Chapter IV: Part 4

But there are obvious dangers. One I have just pointed out, the danger of introducing irrelevancies for their own intrinsic interest, which tend to impair the artistic unity of the play. Another is the danger of applying this method to cases (as in _Hamlet_ and _Cyrano_) where the real centre of interest is not the mimic play but the mimic audience. Imagine the whole stage given up to the _Mouse Trap_, with the front row of stalls occupied by the courtiers, and Hamlet and Ophelia in one box watching the King and Gertrude in the opposite box! That is an extreme instance, which traditional respect for Shakespeare will probably save us from; but some ambitious producer will probably try this game with some modern play, and then I predict disaster.

PLAYS OF TALK

The production on two successive nights of two plays so violently contrasted in method as Mr. Harwood’s _Grain of Mustard Seed_ and Mr. Galsworthy’s _Skin Game_—the first a play mainly of talk, the second a play entirely of action—sets one thinking. According to the orthodox canons, the second is the right, nay, the only method. Drama, we are told, is a conflict of wills and all the interest is in the action, the external manifestation of the conflict. There should be just enough talk to carry that on and not an idle word should be spoken. Diderot, indeed, professed to think that words were almost superfluous, and went to the play with cotton-wool in his ears in order to judge its merits on the dumb show; yet he wrote the most wordy and tedious plays. And there is, or was, a certain school of theatrical criticism which forever quotes the old Astley maxim, “Cut the cackle and come to the ’osses”—which was no doubt a most appropriate maxim, for quadrupeds. Others have mistaken action for physical, preferably violent action—Maldonado sweeping the crockery off the chimney-piece or Lady Audley pushing her husband down the well—and have ignored the fact that talk also may be action, “and much the noblest,” as Dryden says. “Every alteration or crossing of a design, every new-sprung passion, and turn of it, is a part of the action, and much the noblest, except we perceive nothing to be action, till they come to blows; as if the painting of the hero’s mind were not more properly the poet’s work than the strength of his body.” How often we were told in the old days that Dumas _fils_ and Ibsen were too “talky,” when their talk was mainly psychological action.

But this demand for action and nothing but action, so persistently uttered of late years, would deprive the world of much of its best entertainment. Apply it to Congreve, “cut the cackle” of his plays, and you come to the ’osses, spavined hacks, of plots childishly complicated and perfunctorily wound up. Would any one of taste suppress the “cackle” of Sheridan’s scandalous college? Is not, in short, much of the pleasure of comedy in resting from the action, in getting away from it, in the relief of good talk? Yes, and often enough the pleasure of tragedy, too. There is a bustling, melodramatic action in _Hamlet_. But with what relief Hamlet gets away from his revenge “mission” at every moment, puts it out of sight, forgets it! His interview with the players and advice to them on histrionics, his chat with the gravedigger, what else are these but the sheer delight of good talk? For him the joy of living is the joy of talking, and with the chance of these before him his revenge-mission may go hang!

Obviously we never get so near Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s natural temperament, as in these moments of talk for its own sake, talk unfettered by the exigencies of the plot. For that talk wells up spontaneously and is not turned on to order; the poet has something interesting in his mind which he is bursting to say, and if to say it will keep the plot waiting, why, so much the worse for the plot. And here is a reason, I think, in favour of plays of talk. We get nearer the author in them; in good talk the author is expressing a pleasure so strong as to override the objection of irrelevance, and in sharing that pleasure we get the best of him, the spontaneous element in him, the man himself. On the other hand, mere yarn-spinning, mere plot-weaving, may be an almost mechanical exercise. Not necessarily, of course. I should be sorry to call Mr. Galsworthy’s _Skin Game_ a mechanical bit of work. The will-conflict there has an intense reality and is fought tooth and nail. Irrelevant talk in such a white-hot play would obviously be fatal. Everybody speaks briefly, plainly, and to the point. Artistic work of any kind gives pleasure, and it is possible to be as delighted with Mr. Galsworthy’s kind as with Mr. Harwood’s. I am not comparing two artists of two different kinds, which would be absurd. I am only pleading for a kind which is not what a vain people supposeth, and which is apt to be stupidly condemned.

Not that it would be fair, either, to call Mr. Harwood’s brilliant task irrelevant. It helps to paint character. Thus, parents expect their son to have returned from the war a compound of Sir Galahad and Mr. Bottomley, and instead of that he is only a good bridge-player, after four hours’ bridge a day for four years. These witticisms help to tell you something about the young man whose family reputation gives rise to them in the family circle. When the old Parliamentary hand compares government to ’bus-driving, seeking to get through the traffic with the minimum of accident, or remarks on the reputation Canute would have made had he only waited for high tide, he is telling us something about himself and his political principles. But primarily these things are enjoyable for their wit and not for their relevance. In a play of fierce will-conflict they would have been impossible. These plays of brilliant talk belong to the quiet _genre_, and quiet in the theatre, as in art generally, is perhaps an acquired taste. “Punch,” we are constantly being told by the natural unsophisticated man, is what is wanted—the word itself is the invention of an unquiet people. Well, give me wit, and let who will have the “punch.”

The occasional tendency in the theatre to revolt against the restraint of the action and to play lightly round it has its counterpart in criticism. What is it gives so peculiar a charm to the criticism of Dryden? Is it not his discursiveness, his little descriptive embellishments—as, for example, in the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” the river trip, the listening for the distant thunder of the Dutch guns “on that memorable day,” the moonlight on the water, the landing at Somerset Stairs among the crowd of French dancers? I have elsewhere said how Hazlitt’s theatrical criticisms lose in readableness by their strict attention to business, compared with his miscellaneous essays, where he permits himself to wander “all over the place.” George Henry Lewes’s theatrical criticisms can still be read with pleasure for the very reason that they were diversified with deliberate, almost frivolous irrelevancies. And then there was Jules Lemaître with his perpetual “moi,” which provoked the austere Brunetière to quote Pascal’s “_le moi est haïssable_.” Yet where will you find more enjoyable criticism than Lemaître’s? But I must keep off Lemaître and the charm of him, or I shall become, what he never was, tiresome. Even as it is, I may resemble the parson who said he had aimed at brevity in order to avoid tediousness, and was answered, “You _were_ brief, and you _were_ tedious.”

“THE BEGGAR’S OPERA”

One of Boswell’s projected works was a history of the controversy over _The Beggar’s Opera_. The best known of the works he actually did write contains several references to this controversy. Reynolds said it afforded a proof how strangely people will differ in opinion about a literary performance. Burke thought it had no merit. Johnson thought very much the opposite, but said characteristically, “There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality.” Gibbon suggested that it might refine the manners of highwaymen, “making them less ferocious, more polite—in short, more like gentlemen.” It is noteworthy that the work was half a century old when these observations were made about it. It had become a classic. And later generations treated it as a classic—that is to say, kept on refashioning it to the taste of their own time. The version, for instance, that Hazlitt was so fond of writing about (in the second decade of the last century) was a sad mangling of the original. Even so, it represented for Hazlitt the high-water mark of theatrical enjoyment, just as the original did for Boswell, who said, “No performance which the theatre exhibits delights me more.” You cannot take up a volume of Swift’s correspondence, or Horace Walpole’s or Arbuthnot’s, without mention of _The Beggar’s Opera_. It even got into Grimm. It was the _H.M.S. Pinafore_ of the time.

And that reminds me. As I sat at the Hammersmith Lyric listening to the dialogue between Peachum and Mrs. Peachum on the question whether Polly was Macheath’s wife or his mistress, the thing seemed strangely modern, and not only modern, but Gilbertian. (I am speaking, of course, of the tone, not of the sentiment—Gilbert was a very Victorian of propriety.) Peachum is Gilbertian. “Do you think your mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together if ever we had been married? Baggage!” Mrs. Peachum is Gilbertian. “If you must be married, could you introduce nobody into our family but a highwayman? Why, thou foolish jade, thou wilt be as ill-used and as much neglected as if thou hadst married a lord!” Again, “If she had only an intrigue with the fellow, why the very best families have excus’d and huddled up a frailty of that sort. ’Tis marriage, husband, that makes it a blemish.” Once more. “Love him! Worse and worse! I thought the girl had been better bred.” Polly herself is Gilbertian. “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand! I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity! What volleys of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn, that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace! I see him at the tree! The whole circle are in tears! Even butchers weep!” Lucy is Gilbertian. When Macheath is at the “tree,” her comment is, “There is nothing moves one so much as a great man in distress.” And not only the tone, but the very principle of the play is Gilbertian. Gilbert took some typical figure of the social hierarchy—a Lord Chancellor, a First Lord of the Admiralty—and set the Chancellor capering and the First Lord singing about the handle of the big front door. He put a familiar figure in unfamiliar postures. Gay took a typical figure of his own time—the highwayman—and showed him, not at work on the highway, but enjoying an elegant leisure, behaving like a Chesterfield or one of Congreve’s fine gentlemen. It was the realism, the actuality of the subject, combined with the burlesque of the treatment, that delighted the London of 1728 as it delighted the London of a century and a half later. At each date it was a new experiment in opera libretto. Boswell specified the attraction of Gay’s realism—“the real pictures of London life.” Johnson singles out the “novelty” of the treatment.

But it is time that I said something about Mr. Nigel Playfair’s revival. This is a remarkable success, from every point of view. For the original attraction of realism is, of course, no longer there. We have to take it all historically. And the revival has been particularly careful of historical accuracy. Just as Gay’s dialogue prompts you to say “Gilbert,” so Mr. Lovat Fraser’s scenery and costumes prompt you to exclaim “Hogarth!” By the way, on one of Hazlitt’s visits he records the exclamation of an old gentleman in the pit, after the scuffle between Peachum and Lockit, “Hogarth, by G—d!” This was, no doubt, a tribute to the grim, ugly squalor of that particular scene. But the whole _décor_ and atmosphere of the present affair are Hogarthian—the stiff, flattened hoops of the women, the tatterdemalion aspect of Macheath’s rabble, Peachum’s dressing-gown (which I suppose is “documentary”), Macheath’s scarlet coat and flowing wig. And the dresses are accurately simple. The women wear plain stuffs; Polly alone is allowed a little finery. Indeed, there is an almost austere simplicity about the whole affair. One scene, with just the alteration of a few accessories, serves for Peachum’s house, for a tavern, and for Newgate. There is an orchestra of five strings, a flute, an oboe, and a harpsichord. It seems to me that their playing has the delicate charm of chamber music rather than the power and colour of orchestral—but I must not stray out of my province.

Hazlitt indulged in raptures over Miss Stephens, the first Polly he heard, and never failed to contrast with her her less pleasing successors. He had evidently lost his heart to her—a somewhat susceptible heart, if you think of the “Liber Amoris.” I have no Miss Stephens to compare Miss Arkandy with, and can only say the songstress is quite sweet enough for my taste and the actress a charming little doll. Miss Marquesita, the Lucy, is a good contrast, a voluptuous termagant. Boswell says of Walker, the original Macheath, that he “acquired great celebrity by his grave yet animated performance of it.” Mr. Ranalow’s Macheath is decidedly more grave than animated, is in fact a little solemn—long before he gets to the Condemn’d Hold. There is an almost Oriental impassiveness about him, something of the jaded sultan—which, after all, is not an inappropriate suggestion, surrounded as the poor man is by his seraglio of town-ladies. Miss Elsie French bravely makes a thorough hag of Mrs. Peachum; the Peachum and Lockit of Mr. Wynne and Mr. Rawson are properly, Hogarthianly, crapulous; and Mr. Scott Russell makes a good, vociferous Filch, leading with a will the fine drinking-song “Woman and Wine” and the still finer “Let us take the Road” (to the tune of Handel’s march in _Rinaldo_). Altogether a delicious entertainment: gay, despite the solemn deportment of Macheath, and dainty, despite the sordid _crapule_ of Newgate. Yes, my final impression of the affair is one of daintiness. Even the women of the town are dainty. They might almost be Dresden china shepherdesses (which would be bearing out the original suggestion of a Newgate “pastoral” very literally). For the sordid _milieu_ is so remote from us as to have become fantastically unreal; the Peachums and the Lockits are no longer ugly men, but have been turned into grotesque gargoyles; the rabble round Tyburn Tree has lived to see a Russian ballet and learnt to move in its elegant arabesques. It is a Hogarth retouched by a Shepperson—or rather, to speak by the card, by a Lovat Fraser.

GRAND GUIGNOLISM

Dandin, the judge in Racine’s comedy of _Les Plaideurs_, offers to amuse Isabelle by the spectacle of a little torturing. “Eh! Monsieur,” exclaims Isabelle, “eh, Monsieur, peut on voir souffrir des malheureux?” and Dandin, in his reply, speaks for a by no means negligible proportion of the human race: “Bon! cela fait toujours passer une heure ou deux.” Dandin was a Guignolite.

We all have our Guignolite moments, moments of Taine’s “ferocious gorilla” surviving in civilized man, when we seek the spectacle of torture or physical suffering or violent death; but we are careful to æsthetize them, refine them into moments of poetry or art. The pleasure of tragedy is æsthetic. Nevertheless, tragedy involves violent death, and without that would be an idle tale. So Rousseau was not altogether wrong when he said we go to a tragedy for the pleasure of seeing others suffer, without suffering ourselves. Your true Guignolite simply prefers his tragedy “neat,” without æsthetic dilution. But I think it is unfair to charge him, as he is so often charged, with a love of the horrible for its own sake. I think, rather, that he is moved, a little more actively than the rest of the world, by curiosity.

It is customary to talk of curiosity as though it were essentially ignoble. Children, women, and savages are said to have most of it. It accounts for “fortune-telling,” prophetic almanacs, spiritualistic _séances_ and other forms of alleged communication with the dead. But the truth is, curiosity, the desire to enlarge experience, is a highly valuable, or, rather, indispensable, human attribute. Without it there could be no science, no progress, and finally no human life at all. And you cannot restrict it. It must crave for all forms of experience. Some of us will be sweeping the heavens for new stars, and others will want to peep into Bluebeard’s cupboard. More particularly we are curious to know what is already known to others. We desire to see with our own eyes what others have seen and reported to us. That is why so many people have gone to _Chu Chin Chow_. We wish to realize for ourselves, by the direct aid of our own senses, “What it’s like.” And the more difficult it is to see, the greater the secrecy, the intimacy, of its actual happening in life, the greater our curiosity to see a picture or other representation of it. Hence the vogue of stage bedroom scenes, newspaper portraits of “the victim” and “the place of the crime,” and Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

I believe that is why “cela”—the horrible, the dreadful, the gruesome—“fait toujours passer une heure ou deux” for your Guignolite. It satisfies his curiosity about an experience which in real life it is rare or difficult to obtain. For instance, they have been showing at the London Grand Guignol a representation of a criminal’s last half-hour before execution. Time was when you could see that for yourself, follow the prisoner in the cart to Tyburn, and offer him nosegays or pots of beer. In that time, enjoying the real thing, you wanted no mimic representation of it. For stage purposes you only cared to have it fantasticated—as in _The Beggar’s Opera_. To-day you cannot (unless you are a prison official or the hangman himself) enjoy the real thing; the Press is excluded; so you seek the next best thing, a realistic stage picture of it. “Realistic,” I say. That is the merit of Mr. Reginald Berkeley’s _Eight o’Clock_, wherein there is not a trace of staginess or imported sentiment. He gives you what you are looking for, the nearest substitute for the real thing. You are shown, as accurately as possible, “what it’s like.” You see how the warders behave, and how the chaplain and how the prisoner—with the result that you feel as though, for that terrible half-hour, you had been in Newgate yourself. You have gone through an experience which in actual life (let us hope) you will never have. Your curiosity has been satisfied.

And I think realism will have to be the mainstay of the Grand Guignol programmes. There is another “shocker” in the bill, _Private Room No. 6_, by a French author, M. de Lorde, which seemed to me not half so effective as the other because it was largely tinged with romance. Here again was an attempt to gratify curiosity about an unusual experience. The incident was distinctly “private and confidential.” How many of us have had the chance of seeing a fiercely-whiskered Muscovite kissing and biting a (conveniently _décolletée_) lady on the shoulder, subsequently swallowing a tumblerful of kummel at a draught, and presently being strangled by the lady’s glove? This, you may say, was realistic enough, but what made it romantic, theatrical, was the obviously artificial arrangement of the story, the “preparations,” the conventional types. You knew at once you were in the theatre and being served with carefully calculated “thrills.” That is to say, your curiosity was solely about what was going to happen next in the playwright’s scheme—the common interest of every stage plot—which is a very different thing from curiosity about strange, rare, experiences in actual life. You felt that Mr. Berkeley had really shown you “what it’s like.” You felt that M. de Lorde had only shown you what his skill in theatrical invention was like.

And there, I suspect, we reach a limitation of Grand Guignolism. The art of drama at its best—shall we call it grand art, as distinguished from Grand Guignol art?—does not exist to gratify curiosity. The best drama does not provoke the spectator’s curiosity about what is going to happen so much as excite in him a keen desire that a certain thing shall happen and then satisfy that desire to the full. The Greek tragedians did not scruple to announce their plot in advance. Lessing, in his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” maintains that “the dramatic interest is all the stronger and keener the longer and more certainly we have been allowed to foresee everything,” and adds, “So far am I from holding that the end ought to be hidden from the spectator that I don’t think the enterprise would be a task beyond my strength were I to undertake a play of which the end should be announced in advance, from the very first scene.” The truth is, in the fine art of drama we are seeking what we seek in every fine art—beauty, a new form and colouring to be given to the actions and emotions of the real world by the artist’s imagination. But even on the lower plane of realism Grand Guignolism has ample scope. The one-act formula has a clear technical advantage in the single scene and strict coincidence of supposed with actual time, great helps both to unity of impression. (One counted the minutes in _Eight o’Clock_ almost as anxiously as the condemned man did.) And it has the immense fun of theatrical experiment, of seeing how far you can go, what shocks the public can stand and what it can’t, the joy of adventurously exploring the unknown and the _inédit_. Above all, if it is wise it will remember that (as I believe at any rate) its public does not yearn for the “shocking” incident merely as such, but as representing a rare experience, and it will look for some rarities that are not shocking.

A THEATRICAL FORECAST

Newspapers periodically publish their review of the past theatrical year. But it is always a sad thing to recall the past, especially the immediate past, which is too recent to be history and only old enough to be stale. Why not, then, let bygones be bygones and turn to the future, about which hope springs eternal, and which gives free scope to the imagination instead of imposing the tedious labour of research? What are our leading dramatists going to give us next year? The question might be treated in a matter-of-fact way by just going and asking them—and perhaps getting very disappointing answers. It seems more sportsmanlike to guess; besides, it leaves room for some piquant surprises when one is by and by confronted with the actual. These, then, are one or two guesses for next season.

It is long, too long, since London had a play from Sir Arthur Pinero. When he writes a play he gives you a play, not a symposium or a sermon or a piece of propagandism, but a dramatic action which interests you in its story, makes you wonder what is going to happen next, and takes care that something does happen, striking at the moment and worth thinking about afterwards. His characters are presented in strong relief, there is always a dramatic conflict of wills, his women are never insipid, are sometimes deliciously perverse, and, if not past redemption (in which case they commit suicide), are “saved” by the nearest Anglican bishop or dean. His forthcoming play will ignore the Church and will deal with a household divided on the “spiritualistic” question. The husband, who suffers from mild shell-shock and saw the “angels of Mons,” will have come back from the war a devoted follower of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle. The wife (Miss Irene Vanbrugh) will be a pretty sceptic, adoring her husband, but impatient of his credulity and determined to “laugh him out” of it. An opportunity occurs. The young pair have been having a sarcastic scene (a fine opportunity for Miss Irene’s merry ringing laugh) about the husband’s bosom-friend Jack, whom he had left for dead on the field at Mons. The husband eagerly hopes to get into communication with Jack “on the other side.” The wife only remembers, with twinges of conscience, certain love passages she had, before her marriage, with the said Jack, of which she has never told her husband. Now Jack is not dead, but on his way to his bosom-friend, when the wife meets him. She sees at once a chance of opening her husband’s eyes. “We’ll have a _séance_,” she says to Jack; “you shall pretend to be your own spirit, and then suddenly reveal yourself as flesh and blood—and Tom will be for ever cured of his foolishness.” Jack agrees, but he also is suffering from shell-shock (two in one play! you can imagine how clever the critics will be over this—it will have to be made clear that it was the same shell), forgets himself at the _séance_, and at sight of his old lady-love cries “Darling!”; then, horrified at his own misbehaviour, disappears, and the same night is either run over by a motor-car or tumbles into a canal. The wife’s reputation is saved by another lady present, who takes the “darling!” to herself. It is not yet settled whether this shall be a comic amorous dame, really self-deceived (say, Miss Lottie Venne), or a shrewd, kindly woman of the world (Miss Compton, for choice), who promptly sees how the land lies and sacrifices herself for her little married friend. In either case, the wife has to keep up the illusion that the voice came from “the other side,” while the husband, though confirmed in his spiritualism, is secretly disgusted to discover that the spirits can be such “bad form.” Thus the final situation is an ironic transmutation of the first. The divided pair are now united, the merry sceptic being frightened into simulating belief, while the believer ruefully finds belief without zest. Much will depend on the acting of this final situation. Miss Irene may safely be trusted to transfer her laugh adroitly to the wrong side of her mouth, but great subtlety will be required from the actor who has to convey the mixed joy and pain of a belief proved at once true and not worth having. It may, perhaps, count among Mr. Henry Ainley’s triumphs. Mr. Gerald du Maurier will play Jack the friend—another triumph, for even in his moment of breakdown he will still keep the sympathy of the audience.

Sir James Barrie has not yet exhausted the variations on his “enchantment” theme. After the enchanted wood of _Dear Brutus_, where people get a second chance in life, and the enchanted island of _Mary Rose_, where time stands still with you, he will with his next play sound enchanted bagpipes. These will be heard as a weird _obbligato_, whenever any one of the characters falls into insincerity, from _pp_ (amiable taradiddle) to _ff_ (thumping lie), and, while they are playing, the character will talk broad Scotch and sketch the postures of or, in extreme cases, wildly dance a Highland Reel. As the characters will be drawn exclusively from the Holland House set (the scene throughout will be one of the famous breakfasts), the extravagance of the compulsory fits of Caledonianism can be seen a mile off. The dismay of the poet Rogers (Mr. George Robey, specially engaged) at finding his best _méchancetés_, in his notoriously low voice, unexpectedly uttered in the broadest Scotch will only be equalled by the surprise of Sydney Smith at hearing his choicest witticisms in the same lingo. At one supreme moment the whole party will be joining in a Reel, led recalcitrantly but majestically by Lady H. Fashionable dames (a great opportunity for the costumier, and fabulous sums will be spent on the wardrobe) will suddenly change from lisping “vastly amusing I declare!” and rolled-collared _beaux_ from murmuring “monstrous fine women, egad!” to “aiblins,” “hoots, mon,” “hech, sirs,” etc. The situation will ultimately be saved by a little Scottish maiden, in a plaid (Miss Hilda Trevelyan), who, being sincerity itself, will never speak anything but the purest English, and a baby in a box nailed against the wall, who will not speak at all. For the enchanted bagpipes a squad of pipe-majors of the Black Watch, splendid fellows in review order, will be kindly lent from the Edinburgh garrison.

Mr. Maugham has been to China, and has brought back a play which will aim at being as unlike _Mr. Wu_ as possible. In fact, no Chinaman will figure in it—Mr. Maugham would never do anything so artistically vulgar as that—nor anything Chinese except a little porcelain curio of the best period. This will be sold by auction in a scene (it will be the talk of London) faithfully reproducing a celebrated establishment in King Street, St. James’s, with Mr. Hawtrey and Miss Gladys Cooper as the rival bidders. It will serve, later, for chief _pièce justificative_ in a divorce case between the same parties (with a really witty judge—for he will have the wit of Mr. Maugham—who will make a certain actual humorist on the Bench green with envy), and in the end will be broken by an excited counsel (played by the famous crockery-smashing artist from the music-halls).

Mr. Shaw—but no, it is impossible for Mr. Shaw himself, let alone any one else, to guess beforehand what Mr. Shaw will do. Finally, it may be conjectured that the rank and file of our playwrights will write for us precisely the same plays they have written before, under new titles. It would be an agreeable innovation if they would keep the old titles and write new plays for them.

A THEORY OF BRUNETIÈRE

There is a theory of the late Ferdinand Brunetière about the periods of dramatic activity which the time we are now passing through ought to put to the test. Brunetière was an incorrigible generalizer, first because he was a Frenchman, and next because he was a born critic. Criticism without general ideas, without a substructure of principle and theory to build upon, is an idle thing, the mere expression of likes and dislikes, or else sheer verbiage. This French critic was always throwing theories at the drama, and some of them have stuck. Perhaps the soundest of them and the most lasting was his theory of the drama as the spectacle of the struggle of will against obstacles. There has been much controversy about it, there has been no difficulty in instancing cases which it fails to cover, but I venture to think that as a rough generalization it still holds good. I am not, however, concerned with that famous theory for the moment. I am thinking of another theory—a historical one. Brunetière asserted that every outburst of dramatic activity in a nation will be found to have followed close upon a great manifestation of national energy—Greek tragedy, for instance, after the Persian War, Calderon and de Vega after the Spanish conquests in the New World, Shakespeare after the Armada, the French romantic drama after the Napoleonic campaigns. He might have added that the war of 1870 was followed by the best work of Dumas fils, by the Théâtre Libre, by Ibsen and Björnson, Hauptmann and Sudermann, and the Russo-Japanese War by the Moscow Art Theatre and Tchekhov.

I confess, then, my doubts about the soundness of this theory. Throughout the past history of any nation wars have been of so constant occurrence that it would be difficult not to find one preceding, by a fairly short term, any particular outburst of dramatic activity you like to fix upon. One is always _post_ the other; it is not necessarily _propter_. And instances to the contrary will readily occur: periods of dramatic activity that were not immediately preceded by, but rather synchronized with, great manifestations of national energy; for instance, the period of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. And sometimes, when you look for your dramatic sequel to your national energizing, you only draw a blank. Did any outburst of dramatic production follow the American Civil War? The theory, in short, is “an easy one,” relying on lucky coincidence and ignoring inconvenient exceptions.

In any case, we ought to be able now, if ever, to put it to the “acid test.” The leading nations of the world have just fought the biggest of all their wars. Has the promised sequel followed? Is there any sign at home or abroad of a fresh outburst of dramatic energy? In Germany they seem to be merely “carrying on,” or tending to be a little more pornographic than usual. In Vienna they are still translating Mr. Shaw. No new dramatic masterpiece is reported from Italy, D’Annunzio being “otherwise engaged,” Mr. Boffin. Paris is still producing its favourite little “spicinesses” or, for the high brows, translating Strindberg. (Outside the theatre the effect of the war on Paris seems not merely negative but stupefying. They have achieved Dadaism and, so I read in a recent _Literary Supplement_, a distaste for the works of M. Anatole France!) In America the drama is in no better case than before the war.

And what about London? An absolutely unprecedented dearth of not merely good but of actable plays. People will give you other causes, mainly economic, for the theatrical “slump.” They will tell you, truly enough, that playgoers have less money to spend, and that the cheaper “cinema” is diverting more and more money from the theatre. And yet, whenever the managers produce anything really worth seeing there is no lack of people to see it.

There is nothing, then, to discourage the aspiring dramatist. Only he won’t aspire! Or his aspiration is not backed by talent! It seems as though the war, instead of stimulating dramatic energy, had repressed and chilled it. What on earth (if I may use a colloquialism condemned by Dr. Johnson) would poor M. Brunetière have said if he had lived to see his pet theory thus falsified? Probably he would have invented a new one. He would have said that wars mustn’t be _too_ big to fit into a law devised only for usual sizes. Also he might have said, wait and see. The war is only just over; give your young dramatists a little breathing time. Shakespeare’s plays didn’t immediately follow the Armada. The French Romantic Drama didn’t begin till a good dozen years after Waterloo.

Well, we can’t afford to wait. While we playgoers are waiting for good plays, our young men are all frittering away their talent in minor poetry, which war seems to bring as relentlessly in its train as shell-shock. But the victims of both maladies ought by now to be on the high-road to recovery, and it is time that the young minor poets turned their attention to something useful, _e.g._, the reintroduction of the British drama. They have a capital opportunity, since most of our old stalwarts seem to have left the field. Sir Arthur Pinero gives us nothing. Mr. Arthur Henry Jones gives us nothing. Mr. Maugham is, I am told, far away in Borneo, so now is the chance for the young aspirants; the world is all before them where to choose. Of course it is understood that they will drop their verse. That used to be the natural form for plays over two centuries ago. It may come into fashion again, you never can tell, but, quite clearly, the time is not yet. I have heard people ask, “What are the chances for a revival of poetic drama?” They really mean verse-drama, but the answer is, that the essence of poetry is not verse, which is merely ornament, but the expression of a certain spiritual state, a certain _état d’âme_, and that there is always room for poetic plays. _Dear Brutus_ contained much of the poetic essence; so does _Mary Rose_. But their language is prose, and our young aspirants may be recommended to write in prose, for which their previous verse-exercises will have been a useful preparation. Only let them hurry up! Let their hearts swell with the proud hope of creating that magnificent affair, which demands capital letters, the Drama of the Future. Mr. Bergson told us at Oxford that when an interviewer invited him to forecast the drama of the future he answered, “If I could do that I’d write it.” So we can only wonder what it will be like. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson to Boswell who was “wondering,” “you _may_ wonder.”

DISRAELI AND THE PLAY

We have all been reading Mr. Buckle’s concluding volumes, and when we have recovered from the fascination of the great man and the splendid historical pageant they present to us, we dip into them again in search of trifles agreeable to our own individual taste. And I shall make no apology for turning for a moment from Disraeli in robes of ceremony, the friend of Sovereigns, the hero of Congresses, the great statesman and great Parliament man, to Disraeli the playgoer. That dazzling figure is not readily thought of as a unit in the common playhouse crowd. Yet it is with a feeling of relief from the imposing spectacle of great mundane affairs that you find Disraeli, after receiving in the afternoon the “awful news” of the Russian ultimatum to Turkey (October, 1876), going in the evening with his Stafford House hosts to see _Peril_ at the Haymarket, and pleased with the acting of Mrs. Kendal. The play, he tells his correspondent, Lady Bradford, is—

“An adaptation from the French _Nos Intimes_—not over-moral, but fairly transmogrified from the original, and cleverly acted in the chief part—a woman whom, I doubt not, you, an _habituée_ of the drama, know very well, but quite new to me. Now she is married, but she was a sister of Robertson, the playwright. She had evidently studied in the French school. The whole was good and the theatre was ventilated; so I did not feel exhausted, and was rather amused, and shd. rather have enjoyed myself had not the bad news thrown its dark shadow over one’s haunted consciousness....”

Mrs. Kendal’s training was, I fancy, entirely English, but her acting was on a level with the best of “the French school.” Disraeli was an old admirer of French acting, as we know from “Coningsby,” and I think it is pretty clear from the same source that he particularly liked Déjazet. For he had Déjazet in mind, I guess, in the member of Villebecque’s troop of French comedians engaged for the delectation of Lord Monmouth, “a lady of maturer years who performed the heroines, gay and graceful as May.” This was the lady, it will be remembered, who saved the situation when Mlle. Flora broke down. “The failure of Flora had given fresh animation to her perpetual liveliness. She seemed the very soul of elegant frolic. In the last scene she figured in male attire; and in air, fashion, and youth beat Villebecque out of the field. She looked younger than Coningsby when he went up to his grandpapa.” This is Déjazet to the life. The whole episode of the French players in “Coningsby” shows Disraeli as not only an experienced playgoer but a connoisseur of the theatre. His description of the company is deliciously knowing—from the young lady who played old woman’s parts, “nothing could be more garrulous and venerable,” and the old man who “was rather hard, but handy; could take anything either in the high serious or the low droll,” to the sentimental lover who “was rather too much bewigged, and spoke too much to the audience, a fault rare with the French; but this hero had a vague idea that he was ultimately destined to run off with a princess.”

In “Tancred” there is another, and an entirely charming, glimpse of French strolling players or strollers who played in French, the Baroni family—“Baroni; that is, the son of Aaron; the name of old clothesmen in London, and of Caliphs in Baghdad.” There is no more engaging incident in the romantic career of Sidonia than his encounter with this family in a little Flanders town. They played in a barn, to which Sidonia had taken care that all the little boys should be admitted free, and Mlle. Josephine advanced warmly cheered by the spectators, “who thought they were going to have some more tumbling.” It was Racine’s “Andromaque,” however, that she presented, and “it seemed to Sidonia that he had never listened to a voice more rich and passionate, to an elocution more complete; he gazed with admiration on her lightning glance and all the tumult of her noble brow.” Sidonia played fairy godmother to the whole family, and “Mlle. Josephine is at this moment [1849] the glory of the French stage; without any question the most admirable tragic actress since Clairon, and inferior not even to her.” If for Josephine we read Rachel, we shall not be far wrong.

Anyhow, it is evident that, when Disraeli thought Mrs. Kendal must have studied in the French school, he was paying her the highest compliment at his disposal. It is disappointing that we have no criticism from Disraeli of Sarah Bernhardt. Matthew Arnold said that Sarah left off where Rachel began. Disraeli says nothing, which is perhaps significant, for he did see Sarah. He was first asked to see her play at a party at Lord Dudley’s, but declined, as he “could not forgo country air.” A few weeks later, however, he was at the Wiltons’, where “the principal saloon, turned into a charming theatre, received the world to witness the heroine of the hour, Sarah Bernhardt.” And that is all. A playgoer of seventy-five is hardly disposed to take up with new favourites—which accounts, perhaps, for Disraeli’s verdict on Irving. “I liked the _Corsican Brothers_ as a melodrama,” he writes to Lady Bradford (November, 1880), “and never saw anything put cleverer on the stage. Irving whom I saw for the first time, is third-rate, and never will improve, but good eno’ for the part he played, tho’ he continually reminded me of Lord Dudley....” Why “though”?

On another popular favourite he was even harder. Writing again to Lady Bradford, he says:—“Except at Wycombe Fair, in my youth, I have never seen anything so bad as _Pinafore_. It was not even a burlesque, a sort of provincial _Black-eyed Susan_. Princess Mary’s face spoke volumes of disgust and disappointment, but who cd. have told her to go there?” Staying later at Hatfield, however, he found all the Cecil youngsters singing the _Pinafore_ music. A few years earlier he tells Lady Bradford a story he had just heard from a friend of a visit paid by a distinguished Opposition party to _The Heir at Law_ at the old Haymarket. “Into one of the stalls came Ld. Granville; then in a little time, Gladstone; then, at last, Harty-Tarty! Gladstone laughed very much at the performance; H.-T. never even smiled. 3 conspirators....” Another remarkable trio figures in another story. Disraeli had been to the Aquarium to see a famous ape and the lady who used to be shot out of a cannon. “Chaffed” (if the word is not improper) about this by the Queen at the Royal dinner table, Disraeli said, “There were three sights, madam; Zazel, Pongo, and myself.”

It will be seen that there are few records of Disraeli’s playgoing or show-going in his old age. Gladstone, we know, was to the last a frequent playgoer—and, I believe, an enthusiastic admirer of Irving. Disraeli, I take it, had become rather the book-lover than the playgoer. The humblest of us may share that taste with the great man, and even take refuge in his illustrious example for the habit, denounced by the austere, of reading over solitary meals. Mr. Buckle tells us that “over his solitary and simple dinner he would read one of his favourite authors, mostly classics of either Latin, Italian Renaissance, or English eighteenth century literature, pausing for ten minutes between each course.” That passage will endear Disraeli to many of us, simple, home-keeping people, unacquainted with Courts and Parliaments, who feel, perhaps, a little bewildered amid the processional “drums and tramplings” and the gorgeous triumphs of his public career.

HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATRE

Are not the friends of Henry James inclined to be a little too solemn when they write about him, perhaps feeling that they must rise to the occasion and put on their best style, as though he had his eye on them and would be “down” on any lapses? An admirable reviewer of the Letters in the _Literary Supplement_ seemed, indeed, so overcome by his subject as to have fallen into one of Henry James’s least amiable mannerisms—his introduction of elaborate “figures,” relentlessly worked out and at last lagging superfluous. And the editor of the Letters, admirably, too, as he has done his work, is just a little bleak, isn’t he?—wearing the grave face of the historian and mindful never to become familiar. “Thank Heaven!” one seems to hear these writers saying to themselves; “even _he_ could never have called this vulgar.” Such is the posthumous influence of the fastidious “master”! I daresay I am captious. One is never quite satisfied with what one sees in print about people one loved. One always thinks—it is, at any rate, a pleasing illusion—that one has one’s own key to that particular cipher, and to see the thing not merely given away but authoritatively expounded in print is rather a nuisance. Look at the number of fair ladies to whom Henry James wrote letters rich in intimate charm (oh! and, as he would have said, of a decorum!)—perhaps each of them thought she had the best corner of his heart. The most immaculate of women, young and old, matrons and maidens, _will_ sentimentalize their men friends in this way. How could Henry James have escaped? Well, if any one of these ladies had edited the Letters or reviewed them, wouldn’t each of the others have said: “No, that isn’t _my_ Henry James—_she_ never understood him, poor dear”? I apologize for this flippant way of putting it to the two refined writers I began by mentioning. But, as the lady says in _The Spoils of Poynton_, “I’m quite coarse, thank God!”

Henry James, unfortunately for his theatrical ambitions, never was. You must not only be coarse in grain, but tough in hide, for success in the theatre. Everybody knows that Henry James achieved only failure there, either crushing failure amid hootings and yells, as with _Guy Domville_, or that very significant failure which is called a success of “esteem,” as with his stage versions of _The American_ and _Covering End_. But not everybody knows how he positively yearned for the big popular success, and for that biggest, loudest, most brazen-trumpeted of successes, success in the theatre. He talks in his letters as though he actually needed the money, but it was really not so. He looked round the world and found it teeming with “best sellers,” idols of the multitude, who by any standards of his simply couldn’t “write,” didn’t artistically “exist.” And the most pathetic thing in his letters is their evidence that he began, aye! and went on, with the illusion that he, such as he was, the absolute artist, might some day become a “best seller.” Even so late as the days of his Collected Edition it came as a shock to him that the great public wouldn’t buy.

It is evident that he had good hopes, beforehand, of _Guy Domville_. And yet he hated the actual process of production. The rehearsal, he says, is “as amazing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility, in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn’t meant for the Theatre.” And when dire failure came, it wasn’t, he says, from any defect of technique. “I have worked like a horse—far harder than any one will ever know—over the whole stiff mystery of ‘technique’—I have run it to earth, and I don’t in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified purposes of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my pocket.” No, the fault must be in his choice of subject. “The question of realizing how different is the attitude of the theatre-goer toward the quality of things which might be a story in a book from his attitude toward the quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play is another matter altogether. _That_ difficulty is portentous, for any writer who doesn’t approach it naïvely, as only a very limited and simple-minded writer can. One has to _make_ oneself so limited and simple to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled.” “And yet,” he adds, pathetically enough (writing to his brother), “if you were to have seen my play!” He knew he had done good work, in his own way, and the plain fact that his way was a way which the gross theatre public would not understand or sympathize with was a terrible blow to him.

The process of turning himself into a simple-minded writer—that is, of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse, was, of course, impossible. One doesn’t want to wallow in the obvious. But doesn’t it leap at the eyes that an artist who seeks to abandon his own temperament and point of view for another’s will forfeit all chance of that spontaneous joy without which there is no artistic creation? Fortunately, this theatrical malady of Henry James’s (though he had one or two recurrent twinges of it) never became chronic. The history of his real work is a history not of self-renunciation, but of self-development, of abounding, as the French say, in his own sense. As to the theatrical technique which he had put into his pocket he certainly kept it there. Like most laboriously acquired, alien techniques it was too technical, too “architectooralooral”—as any one can see who dips into his two forgotten volumes of “Theatricals.” His own proper technique was a very different thing, an entirely individual thing, and no reader of his books can have failed to notice how he gradually perfected it as he went along. It reached its highest point, to my thinking, in _The Ambassadors_, surely the greatest of his books (though over this question the fierce tribe of Jacobites will fight to their last gasp), when everything, absolutely everything, is shown as seen through the eyes of Strether. To see a thing so “done” as he would have said, an artistic difficulty so triumphantly mastered, is among the rarest and most exquisite pleasures of life. That was Henry James’s function, to give us rare and exquisite pleasures, of a quality never to be had in the modern theatre. He was no theatrical man, but he could, when he chose, be the most delicate of dramatic critics. Read what he says in these Letters about Rostand’s _L’Aiglon_ (“the man really has talent like an attack of small-pox”), about Bernstein’s _Le Secret_ as a “case,” about Ibsen, “bottomlessly bourgeois ... and yet of his art he’s a master—and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life.”

THEATRICAL AMORISM

“The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life, it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren; sometimes like a fury.” It is one of the few things the general reader is able to quote from Bacon, who goes on to make some pointed remarks about love in life, but drops all reference to love on the stage, which he would hardly have done had he been Shakespeare.