they were worth.
But she only drew blood once; and that was when she
looked at Daniel and said something to the effect that
"Nobody can look so ridiculous as a lover." There was
no mistake about the sincerity of that, or of the instant
response from the audience, which had contemplated
Miss Robins's elaborately acted and scrupulously gentle-
manlike gallantries with oppressed and doubting hearts.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I must say I cannot bring myself to declare this a
shortcoming on Miss Robins's part, especially since her
success as the sympathetic. Asta Allmers proves that it
cannot have been the affection that eluded her, but only
the romance. Among the Russian peasantry young peo-
ple when they fall romantically in love are put under
restraint and treated medically as lunatics. In this coun-
try they are privileged as inspired persons, like ordinary
lunatics in ignorant communities ; and if they are crossed,
they may (and often do) commit murder and suicide
with the deepest public sympathy. In "Jo^^^ Gabriel
Borkman" (a performance of which is promised by Miss
Robins immediately after Easter) a lady, Mrs. Wilton,
elopes with a young man. Being a woman of some ex-
perience, thoroughly alive to the possibility that she will
get tired of the young man, or the young man of her,
not to mention the certainty of their boring one another
if they are left alone together too much with no resource
but lovemaking, she takes the precaution of bringing
another woman along with her. This incident has pro-
voked a poignant squeal of indignation from the English
Press. Much as we journalists are now afraid of Ibsen
after the way in which we burnt our fingers in our first
handling of him, we could not stand Mrs. Wilton's fore-
thought. It was declared on all hands an unaccountable,
hideous, and gratuitously nasty blemish on a work to
which, otherwise, we dared not be uncomplimentary. But
please observe that if Ibsen had represented Mrs. Wilton
as finding a love letter addressed by Borkman Junior to
Frida Foldal, and as having thereupon murdered them
both ind then slain herself in despair on their corpses,
everybody would have agreed that a lady could do no
less, and that Ibsen had shown the instinct of a true tragic

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

poet in inventing the incident. In this very play of Eche-
garay's, a man who has already murdered one wife out
of jealousy shoots Marfana before- the eyes of the audi-
ence on the same provocation, as a preliminary to killing
her lover in a duel. This atrocious scoundrel is regarded
as showing a high sense of honor, although if, like the
heroes of some of our divorce cases, he had merely
threatened to kill his wife's pet dog out of jealousy of
her attachment to it, public sympathy would have aban-
doned him at once. Under such circumstances, and with
the newspapers containing at least three romantic mur-
ders a fortnight as symptoms of the insane condition of
the public mind in sex matters, I hail the evidences of
the Russian view in Miss Robins with relief and respect ;
and I 5iincerely hope that on this point she will not try to
adapt her acting to the drama, but will insist on the
drama being adapted to her acting.

This does not alter the fact that until we have a Mari-
ana who can convince us that she is as great a fool about
Daniel as Daniel is about her, we shall not have the
Mariana of Echegaray. And when we get the right
Mariana in that respect, she will probably fall short of
Miss Robins in that side of the part which is motived
iby Mariana's intense revulsion from the brutality, selfish-
ness and madness which underlie the romantic side of
life as exemplified by her mother's elopement with Al-
varado. Here Miss Robins carries all before her; and
if only her part as the modern woman cured of romance,
and fully alive to the fact that the romantic view of her
sex is the whole secret of its degradation, were not man-
acled to another part — that of the passionately romantic
old-fashioned woman — her triumph in it would be com-
plete. As it is, the performance must needs produce an

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

effect of inequality; and those who, not being trained
critical analysts, cannot discover the clue to its variations,
must be a good deal puzzled by the artificiality of Miss
Robins's treatment of the love theme, which repeatedly
mars the effect of her genuine power over the apparently
more difficult theme of the lesson she has learnt from
Alvarado, and of her impulse to place herself under the
grim discipline of Pablo. The main fault really lies, as
I have shown, with the dramatist, who has planned his
play on the romantic lines of Schiller and Victor Hugo,
and filled it in with a good deal of modern realist matter.
Mr. H. B. Irving, as Daniel, is untroubled by Russian
scruples, and raves his way through the transports of
the Spanish lover in a style which will not bear criti-
cism, but nevertheless disarms it, partly by its courage
and thoroughness, partly because it is the only possible
style for him at the present stage of his trying but not
unpromising development as an actor. Mr. Welch's Cas-
tulo is a masterpiece of manner and make-up. Mr.
O'Neill is not quite fitted as Pablo : he looks more likely
to get shot by Miss Robins than to shoot her. Mr. Mar-
tin Harvey, Mr. George Bancroft, and Miss Mabel Hack-
ney take care of the minor parts. As matters of detail I
may suggest that the first act might have been improved
by a little more ingenuity of management, and by a
slight effort on the part of the company to conceal their
hurry to get through it. Also that Mr. Irving will cer-
tainly be cut off with a shilling if his father ever hears
him speak of "the Marianer of my dreams," and that
Miss Robins's diction, once very pleasant, and distin-
guished by a certain charming New England freshness,
is getting stained and pinched with the tricks of genteel
Bayswater cockneydom — a thing not to be suffered with-
out vehement protest.

194

T

GALLERY ROWDYISM

The Mac Haggis: a farce in three acts, by Jerome
K. Jerome and Eden Philpotts! Globe Theatre, 25
February, 1897.

" 'T"^ HE Mac Haggis/' at the Globe Theatre, is a
wild tale of a prim young London gentle-
man who suddenly succeeds to the chieftain-
ship of a Highland clan — such a clan as Mr. Jerome K.
Jerome might have conceived in a nightmare after read-
ing "Rob Roy." It is an intentionally and impenitently
outrageous play : in fact its main assumptions are almost
as nonsensical as those of an average serious drama ; but
its absurdity is kept within the limits of human endurance
by the Jeromian shrewdness and humanity of its small
change. Nevertheless it is not good enough for Mr.
Weedon Grossmith, being only the latest of a long string
of farces written for him on the assumption that he is
a funny man and nothing more. The truth is that he
is the only first-rate comedian under fifty on the London
stage. Later on he may find a worthy rival in Mr.
Welch; but at present his superiority in comedy is in-
contestable. In this Mac Haggis business, silly as much
of it is, there is not a touch of caricature or a taint of
clowning. Take for example the farcial duel with Black
Hamish in the last act, which might have been designed
as a bit of business for a circus clown. Mr. Grossmith
lifts it to the comedy plane by acting that fight as if he
were on Bosworth Field. His gleam of self-satisfaction
when he actually succeeds in hitting his adversary's
shield a very respectable thwack, and the blight that

195

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

withers up that perky little smile as the terrible 'Hamish
comes on undaunted, are finer strokes of comedy than
our other comedians can get into the most delicate pas-
sages of parts written by Jones and Pinero. He never
caricatures, never grimaces, never holds on to a laugh
like a provincial tenor holding on to his high B flat, never
comes out of his part for an instant, never relaxes the
most anxious seriousness about the affairs of the char-
acter he is impersonating, never laughs at himself or
with the audience, and is, in consequence, more contin-
uously and keenly amusing in farce than any other actor
I ever saw except Jefferson. The very naturalness of
his work leads the public into taking its finest qualities
as a matter of course; so that whilst the most inane po-
sing exhibitions by our tailor-made leading men are
gravely discussed as brilliant conceptions and masterly
feats of execution, Mr. Grossmith's creations, exemplify-
ing all the artistic qualities which others lack, pass as
nothing more than the facetiousnesses of a popular enter-
tainer.

"The Mac Haggis" is happily cast and well played all
round. Miss Laura Johnson giving an appalling intensity
to the restless audacities of Eweretta. Miss Johnson will
probably be able to do justice to a moderately quiet part
when she is eighty-five or thereabouts: at present she
seems to have every qualification of a modern actress
except civilization. This was the secret of her success
as Wallaroo in "The Duchess of Coolgardie." In all her
parts she "goes Fantee" more or less.

Although there were no dissentients to the applause
at the end of "The Mac Haggis," the authors did not
appear to make the customary acknowledgments. For
some time past the gods have been making themselves

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

a more and more insufferable nuisance. The worry of
attending first nights has been mercilessly intensified by
the horrible noises they offer to their idols as British
cheers. I do not object to a cheer that has the unmista-
kable depth and solidity of tone that come only from a
genuine ebullition of enthusiasm; but this underbred,
heartless, incontinent, wide-mouthed slack-fibred, brain-
less bawling is wearisome and disgusting beyond endur-
ance. Naturally it provokes furious opposition; and of
late an attempt has been made to countermine the people
who bawl indiscriminately at everything and everybody
by forming an opposition which resolutely boos at every-
body and everything. This of course only makes two
uproars, each stimulating the other to redoubled obstrep-
erousness, where formerly there was but one. Both
the managers and the authors have been forced at last
to take action in the matter. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones
left the gods at the Garrick to howl vainly for the author
for twenty-five minutes after the fall of the curtain ; and
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome has followed his example both
at the Prince of Wales and Globe Theatres. The man-
agers held back until the first-nighters, getting bolder
in their misconduct, began to interrupt the actors just
as political speakers are interrupted at stormy election
meetings. Then they called in the police.

Thereupon much soreness of feeling broke out. The
first-nighters, quite unconscious that their silliness and
rowdiness had long ago revolted the most indulgent of
their friends, and still believing themselves to be a pop-
ular institution instead of an exasperating public nui-
sance, were deeply hurt at the unkindness of the mana-
gers, the injustice to the police (who are apt to propitiate
public order with vicarious sacrifices on such occasions),

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and the attack on their privilege of clamor. Finally an
understanding was arrived at. The right of the gallery
to hiss and hoot and bawl to its heart's content was fully
admitted as a principle of the British Constitution, the
least infringement of which would be equivalent to the
tearing up of Magna Charta; but it was agreed that the
right should not be exercised until the fall of the curtain.
The result of this was of course that the gallery now
began to hoot as an affirmation of its right to hoot, with-
out reference to the merits of the performance. The
gentlemen who had formerly lain in wait for such lines
as "Let me tell you that you are acting detestably," or
"Would that the end were come!" to disconcert the
speaker with a sarcastic "Hear, hear!" felt that since
they had exchanged this amusement for leave to hiss as
much as they liked at the end of the play, the permission
must not lie unused. "The Daughters of Babylon" was
the first great occasion on which the treaty came into
operation ; and the gallery seized the opportunity to out-
do its own folly. In the first act every popular favorite
in the cast was greeted by an outburst of old forced, arti-
ficial, unmanly, undignified, base-toned, meaningless
howling which degrades the gallery to the level of a
menagerie. At the end the hooting — the constitutional
hooting — ^began; and immediately a trial of endurance
set in between the hooters and those who wished to give
Mr. Wilson Barrett an ovation. After a prolonged and
dismal riot, Mr. Barrett turned the laugh against the
hooters, shouted them down with half a dozen sten-
torian words, and finally got the audience out of the
house. At "Nelson's Enchantress" the same medley of
applause and hooting arose; and Mr. Forbes Robertson,
not caring, doubtless, to ask "Risden Home" to make

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

her first appearance by exposing herself to a half silly,
half blackguardly mob demonstration, made her acknowl-
edgments for her. But the moment he said — what else
could he say? — that he would convey her the favorable
reception of her piece, the hooters felt that their consti-
tutional rights would be ignored unless Mr. Robertson
conveyed the hoots as well as the plaudits. He very
pointedly declined to do anything of the kind, and re-
buked the constitutional party, which retired abashed
but grumbling.

These little scenes before the curtain are so obviously
mischievous and disgraceful, that the malcontents and
the constitutionalists are now reinforced by a section of
demonstrators whose object it is to put a stop to the
speech-making, author-calHng system altogether. It will
be remembered that on the first night of "The Notorious
Mrs. Ebbsmith" Mr. Hare was about to respond to the
demands for a speech. Just as he opened his mouth to
begin somebody called out "No speech." Mr. Hare,
with great presence of mind, immediately bowed and
withdrew. Nobody has since been so successful in help-
ing a manager out of a senseless ceremony ; but the ob-
jection on principle to speech-making still struggles for
expression in the tumult.

Here, then, we have so many elements of disorder
that it is necessary to give the situation some serious
consideration. Let us see, to begin with, whether the
alleged constitutional right to hoot and hiss can be de-
fended. I suppose it will not be denied that it is on
the face of it so offensive and unmannerly a thing for
one man to hiss and hoot at another that such conduct
must stand condemned unless it can be justified as a
criminal sentence is justified. I know that there are

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Dramatic ' Opinions and ] Essays

gallery-goers who contend that if the people who like
the play applaud it, the people who dislike it should in
justice show, by expressing their dissatisfaction, that the
approval is not unanimous. They might as well contend
that if a gentleman who admires a lady tells her that
she has pretty hands, any bystander who does not admire
her should immediately in justice tell her that she has a
red nose, or that because foolish admirers of actresses
throw bouquets to them, those who think the compliment
undeserved should throw bad eggs and dead cats. No:
hooting must stand or fall by its pretension to be a salu-
tary and necessary department of lynch law. Now in
punishing criminals we treat them with atrocious cruelty
— so much so that a good deal of crime goes unpunished
at present because humane people will not call in the
police or prosecute except in extreme cases. But cruel
as our punishments are, we do not now make a sport of
them as our forefathers did. Though we deal out sen-
tences of hard labor and of penal servitude which some
of the victims would willingly exchange, if they could,
for the stocks, the pillory, or a reasonable degree of
branding, flogging, or ear-clipping, it cannot be said of
our methods that they are hypocritical devices for grat-
ifying our own vilest lusts under the cloak of justice.
We did not stop flogging women at the cart's tail through
the streets because the women disliked it — we condemn
women to much more dreadful penalties at every sessions
— ^but because the public liked it. Solitary confinement
is a diabolical punishment; but at least nobody gets any
gratification out of it; and the fun of seeing a black
flag go up on a prison flagstaflF must be very poor com-
pared to the bygone Tyburnian joys of seeing the culprit
hanged. Hence I submit that if an author or actor is

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to be punished for bad play or a bad performance, his
punishment should not be made a popular sport. The
punishment of setting him before the curtain to be hooted
at is nothing but a survival of the pillory. Why should
the theatre lag behind the police court in this respect?
Why is the lust of the rabble to mock, jeer, insult, deride,
and yell bestially at their unfortunate fellow-creatures
recognized as sacred in the gallery when it is suppressed
by the police everywhere else? I use the word rabble
because it was invented to describe a crowd which has
thrown away all decency of behavior and is conducting
itself just as savagely and uproariously as it dares. The
people in the stalls and balcony and amphitheatre are
superior to the rabble, not because they pay more for
admission, but because they do not yell, are content with
clapping when they are pleased, and go home quietly
when they are disappointed. The people in the pit and
gallery who do yell, either approvingly or maliciously,
and who remain making a disturbance until somebody
comes out to confront them, are a rabble and nothing
else. What right have they to behave in such a way?
They don't do it at concerts ; they don't do it in church ;
even in International Socialist Congresses and in the
House of Commons, both notoriously disorderly places,
such scenes are the exception and not the rule. As to
the notion that such disorder has any beneficial effect as
an informal censorship of the drama, I really cannot con-
descend to discuss so grotesque a pretension. If there
is a case in which lynch law might be supposed to have
some use in the theatre, it is that of the low comedian
who deliberately interpolates obscene gags into musical
farces, and implicates in them the performer to whom
he is speaking. A single vigorous hiss from the gallery

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

would cure any actor for ever of such blackguardism.
When has that hiss ever been forthcoming? On the
other hand, the gallery will trample furiously on delicate
work like Mr. Henry James's, and keep refined and sen-
sitive artists who attempt original and thoughtful work
in dread all through the first night lest some untheatrical
line should provoke a jeer or some stroke of genuine
pathos a coarse laugh. There would be nothing to fear
if playgoers were not demoralized by the low standard of
manners and conduct prevailing in the gallery. What
possibility is there of fine art flourishing where full
license to yell — the license of the cockpit and prize-ring
— is insisted on by men who never dream of misbehaving
themselves elsewhere?

If I were starting in theatrical management to-morrow,
I should probably abolish the shilling gallery on first
nights, and make the lowest price of admission either
half a crown or threepence, according to the district.
A threepenny gallery is humble and decent, a half-crown
one snobbish and continent. A shilling gallery has the
vices of both and the virtues of neither. But if the shil-
ling gallery is to continue, let it behave as the stalls be-
have: that is, applaud, when it wants to applaud, with
its hands and not with its voice, and go home promptly
and quietly when it does not want to applaud. If there
is anything wrong with the performance, the management
and the author will expiate it quite severely enough by
heavy loss and disappointment. I may add that clapping
as a method of applause has the great advantage of being
more expensive than shouting. The compass of vigor
and speed of repercussion through which it varies is so
great that its nuances are practically infinite: you can
tell, if your ear is worth anything, whether it means a

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perfunctory "Thanks awf'ly," or a cool "Good evening:
sorry I shan't be able to come again," or an eager "Thank
you ever so much: it was splendid," or any gradation
between. Shouting can convey nothing but "Booh!" or
"Hooray!" except, as I have said, in moments of real
enthusiasm, quite foreign to the demonstrativeness of
our theatre fanciers and greenroom gossip swallowers.
Best of all would be no applause ; but that will come later
on. For the present, since we cannot contain ourselves
wholly, let us at least express ourselves humanly and
sensibly.

MADOX BROWN, WATTS, AND
IBSEN

IS March, 1897.

IT HAS not yet been noticed, I think, that the picture
galleries in London are more than usually interest-
ing just now to those lovers of the theatre who fully
understand the saying "There is only one art." At the
Grafton Gallery we have the life-work of the most
dramatic of all painters, Ford Madox Brown, who was
a realist; at the New Gallery that of Mr. G. F. Watts,
who is an idealist ; and at the Academy that of Leighton,
who was a mere gentleman draughtsman.

I call Madox Brown a Realist because he had vitality
enough to find intense enjoyment and inexhaustible in-
terest in the world as it really it, unbeautified, unideal-
ized, untitivated in any way for the artistic consumption.
This love of life and knowledge of its worth is a rare

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thing — whole Alps and Andes above the common market
demand for prettiness, fashionableness, refinement, ele-
gance of style, delicacy of sentiment, charm of character,
sympathetic philosophy (the philosophy of the happy end-
ing), decorative moral systems contrasting roseate and
rapturous vice with lilied and languorous virtue, and
making "Love" face both ways as the universal softener
and redeemer, the whole being worshipped as beauty or
virtue, and set in the place of life to narrow and condi-
tion it instead of enlarging and fulfilling it. To such
sulf -indulgence most artists are mere pandars; for the
sense of beauty needed to make a man an artist is so
strong that the sense of life in him must needs be quite
prodigious to overpower it. It must always be a mys-
tery to the ordinary beauty- fancying, life-shirking ama-
teur how the realist in art can bring his unbeautified, re-
morseless celebrations of common life in among so many
pretty, pleasant, sweet, noble, touching, fictions, and yet
take his place there among the highest, although the rail-
ing, the derision, the protest, the positive disgust, are
almost universal at first. Among painters the examples
most familiar to us are Madox Brown and Rembrandt.
But Madox Brown is more of a realist than Rembrandt ;
for Rembrandt idealized his color: he would draw life
with perfect integrity, but would paint it always in a
golden glow — as if he cared less for the direct light of
the sun than for its reflection in a pot of treacle — and
would sacrifice real color to that stage glow without re-
morse. Not so Madox Brown. You can all breathe his
open air, warm yourself in his sun, and smell "the green
mantle of the standing pool" in his Dalton picture. Again,
Rembrandt would have died rather than paint a cabbage
unconditionally green, or meddle with those piercing

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

anilin6 discords of color which modern ingenuity has ex-
tracted from soot and other unpromising materials. Mad-
ox Brown took to Paisley shawls and magenta ribbons
and genuine greengrocer's cabbages as kindly as Wag-
ner took to "false relations" in harmony. But turn over
a collection of Rembrandt's etchings, especially those in-
numerable little studies which are free from the hobby
of the chiaroscurist ; and at once you see the uncom-
promising realist. Examine him at the most vulnerable
point of the ordinary male painter — ^his studies of women.
Women begin to be socially tolerable at thirty, and im-
prove until the deepening of their consciousness is checked
by the decay of their faculties. But they begin to be
pretty much earlier than thirty, and are indeed sometimes
at their best in that respect long before their chattering
is, apart from the illusions of sex, to be preferred in
serious moments to the silent sympathy of an intelligent
pet animal. Take the young lady painted by Ingres as
"La Source," for example. Imagine having to make con-
versation for her for a couple of hours. Ingres is not
merely indifferent to this : he is determined to make you
understand that he values her solely for her grace of
form, and is too much the classic to 'be affected by any
more cordial consideration. Among Rembrandt's etch-
ings, on the other hand, you will find plenty of women of
all sorts ; and you will be astonished and even scandalized
at the catholicity of his interest and tolerance. He makes
no conditions, classical or moral, with his heroines : Venus
may be seventy, and Chloe in her least presentable predic-
ament: no matter: he draws her for her own sake with
enormous interest, neither as a joke, nor a moral lesson,
nor a model of grace, but simply because he thinks her
worth drawing as she is. You find the same thing in

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Madox Brown. Nature itself is not more unbiassed as
between a pretty woman and a plain one, a young woman
and an old one, than he. Compare the comely wife of
John of Gaunt in the Wycliffe picture with the wife of
Foscari, who has no shop- window good looks to give an
agreeable turn to the pitifulness of her action as she lifts
the elbow of the broken wretch whose maimed hands can-
not embrace her without help. A bonne bouche of pretti-
ness here would be an insult to our humanity ; but in the
case of Mrs. John of Gaunt, the good looks of the wife
as she leans over and grabs at the mantle of John, who,
in the capacity of the politically excited Englishman, is
duly making a fool of himself in public, give the final
touch to the humor and reality of the situation. Nowhere
do you catch the mature Madox Brown at false pathos
or picturesque attitudinizing. Think of all the attitudes
in which we have seen Francesca di Rimini and her lover ;
and then look at the Grafton Gallery picture of that
deplorable, ridiculous pair, sprawling in a death agony
of piteous surprise and discomfiture where the brutish
husband has just struck them down with his uncouthly
murderous weapon. You ask disgustedly where is the
noble lover, the beautiful woman, the Cain-like avenger?
You exclaim at the ineptitude of the man who could omit
all this, and simply make you feel as if the incident had
really happened and you had seen it — ^giving you, not
your notion of the beauty and poetry of it, but the life
and death of it. I remember once, when I was an "art
critic," and when Madox Brown's work was only known
to me by a few drawings, treating Mr. Frederick Shields
to a critical demonstration of Madox Brown's deficiencies,
pointing out in one of the drawings the lack of "beauty"
in some pair of elbows that had more of the wash tub

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

than of "The Toilet of Venus" about them. Mr. Shields
contrived without any breach of good manners to make
it quite clear to me that he considered Madox Brown a
great painter and me a fool. I respected both convictions
at the time ; and now> I share them. Only, I plead in
extenuation of my folly that I had become so accustomed
to take it for granted that what every English painter was
driving at was the sexual beautification and moral ide-
alization of life into something as unHke itself as possible,
that it did not at first occur to me that a painter could
draw a plain woman for any other reason than that he
could not draw a pretty one.

Now turn to Mr. Watts, and you are instantly in a
visionary world, in which life fades into mist, and the
imaginings of nobility and beauty with which we invest
life become embodied and visible. The gallery is one great
transfiguration: life, death, love and mankind are no
longer themselves: they are glorified, sublimified, love-
lified : the very draperies are either rippling lakes of color
harmony, or splendid banners like the flying cloak of
Titian's 'Bacchus in the National Gallery. To pretend
that the world is like this is to live the heavenly life. It
is to lose the whole world and gain one's own soul. Until
you have reached the point of realizing what an astonish-
ingly bad bargain that is you cannot doubt the sufficiency
of Mr. Watts's art, provided only your eyes are fine
enough to understand its language of line and color.

Now if you want to emulate my asinine achievements
as a critic on the occasion mentioned above in connexion
with Mr. Shields, you cannot do better than criticize
either painter on the assumption that the other's art is
the right art. This will lead you by the shortest cut to
the conclusion either that Mr. Watts's big picture of the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

drayman and his horses is the only great work he ever
achieved, or that there is nothing endurable in Madox
Brown's work except the embroidery and furniture, a few
passages of open-air painting, and such technical tours
de force as his combination of the v(|rtuosities of the
portrait styles of Holbein, Antonio Moro, and Rembrandt
in the imaginary portrait of Shakespeare. In which event
I can only wish you sense enough to see that your con-
clusion is not a proof of the futility of Watts or Madox
Brown, but a reductio ad dbsurdum of your own critical
method.

And now, what has all this to do with the drama?
Even if it had nothing to do with it, reader, the question
would be but a poor return for the pains I am taking to
improve your mind; but let that pass. Have you never
been struck with the similarity between the familiar par-
oxysms of Anti-Ibsenism and the abuse, the derision, the
angry distaste, the invincible misunderstanding provoked
by Madox Brown? Does it not occur to you that the
same effect has been produced by the same cause — ^that
what Ibsen has done is to take for this theme, not youth,
beauty, morality, gentility, and propriety as conceived by
Mr. Smith of Brixton and Bays water, but real life taken
as it is, with no more regard for poor Smith's dreams
and hypocrisies than the weather has for his shiny silk
hat when he forgets his umbrella? Have you forgotten
that Ibsen was once an idealist like Mr. Watts, and that
you can read "The Vikings," or "The Pretenders," or
"Brand," or "Emperor or Galilean" in the New Gallery
as suitably as you can hang Madox Brown's "Parisina"
or "Death of Harold" in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal
Academy? Or have you not noticed how the idealists
who are full of loathing for Ibsen's realistic plays will

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

declare that these ideaHstic ones are beautiful, and that
the man who drew Solveig the Sweet could never have
descended to Hedda Gabler unless his mind had given
way.

I had intended to pursue this matter much further;
but I am checked, partly by want of space, partly because
I simply dare not go on to Leighton, and make the ap-
plication of his case to the theatre. Madox Brown was
a man ; Watts is at least an artist and poet ; Leighton was
only a gentleman. I doubt if it was ever worth while
being a gentleman, even before the thing had become the
pet fashion of the lower-middle class ; but to-day, happily,
it is no longer tolerated among capable people, except
from a few old Palmerstonians who do not take it too
seriously. And yet you cannot cure the younger actor-
managers of it. Sir Henry Irving stands on the Watts
plane as an artist and idealist, cut off from Ibsen and
reality by the deplorable limitations of that state, but at
least not a snob, and only a knight on public grounds and
by his own peremptory demand, which no mere gentleman
would have dared to make lest he should have offended
the court and made himself ridiculous. But the others ! —
the knights expectant. Well, let me not be too high-
minded at their expense. If they are Leigh tonian, they
might easily be worse. There are less handsome things
in the world than that collection of pictures at the Acad-
emy, with its leading men who are all gentlemen, its extra
ladies whose Liberty silk robes follow in their flow the
Callipygean curves beneath without a suggestion of
coarseness, its refined resolution to take the smooth with-
out the rough, May fair without Hoxton, Melbury Road
without Saffron Hill. All very nice, gentlemen and ladies ;
but much too negative for a principle of dramatic art.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

To suppress instead of to express, to avoid instead of to
conquer, to ignore instead of to heal: all this, on the
stage, ends in turning a man into a stick for fear of creas-
ing his tailor's handiwork, and a woman into a hair-
dresser's window image lest she should be too actressy
to be invited to a fashionable garden-party.

SHAKESPEARE IN MANCHESTER

20 March, 1897.

Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespearean revival by
Mr. Louis Calvert at the Queen's Theatre, Man-
chester.

SHAKESPEARE is SO much the word-musician that
mere practical intelligence, no matter how well
prompted by dramatic instinct, cannot enable any-
body to understand his works or arrive at a right execu-
tion of them without the guidance of a fine ear. At the
emotional climaxes in his works we find passages which
are Rossinian in their reliance on symmetry of melody
and impressiveness of march to redeem poverty of mean-
ing. In fact, we have got so far beyond Shakespeare as
a man of ideas that there is by this time hardly a famous
passage in his works that is considered fine on any other
ground than that it sounds beautifully, and awakens in
us the emotion that originally expressed itself by its
beauty. Strip it of that beauty of sound by prosaic par-
aphrase, and you have nothing left but a platitude that
even an American professor of ethics would blush to offer
to his disciples. Wreck that beauty by a harsh, jarring
utterance, and you will make your audience wince as if

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

you were singing Mozart out of tune. Ignore it by
"avoiding sing-song" — that is, ingeniously breaking the
verse up so as to make it sound Uke prose, as the profes-
sional elocutionist prides himself on doing — and you are
landed in a stilted, monstrous jargon that has not even
the prosaic merit of being intelligible. Let me give one
example : Cleopatra's outburst at the death of Antony : —

"O withered is the garland of the war.
The soldier's pole is fallen : young boys and girls
Are level now with men : the odds is gone.
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.'*

This is not good sense — not even good grammar. If you
ask what does it all mean, the reply must be that it means
just what its utterer feels. The chaos of its thought is a
reflection of her mind, in which one can vaguely discern
a wild illusion that all human distinction perishes with
the gigantic distinction between Antony and the rest of
the world. Now it is only in music, verbal or other, that
the feeling which plunges thought into confusion can be
artistically expressed. Any attempt to deliver such music
prosaically would be as absurd as an attempt to speak an
oratorio of Handel's, repetitions and all. The right way
to declaim Shakespeare is the sing-song way. Mere
metric accuracy is nothing. There must be beauty of tone,
expressive inflection, and infinite variety of nuance to
sustain the fascination of the infinite monotony of the
chanting.

Miss Janet Achurch, now playing Cleopatra in Man-
chester, has a magnificent voice, and is as full of ideas as
to vocal effects as to everything else on the stage. The
march of the verse and the strenuousness of the rhetoric

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

stimulate her great artistic susceptibility powerfully : she
is determined that Cleopatra shall have rings on her
fingers and bells on her toes, and that she shall have
music wherever she goes. Of the hardihood of ear with
which she carries out her original and often audacious
conceptions of Shakespearean music I am too utterly un-
nerved to give any adequate description. The lacerating
discord of her wailings is in my tormented ears as I
write, reconciling me to the grave. It is as if she had
been excited by the Hallelujah Chorus to dance on the
keyboard of a great organ with all the stops pulled out.
I cannot — dare not — dwell on it. I admit that yvhen she
is using the rich middle of her voice in a quite normal
and unstudied way, intent only on the feeling of the pas-
sage, the effect leaves nothing to be desired; but the
moment she raises the pitch to carry out some deeply
planned vocal masterstroke, or is driven by Shakespeare
himself to attempt a purely musical execution of a pas-
sage for which no other sort of execution is possible, then
— well then, hold on tightly to the elbows of your stall,
and bear it like a man. And when the feat is accompanied,
as it sometimes is, by bold experiments in facial ex-
pression which all the passions of Cleopatra, complicated
by seventy-times-sevenfold demoniacal possession, could
but faintly account for, the eye has to share the anguish
of the ear instead of consoling it with Miss Achurch's
beauty. I have only seen the performance once; and I
would not unsee it again if I could ; but none the less I
am a broken man after it. I may retain always an im-
pression that I have actually looked on Cleopatra en-
throned dead in her regal robes, with her hand on An-
tony's, and her awful eyes inhibiting the victorious Caesar.
I grant that this "resolution" of the discord is grand and

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

memorable ; but oh ! how infernal the discord was whilst
it was still unresolved! That is the word that sums up
the objection to Miss Achurch's Cleopatra in point of
sound : it is discordant.

I need not say that at some striking points Miss
Achurch's performance shows the same exceptional in-
ventiveness and judgment in acting as her Ibsen achieve-
ments did, and that her energy is quite on the grand scale
of the play. But even if we waive the whole musical
question — and that means waiving the better half of
Shakespeare — she would still not be Cleopatra. Cleopatra
says that the man who has seen her "hath seen some
majesty, and should know." One conceives her as a
trained professional queen, able to put on at will the de-
liberate artificial dignity which belongs to the technique
of court life. She may keep it for state occasions, like
the unaffected Catherine of Russia, or always retain it,
like Louis XIV., in whom affectation was nature; but
that she should have no command of it — that she should
rely in modern republican fashion on her personal force,
with a frank contempt for ceremony and artificiality, as
Miss Achurch does, is to spurn her own part. And then,
her beauty is not the beauty of Cleopatra. I do not mean
merely that she is not "with Phoebus' amorous pinches
black," or brown, bean-eyed and pickaxe-faced. She is
not even the English (or Anglo- Jewish) Cleopatra, the
serpent of old Thames. She is of the broad-browed,
column-necked, Germanic type — the Wagner heroine
type — which in England, where it must be considered as
the true racial heroic type, has given us two of our most
remarkable histrionic geniuses in Miss Achurch herself
and our dramatic singer, Miss Marie Brema, both dis-
tinguished by great voices, busy brains, commanding

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

physical energy, and untameable impetuosity and original-
ity. Now this type has its limitations, one of them being
that it has not the genius of worthlessness, and so cannot
present it on the stage otherwise than as comic depravity
or masterful wickedness. Adversity makes it superhuman,
not subhuman, as it makes Cleopatra. When Miss Achurch
comes on one of the weak, treacherous, affected streaks
in Cleopatra, she suddenly drops from an Egyptian war-
rior queen into a naughty English petite bourgeoise, who
carries off a little greediness and a little voluptuousness
by a very unheroic sort of prettiness. That is, she treats
it as a stroke of comedy; and as she is not a comedian,
the stroke of comedy becomes in her hands a bit of
fun. When the bourgeoise turns into a wild cat, and
literally snarls and growls menacingly at the bearer of
the news of Antony's marriage with Octavia, she is at
least more Cleopatra; but when she masters herself, as
Miss Achurch does, not in gipsy fashion, but by a heroic-
grandiose act of self-mastery, quite foreign to the nature
of the "triple turned wanton" (as Mr. Calvert bowdler-
izes it) of Shakespeare, she is presently perplexed by
fresh strokes of comedy —

"He's very knowing.
I do perceive *t : there's nothing in her yet :
The fellow has good judgment."

At which what can she do but relapse farcically into the
bourgeoise again, since it is not on the heroic side of her
to feel elegantly self-satisfied whilst she is saying mean
and silly things, as the true Cleopatra does? Miss
Achurch's finest feat in this scene was the terrible look
she gave the messenger when he said, in dispraise of
Octavia, "And I do think she's thirty" — Qeopatra being

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of course much more. Only, as Miss Achurch had taken
good care not to look more, the point was a little lost on
Manchester. Later on she is again quite in her heroic
element (and out of Cleopatra's) in making Antony fight
by sea. Her "I have sixty sails, Caesar none better," and
her overbearing of the counsels of Enobarbus and Canidius
to fight by land are effective, but effective in the way of
a Boadicea, worth ten guzzling Antonys. There is no
suggestion of the petulant folly of the spoiled beauty who
has not imagination enough to know that she will be
frightened when the fighting begins. Consequently when
the audience, already puzzled as to how to take Cleopatra,
learns that she has run away from the battle, and after-
wards that she has sold Antony to Caesar, it does not know
what to think. The fact is. Miss Achurch steals Antony's
thunder and Shakespeare's thunder and Ibsen's thunder
and her own thunder so that she may ride the whirlwind
for the evening; and though this Walkiirenritt is intense
and imposing, in spite of the discords, the lapses into
farce, and the failure in comedy and characterization —
though once or twice a really memorable effect is reached
— yet there is not a stroke of Qeopatra in it ; and I sub-
mit that to bring an ardent Shakespearean like myself
all the way to Manchester to see "Antony and Qeopatra"
with Qeopatra left out, even with Brynhild-cum-Nora
Helmer substituted, is a very different matter to bringing
down soft-hearted persons like Mr. Clement Scott and
Mr. William Archer, who have allowed Miss Achurch
to make Ibsen-and- Wagner pie of our poor Bard's his-
torical masterpiece without a word of protest.

And yet all that I have said about Miss Achurch's
Cleopatra cannot convey half the truth to those who have
not seen Mr. Louis Calvert's Antony. It is on record

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

that Antony's cooks put a fresh boar on the spit every
hour, so that he should never have to wait long for his
dinner. Mr. Calvert looks as if he not only had the boars
put on the spit, but ate them. He is inexcusably fat:
Mr. Bourchier is a sylph by comparison. You will con-
clude, perhaps, that his fulness of habit makes him ridic-
ulous as a lover. But not at all. It is only your rhetorical
tragedian whose effectiveness depends on the oblatitude
of his waistcoat. Mr. Calvert is a comedian — brimming
over with genuine humane comedy. His one really fine
tragic effect is the burst of laughter at the irony of fate
with which, as he lies dying, he learns that the news of
Cleopatra's death, on the receipt of which he mortally
wounded himself, is only one of her theatrical sympathy-
catching lies. As a lover, he leaves his Cleopatra far
behind. His features are so pleasant, his manner so easy,
his humor so genial and tolerant, and his portliness so
frank and unashamed, that no good-natured woman could
resist him ; and so the topsiturvitude of the performance
culminates in the plainest evidence that Antony is the
seducer of Cleopatra instead of Cleopatra of Antony.
Only at one moment was Antony's girth awkward. When
Eros, who was a slim and rather bony young man, fell
on his sword, the audience applauded sympathetically.
But when Antony in turn set about the Happy Despatch,
the consequences suggested to the imagination were so
awful that shrieks of horror arose in the pit ; and it was
a relief when Antony was borne off by four stalwart
soldiers, whose sinews cracked audibly as they heaved
him up from the floor.

Here, then, we have Qeopatra tragic in her comedy,
and Antony comedic in his tragedy. We have Cleopatra
heroically incapable of flattery or flirtation, and Antony

2l6

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

with a wealth of blarney in every twinkle of his eye and
every fold of his chin. We have, to boot, certain irrel-
evant but striking projections of Miss Achurch's genius,
and a couple of very remarkable stage pictures invented
by the late Charles Calvert. But in so far as we have
''Antony and Cleopatra," we have it partly through the
genius of the author, who imposes his conception on us
through the dialogue in spite of everything that can be
done to contradict him, and partly through the efforts of
the secondary performers.

Of these Mr. George F. Black, who plays Octavius
Caesar, speaks blank verse rightly, if a little roughly, and
can find his way to the feeling of the line by its cadence.
Mr. Mollison — who played Henry IV. here to Mr. Tree's
Falstaff — is Enobarbus, and spouts the description of the
barge with all the honors. The minor parts are handled
with the spirit and intelligence that can always be had
by a manager who really wants them. A few of the actors
are certainly very bad; but they suffer rather from an
insane excess of inspiration than from apathy. Charmian
and Iras (Miss Ada Mellon and Miss Maria Fauvet)
produce an effect out of all proportion to their scanty
lines by the conviction and loyalty with which they sup-
port Miss Achurch; and I do not see why Cleopatra
should ungratefully take Ira's miraculous death as a mat-
ter of course by omitting the lines beginning "Have I the
aspic in my lips," nor why Charmian should be robbed
of her fine reply to the Roman's "Charmian, is this well
done?" "It is well done, and fitted for a princess de-
scended of so many royal kings." No doubt the Cleo-
patras of the palmy days objected to anyone but them-
selves dying effectively, and so such cuts became cus-
tomary ; but the objection does not apply to the scene as

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

arranged in Manchester. Modem managers should never
forget that if they take care of the minor actors the lead-
ing ones will take care of themselves.

May I venture to suggest to Dr. Henry Watson that
his incidental music, otherwise irreproachable, is in a few
places much too heavily scored to be effectively spoken
through? Even in the entr'actes the brass might be
spared in view of the brevity of the intervals and the
almost continuous strain for three hours on the ears of
the audience. If the music be revived later as a concert
suite, the wind can easily be restored.

Considering that the performance requires an efficient
orchestra and chorus, plenty of supernumeraries, ten or
eleven distinct scenes, and a cast of twenty-four persons,
including two leading parts of the first magnitude; that
the highest price charged for admission is three shillings ;
and that the run is limited to eight weeks, the production
must be counted a triumph of management. There is not
the slightest reason to suppose that any London manager
could have made a revival of "Antony and Cleopatra"
more interesting. Certainly none of them would have
planned that unforgettable statue death for Cleopatra, for
which, I suppose, all Miss Achurch's sins against Shake-
speare will be forgiven her. I begin to have hopes of a
great metropolitan vogue for that lady now, since she has
at last done something that is thoroughly wrong from
beginning to end.

2T8

MEREDITH ON COMEDY

An Essay on Comedy. By George Meredith. West-
minster : Archibald G)nstable & Co. 1897.

TWENTY years ago Mr. George Meredith delivered
a lecture at the London Institution on Coijiedy
and the Uses of the Comic Spirit. It was after-
wards published in the "New Quarterly Magazine," and
now reappears as a brown buckram book, obtainable at
the inconsiderable price (considering the quality) of five
shillings. It is an excellent, even superfine, essay, by
perhaps the highest living English authority on its sub-
ject. And Mr. Meredith is quite conscious of his emi-
nence. Speaking of the masters of the comedic spirit (if
I call it, as he does, the Comic Spirit, this darkened gen-
eration will suppose me to refer to the animal spirits of
tomfools and merryandrews), he says, "Look there for
your unchallengeable upper class." He should know ; for
he certainly belongs to it. At the first page I recognize
the true connoisseur, and know that I have only to turn
it to come on the great name of Moliere, who has hardly
been mentioned in London during the last twenty years
by the dramatic critics, except as representing a quaint
habit of the Comedie Frangaise. That being so, why re-
publish an essay on comedy now ? Who cares for comedy
to-day? — who knows what it is? — how many readers of
Mr. Meredith's perfectly straightforward and accurate
account of the wisest and most exquisite of the arts will
see anything in the book but a brilliant sally of table talk
about old plays, to be enjoyed, without practical applica-
tion, as one of the rockets in the grand firework display
of contemparary belles lettresf

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However, since the thing is done, and the book out, I
take leave to say that Mr. Meredith knows more about
plays than about playgoers. "The English public," he
says, "have the basis of the comic in them : an esteem for
common sense." This flattering illusion does not dupe
Mr. Meredith completely; for I notice that he adds "ta-
king them generally." But if it were to be my last word
on earth I must tell Mr. Meredith to his face that whether
you take them generally or particularly — whether in the
lump, or sectionally as playgoers, churchgoers, voters,
and what not — they are everywhere united and made
strong by the bond of their common nonsense, their in-
vincible determination to tell and be told lies about every-
thing, and their power of dealing acquisitively and suc-
cessfully with facts whilst keeping them, like disaffected
slaves, rigidly in their proper place: that is, outside the
moral consciousness. The Englishman is the most suc-
cessful man in the world simply because he values success
— meaning money and social precedence — more than any-
thing else, especially more than fine art, his attitude to-
wards which, culture-affectation apart, is one of half dif-
fident, half contemptuous curiosity, and of course more
than clear-headedness, spiritual insight, truth, justice, and
so forth. It is precisely this unscrupulousness and single-
ness of purpose that constitutes the Englishman's pre-
eminent "common sense" ; and this sort of common sense,
I submit to Mr. Meredith, is not only not "the basis of
the comic," but actually makes comedy impossible, because
it would not seem like common sense at all if it were not
self-satisfiedly unconscious of its moral and intellectual
bluntness, whereas the function of comedy is to dispel
such unconscousness by turning the searchlight of the
keenest moral and intellectual analysis right on to it. Now

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the Frenchman, the Irishman, the American, the ancient
Greek, is disabled from this true British common sense
by intellectual virtuosity, leading to a love of accurate
and complete consciousness of things — of intellectual
mastery of them. This produces a positive enjoyment of
disillusion (the most dreaded and hated of calamities in
England), and consequently a love of comedy (the fine
art of disillusion) deep enough to make huge sacrifices
of dearly idealized institutions to it. Thus, in France,
Moliere was allowed to destroy the Marquises. In Eng-
land he could not have shaken even such titles as the ac-
cidental sheriff's knighthood of the late Sir Augustus
Harris. And yet the Englishman thinks himself much
more independent, level-headed, and genuinely republican
than the Frenchman — not without good superficial rea-
sons; for nations with the genius of comedy often carry
all the snobbish ambitions and idealist enthusiasms of the
Englishman to an extreme which the Englishman himself
laughs at. But they sacrifice them to comedy, to which
the Englishman sacrifices nothing ; so that, in the upshot,
aristocracies, thrones and churches go by the board at
the attack of comedy among our devotedly conventional,
loyal and fanatical next-door neighbors, whilst we, having
absolutely no disinterested regard for such institutions,
draw a few of their sharpest teeth, and then maintain
them determinedly as part of the machinery of worldly
success.

The Englishman prides himself on this anti-comedic
common sense of his as at least eminently practical. As
a matter of fact, it is just as often as not most pigheadedly
unpractical. For example, electric telegraphy, telephony
and traction are invented, and establish themselves as
necessities of civilized life. The unpractical foreigner

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

recognizes the fact, and takes the obvious step of putting
up poles in his streets to carry wires. This expedient
never occurs to the Briton. He wastes leagues of wire
and does unheard-of damage to property by tying his
wires and posts to such chimney stacks as he can beguile
householders into letting him have access to. Finally,
when it comes to electric traction, and the housetops are
out of the question, he suddenly comes out in the novel
character of an amateur in urban picturesqueness, and
declares that the necessary cable apparatus would spoil
the appearance of our streets. The streets of Nuremberg,
the heights of Fiesole, may not be perceptibly the worse
for these contrivances; but the beauty of Tottenham
Court Road is too sacred to be so profaned: to its love-
lines the strained bus-horse and his offal are the only
accessories endurable by the beauty-loving Cockney eye.
This is your common-sense Englishman. His helpless-
ness in the face of electricity is typical of his helplessness
in the face of everything else that lies outside the set of
habits he calls his opinions and capacities. In the theatre
he is the same. It is not common sense to laugh at your
own prejudices : it is common sense to feel insulted when
any one else laughs at them. Besides, the Englishman is
a serious person : that is, he is firmly persuaded that his
prejudices and stupidities are the vital material of civil-
ization, and that it is only by holding on to their moral
prestige with the stiffest resolution that the world is saved
from flying back into savagery and gorilladom, which he
always conceives, in spite of natural history, as a condi-
tion of lawlessness and promiscuity, instead of, as it
actually is, the extremity, long since grown unbearable,
of his own notions of law and order, morality and con-
ventional respectability. Thus he is a moralist, an as-

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cetic, a Christian, a truth-teller and a plain dealer by
profession and by conviction; and it is wholly against
this conviction that, judged by his own canons, he finds
himself in practice a great rogue, a liar, an unconscionable
pirate, a grinder of the face of the poor, and a libertine.
Mr. Meredith points out daintily that the cure for this
self -treasonable confusion and darkness is Comedy, whose
spirit overhead will "look humanely malign and cast an
oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter." Yes, Mr. Meredith; but suppose the patients
have "common sense" enough not to want to be cured!
Suppose they realize the immense commercial advantage
of keeping their ideal life and their practical business life
in two separate conscience-tight compartments, which
nothing but "the Comic Spirit" can knock into on£ ! Sup-
pose, therefore, they dread the Comic Spirit more than
anything else in the world, shrinking from its "illumina-
tion," and considering its "silvery laughter" in execrable
taste ! Surely in doing so they are only carrying out the
common-sense view, in which an encouragement and en-
joyment of comedy must appear as silly and suicidal and
"unEnglish" as the conduct of the man who sets fire to
his own house for the sake of seeing the flying sparks,
the red glow in the sky, the fantastic shadows on the
walls, the excitement of the crowd, the gleaming charge
of the engines, and the dismay of the neighbors. No
doubt the day will come when we shall deliberately burn
a London street every day to keep our city up to date in
health and handsomeness, with no more misgiving as to
our common sense than we now have when sending our
clothes to the laundry every week. When that day comes,
perhaps comedy will be popular too; for after all the
function of comedy, as Mr. Meredith after twenty years'

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

further consideration is perhaps by this time ripe to ad-
mit, 'is nothing less than the destruction of old-established
morals. Unfortunately, to-day such iconoclasm can be
tolerated by our playgoing citizens only as a counsel of
despair and pessimism. They can find a dreadful joy in
it when it is done ceriously, or even grimly and terribly
as they understand Ibsen to be doing it ; but that it should
be done with levity, with silvery laughter like the crack-
ling of thorns under a pot, is too scandalously wicked,
too cynical, too heartlessly shocking to be borne. Con-
sequently our plays must either be exploitations of old-
established morals or tragic challengings of the order of
Nature. Reductions to absurdity, however logical ; ban-
terings, however kindly; irony, however delicate; merri-
ment, however silvery, are out of the question in matters
of morality, except among men with a natural appetite
for comedy which must be satisfied at all costs and
hazards : that is to say, not among the English playgoing
public, which positively dislikes comedy.

No doubt it is patriotically indulgent of Mr. Meredith
to say that "Our English school has not clearly imagined
society," and that "of the mind hovering above con-
gregated men and women it has imagined nothing." But
is he quite sure that the audiences of our English school
do not know too much about society and "congregated
men and women" to encourage any exposures from "the
vigilant Comic," with its "thoughtful laughter," its
"oblique illumination," and the rest of it? May it not
occur to the purchasers of half -guinea stalls that it is bad
enough to have to put up with the pryings of Factory
Inspectors, Public Analysts, County Council Inspectors,
Chartered Accountants and the like, without admitting
this Comic Spirit to look into still more delicate matters ?

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Is it clear that the Comic Spirit would break into silvery
laughter if it saw all that the nineteenth century has to
show it beneath the veneer ? There is Ibsen, for instance :
he is not lacking, one judges, in the Comic Spirit; yet his
laughter does not sound very silvery, does it? No: if
this were an age for comedies, Mr. Meredith would have
been asked for one before this. How would a comedy
from him be relished, I wonder, by the people who wanted
to have the revisers of the Authorized Version of the
Bible prosecuted for blasphemy because they corrected as
many of its mistranslations as they dared, and who reviled
Froude for not suppressing Carlyle's diary and writing
a fictitious biography of him, instead of letting out the
truth ? Comedy, indeed ! I drop the subject with a hol-
low laugh.

The recasting of "A Pierrot's Life" at the matinees at
the Prince of Wales' Theatre greatly increases and solid-
ifies the attraction of the piece. Felicia Mallet now plays
Pierrot; but we can still hang on the upturned nose of
the irresistible Litini, who reappears as Fifine. Litini
was certainly a charming Pierrot ; but the delicate, subtle
charm was an intensely feminine one, and only incorpo-
rated itself dreamily with the drama in the tender shyness
of the first act and the pathos of the last. Litini as a
vulgar drunkard and gambler was as fantastically im-
possible as an angel at a horse-race. Felicia Mallet is
much more credible, much more realistic, and therefore
much more intelligible — also much less slim, and not quite
so youthful. Litini was like a dissolute "La Sylphide":
Mallet is frankly and heartily like a scion of the very
smallest bourgeoisie sowing his wild oats. She is a good
observer, a smart executant, and a vigorous and sym-
pathetic actress, apparently quite indifferent to romantic

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charm, and intent only on the dramatic interest, realistic
illusion, and comic force of her work. And she avoids
the conventional gesture-code of academic Italian panto-
mime, depending on popularly graphic methods through-
out. The result is that the piece is now much fuller of
incident, much more exciting in the second act (hitherto
the weak point) and much more vivid than before. Other
changes have helped to bring this about. Jacquinet, no
longer ridiculously condemned to clothe a Parisian three-
card-trick man in the attire of the fashionable lover in
"L'Enfant Prodigue," appears in his proper guise with
such success that it is difficult to believe that he is the
same person. Miss Ella Dee is a much prettier Louisette,
as prettiness is reckoned in Lx)ndon, than her predecessor,
whom she also surpasses in grace and variety of expres-
sion. Litini is a brilliant Fifine — the brevity of the part
is regretted for the first time; and Rossi, though he is
no better than before, probably would be if he had left
any room for improvement. The band is excellent, and
the music clever and effective, though it has none of those
topical allusions which are so popular here — strangely
popular, considering that the public invariably misses nine
out of ten of them (who, for instance, has noticed that
entr'acte in "Saucy Sally" in which the bassoon plays all
manner of rollicking nautical airs as florid counterpoints
to "Tom Bowling"?) Altogether the "play without
words" is now at its best. One must be a critic to under-
stand the blessedness of going to the theatre without hav-
ing to listen to slipshod dialogue and affectedly fashion-
able or nasally stagy voices. Merely to see plastic figures
and expressive looks and gestures is a delicious novelty
to me; but I believe some of the public rather resent
having to pay full price for a play without words, exactly

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

as they resent having to pay for a doctor^s advice without
getting a bottle of nasty medicine along with it. Some
of these unhappy persons may be observed waiting all
through the performance for the speaking to begin, and
retiring at last with loud expressions of disappointment
at having been sold by the management. For my part,
I delight in these wordless plays, though I am conscious
of the difficulty of making any but the most threadbare
themes intelligible to the public without words. In my
youth the difficulty could have been got over by taking
some story that every one knew; but nowadays nobody
knows any stories. If you put the "Sleeping Beauty" on
the stage in dumb show, the only thing you could depend
on the whole house knowing about her would be her
private name and address, her salary, her engagements
for next year, her favorite pastimes, and the name of her
pet dog.

227

MR. PINERO ON TURNING FORTY

The Physician: a new play of modern life in four
acts, by Henry Arthur Jones. Criterion Theatre,
25 March, 1897.

The Princess and the Butterfly, or The Fantastics:
an original comedy in five acts, by Arthur W. Pinero.
St. James's Theatre, 29 March, 1895.

WHEN I was a fastidious youth, my elders, ever
eager to confer bad advice on me and to
word it with disgusting homeliness, used to
tell me never to throw away dirty water until I got in
clean. To which I would reply that as I had only one
bucket, the thing was impossible. So until I grew middle
aged and sordid, I acted on the philosophy of Bunyan's
couplet : —

"A man there was, tho* some did count him mad,
The more he cast away, the more he had."

Indeed, in the matter of ideals, faiths, convictions and the
like, I was of opinion that Nature abhorred a vacuum,
and that you might empty your bucket boldly with the
fullest assurance that you would find it fuller than ever
before you had time to set it down again. But herein
I youthfully deceived myself. I grew up to find the
genteel world full of persons with empty buckets. Now
The Physician is a man with an empty bucket. **By
Grod!" he says (he doesn't believe in God), "I don't be-
lieve there's in any London slum, or jail, or workhouse,
a poor wretch with such a horrible despair in his heart
as I have to-day. I tell you I've caught the disease of our
time, of our society, of our civilization — middle age, dis-

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

illusionment. My youth's gone. My beliefs are gone.
I enjoy nothing. I believe in nothing. Belief! That's
the placebo I want. That would cure me. My work
means nothing to me. Success means nothing to me. I
cure people with a grin and a sneer. I keep on asking
myself, To what end? To what end?'"

O dear ! Have we not had enough of this hypochon-
driasis from our immortal bard in verse which — we have
it on his own authority — "not marble, nor the gilded
monuments of princes, shall outlive"? It is curable by
Mr. Meredith's prescription — the tonic of comedy; and
when I see a comedian of Mr. Wyndham's skill and a
dramatist of Mr. Jones's mother-wit entering into a phy-
sicianly conspiracy to trade in the disease it is their busi-
ness to treat, I abandon all remorse, flatly refuse to see
any "sympathetic" drama in a mere shaking of the head
at life, and vow that at least one of Dr. Carey's audience
shall tell him that there is nothing in the world more
pitiably absurd than the man who goes about telling his
friends that life is not worth living, when they know
perfectly well that if he meant it he could stop living
much more easily than go on eating. Even the incor-
rigible Hamlet admitted this, and made his excuse for
not resorting to the bare bodkin ; but Dr. Carey, who says
"I never saw a man's soul," has not Hamlet's excuse. His
superstitions are much cruder: they do not rise above
those of an African witch-finder or Sioux medicine-man.
He pretends to "cure" diseases — Mother Carey is much
like Mother Seigel in this respect — and holds up a test-
tube, whispering, "I fancy I'm on the track of the cancer
microbe : I'm not sure I haven't got my gentleman here."
At which abject depth of nineteenth-century magicianism
he makes us esteem Dr. Diafoirus and the Apothecary in

Z29

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

*Romeo and Juliet" as, in comparison, dazzling lights of
science.

And now, as if it were not bad enough to have Mr.
Jones in this state of mind, we have Mr. Pinero, who was
born, as I learn from a recent biographic work of ref-
erence, in 1855, quite unable to get away from the same
tragic preoccupation with the horrors of middle age. He
has launched at us a play in five acts — two and a half of
them hideously superfluous — all about being over forty.
The heroine is forty, and can talk about nothing else.
The hero is over forty, and is blind to every other fact
in the universe. Having this topic of conversation in
common, they get engaged in order that they may save
one another from being seduced by the attraction of youth
into foolish marriages. They then fall in love, she with
a fiery youth of twenty-eight, he with a meteoric girl of
eighteen. Up to the last moment I confess I had suffi-
cient confidence in Mr. Pinero's saving sense of humor
to believe that he would give the verdict against himself,
and admit that the meteoric girl was too young for the
hero (twenty-seven years discrepancy) and the heroine
too old for the fiery youth (thirteen years discrepancy).
But no: he gravely decided that the heart that loves
never ages; and now perhaps he will write us another
drama, limited strictly to three acts, with, as heroine,
the meteoric girl at forty with her husband at sixty-
seven, and, as hero, the fiery youth at forty-nine with
his wife at sixty-two.

Mr. Henry Arthur Jones is reconciled to his own fate,
though he cannot bear to see it overtake a woman. Hear
Lady Val in his play! "I smell autumn; I scent it from
afar. I ask myself how many years shall I have a man
for my devoted slave. . . . Oh, my God, Lewin [she is

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

an Atheist] , it never can be worth while for a woman to
live one moment after she has ceased to be loved." This,
I admit, is as bad as Mr. Pinero: the speech is actually
paraphrased by Mr. St. Roche in the St. James's play.
But mark the next sentence: "And you men have the
laugh of us. Age doesn't wither you or stale your in-
solent, victorious, self-satisfied, smirking, commonplace
durability ! Oh, you brutes, I hate you all, because you're
warranted to wash and wear for fifty years." Observe,
afty years, not forty. I turn again to my book of refer-
ence, and find, as I expected, that Mr. Jones was born in
185 1. I discover also that I myself was born in 1856.
And this is '97. Well, my own opinion is that sixty is the
prime of life for a man. Cheer up, Mr. Pinero : courage,
Henry Arthur! "What though the grey do something
mingle with our younger brown" (excuse my quoting
Shakespeare), the world is as young as ever. Go look
at the people in Oxford Street : they are always the sime
age.

As regards any conscious philosophy of life, I am
bound to say that there is not so much (if any) difference
between Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinero as the very wide dif-
ferences between them in other respects would lead us
to suppose. The moment their dramatic inventiveness
flags, and they reach the sentimentally reflective interval
between genuine creation and the breaking off work until
next day, they fall back on the two great Shakespearean
grievances — namely, that we cannot live for ever and that
life is not worth living. And then they strike up the old
tunes — "Out, out, brief candle!" "Vanitas vanitatum,"
"To what end ?" and so on. But in their fertile, live mo-
ments they are as unlike as two men can be in the same
profession. At such time Mr. Pinero has no views at

231

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

all. Our novelists, especially those of the Thackeray-
Trollope period, have created a fictitious world for him ;
and it is about this world that he makes up stage stories
for us. If he observes life, he does so as a gentleman
observes the picturesqueness of a gipsy. He presents
his figures coolly, clearly, and just as the originals like
to conceive themselves — for instance, his ladies and gen-
tlemen are not real ladies and gentlemen, but ladies and
gentlemen as they themselves (mostly modelling them-
selves on fiction) aim at being; and so Bays water and
Kensington have a sense of being understood by Mr.
Pinero. Mr. Jones, on the other hand, works passionately
from the real. By throwing himself sympathetically into
his figures he gives them the stir of life; but he also
often raises their energy to the intensity of his own, and
confuses their feelings with the revolt of his own against
them. Above all, by forcing to the utmost their aspect
as they really are as against their pose, he makes their
originals protest violently that he cannot draw them — a
protest formerly made, on exactly the same grounds,
against Dickens. For example. Lady Val in "The Physi-
cian" is a study of a sort of clever fashionable woman
now current; but it is safe to say that no clever fashion-
able woman, nor any admirer of clever fashionable wom-
en, will ever admit the truth or good taste of the likeness.
And yet she is very carefully studied from life, and only
departs from it flatteringly in respect of a certain energy
of vision and intensity of conscience that belong to Mr.
Jones and not in the least to herself.

Compare with Lady Val the Princess Pannonia in
Mr. Pinero's play. You will be struck instantly with
the comparative gentlemanliness of Mr. Pinero. He
seems to say, "Dear lady, do not be alarmed: I will

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

show just enough of your weaknesses to make you in-
teresting; but otherwise I shall take you at your own
valuation and make the most of you. I shall not forget
that you are a Princess from the land of novels. My
friend Jones, who would have made an excellent Dis-
senting clergyman, has a vulgar habit of bringing per-
sons indiscriminately to the bar of his convictions as to
what is needful for the life and welfare of the real
world. You need apprehend no such liberties from me.
I have no convictions, no views, no general ideas of any
kind: I am simply a dramatic artist, only too glad to
accept a point of view from which you are delightful.
At the same time, I am not insensible to the great and
tragic issues that meet us wherever we turn. For in-
stance, it is hardly possible to reach the age of forty with-
out &c. &c. &c." And accordingly you have a cool, taste-
ful, polished fancy picture which reflects the self-con-
sciousness of Princesses and the illusions of their imi-
tators much more accurately than if Mr. Jones had
painted it.

The two plays present an extraordinary contrast in
point of dramatic craft. It is no exaggeration to say
that within two minutes from the rising of the curtain
Mr. Jones has got tighter hold of his audience and fur-
ther on with his play than Mr. Pinero within two hours.
During those two hours, "The Princess" marks time com-
placently on the interest, pathos, the suggestiveness, the
awful significance of turning forty. The Princess has
done it; Sir George Lamorant has done it; Mrs. St.
Roche has done it; so has her husband. Lady Chichele,
Lady Ringstead, and Mrs, Sabiston have all done it. And
they have all to meditate on it like Hamlet meditating
on suicide; only, since soliloquies are out of fashion,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

nearly twenty persons have to be introduced to listen to
them. The resultant exhibition of High Life Above
Stairs is no doubt delightful to the people who had rather
read the fashionable intelligence than my articles. To
me not even the delight of playing Peeping Tom whilst
Princess Pannonia was getting out of bed and flattering
me with a vain hope that the next item would be her
bath, could reconcile me to two hours of it. If the women
had worn some tolerable cap-and-apron uniform I could
have borne it better; but those dreadful dresses, mostly
out of character and out of complexion — I counted nine
failures to four successes — upset my temper, which was
not restored by a witless caricature of Mr. Max Beer-
bohm (would he had written it himself!), or by the spec-
tacle of gilded youth playing with toys whilst Sir George
Lamorant put on a fool's cap and warned them that they
would all be forty-five presently, or even by the final
tableau, unspeakably sad to the British mind, of the host
and hostess retiring for the night to separate apartments
instead of tucking themselves respectably and domesti-
cally into the same feather bed. Yet who shall say that
there is no comedy in the spectacle of Mr. Pinero moral-
izing, and the public taking his reflections seriously ? He
is much more depressing when he makes a gentleman
throw a glass of water at another gentleman in a draw-
ing-room, thereby binding the other gentleman in honor
to attack his assailant in the street with a walking stick,
whereupon the twain go to France to fight a duel for
all the world as if they were at the Surrey Theatre.
However, when this is over the worst is over. Mr. Pi-
nero gets to business at about ten o'clock, and the play
begins in the middle of the third act — a good, old-fash-
ioned, well-seasoned bit of sentimental drawing-room

234

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

fiction, daintily put together, and brightening at the end
into a really lighthearted and amusing act of artificial
comedy. So, though it is true that the man who goes
to the St. James's Theatre now at 7.45 will wish he had
never been born, none the less will the man who goes
at 9.30 spend a very pleasant evening.

The two authors have not been equally fortunate in
respect of casting. Half Mr. Jones's play — the women's
half — is obliterated in performance. His Edana is a ster-
ling, convinced girl-enthusiast. "Her face," says the
Doctor, "glowed like a live coal." This sort of charac-
terization cannot be effected on the stage by dialogue.
Enthusiasts are magnetic, not by what they say, or even
what they do, but by how they say and do it. Mr. Jones
would write "yes" and "no" ; but it rested with the actress
whether the affirmation and denial should be that of an
enthusiast or not. Edana at the Criterion is played by
Miss Mary Moore. Now Miss Moore is a dainty light
comedian; and her intelligence, and a certain power of
expressing grief rather touchingly and prettily, enable
her to take painful parts on occasion without making
herself ridiculous. But they do not enable her to play
an enthusiast. Consequently her Edana is a simple sub-
stitution of what she can do for what she is required to
do. The play is not only weakened by this — all plays get
weakened somewhere when they are performed — it is
dangerously confused, because Edana, instead of being
a stronger character than Lady Val, and therefore con-
ceivably able to draw the physician away from her, is
just the sort of person who would stand no chance against
her with such a man. To make matters worse. Lady
Val is played by Miss Marion Terry, who is in every par-
ticular from her heels to her hairpins, exactly what Lady

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Val could not be, her qualities being even more fatal
to the part than her faults. A more hopeless pair of
misfits has never befallen an author. On the other hand,
Mr. Jones has been exceptionally fortunate in his men.
Mr. Alfred Bishop's parson and Mr. J. G. Taylor's
Stephen Gurdon are perfect. Mr. Thalberg does what
is wanted to set the piece going on the rising of the cur-
tain with marked ability. The easy parts — which include
some racy village studies — are well played. Mr. Leslie
Kenyon, as Brooker, has the tact that is all the part re-
quires ; and the physician is played with the greatest ease
by Mr. Wyndham himself, who will no doubt draw all
Harley Street to learn what a consulting-room manner
can be in the hands of an artist. The performance as a
whole is exceptionally fine, the size of the theatre ad-
mitting of a delicacy of handling without which Mr.
Jones's work loses half its sincerity.

In "The Princess" matters are better balanced. There
is a fearful waste of power: out of twenty-nine per-
formers, of whom half are accustomed to play important
parts in London, hardly six have anything to do that could
not be sufficiently well done by nobodies. Mr. Pinero
seems to affirm his supremacy by being extravagant in
his demands for the sake of extravagance ; and Mr. Alex-
ander plays up to him with an equally high hand by being
no less extravagant in his compliances. So the piece is
at all events not underplayed; and it has crowned the
reputation of Miss Fay Davis, whose success, the most
sensational achieved at the St. James's Theatre since that
of Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Paula Tanqueray, is a suc-
cess of cultivated skill and self-mastery on the artist's
part, and not one of the mere accidents of the stage. Miss
Neilson, ever fair and fortunate, puts a pleasant face on

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a long and uninteresting part, all about the horrors of
having reached forty without losing **the aroma of a stale
girlhood." The Princess is ladylike and highly literary.
When, in the familiar dilemma of the woman of forty
with an inexperienced lover, she is forced to prevent his
retiring in abashed despair by explaining to him that her
terrifying fluster over his more personal advances only
means that she likes them and wants some more, she
choicely words it, "I would not have it otherwise." And
his ardor is volcanic enough to survive even that. The
lover's part falls to Mr. H. B. Irving, who is gaining
steadily in distinction of style and strength of feeling.
Mr. Alexander has little to do beyond what he has done
often before — make himself interesting enough to conceal
the emptiness of his part. He laments his forty-five years
as mercifully as such a thing may be done ; and he secures
toleration for the silly episodes of the fool's cap and the
quarrel with Maxime. Mr. Esmond makes the most of
a comic scrap of character; and Miss Rose Leclercq is
duly exploited in the conventional manner as Lady Ring-
stead. Miss Patty Bell's Lady Chichele is not bad: the
rest I must pass over from sheer exhaustion.

237

MADAME SANS-G£NE

Madame Sans-Gene: a comedy in a prologue and
three acts. By MM. Sardou and Moreau. Trans-
lated by J. Comyns Carr. Lyceum Theatre, lo April,
1896.

IT IS rather a nice point whether Miss Ellen Terry
should be forgiven for sailing the Lyceum ship into
the shallows of Sardoodledom for the sake of Mad-
ame Sans-Gene. But hardly any controversy has arisen
on this point: every one seems content to discuss how
Miss Ellen Terry can bring herself to impersonate so
vulgar a character. And the verdict is that she has sur-
mounted the difficulty wonderfully. In that verdict I can
take no part, because I do not admit the existence of the
difficulty. Madame Sans-Gene is not a vulgar person;
and Miss Ellen Terry knows it. No doubt most people
will not agree with Miss Ellen Terry. But if most people
could see everything that Miss Ellen Terry sees, they
would all be Ellen Terries instead of what they are.

I know that it will not be conceded to me without a
struggle that a washerwoman who spits on her iron and
tells her employees to "stir their stumps" is not vulgar.
Let me, therefore, ask those persons of unquestioned
fashion who have taken to bicycling, what they do when
they find their pneumatic tyres collapsing ten miles from
anywhere, and wish to ascertain, before undertaking the
heavy labor of looking for a puncture, whether the valve
is not leaking. The workman's way of doing this is no
trade secret. He puts a film of moisture on the end of
the valve, and watches whether that film is converted into
a bubble by an escape of air. And he gets the moisture

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

exactly where Madame Sans-Gene gets the moisture for
her flat iron. It may be that the washerwoman of the
future, as soon as a trebling of her wages and a halving
of her hours of labor enable her to indulge in a little
fastidiousness, will hang a scent bottle with a spray dif-
fuser at her chatelaine, though even then I doubt if the
fashionable cyclist will prefer the resources of civilization
to those of nature when nobody is looking. But by that
time the washerwoman will no doubt smoke cigarettes,
as to which habit of tobacco smoking, in what form soever
it be practised, I will say nothing more than that the
people who indulge in it, whether male or female, have
clearly no right to complain of the manners of people
who spit on flat irons. Indeed I will go further, and
declare that a civilization which enjoins the deliberate
stiffening of its shirts with white mud and the hotpressing
thereof in order that men may look in the evening like
silhouettes cut out of mourning paper, has more to learn
than to teach in the way of good manners (that is, good
sense) from Madame Sans-Gene.

As to "stir your stumps," that is precisely what an ideal
duchess would say if she had to bustle a laundry, and
had tact and geniality enough to make a success of it. It
is true that she might as easily say, "More diligence,
ladies, please"; but she would not say it, because ideal
duchesses do not deliberately say stupid and underbred
things. Indeed our military officers, whose authority in
matters of social propriety nobody will dispute, are apt
to push the Sans-Gene style to extremes in smartening
the movements of Volunteers and others in reviews and
inspections, to say nothing of the emergencies of actual
warfare.

Concerning Madame Sans-Gene's use of slang, which

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she carries to the extent of remarking, when there is a
question of her husband being compelled by the Emperor
to divorce her and marry a more aristocratic but slenderer
woman, "You like 'em crumby, don't you?", I can only
say that her practice is in accord with that of the finest
masters of language. I have known and conversed with
men whose command of English, and sense of beauty
and fitness in the use of it, had made them famous. They
all revelled in any sort of language that was genuinely
vernacular, racy and graphic. They were just as capable
as Madame Sans-Gene of calling a nose a snout or a
certain sort of figure crumby; and between such literary
solemnities as "magistrate" or "policeman" and the slang
"beak" or the good English "copper" they would not
have hesitated for a moment on familiar occasions. And
they would have been outraged in the last degree had
they been represented as talking of "bereavements,"
"melancholy occasions," or any of the scores of preten-
tious insincerities, aflfectations and literary flourishes of
tombstone, rastrum, shop-catalogue, foreign-policy-lead-
ing-article English which Miss Terry could pass oflF with-
out a word of remonstrance as high-class conversation.

It is further objected that Miss Terry drops into the
dialect of Whitechapel, or rather a sort of generalized
country dialect with some Whitechapel tricks picked up
and grafted on to it. Here I am coming on dangerous
ground ; for it is plain that criticism must sooner or later
speak out fiercely about that hideous vulgarity of stage
speech from which the Lyceum has long been almost our
only refuge. It seems to me that actors and actresses
never dream nowadays of learning to speak. What they
do is this. Since in their raw native state they are usually
quite out of the question as plausible representatives of

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those galaxies of rank and fashion, the dramatis personae
of our smart plays, and having no idea that the simple
remedy is to learn the alphabet over again and learn it
correctly, they take great pains to parrot a detestable con-
vention of "smart" talking, supposed to represent refined
speech by themselves and that huge majority of their
audiences which knows no better, but actually a carica-
ture of the affectations of the parvenu and the "outsider."
Hence the common complaint among the better sort of
gentlefolk that an evening at the theatre leaves an un-
comfortable, almost outraged sensation of having been
entrapped, like the Vicar of Wakefield, to a dinner-party
at which the lords and ladies are really footmen and
lady's-maids "showing off." The vulgarity of this con-
vention is innocent compared to its unbearable monotony,
fatal to that individuality without which no actor can
interest an audience. All countries and districts send us
parliamentary speakers who have cultivated the qualities
of their native dialect and corrected its faults whilst aim-
ing at something like a standard purity and clearness of
speech. Take Mr. Gladstone for instance. For his pur-
poses as an orator he has studied his speech as carefully
and with as great powers of application as any actor. But
he has never lost, and never wanted to lose, certain
features of his speech which stamp him as a North-
countryman. When Mr. T. P. O'Connor delivers a
speech, he does not inflict on us the vulgarities of Beg-
gar's Bush ; but he preserves for us all the music of Gal-
way, though he does not say "Yis" for "Yes" like a
Galway peasant any more than he says "Now" (Nah-oo)
for "No" like a would-be smart London actor. It is so
with all good speakers off the stage. Among good speak-
ers the Irishman speaks like an Irishman, the Scotchman

241

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

like a Scotchman, the American Hke an American, and
so on. It should be so on the stage also, both in clas-
sical plays and representations of modern society, though
of course it is the actor's business to assume dialects and
drop or change them at will in character parts, and to be
something of a virtuoso in speech in all parts. A very
moderate degree of accomplishment in this direction
would make an end of stage smart speech, which, like
the got-up Oxford mince and drawl of a foolish curate,
is the mark of a snob. Indeed, the brutal truth is that
the English theatre is at present suffering severely from
an epidemic of second-rate snobbery. From that, at least,
we are spared whilst Miss Ellen Terry and Sir Henry
Irving are on the stage.

It is natural for those who think this snobbishness a
really fine and genuine accomplishment to conclude that
everybody must lust after it, and, consequently, that
Madame Sans-Gene's neglect to acquire it in spite of her
opportunities as Duchess of Dantzig is incredible. Now
far be it from me to deny that Sardou's assumption that
the Duchess has not learnt to make a curtsey or to put
on a low-necked dress must be taken frankly as an im-
possible pretext for a bit of clowning which may or may
not be worth its cost in verisimilitude. But, apart from
this inessential episode, the idea that Catherine, being
happily "Madame Sans-Gene," should deliberately manu-
facture herself into a commonplace Court lady — a person
with about as much political influence or genuine intimacy
with ministers and princes as an upper housemaid in
Downing Street — is to assume that she would gain by
the exchange, and that her ideals and ambitions are those
of an average solicitor's wife.

Here, then, you have the secret of Madame Sans-Gene

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and Miss Terry's apparent condescension to a "vulgar"
part. There are a few people in the world with sufficient
vitality and strength of character to get to close quarters
with uncommon people quite independently of the drill
which qualifies common people (whatever their rank) to
figure in the retinue which is indispensable to the state
of kings and ministers. And there are a few actresses
who are able to interpret such exceptional people because
they are exceptional themselves. Miss Terry is such an
exceptional actress; and there the whole wonder of the
business begins and ends. Granted this one rare qualifi-
cation, the mere execution is nothing. The part does not
take Miss Terry anywhere near the limit of her powers :
on the contrary, it embarrasses her occasionally by its
crudity. Re jane was also well within her best as Catherine ;
so that a comparison of the two artists is like comparing
two athletes throwing the hammer ten feet. Miss Terry's
difficulties are greater, because she has to make shift with
a translation instead of the original text, and because her
support, especially in the scenes with Lefebvre, is not so
helpful as that enjoyed by Rejane. Also she coaxed the
clowning scene through better than Rejane; and her
retort upon the Queen of Naples, though it was perfectly
genial and simple and laundress-like, set me wondering
why we have never heard her deliver Marie Stuart's
retort upon Elizabeth in Schiller's play, a speculation
which Rejane certainly never suggested to me, and which
I admit is not to the point. But, if there is to be any
comparison, it must, as I have said, take us outside "Ma-
dame Sans-Gene," into which both actresses put as much
acting as it will hold.

Sardou's Napoleon is rather better than Madame Tus-
saud's, and that is all that can be said for it. It is easy

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to take any familiar stage figure, make him up as Napo-
leon, put into his mouth a few allusions to the time when
he was a poor young artillery officer in Paris and to
Friedland or Jena, place at his elbow a Sherlock Holmes
called Fouche and so forth, just as in another dress, and
with Friedland changed to Pharsalia, you would have a
stage Julius Csesar ; but if at the end of the play the per-
sonage so dressed up has felt nothing and seen nothing
and done nothing that might not have been as appropri-
ately felt, seen and done by his valet, then the fact that
the hero is called Emperor is no more important than the
fact that the theatre, in nine cases out of ten, is called
the Theatre Royal. On the other hand, if you get as
your hero a prince of whom nobody ever hear before —
say Hamlet — and make him genuinely distinguished, then
he becomes as well known to us as Marcus Aurelius.
Sardou's Napoleon belongs to the first variety. He is
nothing but the jealous husband of a thousand fashion-
able dramas, talking Buonapartiana. Sir Henry Irving
seizes the opportunity to show what can be done with an
empty part by an old stage hand. The result is that he
produces the illusion of the Emperor behind the part:
one takes it for granted that his abstinence from any
adequately Napoleonic deeds and utterances is a matter
of pure forbearance on his part. It is an amusingly crafty
bit of business, and reminds one pleasantly of the days
before Shakespeare was let loose on Sir Henry Irving's
talent.

Mr. Comyns Carr's translation is much too literary.
Catherine does not speak like a woman of the people
except when she is helping herself out with ready-made
locutions in the manner of Sancho Panza. After a long
speech consisting of a bundle of such locutions padded

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

with forced mistakes in grammar, she will say, "That
was my object," or some similarly impossible piece of
Ciceronian eloquence. It is a pity; for there never was
a play more in need of an unerring sense of the vernacular
and plenty of humorous adroitness in its use.

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN

John Gabriel Borkman: a play in four acts by Hen-
rik Ibsen. English version by William Archer.
Opening performance by the New Century Theatre
at the Strand Theatre, 3 May, 1897.

THE first performance of "John Gabriel Borkman,"
the latest masterpiece of the acknowledged chief
of European dramatic art, has taken place in Lon-
don under the usual shabby circumstances. For the first
scene in the gloomy Borkman house, a faded, soiled, dusty
wreck of some gay French salon, originally designed,
perhaps, for Offenbach's "Favart," was fitted with an
incongruous Norwegian stove, a painted staircase, and
a couple of chairs which were no doubt white and gold
when they first figured in Tom Taylor's "Plot and Pas-
sion" or some other relic of the days before Mr. Bancroft
revolutionized stage furniture, but have apparently lan-
guished ever since, unsold and unsaleable, among second-
hand keys, framed lithographs of the Prince Consort,
casual fireirons and stair-rods, and other spoils of the
broker. Still, this scene at least was describable, and even
stimulative — ^to irony. In Act II., the gallery in which
Borkman prowls for eight years like a wolf was no gal-
lery at all, but a square box ugly to loathesomeness, and

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

too destructive to the imagination and descriptive faculty
to incur the penalty of criticism. In Act III. (requiring,
it will be remembered, the shifting landscape from
"Parsifal"), two new cloths specially painted, and good
enough to produce a tolerable illusion of snowy pinewood
and midnight mountain with proper accessories, were
made ridiculous by a bare acre of wooden floor and only
one set of wings for the two. When I looked at that,
and thought of the eminence of the author and the great-
ness of his work, I felt ashamed. What Sir Henry Irving
and Mr. George Alexander and Mr. Wilson Barrett feel
about it I do not know — on the whole, perhaps, not al-
together displeased to see Ibsen belittled. For my part,
I beg the New Century Theatre, when the next Ibsen
play is ready for mounting, to apply to me for assistance.
If I have a ten-pound note, they shall have it: if not, I
can at least lend them a couple of decent chairs. I cannot
think that Mr. Massingham, Mr. Sutro, and Mr. William
Archer would have grudged a few such contributions
from their humble cots on this occasion if they had not
hoped that a display of the most sordid poverty would
have shamed the public as it shamed me. Unfortunately
their moral lesson is more likely to discredit Ibsen than
to fill the New Century coffers. They have spent either
too little or too much. When Dr. Furnivall performed
Browning's "Luria" in the lecture theatre at University
College with a couple of curtains, a chair borrowed from
the board-room, and the actors in their ordinary evening
dress, the absence of scenery was as completely forgotten
as if we had all been in the Globe in Shakespeare's time.
But between that and an adequate scenic equipment there
is no middle course. It is highly honorable to the pioneers
of the drama that they are poor ; but in art, what poverty

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

can only do unhandsomely and stingily it should not do
at all. Besides, to be quite frank, I simply do not believe
that the New Century Theatre could not have afforded
at least a better couple of chairs.

I regret to say that the shortcomings of the scenery
were not mitigated by imaginative and ingenious stage
management. Mr. Vernon's stage management is very
actor-like : that is to say, it is directed, not to secure the
maximum of illusion for the play, but the maximum of
fairness in distributing good places on the stage to the
members of the cast. Had he been selfish enough, as
some actor-managers are accused of being, to manage
the stage so as to secure the maximum of prominence
for himself, the effect would probably have justified him,
since he plays Borkman. But his sense of equity is ev-
idently stronger than his vanity; for he takes less than
his share of conspicuity, repeatedly standing patiently
with his back to the audience to be declaimed at down
the stage by Miss Robins or Miss Ward, or whoever else
he deems entitled to a turn. Alas! these conceptions of
fairness, honorable as they are to Mr. Vernon's manhood,
are far too simply quantitative for artistic purposes. The
business of the stage manager of "John Gabriel Bork-
man" is chiefly to make the most of the title part; and
if the actor of that part is too modest to do that for him-
self, some one else should stage-manage. Mr. \^ernon
perhaps pleased the company, because he certainly did
contrive that every one of them should have the centre
of the stage to himself or herself whenever they had a
chance of self-assertion; but as this act of green-room
justice was placed before the naturalness of the represen-
tation, the actors did not gain by it, whilst the play suf-
fered greatly.

^7

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Mr. Vernon, I suspect, was also hampered by a rather
old-fashioned technical conception of the play as a trag-
edy. Now the traditional stage management of tragedy
ignores realism — even the moderate degree of realism
traditional in comedy. It lends itself to people talking
at each other rhetorically from opposite sides of the stage,
taking long sweeping walks up to their "points," striking
attitudes in the focus of the public vision with an artificial-
ity which, instead of being concealed, is not only disclosed
but insisted on, and being affected in all their joints by
emotions which a fine comedian conveys by the faintest
possible inflection of tone or eyebrow. "John Gabriel
Borkman" is no doubt technically a tragedy because it
ends with the death of the leading personage in it. But
to stage-manage or act it rhetorically as such is like
drawing a Dance of Death in the style of Caracci or Giulio
Romano. Clearly the required style is the homely-im-
aginative, the realistic-fateful — in a word, the Gothic. I
am aware that to demand Gothic art from stage managers
dominated by the notion that their business is to adapt
the exigencies of stage-etiquette to the tragic and comic
categories of our pseudo-classical dramatic tradition is
to give them an order which they can but dimly under-
stand and cannot execute at all; but Mr. Vernon is no
mere routineer: he is a man of ideas. After all, Sir
Henry Irving (in his "Bells" style), M. Lugne-Poe, Mr.
Richard Mansfield, and Mr. Charles Charrington have
hit this mark (whilst missing the pseudo-classic one)
nearly enough to show that it is by no means unattainable.
Failing the services of these geniuses, I beg the conven-
tional stage manager to treat Ibsen as comedy. That will
not get the business right; but it will be better than the
tragedy plan.

Dramatic Opinions a^d Essays

As to the acting of the play, it was fairly good, as
acting goes in London now, whenever the performers
were at all in their depth ; and it was at least lugubriously
well intentioned when they were out of it. Unfortunately
they were very often out of it. If they had been anti-
Ibsenites they would have marked their resentment of
and impatience with the passages they did not understand
by an irritable listlessness, designed to make the worst
of the play as far as that could be done without making
the worst of themselves. But the Ibsenite actor marks
the speeches which are beyond him by a sudden access of
pathetic sentimentality and an intense consciousness of
Ibsen's greatness. No doubt this devotional plan lets the
earnestness of the representation down less than the
sceptical one ; yet its effect is as false as false can be ; and
I am sorry to say that it is gradually establishing a fu-
nereally unreal tradition which is likely to end in making
Ibsen the most portentous of stage bores. Take, for ex-
ample, Ella Rentheim. Here you have a part which up
to a certain point almost plays itself — a sympathetic old
maid with a broken heart. Nineteen-twentieths of her
might be transferred to the stage of the Princess's to-
morrow and be welcomed there tearfully by the audiences
which delight in "Two Little Vagabonds" and "East
Lynne." Her desire to adopt Erhart is plainsailing senti-
mentalism: her reproach to Borkman for the crime of
killing the "love life" in her and himself for the sake of
his ambition is, as a coup de theatre, quite within the
range of playwrights who rank considerably below Mr.
Pinero. All this is presented intelligently by Miss Robins
— at moments even touchingly and beautifully. But the
moment the dialogue crosses the line which separates the
Ibsen sphere from the ordinary sphere her utterance

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

rings false at once. Here is an example — the most stri-
king in the play: —

Ella [In strong inward emotion]. Pity! Ha ha! I have never
known pity since you deserted me. I was incapable of feeling
it. If a poor starved child came into my kitchen, shivering and
crying, and begging a morsel of food, I let the servants look to
it. I never felt any desire to take the child to myself, to warm
it at my own hearth, to have the pleasure of seeing it eat and
be satisfied. And yet I wasn't like that when I was young: that
I remember clearly. It is you that have created an empty, barren
desert within me — and without me too!

What is there in this speech that might not occur in
any popular novel or drama of sentiment written since
Queen Anne's death? If Miss Millward v^^ere to intro-
duce it into "Black Eyed Susan," the Adelphi pit would
accept it with moist eyes and without the faintest suspi-
cion of Ibsen. But Ella Rentheim does not stop there.
"You have cheated me of a mother's joy and happiness
in life," she continues, "and of a mother's sorrows and
tears as well. And perhaps that is the heaviest part of
the loss to me. It may be that a mother's sorrows and
tears were what I needed most." Now here the Adelphi
pit would be puzzled ; for here Ibsen speaks as the Great
Man — one whose moral consciousness far transcends the
common huckstering conception of life as a trade in hap-
piness in which sorrows and tears represent the bad
bargains and joys and happiness the good ones. And here
Miss Robins suddenly betrays that she is an Ibsenite
without being an Ibsenist. The genuine and touching
tone of self-pity suddenly turns into a perceptibly artificial
snivel (forgive the rudeness of the word) ; and the
sentence which is the most moving in the play provided
it comes out simply^ and truthfully, is declaimed as a sen-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

timental paradox which has no sort of reality or convic-
tion for the actress. In this failure Miss Robins was
entirely consistent with her own successes. As the woman
in revolt against the intolerable slavery and injustice of
ideal "womanliness" (Karin and Martha in "Pillars of
Society") or against the man treating her merely as his
sexual prey (Mariana in the recital of her mother's fate)
her success has had no bounds except those set by the
commercial disadvantages at which the performances
were undertaken. As the impetuous, imaginative New
Woman in her first youth, free, unscrupulous through
ignorance, demanding of life that it shall be "thrilling,"
and terribly dangerous to impressionable Master Builders
who have put on life's chains without learning its les-
sons, she has succeeded heart and soul, rather by being
the character than by understanding it. In representing
poignant nervous phenomena in their purely physical
aspect, as in "Alan's Wife" and "Mrs. Lessingham," she
has set up the infection of agony in the theatre with
lacerating intensity by the vividness of her reproduction
of its symptoms. But in sympathetic parts properly so
called, where wisdom of heart, and sense of identity and
common cause with others — in short, the parts we shall
probably call religious as soon as we begin to gain some
glimmering of what religion means — Miss Robins is only
sympathetic as a flute is sympathetic: that is, she has a
pretty tone, and can be played on with an affectation of
sentiment ; but there is no reality, no sincerity in it. And
so Ella Rentheim, so far as she is sympathetic, eludes her.
The fact is. Miss Robins is too young and too ferociously
individualistic to play her. Ella's grievances came out
well enough, also her romance, and some of those kindly
amenities of hers — notably her amiable farewell to Er-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

hart; but of the woman who understands that she has
been robbed of her due of tears and sorrow, of the woman
who sees that the crazy expedition through the snow
with Borkman is as well worth trying as a hopeless return
to the fireside, there is no trace, nothing but a few in-
dications that Miss Robins would have very little patience
with such wisdom if she met it in real life.

Mr. Vernon's Borkman was not ill acted; only, as it
was not Ibsen's Borkman, but the very reverse and nega-
tion of him, the better Mr. Vernon acted the worse it was
for the play. He was a thoroughly disillusioned elderly
man of business, patient and sensible rather than kindly,
and with the sort of strength that a man derives from
the experience that teaches him his limits. I think Mr.
Vernon must have studied him in the north of Ireland,
where that type reaches perfection. Ibsen's Borkman,
on the contrary, is a man of the most energetic imagina-
tion, whose illusions feed on his misfortunes, and whose
conception of his own power grows hyperbolical and
Napoleonic in his solitude and impotence. Mr. Vernon's
excursion into the snow was the aberration of a respect-
able banker in whose brain a vessel had suddenly burst:
the true Borkman meets the fate of a vehement dreamer
who has for thirteen years been deprived of that daily
contact with reality and responsibility without which
genius inevitably produces unearthliness and insanity.
Mr. Vernon was as earthly and sane as a man need be
until he went for his walk in the snow, and a Borkman
who is that is necessarily a trifle dull. Even Mr. Welch,
though his scene in the second act was a triumph, made
a fundamental mistake in the third, where Foldal, who
has just been knocked down and nearly run over by the
sleigh in which his daughter is being practically abducted

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

by Erhart and Mrs. Wilton, goes into ecstasies of delight
at what he supposes to be her good fortune in riding off
in a silver-mounted carriage to finish her musical educa-
tion under distinguished auspices. The whole point of
this scene, at once penetratingly tragic and irresistibly
laughable, lies in the sincerity of Foldal's glee and Bork-
man's sardonic chuckling over it. But Mr. Welch unex-
pectedly sacrificed the scene to a stage effect which has
been done to death by Mr. Harry NichoUs and even Mr.
Arthur Roberts. He played the heartbroken old man
pretending to laugh — a descendant of the clown who
jokes in the arena whilst his child is dying at home — and
so wrecked what would otherwise have been the best piece
of character work of the afternoon. Mr. Martin Harvey,
as Erhart, was clever enough to seize the main idea of
the part — the impulse towards happiness — ^but not ex-
perienced enough to know that the actor's business is not
to supply an idea with a sounding board, but with a cred-
ible, simple and natural human being to utter it when its
time comes and not before. He showed, as we all knew
he would show, considerable stage talent and more than
ordinary dramatic intelligence ; but in the first act he was
not the embarrassed young gentleman of Ibsen, but rather
the "soaring human boy" imagined by Mr. Chadband;
and later on this attitude of his very nearly produced a
serious jar at a critical point in the representation.

Miss Genevieve Ward played Gunhild. The character
is a very difficult one, since the violently stagey mani-
festations of maternal feeling prescribed for the actress
by Ibsen indicate a tragic strenuousness of passion which
is not suggested by the rest of the dialogue. Miss Ward
did not quite convince me that she had found the tem-
perament appropriate to both. The truth is, her tragic

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

style, derived from Ristori, was not made for Ibsen. On
the other hand, her conversational style, admirably natural
and quite free from the Mesopotamian solemnity with
which some of her colleagues delivered the words of the
Master, was genuinely dramatic, and reminded me of her
excellent performance, years ago with Mr. Vernon, as
Lona Hessel. Mrs. Tree was clever and altogether suc-
cessful as Mrs. Wilton; and Miss Dora Barton's Frida
was perfect. But then these two parts are comparatively
easy. Miss Caldwell tried hard to modify her well-known
representation of a farcical slavey into a passable Ibsenite
parlormaid, and succeeded fairly except in the little scene
which begins the third act.

On the whole, a rather disappointing performance of a
play which cannot be read without forming expectations
which are perhaps unreasonable, but are certainly in-
evitable.

»S4

A DOLL'S HOUSE AGAIN

A Doll's House. By Henrik IbseiL Globe Theatre,

10 May, 1897.

Hamlet. Olympic Theatre, 10 May, 1897.

Chand d* Habits: a musical play without words. By

Catulle Mendes and Jules BouvaL Her Majesty's

Theatre, 8 May, 1897.

AT LAST I am beginning to understand anti-Ibsen-
ism. It must be that I am growing old and weak
and sentimental and foolish; for I cannot stand
up to reality as I did once. Eight years ago, when Mr.
Charrington, with "A Doll's House," struck the decisive
blow for Ibsen — perhaps the only one that has really got
home in England as yet — I rejoiced in it, and watched
the ruin and havoc it made among the idols and temples
of the idealists as a young war correspondent watches the
bombardment of the unhealthy quarters of a city. But
now I understand better what it means to the unhappy
wretches who can conceive no other life as possible to
them except the Doll's House life. The master of the
Doll's House may endure and even admire himself as
long as he is called King Arthur and prodigiously flat-
tered ; but to paint a Torvald Helmer for him, and leave
his conscience and his ever-gnawing secret diffidence to
whisper "Thou art the man" when he has perhaps out-
lived all chance of being any other sort of man, must be
bitter and dreadful to him. Dr. Rank, too, with his
rickets and his scrofula, no longer an example, like Herod,
of the wrath of God, or a curiosity to be stared at as
villagers stare at a sheep with two heads, but a matter-
of-fact completion of the typical picture of family life by

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

one of the inevitable congenital invalids, or drunkards, or
lunatics whose teeth are set on edge because their fathers
have eaten sour grapes: this also is a horror against
which an agony of protest may well be excused.

It will be remarked that I no longer dwell on the
awakening of the woman, which was once the central point
of the controversy as it is the central point of the drama.
Why should I? The play solves that problem just as it
is being solved in real life. The woman^s eyes are opened ;
and instantly her doll's dress is thrown off and her hus-
band left staring at her, helpless, bound thenceforth either
to do without her (an alternative which makes short
work of his fancied independence) or else treat her as a
human being like himself, fully recognizing that he is
not a creature of one superior species, Man, living with
a creature of another and inferior species. Woman, but
that Mankind is male and female, like other kinds, and
that the inequality of the sexes is literally a cock and bull
story, certain to end in such an unbearable humiliation
as that which our suburban King Arthurs suffer at the
hands of Ibsen. The ending of the play is not on the face
of it particularly tragic: the alleged "note of interroga-
tion" is a sentimental fancy; for it is clear that Helmer
is brought to his senses, and that Nora's departure is no
claptrap "Farewell forever," but a journey in search of
self-respect and apprenticeship to life. Yet there is an
underlying solemnity caused by a fact that the popular
instinct has divined : to wit, that Nora's revolt is the end
of a chapter of human history. The slam of the door
behind her is more momentous than the cannon of Water-
loo or Sedan, beeem^s when she comes back, it will not
be to the old home;i for when the patriarch no longer
rules, and the "breadwinner" acknowledges his depend-

i6

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ence, there is an end of the old order ; and an institution
upon which so much human affection and suffering have
been lavished, and about which so much experience of
the holiest right and bitterest wrong has gathered, cannot
fall without moving even its destroyers, much more those
who believe that its extirpation is a mortal wound to
society. This moment of awe and remorse in "A Doll's
House" was at first lightened by the mere Women's
Rights question. Now that this no longer distracts us,
we feel the full weight of the unsolved destiny of our
Helmers, our Krogstads, our Ranks and our Rank ances-
tors, whom we cannot, like the Heavenly Twin, dispose
of by breaking their noses and saying, "Take that, you
father of a speckled toad."

It may be, however, that this difference between the
impression made by the famous performance in 1889 and
the present revival is due partly to artistic conditions. On
Monday last Mr. Courtenay Thorpe accomplished the
remarkable feat of playing Helmer in the afternoon and
the Ghost in "Hamlet" in the evening, and doing both
better than we have seen them done before. Mr. Waring,
our original Helmer, realized the importance of this most
unflattering part, and sacrificed himself to play it. But
he could not bring himself to confess to it wholly. He
played it critically, and realized it by a process of inten-
tional self-stultification. The resultant performance, ex-
cellently convincing up to fully nineteen-twentieths, was,
as regards the remaining twentieth, obviously a piece of
acting in which a line was drawn, as a matter of self-
respect, between Mr. Waring and Mr. Helmer. Never-
theless, it was badly missed when Mr. Charrington tried
the part later on and achieved a record as the very worst
Helmer in the world through sheer incompatibility of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

temperament. But Mr. Courtenay Thorpe obliterates
both records. He plays Helmer with passion. It is the
first time we have seen this done ; and the effect is over-
whelming. We no longer study an object lesson in lord-
of-creationism, appealing to our sociological interest only.
We see a fellow-creature blindly wrecking his happiness
and losing his "love life," and are touched dramatically.
There were slips and blunders, it is true. Mr. Courtenay
Thorpe did not know his dialogue thoroughly ; and when
the words did not come unsought he said anything that
came into his head (stark nonsense sometimes) sooner
than go out of his part to look for them. And he suc-
cumbed to the temptation to utter the two or three most
fatuously conceited of Helmer's utterances as "points,"
thereby destroying the naturalness that could alone make
them really credible and effective. But it did not matter :
the success was beyond being undone by trifles. Ibsen
has in this case repeated his old feat of making an actor's
reputation.

Miss Achurch's Nora is an old story by this time ; and
I leave its celebration to the young critics who saw it on
Monday for the first time. It still seems to me to place
her far ahead of any living English actress of her gen-
eration in this class of work — the only class, let me add,
which now presents any difficulty to actresses who bring
some personal charm to the aid of quite commonplace
attainments. Here and there we have had some bits of
new-fashioned work on the stage — for instance, Mrs.
Kendal's extraordinarily fine and finished performance in
"The Greatest of These," and Miss Winifred Emery's
last serious feat of acting in "The Benefit of the Doubt."
These show that Miss Achurch's monopoly is not one of
executive skill, but of the modernity of culture, the mental

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

power and quickness of vision to recognize the enormous
value of the opportunity she has seized. In the eight
years since 1889 she has gained in strength and art; and
her performance is more powerful, more surely gripped,
and more expertly carried out than it used to be ; but it
has losses to show as well as gains. In the old days
Nora's first scene with Krogstad had a wonderful naivete :
her youthfully unsympathetic contempt for him, her cer-
tainty that his effort to make a serious business of the
forgery was mere vulgarity, her utter repudiation of the
notion that there could be any comparison between his
case and hers, were expressed to perfection. And in the
first half of the renowned final scene the chill "clearness
and certainty" of the disillusion, the quite new tone of
intellectual seriousness, announcing by its freshness and
coolness a complete change in her as she calls her hus-
band to account with her eyes wide open for the first
time: all this, so vitally necessary to the novel truth of
the scene and the convincing effect of the statement that
she no longer loves him, came with lifegiving natural-
ness. But these two scenes have now become unmista-
kably stale to Miss Achurch. In the Krogstad one she
plays as if the danger of penal servitude were the whole
point of it; and she agonizes over the cool opening of
the explanation with Helmer with all the conventional
pangs of parting in full play from the first. This ages
her Nora perceptibly. Physically she is youthful enough:
Helmer's "squirrel" still dances blithely, sings unmerci-
fully, and wears reckless garments at which the modish
occupants of the stalls stare in scandal and consternation
(and which, by the way, are impossible for a snobbish
b]^nk manager's wife). But Miss Achurch can no longer
content herself with a girl's allowance of passion and

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

sympathy. She fills the cup and drains it; and con-
sequently, though Nora has all her old vitality and or-
iginality, and more than her old hold of the audience, she
is less girlish and more sophisticated with the passions
of the stage than she was at the Novelty when she first
captivated us.

Mr. Charrington*s Rank, always an admirable per-
formance, is now better than ever. But it is also sterner
and harder to bear. He has very perceptibly increased
the horror of the part by a few touches which bring and
keep his despair and doom more vividly before the au-
dience; and he no longer softens his final exit by the
sentimental business of snatching Nora's handkerchief.

The effect of a performance of the "Doll's House"
with the three most important parts very well played,
and the economy of the mounting — which involves a dis-
embowelled sofa — got over by intelligent stage manage-
ment and a little judicious hiring and borrowing, is al-
most painfully strong. It is mitigated by the earnest but
mistaken efforts of Mr. Charles Fulton and Miss Vane
Featherstone as Krogstad and Mrs. Linden. Mr. Fulton,
invaluable at the Adelphi, struggles with his part like a
blacksmith mending a watch ; and the style of play which
makes Miss Vane Featherstone so useful and attractive
in the unrealistic drama produces, in a realistic part, ex-
actly the effect that might have been expected. The flat-
tering notion, still current in the profession, that anybody
can play Ibsen, is hardly bearing the test of experience.
Happily, the elements of strength in the performance
triumph over all drawbacks. If "The Wild Duck" next
week is as good as "A Doll's House," the Independent
Theatre (for which, as a small shareholder, I have a
certain partiality) will have done very well.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I found "Hamlet" at the Olympic not a bad anodyne
after the anguish of the Helmer household. Throwing
off the critic, I indulged a silly boyish affection of mine
for the play, which I know nearly by heart, thereby hav-
ing a distinct advantage over Mr. Nutcombe Gould, whose
acquaintance with the text is extremely precarious. His
aptitude for transposing the adverb "so" in such a way
as to spoil the verse, not to mention putting in full stops
where there is no stop, and no stop where there is a full
stop, is calamitous and appalling. For example:

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come [full stop].
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil [full stop].
Must give us pause."

And

"When the grass grows the proverb is somewhat musty."

The effect of changing "'tis" into "it is" was also fully
exploited. Thus —

"Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer."

Even Mr. Foss, otherwise better than most Laerteses,
said,

"O Heaven, is it possible a young maid's wits
Should be as mortal as an old man's life?"

Mr. Nutcombe Gould gave us all Hamlet's appearance,
something of his feeling, and but little of his brains. He
died in the full possession of his faculties, and had but
just announced with unimpaired vigor that the rest was
silence when an elderly gentleman rose in the middle of
the front row of the stalls, and addressed the house ve-
hemently on burning political questions of the day. Miss

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Lily Hanbury went through the familiar ceremony of
playing Ophelia with success, thanks to a delicate ear for
the music and a goodly person. Mr. Ben Greet was an
exasperatingly placid Polonius, and Mr. Kendrick an un-
wontedly spirited Horatio. The only really noteworthy
feature of the performance was, as aforsesaid, the Ghost.
Mr. Courtenay Thorpe's articulation deserted him to-
wards the end; so that the last half dozen lines of his
long narrative and the whole of his part in the closet
scene were a mere wail, in which no man could distin-
guish any words ; but the effect was past spoiling by that
time; and a very remarkable effect it was, well imagined
and well executed.

What possessed Mr. Beerbohm Tree to offer " 'Chand
d'Habits" to the sort of audience that runs after stage
versions of recent imitations of the "historical" novels of
James Grant and Harrison Ainsworth ? These plays with-
out words only exist for people who are highly sensitive
to music, color, and the complex art of physical expres-
sion. To offer them to barbarians with no senses at all,
capable of nothing but sensational stories shouted at them
in plain words, with plenty of guns and swords and silks
and velvets, is to court ridicule, especially at half-past
ten at night, and with the overture, which might have
done something to attune the house, played as an entr'-
acte. For my part, I enjoyed " 'Chand d'Habits" im-
mensely, and thought the insensibility and impatience of
the audience perfectly hoggish. But then I had not to sit
out "Seats of the Mighty" beforehand.

262

IBSEN TRIUMPHANT

22 May, i8py.

CAN IT possibly be true that "The Hobby Horse"
was produced so recently as 1886? More ama-
zing still, was this the comedy — comedy, mark
you — which suggested to me just such hopes of Mr.
Pinero's future as others built upon "The Profligate" and
"The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," both of which I con-
temned as relapses into drawing-room melodrama. Going
back to it now after an interval of ten years, I find it,
not a comedy, but a provincial farce in three acts, de-
crepit in stage convention, and only capable of appear-
ing fresh to those who, like myself, can wrench them-
selves back, by force of memory, to the point of view
of a period when revivals of "London Assurance" were
still possible. What makes the puerilities of the play
more exasperating nowadays is that it is clear, on a
survey of the original production and the present revival,
that Mr. Pinero was not driven into them by any serious
deficiency in the executive talent at his disposal. In Mrs.
Kendal and Mr. Hare he had two comedians for whose
combined services an unfortunate modern dramatic au-
thor might well sacrifice half his percentage. Yet the
part of Spencer Jermyn is made so easy that one may
well ask the people who rave about Mr. Hare's perfom-
ance as a masterpiece of art what they suppose really
difficult acting to be. And imagine Mrs. Kendal con-
demned to make London laugh by pretending to treat
a grown-up stepson as a little boy, arranging his hair,
telling him not to be afraid, that she will not punish him,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and so forth ! One gasps at these things nowadays. They
may be pardonable in the part of Shattock, who, as a
comic relief — for even comedy in England must have
comic relief — is not expected to do or say anything cred-
ible or possible; but here they were thrust into the part
of the heroine, enacted by the most accomplished actress
in London. What sort of barbarians were we in the
days when we took this sort of thing as a matter of
course, and made merry over it?

And yet I was right about "The Hobby Horse." It
has character, humor, observation, genuine comedy and
literary workmanship in it as unmistakably as "The Ben-
efit of the Doubt" has them. What is the matter with
the play is the distortion and debasement of all its qual-
ities to suit the childishness and vulgarity of the theatre
of ten years ago. It will be asked scornfully whether the
theatre of to-day is any better — whether "The Red Robe,"
for instance, is half as good as "The Hobby Horse"?
Before answering that, let me compare "The Hobby
Horse" with "The Princess and the Butterfly"! Could
Mr. Pinero venture nowadays to present to the St.
James's audience, as comedy, the humors of Mr. Shattock
and the scene between Lady Jermyn and her stepson?
You may reply that the author who has given us the
duel in "The Princess and the Butterfly" is capable of
anything; but I would have you observe that the duel
is a mere makeshift in the plot of "The Princess," whereas
the follies of "The Hobby Horse" are presented as flow-
ers of comedy, and — please attend to this — are actually
very good of their kind. That such a kind should have
been the best of its day — nay, that the play should have
suffered in 1886 because its comedy was rather too sub-
tle for the taste of that time — is a staggering thing to

264

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

think of. But I am prepared to go further as to our
improvement by embracing even the comparison with
"The Red Robe" in support of my case. The nineteenth-
century novel, with all its faults, has maintained itself
immeasurably above the nineteenth-century drama. Take
the women novelists alone, from Charlotte Bronte to
Sarah Grand, and think of them, if you can, in any sort
of relation except that of a superior species to the dram-
atists of their day. I unhesitatingly say that no novelist
could, even if there were any reason for it, approach the
writing of a novel with his mind warped, his hand
shackled, and his imagination stultified by the conditions
which Mr. Pinero accepted, and even gloried in accept-
ing, when he wrote "The Hobby Horse." The state of
public taste which turns from the first-rate comedies of
the 'eighties to dramatizations of the third-rate novels
of the 'nineties is emphatically a progressive state. These
cloak-and-sword dramas, at their worst — if we have
reached their worst, which is perhaps too much to hope —
are only bad stories badly told : if they were good stories
well told, there would be no more objection to them on
my part than there is at present on that of the simple
people for whom they are not too bad. But the sort of
play they are supplanting, whether good or bad, was a
wrong sort : the more craftily it was done the more hope-
lessly wrong it was. The dramatists who had mastered
it despised the novelists, and said, "You may sneer at
our craft, but let us see you do it yourselves." Just the
sort of retort a cardsharper might make on a cardinal.

I need hardly go on to explain that Ibsen is at the
back of this sudden explosion of disgusted intolerance
on my part for a style of entertainment which I suffered
gladly enough in the days of the Hare-Kendal manage-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ment. On Monday last I sat without a murmur in a
stuffy theatre on a summer afternoon from three to
nearly half-past six, spellbound by Ibsen; but the price
I paid for it was to find myself stricken with mortal im-
patience and boredom the next time I attempted to sit
out the pre-Ibsenite drama for five minutes. Where shall
I find an epithet magnificent enough for "The Wild
Duck" ! To sit there getting deeper and deeper into that
Ekdal home, and getting deeper and deeper into your
own life all the time, until you forget that you are in a
theatre at all; to look on with horror and pity at a pro-
found tragedy, shaking with laughter all the time at an
irresistible comedy; to go out, not from a diversion, but
from an experience deeper than real life ever brings to
most men, or often brings to any man : that is what "The
Wild Duck" was like last Monday at the Globe. It is idle
to attempt to describe it ; and as to giving an analysis of
the play, I did that seven years ago, and decline now to
give myself an antiquated air by treating as a novelty a
masterpiece that all Europe delights in. Besides, the
play is as simple as "Little Red Ridinghood" to any one
who comes to it fresh from life instead of stale from the
theatre.

And now, what have our "passing-craze" theorists to
say to the latest nine-days' wonder, the tremendous effect
this ultra-Ibsen play has just produced eight years after
the craze set in ? As for me, what I have to say is simply,
"I told you so."

We have by this time seen several productions of "A
Doll's House," three of "Rosmersholm," and two of
"The Wild Duck." The first performance of "A
Doll's House" (Mr. Charrington's at the Novelty) and
of "Rosmersholm" (Miss Florence Farr's at the Vaude-

266

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ville) gave the actors such an overwhelming advantage
as the first revealers to London of a much greater dram-
atist than Shakespeare, that even the vehemently anti-
Ibsenite critics lost all power of discrimination, and flat-
tered the performers as frantically as they abused the
plays. But since then the performers have had to strug-
gle against the unreasonable expectations thus created;
and the effect of the plays has been sternly proportion-
ate to the intelligence and skill brought to bear on them.
We have learnt that an Ibsen performance in the hands
of M. Lugne Poe or Mr. Charrington is a perfectly differ-
ent thing from one in which there is individual talent but
practically no stage management. M. Lugne Poe estab-
lished his reputation at once and easily, because he was
under no suspicion of depending on the genius of a par-
ticular actress: his "Rosmersholm" with Marthe Mellot
as Rebecca had the magic atmosphere which is the sign
of the true manager as unmistakably as his "Master
Builder" with Suzanne Auclaire as Hilda. But Mr. Char-
rington, like Mr. Kendal and Mr. Bancroft, has a wife;
and the difference made by Miss Janet Achurch's acting
has always been much more obvious than that made by
her husband's management to a public which has lost all
tradition of what stage management really is, apart from
lavish expenditure on scenery and furniture. But for
that his production of Voss's "Alexandria" would have
established his reputation as the best stage manager of
true modern drama in London — indeed the only one, in
the sense in which I am now using the words : the sense,
that is, of a producer of poetically realistic illusion. Now,
however, we have him at last with Miss Janet Achurch
out of the bill. The result is conclusive. The same in-
sight which enables Mr. Charrington, in acting Relling,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to point the moral of the play in half a dozen strokes,
has also enabled him to order the whole representation
in such a fashion that there is not a moment of bewilder-
ment during the development of a dramatic action subtle
enough in its motives to have left even highly trained and
attentive readers of the play quite addled as to what it
is all about. The dialogue, which in any other hands
would have been cut to ribbons, is given without the
slightest regard to the clock; and not even the striking
of six produces the stampede that would set in after a
quarter-past five if the play were a "popular" one. That
is a real triumph of management. It may be said that
it is a triumph of Ibsen's genius; but of what use is
Ibsen's genius if the manager has not the genius to be-
lieve in it?

The acting, for a scratch company, was uncommonly
good: there was mettle in it, as there usually is where
there is good leadership. Mr. Lawrence Irving, who
played Relling to Mr. Abingdon's Hjalmar Ekdal at the
first production of the play by Mr. Grein, handed over
Relling to Mr. Charrington, and played Hjalmar him-
self. In all dramatic literature, as far as I know it, there
is no other such part for a comedian; and I do not be-
lieve any actor capable of repeating the lines intelligibly
could possibly fail in it. To say therefore that Mr. Irv-
ing did not fail is to give him no praise at all: to say
that he quite succeeded would be to proclaim him the
greatest comedian in London. He was very amusing,
and played with cleverness and sometimes, with consid-
erable finesse. But though he did not overact any par-
ticular passage, he overdid the part a little as a whole
by making Hjalmar grotesque. His appearance pro-
claimed his weakness at once : the conceited ass was rec-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ognizable at a glance. This was not right: Hjalmar
should impose on us at first. The fact is, we all have to
look much nearer home for the originals of Ibsen's char-
acters than we imagine ; and Hjalmar Ekdals are so com-
mon nowadays that it is not they, but the other people,
who look singular. Still, Mr. Irving's performance was
a remarkable achievement, and fairly entitles him to
patronize his father as an old-fashioned actor who has pos-
itively never played a leading Ibsen part. Mr. Courtenay
Thorpe, as Gregers Werle, confirmed the success he made
in "A Doll's House" as an Ibsen actor — that is, an actor
of the highest class in modern drama; but considering
the length of the play, he was too free in his use of
repetitions and nervous stumblings to give an air of
naturalness and spontaneity to his dialogue. Miss Kate
Phillips, who made her Ibsen debut as Gina, was quite
as natural ; and yet she never wasted an instant, and was
clear, crisp and punctual as clockwork without being in
the least mechanical. I am on the side of smart execu-
tion: if there are two ways of being natural in speech
on the stage, I suggest that Miss Phillips's way is better
than the fluffy way. As to her impersonation of Gina,
Nature prevented her from making it quite complete.
Gina is as unique in drama as Hjalmar. All Shake-
speare's matrons rolled into one, from Volumnia to Mrs.
Quickly, would be as superficial and conventional in
comparison with Gina as a classic sybil by Raphael with
a Dutch cook by Rembrandt. That waddling housewife,
with her practical sense and sympathy, and her sanely
shameless insensibility to the claims of the ideal, or to
any imaginative presentment of a case whatever, could
only be done by Gina herself; and Gina certainly could
not act. If Miss Phillips were to waddle, or counterfeit

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insensitiveness, or divest her speech of artistic character,
the result would only be such a caricature as a child
gives of its grandmother, or, worse still, something stage-
Shakespearean, like her Audrey. She wisely made no
attempt to denaturalize herself, but played the part sin-
cerely and with the technical skill that marks her off, as
it marks Mrs. Kendal and her school off, from our later
generation of agreeable amateurs who do not know the
A B C of their business. Once, in the second act, she
from mere habit and professional sympathy played with
her face to a speech of Hjalmar's which Gina would have
taken quite stolidly ; but this was her only mistake. She
got no laughs of the wrong sort in the wrong place ; and
the speech in which the worrited Gina bursts out with
the quintessence of the whole comedy — "That's what
comes when crazy people go about making the claims of
the what-d'yer-call-it" — went home right up to the hilt
into our midriffs. Mr. Welch's Ekdal left nothing to
be said : it was faultless. Mr. Charrington played Relling
with great artistic distinction: nobody else got so com-
pletely free from conventional art or so convincingly
behind the part and the play as he. The only failure of
the cast was Molvik, who was well made up, but did not
get beyond a crude pantomimic representation of sick-
ness and drunkenness which nearly ruined the play at
the most critically pathetic moment in the final act. Mr.
Outram was uninteresting as Werle: the part does not
suit his age and style. Miss FfoUiott Paget was a cap-
ital Mrs. Sorby.

Miss Winifred Fraser not only repeated her old tri-
umph as Hedwig, but greatly added to it. The theatre
could hardly have a more delicate talent at its service;
and yet it seems to have no use for it. But Miss Fraser

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

need not be discouraged. The British public is slow;
but it is sure. By the time she is sixty it will discover
that she is one of its best actresses ; and then it will
expect her to play Juliet until she dies of old age.

And this reminds me that I wandered away from "The
Hobby Horse" without a word as to the acting of it.
Mrs. Kendal, always great in comedy, had an enchanting
way of making Mrs. Jermyn's silliness credible and at-
tractive. Miss May Harvey is far too clever and too
well acquainted with Mrs. Kendal's methods to be at
any great loss in replacing her; but she is no more spe-
cifically a comedian than Jane Hading is; and her deci-
sive opportunity as an actress will evidently come in
much more intense work. In technical skill she is far
above the average of her generation — a generation, alas !
of duffers — and I have no doubt that she will play a dis-
tinguished part in the theatrical history of the 'nineties
and 'twenties. The lady who plays Miss Moxon cannot
touch Mrs. Beerbohm's Tree's inimitable performance
in that inglorious but amusing and lifelike part. On the
other hand, Mr. Fred Kerr has made the solicitor his own
for ever. His acting is irresistibly funny, not because
it is unscrupulously bad, as funny acting often is, but
because it is perfectly in character and as good of its
kind as can be. An actor of Mr. Kerr's talent should
not be allowed to waste himself on Miss Brown's and
Jedbury Juniors and such stuff. Mr. Gilbert Hare has
improved greatly, and is now as welcome for his own
sake as he formerly was for his father's. Mr. Groves
of course does what can be done with the impossible but
laughable Shattock; and the "pushin' little cad" whom
he denounces, though persona muta and unnamed in the
bill, is richly endowed by Nature for his humble part.

271

MAINLY ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

Othello. Lyric Theatre, 22 May, 1897.

Antony and Cleopatra. Olympic Theatre, 24 May,

1897.

IF ONLY I were a moralist, like Shakespeare, how I
could improve the occasion of the fall of the once
Independent Theatre! A fortnight ago that body,
whose glory was it^reedom from actor-managership and
its repertory of plays which no commercial theatre would
produce, was hanging the wreath on the tip-top of the
Independent tower over its performance of the "Wild
Duck." This week it has offered us, as choice Independ-
ent fare, the thirty-year-old "acting version" of Shake-
speare's "Antony and Cleopatra," with which Miss Janet
Achurch made a sensation the other day in Manchester.
I ask the directors of the Independent Theatre what they
mean by this? I ask it as a shareholder who put down
his hard-earned money for the express purpose of provi-
ding a refuge from such exhibitions. I ask it as a member
of the body politic, whose only hope of dramatic nutrition
is in the strict speciaHzation of these newly and painfully
evolved little organs, the Independent and New Century
Theatres. I ask it as a critic who has pledged himself
for the integrity of the Independent Theatre as recklessly
as Falstaff did for Pistol's honesty. Even Pistol was able
to retort on Falstaff, "Didst thou not share ? Hadst thou
not fifteen pence ?" But I have not had fifteen pence : I
have only had an afternoon of lacerating anguish, spent
partly in contemplating Miss Achurch's overpowering
experiments in rhetoric, and partly in wishing I had never
been born.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

If I speak intemperately on this matter, please to re-
member what I have endured throughout a quarter of a
century of playgoing. Years ago— how many does not
matter — I went to the theatre one evening to see a play
called "The Two Roses," and was much struck therein
by the acting of one Henry Irving, who created a modern
realistic character named Digby Grand in a manner
which, if applied to an Ibsen play now, would astonish
us as much as Miss Achurch's Nora astonished us. When
next I saw that remarkable actor, he had gone into a
much older established branch of his business, and was
trying his hand at "Richelieu." He was new to the work ;
and I suffered horribly; the audience suffered horribly;
and I hope (though I am a humane man, considering my
profession) that the actor suffered horribly. For I knew
what rhetoric ought to be, having tasted it in literature,
music and painting ; and as to the stage, I had seen great
Italians do it in the days when Duse, like Ibsen, had not
arrived. After a long period of convalescence, I ventured
again to the Lyceum, and saw "Hamlet." There was a
change. Richelieu had been incessantly excruciating:
Hamlet had only moments of violent ineptitude separated
by lengths of dulness ; and though I yawned, I felt none
the worse next morning. When some unaccountable im-
pulse led me to the Lyceum again (I suspect it was to
see Miss Ellen Terry), "The Lady of Lyons" was in the
bill. Before Claude Melnotte had moved his wrist and
chin twice, I saw that he had mastered the rhetorical style
at last. His virtuosity of execution soon became ex-
traordinary. His "Charles I.," for instance, became a
miracle of the most elaborate class of this sort of acting.
It was a hard-earned and well-deserved triumph ; and by
it his destiny was accomplished ; the anti-Irvingites were

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

confuted; the caricaturists were disconcerted; and the
foreign actor could no longer gasp at us when we talked
of Irving as a master of his art. But suppose he had
foregone this victory! Suppose he had said, "I can
produce studies of modern life and character like Digby
Grand. I can create weird supernatural figures like Van-
derdecken (Vanderdecken, now forgotten, was a master-
piece), and all sorts of grotesques. But if I try this
rhetorical art of making old-fashioned heroics impressive
and even beautiful, I shall not only make a fool of my-
self as a beginner where I have hitherto shone as an
adept, but — what is of deeper import to me and the world
— I shall give up a fundamentally serious social function
for a fundamentally nonsensical theatrical accomplish-
ment." What would have been the result of such a re-
nunciation? We should have escaped Lyceum Shake-
speare ; and we should have had the ablest manager of the
day driven by life-or-death necessity to extract from con-
temporary literature the proper food for the modern side
of his talent, and thus to create a new drama instead of
galvanizing an old one and cutting himself off from all
contact with the dramatic vitality of his time. And what
an excellent thing that would have been both for us and
for him !

Now what Sir Henry Irving has done, for good or
evil. Miss Janet Achurch can do too. If she is tired of
being "an Ibsenite actress" and wants to be a modern
Ristori, it is clear that the public will submit to her ap-
prenticeship as humbly as they submitted to Sir Henry
Irving's. Mr. Grossmith may caricature her at his re-
citals; flippant critics may pass jests through the stalls
or pittites with an ungovernable sense of the ludicrous
burst into guffaws ; the orchestra may writhe like a heap

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of trodden worms at each uplifting of her favorite tragic
wail; but now, as at the Lyceum of old, the public as a
whole is clearly at her mercy ; for in art the strength of
a chain is its strongest link ; and once the power to strike
a masterstroke is clearly felt, the public will wait for it
patiently through all extremities of experimental blunder-
ing. But the result will repeat itself as surely as the
process. Let Miss Achurch once learn to make the
rhetorical drama plausible, and thenceforth she will never
do anything else. Her interest in life and character will
be supplanted by an interest in plastique and execution;
and she will come to regard emotion simply as the best
of lubricants and stimulants, caring nothing for its specific
character so long as it is of a sufficiently obvious and
facile sort to ensure a copious flow without the fatigue
of thought. She will take to the one-part plays of Shake-
speare, Schiller, Giacometti, and Sardou, and be regarded
as a classic person by the Corporation of Stratford-on-
Avon. In short, she will become an English Sarah Bern-
hardt. The process is already far advanced. On Monday
last she was sweeping about, clothed with red Rossettian
hair and beauty to match ; revelling in the power of her
voice and the steam pressure of her energ)^ ; curving her
wrists elegantly above Antony's head as if she were going
to extract a globe of gold fish and two rabbits from
behind his ear; and generally celebrating her choice be-
tween the rare and costly art of being beautifully natural
in lifelike human acting, like Duse, and the comparatively
common and cheap one of being theatrically beautiful in
heroic stage exhibition. Alas for our lost leaders ! Shake-
speare and success capture them all.

"Othello" at the Lyric was a much less trying ex-
perience. "Antony and Qeopatra" is an attempt at a

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

serious drama. To say that there is plenty of bogus char-
acterization in it — Enobarbus, for instance — is merely to
say that it is by Shakespeare. But the contrast between
Caesar and Antony is true human drama ; and Caesar him-
self is deeper than the usual Shakespearean stage king.
"Othello," on the other hand, is pure melodrama. There
is not a touch of character in it that goes below the skin ;
and the fitful attempts to make lago something better
than a melodramatic villain only make a hopeless mess
of him and his motives. To any one capable of reading
the play with an open mind as to its merits, it is obvious
that Shakespeare plunged through it so impetuously that
he had it finished before he had made up his mind as to
the character and motives of a single person in it. Prob-
ably it was not until he stumbled into the sentimental fit
in which he introduced the willow song that he saw his
way through without making Desdemona enough of the
"supersubtle Venetian" of lago's description to strengthen
the case for Othello's jealousy. That jealousy, by the
way, is purely melodramatic jealousy. The real article
is to be found later on in "A Winter's Tale," where
Leontes is an unmistakable study of a jealous man from
P life. But when the worst has been said of "Othello" that
can be provoked by its superficiality and staginess, it re-
mains magnificent by the volume of its passion and the
splendor of its word-music, which sweep the scenes up to
a plane on which sense is drowned in sound. The words
do not convey ideas: they are streaming ensigns and
\^ tossing branches to make the tempest of passion visible.
In this passage, for instance :

"Like to. the Pontic sea.
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne*er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
E'en so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up,"

if Othello cannot turn his voice into a thunder and surge
of passion, he will achieve nothing but a ludicrously mis-
placed bit of geography. If in the last scene he cannot
throw the darkness of night and the shadow of death
over such lines as

"I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume,"

he at once becomes a person who, on his way to commit
a pettish murder, stops to philosophize foolishly about
a candle end. The actor cannot help himself by studying
his part acutely; for there is nothing to study in it.
Tested by the brain, it is ridiculous : tested by the ear, it
is sublime. He must have the orchestral quality in him ;
and as that is a matter largely of physical endowment, it
follows that only an actor of certain physical endowments
can play Othello. Let him be as crafty as he likes with-
out that, he can no more get the effect than he can sound
the bottom C on a violoncello. The note is not there,
that is all; and he had better be content to play lago,
which is within the compass of any clever actor of normal
endowments.

When I have said that Mr. Wilson Barrett has not this
special musical and vocal gift, I have said everything
needful; for in this matter a miss is as good as a mile.
It is of no use to speak "Farewell the tranquil mind" ; for
the more intelligently and reasonably it is spoken the
more absurd it is. It must affect us as "Ora per sempre

277

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

addio, sante memorie" affects us when sung by Tamagno.
Od!r. Wilson Barrett is an unmusical speaker except when
he is talking Manx. He chops and drives his phrases
like a smart carpenter with a mallet and chisel, hitting
all the prepositions and conjunctions an extra hard rap;
and he has a positive genius for misquotation. For
example :

"Of onetthat loved not wisely but well'*

and

"Drop tears down faster than the Arabian trees,"

both of which appear to me to bear away the palm from
Miss Achurch's

"By the scandering of this pelleted storm.'*

It is a pity that he is not built to fit Othello; for he
produces the play, as usual, very well. At the Lyceum
every one is bored to madness the moment Sir Henry
Irving and Miss Terry leave the stage: at the Lyric, as
aforetime at the Princess's, the play goes briskly from
beginning to end; and there are always three or four
successes in smaller parts sparkling round Mr. Barrett's
big part. Thus Mr. Wigne Percyval, the first Cassio I
ever saw get over the difficulty of appearing a responsible
officer and a possible successor for Othello with nothing
but a drunken scene to do it in, divides the honors of the
second act with lago; and Mr. Ambrose Manning is in-
teresting and amusing all through as Roderigo. Mr.
Franklin McLeay, as lago, makes him the hero of the
performance. But the character defies all consistency.
Shakespeare, as usual, starts with a rough general notion
of a certain type of individual, and then throws it over

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

at the first temptation. lago begins as a coarse black-
guard, whose jovial bluntness passes as "honesty," and
who is professionally a routine subaltern incapable of
understanding why a mathematician gets promoted over
his head. But the moment a stage effect can be made, or
a fine speech brought off by making him refined, subtle
and dignified, he is set talking like Hamlet, and becomes
a godsend to students of the "problems" presented by our
divine William's sham characters. Mr. McLeay does all
that an actor can do with him. He follows Shakespeare
faithfully on the rails and off them. He plays the jovial
blackguard to Cassio and Roderigo and the philosopher
and mentor to Othello just as the lines lead him, with
perfect intelligibility and with so much point, distinction
and fascination that the audience loads him with com-
pliments, and the critics all make up their minds to declare
that he shows the finest insight into the many-sided and
complex character of the prince of villains. As to Miss
Maud Jeffries, I came to the conclusion when she sat up
in bed and said, "Why I should fear, I know not" with
pretty petulance, that she did not realize the situation a
bit; but her voice was so pathetically charming and
musical, and she so beautiful a woman, that I hasten to
confess that I never saw a Desdemona I liked better. Miss
Frances Ivor, always at her best in Shakespeare, should
not on that account try to deliver the speech about "lash-
ing the rascal naked through the world" in the tradi-
tional Mrs. Crummies manner. Emilia's really interest-
ing speeches, which contain some of Shakespeare's cu-
rious anticipations of modem ideas, were of course cut;
but Miss Ivor, in what was left, proved her aptitude for
Shakespearean work, of which I self-denyingly wish her
all possible abundance.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Mr. Barrett^s best scene is that in which he reads the
despatch brought by Lodovico. His worst — leaving out
of account those torrential outbreaks of savagery for which
he is too civilized — is the second act. The storm, the
dread of shipwreck, the darkness, the fierce riot, the
"dreadful bell that frights the isle from its propriety,"
are not only not suggested, but contradicted, by the
scenery and management. We are shown a delightful
Mediterranean evening ; the bell is as pretty as an operatic
angelus ; Othello comes in . like a temperance lecturer ;
Desdemona does not appear ; and the exclamation,

"Look, if my gentle love be not raised up—
I'll make thee an example,"

becomes a ludicrously schoolmasterly "I'll make thee an
example," twice repeated. Here Mr. Barrett makes the
Moor priggish instead of simple, as Shakespeare meant
him to be in the moments when he meant anything beyond
making effective stage points. Another mistake in man-
agement is the business of the portrait in the third act,
which is of little value to Othello, and interrupts Iago*s
speeches in a flagrantly obvious manner.

a8o

ROBERTSON REDIVIVUS

For the Honor of the Family: an anonymous adap-
tation of Emile Augier's "Marriage d'Olympe."
Comedy Theatre, lo June, 1897.
Caste. By T. W. Robertson. Revival. Court The-
atre, 10 June, 1897.

THE revival of "Caste" at the Court Theatre is the
revival of an epoch-making play after thirty years.
A very little epoch and a very little play, certainly,
but none the less interesting on that account to mortal
critics whose own epochs, after full deductions for nonage
and dotage, do not outlast more than two such plays.
The Robertsonian movement caught me as a boy; the
Ibsen movement caught me as a man; and the next one
will catch me as a fossil.

It happens that I did not see Mr. Hare's revival of
"Caste" at the Garrick, nor was I at his leave-taking at
the Lyceum before his trip to America ; so that until last
week I had not seen "Caste" since the old times when
the Hare-Kendal management was still in futurity, and
the Bancrofts had not left Tottenham Court Road. Dur-
ing that interval a great many things have happened,
some of which have changed our minds and morals more
than many of the famous Revolutions and Reformations
of the historians. For instance, there was supernatural
religion then ; and eminent physicists, biologists and their
disciples were "infidels." There was a population ques-
tion then; and what men and women knew about one
another was either a family secret or the recollection of
a harvest of wild oats. There was no social question —
only a "social evil"; and the educated classes knew the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

working classes through novels written by men who had
gathered their notions of the subject either from a squalid
familiarity with general servants in Pentonville kitchens,
or from no familiarity at all with the agricultural laborer
and the retinues of the country house and West End
mansion. To-day the "infidels" are bishops and church-
wardens, without change of view on their part. There
is no population question; and the young lions and li-
onesses of Chronicle and Star, Keynote and Pseudonym,
without suspicion of debauchery, seem to know as much
of erotic psychology as the most liberally educated Peri-
clean Athenians. The real working classes loom hugely
in middle-class consciousness, and have pressed into their
service the whole public energy of the time ; so that now
even a Conservative Government has nothing for the
classes but "doles," extracted with difficulty from its pre-
occupation with instalments of Utopian Socialism. The
extreme reluctance of Englishmen to mention these
changes is the measure of their dread of a reaction to the
older order which they still instinctively connect with
strict applications of religion and respectability.

Since "Caste" has managed to survive all this, it need
not be altogether despised by the young champions who
are staring contemptuously at it, and asking what heed
they can be expected to give to the opinions of critics
who think such stuff worth five minutes' serious con-
sideration. For my part, though I enjoy it more than I
enjoyed "The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith," I do not defend
it. I see now clearly enough that the eagerness with
which it was swallowed long ago was the eagerness with
which an ocean castaway, sucking his bootlaces in an
agony of thirst in a sublime desert of salt water, would
pounce on a spoonful of flat salutaris and think it nectar.

282

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

After years of sham heroics and superhuman balderdash,
"Caste" deHghted everyone by its freshness, its nature,
its humanity. You will shriek and snort, O scornful
young men, at this monstrous assertion. "Nature ! Fresh-
ness !" you will exclaim. "In Heaven's name (if you are
not too modem to have heard of Heaven) where is there
a touch of nature in 'Caste' ?" I reply, "In the windows,
in the doors, in the walls, in the carpet, in the ceiling, in
the kettle, in the fireplace, in the ham, in the tea, in the
bread and butter, in the bassinet, in the hats and sticks
and clothes, in the familiar phrases, the quiet, unpumped,
everyday utterance: in short, the commonplaces that are
now spurned because they are commonplaces, and were
then inexpressibly welcome because they were the most
unexpected of novelties."

And yet I dare not submit even this excuse to a de-
tailed examination. Charles Mathews was in the field
long before Robertson and Mr. Bancroft with the art of
behaving like an ordinary gentleman in what looked like
a real drawing-room. The characters are very old stagers,
very thinly "humanized." Captain Hawtrey may look
natural now in the hands of Mr. Fred Kerr ; but he began
by being a very near relation of the old stage "swell,"
who pulled his moustache, held a single eyeglass between
his brow and cheekbone, said "Haw, haw" and "By Jove,"
and appeared in every harlequinade in a pair of white
trousers which were blacked by the clown instead of his
boots. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, defending his idealized
early impressions as Berlioz defended the forgotten
Dalayrac, pleads for Eccles as "a great and vital tragi-
comic figure." But the fond plea cannot be allowed.
Eccles is caricatured in the vein and by the methods which
Dickens had made obvious; and the implied moral view

283

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of his case is the common Pharisaic one of his day.
Eccles and Gerridge together epitomize mid-century Vic-
torian shabby-genteel ignorance of the working classes.
Polly is comic relief pure and simple ; George and Esther
have nothing but a milkcan to differentiate them from the
heroes and heroines of a thousand sentimental dramas;
and though Robertson happens to be quite right — con-
trary to the prevailing opinion among critics whose con-
ception of the aristocracy is a theoretic one — in represent-
ing the "Marquizzy'^ as insisting openly and jealously on
her rank, and, in fact, having an impenitent and resolute
flunkeyism as her class characteristic, yet it is quite ev-
ident that she is not an original study from life, but
simply a ladyfication of the conventional haughty mother
whom we lately saw revived in all her original vulgarity
and absurdity at the Adelphi in Maddison Morton's "All
that Glitters is not Gold," and who was generally asso-
ciated on the stage with the swell from whom Captain
Hawtrey is evolved. Only, let it not be forgotten that
in both there really is a humanization, as humanization
was understood in the 'sixties: that is, a discovery of
saving sympathetic qualities in personages thitherto
deemed beyond redemption. Even theology had to be
humanized then by the rejection of the old doctrine of
eternal punishment. Hawtrey is a good fellow, which
the earlier "swell" never was; the Marquise is dignified
and affectionate at heart, and is neither made ridiculous
by a grotesque headdress nor embraced by the drunken
Eccles ; and neither of them is attended by a supercilious
footman in plush whose head is finally punched powder-
less by Sam Gerridge. And if from these hints you can-
not gather the real nature and limits of the tiny theatrical
revolution of which Robertson was the hero, I must leave

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

you in your perplexity for want of time and space for
further exposition.

Of the performance I need say nothing. "Caste" is a
task for amateurs: if its difficulties were doubled, the
Court company could without effort play it twice as well
as it need be played. Mr. Hare's Eccles is the tour de
force of a refined actor playing a coarse part; but it is
all the more enjoyable for that. Of the staging I have
one small criticism to offer. If George D'Alroy's draw-
ing-room is to be dated by a cluster of electric lights, Sam
Gerridge must not come to tea in corduroy trousers, dirty
shirt-sleeves, and a huge rule sticking out of his pocket.
No "mechanic" nowadays would dream of doing such a
thing. A stockbroker in moleskins would not be a grosser
solecism.

But if Robertson begins to wear a little, what is to be
said of Augier ? The version of his "Mariage d'Olympe"
produced last week at the Comedy was ten times more
obsolete than "Caste," though Augier's was a solider
talent than Robertson's. The Robertsonian "humanity,"
with its sloppy insistence on the soft place that is to be
found in everybody — especially in the most hopelessly
worthless people — was poor enough; but it was better
than the invincible ignorance which could conscientiously
produce such a tissue of arrant respectability worshipping
folly as "Le Mariage d'Olympe." Augier was a true
bourgeois: when he observed a human impulse that ran
counter to the habits of his class, it never occurred to
him that it opened a question as to their universal pro-
priety. To him those habits were "morality" ; and what
was counter to them was "nostalgic de la boue.'* Ac-
cordingly, the play is already a ridiculous inversion of
moral order. Stupid and prejudiced old gentlemen are

285

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

doubtless childish enough in their objection to rowdy
daughters-in-law to wish occasionally that they would die ;
but they don't shoot them on principle ; and the fact that
Augier was driven to such a foolish solution is in itself
a damning criticism of his play. But it is amusing and
not uninteresting to watch Olympe nowadays, and note
how completely her "nostalgie de la boue*' is justified as
against the dull and sensual respectability of the father-
in-law. In fact, the play now so plainly shows that it is
better for a woman to be a liar and a rapscallion than a
mere lady, that I should be inclined to denounce it as
dangerously immoral if there were no further and better
alternatives open to her.

Miss Eleanor Lane, a very capable American actress,
played Olympe efficiently; and Mrs. Rose Vernon- Paget
made a distinct hit by giving a character sketch of the
detrimental mother on which Granny Stephens at her
best could not have improved. Mr. Bell played the dash-
ing man-about-town as such parts used to be played in
the days of H. J. Byron; and Mrs. Theodore Wright
was particularly good as the wife of the Vindicator of
Family Honor, who was better treated by Mr. Gumey
than he deserved.

286

LORENZACCIO

Lorensaccio: a drama in five acts, by Alfred de
Musset Adapted for the stage by M. Armand
. d'Artois. Adelphi Theatre, 17 June, 1897.

WHAT was the Romantic movement? I don't /
know, though I was under its spell in my
youth. All I can say is that it was a freak
of the human imagination, which created an imaginary
past, an imaginary heroism, an imaginary poetry out of
what appears to those of us who are no longer in the vein
for it as the show in a theatrical costumier's shop window^
Everybody tells you that it began with somebody and
ended with somebody else; but all its beginners were
anticipated; and it is going on still. Byron's Laras and
Corsairs look like the beginning of it to an elderly reader
until he recollects "The Castle of Otranto"; yet "The
Castle of Otranto" is not so romantic as Otway's "Venice
Preserved," which, again, is no more romantic than the
tales of the knights errant beloved of Don Quixote.
Romance is always, I think, a product of ennui, an at-T
tempt to escape from a condition in which real life ap-
pears empty, prosaic and boresome — therefore essentially
a gentlemanly product. The man who has grappled with
real life, flesh to flesh and spirit to spirit, has little patience j
with fools' paradises. When Carlyle said to the emigrants,
"Here and now is your America," he spoke as a realist
to romanticists; and Ibsen was of the same mind when
he finally decided that there is more tragedy in the next
suburban villa than in a whole imaginary Italy of un-
authentic Borgias. Indeed, in our present phase, romance
has become the literary trade of imaginative weaklings

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

who have neither the energy to gain experience of life
nor the genius to divine it: wherefore I would have the
State establish a public Department of Literature, which
should affix to every romance a brief dossier of the au-
thor. For example: — "The writer of this story has no
ascertainable qualifications for dealing with the great
personages and events of history. His mind is stored
with fiction, and his imagination inflamed with alcohol.
His books, full of splendid sins, in no respect reflect his
life, as he is too timid not to be conventionally respectable,
and has never fought a man or tempted a woman. He
cannot box, fence, or ride, and is afraid to master the
bicycle. He appears to be kept alive mainly by the care
of his wife, a plain woman, much worn by looking after
him and the children. He is unconscious that he has any
duties as a citizen; and the Secretary of State for Lit-
erature has failed to extract from him any intelligible
answer to a question as to the difference between an
Urban Sanitary Authority and the Holy Roman Empire.
The public are therefore warned to attach no practical
importance to the feats of swordsmanship, the breakneck
rides, the intrigues with Semiramis, Cleopatra and Cather-
ine of Russia, and the cabinet councils of Julius Caesar,
Charlemagne, Richelieu and Napoleon, as described in
his works ; and he is hereby declared liable to quadruple
assessment for School Board rates in consideration of his
being the chief beneficiary, so far, by the efforts made in
the name of popular education to make reading and wri-
ting coextensive with popular ignorance."
p*For all that, the land of dreams is a wonderful place;
and the great Romancers who found the key of its gates
were no Alnaschars. These artists, inspired neither by
faith and beatitude, nor by strife and realization, were

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neither saints nor crusaders, but pure enchanters, who
conjured up a region where existence touches you deli-
cately to the very heart, and where mysteriously thrilling
people, secretly known to you in dreams of your child-
hood, enact a life in which terrors are as fascinating as
delights ; so that ghosts and death, agony and sin, become,
like love and victory, phases of an unaccountable QCstSLsy^
Goethe bathed by moonlight in the Rhine to learn this
white magic, and saturated even the criticism and didac-
ticism of "Faust" with the strangest charm by means of
it. Mozart was a most wonderful enchanter of this kind :
he drove very clever men — Oublicheff, for example —
clean out of their wits by his airs from heaven and blasts
from hell in "Le Nozze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni."
From the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the
nineteenth century Art went crazy in its search for spells
and dreams ; and many artists who, being neither Mozarts
nor Goethes, had their minds burnt up instead of cleansed
by "the sacred fire," yet could make that fire cast shadows
that gave unreal figures a strange majesty, and phantom
landscapes a "light that never was on sea or land." These
phrases which I quote were then the commonplaces of
critics' rhapsodies.

To-day, alas! — I mean thank goodness! — all this
rhapsidizing makes people stare at me as at Rip Van
Winkle. The lithographs of Delacroix, the ghostly tam-
tam march in "Robert the Devil," the tinkle of the goat's
bell in "Dinorah," the illustrations of Gustave Dore, mean
nothing to the elect of this stern generation but an un-
intelligible refuse of bad drawing, barren, ugly orches-
tral tinkering, senseless and debased ambition. We have
been led forth from the desert in which these mirages
were always on the horizon to a land overflowing with

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

reality and earnestness. But if I were to be stoned for it
this afternoon by fervent Wagnerites and Ibsenites, I
must declare that the mirages were once dear and beau-
tiful, and that the whole Wagnerian criticism of them,
however salutary (I have been myself one of its most
ruthless practitioners), has all along been a pious dia-
lectical fraud, because it applies the tests of realism and
revelation to the arts of illusion and transfiguration.
From the point of view of the Building Act the palaces
built by Mr. Brock, the pyrotechnist, may be most pes-
tilent frauds ; but that only shows that Mr. Brock's point
of view is not that of the Building Act, though it might
be very necessary to deliberately force that criticism on
his works if real architecture showed signs of being
seduced by the charms of his colored fires. It was just
such an emergency that compelled Wagner to resort to
the pious dialectical fraud against his old romanticist
loves. Their enchantments were such that their phan-
tasms, which genius alone could sublimate from real life,
became the models after which the journeyman artist
worked and was taught to work, blinding him to nature
and reality, from which alone his talent could gain nour-
ishment and originality, and setting him to waste his life
in outlining the shadows of shadows, with the result that
Romanticism became, at second hand, the blight and dry
rot of Art. Then all the earnest spirits, from Ruskin and
the pre-Raphaelites to Wagner and Ibsen, rose up and
made war on it. Salvator Rosa, the romantic painter,
went down before the preaching of Ruskin as Delacroix
has gone down before the practice of John Maris, Von
Uhde, and the "impressionists" and realists whose work
led up to them. Meyerbeer was brutally squelched, and
Berlioz put out of countenance, by the preaching and

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practice of Wagner. And after Ibsen — nay, even after
the cup-and-saucer realists — we no longer care for Schil-
ler ; Victor Hugo, on his spurious, violently romantic side,
only incommodes us; and the spirit of such a wayward
masterpiece of Romanticism as Alfred de Musset's
"Lorenzaccio" would miss fire with us altogether if we
could bring ourselves to wade through the morass of
pseudo-mediaeval Florentine chatter with which it begins.
De Musset, though a drunkard, with his mind always
derelict in the sea of his imagination, yet had the sacred
fire. "Lorenzaccio" is a reckless play, broken up into
scores of scenes in the Shakespearean manner, but with-
out Shakespeare's workmanlike eye to stage business and
to cumulative dramatic effect; for half these scenes lead
nowhere; and the most gaily trivial of them — that in
which the two children fight — is placed m the fifth act,
after the catastrophe, which takes place in the fourth.
According to all the rules, the painter Tebaldeo must
have been introduced to stab somebody later on, instead
of merely to make Lorenzaccio feel like a cur; Filippo
Strozzi is a Virginius-Lear wasted; the Marquise was
plainly intended for something very fine in the seven-
teenth act, if the play ever got so far; and Lorenzaccio's
swoon at the sight of a sword in the first act remains a
mystery to the end of the play. False starts, dropped
motives, no-thoroughfares, bewilder the expert in "con-
struction" all through; but none the less the enchanter
sustains his illusion: you are always in the Renaissant
Italian city of the Romanticist imagination, a murderous
but fascinating place ; and the characters, spectral as they
are, are yet as distinct and individual as Shakespeare's,
some of them — Salviati, for instance— coming out with
the rudest force in a mere mouthful of lines. Only, the

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force never becomes realism: the romantic atmosphere
veils and transfigures everything: Lorenzaccio himself,
though his speeches bite with the suddenest vivacity,
never emerges from the mystic twilight of which he seems
to be only a fantastic cloud, and no one questions the con-
sistency of the feet stealing through nameless infamy and
the head raised to the stars. In the Romantic school
horror was naturally akin to sublimity.

In the Romantic school, too, there was nothing incon-
gruous in the man's part being played by a woman, since
the whole business was so subtly pervaded by sex instincts
that a woman never came amiss to a romanticist. To
him she was not a human being or a fellow-creature, but
simply the incarnated divinity of sex. And I regret to
add that women rather liked being worshipped on false
pretences at first. In America they still do. So they play
men's parts fitly enough in the Romantic school ; and the
contralto in trunk hose is almost a natural organic part
of romantic opera. Consequently, the announcement that
Sarah Bernhardt was to play Lorenzaccio was by no
means incongruous and scandalous, as, for instance, a
proposal on her part to play the Master Builder would
have been. Twenty years ago, under the direction of a
stage manager who really understood the work, she
would probably have given us a memorable sensation with
it. As it is — well, as it is, perhaps you had better go and
judge for yourself. A stall will only cost you a guinea.

Perhaps I am a prejudiced critic of French acting, as
it seems to me to be simply English acting fifty years out
of date, always excepting the geniuses like Coquelin and
Re jane, and the bold pioneers like Lugne Poe and his
company. The average Parisian actor was quaint and
interesting to me at first; and his peailiar mechanical

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

cadence, which he learns as brainlessly as a costermonger
learns his street cry, did not drive me mad as it does now.
I have even wished that English actors were taught their
alphabet as he is taught his. But I have worn off his
novelty by this time ; and I now perceive that he is quite
the worst actor in the world. Every year Madame Bern-^
hardt comes to us with a new play, in which she kills
somebody with any weapon from a hairpin to a hatchet ;
intones a great deal of dialogue as a sample of what is
called "the golden voice,** to the great delight of our
curates, who all produce more or less golden voices by
exactly the same trick ; goes through her well-known feat
of tearing a passion to tatters at the end of the second or
fourth act, according to the length of the piece; serves
out a certain ration of the celebrated smile ; and between
whiles gets through any ordinary acting that may be
necessary in a thoroughly businesslike and competent
fashion. This routine constitutes a permanent exhibition,
which is refurnished every year with fresh scenery, fresh
dialogue, and a fresh author, whilst remaining itself in-
variable. Still, there are real parts in Madame Bern-
hardt's repertory which date from the days before the
travelling show was opened; and she is far too clever a
woman, and too well endowed with stage instinct, not to
rise, in an off-handed, experimental sort of way, to the
more obvious points in such an irresistible new part as
Magda. So I had hopes, when I went to see "Lorenzac-
cio," that the fascination which, as Dona Sol, she once
gave to "Hernani," might be revived by De Musset's
romanticism. Those hopes did not last a minute after her
first entry. When the retort "Une msulte de pretre doit
se faire en latin" was intoned on one note with Melis-
sindian sweetness, like a sentimental motto out of a

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

cracker, I concluded that we were to have no Lorenzaccio,
and that poor De Musset's play was only a new pretext
for the old exhibition. But that conclusion, though sound
in the main, proved a little too sweeping. Certainly the
Lorenzaccio of De Musset, the filthy wretch who is a
demon and an angel, with his fierce, serpent-tongued rep-
artees, his subtle blasphemies, his cynical levity playing
over a passion of horror at the wickedness and cowardice
of the world that tolerates him, is a conception which
Madame Bernhardt has failed to gather from the text —
if she has troubled herself to gather any original im-
aginative conception from it, which I cannot help doubt-
ing. But the scene of the stealing of the coat of mail,
with its incorporated fragment of the earlier scene with
the painter, was excellently played ; and the murder scene
was not a bad piece of acting of a heavy conventional
kind, such as a good Shakespearean actor of the old
school would turn on before killing Duncan or Desde-
mona, or in declaiming "Oh that this too too solid flesh
would melt !" I seriously suggest to Madame Bernhardt
that she might do worse than attempt a round of Shake-
spearean heroes. Only, I beg her not to get M. Armand
d'Artois to arrange Shakespeare's plays for the stage as
he has so kindly arranged "Lorenzaccio."

The company supporting Madame Bernhardt is, as far
as I can judge, up to standard requirements. They de-
livered De Musset's phrases in the usual French manner,
so that the words "Alexandre de Medicis" rang through
my head all night like "extra special" or "Tuppence a
barskit." Only one actor succeeded in pronouncing
"Strozzi" properly ; and even he drew the line at Venturi,
which became frankly French. And yet when Mr. Ter-
riss, with British straightforwardness, makes the first

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

syllable in Valclos rhyme to "hall," and pronounces "Con-
tesse" like contest with the final t omitted, the British
playgoer whispers that you would never hear a French
actor doing such a thing. The trutli is that if Mr. Ter-
riss were to speak as we have often heard M. Mounet
Sully speak, he would be removed to an asylum until he
showed signs of returning humanity. As a rule, whefP?
an Englishman can act, he knows better than to waste
that invaluable talent on the stage; so that in England
an actor is mostly a man who cannot act well enough to .
be allowed to perform anywhere except in a theatre. In
France, an actor is a man who has not common sense
enough to behave naturally. And that, I imagine, is just
what the English actor was half a century ago.

GHOSTS AT THE JUBILEE

Ghosts. By Henrik Ibsen. The Independent Theatre,
Queen's Gate Hall, South Kensington, 24, 25, and
26 June, 1897.

THE Jubilee and Ibsen's "Ghosts"! On the one
hand the Queen and the Archbishop of Canter-
bury: on the other, Mrs. Alving and Pastor
Manders. Stupendous contrast! how far reflected in the
private consciousness of those two august persons there
is no means of ascertaining. For though of all the mill-
ions for the nourishment of whose loyalty the Queen must
submit to be carried through the streets from time to
time, not a man but is firmly persuaded that her opinions
and convictions are exact facsimiles of his own, none the
less she, having seen much of men and affairs, may quite

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

possibly be a wise woman and worthy successor of
Canute, and no mere butt for impertinent and senseless
Jubilee odes such as their perpetrators dare not, for fear
of intolerable domestic scorn and ridicule, address to their
I own wives or mothers. I am myself cut off by my pro-
fession from Jubilees ; for loyalty in a critic is corruption.
But if I am to avoid idolizing kings and queens in the
ordinary human way, I must carefully realize them as
fellow-creatures. And so, whilst the nation was burning
war incense in a thousand cannons before the throne at
Spithead, I was wondering, on my way home from
"Ghosts," how far life had brought to the Queen the les-
sons it brought to Mrs. Alving. For Mrs. Alving is not
anybody in particular: she is a typical figure of the ex-
perienced, intelligent woman who, in passing from the
first to the last quarter of the hour of history called the
nineteenth century, has discovered how appallingly op-
portunities were wasted, morals perverted, and instincts
corrupted, not only — sometimes not at all — ^by the vices
she was taught to abhor in her youth, but by the virtues
it was her pride and uprightness to maintain.

Suppose, then, the Queen were to turn upon us in the
midst of our jubilation, and say, "My Lords and Gentle-
men: You have been good enough to describe at great
length the changes made during the last sixty years in
science, art, politics, dress, sport, locomotion, newspapers,
and everything else that men chatter about. But have
you not a word to say about the change that comes home
most closely to me? I mean the change in the number,
the character, and the intensity of the lies a woman must
either believe or pretend to believe before she can grad-
uate in polite society as a well-brought-up lady." If Her
Majesty could be persuaded to give a list of these lies,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

what a document it would be ! Think of the young lady
of seventy years ago, systematically and piously lied to
by parents, governesses, clergymen, servants, everybody;
and slapped, sent to bed, or locked up in the bedevilled
and beghosted dark at every rebellion of her common
sense and natural instinct against sham religion, sham
propriety, sham decency, sham knowledge, and sham
ignorance. Surely every shop-window picture of "the
girl Queen" of 1837 must tempt the Queen of 1897 to
jump out of her carriage and write up under it, "Please
remember that there is not a woman earning twenty-four
shillings a week as a clerk to-day who is not ten times
better educated than this unfortunate girl was when the
crown dropped on her head, and left her to reign by her
mother wit and the advice of a parcel of men who to this
day have not sense enough to manage a Jubilee, let alone
an Empire, without offending everybody." Depend on
it, seventy-eight years cannot be lived through without
finding out things that queens do not mention in Adelphi
melodramas. Granted that the Queen's consort was not
a Chamberlain Alving, and that the gaps made in a wide,
numerous and robust posterity are too few for even Ibsen
to see in the dissoluteness of the ancesters of the First
Gentleman in Europe any great menace to the longevity
of their descendants; still nineteenth-century life, how-
ever it may stage-manage itself tragically and sensation-
ally here, or settle itself happily and domestically there,
is yet all of one piece; and it is possible to have better
luck than Mrs. Alving without missing all her conclu-
sions.

Let us therefore guard ourselves against the gratui-
tous, but just now very common, assumption that the
Queen, in her garnered wisdom and sorrow, is as silly

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

as the noisiest of her subjects, who see in their ideal
Queen the polar opposite of Mrs. Alving, and who are
so far right that the spirit of "Ghosts" is unquestionably
the polar opposite of the spirit of the Jubilee. The
Jubilee represents the nineteenth century proud of itself.
"Ghosts" represents it loathing itself. And how it can
loathe itself when it gets tired of its money ! Think of
Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx,
Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner and Ibsen. How
fiercely they rent the bosom that bore them ! How they
detested all the orthodoxies, and respectabilities, and
ideals we have just been be jubilating! Of all their at-
tacks, none is rasher or fiercer than "Ghosts." And yet,
like them all, it is perfectly unanswerable. Many gen-
erations have laughed at comedies like "L'Etourdi," and
repeated that hell is paved with good intentions; but
never before have we had the well-brought-up, high-
minded nineteenth-century lady and her excellent clergy-
man as the mischief-makers. With them the theme,
though still in its essence comic, requires a god to laugh
at it. To mortals who may die of such blundering it is
tragic and ghastly.

The performance of "Ghosts" by the Independent
Theatre Society left the two previous productions by
the same society far behind. As in the case of "The
Wild Duck," all obscurity vanished; and Ibsen's clear-
ness, his grip of his theme, and the rapidity, directness
and intensity of the action of the piece produced the
effect they can always be depended on to produce in
capable hands, such as Mr. Charrington's, so far alone
among those of Ibsenite stage-managers, have proved
to be. Mrs. Theodore Wright's Mrs. Alving, originally
an achievement quite beyond the culture of any other

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

actress of her generation, is still hardly less peculiar to
her. Mrs. Wright's technique is not in the least that of
the Ibsen school. Never for a moment would you suspect
her of having seen Miss Janet Achurch or any one re-
motely resembling her. She is unmistakably a contem-
porary of Miss Ellen Terry. When I first saw her act
she was playing Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing,"
with a charm and intuition that I have not seen surpassed,
and should not have seen equalled if I had never seen
Miss Terry wasting her gifts on Shakespeare. As it
happened, Mrs. Theodore Wright, perhaps because she
was so fond of acting that the stage, where there is less
opportunity for it than anywhere else in England, bored
her intolerably, found her way behind the scenes of the
revolutionary drama of the century at a time when the
happy ending now in progress had not been reached, and
played Shakespeare and recited Shelley, Hood and
George Eliot before Karl Marx, Morris, Bradlaugh and
other volcanic makers of the difference between 1837
and 1897, ^s proudly as Talma played to his pit of kings.
Her authors, it will be seen, were not so advanced as her
audiences ; but that could not be helped, as the progres-
sive movement in England had not produced a dramatist ;
and nobody then dreamt of Norway, or knew that Ibsen
had begun the drama of struggle and emancipation, and
had declared that the really effective progressive forces of
the moment were the revolt of the working classes against
economic, and of the women against idealistic, slavery.
Such a drama, of course, immediately found out that
weak spot in the theatrical profession which Duse put
her finger on the other day in Paris — the so-called stu-
pidity of the actors and actresses. Stupidity, however,
is hardly the word. Actors and actresses are clever

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

enough on the side on which their profession cultivates
them. What is the matter with them is the characteristic
narrowness and ignorance of their newly conquered con-
ventional respectability. They are now neither above the
commonplaces of middle-class idealism, like the aristo-
crat and poet, nor below them, like the vagabond and
Bohemian. The theatre has become very much what the
Dissenting chapel used to be: there is not a manager in
London who, in respect of liberality and enlightenment
of opinion, familiarity and sympathy with current social
questions, can be compared with the leaders of Noncon-
formity. Take Sir Henry Irving and Dr. Clifford for
example. The "Dissenter" is a couple of centuries ahead
of the actor : indeed, the comparison seems absurd, so gro-
tesquely is it to the disadvantage of the institution which
still imagines itself the more cultured and less prejudiced
of the two. And, but for Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the
authors would cut as poor a figure from this point of
view as the actors. Duse advises actors to read; but of
what use is that? They do read — more than is good for
them. They read the drama, and are eager students of
criticism, though they would die rather than confess as
much to a critic. (Whenever an actor tells me, as he
invariably does, that he has not seen any notices of his
performance, I always know that he has the "Saturday
Review" in his pocket; but I respect the delicacy of an
evasion which is as instinctive and involuntary as blush-
ing.) When the drama loses its hold on life, and criti-
cism is dragged down with it, the actor's main point of
intellectual contact with the world is cut off; for he
reads nothing else with serious attention. He then has
to spin his culture out of his own imagination or that
of the dramatist and critics, a facile but delusive process

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

which leaves nothing real to fall back on but his technical
craft, which may make him a good workman, but nothing
else.

If even technical craft became impossible at such a
period — say through the long run and the still longer
tour destroying the old training without replacing it by
a new one — then the gaps in the actor's cultivation and
the corresponding atrophied patches in his brain would
call almost for a Mission for his Intellectual Reclamation.
Something of this kind might have happened in our own
time — I am not sure that a few cases of it did not actu-
ally happen — if Ibsen had not come to the rescue. At
all events, things had gone so far that the reigning gen-
eration of actor-managers were totally incapable of un-
derstanding Ibsen: his plays were not even grammar
and spelling to them, much less drama. That what they
found there was the life of their own time ; that its ideas
had been seething round their theatres for years past;
that they themselves, chivalrously "holding up the ban-
ner of the ideal" in the fool's paradise of theatrical ro-
mance and sentiment, had served Ibsen, as they formerly
served Goethe, as reductions-to-absurdity of that divorce
of the imagined life from the real which is the main
peril of an age in which everybody is provided with the
means of substituting reading and romancing for real
living: all this was quite outside their comprehension.
To them the new phenomenon was literally "the Ibsen
craze," a thing bound to disappear whilst they were rub-
bing their eyes to make sure that they saw the absurd
monster clearly. But that was exactly Mrs. Theodore
Wright's opportunity. A lady who had talked over mat-
ters with Karl Marx was not to be frightened by Pastor
Manders. She created Mrs. Alving as easily, sympathet-

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ically, and intelligently as Miss Winifred Emery or Miss
Kate Rorke will create the heroine of the next adaptation
from the French drama of 1840 by Mr. Grundy; and by
that one step she walked over the heads of the whole pro-
fession, I cannot say into the first intellectual rank as
an English actress, because no such rank then existed,
but into a niche in the history of the English stage the
prominence of which would, if they could foresee it, very
considerably astonish those who think that making his-
tory is as easy as making knights. (The point of this
venomous allusion will not be missed. It is nothing to
be a knight-actor now that there are two of them. When
will Sir Henry Irving bid for at least a tiny memorial in-
scription in the neighborhood of Mrs. Theodore Wright's
niche?)

The remarkable success of Mr. Courtenay Thorpe in
Ibsen parts in London lately, and the rumors as to the
sensation created by his Oswald Alving in America, gave
a good deal of interest to his first appearance here in
that part. He has certainly succeeded in it to his heart's
content, though this time his very large share of the
original sin of picturesqueness and romanticism broke
out so strongly that he borrowed little from realism ex-
cept its pathologic horrors. Since Miss Robins's mem-
orable exploit in "Alan's Wife" we have had nothing so
harrowing on the stage; and it should be noted, for
guidance in future experiments in audience torture, that
in both instances the limit of the victims' susceptibility
was reached before the end of the second act, at which
exhaustion produced callousness. Mrs. Alving, who
spared us by making the best of her sorrows instead of
the worst of them, preserved our sympathy up to the
last; but Oswald, who showed no mercy, might have

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

been burnt alive in the orphanage without a throb of
compassion. Mr. Leonard Outram improved prodig-
iously on his old impersonation of Pastor Manders. In
1 89 1 he was still comparatively fresh from the appren-
ticeship as a heroic rhetorical actor which served him
so well when he played Valence to Miss Alma Murray's
Colombe for the 'Browning Society; and his stiff and
cautious performance probably meant nothing but clev-
erly concealed bewilderment. This time Mr. Outram
really achieved the character, though he would probably
please a popular audience better by making more of that
babyish side of him which excites the indulgent affection
of Mrs. Alving, and less of the moral cowardice and
futility posing as virtue and optirnism which brings down
on him the contemptuous judgment of Ibsen himself.
Miss Kingsley's attractions, made as familiar to us by
the pencil of Mr. Rothenstein as Miss Dorothy Dene's
by that of Leighton, were excellently fitted to Regina;
and Mr. Norreys Connell, after a somewhat unpromising
beginning, played Engstrand with much zest and humor.

303

MR. GRUNDY'S IMPROVEMENTS ON
DUMAS

The Silver Key: a comedy in four acts, adapted

from Alexandre Dumas' "Mile de Belleisle" by

Sydney Grundy. Her Majesty's Theatre, lo July,
1897.

I MUST say I take the new Dumas adaptation in any-
thing but good part. Why on earth cannot Mr.
Grundy let well alone ? Dumas pkre was what Gou-
nod called Mozart, a summit in art. Nobody ever could,
or did, or will improve on Mozart's operas; and nobody
ever could, or did, or will improve on Dumas' romances
and plays. After Dumas you may have Dumas-and-
water, or you may have, in Balzac, a quite new and dif-
ferent beginning; but you get nothing above Dumas on
his own mountain : he is the summit, and if you attempt
to pass him you come down on the other side instead
of getting higher. Mr. Grundy's version of the "Mar-
iage sous Louis Quinze" did not suggest that he was
in the absurd position of being the only expert in the
world who did not know this ; but the chorus of acclama-
tion with which we greeted that modest and workman-
like achievement seems to have dazzled him; for in his
version of "Madamoiselle de Belleisle" he treats us to
several improvements of his own, some of them pruder-
ies which spare us nothing of the original except its wit ;
others, like the dreams and the questioning of the ser-
vant in her mistress's presence by the jealous lover, wan-
ton adulterations ; and all, as it seems to me, blunders in
stagecraft. They remind me of the "additional accom-
paniments" of our musicians used to condescend to sup-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ply when an opera by some benighted foreigner of genius
was produced here. If Mr. Grundy were a painter and
composer as well as a dramatist, I dare say he could re-
score "Don Giovanni" and repaint Velasquez' Philip to
the entire satisfaction of people who know no better;
but if he were an artist, he would not want to do so,
and would feel extremely indignant with any one who
did. I hope I am no fanatic as to the reverence with
which the handiwork of a great man should be treated.
If Dumas had failed to make any point in his story clear,
then I should no more think of blaming Mr. Grundy for
putting in a speech, or even a little episode, to elucidate
it, than I blame Wagner for helping out Beethoven in
the Ninth Symphony in places where the most prominent
melody in the written score was, as a matter of physical
fact, inaudible when performed, or where there were dis-
tortions caused by deficiencies in instruments since pro-
vided with a complete scale. But "Madamoiselle de
Belleisle" is expounded by its author with a dramatic
perspicacity far beyond our most laborious efforts at
play construction; and the net result of Mr. Grundy's
meddling is that the audience does not fully understand
until the end of the third act (the original fourth) the
mistake on which the whole interest of the scene in the
second (third) between Richelieu and the two lovers
depends. It is almost as if Mr. Grundy were to adopt
"Cymbeline," which is the same play with a slight dif-
ference of treatment, and to send the audience home with
the gravest doubts as to what really took place between
lachimo and Imogen. The resource of "construction"
cannot reasonably be denied to authors who have not
the natural gift of telling a story; but when the whole
difficulty might have been avoided by dealing faithfully

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with the work of one of the best storytellers, narrative
or dramatic, that ever lived, I feel driven to express my-
self shrewishly. As to the ending of the play with a
crudely dragged in title-tag ("The Silver King" or some-
thing like it), it is — well, I do not wish to be inipolite;
so I will simply ask Mr. Grundy whether he really thinks
highly of it himself.

The acting at Her Majesty's is not precisely what one
calls exquisite; and for perfect interpretation of Dumas
acting should be nothing less. Such delicacy of execu-
tion as there is on our stage never comes within a mile
of virtuosity. As virtuosity in manners was the char-
acteristic mode of eighteenth-century smart society, it
follows that we get nothing of the eighteenth century
at Her Majesty's, except that from time to time the per-
sons of the drama alarm us by suddenly developing symp-
toms of strychnine poisoning, which are presently seen
to be intended for elaborate bows and curtseys. This
troubles the audience very little. The manners of Mr.
Tree and Mr. Waller are better than eighteenth-century
manners ; and I, for one, am usually glad to exchange old
lamps for new ones in this particular. But it takes no
very subtle critic to see that the exchange makes the
play partly incredible. Mr. Waller suffers more in this
respect than Mr. Tree, because his late-nineteenth-century
personality is hopelessly incompatible with the eighteenth-
century cut-and-dried ideals of womanhood and chivalry
of the hero he represents. Mr. Tree is in no such dilem-
ma. The lapse of a century has left Richelieu (described
by Macaulay as "an old fop who had passed his life from
sixteen to sixty in seducing women for whom he cared
not one straw") still alive and familiar. What people
call vice is eternal : what they call virtue is mere fashion.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Consequently, though Mr. Waller's is the most forcible
acting in the piece — though he alone selects and em-
phasizes the dramatically significant points which lead
the spectator clearly through the story, yet his perform-
ance stands out flagrantly as a tour de force of acting
and not as life; whilst Mr. Tree, who makes no partic-
ular display of his powers as an actor except for a mo-
ment in the duel with dice, produces a quite sufficient
illusion.

There is one quality which is never absent in Dumas,
and never present in English performances of him ; and
that is the voluntary naivete of humorous clearsighted-
ness. Dumas* invariable homage to the delicacy of his
heroines and the honor of his heroes has something in it
of that maxima reverentia which the disillusionment of
mature age pays to the innocence of youth. He handles
his lovers as if they were pretty children, giving them
the charm of childhood when he can, and unconsciously
betraying a wide distinction in his own mind between the
ideal virtues which he gives them as a romantic sinner
might give golden candlesticks to a saint's altar, and the
real ones which he is prepared to practise as well as
preach — high personal loyalty, for instance. Hence it
is that his stories are always light-hearted and free from
that pressure of moral responsibility without which an
Englishman would burst like a fish dragged up from
the floor of the Atlantic deeps. At Her Majesty's the
two performers with the strongest sense of comedy — Mrs.
Tree and Mr. Lionel Brough — do contrive to bear the
burden of public morality easily; but the rest carefully
clear thernselves of all suspicion of Continental levity:
even Richelieu contrives to convey that whatever may
happen in the Marquise's bedroom, he will be found at

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the strait gate in the narrow way punctually at eleven
the next Sunday morning. As to Miss Millard, she im-
personated Madamoiselle de Belleisle with the most
chastising propriety. She evidently knew all about Rich-
elieu's ways from the beginning, and was simply lying
in wait for effective opportunities of pretending to be
amazed and horrified at them. I have seen nothing more
ladylike on the stage. It was magnificent; but it was
not Dumas.

Miss Gigia Filippi — sister, I presume, to that clever
actress Miss Rosina Filippi — played the waiting-maid
Mariette according to a conception of her art upon which
I shall preach a little sermon, because I believe it to be
a misleading conception, and because nevertheless it is
one which no less an exponent of stage art thaai Miss
Ellen Terry has carried out with undeniable success. It
came about, as I guess, in this way. Miss Terry, as we
all know, went on the stage in her childhood, and not
only "picked-up" her profession, but was systematically
taught it by Mrs. Charles Kean, with the result that to
this day her business is always thoroughly well done,
and her part gets over the footlights to the ends of the
house without loss of a syllable or the waste of a stroke.
But if Mrs. Charles Kean qualified her to be the heroine
of a play. Nature presently qualified her to be the heroine
of a picture by making her grow up quite unlike anybody
that had ever been seen on earth before. I trust Nature
has not broken the mould : if she has. Miss Terry's por-
traits will go down to posterity as those of the only real
New Woman, who was never repeated afterwards. The
great painters promptly pounced on her as they did on
Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Stillman. She added what she
learnt in the studio to what she had already learnt on

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the stage so successfully that when I first saw her in
"Hamlet" it was exactly as if the powers of a beautiful
picture of Ophelia had been extended to speaking and
singing. It was no doubt her delight in this pictorial art
that made he so easily satisfied with old-fashioned rhetor-
ical characters which have no dramatic interest for any
intelligent woman nowadays, much less for an ultra-
modem talent like Miss Terry's. When she came to the
"touches of nature" in such characters (imagine a school
of drama in which nature is represented only by
"touches"!) she seized on them with an enjoyment and
a tender solicitude for them that showed the born actress ;
but after each of them she dropped back into the picto-
rial as unquestioningly as Patti, after two bars of really
dramatic music in an old-fashioned aria, will drop back
into purely decorative roulade. And here you have the
whole secret of the Lyceum : a drama worn by age into
great holes, and the holes filled up with the art of the
picture gallery. Sir Henry Irving as King Arthur, going
solemnly through a Crummies broadsword combat with
great beauty of deportment in a costume designed by
Burne-Jones is the reductio-ad-absurdum of it. Miss
Ellen Terry as a beautiful living picture in the vision in
the prologue is its open reduction to the art to which
it really belongs. And Miss Ellen Terry as Madame
Sans-Gene is the first serious struggle of dramatic art to
oust its supplanter and reclaim the undivided service of
its wayward daughter.

The most advanced audiences to-day, taught by Wag-
ner and Ibsen (not to mention Ford Madox Brown),
cannot stand the drop back into decoration after the
moment of earnest life. They want realistic drama of
complete brainy, passional texture all through, and will

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not have any pictorial stuff or roulade at all — ^will not
even have the old compromise by which drama was dis-
guised and denaturalized in adaptations of the decorative
forms. The decorative play, with its versified rhetoric,
its timid little moments of feeling and blusterous big
moments of raving nonsense, must now step down to
the second-class audience, which is certainly more nu-
merous and lucrative than the first-class, but is being
slowly dragged after it in spite of its reinforcement of
its resistence by the third-class audience hanging on to
its coat tails. It screams and kicks most piteously during
the process; but it will have to submit; for the public
must finally take, willy-nilly, what its greatest artists
choose to give it, or else do without art. And so even
the second-class public, though it still likes plenty of pic-
torial beauty and distinction (meaning mostly expensive-
ness and gentility) in the setting, and plenty of comfort-
able optimistic endearment and cheap fun in the sub-
stance, nevertheless needs far more continuous drama
to bind the whole together and compel sustained atten-
tion and interest than it did twenty years ago. Conse-
quently the woman who now comes on the stage with
carefully cultivated qualifications as an artist's model,
and none as an actress, no longer finds herself fitting
exactly into leading parts even in the fashionable drama
of the day, and automatically driving the real actresses off
the stage. Miss Ellen Terry innocently created a whole
school of such pictorial leading ladies. They went to
the Lyceum, where, not being skilled critics, they recog-
nized the heroine's pictorial triumphs as art, whilst ta-
king such occasional sallies of acting as the Shakespearean
"touches of nature" admitted of as the spontaneous opera-
tion of Miss Terry's own charming individuality. I am

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not sure that I have not detected that simple-mindeH
Terry theory in more critical quarters. The art, of
course, lay on the side where it was least suspected. The
nervous athleticism and trained expertness which have
enabled Miss Terry, without the least appearance of
violence, to hold her audiences with an unfailing grip in
a house which is no bandbox, and where really weak
acting, as we have often seen, drifts away under the
stage door and leaves the audience coughing, are only
known by their dissimulative effect: that is, they are not
known at all for what they really are; whereas the pic-
torial business, five-sixths of which is done by trusting
to nature, proceeds, as to the other sixth, by perfectly
obvious methods. In this way, an unenlightened obser-
vation of Miss Ellen Terry produced the "aesthetic" act-
ress, or living picture. Such a conception of stage art
came very easily to a generation of young ladies whose
notions of art were centered by the Slade School and the
Grosvenor Gallery.

Now Miss Gigia Filippi is original enough not to
directly imitate Miss Terry or any other individual art-
ist. But I have never seen the pictorial conception car-
ried out with greater industry and integrity. Miss Filippi
was on the stage when the curtain went up; and before
it was out of sight I wanted a kodak. Every movement
ended in a picture, not a Burne- Jones or Rossetti, but a
dark-eyed, red-cheeked, full-lipped, pearly-toothed, co-
quettish Fildes or Van Haanen. The success of the ex-
hibition almost justified the labor it must have cost.
But that is not acting. It is a string that a finished
actress may add to her bow if she has the faculty for it,
like Miss Terry; but as a changeling for acting it will
not do, especially in a play by Dumas. When Miss Fil-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ippi speaks, she takes pains to make her voice soft and
musical; but as she has never had a competent person
sitting in the gallery to throw things at her head the
moment she became unintelligible, the consonants often
slip away unheard, and nothing remains but a musical
murmur of vowels, soothing to the ear, but baffling and
exasperating to people whose chief need at the moment
is to find out what the play is about. On the other side
of the Haymarket Miss Dairolles has a precisely similar
part. Miss Dairolles seeks first to live as the clever
lady's-maid of the play in the imagination of the audi-
ence ; and all the other things are added unto her without
much preoccupation on her part. Miss Filippi prefers
to stand composing pretty pictures, and exhibiting each
of them for nearly half a minute, instead of for the tenth
part of a second, as a skilled actress would. Now an
effect prolonged for even an instant after artists and
audience have become conscious of it is recognized as
an end with the artist instead of a means, and so ceases
to be an effect at all. It is only applauded by Partridge,
with his "anybody can see that the king is an actor,"
or, in Miss Filippi's case, by dramatically obtuse painters
and Slade School students on the watch for pictures
everywhere. I earnestly advise Miss Filippi to disregard
their praises and set about finding a substitute for Mrs.
Qiarles Kean at once.

^12

"HAMLET"

2 October, iSgf,

THE Forbes-Robertson "Hamlet" at the Lyceum is,
very unexpectedly at that address, really not at
all unlike Shakespeare's play of the same name.
I am quite certain I saw Reynaldo in it for a moment;
and possibly I may have seen Voltimand and Cornelius ;
but just as the time for their scene arrived, my eye fell
on the word "Fortinbras" in the programme, which so
amazed me that I hardly know what I saw for the next
ten minutes. Ophelia, instead of being a strenuously
earnest and self-possessed young lady giving a concert
and recitation for all she was worth, was mad — ^actually
mad. The story of the play was perfectly intelligible,
and quite took the attention of the audience off the
principal actor at moments. What is the Lyceum coming
to? Is it for this that Sir Henry Irving has invented a
whole series of original romantic dramas, and given the
credit of them without a murmur to the immortal bard
whose profundity (as exemplified in the remark that good
and evil are mingled in our natures) he has just been
pointing out to the inhabitants of Cardiff, and whose
works have been no more to him than the word-quarry
from which he has hewn and blasted the lines and titles
of masterpieces which are really all his own? And now,
when he has created by these means a reputation for
Shakespeare, he no sooner turns his back for a moment
on London than Mr. Forbes Robertson competes with him
on the boards of his own theatre by actually playing off
against him the authentic Swan of Avon. Now if the
result had been the utter exposure and collapse of that

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impostor, poetic justice must have proclaimed that it
served Mr. Forbes Robertson right. But alas! the wily
William, by literary tricks which our simple Sir Henry
has never quite understood, has played into Mr. Forbes
Robertson's hands so artfully that the scheme is a pro-
digious success. The effect of this success, coming after
' that of Mr. Alexander's experiment with a Shakespearean
version of "As You Like It," makes it almost probable
that we shall presently find managers vieing with each
other in offering the public as much of the original Shake-
spearean stuff as possible, instead of, as heretofore, doing
their utmost to reassure us that everything that the most
modern resources can do to relieve the irreducible min-
imum of tedium inseparable from even the most heavily
cut acting version will be lavished on their revivals. It
is true that Mr. Beerbohm Tree still holds to the old
scepticism, and calmly proposes to insult us by offering
us Garrick's puerile and horribly caddish knockabout
farce of "Katherine and Petruchio" for Shakespeare's
"Taming of the Shrew" ; but Mr. Tree, like all romantic
actors, is incorrigible on the subject of Shakespeare.

Mr. Forbes Robertson is essentially a classical actor,
the only one, with the exception of Mr. Alexander, now
established in London management. What I mean by
Classical is that he can present a dramatic hero as a man
whose passions are those which have produced the philos-
ophy, the poetry, the art, and the statecraft of the world,
and not merely those which have produced its weddings,
\^ coroner's inquests, and executions. And that is just the
sort of actor that Hamlet requires. A Hamlet who only
understands his love for Ophelia, his grief for his father,
his vindictive hatred of his uncle, his fear of ghosts, his
impulse to snub Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, and the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

sportsman's excitement with which he lays the "mouse-
trap" for Claudius, can, with sufficient force or virtuosity
of execution, get a great reputation in the part, even
though the very intensity of his obsession by these senti-
ments (which are common not only to all men but to
many animals), shows that the characteristic side of
Hamlet, the side that differentiates him from Fortinbras,
is absolutely outside the actor's consciousness. Such a
reputation is the actor's, not Hamlet's. Hamlet is not a
man in whom "common humanity" is raised by great
vital energy to a heroic pitch, like Coriolanus or Othello.
On the contrary, he is a man in whom the common per-
sonal passions are so superseded by wider and rarer in-
terests, and so discouraged by a degree of critical self-
consciousness which makes the practical efficiency of the
instinctive man on the lower plane impossible to him,
that he finds the duties dictated by conventional revenge
and ambition as disagreeable a burden as commerce is to
a poet. Even his instinctive sexual impulses offend his
intellect; so that when he meets the woman who excites
them he invites her to join him in a bitter and scornful
criticism of their joint absurdity, demanding "What
should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and
earth?" "Why would'st thou be a breeder of sinners?"
and so forth, all of which is so completely beyond the
poor girl that she naturally thinks him mad. And, in-
deed, there is a sense in which Hamlet is insane; for he
trips over the mistake which lies on the threshold of in-
tellectual self-consciousness: that of bringing life to
utilitarian or Hedonistic tests, thus treating it as a means
instead of an end. Because Polonius is "a foolish prating
knave," because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are snobs,
he kills them as remorselessly as he might kill a flea,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

showing that he has no real belief in the superstitious
reason which he gives for not killing himself, and in fact
anticipating exactly the whole course of the intellectual
history of Western Europe until Schopenhauer found the
clue that Shakespeare missed. But to call Hamlet mad
because he did not anticipate Schopenhauer is like calling
Marcellus mad because he did not refer the Ghost to the
Psychical Society. It is in fact not possible for any actor
to represent Hamlet as mad. He may (and generally
does) combine some notion of his own of a man who is
the creature of affectionate sentiment with the figure
drawn by the lines of Shakespeare ; but the result is not
a madman, but simply one of those monsters produced
by the imaginary combination of two normal species, such
as sphinxes, mermaids, or centaurs. And this is the in-
variable resource of the instinctive, imaginative, romantic
actor. You will see him weeping buckets ful of tears over
Ophelia, and treating the players, the gravedigger, Hora-
tio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as if they were mutes
at his own funeral. But go and watch Mr. Forbes Robert-
son's Hamlet seizing delightedly on every opportunity for
a bit of philosophic discussion or artistic recreation to
escape from the "cursed spite" of revenge and love and
other common troubles; see how he brightens up when
the players come; how he tries to talk philosophy with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the moment they come
into the room; how he stops on his country walk with
Horatio to lean over the churchyard wall and draw out
the gravedigger whom he sees singing at his trade ; how
even his fits of excitement find expression in declaiming
scraps of poetry; how the shock of Ophelia's death re-
lieves itself in the fiercest intellectual contempt for
Laertes's ranting, whilst an hour afterwards, when

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Laertes stabs him, he bears no malice for that at all, but
embraces him gallantly and comradely; and how he dies
as we forgive everything to Charles 11. for dying, and
makes "the rest is silence" a touchingly humorous apology
for not being able to finish his business. See all that;
and you have seen a true classical Hamlet. Nothing half
so charming has been seen by this generation. It will
bear seeing again and again.

And please observe that this is not a cold Hamlet. He
is none of your logicians who reason their way through
the world because they cannot feel their way through it :
his intellect is the organ of his passion : his eternal self-
criticism is as alive and thrilling as it can possibly be.
The great soliloquy — no: I do NOT mean "To be or
not to be" : I mean the dramatic one, "O what a rogue
and peasant slave am I!" — is as passionate in its scorn
of brute passion as the most buUnecked affirmation or
sentimental dilution of it could be. It comes out so with-
out violence: Mr. Forbes Robertson takes the part quite
easily and spontaneously. There is none of that strange
Lyceum intensity which comes from the perpetual strug-
gle between Sir Henry Irving and Shakespeare. The
lines help Mr. Forbes Robertson instead of getting in his
way at every turn, because he wants to play Hamlet, and
not to slip into his inky cloak a changeling of quite an-
other race. We may miss the craft, the skill double-dis-
tilled by constant peril, the subtlety, the dark rays of heat
generated by intense friction, the relentless parental te-
nacity and cunning with which Sir Henry nurses his own
pet creations on Shakespearean food like a fox rearing
its litter in the den of a lioness ; but we get light, freedom,
naturalness, credibility, and Shakespeare. It is wonder-
ful how easily everything comes right when you have the

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

right man with the right mind for it — how the story tells
itself, how the characters come to life, how even the
failures in the cast cannot confuse you, though they may
disappoint you. And Mr. Forbes Robertson has certainly
not escaped such failures, even in his own family. I
strongly urge him to take a hint from Claudius and make
a real ghost of Mr. Ian Robertson at once; for there is
really no use in going through that scene night after
night with a Ghost who is so solidly, comfortably and
dogmatically alive as his brother. The voice is not a bad
voice; but it is the voice of a man who does not believe
in ghosts. Moreover, it is a hungry voice, not that of
one who is past eating. There is an indescribable little
complacent drop at the end of every line which no sooner
calls up the image of purgatory by its words than by its
smug elocution it convinces us that this particular penitent
is cosily warming his shins and toasting his muffin at the
flames instead of expiating his bad acting in the midst of
them. His aspect and bearing are worse than his recita-
tions. He beckons Hamlet away like a beadle summoning
a timid candidate for the post of junior footman to the
presence of the Lord Mayor. If I were Mr. Forbes Rob-
ertson I would not stand that from any brother : I would
cleave the general ear with horrid speech at him first.
It is a pity; for the Ghost's part is one of the wonders
of the play. And yet, until Mr. Courtenay Thorpe divined
it the other day, nobody seems to have had a glimpse of
the reason why Shakespeare would not trust any one else
with it, and played it himself. The weird music of that
long speech which should be the spectral wail of a soul's
bitter wrong crying from one world to another in the ex-
tremity of its torment, is invariably handed over to the
most squaretoed member of the company, who makes it

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sound, not like Rossetti's "Sister Helen," or even, to sug-
gest a possible heavy treatment, like Mozart's statue-
ghost, but like Chambers's Information for the People.

Still, I can understand Mr. Ian Robertson, by sheer
force of a certain quality of sententiousness in him, over-
bearing the management into casting him for the Ghost.
What I cannot understand is why Miss Granville was
cast for the Queen. It is like setting a fashionable modem
mandolinist to play Haydn's sonatas. She does her best
under the circumstances; but she would have been more
fortunate had she been in a position to refuse the part.

On the other hand, several of the impersonations are
conspicuously successful. Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
Ophelia is a surprise. The part is one which has hitherto
seemed incapable of progress. From generation to gen-
eration actresses have, in the mad scene, exhausted their
musical skill, their ingenuity in devising fantasias in the
language of flowers, and their intensest powers of por-
traying anxiously earnest sanity. Mrs. Patrick Campbell,
with that complacent audacity of hers which is so ex-
asperating when she is doing the wrong thing, this time
does the right thing by making Ophelia really mad. The
resentment of the audience at this outrage is hardly to
be described. They long for the strenuous mental grasp
and attentive coherence of Miss Lily Hanbury's concep-
tion of maiden lunacy; and this wandering, silly, vague
Ophelia, who no sooner catches an emotional impulse
than it drifts away from her again, emptying her voice
of its tone in a way that makes one shiver, makes them
horribly uncomfortable. But the effect on the play is
conclusive. The shrinking discomfort of the King and
Queen, the rankling grief of Laertes, are created by it
at once ; and the scene, instead of being a pretty interlude

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

coming in just when a little relief from the inky cloak
is welcome, touches us with a chill of the blood that gives
it is right tragic power and dramatic significance. Play-
goers naturally murmur when something that has always
been pretty becomes painful; but the pain is good for
them, good for the theatre, and good for the play. I
doubt whether Mrs. Patrick Campbell fully appreciates
the dramatic value of her quite simple and original sketch
— it is only a sketch — of the part ; but in spite of the oc-
casional triviality of its execution and the petulance with
which it has been received, it seems to me to finally settle
in her favor the question of her right to the very im-
portant place which Mr. Forbes Robertson has assigned
to her in his enterprises.

I did not see Mr. Bernard Gould play Laertes : he was
indisposed when I returned to town and hastened to the
Lyceum; but he was replaced very creditably by Mr.
Frank Dyall. Mr. Martin Harvey is the best Osric I have
seen: he plays Osric from Osric's own point of view,
which is, that Osric is a gallant and distinguished courtier,
and not, as usual, from Hamlet's, which is that Osric is
"a waterfly." Mr. Harrison Hunter hits off the modest,
honest Horatio capitally; and Mr. Willes is so good a
Gravedigger that I venture to suggest to him that he
should carry his work a little further, and not virtually
cease to concern himself with the play when he has spoken
his last line and handed Hamlet the skull. Mr. Cooper
Cliff e is not exactly a subtle Claudius; but he looks as
if he had stepped out of a picture by Madox Brown, and
plays straightforwardly on his very successful appearance.
Mr. Barnes makes Polonius robust and elderly instead of
aged and garrulous. He is good in the scenes where
Polonius appears as a man of character and experience;

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

but the senile exhibitions of courtierly tact do not match
these, and so seem forced and farcical.

Mr. Forbes Robertson's own performance has a con-
tinuous charm, interest and variety which are the result
not only of his well-known familiar grace and accom-
plishment as an actor, but of a genuine delight — the
rarest thing on our stage — in Shakespeare's art, and a
natural familiarity with the plane of his imagination. He
does not superstitiously worship William : he enjoys him
and understands his methods of expression. Instead of
cutting every line that can possibly be spared, he retains
every gem, in his own part or anyone else's, that he can
make time for in a spiritedly brisk performance lasting
three hours and a half with very short intervals. He
does not utter half a line; then stop to act; then go on
with another half line; and then stop to act again, with
the clock running away with Shakespeare's chances all
the time. He plays as Shakespeare should be played, on
the line and to the line, with the utterance and acting
simultaneous, inseparable and in fact identical. Not for
a moment is he solemnly conscious of Shakespeare's rep-
utation, or of Hamlet's momentousness in literary his-
tory : on the contrary, he delivers us from all these bore-
doms instead of heaping them on us. We forgive him
the platitudes, so engagingly are they delivered. His
novel and astonishingly effective and touching treatment
of the final scene is an inspiration, from the fencing match
onward. If only Fortinbras could also be inspired with
sufficient force and brilliancy to rise to the warlike splen-
dor of his helmet, and make straight for that throne like
a man who intended to keep it against all comers, he
would leave nothing to be desired. How many genera-
tions of Hamlets, all thirsting to outshine their compet-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

itors in effect and originality, have regarded Fortinbras,
and the clue he gives to this kingly death for Hamlet, as
a wildly unpresentable blunder of the poor foolish old
Swan, than whom they all knew so much better! How
sweetly they have died in that faith to slow music, like
Little Nell in "The Old Curiosity Shop" ! And now how
completely Mr. Forbes Robertson has bowled them all
out by being clever enough to be simple.

By the way, talking of slow music, the sooner Mr.
Hamilton Clarke's romantic Irving music is stopped, the
better. Its effect in this Shakespearean version of the
play is absurd. The four Offenbachian young women
in tights should also be abolished, and the part of the
player-queen given to a man. The courtiers should be
taught how flatteringly courtiers listen when a king shows
off his wisdom in wise speeches to his nephew. And that
nice wooden beach on which the ghost walks would be
the better for a seaweedy-looking cloth on it, with a hand-
ful of shrimps and a pennorth of silver sand.

322

AT SEVERAL THEATRES

Francillon. From the French of Alexandre Dumas
His. A comedy in three acts. Duke of York's
Theatre.

As You Like It. Grand Theatre, Islington, 4 Octo-
ber, 1897.

The Liars: a new and original comedy. By Henry
Arthur Jones. Criterion Theatre, 6 October, 1897.

I NEVER see Miss Ada Rehan act without burning to
present Mr. Augustin Daly with a delightful villa
in St. Helena, and a commission from an influential
committee of his admirers to produce at his leisure a
complete set of Shakespeare's plays, entirely rewritten,
reformed, rearranged, and brought up to the most ad.-
vanced requirements of the year 1850. He was in full
force at the Islington Theatre on Monday evening last
with his version of "As You Like It" just as I don't like
it. There I saw Amiens under the greenwood tree,
braving winter and rough weather in a pair of crimson
plush breeches, a spectacle to benumb the mind and ob-
scure the passions. There was Orlando with the harmony
of his brown boots and tunic torn asunder by a piercing
discord of dark volcanic green, a walking tribute to Mr.
Daly's taste in tights. There did I hear slow music steal-
ing up from the band at all the well-known recitations
of Adam, Jacques and Rosalind, lest we should for a
moment forget that we were in a theatre and not in the
forest of Arden. There did I look through practicable
doors in the walls of sunny orchards into an abyss of
pitchy darkness. There saw I in the attitudes, grace and

323

Dramatic Opinions and Essa3is

deportment of the forest dwellers the plastique of an
Arcadian past. And the music synchronized with it all
to perfection, from "La Grande Duchesse" and "Dichter
und Bauer," conducted by the leader of the band, to the
inevitable old English airs conducted by the haughty
musician who is Mr. Daly's special property. And to
think that Mr. Daly will die in his bed, whilst innocent
presidents of republics, who never harmed an immortal
bard, are falling on all sides under the knives of well-
intentioned reformers whose only crime is that they as-
sassinate the wrong people ! And yet let me be magnan-
imous. I confess I would not like to see Mr. Daly as-
sassinated: St. Helena would satisfy me. For Mr. Daly
was in his prime an advanced man relatively to his own
time and place, and was a real manager, with definite
artistic aims which he trained his company to accomplish.
His Irish-American Yanko-German comedies, as played
under his management by Ada Rehan and Mrs. Gilbert,
John Drew, Otis Skinner and the late James Lewis, turned
a page in theatrical history here, and secured him a posi-
tion in London which was never questioned until it be-
came apparent that he was throwing away Miss Rehan's
genius. When, after the complete discovery of her gifts
by the London public, Mr. Daly could find no better em-
ployment for her than in a revival of "Dollars and Cents,"
his annihilation and Miss Rehan's rescue became the
critic's first duty. Shakespeare saved the situation for
a time, and got severely damaged in the process; but
"The Countess Gucki" convinced me that in Mr. Daly's
hands Miss Rehan's talent was likely to be lost not only
to the modern drama, but to the modern Shakespearean
stage: that is to say, to the indispensable conditions of
its own fullest development. No doubt starring in Daly

324

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Shakespeare is as lucrative and secure as the greatest of
Duse's achievements are thankless and precarious; but
surely it must be better fun making money enough by
"La Dame aux Camelias" to pay for "Heimat" and "La
Femme de Claude," and win the position of the greatest
actress in the world with all three, than to astonish pro-
vincials with versions of Shakespeare which are no longer
up even to metropolitan literary and dramatic standards.
However, since I cannot convert Miss Rehan to my
view of the position, I must live in hope that some day
she will come to the West End of London for a week or
two, just as Re jane and Sarah Bernhardt do, with some
work of sufficient novelty and importance to make good
the provincial wear and tear of her artistic prestige. Just
now she is at the height of her powers. The plumpness
that threatened the Countess Gucki has vanished : Rosa-
lind is as slim as a girl. The third and fourth acts are
as wonderful as ever — miracles of vocal expression. If
"As You Like It" were a typical Shakespearean play, I
should unhesitatingly declare Miss Rehan the most per-
fect Shakespearean' executant in the world. But when
I think of those plays in which our William anticipated
modem dramatic art by making serious attempts to hold
the mirror up to nature — "All's Well," "Measure for
Measure," "Troilus and Cressida" and so on — I must limit
the tribute to Shakespeare's popular style. Rosalind is"*^
not a complete human being: she is simply an extension
into five acts of the most affectionate, fortunate, delight-
ful five minutes in the life of a charming woman. And^
all the other figures in the play are cognate impostures.
Orlando, Adam, Jacques, Touchstone, the banished Duke
and the rest play each the same tune all through. This
is not human nature or dramatic character : it is juvenile

325

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

lead, first old man, heavy lead, heavy father, principal
comedian and leading lady, transfigured by magical word-
music. The Shakespearolators who are taken in by it
do not know drama in the classical sense from "drama"
in the technical Adelphi sense. You have only to com-
pare Orlando and Rosalind with Bertram and Helena,
the Duke and Touchstone with Leontes and Autolycus,
to learn the difference from Shakespeare himself. There-
fore I cannot judge from Miss Rehan's enchanting Rosa-
lind whether she is a great Shakespearean actress or not :
there is even a sense in which I cannot tell whether she
can act at all or not. So far, I have never seen her create
a character: she has always practised the same adorable
arts on me, by whatever name the playbill has called her
— Nancy Brasher, (ugh!), Viola, or Rosalind. I have
never complained : the drama with all its heroines levelled
up to a universal Ada Rehan has seemed no such dreary
prospect to me; and her voice, compared to Sarah Bern-
hardt's voix d'or, has been as all the sounds of the wood-
land to the chinking of twenty-franc pieces. In Shake-
speare (what Mr. Daly leaves of Him) she was and is
irresistible: at Islington on Monday she made me cry
faster than Mr. Daly could make me swear. But the
critic in me is bound to insist that Ada Rehan has as yet
created nothing but Ada Rehan. She will probably never
excel that masterpiece ; but why should she not superim-
pose a character study or two on it? Duse's greatest
work is Duse; but that does not prevent Cesarine, San-
tuzza and Camille from being three totally different wom-
en, none of them Duses, though Duse is all of them. Miss
Rehan would charm everybody as Mirandolina as ef-
fectually as Duse does. But how about Magda? It is
because nobody in England knows the answer to that

326

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

question that nobody in England as yet knows whether
Ada Rehan is a creative artist or a mere virtuosa.

"The Liars," Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's new comedy,
is one of his lighter works, written with due indulgence
to the Criterion company and the playgoing public. Its
subject is a common enough social episode — a married
lady sailing too close to the wind in a flirtation, and her
friends and relatives interposing to half hustle, half coax
the husband and wife into a reconciliation, and the gallant
off to Africa. Mr. Jones has extracted from this all the
drama that can be got from it without sacrificing ver-
isimilitude, or spoiling the reassuring common sense of
the conclusion. Its interest, apart from its wealth of
comedy, lies in its very keen and accurate picture of smart
society. Smart society will probably demur, as it always
does to views of it obtained from any standpoint outside
itself. Mr. Jones's detachment is absolute: he describes
Mayfair as an English traveller describes the pygmies or
the Zulus, caring very little about the common human
perversities of which (believing them, of course, to be
the caste-mark of their class) they are so self -importantly
conscious, and being much tickled by the morally signif-
icant pecularities of which they are not conscious at all.
"Society" is intensely parochial, intensely conceited, and,
outside that art of fashionable life for which it has spe-
cialized itself, and in which it has acquired a fairly artistic
technique, trivial, vulgar and horribly tiresome. Its con-
ceit, however, is not of the personally self-complacent
kind. Within its own limits it does not flatter itself: on
the contrary, being chronically bored with itself, it pos-
itively delights in the most savage and embittered satire
at its own expense from its own point of view. For ex-
ample, Thackeray, who belonged to it and hated it, is

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

admired and endorsed by it, because, with all his rancor
against its failings, he took Hyde Park Corner as the
cosmic headquarters, a Ptolemaic mistake which saved
his gentility throughout all his Thersites railings at it.
Charles Dickens, on the other hand, could never be a
gentleman, because it never occurred to him to look at
fashionable society otherwise than from the moral and
industrial centres of the community, in which position he
was necessarily "an outsider" from the point of view of
the parishioners of St. James of Piccadilly and St. George
of Hanover Square. That this outside position could be
a position of advantage, even to a literary lion flatteringly
petted and freely fed at the parish tables, is a conception
impossible to the insider, since if he thought so, he would
at once, by that thought, be placed outside. All fiction
which deals with fashionable society as a class exhibits
this division into Thackeray and Dickens — into the in-
sider and the outsider. For my own part I recommend
the outside, because it is possible for the outsider to com-
prehend and enjoy the works of the insiders, whereas they
can never comprehend his. From Dickens's point of
view Thackeray and Trollope are fully available, whilst
from their point of view Dickens is deplorable. Just so
with Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinero. Mr. Jones's pictures of
society never seem truthful to those who see ladies and
gentlemen as they see themselves. They are restricted
to Mr. Pinero's plays, recognizing in them alone poetic
justice to the charm of good society. But those who ap-
preciate Mr. Jones accommodate themselves without dif-
ficulty to Mr. Pinero's range, and so enjoy both. In the
latest plays of these two authors the difference is very
marked. The pictures of fashionable life in "The Prin-
cess and the Butterfly," containing, if we except the mere

328

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

kodaking, not one stroke that is objectively lifelike or
even plausible, is yet made subjectively appropriate in a
most acceptable degree by the veil of sentimental romance
which it casts over Mayfair. In "The Liars," the "smart"
group which carries on the action of the piece is hit off
to the life, with the result that the originals will probably
feel brutally misrepresented.

And now comes in the oddity of the situation. Mr.
Jones, with a wide and clear vision of society, is content
with theories of it that have really no relation to his
observation. The comedic sentiment of "The Liars" is
from beginning to end one of affectionate contempt for
women and friendly contempt for men, applied to their
affairs with shrewd worldly common sense and much
mollifying humor; whilst its essentially pious theology
and its absolute conceptions of duty belong to a passion-
ately anti-comedic conception of them as temples of the
Holy Ghost. Its observations could only have been made
to-day ; its idealism might have been made yesterday ; its
reflections might have been made a long time ago.
Against this I am inclined to protest. It is surely im-
moral for an Englishman to keep two establishments,
much more three.

The incongruities arising from the different dates of
Mr. Jones's brain compartments have, happily, the effect
of keeping his sense of humor continually stirring. I am
sure "The Liars" must be an extremely diverting play on
the stage. But I have not seen it there. Mr. Wyndham's
acting-manager wrote to ask whether I would come if
I were invited. I said Yes. Accordingly I was not in-
vited. The shock to my self-esteem was severe and unex-
pected. I desire it to be distinctly understood, however,
that I forgive everybody.

329

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

The conscientious transliteration (for the most part)
of the "Francillon" of Dumas Als at the Duke of York's
Theatre makes a very tolerable evening's amusement. It
is, of course, only here to get hallmarked as a London
success, and is planned to impress unsophisticated au-
diences as an exceedingly dashing and classy representa-
tion of high life. Mrs. Brown Potter is unsparing of the
beauties of her wardrobe, and indeed of her own person.
She seems, as far as I can judge, congenitally incapable
of genuine impersonation; but she has coached herself
into a capital imitation of a real French actress playing
the part, which she thoroughly understands. Saving one
or two lapses into clowning for provincial laughs, her
performance is not a bad specimen of manufactured
acting. The best manufactured acting I ever saw was
Modjeska's. It was much stricter, adroiter, finer, cleverer,
more elaborate and erudite than Mrs. Brown Potter's;
but Modjeska was not genial. Mrs. Brown Potter is
genial. Her good looks are unimpaired; and only the
very hard-hearted will feel much ill used by her short-
comings, especially as she is well supported in a good
play, carefully managed and staged up to the point of
making several prolonged passages of pure pantomime
quite successful. Mr. Bellew should stay in London a
while, to brush away a few trifling stage habits which,
like the comedy itself, begin to date a little. He plays
with his old grace and much more than his old skill and
ease, in the quiet style of the eighties, which is also re-
vived with success by Messrs. Elwood, Thursby and
Beauchamp. Mr. J. L. Mackay keeps to his own some-
what later date, not unwisely, as Stanislas.

330

THE THEATRES

Never Again: a farcical comedy in three acts. By

Maurice Desvallieres and Antony Mars. Vaudeville

Theatre, ii October, 1897.

One Summer's Day: a love story in three acts. By

H. V. Esmond. Q)medy Theatre.

The White Heather. By Cecil Raleigh and Henry

Hamilton. Drury Lane Theatre.

I CAN hardly estimate offhand how many visits to
"Never Again" at the Vaudeville would enable an
acute acrostician to unravel its plot. Probably not
less than seventeen. It may be that there is really no
plot, and that the whole bewildering tangle of names and
relationships is a sham. If so, it shows how superfluous
a real plot is. In this play every one who opens a door
and sees somebody outside it utters a yell of dismay and
slams the door to as if the fiend in person had knocked
at it. When anybody enters a room, he or she is received
with a roar of confusion and terror, and frantically
ejected by bodily violence. The audience does not know
why; but as each member of it thinks he ought to, and
believes that his neighbor does, he echoes the yell of the
actor with a shout of laughter; and so the piece "goes"
immensely. It is, to my taste, a vulgar, stupid, noisy,
headachy, tedious business. One actor, Mr. Ferdinand
Gottschalk, shows remarkable talent, both as actor and
mimic, in the part of a German musician ; but this char-
acter is named Katzen jammer, which can produce no ef-
fect whatever on those who do not know what it means,
and must sicken those who do. There is of course a
Shakespearean precedent in "Twelfth Night"; but even

331

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

in the spacious times of great Elizabeth they did not keep
repeating Sir Toby's surname all over the stage, whereas
this play is all Katzen jammer : the word is thrown in the
face of the audience every two or three minutes. Un-
fortunately this is only part of the puerile enjoyment of
mischief and coarseness for their own sakes which is
characteristic not so much of the play as of the method
of its presentation. And as that method is aggressively
American, and is apparently part of a general design on
Mr. Charles Frohman's part to smarten up our stage
habits by Americanizing them, it raises a much larger
question than the merits of an insignificant version of a
loose French farce.

I need hardly point out to intelligent Americans that
any difference which exists between American methods
and English ones must necessarily present itself to the
American as an inferiority on the part of the English, and
to the Englishman as an inferiority on the part of the
Americans ; for it is obvious that if the two nations were
agreed as to the superiority of any particular method,
they would both adopt it, and the difference would dis-
appear, since it can hardly be seriously contended that the
average English actor cannot, if he chooses, do anything
that the average American actor can do, or vice versa.
Consequently nothing is more natural and inevitable than
that Mr. Frohman, confronted with English stage busi-
ness, should feel absolutely confident that he can alter it
for the better. But it does not at all follow that the Eng-
lish public will agree with him. For example, if in a
farcieal comedy a contretemps is produced by the arrival
of an unwelcome visitor, and the English actor extricates
himself from the difficulty by half bowing, half coaxing
the intruder out, it may seem to Mr. Frohman much fun-

SS2

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

nier and livelier that he should resort to the summary
and violent methods of a potman, especially if the visitor
is an elderly lady. Now I do not deny that Mr. Frohman
may strike on a stratum of English society which will
agree with him, nor even that for twenty years to come
the largest fortunes made in theatrical enterprise may be
made by exploiting that stratum; but to English people
who have learnt the art of playgoing at our best theatres,
such horseplay is simply silly. Again, it may seem to
Mr. Frohman, as it did once (and probably does still) to
Mr. Augustin Daly, that the way to work every act of a
comedy up to a rattling finish is to upset chairs, smash
plates, make all the women faint and all the men tumble
over one another. But in London we are apt to receive
that sort of thing so coldly even in its proper place in the
rallies of a harlequinade that there is no temptation to
West End managers to condescend to it. The truth is,
all this knockabout stuff, these coarse pleasantries about
women's petticoats, Katzen jammer, and so forth, belong,
not to American civilization, but to American barbarism.
It converts what might be, at worst, a wittily licentious
form of comedy for licentiously witty people into a crude
sort of entertainment for a crude sort of audience. The
more it tries to hustle and bustle me into enjoying my-
self, the more does it put me on my most melancholy
dignity, and set me reflecting funereally on the probable
future of a race nursed on such amusements. To save
myself from pessimism I have to remind myself that
neither in America nor here is the taste for them a mature
taste, and that the Americans in particular are so far from
being its partisans that they rate English acting and Eng-
lish methods far higher than we do ourselves.
There is, however, a heavy account on the other side.

333

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

The routine of melodrama and farcical comedy is not a
fine art : it is an industry ; and in it the industrial qualities
of the Americans shine out. Their companies are smarter,
better drilled, work harder and faster, waste less time,
and know their business better than English companies.
They do not select duffers when they can help it; and
though the duffer may occasionally get engaged faute
de mieux, as a dog gets eaten during a siege, he does not
find that there is a living for him in melodrama, and so
gets driven into the fashionable drama of the day, in
which he will easily obtain engagements if he convinces
the manager that he is a desirable private acquaintance.
A good deal of the technique acquired by American actors
no doubt makes one almost long for the fatuous com-
placency of the British "walker-on"; but still it is at
least an accomplishment which raises its possessor above
the level of an unskilled laborer ; and the value of a well-
directed systematic cultivation of executive skill will be
appreciated by any one who compares the speech of Miss
Maud Jeffries and the physical expertness of Miss Fay
Davis with those of English actresses of their own age
and standing. Now in so far as Mr. Frohman*s Amer-
icanizations tend to smarten the organization of English
stage business, and to demand from every actor at least
some scrap of trained athleticism of speech and move-
ment, they are welcome. So far, too, as the influence of
a bright, brainy people, full of fun and curiosity, can
wake our drama up from the half-asleep, half-drunk de-
lirium of brainless sentimentality in which it is apt to
wallow, it will be a good influence. But in so far as it
means mechanical horseplay, prurient pleasantries, and
deliberate nastinesses of the Katzenjammer order, it is
our business to reform the Americans, not theirs to re-

334

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

form us. When it comes to the stupidities, follies and
grossnesses of the stage, we may safely be left to our
native resources, which have never yet failed us in such
matters.

The only notable addition to the Vaudeville company
is Mr. Allan Aynesworth, who keeps up the fun with an
unsparing devotion to a bad play which must be ex-
tremely touching to the author. I do not believe he un-
derstands the plot, because no man can do what is impos-
sible ; but he quite persuades the audience that he does.

"One Summer's Day" at the Comedy Theatre is a play
written by Mr. Esmond to please himself. Some plays
are written to please the author ; some to please the actor-
manager (these are the worst) ; some to please the public;
and some — ^my own, for instance — to please nobody.
Next to my plan, I prefer Mr. Esmond's; but it un-
doubtedly leads to self-indulgence. When Mr. Esmond,
in the third act of a comedy, slaughters an innocent little
boy to squeeze two pennorth of sentiment out of his
mangled body, humanity protests. If Mr. Esmond were
hard to move, one might excuse him for resorting to ex-
treme measures. But he is, on the contrary, a highly
susceptible man. He gets a perfect ocean of sentiment
out of Dick and Dick's pipe. If you ask who Dick was,
I reply that that is not the point. It is in the name Dick
— in its tender familiarity, its unaffected good-nature, its
modest sincerity, its combination of womanly aifectionate-
ness with manly strength, that the charm resides. If you
say that the name Dick does not convey this to you, I can
only say that it does to Mr. Esmond when associated with
a pipe; and that if your imagination is too sluggish or
prosaic to see it, then that is your misfortune and not Mr.
Esmond's fault. He cherishes Dick more consistently

335

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

than Thackeray cherished Colonel Newcome ; for he tells
you nothing unpleasant, and indeed nothing credible,
about him; whereas Thackeray, being daimonic as well
as sentimental, must paint his Colonel remorselessly as
a fool, humbug and swindler with one hand, whilst vainly
claiming the world's affection for him with the other.
Dick's drawbacks are not hinted at. Provided you take
him on trust, and Maysie on trust, and indeed everybody
else on trust, "One Summer's Day" is a quite touching
play. Mr. Hawtrey has finally to dissolve in tears, like
the player in "Hamlet" ; and he does it like a true come-
dian: that is, in earnest, and consequently almost dis-
tressingly. That is the penalty of comedianship : it in-
volves humanity, which forbids its possessor to enjoy
grief. Your true pathetic actor is a rare mixture of
monstrous callousness and monstrous vanity. To him
suffering means nothing but a bait to catch sympathy.
He enjoys his malingering; and so does the audience.
Mr. Hawtrey does not enjoy it; and the result is an im-
pression of genuine grief, which makes it seem quite
brutal to stare at him. Fortunately, this is only for a
moment, at the end of the play, just after Mr. Esmond's
massacre of the innocent. For the rest, he is as enter-
taining as ever, and happily much smoother, pleasanter,
sunnier and younger than Mr. Esmond evidently intended
Dick to be. I really could not have stood Dick if he had
gone through with the Dobbin-Newcome formula, and
robbed good-nature of grace and self-respect. The comic
part of the play has a certain youthfully mischievous
quality, which produces good entertainment with a love-
sick schoolboy, excellently played by Mr. Kenneth
Douglas, and an impossible but amusing urchin imper-
sonated by Master Bottomley. But Mrs. Bendyshe, whose

336

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

part is so poor that it would conquer Mrs. Charles Calvert
if she were conquerable, which it seems she is not, and
Mr. Bendyshe, one of her husbands (she seemed to have
two), exhibit Mr. Esmond as descending from the dignity
of dramatic authorship to lark boyishly at the expense
of his elderly fellow-creatures. Miss Eva Moore's Maysie
secures the success of the piece, though the part is not
difficult enough to tax her powers seriously.

The Drury Lane play proves Mr. Arthur Collins to be
every whit as competent a manager of Harrisian drama
as the illustrious founder of that form of art was himself.
In fact, Mr. Collins, as a younger man, with a smarter
and more modern standard, does the thing rather better.
Sir Augustus, lavish as to the trappings and suits of his
fashionable scenes, was reckless as to the presentability
of their wearers. Compare Mr. Collinses cycling parade
in Battersea Park, for instance, with Sir Augustus's
church parade in Hyde Park! There is no reason to
suppose that Battersea has cost a farthing more; yet it
is ten times more plausible. It is not given to all "extra
ladies" to look ladylike in proportion to the costliness of
their attire : on the contrary, many of them have the gift
of looking respectable in the uniform of a parlormaid,
or even in a shawl, gown, apron and ostrich- feathered
hat, but outrageous and disreputable in a fashionable
frock confected by an expensive modiste. Now whether
Sir Augustus knew the difference, and cynically selected
the disreputable people as likely to be more attractive to
the sailorlike simplicity of the average playgoer, or
whether he had a bad eye for such distinctions, just as
some people have a bad ear for music, there can be no
doubt that not even the Vicar of Wakefield could have
been imposed on by his fashionable crowds. Mr. Collins

337

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

IS much more successful in this respect. As I saw "The
[White Heather" from a rather remote corner of the stalls,
distance may have lent my view some enchantment; but
as far as I could see, Mr. Collins does not, if he can help
it, pay an extravagant sum for a dress, and then put it
on the back of a young lady who obviously could not
have become possessed of it by ladylike means. His cast-
ing of principal parts is also much better : he goes straight
to the mark with Mrs. John Wood where Sir Augustus
would have missed it with Miss Fanny Brough (an ha-
bitually underparted tragi-comic actress) ; and he refines
the whole play by putting Miss Kate Rorke and Miss
Beatrice Lamb into parts which would formerly have been
given respectively to a purely melodramatic heroine and
villainness. Indeed he has in one instance overshot the
mark in improving the company; for though he has re-
placed the usual funny man with a much higher class of
comedian in Mr. De Lange, the authors have abjectly
failed to provide the actor with anything better than the
poorest sort of clowning part; and as Mr. De Lange is
not a clown, he can only help the play, at a sacrifice of
"comic relief," by virtually suppressing the buffoonery
with which the authors wanted to spoil it. In short,
everything is improved at Drury Lane except the drama,
which, though very ingeniously adapted to its purpose,
and not without flashes of wit (mostly at its own ex-
pense), remains as mechanical and as void of real dra-
matic illusion as the equally ingenious contrivances of
the lock up the river, the descent of the divers and their
combat under the sea, the Stock Exchange, and the re-
production of the costume ball at Devonshire House.

Naturally, though there is plenty of competent acting
that amply fulfils the requirements of the occasion, the

338

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

principals have nothing to do that can add to their estab-
Ushed reputations. Mr. Robert Loraine as Dick Beach
was new to me; but he played so well that I concluded
that it was I, and not Mr. Loraine, who was the novice
in the matter.

ROMANCE IN ITS LAST DITCH

The Vagabond King: a play in four acts. By Louis
N. Parker. Theatre Metropole, Camberwell. i8
October, 1897-

THE production of Mr. Louis Parker's play at a
suburban theatre last Monday was an expected
development in an unexpected place. A few years
ago some of the central theatres began trying very hard
which could stoop lowest to meet the rising tide of pop-
ular interest in fiction of all sorts. Most of the attempts
failed because they went back to the obsolete methods of
the days when audiences were illiterate as well as igno-
rant. Now audiences are still ignorant; but they are no
longer illiterate: on the contrary, they are becoming so
bookish that they actually repudiate and ridicule clap-
trap and sentiment of purely theatrical extraction, and
must have both adapted to a taste educated by inveterate
novel-reading. Formerly a man who had never read
a novel but knew the stage and the playgoing public,
was a more trustworthy provider of artificial substitutes
for genuine drama than the cleverest novelist. Nowadays
the old stager is the most fatal of advisers; and "The
Prisoner of Zenda," "Trilby," and "Under the Red Robe,"
all three specifically literary plays, have swept from the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

boards the rival attempts that were being made to White-
chapelize the West End theatres on the old stagey lines.
And it is significant that when a literary play failed,
however deservedly, it was respected in the midst of its
misfortunes, whereas the stagey plays failed with the
extremity of derision, disgrace, and loss of caste for their
promoters.

One of the advantages of the literary play was that
it was very easy to act. It completed the process, by
that time far advanced, of adapting the drama to the
incompetent acting produced by the long run and tour
system. But it is not possible under a system of com-
petitive commerce in theatrical entertainments to main-
tain extravagant prices for cheap commodities and facile
services. Time was when I demanded again and again
what the theatres were offering that could induce any
sensible person to leave his comfortable suburban fire-
side, his illustrated magazines and books, his piano and
his chessboard, to worry his way by relays of omnibus,
train and cab to seek admission to a stuflfy theatre at a
cost of a guinea for comfortable seats for himself and
his wife. I prophesied the suburban theatre, following
my usual plan of prophesying nothing that is not already
arrived and at work (and therefore sure to be discovered
by the English Press generally in from ten to fifty years).
Well, the suburban theatre has come with a rush. The
theatre within ten minutes' walk the four-shilling stall,
the twopenny program, the hours admitting of bed be-
fore midnight, have only to be combined with an enter-
tainment equal in quality to that of the West End houses
to beat them out of the field. So far from there being
any difficulty about such a combination, the suburban
theatres may be safely defied to produce anything worse

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than many of the central theatres have been unblushingly
offering for some years past. The acting is as likely as
not to be better; for snobbery behind the scenes at the
West End houses has led to a steady squeezing-out of
the trained and skilled actor who makes no pretension to
fashion in private life, as well as the artistic enthusiast
who is necessarily unconventional and revolutionary in
personal ideas and conduct, and the replacement of both
by society-struck actors and stage-struck wealthy ama-
teurs. In tailor-made plays the man who is an actor off
the stage and a man of fashion on it gets displaced by
the competitor who is a man of fashion off the stage and
a duffer on it. I say nothing of the preference of actor-
managers for nice fellows and moderately good actors,
since the superseded actors are not likely to let that be
forgotten, though they are naturally slow to confess that
what they lack is an air of belonging to "the Marlborough
House set" or some such nonsense. If an exact estimate
could be made of the average skill of the well-known
actors who have been for the last few years mostly out
of engagement and those who have been mostly in it,
the balance would perhaps not be against the unemployed.
Such unemployment is the opportunity of the suburban
manager, who does not concern himself with the set to
which the members of his company belong, and has no
interest in preventing them from attaining the maximum
of popularity. Consequently, when once the good actors
who do not affect smart society are starved out of wait-
ing vainly for West End engagements, it is possible that
the suburban actor may beat the fashionable actor out
of the field too.

Finally, let us hope, the cards will be completely re-
shuffled, and the central theatres will have either to shut

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up shop or else give an entertainment beyond the reach
of suburban art and suburban prices. Mr. Forbes Robert-
son is doing that at the Lyceum at present : consequently
the suburban theatres, far from damaging him, are,
as Sir Henry Irving foresaw, simply acting as nurseries
of playgoers for him. But take the case of the "triple
bill" which has just vanished from the Avenue, perhaps
as a judgment for playing Mozart's ''Figaro" overture
between the acts with big drum and cymbals ad lib. a la
Offenbach. The triple bill was not bad of its kind : seen
from a half-crown seat at the Lyric Hall, Ealing, it would
have been excellent value. But why should any man in
his senses have gone miles and paid half a guinea to
see it? Take, again, such a play as "My Friend the
Prince." Is it conceivable that the actors now perform-
ing it at the Fulham Grand Theatre, even if they do not
play quite as well as the original company at the Garrick
(and I have no reason to suppose they don't), do not at
least act it as well as it need be acted, and get just as loud
laughs when the gentleman sits down on his spur, and
all the men come in at the end in the same disguise ? Or
take the rough-and-tumble farcical comedy at the Vaude-
ville! Am I to be told that Mr. Mulholland could not
do everything for that piece at Camberwell that Mr.
Frohman is doing for it in the Strand, without raising
his prices one farthing, or even making any particularly
expensive engagement?

It looks, then, as if the West End theatre were to be
driven back on serious dramatic art after all. Of course
there will always be the sort of West End production,
supported by deadheads, which is nothing but a prelim-
inary advertisement for the tour of "a London success."
Personal successes will be made in very bad plays by

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popular favorites like Miss Louie Freear and Mr. Pen-
ley. But legitimate business at high-priced West End
houses must at last be forced in the direction of better
plays, probably with the extreme runs shorter than at
present, but most likely with the average run longer. And
the better plays will make short work of the incompetent
fashionable actor. When Mr. Forbes Robertson was
wasting his energies on fashionable plays at the Garrick
with Miss Kate Rorke, there was not a pin to choose
between him and any other fashionable leading man. In
Hamlet and Joseph Surface there are a good many thou-
sand pounds to choose. When the plays that are no plays
are all driven to the suburbs, the actors who are no actors
will have to go after them; and then perhaps the actors
who are actors will come back.

This is why I began by saying that what has just hap-
pened at the Camberwell Theatre was the expected com-
ing in an unexpected place. The higher class of play
has appeared, not at the West End, but in the suburbs.
The reappearance of a once famous actress for whom the
fashionable stage found no use, and of a few younger
people who had exposed themselves to West End man-
agerial suspicion by the exhibition of a specific profes-
sional talent and skill, has occurred on the same occasion.
That, however, is a mere accident. A year ago no West
End manager would have considered a play of the class
of "The Vagabond King" commercially practicable. A
year or so hence managers in search of "high-class
drama" will probably be imploring Mr. Parker to let
them have something as high as possible above the heads
of the public. Thus does the whirligig of time bring its
revenges.

Whoever has glanced at the notices of Mr. Parker's

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

play will have gathered here and there that there is
something wrong with it. Now what I wish to convey
is that there is something right with it, and that this
something right is exactly the something wrong of which
my romantic colleagues complain. It is true that they
too find something right with it — something "beautiful
and true," as they call it; but to me this bit of romantic
beauty and truth is a piece of immoral nonsense that
spoils the whole work. If Mr. Parker wishes to get on
safe ground as a dramatist, he must take firm hold of
the fact that the present transition from romantic to sin-
cerely human drama is a revolutionary one, and that
those who make half-revolutions dig their own graves.
Nothing is easier than for a modern writer only half
weaned from Romance to mix the two, especially in
his youth, when he is pretty sure to have romantic illu-
sions about women long after he has arrived at a fairly
human view of his own sex. This is precisely what has
happened to Mr. Parker. Into the middle of an exiled
court which has set up its mock throne in furnished lodg-
ings in London, and which he has depicted in an entirely
disillusioned human manner, he drops an ultra-romantic
heroine. If this were done purposely, with the object of
reducing the romantic to absurdity, and preaching the
worth of the real, there are plenty of works, from "Don
Quixote" to "Arms and the Man," to justify it as the
classic formula of the human school in its controversial
stage. Or if it were done with the shallower purpose of
merely enjoying the fantastic incongruity of the mixture,
then we should have at once the familiar formula of
comic opera. But when it is done unconsciously — when
the artist designs his heroine according to an artificial
convention of moral and physical prettiness, and confess-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

.edly draws all the rest in the light of a perception of
"the true meaning of life," the result is the incongruity
of comic opera without its fun and fantasy, and the
Quixote belittlement of romance without its affirmation
of the worth of reality. Mr. Parker's Vagabond King
married to Stella Desmond is like Balzac's Mercadet mar-
ried to Black Eyed Susan. Whoever has come to a
clear understanding with himself as between romance
and reality will be able to follow with perfect intelligence
the waverings of Mr. Louis Parker's play between fail-
ure and success. When Miss Lena Ashwell gets the play
completely on the romantic plane, and makes the audi-
ence for the moment unconscious of all other planes by
acting so beautifully saturated with feeling as to appear
almost religious (it has been plain to the wise, any time
these two years, that Miss Ashwell was on the way to
a high place in her art) , the audience is satisfied and de-
lighted to the seventh heaven. But she makes it impos-
sible for the King and the parasites of the exiled Court
to get their scenes definitely on the realistic plane. At
her romantic pitch they are out of tune ; for the audience,
accustomed to that pitch, conceives that they are flat
rather than she sharp. If the effort were reversed, the
play would be irretrievably ruined by their reduction of
her to absurdity. For, judged by serious human stand-
ards she is an objectionable and mischievous person. She
begins by conniving with the King's mother to entrap him
into prostitution. She allows him to ruin and degrade
himself, and to beggar her, in the true romantic manner,
so that she may be able to make a "sacrifice." In the
end she spoils the moral of the play and utterly discredits
his discovery of "the true meaning of life," and his reso-
lution to live by honest toil, by enabling him to face their

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

stern realities from the comfortable vantage ground of
a pretty cottage at Highgate and a charming wife with
money enough left to indulge in the smartest frocks.
Nothing could be further from the true meaning of life ;
nothing could pander more amiably and abjectly to that
miserable vital incapacity to which life at its imagined
best means only what a confectioner's shop-window means
to a child. It is quite clear that no such experience as that
of the Vagabond King could redeem any man : one might
as well try to refine gold by holding it to the spark of a
glowworm. The woman declares that she has sacrificed
this, that and the other, and has nothing left but love
(the cottage and dresses not being worth mentioning) ;
but as a matter of fact she has neither lost nor gained
one jot or tittle, being exactly the same unmeaning ro-
mantic convention at the end of the play as at the be-
ginning.

When the world gets a serious fit, and the desire for
a true knowledge of the world and a noble life in it at
all costs arises in men and lifts them above lusting for
the trivial luxuries and ideals and happy endings of ro-
mance, repudiated by art and challenged by religion, falls
back on its citadel, and announces that it has given up
all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and rec-
ognizes that nothing is eternally valid and all-redeeming
but Love. That is to say, the romanticist is blind enough
to imagine that the humanist will accept the abandonment
of all his minor lies as a bribe for the toleration of the
most impudent of all lies. "I am willing to be redeemed,
and even religious," says the converted romanticist, "if
only the business be managed by a pretty woman who
will be left in my arms when the curtain falls." And
this is just how the Vagabond King gets out of his dif-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ficulties. Has Mr. Parker, a disciple of Richard Wagner,
forgotten these lines? —

"Nicht Gut, nicht Gold, noch gottliche Pracht;
nicht Haus, nicht Hof, noch herrischer Prunk;
riich triiber Vertrage triigender Bund,
noch heuchelnder Sitte hartes Gesetz:
selig in Lust und Leid Idsst die Liebe nur sein/'

There is the arch lie formulated by the master's hand!
But when he completed the work by finding the music
for the poem, he found no music for that: the Nibel-
ungen score is guiltless of it. I presume Wagner had
by that time made up his mind that a world in which all
the women were piously willing to be redeemed by a
Siegfried, and all the men by a Brynhild, would find their
way to the bottomless pit by quite as short a cut as the
most cynical of the voluptuaries who enjoy themselves
without claiming divine honors for their passions. Mr.
Parker may take my word for it, that Vagabond King
of his will be damned yet, in spite of pretty Stella Des-
mond, unless he can find a means to save himself. He
that would save his soul (not get it saved for him) must
first lose it ; and he must lose it in earnest, and not keep
back a pretty woman and a cottage at Highgate after
the prudent manner of Ananias.

Though this be an adverse criticism, yet it is no small
compliment to Mr. Parker that he has come within reach
of it. He has fallen like many another artist before him,
through woman worship, " 'arter all, an amiable weak-
ness," as the elder Weller observed of wife-beating, which
is another mode of the same phenomenon. However,
"beautiful and true" may be his assumption that the best
woman is far better than the best man, and however
loathsome and cynical may be my assumption that she

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

is not — nay, that as women are treated at present she is
almost certain, other things being equal, to be a good deal
worse — I venture to think that Mr. Parker will find that
more convincing plays can be got out of my assumption
than out of his. At the same time I am bound to add
that the very worst real woman I ever knew was better
than Mr. Parker's paragon, whose conduct, like that of
all romantic heroines, will not stand a moment's serious
investigation.

The play has a cast which would rank as a strong
one at any West-End theatre. Besides Miss Bateman
and Miss Lena Ashwell, there is Miss Phyllis Broughton.
Mr. Murray Carson is the Vagabond King; Mr. George
Grossmith, junior, the other King, both supported by a
Court including Mr. Sidney Brough, Mr. Gilbert Far-
quhar, and Mr. L. D. Mannering, who will be remem-
bered for some remarkable work in Elizabethan drama.

348

VEGETARIAN AND ARBOREAL

The Fanatic: a new and original play, in four acts,
by John T. Day. Strand Theatre, 21 October, 1897.
The Tree of Knowledge: a new and original play, in
five acts, by R. C Carton. St. James's Theatre, 25
October, 1897.

AN ANTI-VEGETARIAN play IS an unexpected but not
unwelcome novelty. Hitherto the ideas of dram-
atists on the food question have been limited to
a keen sense of the effect on the poorer section of the
audience of a liberal display at every possible opportunity
of spirit stands, siphons, and bottles ; so that the elaborate
interiors may combine the charms of the private and the
public house. I am always asking myself whether it is
toast and water or whether it is real; and, if the latter,
how much extra salary an actor receives for the injury
to his liver involved in repeated exhibitions to the gallery
of the never-palling spectacle of a gentleman taking an
expensive drink. But now we have a dramatist who
makes the whole interest of his play depend on a passion-
ate faith in the nutritiousness of a cutlet and a glass of
wine. The result is at least more real and interesting
than Mr. Carton's five-act stage romance at the St.
James's. But for an unsound theory of alimentation, and
an unhappy relapse into more-than-Cartonic romance at
the end, it would be an excellent comedy.

The heroine of "The Fanatic" marries a vegetarian
teetotaller, who proceeds to feed her at a rate which may
be faintly estimated from the fact that her breakfast alone
consists of hominy porridge, tapioca omelette, and cucum-
ber pie. If she were an elephant working out a sentence

349

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of hard labor, she might possibly be able to get exercise
enough to keep pace with such Gargantuan meals. As
she is only a rather sedentary lady, they speedily ruin
her complexion and render her incapable of assimilating
any nourishment at all. The doctor is called in; and I
should unhesitatingly rank Mr. Day with Moliere as a
delineator of doctors if I could pretend not to see that
he takes his modern Diafoirus with awestruck serious-
ness, and without the least comedic intention. Neverthe-
less we have had no better bit of comedy this season,
nor any truer to life, than this foolish fashionable doctor
instantly diagnosing a glaring case of over-feeding as
one of "starvation," and flying Diafoiresquely into a ra-
ging condition of academic indignation with the husband
for repudiating his prescription of the glass of wine and
the cutlet. It is to be observed, as a curious illustration
of our notions of family morals, that it never occurs to
the doctor or to anyone else in the play to question the
husband's right to dictate what his wife shall eat as abso-
lutely as if she were a convict and he the prison doctor —
nay, almost as if he were a farmer and she one of his
ewes being fattened for market. And the doctor's right
to dictate what the husband shall order is only disputed
in order to prove the lunacy of the man who questions
it. The unfortunate patient's own views are left com-
pletely out of account. "She shall have cutlet and mar-
sala," says the doctor. "She shan't," says the husband:
"she shall have cucumber pie and cocoa." "Cucumber
pie isn't food : she'll die of it," says the doctor. "Cucum-
ber pie is food," retorts the husband : "here's a pamphlet
which proves it." And so on. The question is one of
cucumbers versus corpses, of the husband's authority
versus the doctor's authority: never for a moment is it

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

suggested that a short way out of the difficulty would
be to allow the lady to order her own dinner. When
they go on from the food question to the drink question
they reach the summit of conceited absurdity. "I insist
on her having wine," screams the doctor: "if she don't,
she'll die." "Let her die," says the husband: "I'm a
teetotaller, and would rather see her in her grave than
allow her to drink alcohol."

Here you have the comedy in which Moliere delighted
— the comedy of lay ignorance and incapacity confronting
academic error and prejudice: the layman being right
in theory and wrong in practice, the academician wrong
in theory and right in practice. Unfortunately, though
Mr. Day observes the conflict very accurately, he does
not understand it, and takes sides vehemently with the
doctor, even whilst faithfully dramatizing the dispute on
the lines of a wrangle between two African witches as
to the merits of their rival incantations. The doctor
prescribes his diet of cutlet and wine (which, by the
way, would almost at once cure the patient) quite super-
stitiously, as a charm. The vegetarian prescribes his
hominy porridge diet (which he is quite right in sup-
posing to be just as nutritious as a dead sheep) in the
same way. Both have irresistible facts on their side.
The doctor sees that the woman is being killed by her
monstrous breakfasts: the husband knows, as everybody
knows, that as good work can be done, and as long lives
lived, on the diet of the saints and the cranks as on that
of the men about town. Probably he reads my articles,
and finds them as vigorous as those of my carnivorous
colleagues. The sensible solution is obvious enough. It
is the doctor's business to go to the patient and say, "My
good lady: do you wish to remain a vegetarian or not?

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

If you do, I must cut you down from your present allow-
ance of forage enough at every meal to feed six dragoons
and their horses for a day, to something that you can
manage and relish. If not, I can settle the difficulty at
once by simply sending you back to cutlets, in which your
experience will prevent you from overeating yourself."
But alas! doctors seldom do know their business. This
particular doctor and his client do not get beyond the
Pickwickian position : — " 'Crumpets is wholesome, sir,'
says the patient. 'Crumpets is not wholesome, sir,* says
the doctor, wery fierce." When the dramatist takes sides
in such a wrangle he is lost. His drama, beginning in
excellent realistic comedy, and making fair way with
the audience on that plane, ends in pathos and folly.
The doctor, to rescue the lady from her cucumber pie,
proposes an elopement. She consents. The husband
comes back just in time to save her from ruin and dis-
grace. But he brings back with him hominy porridge,
surfeit, and death. Feeling the delicacy of the situation,
he considerately drops dead there and then. The doctor,
wrong to the last, diagnoses heart disease ; but the audi-
ence quite understands that he perishes simply because
there must be a happy ending to all plays, even anti-veg-
etarian ones.

There is some unintentional comedy in the casting of
the piece as well as in the drama itself. The fanatic has
a female accomplice who is also a Spartan abstainer, and
who should therefore, if the doctor's views are to be
made good, be on the verge of starvation. This lady is
impersonated by Miss Kate Phillips. Now Miss Phillips
stands out in this inept generation as an exceptionally
accomplished and expert actress; but the one thing she
cannot do is to look as if she were dying of starva ion.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Her plump contours do not curve that way, and her in-
spiriting vital energy irresistibly suggests that her diet,
whatever it is, is probably the right diet for persons in
quest of stamina. She gives the dramatist's didactic
position away with every line of her figure and every
point in her speeches, presenting Matilda Maudsley as a
good platform speaker and capable agitator ; getting what
comedy there is to be got out of the part ; and altogether
declining to give the audience the mean satisfaction of
seeing a clever woman made uncomely and ridiculous.
The doctor, on the other hand, is presented by Mr. J. G.
Grahame as a well-meaning, well-dressed creature with
a sympathetic "bedside manner" and a cheerfully common
brain, in whose wake one can see rows of graves smelling
of all the drugs in the pharmacopoeia. Miss Fordyce
cannot make the wife otherwise than silly, her part being
written that way. One would unhesitatingly back her
fanatical husband's opinion against hers, in spite of the
elaborately pasty complexion with which Mr. Gurney
endows him. On the whole, Mr. Day, without quite
intending it, has given better parts to the fanatics than
to the orthodox cutlet-eaters; and as Mr. Gurney and
Miss Phillips make the most of them, the total effect
produced against both the bowl and the butcher.

The only other persons of any importance in the piece
are the fanatic's backsliding son, pleasantly played by
Mr. Charles Troode, and a sympathetic secretary of the
Taffy order, as whom Mr. Nye Chart, notwithstanding
a weakness for imitating some of the comedy methods
of Mr. John Drew, makes something of a not too inter-
esting part.

I approach the subject of the St. James's play with
much reluctance. Mr. Carton's plays are so extremely

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

good-natured that they disarm criticism. But there is
a point at which good-nature rouses malice; and that
point is reached and overstepped in "The Tree of Knowl-
edge." It is to me an unbearable play. Its staleness is
not to be described: the situations are expected and in-
evitable to such a degree of obviousness that even when
Mr. Alexander remonstrates with Miss Julia Neilson in
the manner of Bill Sikes with Nancy, and all but stran-
gles her in full view of the audience, the effect is that
of a platitude. Not for a moment is it possible to see
anybody in the figures on the stage but Mr. Alexander,
Mr. Vernon, Mr. Terry, Mr. Esmond, Miss Fay Davis,
Miss Neilson, and Miss Addison. There are five mortal
acts ; and there is not a moment of illusion in them. All
that can be said in its favor is that Mr. H. B. Irving,
fresh from the unnatural occupation of tearing the ro-
mantic trappings off his father's favorite heroes in the
magazines, did contrive, in a cynical part of the old
Byron-Montague type, to throw a glamor of the genuine
ante-Shakespearean-Irving kind over a few of his
scenes, and scored the only personal success of the eve-
ning ; and that Mr. George Sheldon, as the bad character
of the village, also left us with some sense of having
made a new acquaintance. But the rest was nothing but
a new jug of hot water on very old tea leaves. Acting
under such circumstances is not possible. Mr. Esmond
went back to the old business, brought in by Mr. Hare
in the 'sixties, of the young man made up as an old one.
The make-up seemed to me as unreal as the part; and
I venture to suggest to Mr. Esmond that if he keeps
on doing this sort of thing he will find some day, that
the pretence has become a reality, and will regret that he
wasted his prime on sham caducity when there were young

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

parts going. Mr. Alexander, having a great deal to do
and no discoverable scrap of character in his part, des-
perately burlesqued his own mannerisms: a policy in
which he was outdone by Miss Julia Neilson, who, as a
second Mrs. Tanqueray — a sort of person whom Mr.
Carton understands less, if possible, than Mr. Pinero,
and whom Miss Neilson does not understand at all —
gave us an assortment of all the best known passages in
modern acting, not excepting her own, and including, for
the first time, Miss Achurch's frozen stare from the last
act of "A Doll's House." I do not blame either Mr.
Alexander or Miss Neilson : they had to fill in their parts
somehow ; but the spectacle was an extremely trying one
for all parties. Mr. Fred Terry was more fortunate.
After struggling manfully for many years with the fam-
ily propensity to act, he has of late succumbed to it, and
now bears up against Mr. Carton almost as cheerfully
as Miss Ellen Terry bears up against Shakespeare. Miss
Fay Davis, Mr. Vernon, and Miss Carlotta Addison, hav-
ing nothing to do but illustrate the author's amiability,
did it with all possible amenity and expertness: indeed,
but for the soothing effect of Miss Davis's charm, I
should have gone out at the end of the fourth act and
publicly slain myself as a protest against so insufferable
an entertainment.

I should perhaps state my objections to "The Tree
of Knowledge" more clearly and precisely; but how can
I, with my mind unhinged by sitting out those five acts?
My feelings towards Mr. Carton's plays is generally
almost reprehensibly indulgent; for his humor is excel-
lent ; his imagination is genial and of the true storytelling
brand; he is apt and clear as a man of letters; and his
sympathies are kindly and free from all aflFectation and

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

snobbery. But he seems to have no dramatic conscience,
no respect for the reaHties of life, and, except in his
humor, no originality whatever. The quantity of very
bad early Dickens, of the Cheeryble-Linkinwater sort,
which he pours out, is beyond endurance. One should
begin where Dickens left off, not where he started. All
this throwing back to Pickwick, and to the theatre of
Byron and Robertson, for some sort of fanciful decoration
for a hackneyed plot, is bad enough when there is at
least some quaint pretence of character, like that of the
old bookseller in "Liberty Hall." But when there is no
such pretence; when the thing is spun out to five acts;
and when the fifth act consists largely of the novice's
blunder of making one of the characters describe what
passed in the fourth, then even the most patient critic
cannot repress a groan.

By the way, if Mr. Alexander is going to make a spe-
cialty of plays, lasting from three to four hours, may
I suggest that he should get his upholstery and curtains
dyed green, or some more restful color than the present
crimson ? I believe my irresistible impulse to rush at "The
Tree of Knowledge" and gore and trample it is chiefly
due to the effect of all that red drapery on me.

356

CHIN CHON CHINO

The Cat and the Cherub. By Chester Bailey Fernald
Lyric Theatre, 30 October, 1897.
. The First Born. By Francis Powers. Globe The-
atre, I November, 1897.

THE latest attempt to escape from hackneydom and
cockneydom is the Chinatown play, imported, of
course, from America. There is no reason, how-
ever, why it should not be manufactured in England. I
beg respectfully to inform managers and syndicates that
I am prepared to supply "Chinese plays," music and
all, on reasonable terms, at the shortest notice. A form
of art which makes a merit of crudity need never lack
practitioners in this country. The Chinese music, which
we are spared at the Lyric, is unmitigated humbug. At
the Globe it is simply very bad American music, with
marrowbones and cleaver, teatray and catcall, ad lib.
And the play is nothing but Wilkie Collins fiction dis-
guised in pigtail and petticoats.

The result is worth analysing. The dramatic art of
our day has come to such a pass of open artificiality and
stale romantic convention that the sudden repudiation of
an art produces for the moment almost as refreshing a
sensation as its revival would. In "The First Born" the
death of the little boy at the end of the first scene,
and the murder of the man whose corpse is propped up
against the doorpost by his murderer and made to coun-
terfeit life whilst the policeman passes, might be impro-
vised in a schoolroom: yet they induce a thrill which
all of the resources of the St. Jameses Theatre, strained
during five long acts to their utmost, cannot attain to

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

for the briefest instant. Truly the secret of wisdom is
to become as a little child again. But our art of loving au-
thors will not learn the lesson. They cannot understand
that when a great genius lays hands on a form of art
and fascinates all who understand its language with it,
he makes it say all that it can say, and leaves it exhausted.
When Bach has got the last word out of the fugue,
Mozart out of the opera, Beethoven out of the symphony,
Wagner out of the symphonic drama, their enraptured
admirers exclaim : "Our masters have shown us the way :
let us compose some more fugues, operas, symphonies and
Bayreuth dramas." Through just the same error the
men who have turned dramatists on the frivolous ground
of their love for the theatre have plagued a weary world
with Shakespearean dramas in five acts and in blank
verse, with artificial comedies after Congreve and Sher-
idan, and with the romantic goody-goody fiction which
was squeezed dry by a hundred strong hands in the first
half of this century. It is only when we are dissatisfied
with existing masterpieces that we create new ones: if
we merely worship them, we only try to repeat the ex-
ploit of their creator by picking out the tidbits and string-
ing them together, in some feeble fashion of our own,
into a "new and original" botching of what our master
left a good and finished job. We are encouraged in our
folly by the need of the multitude for intermediaries be-
tween its childishness and the maturity of the mighty men
of art, and also by the fact that art fecundated by itself
gains a certain lapdog refinement, very acceptable to
lovers of lapdogs. The Incas of Peru cultivated their
royal race in this way, each Inca marrying his sister.
The result was that an average Inca was worth about as
much as an average fashionable drama bred carefully

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

from the last pair of fashionable dramas, themselves bred
in the same way, with perhaps a cross of novel. But vital
art work comes always from a cross between art and life :
art being of one sex only, and quite sterile by itself.
Such a cross is always possible; for though the artist
may not have the capacity to bring his art into contact
with the higher life of his time, fermenting in its religion,
its philosophy, its science, and its statesmanship (perhaps,
indeed, there may not be any statesmanship going), he
can at least bring it into contact with the obvious life and
common passions of the streets. This is what has hap-
pened in the case of the Chinatown play. The dramatist,
compelled by the nature of his enterprise to turn his back
on the fashionable models for "brilliantly" cast plays, and
to go in search of documents and facts in order to put a
slice of Californian life on the stage with crude realism,
instantly wakes the theatre up with a piece which has
some reality in it, though its mother is the cheapest and
most conventional of the daughters of art, and its father
the lowest and darkest stratum of Americanized yellow
civilization. The phenomenon is a very old one. When
art becomes effete, is is realism that comes to the rescue.
In the same way, when ladies and gentlemen become
effete, prostitutes become prime ministers; mobs make
revolutions; and matters are readjusted by men who do
not know their own grandfathers.

This moral of the advent of the Qiinatown play is
brought out strikingly by the contrast between the rival
versions at the Lyric and at the Globe. The Lyric ver-
sion, entitled "The Cat and the Cherub," and claiming to
be the original (a claim which is apparently not contra-
dicted), is much the more academic of the two. It is a
formal play, with comparatively pretentious acting parts,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and the local color blended into the dramatic business
in the most approved literary manner: the whole ending
with a complicated death struggle, in which the victim
is strangled with his own pigtail, and performs an elabor-
ate stage fall. In the Globe version there is comparatively
no art at all: we see the affair as we see a street row,
with all the incidents of the Chinatown slum going
on independently — vulgar, busy, incongruous, irrelevant,
indifferent, just as we see them in a London slum whilst
the policeman is adjusting some tragedy at the corner.
Placed between an academic play and a vulgar play, the
high-class London critic cannot hesitate. He waves the
Globe aside with scorn and takes the Lyric to his bosom.
It seems to me that the popular verdict must go the
other way. It is of course eminently possible that people
may not care to pay West End theatre prices for a very
short entertainment which, at best, would make an excel-
lent side show at Earl's Court. But if they choose either
way, they will probably like the crude, coarse, curious,
vivid, and once or twice even thrilling hotch-potch at the
Globe, better than the more sedate and academic drama
at the Lyric. A good deal will depend on which they see
first. Nine-tenths of the charm of Chinatown lies in its
novelty; and a comparison of the opinions of those who
saw the two plays in the order of their production, and
those who, like myself, saw the Globe play first, will
prove, I think, that the first experience very heavily dis-
counts the second.

Up to a late hour on Monday night I persuaded myself
that I would hasten from the Globe to Her Majesty's, and
do my stern duty by "Katharine and Petruchio." But
when it came to the point I sacrificed duty to personal con-
siderations. "The Taming of the Shrew'' is a remarkable

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

example of Shakespeare's repeated attempts to make the
public accept realistic comedy. Petruchio is worth fifty
Orlandos as a human study. The preliminary scenes in
which he shows his character by pricking up his ears at
the news that there is a fortune to be got by any man
who will take an ugly and ill-tempered woman off her
father's hands, and hurrying oif to strike the bargain be-
fore somebody else picks it up, are not romantic ; but they
give an honest and masterly picture of a real man, whose
like we have all met. The actual taming of the woman
by the methods used in taming wild beasts belongs to his
determination to make himself rich and comfortable, and
his perfect freedom from all delicacy in using his strength
and opportunities for that purpose. The process is quite
bearable, because the selfishness of the man is healthily
goodhumored and untainted by wanton cruelty; and it
is good for the shrew to encounter a force like that and
be brought to her senses. Unfortunately, Shakespeare's
OWT7 immaturity, as well as the immaturity of the art he
was experimenting in, made it impossible for him to
keep the play on the realistic plane to the end; and the
last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility.
No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the
company of a woman without feeling extremely ashamed
of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and
the speech put into the woman's own mouth. Therefore
the play, though still worthy of a complete and efficient
representation, would need, even at that, some apology.
But the Garrick version of it, as a farcical afterpiece! —
thank you: no.

361

SHAKESPEARE AND MR. BARRIE

The Tempest. Performance by the Elizabethan
Stage Society at the Mansion House, s November,
1897.

The Little Minister: a play m four acts. By J. M.
Barrie, founded on his novel of that name. Hay-
market Theatre, 6 November, 1897.

IT WAS a curious experience to see "The Tempest"
one night and "The Little Minister" the next. I
should like to have taken Shakespeare to the Hay-
market play. How well he would have recognized it!
For he also once had to take a popular novel; make
a shallow, unnatural, indulgent, pleasant, popular drama
of it; and hand it to the theatre with no hint of his feel-
ings except the significant title "As You Like It." And
we have not even the wit to feel the snub, but go on
complacently talking of the manufacture of Rosalinds and
Orlandos (a sort of thing that ought really to be done
in a jam factory) as "delineation of character" and the
like. One feels Shakespeare's position most strongly in
the plays written after he had outgrown his interest in
the art of acting and given up the idea of educating the
public. In "Hamlet" he is quite enthusiastic about
naturalness in the business of the stage, and makes Ham-
let hold forth about it quite Wagnerianly: in "Cymbe-
line" and "The Tempest" he troubles himself so little
about it that he actually writes down the exasperating
clownish interruptions he once denounced; brings on the
god in the car; and, having indulged the public in mat-
ters which he no longer set any store by, took it out of
them in poetry.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

The poetry of "The Tempest" is so magical that it
would make the scenery of a modern theatre ridiculous.
The methods of the Elizabethan Stage Society (I do not
commit myself to their identity with those of the Eliz-
abethan stage) leave to the poet the work of conjuring
up the isle "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs." And
I do not see how this plan can be beaten. If Sir Henry
Irving were to put the play on at the Lyceum next season
(why not, by the way?), what could he do but multiply
the expenditure enormously and spoil the illusion? He
would give us the screaming violin instead of the harmo-
nious viol; "characteristic" music scored for wood-wind
and percussion by Mr. German instead of Mr. Dolmetsch's
pipe and tabor; an expensive and absurd stage ship;
and some windless, airless, changeless, soundless, electric-
lit, wooden-floored mockeries of the haunts of Ariel.
They would cost more ; but would they be an improvement
on the Mansion House arrangement? Mr. Poel says
frankly, "See that singers' gallery up there! Well, lets
pretend that it's the ship." We agree ; and the thing is
done. But how could we agree to such a pretence with a
stage ship? Before it we should say, "Take that thing
away : if our imagination is to create a ship, it must not be
contradicted by something that apes a ship so vilely as to
fill us with denial and repudiation of its imposture. The
singing gallery makes no attempt to impose on us: it
disarms criticism by unaffected submission to the facts
of the case, and throws itself honestly on our fancy, with
instant success. In the same way a rag doll is fondly
nursed by a child who can only stare at a waxen simu-
lacrum of infancy. A superstitious person left to himself
will see a ghost in every ray of moonlight on the wall
and every old coat hanging on a nail; but make up a

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

really careful, elaborate, plausible, picturesque, blood-
curdling ghost for him, and his cunning grin will pro-
claim that he sees through it at a glance. The reason is,
not that a man can always imagine things more vividly
than art can present them to him, but that it takes an
altogether extraordinary degree of art to compete with
the pictures which the imagination makes when it is stim-
ulated by such potent forces as the maternal instinct,
superstitious awe, or the poetry of Shakespeare. The
dialogue between Gonzalo and that "bawling, blasphe-
mous, incharitable dog" the boatswain, would turn the
House of Lords into a ship: in less than ten words —
"What care these roarers for the name of king?" — you
see the white horses and the billowing green mountains
playing football with crown and purple. But the Eliza-
bethan method would not do for a play like "The White
Heather," excellent as it is of its kind. If Mr. Poel, on
the strength of the Drury Lane dialogue, were to leave
us to imagine the singers' gallery to be the bicycling ring
in Battersea Park, or Boulter's Lock, we should flatly
decline to imagine anything at all. It requires the nicest
judgment to know exactly how much help the imagination
wants. There is no general rule, not even for any par-
ticular author. You can do best without scenery in "The
Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," because
the best scenery you can get will only destroy the illusion
created by the poetry; but it does not at all follow that
scenery will not improve a representation of "Othello."
Maeterlinck's plays, requiring a mystical inscenation in
the style of Fernand Knopf, would be nearly as much
spoiled by Elizabethan treatment as by Drury Lane treat-
ment. Modern melodrama is so dependent on the most
realistic scenery that a representation would suffer far

3^

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

less by the omission of the scenery than of the dialogue.
This is why the manager who stages every play in the
same way is a bad manager, even when he is an adept at
his one way. A great deal of the distinction of the
Lyceum productions is due to the fact that Sir Henry
Irving, when the work in hand is at all within the limits
of his sympathies, knows exactly how far to go in the
matter of scenery. When he makes mistakes, they are
almost always mistakes in stage management, by which
he sacrifices the eflfect of some unappreciated passage of
dialogue of which the charm has escaped him.

Though I was sufficiently close to the stage at "The
Tempest" to hear or imagine I heard, every word of
the dialogue, yet it was plain that the actors were not
eminent after-dinner speakers, and had consequently never
received in that room the customary warning to speak to
the second pillar on the right of the door, on pain of not
being heard. Though they all spoke creditably, and some
of them remarkably well, they took matters rather too
easily, with the result that the quieter passages were in-
audible to a considerable number of spectators. I men-
tion the matter because the Elizabethan Stage Society
is hardly yet alive to the acoustic difficulties raised by
the lofty halls it performs in. They are mostly trouble-
some places for a speaker; for if he shouts, his vowels
make such a roaring din that his consonants are indistin-
guishable; and if he does not, his voice does not travel
far enough. They are too resonant for noisy speakers
and too vast for gentle ones. A clean, athletic articula-
tion, kept up without any sentimental or indolent relax-
ations, is indispensable as a primary physical accomplish-
ment for the Elizabethan actor who "takes to the halls."

The performance went without a hitch. Mr. Dolmetsch

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

looked after the music; and the costumes were worthy
o1 the reputation which the Society has made for itself
in this particular. Ariel, armless and winged in his first
incarnation, was not exactly a tricksy sprite; for as the
wing arrangement acted as a strait waistcoat, he had to
be content with the effect he made as a living picture.
This disability on his part was characteristic of the whole
performance, which had to be taken in a somewhat low
key and slow tempo, with a minimum of movement. If
any attempt had been made at the impetuosity and live-
liness for which the English experts of the sixteenth
century were famous throughout Europe, it would have
not only failed, but prevented the performers from attain-
ing what they did attain, very creditably, by a more mod-
est ambition.

To our host the Lord Mayor I take off my hat. When
I think of the guzzling horrors I have seen in that room,
and the insufferable oratory that has passed through
my head from ear to ear on its way to the second pillar
on the right of the door (which has the advantage of
being stone deaf), I hail with sincere gratitude the first
tenant of the Mansion House who has bidden me to an
entertainment worthy of the first magistrate of a great
city, instead of handing me over to an army of waiters
to be dealt with as one "whose god is his belly."

"The Little Minister" is a much happier play than "The
Tempest." Mr. Barrie has no impulse to throw his
adaptation of a popular novel at the public head with a
sarcastic title, because he has written the novel himself,
and thoroughly enjoys it. Mr. Barrie is a born story-
teller ; and he sees no further than his stories — conceives
any discrepancy between them and the world as a short-
coming on the world's part, and is only too happy to be

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

able to rearrange matters in a pleasanter way. The pop-
ular stage, which was a prison to Shakespeare's genius,
is a playground to Mr. Barrie's. At all events he does
the thing as if he liked it, and does it very well. He has
apparently no eye for human character ; but he has a keen
sense of human qualities, and he produces highly popular
assortments of them. He cheerfully assumes, as the
public wish him to assume, that one endearing quality
implies all endearing qualities, and one repulsive quality
all repulsive qualities: the exceptions being comic char-
acters, who are permitted to have "weaknesses," or stern
and terrible souls who are at once understood to be sa-
ving up some enormous sentimentality for the end of the
last act but one. Now if there is one lesson that real life
teaches us more insistently than another, it is that we
must not infer one quality from another, or even rely on
the constancy of ascertained qualities under all circum-
stances. It is not only that a brave and good-humored
man may be vain and fond of money; a lovable woman
greedy, sensual and mendacious; a saint vindictive; and
a thief kindly; but these very terms are made untrust-
worthy by the facts that the man who is brave enough to
venture on personal combat with a prizefighter or a tiger
may be abjectly afraid of ghosts, mice, women, a dentist's
forceps, public opinion, cholera epidemics, and a dozen
other things that many timorous mortals face resignedly
enough; the man who is stingy to miserliness with coin,
and is the despair of waiters and cabmen, gives thousands
(by cheque) to public institutions; the man who eats
oysters by the hundred and legs of mutton by the dozen
for wagers, is in many matters temperate, moderate, and
even abstemious ; and men and women alike, though they
behave with the strictest conventional propriety when

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

tempted by advances from people whom they do not hap-
pen to like, are by no means so austere with people whom
they do like. In romance, all these "inconsistencies" are
corrected by replacing human nature by conventional as-
sortments of qualities. When Shakespeare objected to
this regulation, and wrote "All's Well" in defiance of it,
his play was not acted. When he succumbed, and gave
us the required assortment "as we like it," he was enor-
mously successful. Mr Barrie has no scruples about
complying. He is one with the public in the matter, and
makes a pretty character as a milliner makes a pretty
bonnet, by "matching" the materials. And why not, if
everybody is pleased?

To that question I reply by indignantly refusing, as
a contemporary of Master- Builder Solness, to be done out
of my allowance of "salutary self-torture." People don't
go to the theatre to be pleased: there are a hundred
cheaper, less troublesome, more effective pleasures than
an uncomfortable gallery can offer. We are led there
by our appetite for drama, which is no more to be sat-
isfied by sweetmeats than our appetite for dinner is to be
satisfied with meringues and raspberry vinegar. One
likes something solid ; and that, I suppose, is why heroes
and heroines with assorted qualities are only endurable
when the author has sufficient tact and comic force to
keep up an affectionate undercurrent of fun at their ex-
pense and his own. That was how Shakespeare pulled
his amiable fictions through ; that is how Mr. Carton does
it; that is how Mr. Barrie does it. Dickens, with his
fundamental seriousness and social conscience always at
war with his romantic instincts and idealism, and even
with his unconquerable sense of humor, made desperate
efforts to take his assorted heroines quite seriously by

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

resolutely turning off the fun, with a result — Agnes Wick-
field, Esther Summerson and so forth — so utterly un-
bearable that they stand as a warning to all authors that
it is dangerous to be serious unless you have something
real to be serious about, even when you are a great genius.
Happily, Mr. Barrie is not serious about his little minister
and his little minister's Babby. At most he is affectionate,
which is quite a different thing. The twain are nine-
tenths fun and the other tenth sentiment, which makes
a very toothsome combination.

I should explain, however, that I took care not to read
the novel before seeing the play ; and I have not had time
to read it since. But it is now clear to me that Mr. Barrie
has depended on the novel to make his hero and heroine
known to the playgoer. Their parts consist of a string
of amusing and sometimes touching trivialities ; but it is
easy to divine that the young minister's influence over
his elders, and perhaps Babby's attraction for him, are
more fully accounted for in the book. I should hope also
that Rob Dow and the chief elder, who in the play are
machine-made after a worn-out pattern, are more original
and natural in the novel. Otherwise, I found the play
self-sufficing.

As a success for the Haymarket Theatre the play has
fulfilled and exceeded all expectation. It has every
prospect of running into the next century. It is the first
play produced under Mr. Cyril Maude's own management
that has given him a chance as an actor. It is quite char-
acteristic of the idiotic topsyturviness of our stage that
Mr. Maude, who has a remarkable charm of quaintly
naive youthfulness, should have been immediately pitched
upon — nay, have pitched on himself — as a born imper-
sonator of old men. All he asked from the author was

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

a snuff-box, a set of grease paints, and a part not younger
than sixty-five to make him perfectly happy. There was
Mr. Grundy's "Sowing the Wind," for instance: Mr.
Maude was never more pleased with himself than when,
after spending the afternoon in pencilling impossible
wrinkles all over his face, he was crustily taking snuff as
the old man in that play. The spectacle used to exasperate
me to such a degree that nothing restrained me from hurl-
ing the nearest opera-glass at those wrinkles but the fear
that, as I am unfortunately an incorrigibly bad shot, I
might lay Miss Emery low, or maim Mr. Brandon Thomas
for life. I do declare that of all infuriating absurdities
that human perversity has evolved, this painted-on "char-
acter-acting" is the only one that entirely justifies man-
slaughter. It was not that Mr. Cyril Maude did it badly ;
on the contrary, he did it very cleverly indeed: it was
that he ought to have been doing something else. The
plague of the stage at present is the intolerable stereo-
typing of the lover : he is always the same sort of young
man, with the same cast of features, the same crease down
his new trousers, the same careful manners, the same air
of behaving and dressing like a gentleman for the first
time in his life and being overcome with the novelty and
importance of it. Mr. Maude was just the man to break
this oppressive fashion ; and instead of doing it, he amused
himself with snuff, and crustiness, and wrinkles as afore-
said, perhaps for the sake of the novelty which gentility
could not offer him. As the little minister he at last plays
without disguise, and with complete success. He is
naturally shy at showing himself to the public for the
first time ; but the shyness becomes him in the part ; and
I dare say he will run Mr. Forbes Robertson hard for
the rest of the season as a much-admired man. Miss

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Winifred Emery, as Babby, has a rare time of it. She
plays with the part like a child, and amuses herself and
the audience unboundedly. Her sudden assumption of
Red-Robe dignity for a few minutes in the fourth act
constitutes what I think may be described safely as the
worst bit of acting the world has yet seen from a per-
former of equal reputation, considering that it is supposed
to represent the conduct of a girl just out of the school-
room; but she soon relapses into an abandonment to fun
compared to which Miss Rehan's most reckless attacks of
that nature are sedate. Mr. Kinghorne is, I think, the
best of the elders; but Mr. Brandon Thomas and Mrs.
Brooke are in great force. There was a good deal of
curiosity among the women in the audience to see Mr.
Barrie, because of his evident belief that he was showing
a deep insight into feminine character by representing
Babby as a woman whose deepest instinct was to find a
man for her master. At the end, when her husband an-
nounced his intention of caning her if she deserved it,
she flung her arms round his neck and exclaimed ecstat-
ically that he was the man for her. The inference that,
with such an experience of the sex, Mr. Barrie's personal-
ity must be little short of godlike, led to a vociferous call
for him when the curtain fell. In response, Mr. Har-
rison appeared, and got as far as "Mr. Barrie is far too
modest a man — " when he was interrupted by a wild
shriek of laughter. I do not doubt that many amiable
ladies may from time to time be afflicted with the fancy
that there is something voluptuous in getting thrashed
by a man. In the classes where the majority of married
women get that fancy grafted with excessive liberality,
it is not so persistent as Mr. Barrie might think. I seri-
ously suggest to him that the samples of his notion of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

"womanliness" given by Babby are nothing but silly
travesties of that desire to find an entirely trustworthy
leader which is common to men and women.

Sir A. C. Mackenzie's overture was drowned by the
conversation, which was energetically led by the composer
and Sir George Lewis. But I caught some scraps of re-
freshingly workmanlike polyphony; and the melodrame
at the beginning of the garden scene was charming.

ON PLEASURE BENT

20 November, i8p/.

Up TO a certain point, I . have never flinched from
martyrdom. By far the heaviest demand ever
made upon me by the public weal is that which
nearly three years ago devoted my nights to the theatres
and my days to writing about them. If I had known how
exceedingly trying the experience would be, I am not
sure that I should not have seen the public weal further
before making this supreme sacrifice to it. But I had
been so seldom to the theatre in the previous years that
I did not realize its horrors. I firmly believe that the
trials upon which I then entered have injured my brain.
At all events matters reached a crisis after the critical
activities of last week. I felt that I must have a real
experience of some kind, under conditions, especially as
regards fresh air, as unlike those of the stalls as possible.
After some consideration it occurred to me that if I went
into the country, selected a dangerous hill, and rode down

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

it on a biciycle at full speed in the darkest part of the
night, some novel and convincing piece of realism might
result. It did.

Probably no man has ever misunderstood another so
completely as the doctor misunderstood me when he apol-
ogized for the sensation produced by the point of his
needle as he corrected the excessive openness of my coun-
tenance after the adventure. To him who has endured
points made by actors for nearly three years, the point
of a surgeon's darning needle comes as a delicious relief.
I did not like to ask him to put in a few more stitches
merely to amuse me, as I had already, through pure self-
indulgence, cut into his Sunday rest to an extent of which
his kindness made me ashamed; but I doubt if I shall
ever see a play again without longing for the comparative
luxury of that quiet country surgery, with the stillness
without broken only by the distant song and throbbing
drumbeat of some remote Salvation Army corps, and the
needle, with its delicate realism, touching my sensibilities,
stitch, stitch, stitch, with absolute sincerity in the hands
of an artist who had actually learned his business and
knew how to do it.

To complete the comparison it would be necessary to
go into economics of it by measuring the doctor's fee
against the price of a stall in a West End theatre. But
here I am baffled by the fact that the highest art revolts
from an equation between its infinite value and a finite
pile of coin. It so happened that my voice, which is an
Irish voice, won for me the sympathy of the doctor. This
circumstance must appear amazing almost beyond cred-
ibility in the light of the fact that he was himself an
Irishman; but so it was. He rightly felt that sympathy
is beyond price, and declined to make it the subject of a

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commercial transaction. Thereby he made it impossible
for me to mention his name without black ingratitude ; for
I know no more effectual way of ruining a man in this
country than by making public the smallest propensity
on his part to adopt a benevolent attitude towards neces-
sitous strangers. Here the West End manager will per-
haps whisper reproachfully, "Well; and do / ever make
you pay for your stall?" To which I cannot but reply,
"Is that also due to the sympathy my voice awakens in
you when it is raised every Saturday?" I trust I am not
ungrateful for my invitations; but to expect me to feel
towards the manager who lacerates my nerves, enfeebles
my mind, and destroys my character, as I did towards
the physician who healed my body, refreshed my soul,
and flattered my vocal accomplishments when I was no
more to him than an untimely stranger with an unheard-
of black eye, is to dethrone justice and repudiate salvation.
Besides, he said it was a mercy I was not killed. Would
any manager have been of that opinion?

Perhaps the most delightful thing about this village
was that its sense of the relative importance of things
was so rightly adjusted that it had no theatrical gossip;
for this doctor actually did not know who I was. With
a cynicism for which his charity afterwards made me
blush, I sought to reassure him as to the pecuniary com-
petence of his muddy, torn, ensanguined and facially
spoiled visitor by saying "My name is G. B. S.," as who
should say "My name is Cecil Rhodes, or Henry Irving,
or William of Germany." Without turning a hair, he
sweetly humored my egotistic garrulity by replying, in

perfect lightness of heart, "Mine's F : what are youV

Breathing at last an atmosphere in which it mattered so
little who and what G. B. S. was, that nobody knew either

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one or the other, I almost sobbed with relief whilst he
threaded his needle with a nice white horsehair, tactftdly
pretending to listen to my evasive murmur that I was a
"sort of writer," an explanation meant to convey to him
that I earned a blameless living by inscribing names in
letters of gold over shop windows and on perforated wire
blinds. To have brought the taint of my factitious little
vogue into the unperverted consciousness of his benev-
olent and sensible life would have been the act of a
serpent.

On the whole, the success of my experiment left nothing
to be desired; and I recommend it confidently for imita-
tion. My nerves completely recovered their tone and my
temper its natural sweetness. I have been peaceful, happy
and affectionate ever since, to a degree which amazes my
associates. It is true that my appearance leaves some-
thing to be desired; but I believe that when my eye be-
comes again visible, the softness of its expression will
more than compensate for the surrounding devastation.

However, a man is something more than an omelette;
and no extremity of battery can tame my spirit to the
point of submitting to the sophistry by which Mr. Beer-
bohm Tree has attempted to shift the guilt of "Katharine
and Petruchio" from his shoulders and Garrick's to those
of Shakespeare. I have never hesitated to give our im-
mortal William as much of what he deserves as is pos-
sible considering how far his enormities transcend my
powers of invective; but even William is entitled to fair
play. Mr. Tree contends that as Shakespeare wrote the
scenes which Garrick tore away from their context, they
form a genuine Shakespearean play; and he outdares
even this audacity by further contending that since the
play was performed for the entertainment of Christopher

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Sly the tinker, the more it is debauched the more ap-
propriate it is. This line of argument is so breath-be-
reaving that I can but gasp out an inquiry as to what
Mr. Tree understands by the one really eloquent and
heartfelt line uttered by Sly : — " 'Tis a very excellent piece
of work : would 'twere done !"

This stroke, to which the whole Sly interlude is but as
the handle to the dagger, appears to me to reduce Mr.
Tree's identification of the tastes of his audiences at Her
Majesty's with those of a drunken tinker to a condition
distinctly inferior to that of my left eye at present. The
other argument is more seriously meant, and may even
impose upon the simplicity of the Cockney playgoer. Let
us test its principle by varying its application. Certain
anti- Christian propagandists, both here and in America,
have extracted from the Bible all those passages which
are unsuited for family reading, and have presented a
string of them to the public as a representative sample
of Holy Writ. Some of our orthodox writers, though
intensely indignant at this controversial ruse, have never-
theless not scrupled to do virtually the same thing with
the Koran. Will Mr. Tree claim for these collections the
full authority, dignity, and inspiration of the authors from
whom they are culled? If not, how does he distinguish
Garrick's procedure from theirs? Garrick took from a
play of Shakespeare's all the passages which served his
baser purpose, and suppressed the rest. Had his object
been to discredit Shakespeare in the honest belief that
Shakespearolatry was a damnable error, we might have
respected "Katharine and Petruchio" even whilst deplor-
ing it. But he had no such conviction : in fact, he was a
professed Shakespearolater, and no doubt a sincere one,
as far as his wretched powers of appreciation went. He

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debased "The Taming of the Shrew" solely to make
money out of the vulgarity of the taste of his time. Such
a transaction can be defended on commercial grounds:
to defend it on any other seems to me to be either an
artistic misdemeanor or a profession of Philistinism. If
Mr. Tree were to declare boldly that he thinks "Katharine
and Petruchio" a better play than "The Taming of the
Shrew," and that Garrick, as an actor-manager, knew his
business better than a mere poet, he would be within his
rights. He would not even strain our credulity; for a
long dynasty of actor-managers, from Gibber to Sir
Henry Irving, have been unquestionably sincere in prefer-
ring their own acting versions to the unmutilated master-
pieces of the genius on whom they have lavished lip-
honor. But Mr. Tree pretends to no such preference:
on the contrary, he openly stigmatizes the Garrick version
as tinker's fare, and throws the responsibility on Shake-
speare because the materials were stolen from him.

I do not wish to pose academically at Mr. Tree. My
object is a practical one: I want to intimidate him into
a thorough mistrust of his own judgment where Shake-
speare is concerned. He is about to produce one of
Shakespeare's great plays, "Julius Caesar"; and he is just
as likely as not to cut it to ribbons. The man who would
revive "Katharine and Petruchio" at this time of day
would do anything un- Shakespearean. I do not blame
him for this : it is a perfectly natural consequence of the
fact that, like most actors and managers, he does not like
Shakespeare and does not know him, although he con-
forms without conscious insincerity to the convention as
to the Swan's greatness. I am far from setting up my
own Shakespearean partialities and intimacies, acquired
in my childhood, as in any way superior to Mr. Tree*s

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mature distaste or indifference. But I may reasonably
assume — though I admit that the assumption is unusual
and indeed unprecedented — that Shakespeare's plays are
produced for the satisfaction of those who like Shake-
speare, and not as a tedious rite to celebrate the reputa-
tion of the author and enhance that of the actor. There-
fore I hope Mr. Tree, in such cutting of ''Julius Caesar"
as the limits of time may force upon him, will carefully
retain all the passages which he dislikes and cut out those
which seem to him sufficiently popular to meet the views
of Christopher Sly. He will not, in any case, produce
an acting version as good as Mr. Forbes Robertson's
"Hamlet," because Mr. Forbes Robertson seems to have
liked "Hamlet" ; nor as good as Mr. George Alexander's
"As You Like It," because Mr. Alexander apparently
considers Shakespeare as good a judge of a play as him-
self ; but we shall at least escape a positively anti-Shake-
spearean "Julius Caesar." H Mr. Tree had suffered as
much as I have from seeing Shakespeare butchered to
make a cockney's holiday, he would sympathize with my
nervousness on the subject.

As I write — or rather as I dictate — comes the remark-
able news that the London managers have presented the
Vice-Chamberlain with 500 ounces of silver. One cannot
but be refreshed by the frank publicity of the proceeding.
When the builders in my parish proffer ounces of silver
to the sanitary inspector, they do so by stealth, and blush
to find it fame. But the Vice-Chamberlain, it appears,
may take presents from those over whom he is set as an
inspector and judge without a breath of scandal. It
seems to me, however, that the transaction involves a
grave injustice to Mr. Redford. Why is he to have
nothing? A well-known Irish landlord once replied to

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a threatening letter by saying, "If you expect to intim-
idate me by shooting my agent, you will be disappointed."
One can imagine Mr. Redford saying to the managers
in a similar spirit, "If you expect to bribe me by present-
ing 500 ounces of silver to my vice-principal, you will be
disappointed." I do not suppose that Sir Spencer Pon-
sonby-Fane has dreamt of giving any serious thought to
this aspect of what I shall permit myself to describe as
a ludicrously improper proceeding; for the Censorial
functions of his department will not bear serious thought.
His action is certainly according to precedent. Sir Henry
Herbert, who, as Master of the Revels to Charles I., did
much to establish the traditions of the Censorship, has
left us his grateful testimony to the civility of a con-
temporary actor-manager who tactfully presented his
wife with a handsome pair of gloves. Still, that actor-
manager did not invite the Press to report the speech he
made on the occasion, nor did he bring a large public
deputation of his brother managers with him. I suggest
that his example in this respect should be followed in
future rather than that of Tuesday last. I shall be told,
no doubt, that Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane has nothing
to do with the licensing of plays. And I shall immediately
retort, "What then have the London managers to do with
Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane?"

379

A BREATH FROM THE SPANISH

MAIN

A MarCs Shadow. Adapted from the French play
"Roger la Honte" by Robert Buchanan. Revival.
Her Majesty's Theatre. 27 November, 1897.
Admiral Guinea: a play in four acts. By R. L.
Stevenson and W. E. Henley. Honesty: a Cottage
Flower: in one act. By Margaret Young. The New
Century Theatre. Avenue Theatre. 29 November,
1897.

IT IS not in human nature to regard Her Majesty's
Theatre as the proper place for such a police-court
drama as "A Man's Shadow." Still, it is not a bad
bit of work of its kind ; and it would be a good deal bet-
ter if it were played as it ought to be with two actors
instead of one in the parts of Lucien Laroque and Luver-
san. Of course Mr. Tree, following the precedent of
"The Lyons Mail," doubles the twain. Equally of course,
this expedient completely destroys the illusion, which
requires that two different men should rememble one an-
other so strongly as to be practically indistinguishable
except on tolerably close scrutiny; whilst Mr. Tree's
reputation as a master of the art of disguising himself
requires that he shall astonish the audience by the ex-
travagant dissimilarity of the two figures he alternately
presents. No human being could, under any conceivable
circumstances, mistake his Laroque for his Luversan ; and
I have no doubt that Mr. Tree will take this as the highest
compliment I could possibly pay him for this class of
work. Nevertheless, I have no hesitation in saying that
if the real difficulty — one compared to which mere dis-
guise is child's play — were faced and vanquished, the

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interest of the play would be trebled. That difficulty, I
need hardly explain, is the presentation to the spectators
of a single figure which shall yet be known to them as
the work of two distinct actors. As it is, instead of two
men in one, we have one man in two, which makes the
play incredible as well as impossible.

However, as I have said, the play serves its turn. The
one act into which the doubling business enters for a
moment only (a very disastrous moment, by the way) is
thoroughly effective, and gives Mr. Tree an opportunity
for a remarkable display of his peculiar talent as an im-
aginative actor. Indeed, he plays so well as the prisoner
in the dock that all the applause goes to the bad playing
of the advocate who saves himself from the unpleasant-
ness of defending his friend at the expense of his wife's
reputation by the trite expedient of dropping down dead.
I dare say this will seem a wanton disparagement of a
stage effect which was unquestionably highly successful,
and to which Mr. Waller led up by such forcible and
sincere acting that his going wrong at the last moment
was all the more aggravating. But if to let the broken-
hearted Raymond de Noirville suddenly change into
Sergeant Buzfuz at the very climax of his anguish was
to go wrong, then it seems to me that Mr. Lewis Waller
certainly did go wrong. When he turned to the jury and
apostrophized them as GENTLEMEN, in a roll of elocu-
tionary thunder, Raymond de Noirville was done for;
and it was really Lucien Laroque who held the scene to-
gether. The gallery responded promptly enough to Mr.
Waller, as the jury always does respond to Sergeant Buz-
fuz ; but I venture to hope that the very noisiness of the
applause has by this time convinced him that he ought
not to have provoked it.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

By the way, since Mr. Tree is fortunate enough to
have his band made so much of as it is by Mr. Raymond
Roze, he would, I think, find it economical to lavish a
few "extra gentlemen" (or ladies) on the orchestra, even
if they had to be deducted from his stage crowd. Two
or three additional strings would make all the difference
in such works as Mendelssohn's "Ruy Bias" overture.

Considering the lustre of the blazing galaxy of intellect
which has undertaken the administration of the New
Century Theatre, I really think the matinees of that in-
stitution might be better tempered to the endurance of
the public. It is true that one has the vindictive satisfac-
tion of seeing the committee men sharing the fatigue of
the subscribers, and striving to outface their righteous
punishment with feeble grins at their own involuntary
yawns. But this is not precisely the sort of fun the New
Century Theatre promised us. I ask Mr. Archer, Mr.

Massingham, Mr. Sutro, and Miss Robins, what the

I beg Miss Robins 's pardon — what on earth they mean
by putting on a long first piece in front of an important
four-act play for no other purpose, apparently, than to
damage the effect of that play, and overdrive a willing
audience by keeping it in the theatre from half-past two
until a quarter to six. If the first piece had been one of
surpassing excellence, or in any way specially germane
to the purposes of the New Century Theatre, I should
still say that it had better have been reserved for another
occasion. But as it only needed a little obvious trimming
to be perfectly eligible for the evening bill at any of our
ordinary commercial theatres, its inclusion must be con-
demned as the very wantonness of bad management, un-
less there was some munificent subscriber to be propitiated
by it. Or was Miss Kate Rorke's appearance as the lodg-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ing-house slavey the attraction? If so, Miss Rorke and
the committee have to share between them the responsibil-
ity of a stupendous error of judgment. Miss Rorke is
congenitally incapable of reproducing in her own person
any single touch, national or idiosyncratic, of Clorindar
Ann. She can industriously pronounce face as fice, mile
as mawl, and no as nah-oo; but she cannot do it in a
London voice ; nor is her imaginative, idealistic, fastidious
sentiment even distantly related to the businesslike pas-
sions of the cockney kitchen. Whatever parts she may
have been miscast for before she won her proper place
on the stage, she had better now refer applicants for
that sort of work to Miss Louie Freear or Miss Cicely
Richards. It would give me great pleasure to see Miss
Rorke again as Helena in "A Midsummer Night's
Dream" ; but I think I had almost rather be boiled alive
than go a second time to see "Honesty," which, on this
occasion, was most decidedly not the best policy for the
New Century Theatre.

Hardly anything gives a livelier sense of the deadness
of the English stage in the eighties than the failure of
Stevenson and Mr. Henley to effect a lodgment on it.
To plead that they were no genuine dramatists is not to
the point : pray what were some of the illiterate bunglers
and ignoramuses whose work was preferred to theirs?
Ask any playgoer whether he remembers any of the fash-
ionable successes of that period as vividly as he remem-
bers "Deacon Brodie" ! If he says yes, you will find that
he is either a simple liar, or else no true playgoer, but
merely a critic, a fireman, a policeman, or some other
functionary who has to be paid to induce him to enter a
theatre. Far be it from me to pretend that Henley and
Stevenson, in their Boy Buccaneer phase, took the stage

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

seriously — unless it were the stage of pasteboard scenes
and characters, and tin lamps and slides. But even that
stage was in the eighties so much more artistic than the
real stage — so much more sanctified by the childish fancies
and dreams in which real dramatic art begins, that it was
just by writing for it, and not for the West End houses,
that Henley and Stevenson contrived to get ahead of their
time. "Admiral Guinea" is perhaps their most frankly
boyish compound of piracy and pasteboard, coming oc-
casionally very close to poetry and pasteboard, and writ-
ten with prodigious literary virtuosity. Indeed, both of
them had a literary power to which maturity could add
nothing except prudence, which in this style is the mother
of dulness. Their boyishness comes out in their bar-
barous humor, their revelling in blood and broadswords,
crime, dark lanterns, and delirious supernatural terrors:
above all, in their recklessly irreligious love of adventure
for its own sake. We see it too in the unnatural drawing
of the girl Arethusa, though the womanliness aimed at is
not altogether ill divined in the abstract. The Admiral
himself is rank pasteboard ; but the cleverness with which
he is cut out and colored, and his unforgettable story of
his last voyage and his wife's death, force us to overlook
the impossibilities in his anatomy, and to pretend, for the
heightening of our own enjoyment, that he not only moves
on the authors' slides, and speaks with their voices, but
lives. Pew is more convincing ; for his qualities are those
that a man might have ; only, if a real man had them, he
would end, not as a blind beggar, but as ruler of the
Queen's Navee. This does not trouble the ordinary play-
goer, who, simple creature! accepts Pew's villainy as a
sufficient cause for his exceeding downness on his luck.
Students of real life will not be so easily satisfied: they

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

will see in him the tact, ability, force of character, and
boldness which have been associated with abominable
vices in many eminently successful men, but which no
vicious tramp, however impudent, reckless, greedy and
ferocious, ever had, or ever will have.

The juvenility of the piece is very apparent indeed in
the contrast between the clumsy conduct of the action,
and the positive inspiration of some of the stage effects.
The blind robber, disturbed by the strangely tranquil foot-
steps of the sleepwalker, and believing himself to be hid-
den by the night until, groping his way to the door, he
burns his hand in the candle and infers that he must be
visible to the silent presence, is a masterstroke of stage
effect ; but it is not better in its way than the quieter point
made when the Admiral opens his famous treasure chest
and shows that it contains an old chain, an old ring, an
old wedding dress, and nothing more. These triumphs
are the fruit of the authors' genius. When we come to
the product of their ordinary intelligence, our admiration
changes to exasperation. Anything more ludicrously
inept than the far-fetching of Kit French into the Ad-
miral's house by Pew in the third act, will not soon be
seen again, even on the English stage. The fact is. Kit
French should be cut out of the play altogether; for
though it is hard to leave Arethewsa without her Sweet
Willyum, it is still harder to have a work of art which
in all other respects hits its mark, reduced to absurdity
by him. One burglary is enough; and three acts are
enough. On reflection, I relent so far that I think that
Kit might be allowed to live for the purpose of drawing
out of Admiral Guinea and Arethusa their very fine scene
at the beginning of the third act, and officiating as Pew's
executioner; but the rest of his exploits, like the House

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of Lords, are useless, dangerous, and ought to be
abolished.

The performance was a remarkably good one. The
stage manager should not have so far neglected the an-
cient counsel to "jine his flats" as to leave a large gap in
the roof of the Admiral's house; but there was nothing
else to complain of. Mr. Sidney Valentine had a rare
chance as Pew. He proved unable to bear the extraor-
dinary strain put by the authors on his capacity for rum,
and frankly stopped after the first gallon or two; but in
no other respect was he found wanting. Mr. Mollison
played the Admiral very carefully and methodically. The
part was not seen by flashes of lightning; but none of it
was lost. What man could do with the impossible Kit
French Mr. Loraine did; and Miss Dolores Drummond
was well within her means as the landlady of the Benbow
Inn. The part of Arethusa, pretty as it is, is so roman-
tically literary that Miss Cissie Loftus could show Us
nothing about herself in it except what we already know :
namely, that she is like nobody else on the stage or off it,
and that her vocation is beyond all doubt.

386

HAMLET REVISITED

i8 December, 18^7,

PUBLIC feeling has been much harrowed this week
by the accounts from America of the 144 hours'
bicycle race; but what are the horrors of such an
exhibition compared to those of the hundred-nights run
of Hamlet ! On Monday last I went, in my private capac-
ity, to witness the last lap but five of the Lyceum trial of
endurance. The performers had passed through the stage
of acute mania, and were for the most part sleep-walking
in a sort of dazed blank-verse dream. Mr. Barnes raved
of some New England maiden named Affection Poo ; the
subtle distinctions made by Mrs. Patrick Campbell be-
tween madness and sanity had blurred off into a placid
idiocy turned to favor and to prettiness; Mr. Forbes
Robertson, his lightness of heart all gone, wandered into
another play at the words "Sleep ? No more !" which he
delivered as, "Sleep no more." Fortunately, before he
could add "Macbeth does murder sleep," he relapsed into
Hamlet and saved the situation. And yet some of the
company seemed all the better for their unnatural ex-
ercise. The King was in uproarious spirits; and the
Ghost, always comfortable, was now positively pampered,
his indifference to the inconveniences of purgatory having
developed into a bean-fed enjoyment of them. Fortinbras,
as I judged, had sought consolation in religion: he was
anxious concerning Hamlet's eternal welfare; but his
general health seemed excellent. As Mr. Gould did not
play on the occasion of my first visit, I could not compare
him with his former self ; but his condition was sufficiently
grave. His attitude was that of a cast-away mariner who

387

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

has no longer hope enough to scan the horizon for a sail ;
yet even in this extremity his unconquerable generosity
of temperament had not deserted him. When his cue
came, he would jump up and lend a hand with all his old
alacrity and resolution. Naturally the players of the
shorter parts had suffered least : Rosencrantz andGuilden-
stern were only beginning to enjoy themselves; and
Bernardo (or was it Marcellus?) was still eagerly work-
ing up his part to concert pitch. But there could be no
mistake as to the general effect. Mr. Forbes Robertson's
exhausting part had been growing longer and heavier on
his hands ; whilst the support of the others had been fall-
ing off ; so that he was keeping up the charm of the repre-
sentation almost single-handed just when the torturing
fatigue and monotony of nightly repetition had made the
task most difficult. To the public, no doubt, the justifica-
tion of the effort is its success. There was no act which
did not contain at least one scene finely and movingly
played; indeed some of the troubled passages gained in
verisimilitude by the tormented condition of the actor.
But "Hamlet" is a very long play; and it only seems a
short one when the high-mettled comedy with which it
is interpenetrated from beginning to end leaps out with
all the lightness and spring of its wonderful loftiness of
temper. This was the secret of the delighted surprise
with which the public, when the run began, found that
"Hamlet," far from being a funereally classical bore, was
full of a celestial gaiety and fascination. It is this rare
vein that gives out first when the exigencies of theatrical
commerce force an actor to abuse it. A sentimental
Hamlet can go on for two years, or ten for the matter
of that, without much essential depreciation of the per-
formance; but the actor who sounds Hamlet from the

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

lowest note to the top of his compass very soon finds that
compass contracting at the top. On Monday night the
first act, the third act, and the fifth act from the entrance
of Laertes onward, had lost little more than they had
gained as far as Mr. Forbes Robertson was concerned;
but the second act, and the colloquy with the grave-dig-
ger, which were the triumphs of the representation in its
fresher stages, were pathetically dulled, with the result
that it could no longer be said that the length of the play
was forgotten.

The worst of the application of the long-run system to
heroic plays is that, instead of killing the actor, it drives
him to limit himself to such effects as he can repeat to
infinity without committing suicide. The opposite system,
in its extreme form of the old stock company playing
two or three different pieces every night, led to the same
evasion in a more offensive form. The recent correspond-
ence in the "Morning Post" on The Stage as a Profes-
sion, to which I have myself luminously contributed, has
produced the usual fallacious eulogies of the old stock
company as a school of acting. You can no more prevent
contributors to public correspondences falling into this
twenty-times-exploded error than from declaring that
duelling was a school of good manners, that the lash sup-
pressed garotting, or any other of the gratuitous igno-
rances of the amateur sociologist. The truth is, it is just
as impossible for a human being to study and perform a
new part of any magnitude every day as to play Hamlet
for a hundred consecutive nights. Nevertheless, if an
actor is required to do these things, he will find some
way out of the difficulty without refusing. The stock
actor solved the problem by adopting a "line": for ex-
ample, if his "line" was old age, he acquired a trick of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

doddering and speaking in a cracked voice : if juvenility,
he swaggered and effervesced. With these accompHsh-
ments, eked out by a few rules of thumb as to wigs and
face-painting, one deplorable step dance, and one still
more deplorable "combat," he ^'swallowed" every part
given to him in a couple of hours, and regurgitated it in
the evening over the footlights, always in the same man-
ner, however finely the dramatist might have individ-
ualised it. His infamous incompetence at last swept him
from the reputable theatres into the barns and booths;
and it was then that he became canonised, in the imagina-
tion of a posterity that had never suffered from him, as
the incarnation of the one quality in which he was quite
damnably deficient: to wit, versatility. His great con-
tribution to dramatic art was the knack of earning a living
for fifty years on the stage without ever really acting, or
either knowing or caring for the difference between the
"Comedy of Errors" and "Box and Cox."

A moment's consideration will show that the results of
the long-run system at its worst are more bearable than
the horrors of the past. Also, that even in point of giving
the actor some chance of varying his work, the long-run
system is superior, since the modern actor may at all
events exhaust the possibilities of his part before it ex-
hausts him, whereas the stock actor, having barely time
to apply his bag of tricks to his daily task, never varies
his treatment by a hair's breadth from one half century
to another. The best system, of course, lies between these
extremes. Take the case of the great Italian actors who
have visited us, and whose acting is of an excellence ap-
parently quite beyond the reach of our best English per-
formers. We find them extremely chary of playing every
night. They have a repertory containing plays which
count as resting places for them. For example, Duse

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

relieves Magda with Mirandolina just as our own Shake-
spearean star actors used to relieve Richard the Third
and Othello with Charles Surface and Don Felix. But
even with this mitigation no actor can possibly play lead-
ing parts of the first order six nights a week all the year
round unless he underplays them, or routines them me-
chanically in the old stock manner, or faces a terrible
risk of disablement by paralysis, or, finally, resorts to
alcohol or morphia, with the usual penalties. What we
want in order to get the best work is a repertory theatre
with alternative casts. If, for instance, we could have
"Hamlet" running at the Lyceum with Sir Henry Irving
and Miss Ellen Terry on Thursdays and Saturdays, Mr.
Forbes Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell on Wednes-
days and Fridays, and the other two days devoted to
comedies in which all four could occasionally appear, with
such comedians as Mr. Charles Wyndham, Mr. Weedon
Grossmith,, Mr. Bourchier, Mr. Cyril Maude, and Mr.
Hawtrey, then we should have a theatre which we could
invite serious people to attend without positively insulting
them. I am aware that the precise combination which I
have named is not altogether a probable one at present;
but there is no reason why we should not at least turn
our faces in that direction. The actor-manager system,
which has hitherto meant the star system carried to its
utmost possible extreme, has made the theatre so insuf-
ferable that, now that its monopoly has been broken up
by the rise of the suburban theatres, there is a distinct
weakening of the jealous and shameless individualism of
the last twenty years, and a movement towards combina-
tion and co-operation.

By the way, is it quite prudent to start a public cor-
respondence on the Stage as a Profession ? Suppose some
one were to tell the truth about it !

391

PEACE AND GOOD WILL TO
MANAGERS

The Babes in the Wood. The Children's Grand
Pantomime, by Arthur Sturgess and Arthur Collins.
Music by J. M. Glover. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,
27 December, 1897.

I AM sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christ-
mas in these articles. It is an indecent subject; a
cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly
subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadg-
ing, lying, filthy, blasphemous, and demoralising subject.
Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation
by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it
would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal
hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be
turned into a pillar of greasy sausages. Yet, though it is
over now for a year, and I can go out without positively
elbowing my way through groves of carcases, I am
dragged back to it, with my soul full of loathing, by the
pantomime.

The pantomime ought to be a redeeming feature of
Christmas, since it professedly aims at developing the
artistic possibilities of our Saturnalia. But its profes-
sions are like all the other Christmas professions: what
the pantomime actually does is to abuse the Christmas
toleration of dulness, senselessness, vulgarity and ex-
travagance to a degree utterly incredible by people who
have never been inside a theatre. The manager spends
five hundred pounds to produce two penn'orth of effect.
As a shilling's worth is needed to fill the gallery, he has
to spend three thousand pounds for the "gods," seven

392

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

thousand five hundred for the pit, and so on in propor-
tion, except that when it comes to the stalls and boxes he
caters for the children alone, depending on their credulity
to pass off his twopence as a five-shilling piece. And yet
even this is not done systematically and intelligently. The
wildest superfluity and extravagance in one direction is
wasted by the most sordid niggardliness in another. The
rough rule is to spend money recklessly on whatever can
be seen and heard and recognized as costly, and to econ-
omise on invention, fancy, dramatic faculty — in short,
on brains. It is only when the brains get thrown in
gratuitously through the accident of some of the contract-
ing parties happening to possess them — a contingency
which managerial care cannot always avert — that the
entertainment acquires sufficient form or purpose to make
it humanly apprehensible. To the mind's eye and ear
the modern pantomime, as purveyed by the late Sir Au-
gustus Harris, is neither visible nor audible. It is a
glittering, noisy void, horribly wearisome and enervating,
like all performances which worry the physical senses
without any recreative appeal to the emotions and through
them to the intellect.

I grieve to say that these remarks have lost nothing of
their force by the succession of Mr. Arthur Collins to
Sir Augustus Harris. In Drury Lane drama Mr. Col-
lins made a decided advance on his predecessor. In pan-
tomime he has, I think, also shown superior connoisseur-
ship in selecting pretty dummies for the display of his
lavishly expensive wardrobe; but the only other respect
in which he has outdone his late chief is the cynicism
with which he has disregarded, I will not say the poetry
of the nursery tale, because poetry is unthinkable in such
a connexion, but the bare coherence and common sense

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of the presentation of its incidents. The spectacular
scenes exhibit Mr. ColHns as a manager to whom a thou-
sand pounds is as five shilHngs. The dramatic scenes
exhibit him as one to whom a crown-piece is as a milHon.
If Mr. Dan Leno had asked for a hundred-guinea tunic
to wear during a single walk across the stage, no doubt
he would have got it, with a fifty-guinea hat and sword-
belt to boot. If he had asked for ten guineas' worth of
the time of a competent dramatic humorist to provide him
with at least one line that might not have been pirated
from the nearest Cheap Jack, he would, I suspect, have
been asked whether he wished to make Drury Lane bank-
rupt for the benefit of dramatic authors. I hope I may
never again have to endure anything more dismally fu-
tile than the efforts of Mr. Leno and Mr. Herbert Camp-
bell to start a passable joke in the course of their stum-
blings and wanderings through barren acres of gag on
Boxing-night. Their attempt at a travesty of "Hamlet"
reached a pitch of abject resourcelessness which could
not have been surpassed if they really had been a couple
of school children called on for a prize-day Shakespear-
ean recitation without any previous warning. An imita-
tion of Mr. Forbes Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Camp-
bell would have been cheap and obvious enough ; but even
this they were unequal to. Mr. Leno, fortunately for
himself, was inspired at the beginning of the business to
call "Hamlet" "Ham." Several of the easily amused
laughed at this ; and thereafter, whenever the travesty be-
came so frightfully insolvent in ideas as to make it almost
impossible to proceed. Mr. Leno said "Ham," and saved
the situation. What will happen now is that Mr. Leno
will hit on a new point of the "Ham" order at, say, every
second performance. As there are two performances a

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

day, he will have accumulated thirty ''wheezes," as h6
calls them, by the end of next month, besides being cut
down to strict limits of time. In February, then, his part
will be quite bearable — probably even very droll — and
Mr. Collins will thereby be confirmed in his belief that
if you engage an eccentric comedian of recognized gag-
ging powers you need not take the trouble to write a part
for him. But would it not be wiser, under these circum-
stances, to invite the critics on the last night of the pan-
tomime instead of on the first? Mr. Collins will prob-
ably reply that by doing so he would lose the benefit of
the press notices, which, as a matter of Christmas cus-
tom, are not criticisms, but simply gratuitous advertise-
ments given as a Christmas-box by the newspaper to the
manager who advertises all the year round. And I am
sorry to say he will be quite right.

It is piteous to see the wealth of artistic effort which
is annually swamped in the morass of purposeless waste-
fulness that constitutes a pantomime. At Drury Lane
many of the costumes are extremely pretty, and some of
them, notably those borrowed for the flower ballet from
one of Mr. Crane's best-known series of designs, rise
above mere theatrical prettiness to the highest class of
decorative art available for fantastic stage purposes. Un-
happily, every stroke that is at all delicate, or rare, or
precious is multiplied, and repeated, and obtruded, usu-
ally on the limbs of some desolatingly incompetent young
woman, until its value is heavily discounted. Still, some
of the scenes are worth looking at for five minutes, though
not for twenty. The orchestral score is very far above
the general artistic level of the pantomime. The instru-
mental resources placed at the disposal of Mr. Glover —
quite ungrudgingly as far as they consist of brass — would

395

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

suffice for a combined Bach festival and Bayreuth "Got-
terdammerung" performance. To hear a whole battery
of Bach trumpets, supported by a park of trombones,
blasting the welkin with the exordium of Wagner's Kai-
sermarsch, is an ear-splitting ecstasy not to be readily
forgotten ; but these mechanical effects are really cheaper
than the daintiness and wit of the vocal accompaniments,
in which Mr. Glover shows a genuine individual and
original style in addition to his imposing practical knowl-
edge of band business.

If I were Mr. Collins I should reduce the first four
scenes to one short one, and get some person with a
little imagination, some acquaintance with the story of
the Babes in the Wood, and at least a rudimentary faculty
for amusing people, to write the dialogue for it. I
should get Messrs. Leno and Campbell to double the
parts of the robbers with those of the babes, and so
make the panorama scene tolerable. I should reduce the
second part to the race-course scene, which is fairly
funny, with just one front scene, in which full scope
might be allowed for Mr. Leno's inspiration, and the
final transformation. I should either cut the harlequinade
out, or, at the expense of the firms it advertises, pay the
audience for looking at it; or else I should take as much
trouble with it as Mr. Tree took with "Chand d'Habits"
at Her Majesty's. And I should fill up the evening with
some comparatively amusing play by Ibsen or Browning.

Finally, may I ask our magistrates on what ground
they permit the legislation against the employment of
very young children as money makers for their families
to be practically annulled in favor of the pantomimes?
If the experience, repeated twice a day for three months,
is good for the children, I suggest that there need be no

396

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

difficulty in filling their places with volunteers from
among the children of middle and upper-class parents
anxious to secure such a delightful and refining piece
of education for their oflFspring. If it is not good for
them, why do the magistrates deliberately license it? I
venture to warn our managers that their present mon-
strous abuse of magistrates' licenses can only end in
a cast-iron clause in the next Factory Act uncondition-
ally forbidding the employment of children under thir-
teen on any pretext whatever.

TAPPERTIT ON C^SAR

Julius Caesar. Her Majesty's Theatre, 22 January,
1898.

THE truce with Shakespeare is over. It was only
possible whilst "Hamlet" was on the stage.
"Hamlet" is the tragedy of private life — nay,
of individual bachelor-poet life. It belongs to a detached
residence, a select library, an exclusive circle, to no oc-
cupation, to fathomless boredom, to impenitent mug-
wumpism, to the illusion that the futility of these things
is the futility of existence, and its contemplation phil-
osophy: in short, to the dream-fed gentlemanism of tfie
stage which Shakespeare inaugurated in English litera-
ture : the age, that is, of the rising middle-class bringing
into power the ideas taught it by its servants in the
kitchen, and its fathers in the shop — ideas now happily
passing away as the onslaught of modern democracy
offers to the kitchen-taught and home-bred the alternative

397

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

of achieving a real superiority or going ignominiously
under in the class conflict.

It is when we turn to "Julius Caesar," the most splen-
didly written political melodrama we possess, that we
realize the apparently immortal author of "Hamlet" as
a man, not for all time, but for an age only, and that,
too, in all solidly wise and heroic aspects, the most des-
picable of all the ages in our history. It is impossible
for even the most judicially-minded critic to look without
a revulsion of indignant contempt at this travestying of
a great man as a silly braggart, whilst the pitiful gang
of mischief-makers who destroyed him are lauded as
statesmen and patriots. There is not a single sentence
uttered by Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that is, I will
not say worthy of him, but even worthy of an average
Tammany boss. Brutus is nothing but a familiar type
of English suburban preacher : politically he would hardly
impress the Thames Conservancy Board. Cassius is a
vehemently assertive nonentity. It is only when we
come to Antony, unctuous voluptuary and self-seeking
sentimental demagogue, that we find Shakespeare in his
depth ; and in his depth, of course, he is superlative. Re-
garded as a crafty stage job, the play is a triumph : rhet-
oric, claptrap, effective gushes of emotion, all the devices
of the popular playwright, are employed with a profusion
of power that almost breaks their backs. No doubt there
are slips and slovenlinesses of the kind that careful re-
visers eliminate; but they count for so little in the mass
of accomplishment that it is safe to say that the drama-
tist's art can be carried no further on that plane. If
Goethe, who understood Caesar and the significance of
his death — "the most senseless of deeds" he called it —
had treated the subject, his conception of it would have

398

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

been as superior to Shakespeare's as St. John's Gospel
is to the "PoHce News" ; but his treatment could not have
been more magnificently successful. As far as a sonority^
imagery, wit, humor, energy of imagination, power over
language, and a whimsically keen eye for idiosyncrasies
can make a dramatist, Shakespeare was the king of dram::^
atists. Unfortunately, a man may have them all and yet
conceive high affairs of state exactly as Simon Tappertit
did. In one of the scenes in "J^^^^s Caesar" a conceited
poet bursts into the tent of Brutus and Cassius, and ex-
horts them not to quarrel with one another. If Shake-
speare had been able to present his play to the ghost of
the great Julius, he would probably have had much the
same reception. He certainly would have deserved it.

When it was announced that Mr. Tree had resolved
to give special prominence to the character of Caesar in
his acting version, the critics winked, and concluded
simply that the actor-manager was going to play Antony
and not Brutus. Therefore I had better say that Mr.
Tree must stand acquitted of any belittlement of the
parts which compete so strongly with his own. Before
going to Her Majesty's I was curious enough to block
out for myself a division of the play into three acts ; and
I found that Mr. Tree's division corresponded exactly
with mine. Mr. Waller's opportunities as Brutus, and
Mr. McLeay's as Cassius, are limited only by their own
ability to take advantage of them ; and Mr. Louis Calvert
figures as boldly in the public eye as he did in his own
production of "Antony and Cleopatra" last year at Man-
chester. Indeed, Mr. Calvert is the only member of the
company who achieves an unequivocal success. The
preference expressed in the play by Caesar for fat men
may, perhaps, excuse Mr. Calvert for having again per-

399

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

mitted himself to expand after his triumph reduction of
his girth for his last appearance in London. However,
he acted none the worse: in fact, nobody else acted so
skilfully or originally. The others, more heavily bur-
dened, did their best, quite in the spirit of the man who
had never played the fiddle, but had no doubt he could
if he tried. Without oratory, without style, without
specialized vocal training, without any practice worth
mentioning, they assaulted the play with cheerful self-
sufficiency, and gained great glory by the extent to which,
as a masterpiece of the playwright's trade, it played itself.
Some small successes were not lacking. Caesar's nose
was good: Calpurnia's bust was worthy of her: in such
parts Garrick and Siddons could have achieved no more.
Miss Evelyn Millard's Roman matron in the style of
Richardson — Cato's daughter as Clarissa — was an un-
looked-for novelty; but it cost a good deal of valuable
time to get in the eighteenth century between the lines
of the first b. c. By operatic convention — the least appro-
priate of all conventions — the boy Lucius was played by
Mrs. Tree, who sang Sullivan's ultra-nineteenth-century
"Orpheus with his Lute," modulations and all, to a piz-
zicato accompaniment supposed to be played on a lyre
with eight open and unstopped strings, a feat complexly
and absurdly impossible. Mr. Waller, as Brutus, failed
in the first half of the play. His intention clearly was
to represent Brutus as a man superior to fate and circum-
stance ; but the effect he produced was one of insensibility.
Nothing could have been more unfortunate; for it is
through the sensibility of Brutus that the audience have
to learn what they cannot learn from the phlegmatic pluck
of Casca or the narrow vindictiveness of Cassius : that is,
the terrible momentousness, the harrowing anxiety and

400

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

dread, of the impending catastrophe. Mr. Waller left
that function to the thunderstorm. From the death of
Caesar onward he was better ; and his appearance through-
out was effective; but at best his sketch was a water-
color one. Mr. Franklyn McLeay carried off the honors
of the evening by his deliberate staginess and imposing
assumptiveness : that is, by as much of the grand style
as our playgoers now understand; but in the last act
he was monotonously violent, and died the death of an
incorrigible poseur, not of a noble Roman. Mr. Tree's
memory failed him as usual; and a good deal of the
technical part of his work was botched and haphazard,
like all Shakespearean work nowadays ; nevertheless, like
Mr. Calvert, he made the audience believe in the reality
of the character before them. But it is impossible to
praise his performance in detail. I cannot recall any
single passage in the scene after the murder that was
well done: in fact, he only secured an effective curtain
by bringing Calpurnia on the stage to attitudinise over
Caesar's body. To say that the demagogic oration in the
Forum produced its effect is nothing; for its effect is
inevitable, and Mr. Tree neither made the most of it nor
handled it with any pretence of mastery or certainty.
But he was not stupid, nor inane, nor Bard-of-Avon rid-
den ; and he contrived to interest the audience in Antony
instead of trading on their ready-made interest in Mr.
Beerbohm Tree. And for that many sins may be for-
given him nowadays, when the playgoer, on first nights
at all events, goes to see the cast rather than the play.

What is missing in the performance, for want of the
specific Shakespearean skill, is the Shakespearean music.
When we come to those unrivalled grandiose passages
in which Shakespeare turns on the full organ, we want

401

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to hear the sixteen-foot pipes booming, or, failing them
(as we often must, since so few actors are naturally
equipped with them), the ennobled tone, and the tempo
suddenly steadied with the majesty of deeper purpose.
You have, too, those moments when the verse, instead
of opening up the depths of sound, rises to its most bril-
liant clangor, and the lines ring like a thousand trump-
ets. If we cannot have these effects, or if we can only
have genteel drawing-room arrangements of them, we
cannot have Shakespeare; and that is what is mainly the
matter at Her Majesty's : there are neither trumpets nor
pedal pipes there. The conversation is metrical and em-
phatic in an elocutionary sort of way; but it makes no
distinction between the arid prairies of blank verse which
remind one of "Henry VI." at its crudest, and the places
where the morass suddenly piles itself into a mighty
mountain. Cassius in the first act has a twaddling forty-
line speech, base in its matter and mean in its measure,
followed immediately by the magnificent torrent of
rhetoric, the first burst of true Shakespearean music in
the play, beginning, —

"Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves."

I failed to catch the slightest change of elevation or re-
inforcement of feeling when Mr. McLeay passed from
one to the other. His tone throughout was dry; and it
never varied. By dint of energetic, incisive articulation,
he drove his utterances harder home than the others ; but
the best lines seemed to him no more than the worst:

402

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

there were no heights and depths, no contrast of black
thunder-cloud and flaming lightning flash, no stirs and
surprises. Yet he was not inferior in oratory to the rest.
Mr. Waller certainly cannot be reproached with dryness
of tone ; and his delivery of the speech in the forum was
perhaps the best piece of formal elocution we got; but
he also kept at much the same level throughout, and did
not at any moment attain to anything that could be called
grandeur. Mr. Tree, except for a conscientiously desper-
ate effort to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war in the
robustious manner, with no better result than to all but
extinguish his voice, very sensibly left oratory out of
the question, and tried conversational sincerity, which
answered so well that his delivery of "This was the no-
blest Roman of them all" came off excellently.

The real hero of the revival is Mr. Alma Tadema. The
scenery and stage coloring deserve everything that has
been said of them. But the illusion is wasted by want
of discipline and want of thought behind the scenes.
Every carpenter seems to make it a point of honor to set
the cloths swinging in a way that makes Rome reel and
the audience positively seasick. In Brutus's house the
door is on the spectator's left: the knocks on it come
from the right. The Roman soldiers take the field each
man with his two javelins neatly packed up like a fishing-
rod. After a battle, in which they are supposed to have
made the famous Roman charge, hurling these javelins
in and following them up sword in hand, they come back
carrying the javelins still undisturbed in their rug-straps,
in perfect trim for a walk-out with the nursery-maids of
Philippi.

The same want of vigilance appears in the acting ver-
sion. For example, though the tribunes Flavins and

403

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Marullus are replaced by two of the senators, the lines
referring to them by name are not altered. But the odd-
est oversight is the retention in the tent scene of the
obvious confusion of the original version of the play, in
which the death of Portia was announced to Brutus by
Messala, with the second version, into which the quarrel
scene was written to strengthen the fourth act. In this
version Brutus, already in possession of the news, reveals
it to Cassius. The play has come down to us with the
two alternative scenes strung together; so that Brutus's
reception of Messala's news, following his own revela-
tion of it to Cassius, is turned into a satire on Roman
fortitude, the suggestion being that the secret of the calm
with which a noble Roman received the most terrible
tidings in public was that it had been carefully imparted
to him in private beforehand. Mr. Tree has not noticed
this ; and the two scenes are gravely played one after the
other at Her Majesty's. This does not matter much to
our playgoers, who never venture to use their common
sense when Shakespeare is in question ; but it wastes time.
Mr. Tree may without hesitation cut out Pindarus and
Messala, and go straight on from the bowl of wine to
Brutus's question about Philippi.

The music composed for the occasion by Mr. Raymond
Roze, made me glad that I had already taken care to ac-
knowledge the value of Mr. Roze's services to Mr. Tree ;
for this time he has missed the Roman vein rather badly.
To be a Frenchman was once no disqualification for the
antique, because French musicians used to be brought up
on Gluck as English ones were brought up on Handel.
But Mr. Roze composes as if Gluck had been supplanted
wholly in his curriculum by Gounod and Bizet. If that
prelude to the third act were an attempt to emulate the

404

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

overtures to "Alceste'' or "Iphigenia" I could have for-
given it. But to give us the soldiers' chorus from Faust,
crotchet for crotchet and triplet for triplet, with nothing
changed but the notes, was really too bad.

I am sorry I must postpone until next week all con-
sideration of Mr. Pinero's "Trelawny of the Wells." The
tragic circumstances under which I do so are as follows :
The manager of the Court Theatre, Mr. Arthur Chud-
leigh, did not honor the "Saturday Review" with the
customary invitation to the first performance. When
a journal is thus slighted, it has no resource but to go to
its telephone and frantically offer any terms to the box-
offices for a seat for the first night. But on fashionable
occasions the manager is always master of the situation :
there are never any seats to be had except from himself.
It was so on this occasion; and the "Saturday Review"
was finally brought to its knees at the feet of the Sloane
Square telephone. In response to a humble appeal, the
instrument scornfully replied that "three lines of adverse
criticism were of no use to it." Naturally my curiosity
was excited to an extraordinary degree by the fact that
the Court Theatre telephone, which knew all about Mr.
Pinero's comedy, should have such a low opinion of it
as to be absolutely certain that it would deserve an un-
precedentedly contemptuous treatment at my hands. I
instantly purchased a place for the fourth performance,
Charlotte Corday and Julius Caesar occupying my time
on the second and third nights ; and I am now in a posi-
tion to assure that telephone that its misgivings wiere
strangely unwarranted, and that, if it will excuse my skjy-
ing so, it does not know a good comedietta when iiisees
one. Reserving my reasons for next week, I offer Mr.
Pinero my apologies for a delay which is not itiy <Bwn

405

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

fault. (Will the "Mining Journal" please copy, as Mr.
Pinero reads no other paper during the current fort-
night.)

MR. PINERO'S PAST

Charlotte Cor day: a drama in four acts. Anony-
mous. Adelphi Theatre. 21 January, 1898.
Trelawny of the "Wells": an original comedietta in
four acts. By Arthur W. Pinero. Court Theatre.
20 January, 1898.

MR. Pinero has not got over it yet. That fatal
turning-point in life, the fortieth birthday, still
oppresses him. In "The Princess and the But-
terfly" he unbosomed himself frankly, making his soul's
trouble the open theme of his play. But this was taken
in such extremely bad part by myself and others (gnawed
by the same sorrow) that .he became shy on the subject,
and, I take it, began to cast about for some indirect means
of returning to it. It seems to have occurred to him at
last that by simply showing on the stage the fashions of
forty years ago, the crinoline, the flounced skirt, the gari-
baldi, the turban hat, the chenille net, the horse-hair sofa,
the peg-top trouser, and the "weeper" whisker, the chord
of memory could be mutely struck without wounding my
vanity. The delicacy of this mood inspires the whole
play, which has touched me more than anything else Mr.
Pinero has ever written.

But first let me get these old fashions— or rather these
middle-aged fashions : after all, one is not Methusaleh —
oflF my mind. It is significant of the difference between

406

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

my temperament and Mr. Pinero's, that when he, as a
little boy, first heard "Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming,"
he wept ; whereas, at the same tender age, I simply noted
with scorn the obvious plagiarism from "Cheer, Boys,
Cheer/'

To me the sixties waft ballads by Virginia Gabriel and
airs from "II Trovatore"; but Mr. Pinero's selection is
none the less right; for Virginia Gabriel belonged to
Cavendish Square and not to Bagnigge Wells; and "II
Trovatore" is still alive, biding its time to break out again
when M. Jean de Reszke also takes to fondly dreaming.

The costumes at the Court Theatre are a mixture of
caricature and realism. Miss Hilda Spong, whose good
looks attain most happily to the i860 ideal (Miss Ellen
Terry had not then been invented) is dressed exactly after
Leech's broadest caricatures of crinolined English maid-
enhood ; whereas Miss Irene Vanbrugh clings to the finer
authority of Millais' masterly illustrations to Trollope.
None of the men are properly dressed : the "lounge coat"
which we all wear unblushingly to-day as a jacket, with
its comers sloped away in front, and its length behind
involving no friction with the seats of our chairs, then
clung nervously to the traditions of the full coat, and was
longer, straighter, rectangular — cornerder and franker
as to the shoulders than Mr. Pinero has been able to
persuade the tailors of the Court Theatre to make it to-
day. I imagine, too, that Cockney dialect has changed
a good deal since then. Somewhere in the eighties, Mr.
Andrew Tuer pointed out in the "Pall Mall Gazette" that
the conventional representations in fiction of London pro-
nunciation had ceased to bear any recognisable relation
to the actual speech of the coster and the flower-girl ; and
Mr. Anstey, in "Punch," was the first author to give gen-

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eral literary currency to Mr. Tuer's new phonetics. The
lingo of Sam Weller had by that time passed away from
London, though suggestions of it may be heard even to-
day no further off than Hounslow. Sir Henry Irving
can no longer be ridiculed, as he was in the seventies, for
substituting pure vowel sounds for the customary col-
loquial diphthongs; for the man in the street, without at
all aiming at the virtuosity of our chief actor, has himself
independently introduced a novel series of pure vowels.
Thus i has become aw, and ow ah. In spite of Sir Henry,

0 has not been turned into a true vowel ; but it has become
a very marked ow, whilst the English a is changed to a
flagrant i. There is, somewhere in the old files of "All
the Year Round" a Dickensian description of an illiterate
lady giving a reading. Had she been represented as say-
ing, "The scene tikes plice dahn in the Mawl En' Rowd"
(takes place down in the Mile End Road) Dickens would
apparently not have understood the sentence, which no
Londoner with ears can now mistake. On these grounds,

1 challenge the pronunciation of Avonia Bunn, in the per-
son of Miss Pattie Browne, as an anachronism. I feel
sure that if Avonia had made so rhyme to thou in the
sixties, she would have been understood to have alluded
to the feminine pig. On this point, however, my personal
authority is not conclusive, as I did not reach London
until the middle of the seventies. In England everything
is twenty years out of date before it gets printed ; and it
may be that the change had been in operation long before
it was accurately observed. It has also to be considered
that the old literary school never dreamt of using its eyes
or ears, and would invent descriptions of sights and
sounds with an academic self-sufficiency which led later
on to its death from acute and incurable imposture. Its

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ghost still walks in our resurrectionary reviewing enter-
prises, with precipitous effects on the circulation.

It is not in the nature of things possible that Mr.
Pinero's first variation on the theme of "The Princess"
should be successfully acted by a modem London com-
pany. If he had scoured the provinces and America for
elderly actors, thirty years out of date, and, after raising
their wildest hopes by a London engagement, met them
at rehearsal with the brutal announcement that they were
only wanted to burlesque themselves, the thing might
doubtless have been done. But every line of the play
proclaims the author incapable of such heartlessness.
There are only two members of the "theatrical-folk" sec-
tion of the cast who carry much conviction; and these
are the two Robertsonians, to whom success comes only
with the then new order. Miss Irene Vanbrugh is quite
the woman who was then the New Woman ; and Mr. Paul
Arthur, a contemporary American, only needs to seize
the distinction made by the Atlantic between "comedy"
and "cawmedy" to hit off the historical moment of the
author of "Caste" to perfection. And Miss Spong's fair-
ness, fortunately, is universal enough to fit all the cen-
turies and all the decades. But when we come to
Ferdinand Gadd, the leading juvenile of "The Wells,"
we find Mr. Gerald du Maurier in a difficulty. At his
age his only chance of doing anything with the part is
to suggest Sir Henry Irving in embryo. But Mr. Pinero
has not written it that way : he has left Ferdinand Gadd
in the old groove as completely as Mr. Crummies was.
The result is that the part falls between two stools. The
Telfers also miss the mark. Mr. Athol Forde, the Eng-
lish creator of Kroll in "Rosmersholm," is cut off from
the sixties by a mighty gulf. Mrs. Telfcr's criticism of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

stage queens as being "considered merely as parts, not
worth a tinker's oath," is not founded on the real ex-
perience of Mrs. Saker, whose career has run on lighter
lines. My own age in the sixties was so tender that I
cannot pretend to know with any nicety what the "prin-
cipal boy" of the pantomime was like in her petticoats
as a private person at that period; but I have a strong
suspicion that she tended to be older and occasionally
stouter than the very latest thing in that line; and it is
the ultra-latest thing that Miss Pattie Browne has studied
for Avonia Bunn. On the whole I doubt whether the
Court company knows a scrap more about the profes-
sional atmosphere of the old "Wells" than the audience.
The "non-theatrical folk" came off better, with one
exception. I know that Mr. Dion Boucicault as Sir
William Gower can claim a long-established stage con-
vention in favor of his method of portraying crusty senil-
ity. But I have grown out of all endurance of that con-
vention. It is no more like a real old man than a worn-
out billiard table is like a meadow; and it wastes and
worries and perverts the talent of an actor perfectly
capable of making a sincere study of the part. We would
all, I believe, willingly push the stage old man into the
grave upon whose brink he has been cackling and dod-
dering as long as we can remember him. If my vengeance
could pursue him beyond the tomb, it should not stop
there. But so far, at least, he shall go if my malice can
prevail against him. Miss Isabel Bateman is almost
charming as Sir William's ancient sister, and would be
quite so if she also were not touched by the tradition that
old age, in comedy, should always be made ridiculous.
Mr. James Erskine is generally understood to be a Lord-
ling, and, as such, a feeble amateur actor. I am bound

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to say, in defence of a trampled aristocracy, that he rose
superior to the accident of birth, and acted his part as
well as it could be acted. This, I observe, is explained
away on the ground that he has only to be himself on the
stage. I can only reply that the accomplishment of a feat
so extremely difficult entitles him to count the explana-
tion as a very high compliment. Mr. Sam Sothern gives
us a momentary glimpse of Lord Dundreary: I wonder
what the younger generation thinks of it? Miss Irene
Vanbrugh, in the title part, which is not, to tell the truth,
a difficult one in the hands of the right person, vanquishes
it easily and successfully, getting quite outside those comic
relief lines within which her lot has been so often cast.

As to the play itself, its charm, as I have already hinted,
lies in a certain delicacy which makes me loth to lay my
fingers on it. The life that it reproduces had been already
portrayed in the real sixties by Dickens in his sketch of
the Crummies company, and by Anthony Trollope in his
chronicles of Barsetshire. I cannot pretend to think that
Mr. Pinero, in reverting to that period, has really had to
turn back the clock as far as his own sympathies and
ideals are concerned. It seems to me that the world is
to him still the world of Johnny Eames and Lily Dale,
Vincent Crummies and Newman Noggs : his Paula Tan-
querays and Mrs. Ebbsmiths appearing as pure aberra-
tions whose external differences he is able to observe as
far as they can be observed without the inner clue, but
whose point of view he has never found. That is why
Mr. Pinero, as a critic of the advanced guard in modern
life, is unendurable to me. When I meet a musician of
the old school, and talk Rossini and Bellini and Donizetti,
Spohr and Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer with him, we get
on excellently together; for the music that is so empty

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and wooden and vapid and mechanical to the young lions
of Bayreuth, is full of sentiment, imagination and dra-
matic force to us. But when he begins to deplore the
"passing craze" for Wagner, and to explain the horrors
and errors of the Bayreuth school: its lack of melody,
its perpetual "recitative," its tearing discords, its noisy
orchestration overwhelming and ruining the human voice,
I get up and flee. The unsympathetic discourse about
Wagner may be wittier than the sympathetic discourse
about Donizetti ; but that does not make it any the more
tolerable to me, the speaker having passed from a subject
he understands to one that has virtually no existence for
him. It is just so with Mr. Pinero. When he plays me
the tunes of i860, I appreciate and sympathise. Every
stroke touches me: I dwell on the dainty workmanship
shown in the third and fourth acts : I rejoice in being old
enough to know the world of his dreams. But when he
comes to 1890, then I thank my stars that he does not
read the "Saturday Review." Please remember that it
is the spirit and not the letter of the date that I insist on.
"The Benefit of the Doubt" is dressed in the fashions of
to-day; but it might have been written by Trollope.
"Trelawny of the Wells" confessedly belongs to the days
of Lily Dale. And whenever Lily Dale and not Mrs.
Ebbsmith is in question, Mr. Pinero may face with com-
plete equanimity the risk of picking up the "Saturday
Review" in mistake for the "Mining Journal."

Very different are my sentiments towards the author
of "Charlotte Corday" at the Adelphi, whoever he may
be. He has missed a rare chance of giving our playgoers
a lesson they richly deserve. Jean Paul Marat, "people's
friend" and altruist par excellence, was a man just after
their own hearts — a man whose virtue consisted in burn-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

ing indignation at the sufferings of others and an intense
desire to see them balanced by an exemplary retaliation.
That is to say, his morality was the morality of the melo-
drama, and of the gallery which applauds frantically when
the hero knocks the villain down. It is only by coarsely
falsifying Marat's character that he has been made into
an Adelphi villain — nay, prevented from bringing down
the house as an Adelphi hero, as he certainly would if
the audience could be shown the horrors that provoked
him and the personal disinterestedness and sincerity with
which he threw himself into a war of extermination
against tyranny. Ibsen may have earned the right to
prove by the example of such men as Marat that these
virtues were the making of a scoundrel more mischievous
than the most openly vicious aristocrat for whose head
he clamored; but the common run of our playgoers will
have none of Ibsen's morality, and as much of Marat's
as our romantic dramatists can stuff them with. Charlotte
Corday herself was simply a female Marat. She, too,
hated tyranny and idealised her passionate instinct for
bloody retaliation. There is the true tragic irony in
Marat's death at her hand : it was not really murder : it
was suicide — Marat slain by the spirit of Marat. No bad
theme for a playwright capable of handling it!

What the Adelphi play must seem to anyone who un-
derstands this situation, I need not say. On its own con-
ventional stage lines, it appears as a page of romantic
history, exciting as the police intelligence is exciting, but
not dramatic. Mr. Kyrle Bellew's Marat is a made-up
business, extremely disfiguring to himself, which could
be done as well or better by any other actor in the very
competent company. Mrs. Brown Potter is everything
that can be desired from the pictorial point of view

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

(school of Delaroche) ; and her cleverness and diligence
carry her successfully through all the theatrical business
of the part. Miss Mabel Hackney and Mr. Vibart gain
some ground by their playing: the older hands do not
lose any. But the play is of no real importance.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

The Coxcomb. By Beaumont and Fletcher. Acted
by the Elizabethan Stage Society in the Hall of the
Inner Temple. lo February, 1898.

I CONFESS to a condescending tolerance for Beaumont
and Fletcher. It was, to be sure, no merit of theirs
that they were born late enough to come into the
field enthusiastically conscious of their art in the full
development to which Shakespeare had brought it, instead
of blundering upon its discovery like the earlier men.
Still, merit or no merit, they were saved from the clumsy
horseplay and butcherly rant of Marlowe as models of
wit and eloquence, and from the resourceless tum-tum of
his "mighty line" as a standard for their verse. When one
thinks of the donnish insolence and perpetual thick-
skinned swagger of Chapman over his unique achieve-
ments in sublime balderdash, and the opacity that pre-
vented Webster, the Tussaud laureate, from appreciating
his own stupidity — when one thinks of the whole rabble
of dehumanised specialists in elementary blank verse
posing as the choice and master-spirits of an art that had

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

produced the stories of Chaucer and the old mystery
plays, and was even then pregnant with "The Pilgrim's
Progress," it is hard to keep one's critical blood cold
enough to discriminate in favor of any Elizabethan
whatever. Nothing short of a statue at Deptford to the
benefactor of the human species who exterminated Mar-
lowe, and the condemnation of Mr. Swinburne to spend
the rest of his life in selling photographs of it to American
tourists, NYOuld meet the poetic justice of the case. We
are not all, happily, victims of the literary aberration that
led Charles Lamb to revive Elizabethanism as a modern
cult. We forgive him his addiction to it as we forgive
him his addiction to gin.

Unfortunately, Shakespeare dropped into the middle
of these ruffianly pedants; and since there was no other
shop than theirs to serve his apprenticeship in, he had
perforce to become an Elizabethan too. In such a school
of falsehood, bloody-mindedness, bombast and intel-
lectual cheapness, his natural standard was inevitably
dragged down, as we know to our cost ; but the degree to
which he dragged their standard up has saved them from
oblivion. It makes one giddy to compare the execrable
rottenness of the "Jew of Malta" with the humanity and
poetry of "The Merchant of Venice." Hamlet, Othello,
and lago are masterpieces beside Faustus, Bussy d'Am-
boise, and Bosola. After Shakespeare, the dramatists
were in the position of Spohr after Mozart. A ravishing
secular art had been opened up to them, and was refining
their senses and ennobling their romantic illusions and
enthusiasms instead of merely stirring up their basest
passions. Cultivated lovers of the beauties of Shake-
speare's art — true amateurs, in fact — took the place of
the Marlovian crew. Such amateurs, let loose in a field

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

newly reaped by a great master, have always been able
to glean some dropped ears, and even to raise a brief
aftermath. In this way the world has gained many
charming and fanciful, though not really original, works
of art — blank verse dramas after Shakespeare, rhetorical
frescoes after Raphael, fugues after Bach, operas after
Mozart, symphonies after Beethoven, and so on. This,
I take it, is the distinction between Marlowe and Com-
pany and the firm of Beaumont and Fletcher. The pair
wrote a good deal that was pretty disgraceful ; but at all
events they had been educated out of the possibility of
writing "Titus Andronicus." They had no depth, no
conviction, no religious or philosophic basis, no real power
or seriousness — Shakespeare himself was a poor master
in such matters — ^but they were dainty romantic poets,
and really humorous character-sketchers in Shakespeare's
popular style: that is, they neither knew nor cared any-
thing about human psychology, but they could mimic the
tricks and manners of their neighbors, especially the vul-
garer ones, in a highly entertaining way.

"The Coxcomb" is not a bad sample of their art. Mr.
Poel has had to bowdlerise it in deference to the modesty
of the barristers of the Inner Temple. For instance,
Mercury's relations with Maria stop short of exacting
her husband's crowning sacrifice to friendship ; and when
the three merry gentlemen make Riccardo too drunk to
keep his appointment to elope with Viola, the purpose
with which the four roysterers sally out into the street,
much insisted on by Beaumont and Fletcher, is discreetly
left to the guilty imagination of the more sophisticated
spectators. With these exceptions the play was presented
as fairly as could be expected.

The performance was one of the best the Elizabethan

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Stage Society has achieved. I confess that I anticipated
failure in the part of Riccardo, who is not a human being,
but an embodiment of the most dehcate literary passion
of Elizabethan romantic poetry. Miss Rehan, one felt,
might have done something with it on the lines of her
Viola in "Twelfth Night" ; but then Miss Rehan was not
available. The lady who was available did not allow her
name to appear in the bill; and I have no idea who she
is. But she certainly hit that part off to perfection, hav-
ing, by a happy temperamental accident, the musical root
of the poetic passion in her. Her performance was ap-
parently quite original. There was no evidence in it of
her ever having seen Miss Rehan act: if she suggested
anybody, it was Calve. Mr. Sherbrooke's Mercury also
was an excellent performance. The vivacity of his panto-
mime, and a trick of pronouncing his d's and t's foreign
fashion, with the tongue against the teeth, raised some
doubt as to whether he was quite as English as his name ;
but his performance was none the worse. In delivering
his asides he convinced me more than any of the rest that
he had divined the method and style of the Elizabethan
stage. I should like to say a special word about every
one of the performers, but the programme reminds me
that there are no less than twenty- four of them ; so I can
only add hastily that Mr. Poel himself played the Cox-
comb; that Mr. Paget Bowman spoke the prologue and
played Valerio ; that the Justice was impersonated by Mr.
J. H. Brewer, and not, as some supposed, by Sir Peter
Edlin; that Miss Imogen Surrey played Viola and Miss
Hepworth's Valerio's mother ; and that these and all the
other parts, especially the tinker and his trull, and not
forgetting Mr. Leonard Howard's Alexander, come out
guite vividly and intelligibly. I have no doubt some of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the audience were bored; but the explanation of that is
simple: they were the people who have no taste for
Elizabethan drama. After all, you cannot plunge into
these things absolutely without connoisseurship.

SHAKESPEARE'S MERRY GENTLEMEN

Much Ado About Nothing, St. James's Theatre. i6
February, 1898.

MUCH Ado" is perhaps the most dangerous actor-
manager trap in the whole Shakespearean rep-
ertory. It is not a safe play like "The Mer-
chant of Venice" or "As You Like It," nor a serious play,
like "Hamlet." Its success depends on the way it is
handled in performance ; and that, again, depends on the
actor-manager being enough of a critic to discriminate
ruthlessly between the pretension of the author and his
achievement.

The main pretension in "Much Ado" is that Benedick
and Beatrice are exquisitely witty and amusing persons.
They are, of course, nothing of the sort. Benedick's
pleasantries might pass at a sing-song in a public-house
parlor ; but a gentleman rash enough to venture on them
in even the very mildest £52-a-year suburban imitation
of polite society to-day would assuredly never be invited
again. From his first joke, "Were you in doubt, sir, that
you asked her?" to this last, "There is no staff more
reverend than one tipped with horn," he is not a wit, but
a blackguard. He is not Shakespeare's only failure in
that genre. It took the Bard a long time to grow out of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the provincial conceit that made him so fond of exhibiting
his accomplishments as a master of gallant badinage. The
very thought of Biron, Mercutio, Gratiano and Benedick
must, I hope, have covered him with shame in his later
years. Even Hamlet's airy compliments to Ophelia before
the court would make a cabman blush. But at least
Shakespeare did not value himself on Hamlet's indecent
jests as he evidently did on those of the four merry gen-
tlemen of the earlier plays. When he at last got convic-
tion of sin, and saw this sort of levity in its proper light,
he made masterly amends by presenting the blackguard
as a blackguard in the person of Lucio in "Measure for
Measure." Lucio, as a character study, is worth forty
Benedicks and Birons. His obscenity is not only inof-
fensive, but irresistibly entertaining, because it is drawn
with perfect skill, offered at its true value, and given its
proper interest, without any complicity of the author in
its lewdness. Lucio is much more of a gentleman than
Benedick, because he keeps his coarse sallies for coarse
people. Meeting one woman, he says humbly, "Gentle
and fair: your brother kindly greets you. Not to be
weary with you, he's in prison." Meeting another, he
hails her sparkingly with "How now ? which of your hips
has the more profound sciatica?" The one woman is a
lay sister, the other a prostitute. Benedick or Mercutio
would have cracked their low jokes on the lay sister, and
been held up as gentlemen of rare wit and excellent dis-
course for it. Whenever they approach a woman or an
old man, you shiver with apprehension as to what brutal-
ity they will come out with.

Precisely the same thing, in the tenderer degree of her
sex, is true of Beatrice. In her character of professed
wit she has only one subject, and that is the subject which

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

a really witty woman never jests about, because it is too
serious a matter to a woman to be made light of without
indelicacy. Beatrice jests about it for the sake of the
indelicacy. There is only one thing worse than the Eliza-
bethan "merry gentleman," and that is the Elizabethan
"merry lady."

Why is it then that we still want to see Benedick and
Beatrice, and that our most eminent actors and actresses
still want to play them? Before I answer that very
simple question let me ask another. Why is it that Da
Ponte's "dramma giocosa," entitled "Don Giovanni," a
loathsome story of a coarse, witless, worthless libertine,
who kills an old man in a duel and is finally dragged
down through a trapdoor to hell by his twaddling ghost,
is still, after more than a century, as "immortal" as "Much
Ado ?" Simply because Mozart clothed it with wonderful
music, which turned the worthless words and thoughts
of Da Ponte into a magical human drama of moods and
transitions of feeling. That is what happened in a smaller
way with "Much Ado." Shakespeare shows himself in
it a common-place librettist working on a stolen plot, but
a great musician. No matter how poor, coarse, cheap
and obvious the thought may be, the mood is charming,
and the music of the words expresses the mood. Para-
phrase the encounters of Benedick and Beatrice in the
style of a blue-book, carefully preserving every idea they
present, and it will become apparent to the most infat-
uated Shakespearean that they contain at best nothing
out of the common in thought or wit, and at worst a good
deal of vulgar naughtiness. Paraphrase Goethe, Wagner
or Ibsen in the same way, and you will find original ob-
servation, subtle thought, wide comprehension, far-reach-
ing intuition and serious psychological study in them.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Give Shakespeare a fairer chance in the comparison by-
paraphrasing even his best and maturest work, and you
will still get nothing more than the platitudes of prover-
bial philosophy, with a very occasional curiosity in the
shape of a rudiment of some modern idea, not followed
up. Not until the Shakespearean music is added by re-
placing the paraphrase with the original lines does the
enchantment begin. Then you are in another world at
once. When a flower-girl tells a coster to hold his jaw,
for nobody is listening to him, and he retorts, "Oh, you're
there, are you, you beauty?" they reproduce the wit of
Beatrice and Benedick exactly. But put it this way. "I
wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick:
nobody marks you." "What ! my dear Lady Disdain, are
you yet living?" You are miles away from costerland at
once. When I tell you that Benedick and the coster are
equally poor in thought, Beatrice and the flower-girl
equally vulgar in repartee, you reply that I might as well
tell you that a nightingale's love is no higher than a cat's.
Which is exactly what I do tell you, though the nightin-
gale is the better musician. You will admit, perhaps, that
the love of the worst human singer in the world is accom-
panied by a higher degree of intellectual consciousness
than that of the most ravishingly melodious nightingale.
Well, in just the same way, there are plenty of quite
second-rate writers who are abler thinkers and wits than
William, though they are unable to weave his magic into
the expression of their thoughts.

It is not easy to knock this into the public head, because
comparatively few of Shakespeare's admirers are at all
conscious that they are listening to music as they hear
his phrases turn and his lines fall so fascinatingly and
memorably ; whilst we all, no matter how stupid we are,

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

can understand his jokes and platitudes, and are flattered
when we are told of the subtlety of the wit we have rel-
ished, and the profundity of the thought we have fath-
omed. Englishmen are specially susceptible to this sort
of flattery, because intellectual subtlety is not their strong
point. In dealing with them you must make them believe
that you are appealing to their brains when you are really
appealing to their senses and feelings. With Frenchmen
the case is reversed: you must make them believe that
you are appealing to their senses and feelings when you
are really appealing to their brains. The Englishman,
slave to every sentimental ideal and dupe of every sensu-
ous art, will have it that his great national poet is a
thinker. The Frenchman, enslaved and duped only by
systems and calculations, insists on his hero being a sen-
timentalist and artist. That is why Shakespeare is es-
teemed a master-mind in England, and wondered at as
a clumsy barbarian in France.

However indiscriminate the public may be in its Shake-
speare worship, the actor and actress who are to make
a success of "Much Ado" must know better. Let them
once make the popular mistake of supposing that what
they have to do is to bring out the wit of Benedick and
Beatrice, and they are lost. Their business in the "merry"
passages is to cover poverty of thought and coarseness of
inuendo by making the most of the grace and dignity of
the diction. The sincere, genuinely dramatic passages
will then take care of themselves. Alas ! Mr. Alexander
and Miss Julia Neilson have made the plunge without
waiting for my advice. Miss Neilson, throwing away all
her grace and all her music, strives to play the merry
lady by dint of conscientious gambolling. Instead of ut-
tering her speeches as exquisitely as possible, she rattles

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

through them, laying an impossible load of archness on
every insignificant conjunction, and clipping all the im-
portant words until there is no measure or melody left
in them. Not even the wedding scene can stop her : after
an indignant attitude or two she redoubles her former
skittishness. I can only implore her to give up all her
deep-laid Beatricisms, to discard the movements of Miss
Ellen Terry, the voice of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the
gaiety of Miss Kitty Loftus, and try the effect of Julia
Neilson in all her grave grace taken quite seriously. Mr.
Alexander makes the same mistake, though, being more
judicious than Miss Neilson, he does not carry it out so
disastrously. His merry gentleman is patently a dutiful
assumption from beginning to end. He smiles, rackets,
and bounds up and down stairs like a quiet man who has
just been rated by his wife for habitual dulness before
company. It is all hopeless : the charm of Benedick can-
not be realised by the spryness of the actor's legs, the
flashing of his teeth, or the rattle of his laugh: nothing
but the music of the words — above all, not their meaning
— can save the part. I wish I could persuade Mr. Alex-
ander that if he were to play the part exactly as he played
Guy Domville, it would at once become ten times more
fascinating. He should at least take the revelation of
Beatrice's supposed love for him with perfect seriousness.
The more remorsefully sympathetic Benedick is when she
comes to bid him to dinner after he has been gulled into
believing she loves him, the more exquisitely ridiculous
the scene becomes. It is the audience's turn to laugh
then, not Benedick's.

Of all Sir Henry Irving's manifold treasons against
Shakespeare, the most audacious was his virtually cutting
Dogberry out of "Much Ado." Mr. Alexander does not

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

go so far; but he omits the fifth scene of the third act,
upon which the whole effect of the later scenes depends,
since it is from it that the audience really gets Dogberry's
measure. Dogberry is a capital study of parochial char-
acter. Sincerely played, he always comes out as a very
real and highly entertaining person. At the St. James's,
I grieve to say, he does not carry a moment's conviction :
he is a mere mouthpiece for malapropisms, all of which
he shouts at the gallery with intense consciousness of their
absurdity, and with open anxiety lest they should pass
unnoticed. Surely it is clear, if anything histrionic is
clear, that Dogberry's first qualification must be a com-
plete unconsciousness of himself as he appears to others.

Verges, even more dependent than Dogberry on that
cut-out scene with Leonato, is almost annihilated by its
excision; and it was hardly worth wasting Mr. Esmond
on the remainder.

When I have said that neither Benedick nor Beatrice
have seen sufficiently through the weakness of Shake-
speare's merriments to concentrate themselves on the
purely artistic qualities of their parts, and that Dogberry
is nothing but an excuse for a few laughs, I have made
a somewhat heavy deduction from my praises of the re-
vival. But these matters are hardly beyond remedy ; and
the rest is excellent. Miss Fay Davis's perfect originality
contrasts strongly with Miss Neilson's incorrigible im-
itativeness. Her physical grace is very remarkable; and
she creates her part between its few lines, as Hero must
if she is to fill up her due place in the drama. Mr. Fred
Terry is a most engaging Don Pedro; and Mr. H. B.
Irving IS a striking Don John, though he is becoming too
accomplished an actor to make shift with that single smile
which is as well known at the St. James's by this time

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as the one wig of Mr. Pinero's hero was at "The Wells."
Mr. Vernon and Mr. Beveridge are, of course, easily
within their powers as Leonato and Antonio ; and all the
rest come off with credit — even Mr. Loraine, who has not
a trace of Claudio in him. The dresses are superb, and
the scenery very handsome, though Italy contains so many
palaces and chapels that are better than handsome that
I liked the open-air scenes best. If Mr. Alexander will
only make up his mind that the piece is irresistible as
poetry, and hopeless as epigrammatic comedy, he need
not fear for its success. But if he and Miss Neilson per-
sist in depending on its attempts at wit and gallantry,
then it remains to be seen whether the public's sense of
duty or its boredom will get the upper hand.

THE DRAMA IN HOXTON

9 April, i8g8.

OF LATE, I am happy to say, the theatres have been
so uneventful that I should have fallen quite
out of the habit of my profession but for a cer-
tain vigorously democratic clergyman, who seized me
and bore me off to the last night of the pantomime at
"the Brit." The Britannia Theatre is in Hoxton, not far
from Shoreditch Church, a neighborhood in which the
"Saturday Review" is comparatively little read. The
manager, a lady, is the most famous of all London mana-
gers. Sir Henry Irving, compared to her, is a mushroom,
just as his theatre, compared to hers, is a back drawing-

425

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

room. Over 4000 people pay nightly at her doors; and
the spectacle of these thousands, serried in the vast pit
and empyrean gallery, is so fascinating that the stranger
who first beholds it can hardly turn away to look at the
stage. Forty years ago Mrs. Sara Lane built this theatre ;
and she has managed it ever since. It may be no such
great matter to handle a single playhouse — your Irvings,
Trees, Alexanders, Wyndhams, and other upstarts of
yesterday can do that ; but Mrs. Lane is said to own the
whole ward in which her theatre stands. Madame Sarah
Bernhardt's diamonds fill a jewel-box: Mrs. Lane's are
reputed to fill sacks. When I had the honor of being
presented to Mrs. Lane, I thought of the occasion when
the late Sir Augustus Harris, her only serious rival in
managerial fame, had the honor of being presented to
me. The inferiority of the man to the woman was man-
ifest. Sir Augustus was, in comparison, an hysterical
creature. Enterprise was with him a frenzy which killed
him when it reached a climax of success. Mrs. Lane
thrives on enterprise and success, and is capable, self-
contained, practical, vigilant, everything that a good gen-
eral should be. A West End star is to her a person to
whom she once gave so many pounds or shillings a week,
and who is now, in glittering and splendid anxiety, beg-
ging for engagements, desperately wooing syndicates and
potential backers, and living on Alnaschar dreams and
old press notices which were unanimously favorable (if
you excluded those which were obviously malignant per-
sonal attacks). Mrs. Lane, well furnished with realities,
has no use for dreams; and she knows syndicates and
capitaHsts only as suspicious characters who want her
money, not as courted deities with powers of life and
death in their hands. The fortune of her productions

426

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

means little to her: if the piece succeeds, so much the
better: if not, the pantomime pays for all.

The clergyman's box, which was about as large as an
average Metropolitan railway station, was approached
from the stage itself; so that I had opportunities of crit-
icising both from before the curtain and behind it. I
was struck by the absence of the worthless, heartless, in-
competent people who seem to get employed with such
facility^ — nay, sometimes apparently by preference — in
West End theatres. The West End calculation for mu-
sical farce and pantomime appears to be that there is
"a silver mine" to be made by paying several pounds a
week to people who are worth nothing, provided you
engage enough of them. This is not Mrs. Lane's plan.
Mr. Bigwood, the stage-manager, is a real stage-manager,
to whom one can talk on unembarrassed human terms as
one capable man to another, and not by any means an er-
ratic art failure from Bedford Park and the Slade School,
or one of those beachcombers of our metropolitan civilisa-
tion who drift to the West End stage because its fringe
of short-lived ventures provide congenital liars and im-
postors with unique opportunities of drawing a few
months' or weeks' salary before their preoccupied and
worried employers have leisure to realize that they have
made a bad bargain. I had not the pleasure of making
the prompter's acquaintance; but I should have been
surprised to find him the only person in the theatre who
could not read, though in the West I should have expected
to find that his principal qualification. I made my way
under the stage to look at the working of the star-trap
by which Mr. Lupino was flung up through the boards
like a stone from a volcano; and there, though I found
eight men wasting their strength by overcoming a coun-

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

terweight which, in an up-to-date French theatre de
f eerie, is raised by one man with the help of a pulley, the
carpenter-machinist in command was at once recognisable
as a well-selected man. On the stage the results of the
same instinctive sort of judgment were equally apparent.
The display of beauty was sufficiently voluptuous; but
there were no good-for-nothings: it was a company of
men and women, recognisable as fellow-creatures, and
not as accidentally pretty cretinous freaks. Even the low
comedians were not blackguards, though they were cer-
tainly not fastidious, Hoxton being somewhat Rabelaisian
in its ideas of broad humor. One scene, in which the hor-
rors of sea-sickness were exploited with great freedom,
made the four thousand sons and daughters of Shoreditch
scream with laughter. At the climax, when four voyagers
were struggling violently for a single bucket, I looked
stealthily round the box, in which the Church, the Peerage
and the Higher Criticism were represented. All three
were in convulsions. Compare this with our West End
musical farces, in which the performers strive to make
some inane scene "go" by trying to suggest to the starv-
ing audience that there is something exquisitely loose and
vicious beneath the dreary fatuity of the surface. Who
would not rather look at and laugh at four men pretend-
ing to be seasick in a wildly comic way than see a row
of young women singing a chorus about being "Gaiety
Girls" with the deliberate intention of conveying to the
audience that a Gaiety chorister's profession — their own
profession — is only a mask for the sort of life which is
represented in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square
after midnight? I quite agree with my friend the clergy-
man that decent ladies and gentlemen who have given up
West End musical farce in disgust will find themselves
much happier at the Britannia pantomime.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I shall not venture on any searching artistic criticism
of "Will o' the Wisp," as the pantomime was called. If
it were a West End piece, I should pitch into it without
the slightest regard to the prestige and apparent opulence
of the manager, not because I am incorruptible, but be-
cause I am not afraid of the mere shadow of success. I
treat its substance, in the person of Mrs. Lane, with care-
ful respect. Show me real capacity ; and I bow lower to
it than a;nybody. All I dare suggest to the Hoxtonians is
that when they insist on an entertainment lasting from
seven to close upon midnight, they have themselves to
thank if the actors occasionally have to use all their in-
genuity to spin out scenes of which a judicious playgoer
would desire to have at least ten minutes less.

The enthusiasm of the pit on the last night, with no
stalls to cut it off from the performers, was frantic.
There was a great throwing of flowers and confectionery
on the stage; and it would happen occasionally that an
artist would overlook one of these tributes, and walk off,
leaving it unnoticed on the boards. Then a shriek of
tearing anxiety would arise, as if the performer were
wandering blindfold into a furnace or over a precipice.
Every factory girl in the house would lacerate the air
with a mad scream of "Pick it up, Topsy !" "Pick it up,
Voylit!" followed by a gasp of relief, several thousand
strong, when Miss Topsy Sinden or Miss Violet Durkin
would return and annex the offering. I was agreeably
astonished by Miss Topsy Sinden's dancing. Thitherto
it had been my miserable fate to see her come on, late in
the second act of some unspeakably dreary inanity at the
West End, to interpolate a "skirt dance," and spin out
the unendurable by the intolerable. On such occasions
I have looked on her with cold hatred, wondering why

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the "varieties" of a musical farce should not include a
few items from the conventional "assault-at-arms," cul-
minating in some stalwart sergeant, after the usual slicing
of lemons, leaden bars and silk handkerchiefs, cutting a
skirt-dancer in two at one stroke. At the Britannia Miss
Sinden really danced, acted, and turned out quite a charm-
ing person. I was not surprised ; for the atmosphere was
altogether more bracing than at the other end of the town.
These poor playgoers, to whom the expenditure of half a
guinea for a front seat at a theatre is as outrageously and
extravagantly impossible as the purchase of a deer forest
in Mars is to a millionaire, have at least one excellent
quality in the theatre. They are jealous for the dignity
of the artist, not derisively covetous of his (or her) deg-
radation. When a white statue which had stood for thir-
teen minutes in the middle of the stage turned out to be
Mr. Lupino, who forthwith put on a classic plasticity, and
in a series of rapid poses claimed popular respect for "the
antique," it was eagerly accorded ; and his demon conflict
with the powers of evil, involving a desperate broadsword
combat, and the most prodigious plunges into the earth
and projections therefrom by volcanic traps as aforesaid,
was conducted with all the tragic dignity of Richard III.
and received in the true Aristotelean spirit by the au-
dience. The fairy queen, a comely prima donna who
scorned all frivolity, was treated with entire respect and
seriousness. Altogether, I seriously recommend those
of my readers who find a pantomime once a year good
for them, to go next year to the Britannia, and leave
the West End to its boredoms and all the otherdoms that
make it so expensively dreary.

Oh, these sentimental, second-sighted Scotchmen!
Reader: would you like to see me idealised by a master

4ao

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

hand? If you would, buy the "Sunday Special" of the
3rd instant, and study Mr. Robert Buchanan's open letter
to me. There you will find the ideal G. B. S. in "the
daring shamelessness of a powerful and fearless nudity."
This is the sort of thing that flatters a timid, sedentary
literary man. Besides, it protects him: other people be-
lieve it all, and are afraid to hit the poor paper Titan.
Far be it from me to say a word against so effective an
advertisement; though when I consider its generosity I
cannot but blush for having taken in so magnanimous an
idealiser. Yet a great deal of it is very true: Mr.
Buchanan is altogether right, it seems to me, in identify-
ing my views with his father's Owenism; only I claim
that Comte's law of the three stages has been operating
busily since Owen's time, and that modern Fabianism
represents the positive stage of Owenism. I shall not
plead against the highly complimentary charge of im-
pudence in its proper sense of shamelessness. Shame is
to the man who fights with his head what cowardice is
to the man who fights with his hands: I have the same
opinion of it as Bunyan put into the mouth of Faithful
in the Valley of Humiliation. But I do not commit my-
self to Mr. Buchanan's account of my notions of practical
reform. It is true that when I protest against our mar-
riage laws, and Mr. Buchanan seizes the occasion to ob-
serve that "the idea of marriage, spiritually speaking, is
absolutely beautiful and ennobling," I feel very much as
if a Chinese mandarin had met my humanitarian objec-
tion to starving criminals to death or cutting them into
a thousand pieces, by blandly remarking that "the idea
of evil-doing leading to suflFering is, spiritually speaking,
absolutely beautiful and ennobling." If Mr. Buchanan
is content to be forbidden to spiritually ennoble himself

431

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

except under legal conditions so monstrous and immoral
that no disinterestedly prudent and self-respecting person
would accept them when free from amorous infatuation,
then I am not. Mr. Buchanan's notion that I assume
that "marriage is essentially and absolutely an immoral
bargain between the sexes in so far as it conflicts with
the aberrations and caprices of the human appetite," is a
wildly bad shot. What on earth has marriage to do with
the aberrations and caprices of human appetite? People
marry for companionship, not for debauchery. Why
that wholesome companionship should be a means of
making amiable and honest people the helpless prey of
drunkards, criminals, pestiferous invalids, bullies, vira-
goes, lunatics, or even persons with whom, through no
fault on either side, they find it impossible to live happily,
I cannot for the life of me see ; and if Mr. Buchanan can,
I invite him to give his reasons. Can any sane person
deny that a contract "for better, for worse" destroys all
moral responsibility? And is it not a revolting and in-
decent thing that any indispensable social contact should
compulsorily involve a clause, abhorrent to both parties
if they have a scrap of honor in them, by which the per-
sons of the parties are placed at each other's disposal by
legal force? These abominations may not belong to "the
idea of marriage, spiritually speaking"; but they belong
to the fact of marriage, practically speaking; and it is
with this fact that I, as a Realist (Mr. Buchanan's own
quite correct expression), am concerned. If I were to
get married myself, I should resort to some country
where the marriage law is somewhat less than five cen-
turies out of date ; and as this seems to me as unreason-
able a condition for the ordinary man as a trip to Bay-
reuth is to the ordinary gallery opera-goer, I do what

432

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I can to relieve him of it, and make married people as
responsible for their good behavior to one another as
business partners are. Hereupon Mr. Buchanan dis-
courses in the following terms: — "The Naked Man
(me!) posing as a realist, cries, 'away with sanctions!
let us have no more of them' ; but the man who is clothed
and in his right mind knows that they are inevitable and
accepts them." Did anyone ever hear such nonsense?
Do the Americans accept them ? Do the French accept
them ? Would we accept them but for our national pref-
erence for hypocrisy eked out with collusive divorce
cases? I have no objection to Mr. Buchanan idealising
me; but when he takes to idealising the English law at
its stupidest, he oversteps my drawn line. I am none the
less obliged to him for giving me an excuse for another
assault on these patent beautifiers and ennoblers without
which, it is assumed, we should all fall to universal
rapine, though the danger of license is plainly all the
other way. I verily believe that if the percentage of
happy marriages ever rises to, say, twenty-five, the exist-
ence of the human intellect will be threatened by the very
excesses against which our marriage law is supposed to
protect us.

433

MR. CHARLES FROHMAN'S MISSION

The Heart of Maryland: a drama in four acts. By
David Belasco. Adelphi Theatre, 9 April, 1898.

AFTER "The Heart of Maryland," at the Adelphi,
I begin to regard Mr. Charles Frohman as a
manager with a great moral mission. We have
been suffering of late years in England from a wave of
blackguardism. Our population is so large that even its
little minorities of intellectual and moral dwarfs form a
considerable body, and can make an imposing noise, so
long as the sensible majority remain silent, with its
clamor for war, for "empire," for savage sports, savage
punishments, flogging, duelling, prize-fighting, 144 hours'
bicycle races, national war dances to celebrate the cau-
tious pounding of a few thousand barbarians to death
with machine projectiles, followed by the advance of a
whole British brigade on the wretched survivors under
"a withering fire" which kills twenty-three men, and na-
tional newspaper paragraphs in which British heroes of
the rank and file, who will be flung starving on our streets
in a year or two at the expiration of their short service,
proudly describe the sport of village-burning, remarking,
with a touch of humorous cockney reflectiveness, on the
amusing manner in which old Indian women get "fairly
needled" at the spectacle of their houses and crops being
burnt, and mentioning with honest pride how their of-
ficers were elated and satisfied with the day's work. My
objection to this sort of folly is by no means purely
humanitarian. I am quite prepared to waive the human-
itarian point altogether, and to accept, for the sake of
argument, the position that we must destroy or be de-

434

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

stroyed. But I do not believe in the destructive force of
a combination of descriptive talent with delirium tremens.
I do not feel safe behind a rampart of music-hall en-
thusiasm: on the contrary, the mere thought of what
these poor, howling, half -drunk patriots would do if the
roll of a hostile drum reached their ears, brings out a
cold sweat of pity and terror on me. Imagine going to
war, as the French did in 1870, with a stock of patriotic
idealism and national enthusiasm instead of a stock of
military efficiency. The Dervishes have plenty of racial
idealism and enthusiasm, with religious fanaticism and
personal hardihood to boot; and much good it has done
them ! What would have happened to them if they had
been confronted by the army of the future is only con-
ceivable because, after all, the limit of possibility is an-
nihilation, which is conceivable enough. I picture that
future army to myself dimly as consisting of half-a-dozen
highly-paid elderly gentlemen provided with a picnic-
basket and an assortment of implements of wholesale
destruction. Depend upon it, its first meeting with our
hordes of Continental enslaved conscripts and thriftless
English "surplus population," disciplined into combining
all the self-helplessness of machinery with the animal
disadvantages of requiring food and being subject to
panic, and commanded by the grown-up boyishness for
which the other professions have no use, will be the death
of military melodrama. It is quite clear, at all events,
that the way out of the present militaristic madness will
be found by the first nation that takes war seriously, or,
as the melodramatisers of war will say, cynically. It has
always been so. The fiery Rupert, charging for God and
the King, got on excellently until Cromwell, having some
experience as a brewer, made the trite experiment of

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

raising the wages of the Parliamentary soldier to the
market value of respectable men, and immediately went
over Rupert like a steam-roller. Napoleon served out
enthusiasm, carefully mixed with prospects of loot, as
cold-bloodedly as a pirate captain serves out rum, and
never used it as an efficient substitute for facts and can-
non. Wellington, with his characteristic Irish common
sense, held a steadfast opinion of the character of the
average British private and the capacity of the average
British officer which would wreck the Adelphi Theatre if
uttered there; but he fed them carefully, and carried our
point with them against the enemy. At the present time,
if I or anyone else were to propose that enough money
should be spent on the British soldier to make him an
efficient marksman, to attract respectable and thrifty men
to the service, to escape the necessity for filling the ranks
with undersized wasters and pretending to believe the
glaring lies as to their ages which the recruiting-sergeant
has to suggest to them, and to abolish the military prison
with its cat-o'-nine-tails perpetually flourishing before
our guardsmen in Gibraltar "fortress orders" and the
like, there would be a howl of stingy terror from the very
taxpayers who are now weeping with national enthusiasm
over the heroism of the two Dargai pipers who, five years
hence, will probably be cursing, in their poverty, the day
they ever threw away their manhood on the British War
Office.

The question for the dramatic critic is, how is it pos-
sible to knock all this blood-and-thunder folly out of the
head of the British playgoer? Satire would be useless:
sense still more out of the question. Mr. Charles Froh-
man seems to me to have solved the problem. You can-
not make the Britisher see that his own bunkum is con-

436

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

temptible. But show him the bunkum of any other na-
tion, and he sees through it promptly enough. And that
is what Mr. Frohman is doing. "The Heart of Mary-
land" is an American melodrama of the Civil War. As
usual, all the Southern commanders are Northern spies,
and all the Northern commanders Southern spies — at
least that is the general impression produced. It may be
historically correct; for obviously such an arrangement,
when the troops once got used to it, would not make the
smallest difference; since a competition for defeat, if
earnestly carried out on both sides, would be just as
sensible, just as exciting, just as difficult, just as well
calculated to call forth all the heroic qualities, not to
mention the Christian virtues, as a competition for vic-
tory. Maryland Cawlvert (spelt Calvert), is "a Southern
woman to the last drop of her blood," and is, of course,
in love with a Northern officer, who has had the villain
drummed out of the Northern army for infamous con-
duct. The villain joins the Southerns, who, in recogni-
tion no doubt of his high character and remarkable rec-
ord, at once make him a colonel, especially as he is ad-
dicted to heavy drinking. Naturally, he is politically im-
partial, and, as he says to the hysterical Northerner (who
is, of course, the hero of the piece), fights for his own
hand. "But the United States!" pleads the hysterical
one feebly. "Damn the United States" replies the villain.
Instantly the outraged patriot assaults him furiously,
shouting "Take back that. Take it back." The villain
prudently takes it back; and the honor of America is
vindicated. This is clearly the point at which the au-
dience should burst into frantic applause. No doubt
American audiences do. Perhaps the Adelphi audience
would too if the lines were altered to "Damn the United

437

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Kingdom." But we are sensible enough about other
people's follies; and the incontinent schoolboyishness of
the hero is received with the coolest contempt. This,
then, is the moral mission of Mr. Charles Frohman. He
is snatching the fool's cap from the London playgoer and
showing it to him on the head of an American. Mean-
while, our foolish plays are going to America to return
the compliment. In the end, perhaps, we shall get melo-
dramas in which the heroism is not despicable, puerile
and blackguardly, nor the villainy mere mechanical
criminality.

For the rest, "The Heart of Maryland" is not a bad
specimen of the American machine-made melodrama.
The actors know the gymnastics of their business, and
work harder and more smartly, and stick to it better
than English actors. Mrs. Leslie Carter is a melodra-
matic heroine of no mean powers. Her dresses and
graces and poses cast a glamor of American high art on
Mr. Belasco's romance ; and her transports and tornadoes,
in which she shows plenty of professional temperament
and susceptibility, give intensity to the curtain situations,
and secure her a flattering series of recalls. She disdains
the silly and impossible sensation scene with the bell,
leaving it to a lively young-lady athlete, who shows with
every muscle in her body that she is swinging the bell
instead of being swung by it. Mr. Morgan, as the villain,
is received with special favor ; and Mr. Malcolm Williams
pretends to be a corpse in such a life-like manner that
he brings down the house, already well disposed to him
for his excellent acting before his decease. Nobody else
has much of a chance.

438

THE DRAMA PURIFIED

The Conquerors: a drama in four acts. By Paul
M. Potter. St. James's Theatre. 14 April, 1898.

WHEN civilisation becomes effete, the only cure
is an irruption of barbarians.' When the
London dramatist has driven everybody out
of the theatre with his tailor-made romances and sub-
urban love affairs, the bushranger and the backwoodsman
become masters of the situation. These outlandish people
have no grace of language or subtlety of thought. Their
women are either boyishly fatuous reproductions of the
beautiful, pure, ladylike, innocent, blue-eyed, golden-
haired divinities they have read about in obsolete novels,
or scandalous but graphic portraits of female rowdies
drawn from the life. Their heroes are criminals and hard
drinkers, redeemed, in an extremely unconvincing man-
ner, by their loves for the divinities aforsesaid. Their
humor is irreverent and barbarous; and their emotional
stock-in-trade contains nothing but the commonest pas-
sions and cupidities, with such puerile points of honor
as prevail among the men who are outcasts where civilisa-
tion exists, and "pioneers" where it does not. All the
same, these bushwacking melodramatists have imagina-
tion, appetite, and heat of blood ; and these qualities, sud-
denly asserting themselves in our exhausted theatre,
produce the effect of a stiff tumbler of punch after the
fiftieth watering of a pot of tea. Being myself a teeto-
taller, with a strong taste for the water of life, their
punch has no charms for me; but I cordially admit its

439

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

superiority to the tea-leaf infusion; and I perceive that
it will wake up the native dramatist, and teach him that
if he does not take the trouble to feel and to invent, and
even to think and to know, he will go under, and his place
be taken by competitors whose more appropriate function
in literature would appear to be the production of in-
terminable stories of adventure in weekly numbers as a
bait for the pennies of Schoolboard children.

It is quite impossible, in view of the third and fourth
acts of "The Conquerors,*' to treat it with any sort of
serious respect, even as a melodrama. And yet it pro-
duced what very few plays at the St. James's produce:
that is, a strong illusion that we were looking at the per-
sons and events of Mr. Potter's story, and not merely at
our friends Mr. Alexander, Miss Neilson, and party, in
their newest summer costumes. At the end of the first
act, a gentleman in the audience so completely forgot
Mr. Alexander's identity, that he got up and indignantly
remonstrated with him for the blackguardism with which
he was behaving in the character of "the Babe." The
incident which produced this triumph was, it is true, bor-
rowed from Guy de Maupassant; but the realistic vigor
and brutality of the expression was Mr. Potter's.

The second act of the play may be taken as the reply
of the Censorship to Mr. Heinemann's charges of il-
liberality. It culminates in a long, detailed, and elaborate
preparation by the hero for a rape on the person of the
heroine. After a frantic scene of ineffectual efforts to
escape, with prayers for mercy, screams for help, and
blood-curdling hysteria, the lady faints. The gentleman
then observes that he is a blackguard, and takes himself
off. Now it is to be noted, that if he had been repre-
sented as haying effected his purpose, the Lord Chamber-

440

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

lain would have refused to license the play. The present
arrangement entertains the public with just as much of
a rape as it is possible to present on the stage at all,
Censorship or no Censorship. But the scene is supposed
to be "purified" by a formal disclaimer, after all that is
possible in stage libertinage has been done. The sub-
sequent developments are as follows. When the lady
comes to, and finds herself alone, she concludes that the
man has actually carried out his threat. Under this im-
pression she raves through two acts in a frenzy of passion
which is half murderous and half incipiently affectionate.
The mere imagination of the rape has produced what I
may politely call a physiological attachment on the part
of the victim. So she first plunges a knife into the hero,
and then, in a transport of passionate remorse, carries
him off to her bedroom to nurse him back to life. When
her brother — to whom she is supposed to be devoted —
has to make his escape either through this bedroom or
through a garden where there is a sharpshooter behind
every tree waiting to kill him, she unhesitatingly sends
him through the garden, lest he should discover and shoot
her ravisher. Finally, she learns that the ravisher is
"innocent," and has been redeemed by her love ; on which
edifying situation they fall into one another's arms, and
make a happy ending of it.

Now I do not object to the representation of all this
if the public want to see it represented ; but I do want to
know whether were we to abolish not only the Lord
Chamberlain's jurisdiction, but also the ordinary legal
remedies against the abuse of such freedom as the Press
enjoys any dramatist, however viciously or voluptuously
disposed, could go further than Mr. Potter in the direc-
tion which the Censorship is supposed to bar ? The truth

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

is, that at the point reached three minutes before the fall
of the curtain on the second act of "The Conquerors,"
the only possible way of making the play acceptable to
an audience which is at all scrupulous is to allow the
drunken blackguard to commit the crime, and then merci-
lessly work out the consequences in the sequel. The
Lord Chamberlain's formula is about as eflFective a safe-
guard of morality as a deathbed repentance. However
excellent its intention may be, it operates as an official
passport for licentiousness. It does not prevent the ex-
hibition at the St. James's Theatre of sensational sexual-
ity, brutality, drunkenness, and murder ; but it takes care
that all these things shall end happily, charmingly, re-
spectably, prettily, lady-and-gentlemanlikely for all
parties concerned. And on these conditions it relieves
the public, and the managers, and the actors, and the
audience, of all sense of responsibility in the matter. The
relief appears cheap at two guineas, but as it unfor-
tunately involves the prohibition of an honest treatment
of the theme, and suppresses the moral influence of Ibsen
and Tolstoi in the interest of Mr. Potter and the authors
of pieces Hke ''A Night Out" and "Gentleman Joe," it
is perfectly clear to me that it would pay the nation very
well indeed to commute the expectations of the Lord
Chamberlain and Mr. Redford for a lump sum, buy their
office from the Queen, and abolish the whole Censorship
as a pestiferous sham which makes the theatre a plague-
spot in British art.

"The Conquerors" is not a difficult play to act ; and the
St. James's Company has no difficulty in producing an
impression of brilliant ability in it, with the single ex-
ception of Miss Julia Neilson, who only compromises her
dignity and throws away her charm by attempting this

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tearing, screaming, sensational melodramatic business.
Mr. Alexander, having at last got hold of a part which
has some brute reality about it (until the Lord Chamber-
lain intervenes), plays strongly and successfully; and
Mr. Fred Terry creates so much interest by his appear-
ances as the noble brother in the first two acts that the
subsequent petering out of his part is highly exaspera-
ting. Miss Fay Davis, dividing the comic relief with Mr.
Esmond, is in the last degree fascinating; Mr. Irving
condescends to murder and corduroys with his usual
glamor; Mr. Bertram Wallis sings the "Erl King"; Mr.
Vernon is a gruff general; Mr. Beveridge, a whiskered
major; Mr. Loraine, a nobody (a little wasteful, this) ;
Miss Constance Collier, a handsome and vindictive
Chouan woman, who could not possibly have been born
and bred anywhere but in London; and Miss Victor is
brought on expressly to make her age, sex, and talent
ridiculous, a vulgar outrage which the audience, to its
great credit, refuses to tolerate. As usual at the St.
James's, the mounting is excellent, and the stage manage-
ment thoroughly well carried out; but Mr. Alexander, it
seems to me, has not yet noticed that these barbarian
melodramas, with their profusion of action and dialogue,
do not require, and it fact will not bear, the long silences
which are necessary in order to give a stale, scanty, Lon-
don-made play an air of having something in it, even if
that something has to be manufactured between the lines
out of impressive listenings, posing, grimacings, and
"business." If Mr. Alexander will take a look at the
Americans at the Adelphi, he will see that they talk
straight on, losing as little time as possible. There is
none of the usual English attempt to get the acting in
between the lines instead of on the lines. They know
better than to give the audience time to think.

443

KATE TERRY

The Master: an original comedy in three acts. By
G. Stuart Ogilvie. Globe Theatre, 23 April, 189&

Lord and Lady Algy: an original light comedy in
three acts. By R. C. Carton. Comedy Theatre. 21
April, 1898.

I MUST say Mr. Stuart Ogilvie has an odd notion of
how to write a part to suit a particular actor. Here
is Mr. Hare, one of the very few English actors
one dare send a foreigner to see, excelling in the repre-
sentation of all sorts and conditions of quick, clear, crisp,
shrewd, prompt, sensible men. Enter to him Mr. Ogilvie,
with a part expressly designed to show that all this is
nothing but a pig-headed affectation, and that the true
humanity beneath it is the customary maudlin, muzzy,
brainless, hysterical sentimentality and excitability which
is supposed to touch the heart of the British playgoer,
and which, no doubt, does affect him to some extent when
he induces in himself the necessary degree of susceptibil-
ity with a little alcohol. What a situation ! And it would
have been so easy to provide Mr. Hare with a part show-
ing the worth and dignity of his own temperament ! All
through "The Master" Mr. Ogilvie seems to be trying
to prove to Mr. Hare what a much finer and more gen-
uine fellow he would have been if nature had made him
a Charles Warner or a Henry Neville. Apart from the
point being an extremely debateable one, it seems hardly
quite polite to Mr. Hare, who, after all, cannot help being
himself. This comes of an author making no serious
attempt to get to the point of view of the character he
professes to have dramatised— of simply conspiring with

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the stupid section of the pit to make an Aunt Sally of
it. Half the play might be made plausible if "The Mas-
ter*' were played as a savage, iron-jawed, madly selfish
old brute; but the other half is evidently laid out for
Mr. Hare's refinement and humanity of style. And then
there is a revolting obviousness about the operations of
destiny with a view to a happy ending. The old gentle-
man first puts his son out of the house, then puts out his
daughter, and finally puts out his wife, whereupon the
servants leave of their own accord. Immediately, with a
punctuality and perfect expectedness which is about as
dramatic as the response of a box of vestas to a penny
in the slot, comes the winning of the Victoria Cross in
India by the disinherited son, the heroic rescue of a band
of entombed miners by the manly young husband for
whose sake the daughter defies her father, and the sacri-
fice by the discarded wife of her whole fortune to save
her oppressor from ruin. For a man of Mr. Ogilvie's
calibre I call this gross. It is not the fine art of the
dramatist : it is the trade of the playwright, and not even
a first-class jog at that. For the life of me I cannot see
why Mr. Ogilvie should thus aim at rank commonness
in his drama any more than at the rank illiteracy of ex-
pression which usually accompanies it, and which he
saves his play from absolute intolerableness by avoiding.
He may reply that the public like rank commonness.
That may be, when it comes from the man to whom it is
natural, and who, in doing it, is doing his best. But
whether the public will like it from Mr. Ogilvie remains
to be seen. Miss Marie Corelli's novels may be more
widely read within a month of their publication than Mr.
Meredith's used to be ; but it does not at all follow that
if Mr. Meredith were deliberately to try to do Miss

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Corelli's work the result would be popular. The public
does not like to see a man playing down; and I should
insult Mr. Ogilvie most fearfully if I were to assume that
he was doing his best in "The Master." When, after
stooping to a baby, he took the final plunge with a band
playing "Soldiers of our Queen" to a cheering crowd out-
side, I hid my face and heard no more.

The interest of the occasion was strongly helped out
by the reappearance of Miss Kate Terry, an actress un-
known, except as an assiduous playgoer, to the present
generation. Miss Terry entered apologetically, frankly
taking the position of an elderly lady who had come to
look after her daughter, and tacitly promising to do her
best not to be intrusive, nor to make any attempt at act-
ing or anything of that sort, if the audience would only
be a little indulgent with her. She sat down on a sofa,
looking very nice and kindly; but the moment she had
to say something to Mr. Hare her old habits got the bet-
ter of her, and the sentence was hardly out of her mouth
before she recognized, as its cadence struck her ear,
that she had acted it, and acted it uncommonly well. The
shame of this discovery made her nervous ; but the more
nervous she was, the less she could help acting; and the
less she could help acting, the more she put on the youth
of the time when she had last acted — a fearful indiscre-
tion. However, as the audience, far from taking it in
bad part, evidently wanted more of it, Miss Terry, after
a brief struggle, abandoned herself to her fate and went
recklessly for her part. It was not much of a part; but
she gave the audience no chance of finding that out.
She apparently began, in point of skill and practice, just
where she had left oflF years ago, without a trace of rust.
Her first two or three speeches, though delicately distinct,

446

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

had a certain privacy of pitch, I thought; but almost be-
fore I had noticed it, it vanished, as she recaptured the
pitch of the theatre and the ear of the crowded audience.
She has distinguished skill, infallible judgment, alto-
gether extraordinary amenity of style, and withal a quite
enchanting air of being a simple-minded motherly lady,
who does not mean to be clever in the least, and never
was behind the scenes in a theatre in her life. I some-
times dream that I am on a concert platform with a
violin in my hands and an orchestra at my back, having
in some inexplicable madness undertaken to play the
Brahms Concerto before a full audience without knowing
my G string from my chanterelle. Whoever has not
dreamt this dream does not know what humility means.
Trembling and desperate, I strike Joachim's attitude, and
find, to my amazement, that the instrument responds in-
stantly to my sense of the music, and that I am playing
away like anything. Miss Terry's acting reminds me of
my imaginary violin-playing: she seems utterly innocent
of it, and yet there it is, all happening infallibly and de-
lightfully. But, depend on it, she must know all about
it; for how else does her daughter. Miss Mabel Terry,
come to be so cunningly trained ? She has walked on to
the stage with a knowledge of her business, and a delicacy
in its execution, to which most of our younger leading
ladies seem no nearer than when they first plundered on
to the boards in a maze of millinery and professional ig-
norance. Yes: the daughter gives the apparent naivete
of the mother away: if that art were an accident of
Nature it could never be taught so perfectly. Indeed,
there were plenty of little revelations of this kind for
sharp eyes. I have already described how Miss Kate
Terry's momentary nervousness at first threw her back

447

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

to the acting of thirty years ago. In that moment one
saw how much of the original Kate Terry her daughter
had just been reproducing for us. Then Miss Terry re-
covered her self-possession and her own age; and here
again one saw that she was by no means going to be the
maidenly Kate Terry with a matronly face and figure,
but virtually a new actress of matronly parts, unsurpassed
in stage accomplishment, and with a certain charm of
temperament that will supply our authors with something
that they get neither from the dazzling cleverness of Mrs.
Kendal nor the conviction and comic force of Mrs.
Calvert, who alone can lay claim to anything approach-
ing her technical powers. I do not feel sure that Miss
Terry could play Mrs. Alving in "Ghosts" as Mrs. Theo-
dore Wright plays it — if, indeed, she could bring herself
to play it at all — ^but I am sure that her art will not fail
her in any play, however difficult, that does not positively
antagonize her sympathies.

Stage art, even of a highly cultivated and artificial
kind, sits so naturally on the Terrys that I dare say we
shall hear a great deal about the family charm and very
little about the family skill. Even Miss Ellen Terry,
whose keenness of intelligence is beyond all dissimulation,
has often succeeded in making eminent critics believe
that her stagecraft and nervous athleticism are mere ef-
florescences of her personal charm. But Miss Mabel
Terry has no special enchantments to trade upon — only
the inevitable charms of her age. She is not recognisably
her aunt's niece. She is not majestically handsome and
graceful like Miss Julia Neilson ; nor voluptuously lovely
like Miss Lily Hanbury; nor perilously bewitching like
Mrs. Patrick Campbell. But she can speak beautifully,
without the slightest trick or mannerism of any sort ; and

448

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

no moment of nervousness can disable her: the word
gets rightly touched even when she can hardly hear it
herself. She never makes a grimace, nor is there a trace
of consciousness or exaggeration about her gestures. She
played between her mother and Mr. Hare without being
technically outclassed. Most of our stage young ladies
would have sustained the comparison like an understudy
volunteered in a desperate emergency by the nearest
amateur. If we are to write this down as the family
charm, let us not forget that it is a charm which includes
a good deal of industriously acquired skill. It ought to
be called artistic conscience.

Mr. Gilbert Hare is condemned to his usual premature
grey hairs. If he ever gets a chance as Romeo, I am
convinced that, from mere force of habit, the first thing
he will say to Juliet will be, "I have known your uncle
close on fifty years. Your mother was a sweet, gentle
lady, God bless her." There is only five minutes — more's
the pity — of Mr. Kerr. His Major Hawkwood is a
younger brother of Baron Croodle, whose second coming,
by the way, ought to be at hand by this time. Mr. Gill-
more and Mr. Cherry as the two heroes, and Mr. Rock
as the butler, leave nothing to be desired except less
obvious parts for them. Mr. Ross struck me as not quite
plausible enough in his villainy for the favorite of so
exacting a principal as The Master.

''Lord and Lady Algy" at the Comedy is an ignoble,
but not unamusing, three-act farce. I should have
nothing more to say about it had my eye not been caught
by the astounding epithet "wholesome" applied to it. I
declare that it is the most immoral play I ever saw. Lord
and Lady Algy are a middle-aged pair more completely
and shamelessly void of self-respect than any other

449

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

couple for whom the theatre lias ventured to claim sym-
pathy. They have one resource, one taste, one amuse-
ment, one interest, one ambition, one occupation, one ac-
complishment; and that is betting on the lurf. The
"wholesomeness" consists of the woman's boast that
though she flirts, she always "runs straight" — as if it
mattered a straw to any human being whether she ran
straight or not. A lady who is a gambler, a loafer, and
a sponge, is not likely to have any motive of the smallest
moral value for refraining from adultery. There are
people who are beneath law-breaking as well as people
who are above it; and Lord and Lady Algy are of that
class. But the play is altogether too trivial and sportive
to raise moral questions; and I laughed at its humors
without scruple. Mr. Henry Ford's jockey was the best
bit of character in the performance. Mr. Hawtrey, as
the Duke of Marlborough at a fancy ball, harmlessly
drunk, makes plenty of inoffensive fun ; and he and Miss
Compton have plenty of their popular and familiar busi-
ness in the first and third acts. The other parts are really
exasperating in view of the talent thrown away in them.

450

VAN AMBURGH REVIVED

The Club Baby: a farce in three acts. By Edward
G. Knoblauch. Avenue Theatre. 28 April, 1898.
The Medicine Man: a melodramatic comedy in five
acts. By H. D. Traill and Robert Hichens. Lyceum
Theatre. 4 May, 1898.

THE Club Baby" at the Avenue ought to have
been called "The Stage Baby's Revenge." The
utter worthlessnessof the sentiment in which our
actors and playgoers wallow is shown by their readiness
to take an unfortunate little child who ought to be in bed,
and make fun of it on the stage as callously as a clown
at a country fair will make fun of a sucking pig. But
at the Avenue the baby turns the tables on its exploiters.
The play tumbled along on the first night in an unde-
servingly funny way until the end of the second act, when
the baby was rashly brought on the stage. Then it was
all over. It was not so much that the audience looked at
the baby; for audiences, in their thoughtless moments,
are stupid enough to look at anything without blushing.
But that baby looked at the audience ; and its gaze would
have reclaimed a gang of convicts. The pained wonder
and unfathomable sadness with which it saw its elders,
from whom its childlike trust and reverence had expected
an almost godlike dignity, profanely making fools of
themselves with a string of ribald jests at its expense,
came upon us as the crowing of the cock came upon
Peter. We went out between the acts and drank heavily
as the best available substitute for weeping bitterly. If
even one man had had the grace to hang himself I should
still have some hopes of the British public. As it is, I

451

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

merely beg the Home Secretary to ask the magistrate who
is responsible for the appearance of this child on the
stage on what grounds he went out of his way to permit
it. We have been at the trouble of passing an Act of
Parliament to forbid the commercial exploitation of
children on the stage except in cases where the enforce-
ment of the Act would banish from the theatre some
masterpiece of dramatic art written before the passing
of the Act. For instance, we did not wish to make "Rich-
ard III.'' impossible by unconditionally abolishing the
little Duke of York, nor to suppress "A Doll's House"
by depriving Nora Helmer of her children. But "The
Qub Baby" is a play newly written with the deliberate
intention of doing precisely what the Act was passed to
prevent. It is a play without merit enough of any sort
to give it a claim to the most trivial official indulgence,
much less the setting aside of an Act of Parliament in
its interest. And yet a magistrate licenses the employ-
ment in it, not of a boy or girl, but actually of a child in
arms who is handed about the stage until eleven o'clock
at night. It is useless to appeal to playgoers, managers,
authors and people of that kind in this matter. If the
exhibition of a regiment of new-born babies would raise
an extra laugh or draw half-a-guinea over its cost, that
regiment of babies would be ordered and a play written
round it with the greatest alacrity. But the Home Office
is responsible for the prevention of such outrages. Sir
Matthew White Ridley is at present receiving £5000 a
year, partly at my expense, for looking after the admin-
istration of the laws regulating the employment of chil-
dren. If a factory owner employed a child under the
specified age, or kept a "young person" at work ten min-
utes after the specified hour. Sir Matthew would be down

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

on him like five thousand of brick. If the factory owner
were to plead that his factory was producing goods of
vital utility and the rarest artistic value, the plea would
not be listened to for a moment. In the name of common
sense, why are speculators in Club Babies and the like
to enjoy illegal and anti-social privileges which are de-
nied to manufacturers?

I have been invited to the Strand Theatre to a play
called "The J. P." In the bill the following appears:
"Charlie Vivian, Junior. By a Baby Three Months' old."
What right has Mr. Edouin, the manager, to invite me
to witness such an outrage ?

I suggest to the Home Office that a rigid rule should
be made against the licensing of children for any new
entertainment whatsoever. With regard to old plays,
a privileged list might be made of works of the "Richard
III." order; but the Hcenses given under this list should
be limited to specified parts: for example, the "Richard
III." privilege should apply solely to the part of the Duke
of York, and not be made an excuse for introducing a
coronation scene with a procession of five-year-old in-
fants strewing flowers. If it were once understood that
applications for licenses outside this list would be refused
as a matter of course, the present abuses would disappear
without further legislation. I would remind my critical
colleagues that about six years ago a sort of epidemic of
child exhibition broke out at the theatres devoted to comic
opera. I was a critic of music at that time ; and. I re-
member an opera at the Lyric Theatre in which a ballet
of tiny Punchinellos was danced between eleven o'clock
and midnight by a troop of infants in a sort of delirium
induced by the conflict between intense excitement and
intense sleepiness. I vainly tried to persuade some of

453

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

the most enlightened of my fellow-critics to launch the
thunder of the press at this abomination. Unfortunately,
having little children of their own, and having observed
that a single night's private theatricals gave much inno-
cent delight to their babies, they thought it was quite a
charming thing that the poor little Punchinellos should
have such fun every night for several months. Truly,
as Talleyrand said, the father of a family is capable of
anything. I was left to launch the little thunder I could
wield myself ; and the result, I am happy to say, was that
the managers, including a well-known stage-manager
since deceased, suffered so much anguish of mind from
my criticisms, without any counterbalancing conviction
that their pieces were drawing a farthing more with the
children than they would have drawn without them, that
they mended their ways. But of late the epidemic has
shown signs of breaking out again. I therefore think it
only fair to say that I also am quite ready to break out
again, and that I hope by this time my colleagues have
realised that their "bless-its-little-heart" patrosentimen-
tality is not publicism.

As to the performance of "The Club Baby," all I need
to say is that a long string of popular comedians do their
best with it, and that a Miss Clare Greet, whom I do not
remember to have seen before, distinguishes herself very
cleverly in the part of the country girl.

Now that Sir Henry Irving has taken to encouraging
contemporary literature, it cannot be denied that he has
set to work in a sufficiently original fashion. Mr. H. D.
Traill is an academic literary gentleman who, like Scho-
penhauer, conceives the world as Will and the intellec-
tual representations by which Man strives to make him-
self conscious of his will ; only Mr. Traill conceives thc;ie

454

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

things in a professional mode, the will being to him not
a Will to Live, but a Will to Write Books, and the proc-
ess of making us conscious of these books by intellec-
tual representations being simply reviewing. Some time
in the eighties London rose up in revolt against this view.
The New Journalism was introduced. Lawless young
men began to write and print the living English language
of their own day instead of the prose style of one of
Macaulay's characters named Addison. They split their
infinitives, and wrote such phrases as "a man nobody
ever heard of" instead of "a man of whom nobody had
ever heard," or more classical still, "a writer hitherto
unknown." Musical critics, instead of reading books
about their business and elegantly regurgitating their eru-
dition, began to listen to music and distinguish between
sounds ; critics of painting began to look at pictures ; crit-
ics of the drama began to look at something else besides
the stage; and descriptive writers actually broke into
the House of Commons, elbowing the reporters into the
background, and writing about political leaders as if they
were mere play-actors. The interview, the illustration
and the cross-heading, hitherto looked on as Amer-
ican vulgarities impossible to English literary gentlemen,
invaded all our papers; and, finally, as the climax and
masterpiece of literary Jacobinism, the "Saturday Re-
view" appeared with a signed article in it. Then Mr.
Traill and all his generation covered their faces with
their togas and died at the base of Addison's statue,
which all the while ran ink. It is true that they got up
and went home when the curtain fell ; but they made no
truce with Jacobinism ; and Mr. Traill fled into the fort-
ress of the "Times," and hurled therefrom, under the
defiant title of "Literature," a destructive mass of reviews

455

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

and publishers* advertisements which caught me one
morning in a railway carriage and nearly killed me. One
of the Jacobins was Mr. Hichens. He paid me the com-
pliment of following up the assault on Academicism on
my old lines — those of musical criticism. He was well
received by a revolutionary and licentious generation;
but whatever circulation his novels and articles might
achieve, it was not to be expected that Mr. Traill would
ever consent to be seen speaking to him in the street.
And yet Sir Henry Irving, in the calmest manner, seems
to have ordered a play from the twain jointly. What is
more, he has got it. I hardly know how to describe the
result. I trace the theme of the piece to a story, well
known to Mr. Traiirs generation, of the lion-tamer Van
Amburgh, who professed to quell the most ferocious
animals, whether human or not, by the power of his eye
alone. Challenged to prove this power on the person of
a very rough-looking laborer, he approached the man
and fixed a soul-searching gaze on him. The laborer soon
evinced the greatest disquietude, became very red and
self-conscious, and finally knocked Van Amburgh down,
accompanying the blow with a highly garnished demand
as to who he was staring at. In "The Medicine Man"
we have Van Amburgh with the period of quelling con-
templation extended to five acts, and including not only
the laborer, Bill Burge, but also a beauteous maiden
named Sylvia. One can understand the humorous insan-
ity of such a story fascinating Mr. Hichens, and Mr.
Traill chuckling secretly at having planted it on the young
Jacobin as a new idea. I find myself totally unable to
take it seriously: it sends me into a paroxysm of laugh-
ter whenever I think of it. I wonder which of the two
authors gave the muscular victim of Van Amburgh Tre-

456

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

genna the name of a very eminent contemporary pugilist,
known affectionately to the fancy as the Coffee Cooler.
If Mr. Burge should take the suggested portrait at all
amiss, and should seek personal redress at the hands of
the authors or the manager, one shudders at the possible
consequences to literature and the stage.

There was infinite comedy in the first night of the
play at the Lyceum. It lasted from eight to past eleven,
and contained just matter enough for a half-hour panto-
mimic sketch by Mr. Martinetti. Sir Henry Irving,
pleased by the lion-taming notion, was perfectly delighted
with his part, and would evidently have willingly gone
on impressing and mesmerising his devoted company for
three hours longer. Miss Ellen Terry, on the other hand,
was quite aware of the appalling gratuitousness of his
satisfaction. To save the situation she put forth all her
enchantments, and so beglamored the play act by act
that she forced the audience to accept Sylvia as a witch-
ing and pathetically lovely creation of high literary drama.
The very anguish the effort caused her heightened the
effect. When, after some transcendently idiotic speech
that not even her art could give any sort of plausibility to,
she looked desperately at us all with an expression that
meant "Don't blame me: / didn't write it," we only rec-
ognised a touch of nature without interpreting it, and
were ravished. Hand-in-hand with the innocently happy
Sir Henry, she endured the curtain calls with a proud
reticence which said to us plainly enough, "I will play
this part for you unworthy people, since you have no
better use to make of me; but I will not pretend to like
it," which was really hardly fair ; for we were, as I have
said, in a state of enchantment, and thought it all adora-
ble. Mr. Mackintosh as Bill Burge is laboriously impos-

457

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

sible. His Hogarthian make-up is not like anything now
discoverable at the docks ; his dialect has no touch of the
East End in it; he is as incapable of walking out of a
room naturally as a real dock laborer is of ''doing an
exit." However, it does not matter much; the whole
business is such utter nonsense that a stagey dock laborer
is quite in keeping with the freakish humors of Mr. Hich-
ens, to whom the life of the poor is a tragic-comic phan-
tasmagoria with a good deal of poker and black eye in it.
Only at a West End theatre could such a picture pass
muster. Some of it — the humors of Mrs. Burge, for
instance — is an outrage on humanity. But Mr. Hichens
will retrieve 'The Medicine Man" easily enough, for he
has by no means mistaken his vocation in writing for the
stage, though he had better avoid collaboration with the
chartered dulness of academic history and the solemn
frivolity of academic literature. It would take ten years'
hard descriptive reporting for the "Star" or "Daily Mail"
to teach Mr. Traill to observe life and to write seriously.
The first tinker he meets will tell him a better ghost
story than the vague figment, despicable to his own com-
mon sense, which he has thought good enough to make
a theme for the most exacting of all the forms of literary
art. That is your literary man all over — any old theme
for a great occasion, provided only nobody can suspect
you of believing in it.

458

G. B. S. VIVISECTED

14 May, 1898.

Eureka! I have found it out at last. I now un-
derstand the British drama and the British actor.
It has come about in this way.

A few weeks ago one of my feet, which had borne
me without complaining for forty years, struck work. The
spectacle of a dramatic critic hopping about the metropo-
lis might have softened a heart of stone; but the mana-
gers, I regret to say, seized the opportunity to disable me
by crowding a succession of first nights on me. After
"The Medicine Man" at the Lyceum, the foot got into
such a condition that it literally had to be looked into. I
had no curiosity in the matter myself; but the adminis-
tration of an anaesthetic made my views of no importance.
It is to the anaesthetic that I owe the discovery which
elicts my cry of Eureka !

The beginning of the anaesthesia threw no new light
on the theatre. I was extinguished by the gas familiar
to dentists' patients, and subsequently kept in a state
of annihilation with ether. My last recollection is a sort
of chuckle at being wideawake enough to know when the
operator lifted my eyelid and tapped my eyeball to con-
vince himself that he had made an end of me. It was
not until I was allowed to recover that the process became
publicly interesting. For then a very strange thing hap-
pened. My character did not come back all at once. Its
artistic and sentimental side came first: its morality, its
positive elements, its commonsense, its incorrigible Prot-
estant respectability, did not return for a long time
after. For the first time in my life I tasted the bliss of

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having no morals to restrain me from lying, and no
sense of reality to restrain me from romancing. I over-
flowed with what people call "heart." I acted and lied
in the most touchingly sympathetic fashion; I felt pre-
pared to receive unlimited kindness from everybody with
the deepest, tenderest gratitude; and I was totally inca-
pable of even conceiving the notion of rendering anyone
a service myself. If only I could have stood up and talked
distinctly as ia man in perfect health and self-possession,
I should have won the hearts of Everybody present until
they found me out later on. Even as it was, I was per-
fectly conscious of the value of my prostrate and half-
delirious condition as a bait for sympathy; and I delib-
erately played for it in a manner which now makes me
blush. I carefully composed effective little ravings, and
repeated them, and then started again and let my voice
die away, without an atom of shame. I called everybody
by their Christian names, except one gentleman whose
Christian name I did not know, and I called him "dear
old So-and-so." Artistically, I was an immense suc-
cess : morally, I simply had no existence.

At last they quietly extinguished the lights, and stole
out of the chamber of the sweet invalid who was now
sleeping like a child, but who, noticing that the last per-
son to leave the room was a lady, softly breathed that
lady's name in his dreams. Then the effect of the an-
aesthetic passed away more and more; and in less than
an hour I was an honest taxpayer again, with my heart
perfectly well in hand. And now comes the great ques-
tion. Was that a gain or a loss? The problem comes
home to me with special force at this moment, because I
have just seriously distracted public attention from the
American war by publishing my plays; and I have been

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Overwhelmed as usual by complaints of my want of heart,
my unnaturally clear intellectual consciousness, my cyni-
cism, and all the rest of it. One of my female characters,
who drinks whisky, and smokes cigars, and reads detec-
tive stories, and regards the fine arts, especially music,
as an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has
been declared by my friend Mr. William Archer to be an
exact and authentic portrait of myself, on no other
grounds in the world except that she is a woman of busi-
ness and not a creature of romantic impulse. In this
"nation of shopkeepers," the critics no sooner meet a
character on the stage with the smallest trace of business
sagacity, or an author who makes the least allowance for
the provident love of money and property as a guarantee
of security, comfort and independence, which is so pow-
erful a factor in English society, than they immediately
declare such a character totally inhuman and unnatural,
and such an author a cynical crank. If I am the unfor-
tunate author, they dispose of the character at once as
a mere dramatisation of my own personal eccentricities.
This, regarded as one of the humors of natural self-
unconsciousness, is so farcically paradoxical and prepos-
terous that I have always felt it to be too coarse for the
exquisite high comedy of real life. And I have been
right. The protests come only from what we call the
artistic class, by which contemptuous expression (for
such it is in England) we mean the men and women who
love books and pictures, histories and operas, and shrink
from business and public affairs so persistently that in
the end their consciousness becomes absolutely fictitious,
in which condition reality seems unreal to them, and the
most commonplace characteristics of English life, when
dramatised, produce on them the effect of a mere biz-

461

Dramatic Opinions and Essays

arrerie. When this effect is strong enough to give a
serious jar to their artistic habits, they generally mistake
the disagreeable sensation for a shock to their moral
sense, it being one of their artistic conventions that it is
possible to shirk real life, and yet possess moral sense.

Often as I have to point this out, I had, until yester-
day, yet to realize fully the difference between observing
it in other people and experiencing it oneself. At last
I can speak of it at first hand; and now I understand it
as I never understood it before. No longer shall I look
at my sentimental, fiction-loving friends as Bismarck
might look at a rather engaging South Sea chief; for I
have actually changed personalities with them. What is
more, I know how to reproduce the miracle at will as
certainly as if I possessed the wishing-cap of Siegfried.
My wishing-cap is a bag of ether. With that, I can first
plunge into the darkness that existed before my birth
and be simply nothing. Then I can come to life as an
artist and a man of feeling — as everything that I have
been reproached so bitterly for not being. I can pro-
long that condition indefinitely by taking a whiff or two
of ether whenever I feel the chill of a moral or intellec-
tual impulse. I can write plays in it; I can act in it; I
can gush in it; I can borrow money to set myself up as
an actor-manager in it; I can be pious and patriotic in
it ; I can melt touchingly over disease and death and mur-
der and hunger and cold and poverty in it, turning all
the woes of the world into artistic capital for myself ; and
finally I can come back to full consciousness and criti-
cise myself as I was in it. The parable of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde will be fulfilled in me, with this difference, that
it is Hyde who will be popular and petted, and Jekyll
who will be rebuked for his callous, heartless cynicism.

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Dramatic Opinions and Essays

I have already ordered a set of cards inscribed "G. B. S.
. .At Home. .Tuesdays and Fridays under ether for sen-
timental, theatrical and artistic purposes . . Mondays and
Saturdays normal for business engagements and public
affairs."

Here I must summarily break off. My doctor's inves-
tigation of my interior has disclosed the fact that for
many years I have been converting the entire stock of
energy extractable from my food (which I regret to say
he disparages) into pure genius. Expecting to find bone
and tissue, he has been almost wholly disappointed, and
a pale, volatile moisture has hardly blurred the scalpel
in the course of its excursions through my veins. He
has therefore put it bluntly to me that I am already al-
most an angel, and that it rests with myself to complete
the process summarily by writing any more articles be-
fore I have recovered from the effects of the operation
and been renovated in the matter of bone and muscle.
I have therefore pledged myself to send only the briefest
line explaining why my article cannot appear this week.
It is also essential, in order to keep up the sympathy which
rages at my bedside, to make the very worst of my ex-
hausted condition. Sad to say, there is enough of ether
clinging round me still to keep me doing this with a
very perceptible zest.

I can no more.

463

VALEDICTORY

21 May, i8g8.

As I lie here, helpless and disabled, or, at best,
nailed by one foot to the floor like a doomed
Strasburg goose, a sense of injury grows on
me. For nearly four years — ^to be precise, since New
Year 1895 — I have been the slave of the theatre. It has
tethered me to the mile radius of foul and sooty air which
has its center in the Strand, as a goat is tethered in the
little circle of cropped and trampled grass that makes
the meadow ashamed. Every week it clamors for its
tale of written words; so that I am like a man fighting
a windmill: I have hardly time to stagger to my feet
from the knock-down blow of one sail, when the next
strikes me down. Now I ask, is it reasonable to expect
me to spend my life in this way? For just consider my
position. Do I receive any spontaneous recognition for
the prodigies of skill and industry I lavish on an un-
worthy institution and a stupid public ? Not a bit of it :
^Kalf my time is spent in telling people what a clever man
I am. It is no use merely doing clever things in Eng-
land. The English do not know what to think until they
are coached, laboriously and insistently for years, in the
proper and becoming opinion. For ten years past, with
an unprecedented pertinacity and obstination, I have been
dinning into the public head that I am an extraordinarily
witty, brilliant, and clever man. That is now part of the
public opinion of England; and no power in heaven or
on earth will ever change it. I may dodder and dote; I
may potboil and platitudinise ; I may become the butt
and chopping-block of all the bright, original spirits of

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the rising generation ; but my reputation shall not suffer :
it is built up fast and solid, like Shakespeare's, on an
impregnable basis of dogmatic reiteration. ^

Unfortunately, the building process has been a most
painful one to me, because I am congenitally an extremely
modest man. Shyness is the form my vanity and self-
consciousness take by nature. It is humiliating, too,
after making the most dazzling displays of professional
ability, to have to tell people how clever it all is. Besides,
they get so tired of it, that finally, without dreaming of
disputing the alleged brilliancy, they begin to detest it.
I sometimes get quite frantic letters from people who
feel that they cannot stand me any longer.

Then there are the managers. Are they grateful ? No :
they are simply forbearing. Instead of looking up to
me as their guide, philosopher and friend, they regard
me merely as the author of a series of weekly outrages
on their profession and their privacy. Worse than the
managers are the Shakespeareans. When I began to
write, William was a divinity and a bore. Now he is a
fellow-creature; and his plays have reached an unprece-
dented pitch of popularity. And yet his worshippers over-
whelm my name with insult.

These circumstances will not bear thinking of. I have
never had time to think of them before ; but now I have
nothing else to do. When a man of normal habits is ill,
everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to re-
cover. When a Vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very
seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going
to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him
right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy,
so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night.
They tell him awful stories of cases just like his own

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which ended fatally after indescribable torments; and
when he tremblingly inquires whether the victims were
not hardened meat-eaters, they tell him he must not
talk, as it is not good for him. Ten times a day I am
compelled to reflect on my past life, and on the limited
prospect of three weeks or so of lingering moribundity
which is held up to me as my probable future, with the
intensity of a drowning man. And I can never justify
to myself the spending of four years on dramatic criti-
cism. I have sworn an oath to endure no more of it.
Never again will I cross the threshold of a theatre. The
subject is exhausted; and so am I.

Still, the gaiety of nations must not be eclipsed. The
long string of beautiful ladies who are at present in the
square without, awaiting, under the supervision of two
gallant policemen, their turn at my bedside, must be re-
assured when they protest, as they will, that the light
of their life will go out if my dramatic articles cease.
To each of them I will present the flower left by her pred-
ecessor, and assure her that there are as good fish in
the sea as ever came out of it. The younger generation
is knocking at the door; and as I open it there steps
spritely in the incomparable Max.

For the rest, let Max speak for himself. I am off
duty for ever, and am going to sleep.

466

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