Chapter IV: Part 4

The past fifteen or twenty years have witnessed one more concerted effort to “elevate the English stage,” and this time with a fair prospect of results. There is a stir of expectation: the new drama is announced and already in part arrived. It would be premature to proclaim success as yet; but thus much may be affirmed, that the dramatic output of the last quarter-century outweighs that of any other quarter-century since 1700. Here, for instance, are the titles of a dozen contemporary plays which it would be hard to match with any equal number produced during an equal period of time since the failure of Congreve’s latest and most brilliant comedy, “The Way of the World,” marked the close of the Restoration drama: W. S. Gilbert’s “Pygmalion and Galatea”; Sydney Grundy’s “An Old Jew”; Henry Arthur Jones’s “Judah” and “The Liars”; Arthur Wing Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “The Benefit of the Doubt”; George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and “Arms and the Man”; Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Stephen Phillips’s “Ulysses”; and W. Butler Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” (I have gone back a few years to include Mr. Gilbert’s piece, first given at the Haymarket in 1871.)

Every one of these dramas has been performed with acceptance, every one of them is a contribution to literature, worthy the attention of cultivated readers. I do not say that any one of them is a masterpiece, or that collectively they will hold the stage as Goldsmith’s and Sheridan’s are still holding it a century and a quarter after their first production. But I will venture to say that, taken together, they constitute a more solid and varied group of dramatic works than that favorite little bunch of “classical” comedies, and offer a securer ground of hope for the future of the British stage. It will be observed that half of them are tragedies, or plays of a serious interest; also that they do not form a school, in the sense in which the French tragedy of Louis XIV, or the English comedy of the Restoration, was a school—that is, a compact dramatic group, limited in subject and alike in manner. They are the work of individual talents, conforming to no single ideal, but operating on independent lines. And it would be easy to add a second dozen by the same authors little, if at all, inferior to those on the first list.

Probably the foremost English playwriter of to-day is Mr. A. W. Pinero, whether tried by the test of popular success in the theatre, or by the literary quality of his printed dramas. He learned his art as Shakespeare learned his, by practical experience as an actor, and by years of obscure work as a hack writer for the playhouses, adapting from the French, dramatizing novels, scribbling one-act curtain-raisers and all kinds of theatrical nondescripts. There is a long list of failures and half successes to his account before he emerged, about 1885, with a series of three-act farces, “The Magistrate,” “The Cabinet Minister,” “The Schoolmistress” and the like, which pleased every one by their easy, natural style, their fresh invention, the rollicking fun that carried off their highly improbable entanglements, and the _bonhomie_ and knowledge of the world with which comic character was observed and portrayed. Absurdity is the kingdom of farce; and, as in the topsyturvy world of _opera bouffe_, a great part of the effect in these plays is obtained by setting dignified persons, like prime ministers, cathedral deans and justices, to doing ludicrously incongruous actions. Thus, the schoolmistress, outwardly a very prim and proper gentlewoman, leads a double life, putting in her Christmas vacation as a _figurante_ in comic opera; anticipating, and perhaps suggesting, Mr. Zangwill’s “Serio-Comic Governess.”

To these farces succeeded pieces in which social satire, sentimental comedy, and the comedy of character were mixed in varying proportions: “Sweet Lavender,” “The Princess and the Butterfly,” “Trelawney of the Wells,” and others. Of these, the first was, perhaps, the favorite, and was translated and performed in several languages. It is a very winning play, with a genuine popular quality, though with a slight twist in its sentiment. Pinero’s art has deepened in tone, until in such later work as “The Profligate,” “The Benefit of the Doubt,” “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith,” and “Iris,” he has dealt seriously, and sometimes tragically, with the nobler passions. His _chef d’oeuvre_ in this kind, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” is constructed with consummate skill, and its psychology is right and true. This is a problem play (it is unfortunate that we apply this term exclusively to plays dealing with one particular class of problems), and its ethical value, as well as its tragical force, lies in its demonstration of the truth that no one can escape from his past. The past will avenge itself upon him or her, not only in the unforeseen consequences of old misdeeds, but in that subtler nemesis, the deterioration of character which makes life under better conditions irksome and impossible. The catastrophe comes with the inevitableness of the old Greek fate-tragedies. In this instance, it is suicide, as in “Hedda Gabler” or Hauptmann’s “_Vor Sonnenaufgang_.” Though criticised as melodramatic, the dramatist makes us feel it here to be the only solution. Mr. Pinero has already achieved the distinction of a “Pinero Birthday Book”; while “Arthur Wing Pinero: a Study,” by H. Hamilton Fyfe, a book of two hundred and fifty pages, with a bibliography, reviews his plays _seriatim_.

Without pushing the analogy too far, we may call Mr. Pinero and Mr. Bernard Shaw the Goldsmith and Sheridan of the modern stage. In Pinero, as in Goldsmith, humor more than wit is the prevailing impression. That “brilliancy” which is often so distressing is absent from his comedy, whose surfaces do not corruscate, but absorb the light softly. His satire is good-natured, his worldliness not hard, and his laughter is a neighbor to tears. Shaw is an Irishman, a journalistic free-lance and Socialist pamphleteer. He has published three collections of plays—“Pleasant,” “Unpleasant,” and “For Puritans”—accompanied with amusingly truculent prefaces, discussing, among other things, whether his pieces are “better than Shakespeare’s.” Two of his comedies, “Arms and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” were put on in New York by Mr. Mansfield as long ago, if I am right, as 1894 and 1897, respectively. “Arms and the Man” is an effective theatre piece, with a quick movement, ingenious misunderstandings, and several exciting moments. Like his fellow countryman, Sheridan, Mr. Shaw is clever in inventing situations, though he professes scorn of them as bits of old theatrical lumber, a concession to the pit. “Candida” was given in America a season or two ago, and the problems of character which it proposes have been industriously discussed by the dramatic critics and by social circles everywhere. The author is reported to have been amused at this, and to have described his heroine as a most unprincipled woman—a view quite inconsistent with the key kindly afforded in the stage directions. These, in all Shaw’s plays, are explicit and profuse, comprising details of costume, gesture, expression, the furniture and decorations of the scene, with full character analyses of the _dramatis personae_ in the manner of Ben Jonson. The italicized portions of the printed play are little less important than the speeches; and small license of interpretation is left to the players. This is an extra-dramatic method, the custom of the novel overflowing upon the stage. But Mr. Shaw defends the usage and asks: “What would we not give for the copy of ‘Hamlet’ used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original ‘business’ scrawled by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had, in addition, the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage: above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate! Well, we should have had all this if Shakespeare, instead of merely writing out his lines, had prepared the plays for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Meredith.” “I would give half a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.”

Shaw’s appeal has been more acutely intellectual than Pinero’s, but his plays are less popular and less satisfying; while the critics, he complains, refuse to take him seriously. They treat him as an irresponsible Irishman with a genius for paradox, a puzzling way of going back on himself, and a freakish delight in mystifying the public. The heart interest in his plays is small. He has the Celtic subtlety, but not the Celtic sentiment; in this, too, resembling Sheridan, that wit rather than humor is the staple of his comedy—a wit which in both is employed in the service of satire upon sentiment. But the modern dramatist’s satire cuts deeper and is more caustic. Lydia Languish and Joseph Surface, Sheridan’s embodiments of romance and sentiment, are conceived superficially and belong to the comedy of manners, not of character. Sheridan would not have understood Lamb’s saying that Charles Surface was the true canting hypocrite of “The School for Scandal.” For nowadays sentiment and romance take less obvious shapes; and Shaw, who detests them both and holds a retainer for realism, tests for them with finer reagents.

And here comes in the influence of Ibsen, perhaps the most noticeable foreign influence in the recent English drama, from which it has partly driven out the French, hitherto all-predominant. Ibsen’s introduction to the English stage dates from 1889 and the years following, although Mr. Gosse’s studies and the translations of Mr. Havelock Ellis and others had made a few of his plays known to the reader. As long since as 1880, a very free version of “A Doll’s House,” under the title “Breaking a Butterfly,” had been made for the theatre by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and a collaborator. The French critic, M. Augustin Filon, in his book, “The English Stage” (1897), ventures a guess that the Ibsen brand of realism will be found to agree better with the English character than the article furnished by Dumas _fils_ and other French dramatists; and he even suggests the somewhat fantastic theory that an audience of the fellow countrymen of Darwin and Huxley will listen with a peculiar sympathy to such a play as “Ghosts,” in which the doctrine of heredity is so forcibly preached. Ibsen’s masterly construction, quite as much as his ideas, has been studied with advantage by our dramatists. Thus it is thought that Pinero, who has shown, in general, very little of Ibsen’s influence, may have taken a hint from him in the inconclusive ending of “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” The inconclusive ending is a practice—perhaps a principle—of the latest realistic schools of drama and fiction. Life, they contend, has no artificial closes, but flows continually on, and a play is only a “bleeding slice of life.” In old tragedy, death is the end. “Troilus and Cressida” is Shakespeare’s only episodical tragedy, the only one in which the protagonist is not killed—and, perhaps for that reason, the quarto title-page describes it as a comedy. But in Ibsenite drama the hero or heroine does not always die. Sometimes he or she goes away, or sometimes just accepts the situation and stays on. The sound of the door shutting in “A Doll’s House” tells us that Nora has gone out into the world to begin a new career. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” one of Shaw’s strongest “Plays Unpleasant,”—so unpleasant that its production on the boards was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain,—when Vivie discovers what her mother’s profession is, and where the money comes from that sent her to Newnham, she does nothing melodramatic, but simply utilizes her mathematical education by entering an actuary’s office. The curtain falls to the stage direction, “Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.”

Shaw is a convinced Ibsenite and took up the foils for the master in a series of articles in the _Saturday Review_ in 1895. The new woman, the emancipated woman so much in evidence in Ibsen, goes in and out through Shaw’s plays, short-skirted, cigarette-smoking, a business woman with no nonsense about her, a good fellow, calling her girl friends by their last names and treating male associates with a brusque _camaraderie_. But, as he satirizes everything, himself included, he has his laugh at the Ibsen cult in “The Philanderer.” There is an Ibsen Club, with a bust of the Norse divinity over the library mantelpiece. One of the rules is that no womanly woman is to be admitted. At the first symptom of womanliness, a woman forfeits her membership. What Shaw chiefly shares with Ibsen is his impatience of heroics, cant, social lies, respectable prejudices, the conventions of a traditional morality. Face facts, call things by their names, drag the skeleton out of the closet. Ibsen brushes these cobwebs aside with a grave logic and a savage contempt; he makes their hollow unreality the source of tragic wrong. But Shaw’s lighter temperament is wholly that of the comic artist, and he attacks cant with the weapons of irony. His favorite characters are audacious, irreverent young men and women, without illusions and incapable of being shocked, but delighting in shocking their elders. The clergy are the professional trustees of this conventional morality and are treated by Ibsen and Shaw with scant respect. Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” shows the same contemptuous toleration of the scruples of the rabbit-like Parson Manders, as Candida shows for her clerical husband’s preaching and phrase-making. The present season has witnessed the first appearance on the American stage of Mr. Shaw’s gayest farce comedy, “You Never Can Tell.”

I asked an actor, a university graduate, what he thought of the future of verse drama in acted plays. He inclined to believe that its day had gone by, even in tragedy; and that the language of the modern serious drama would be prose, colloquial, never stilted (as it was in “George Barnwell” and “Richelieu”), but rising, when necessary, into eloquence and a kind of unmetrical poetry. He instanced several passages in Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” and later plays. Still, the blank verse tradition dies hard. Probably the leading representative of ideal or poetic drama in the contemporary theatre is Stephen Phillips, whose “Paolo and Francesca” (1899), “Herod” (1900), and “Ulysses” (1902) have all been shown upon the boards and highly acclaimed, at least by the critics. There is no doubt that they are fine dramatic poems with many passages of delicate, and some of noble, beauty. But whether they are anything more than excellent closet drama is not yet proved. Mr. Phillips’s experience as an actor has given him a practical knowledge of technic; and it may be conceded that his plays are nearer the requirements of the stage than Browning’s or Tennyson’s. They are simple, as Browning’s are not; and they have quick movement, where Tennyson’s are lumbering. Neither is it much against them that their subjects are antique, taken from Dante, Josephus, and Homer. But they appear to me poetically rather than dramatically imagined. Shakespeare and Racine dealt with remote or antique life; yet, each in his own way modernized and realized it. It is a hackneyed observation that Racine’s Greeks, Romans, and Turks are French gentlemen and ladies of the court of Louis XIV. Shakespeare’s Homeric heroes are very un-Homeric. There is little in either of local color or historical perspective: there is in both a fulness of handling, an explication of sentiments and characters. The people are able talkers and reasoners. Mr. Phillips’s method is implicit, and the atmosphere of things old and foreign is kept, the distance which lends enchantment to mediaeval Italy, or the later Roman Empire, or the heroic age. It is as if the “Idylls of the King” were dramatized,—as, indeed, “Elaine” was dramatized for one of the New York playhouses by George Lathrop,—retaining all their romantic charm and all their dramatic unreality.

Still, there are moments of genuine dramatic passion in all three of these plays: in “Herod,” for instance, where Mariamne acknowledges to the tetrarch that her love for him is dead. And in “Ulysses,” Telemachus’s recognition of his father moves one very deeply, producing its impression, too, by a few speeches in a perfectly simple, unembroidered diction, by means properly scenic, not poetic like Tennyson’s. “Ulysses” seems the best of Mr. Phillips’s pieces, more loosely built than the others, but of more varied interest and more lifelike. The gods speak in rhyme and the human characters in blank verse, while some of the more familiar dialogue is in prose; Ctesippus, an elderly wooer of Penelope, is a comic figure; and there is a good deal of rough, natural fooling among the wooers, shepherds, and maids in the great hall of Ithaca. In its use of popular elements and its romantic freedom of handling, the play contrasts with Robert Bridges’s “The Return of Ulysses,” which Mr. Yeats praises for its “classical gravity” and “lyric and meditative” quality. Mr. Phillips opens his scene on Calypso’s island, and brings his wandering hero home only after making him descend to the shades. His Ulysses shoots the wooers in full view of the audience. In Mr. Bridges’s play the action begins in Ithaca, the unities of time and place are observed, and so is dramatic decency. The wooers are slain outside, and their slaying is described to Penelope by a handmaid who sees it from the door. Yet, upon the whole, Mr. Phillips’s constructive formula is more Sophoclean than Shakespearean. Not that he adheres to the external conventions of Attic tragedy, the chorus, the unities, etc., like Matthew Arnold in “Merope”; but that his plot evolution exhibits the straight, slender line of Sophocles, rather than the rich composite pattern of Elizabethan tragi-comedy. I have been told by some who saw “Ulysses” played, that the descent _ad inferos_ was grotesque in effect. But “Paolo and Francesca” might have gained from an infusion of grotesque. D’Annunzio’s almost precisely contemporary version of the immortal tale has just the solid, materialistic treatment which makes you feel the brutal realities of mediaeval life, the gross soil in which this “lily of Tartarus” found root. Mr. Phillips’s latest piece, “The Sin of David,” a tragedy of Cromwell’s England, is now in its first season.

Among the most interesting of recent dramatic contributions are William Butler Yeats’s “Plays for an Irish Theatre.” Mr. Yeats’s recent visit to this country is still fresh in recollection; and doubtless many of my readers have seen his beautiful little fairy piece, “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Probably allegory, or at least symbolism, is the only form in which the supernatural has any chance in modern drama. The old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition to produce in a sceptical generation that “willing suspension of disbelief” which, says Coleridge, constitutes dramatic illusion. Hamlet’s father talks too much; and the ghosts in “Richard III” are so sociable a company as to quite keep each other in countenance. The best ghost in Shakespeare is Banquo’s, which is invisible—a mere “clot on the brain”—and has no “lines” to speak. The elves in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the elemental spirits in “The Tempest” are nothing but machinery. The other world is not the subject of the play. Hauptmann’s “_Die Versunkene Glocke_” is symbolism, and so is “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Maeterlinck’s “_Les Aveugles_” and Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” are more formally allegorical. The poor old woman, in the latter, who takes the bridegroom from his bride, is Ireland, from whom strangers have taken her “four beautiful green fields”—the ancient kingdoms of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connaught.

These Irish plays, indeed, are the nearest thing we have to the work of the Belgian symbolist, to dramas like “_Les Aveugles_” and “_L’Intruse_.” And, as in those, the people are peasants, and the dialogue is homely prose. No brogue: only a few idioms and sometimes not even that, the whole being supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic into standard English. Maeterlinck’s dramas have been played on many theatres. Mr. William Sharp, who twice saw “_L’Intruse_” at Paris, found it much less impressive in the acting than in the reading, and his experience was not singular. As for the more romantic pieces, like “_Les Sept Princesses_” and “_Aglavaine et Sélysette_,” they are about as shadowy as one of Tieck’s tales. Those who saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in “_Pelléas et Mélisande_” will doubtless agree that these dreamlike poems are hurt by representation. It may be that Maeterlinck, like Baudelaire, has invented a new shudder. But the matinée audiences laughed at many things which had thrilled the closet reader.

Yeats’s tragedies, like Maeterlinck’s, belong to the _drame intime_, the _théâtre statique_. The popular drama—what Yeats calls the “theatre of commerce”—is dynamic. The true theatre is the human will. Brunetière shows by an analysis of any one of Racine’s plays—say “_Andromaque_”—how the action moves forward by a series of decisions. But Maeterlinck’s people are completely passive: they suffer: they do not act, but are acted upon by the unearthly powers of which they are the sport. Yeats’s plays, too, are “plays for marionettes,” spectral puppet-shows of the Celtic twilight. True, his characters do make choices: the young wife in “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” the bridegroom in “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” make choices, but their apparently free will is supernaturally influenced. The action is in two worlds. In antique tragedy, too, man is notoriously the puppet of fate; but, though he acts in ignorance of the end to which destiny is shaping his deed, he acts with vigorous self-determination. There is nothing dreamlike about Orestes or Oedipus or Antigone.

It is said that the plays of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, are now great favorites in Germany: “Salome,” in particular, and “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “A Woman of No Importance” (“_Eine unbedeutende Frau_”). This is rather surprising in the case of the last two, which are society dramas with little action and an excess of cynical wit in the dialogue. It is hard to understand how the unremitting fire of repartee, paradox, and “reversed epigram” in such a piece as “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” the nearest recent equivalent of Congreve comedy—can survive translation or please the German public.

This “new drama” is very new indeed. In 1882, William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, published his book, “English Dramatists of To-day,” in the introduction to which he acknowledged that the English literary drama did not exist. “I should like to see in England,” he wrote, “a body of playwrights whose works are not only acted, but printed and _read_.” Nine years later, Henry Arthur Jones, in the preface to his printed play, “Saints and Sinners,” denied that there was any relation between English literature and the modern English drama. A few years later still, in his introduction to the English translation of M. Filon’s book, “The English Stage” (1897), Mr. Jones is more hopeful. “If any one will take the trouble,” he writes, “to examine the leading English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings of an English drama of greater import and vitality, and of wider aim, than any school of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans.”

In his book on “The Renaissance of the Drama,” and in many other places, Mr. Jones has pleaded for a theatre which should faithfully reflect contemporary life; and in his own plays he has endeavored to furnish examples of what such a drama should be. His first printed piece, “Saints and Sinners” (exhibited in 1884), was hardly literature, and did not stamp its author as a first-class talent. It is a seduction play of the familiar type, with a set of stock characters: the villain; the forsaken maid; the steadfast lover who comes back from Australia with a fortune in the nick of time; the _père noble_, a country clergyman straight out of “The Vicar of Wakefield”; and a pair of hypocritical deacons in a dissenting chapel—very much overdone, _pace_ Matthew Arnold, who complimented Mr. Jones on those concrete examples of middle-class Philistinism, with its alliterative mixture of business and bethels. Mr. Jones, like Mr. Shaw, is true to the tradition of the stage in being fiercely anti-Puritan, and wastes many words in his prefaces in vindicating the right of the theatre to deal with religious hypocrisy; as if Tartuffe and Tribulation Wholesome had not been familiar comedy heroes for nearly three hundred years!

This dramatist served his apprenticeship in melodrama, as Pinero did in farce; and there are signs of the difference in his greater seriousness, or heaviness. Indeed, an honest feeling and an earnest purpose are among his best qualities. M. Filon thinks him the most English of contemporary writers for the stage. And, as Pinero’s art has gained in depth, Jones’s has gained in lightness. Crude at first, without complexity or shading in his character-drawing, without much art in comic dialogue or much charm and distinction in serious, he has advanced steadily in grasp and skill and sureness of touch, and stands to-day in the front rank of modern British dramatists. “The Crusaders,” “The Case of Rebellious Susan,” “The Masqueraders,” “Judah,” “The Liars,” are all good plays—or, at least plays with good features—and certainly fall within the line which divides literary drama from the mere stage play. “Judah,” for instance, is a solidly built piece, with two or three strong situations. The heroine is a fasting girl and miraculous healer, a subject of a kind which Hawthorne often chose; or reminding one of Mr. Howells’s charlatans in “The Undiscovered Country” and Mr. James’s in “The Bostonians.” The characterization of the leading persons is sound, and there is a brace of very diverting broad comedy figures, a male and a female scientific prig. They are slightly caricatured—Jones is still a little heavy-handed—but the theatre must over-accentuate now and again, just as actresses must rouge.

In this play and in “The Crusaders,” social satire is successfully essayed at the expense of prevailing fads, such as fashionable philanthropy, slumming parties, neighborhood guilds, and the like. There is a woman in “The Crusaders,”—a campaigner, a steamboat, a specimen of the loud, energetic, public, organizing, speech-making, committee and platform, subscription-soliciting woman,—nearly as good as anything in our best fiction. Mr. Joseph Knight, who writes a preface to “Judah” (first put on at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, 1890), compares its scientific faddists with the women who swarm to chemistry and biology lectures in that favorite Parisian comedy, “_Le monde où l’on s’ennuie_.” There is capital satire of the downright kind in these plays, but surely it is dangerous to suggest comparison with the gay irony, the courtly grace, the dash and sparkle of Pailleron’s little masterpiece. There are no such winged shafts in any English quiver. Upon the whole, “The Liars” seems to me the best comedy of Mr. Jones’s that I have read,—I have not read them all,—the most evenly sustained at every point of character and incident, a fine piece of work in both invention and construction. The subject, however, is of that disagreeable variety which the English drama has so often borrowed from the French, the rescue of a married woman from a compromising position, by a comic conspiracy in her favor.

The Puritans have always been halfway right in their opposition to the theatre. The drama, in the abstract and as a form of literature, is of an ancient house and a noble. But the professional stage tends naturally to corruption, and taints what it receives. The world pictured in these contemporary society plays—or in many of them—we are unwilling to accept as typical. Its fashion is fast and not seldom vulgar. It is a vicious democracy in which divorces are frequent and the “woman with a past” is the usual heroine; in which rowdy peers mingle oddly with manicurists, clairvoyants, barmaids, adventuresses, comic actresses, faith-healers, etc., and the contact between high life and low-life has commonly disreputable motives. Surely this is not English life, as we know it from the best English fiction. And, if the drama is to take permanent rank with the novel, it must redistribute its emphasis.

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[4] This article was printed in the _North American Review_ in two instalments, in May, 1905, and July, 1907. The growth of the literary drama in the last fifteen years has been so marked, and plays of such high quality have been put upon the stage by new writers like Barrie, Synge, Masefield, Kennedy, Moody, Sheldon, and others, that these prophecies and reflections may seem out of date. The article is retained, notwithstanding, for whatever there may be in it that is true of drama in general.

SHERIDAN

WITH the exception of Goldsmith’s comedy, “She Stoops to Conquer,” the only eighteenth century plays that still keep the stage are Sheridan’s three, “The Rivals,” “The Critic,” and “The School for Scandal.” Once in a while, to be sure, a single piece by one or another of Goldsmith’s and Sheridan’s contemporaries makes a brief reappearance in the modern theatre. I have seen Goldsmith’s earlier and inferior comedy, “The Good-natured Man,” as well as Towneley’s farce, “High Life Below Stairs,” both given by amateurs; and I have seen Colman’s “Heir at Law” (1797) acted by professionals. Doubtless other eighteenth century plays, such as Cumberland’s “West Indian” and Holcroft’s “Road to Ruin,” are occasionally revived and run for a few nights. Sometimes this happens even to an earlier piece, such as Farquhar’s “Beaux’ Stratagem” (1707), which retained its popularity all through the eighteenth century. But things of this sort, though listened to with a certain respectful attention, are plainly tolerated as interesting literary survivals, like an old miracle or morality play, say the “_Secunda Pastorum_” or “Everyman,” revisiting the glimpses of the moon. They do not belong to the repertoire.

Sheridan’s plays, on the other hand, have never lost their popularity as acting dramas. “The School for Scandal” has been played oftener than any other English play outside of Shakespeare; and “The Rivals” is not far behind it. Even “The Critic,” which is a burlesque and depends for its effect not upon plot and character but upon the sheer wit of the dialogue and the absurdity of the situations—even “The Critic” continues to be presented both at private theatricals and upon the public stage, and seldom fails to amuse. There is no better proof of Sheridan’s extraordinary dramatic aptitude than is afforded by a comparison of “The Critic” with its model, Buckingham’s “Rehearsal.” To Boswell’s question why “The Rehearsal” was no longer played, Dr. Johnson answered, “Sir, it had not wit enough to keep it sweet”; then paused and added in good Johnsonese, “it had not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction.” “The Rehearsal” did have plenty of wit, but it was of the kind which depends for its success upon a knowledge of the tragedies it burlesqued. These are forgotten, and so “The Rehearsal” is dead. But “The Critic” is not only very much brighter, but it satirizes high tragedy in general and not a temporary literary fashion or a particular class of tragedy: and, therefore, nearly a century and a half after its first performance, “The Critic” is still very much alive. The enduring favor which Sheridan’s plays have won must signify one of two things: either that they touch the springs of universal comedy, _la comédie humaine_—the human comedy, as Balzac calls it: go down to the deep source of laughter, which is also the fountain of tears; or else that, whatever of shallowness or artificiality their picture of life may have, their cleverness and artistic cunning are such that they keep their freshness after one hundred and fifty years. Such is the antiseptic power of art.

The latter, I think, is Sheridan’s case. His quality was not genius, but talent, yet talent raised to a very high power. His comedy lacks the depth and mellowness of the very greatest comedy. His place is not among the supreme creative humorists, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Aristophanes, Molière. Taine says that in Sheridan all is brilliant, but that the metal is not his own, nor is it always of the best quality. Yet he acknowledges the wonderful vivacity of the dialogue, and the animated movement of every scene and of the play as a whole. Sheridan, in truth, was inventive rather than original. His art was eclectic, derivative, but his skill in putting together his materials was unfailing. He wrote the comedy of manners: not the comedy of character. In the greatest comedy, in “The Merchant of Venice,” or “_Le Misanthrope_,” or “Peer Gynt” there is poetry, or at least there is seriousness. But in the comedy of manners, or in what is called classical comedy, i.e., pure, unmixed comedy, the purpose is merely to amuse.

He never drives his plowshare through the crust of good society into the substratum of universal ideas. We are not to look in the comedy of manners for wisdom and far-reaching thoughts; nor yet for profound, vital, subtle studies of human nature. Sheridan’s comedies are the sparkling foam on the crest of the wave: the bright, consummate flower of high life: finished specimens of the playwright’s art: not great dramatic works.

Yet when all deductions have been made, Sheridan’s is a most dazzling figure. The brilliancy and versatility of his talents were indeed amazing. Byron said: “Whatsoever Sheridan has done, or chosen to do, has been _par excellence_ always the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy, the best drama, the best farce and the best address; and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration ever conceived or heard in this country.” By the best comedy Byron means “The School for Scandal”; the best drama was “The Duenna,” an opera or music drama; the best address was the monologue on Garrick; and the best oration was the famous speech on the Begums of Oude in the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings: a speech which held the attention of the House of Commons for over five hours at a stretch, and was universally acknowledged to have outdone the most eloquent efforts of Burke and Pitt and Fox.

Sheridan came naturally by his aptitude for the theatre. His father was an actor and declamation master and had been manager of the Theatre Royal in Dublin. His mother had written novels and plays. Her unfinished comedy, “A Journey to Bath,” furnished a few hints towards “The Rivals,” the scene of which, you will remember, is at Bath, the fashionable watering place which figures so largely in eighteenth century letters: in Smollett’s novel, “Humphrey Clinker,” in Horace Walpole’s correspondence, in Anstey’s satire, “The New Bath Guide,” and in Goldsmith’s life of Beau Nash, the King of the Pumproom. Histrionic and even dramatic ability has been constantly inherited. There are families of actors, like the Kembles and the Booths; and it is noteworthy how large a proportion of our dramatic authors have been actors, or in practical touch with the stage: Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Shakespeare, Otway, Lee, Cibber, the Colmans, father and son, Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, Tom Taylor, Pinero, Stephen Phillips. These names by no means exhaust the list of those who have both written and acted plays. Sheridan’s career was full of adventure. He eloped from Bath with a beautiful girl of eighteen, a concert singer, daughter of Linley, the musical composer, and was married to her in France. In the course of this affair he fought two duels, in one of which he was dangerously wounded. Now what can be more romantic than a duel and an elopement? Yet notice how the identical adventures which romance uses in one way, classical comedy uses in quite another. These personal experiences doubtless suggested some of the incidents in “The Rivals”; but in that comedy the projected duel and the projected elopement end in farce, and common sense carries it over romance, which it is the whole object of the play to make fun of, as it is embodied in the person of Miss Lydia Languish.

It was Sheridan who said that easy writing was sometimes very hard reading. Nevertheless, whatever he did had the air of being dashed off carelessly. All his plays were written before he was thirty. He was a man of the world, who was only incidentally a man of letters. He sat thirty years in the House of Commons, was Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs under Fox, and Secretary to the Treasury under the coalition ministry. He associated intimately with that royal fribble, the Prince Regent, and the whole dynasty of dandies, and became, as Thackeray said of his forerunner, Congreve, a tremendous swell, but on a much slenderer capital. It is one of the puzzles of Sheridan’s biography where he got the money to pay for Drury Lane Theatre, of which he became manager and lessee. He was a shining figure in the world of sport and the world of politics, as well as in the world of literature and the drama. He had the sanguine, improvident temperament, and the irregular, procrastinating habits of work which are popularly associated with genius. The story is told that the fifth act of “The School for Scandal” was still unwritten while the earlier acts were being rehearsed for the first performance; and that Sheridan’s friends locked him up in a room with pen, ink, and paper, and a bottle of claret, and would not let him out till he had finished the play. This anecdote is not, I believe, authentic; but it shows the current impression of his irresponsible ways. His reckless expenses, his betting and gambling debts resulted in his arrest and imprisonment, and writs were served upon him in his last illness. I do not think that Sheridan affected a contempt for the profession of letters; but there was perhaps a touch of affectation in his rather _dégagé_ attitude toward his own performances. It is an attitude not uncommon in literary men who are also—like Congreve—“tremendous swells.” “I hate your authors who are _all_ author,” wrote Byron, who was himself a bit of a snob. When Voltaire called upon Congreve, the latter disclaimed the character of author, and said he was merely a private gentleman, who wrote for his own amusement. “If you were merely a private gentleman,” replied Voltaire, “I would not have thought it worth while to come to see you.”

Dramatic masterpieces are not tossed off lightly from the nib of the pen; and doubtless Sheridan worked harder at his plays than he chose to have the public know and was not really one of that “mob of gentlemen who write with ease” at whom Pope sneers. Byron and many others testify to the coruscating wit of his conversation; and it is well-known that he did not waste his good things, but put them down in his notebooks and worked them up to a high polish in the dialogue of his plays. It is noticeable how thriftily he leads up to his jokes, laying little traps for his speakers to fall into. Thus in “The Rivals,” where Faulkland is complaining to Captain Absolute about Julia’s heartless high spirits in her lover’s absence, he appeals to his friend to mark the contrast:

“Why Jack, have _I_ been the joy and spirit of the company?”

“No, indeed, you have not,” acknowledges the Captain.

“Have _I_ been lively and entertaining?” asks Faulkland.

“O, upon my word, I acquit you,” answers his friend.

“Have _I_ been full of wit and humor?” pursues the jealous
lover.

“No, faith, to do you justice,” says Absolute, “you have been
confoundedly stupid.”

The Captain could hardly have missed this rejoinder; it was fairly put into his mouth by the wily dramatist.

Again observe how carefully the way is prepared for the repartee in the following bit of dialogue from “The School for Scandal”: Sir Peter Teazle has married a country girl and brought her up to London, where she shows an unexpected zest for the pleasures of the town. He is remonstrating with her about her extravagance and fashionable ways.

Sir Peter: “Madam, I pray had you any of these elegant expenses when you married me?”

Lady Teazle: “Lud, Sir Peter, would you have me be out of the fashion?”

Sir Peter: “The fashion indeed! What had you to do with the fashion before you married me?”

Lady Teazle: “For my part—I should think you would like to have your wife thought a woman of taste.”

Sir Peter: “Aye, there again—Taste! Zounds, Madam, you had no taste when you married me.”

The retort is inevitable and a modern playwriter—say, Shaw or Pinero—would leave the audience to make it, Lady Teazle answering merely with an ironical bow. But Sheridan was not addressing subtle intellects, and he doesn’t let us off from the lady’s answer in good blunt terms: “That’s very true indeed, Sir Peter! After having married you I should never pretend to taste again, I allow.” But why expose these tricks of the trade? All playwrights have them, and Sheridan uses them very cleverly, if rather transparently. Another time-honored stage convention which Sheridan practises is the labelling of his characters. Names like Malaprop, O’Trigger, Absolute, Languish, Acres, etc., are descriptive; and the realist might ask how their owners came by them, if he were pedantic enough to cross-question the innocent old comedy tradition, which is of course unnatural and indefensible enough if we choose to take such things seriously.

About the comparative merits of Sheridan’s two best plays, tastes have differed. “The Rivals” has more of humor; “The School for Scandal” more of wit; but both have plenty of each. On its first appearance, January 17, 1775, “The Rivals” was a failure, owing partly to its excessive length, partly to bad acting, partly to a number of outrageous puns and similar witticisms which the author afterwards cut out, and partly to the offense given by the supposed caricature of an Irish gentleman in the person of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Sheridan withdrew the play and revised it thoroughly, shortening the acting time by an hour and redistributing the parts among the members of the Covent Garden Theatre company. At its second performance, eleven days later, it proved a complete success, and has remained so ever since. It has always been a favorite play with the actors, because it offers so many fine rôles to an all-star company. It affords at least four first-class parts to the comic artist: Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Bob Acres, and Sir Lucius O’Trigger: while it has an unusually spirited _jeune premier_, a charming though utterly unreasonable heroine, a good soubrette in Lucy, and entertaining minor characters in Fag and David.

As we have no manuscript of the first draft of “The Rivals,” it is impossible to say exactly what changes the author made in it. But as the text now stands it is hard to understand why Sir Lucius O’Trigger was regarded as an insult to the Irish nation. Sheridan was an Irishman and he protested that he would have been the last man to lampoon his compatriots. Sir Lucius is a fortune hunter, indeed, and he is always spoiling for a fight; but he is a gentleman and a man of courage; and even in his fortune hunting he is sensitive upon the point of honor: he will get Mrs. Malaprop’s consent to his addresses to her niece, and “do everything fairly,” for, as he says very finely, “I am so poor that I can’t afford to do a dirty action.” The comedy Irishman was nothing new in Sheridan’s time. He goes back to Jonson and Shakespeare. In the eighteenth century his name was Teague; in the nineteenth, Pat or Mike. We are familiar with this stock figure of the modern stage, his brogue, his long-skirted coat and knee breeches, the blackthorn shillalah in his fist and the dudeen stuck into his hatband. The Irish naturally resent this grotesque: their history has been tragical and they wish to be taken seriously. We have witnessed of late their protest against one of their own comedies, “The Playboy of the Western World.” But perhaps they have become over touchy. There is not any too much fun in the world, and if we are to lose all the funny national peculiarities from caricature and farce and dialect story, if the stage Irishman has got to go, and also the stage Yankee, Dutchman, Jew, Ole Olsen, John Bull, and the burnt cork artist of the negro minstrel show, this world will be a gloomier place. Be that as it may, Sir Lucius O’Trigger is no caricature: he doesn’t even speak in brogue, and perhaps the nicest stroke in his portrait is that innocent inconsequence which is the essence of an Irish bull. “Hah, my little ambassadress,” he says to Lucy, with whom he has an appointment, “I have been looking for you; I have been on the South Parade this half hour.”

“O gemini!” cries Lucy, “and I have been waiting for your worship on the North.”

“Faith,” answers Sir Lucius, “maybe that was the reason we did not meet.”

A great pleasure in the late sixties and early seventies used to be the annual season of English classical comedy at Wallack’s old playhouse; and not the least pleasant feature of this yearly revival was the performance of “The Rivals,” with John Gilbert cast for the part of Sir Anthony, Mrs. Gilbert as Mrs. Malaprop, and Lester Wallack himself, if I remember rightly, in the rôle of the Captain. But, of course, the comic hero of the piece is Bob Acres; and this, I think, was Jefferson’s great part. I saw him three times in Bob Acres, at intervals of years, and it was a masterpiece of high comedy acting: so natural, so utterly without consciousness of the presence of spectators, that it was less like acting than like the thing itself. The interpretation of the character, too, was so genial and sympathetic that one was left with a feeling of great friendliness toward the unwarlike Bob, and his cowardice excited not contempt but only amusement. The last time that I saw Joe Jefferson in “The Rivals,” he was a very old man, and there was a pathetic impression of fatigue about his performance, though the refinement and the warm-heartedness with which he carried the part had lost nothing with age.

Historically Sheridan’s plays represent a reaction against sentimental comedy, which had held the stage for a number of years, beginning, perhaps, with Steele’s “Tender Husband” (1703) and numbering, among its triumphs, pieces like Moore’s “Foundling” (1748), Kelly’s “False Delicacy,” and several of Cumberland’s plays. Cumberland, by the way, who was intensely jealous of Sheridan, was the original of Sir Fretful Plagiary in “The Critic,” Sheridan’s only condescension to personal satire. He was seemingly a vain and pompous person, and well deserved his castigation. The story is told of Cumberland that he took his children to see “The School for Scandal” and when they laughed rebuked them, saying that he saw nothing to laugh at in this comedy. When this was reported to Sheridan, his comment was, “I think that confoundedly ungrateful, for I went to see Cumberland’s last tragedy and laughed heartily at it all the way through.”

With Goldsmith and Sheridan gayety came back to the English stage. In their prefaces and prologues both of them complain that the comic muse is dying and is being succeeded by “a mawkish drab of spurious breed who deals in sentimentals,” genteel comedy, to wit, who comes from France where comedy has now become so very elevated and sentimental that it has not only banished humor and Molière from the stage, but it has banished all spectators too. Goldsmith laments the disgusting solemnity that had lately infected literature and sneers at the moralizing comedies that deal with the virtues and distresses of private life instead of ridiculing its faults. Joseph Surface in “The School for Scandal” is Sheridan’s portrait of the sentimental, moralizing hypocrite, whose catchword is “the man of sentiment”; and whose habit of uttering lofty moralities is so ingrained that he vents them even when no one is present who can be deceived by them.

Surface: “The man who does not share in the distresses of a brother—even though merited by his own misconduct—deserves—”

“O Lud,” interrupts Lady Sneerwell, “you are going to be moral, and forget that you are among friends.”

“Egad, that’s true,” rejoins Joseph, “I’ll keep that sentiment till I see Sir Peter.”

“The Critic” has a slap or two at sentimental comedy. A manuscript play has been submitted to Mr. Dangle, who reads this stage direction, “_Bursts into tears and exit_,” and naturally asks, “What is this, a tragedy?” “No,” explains Mr. Sneer, “that’s a genteel comedy, not a translation—only taken from the French: it is written in a style which they have lately tried to run down; the true sentimental and nothing ridiculous in it from the beginning to the end. . . . The theatre, in proper hands, might certainly be made the school of morality; but now, I am sorry to say it, people seem to go there principally for their entertainment.” Another of these moral comedies is entitled “‘The Reformed Housebreaker’ where, by the mere force of humour, housebreaking is put in so ridiculous a light, that if the piece has its proper run . . . bolts and bars will be entirely useless by the end of the season.”

Sheridan has often been called the English Beaumarchais. The comedies of Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro” were precisely contemporaneous with Sheridan’s, and, like the latter, they were a reaction against sentimentalism, against the so-called _comédie larmoyante_ or tearful comedies of La Chaussée and other French dramatists. With Beaumarchais laughter and mirth returned once more to the French stage. He goes back for a model to Molière, as Sheridan goes back to English Restoration comedy, and particularly to Congreve, whom he resembles in the wit of his dialogue and the vivacity of his character painting, but whom he greatly excels in the invention of plot and situation. Congreve’s plots are intricate and hard to follow, highly improbable and destitute of climaxes. On the other hand, Sheridan is a master of plot. The duel scene in “The Rivals,” the auction scene and the famous screen scene in “The School for Scandal” are three of the most skilfully managed situations in English comedy. Congreve’s best play, “The Way of the World” (1700), was a failure on the stage. But whatever Sheridan’s shortcomings, a want of practical effectiveness, of acting quality, was never one of them. Sheridan revived society drama, what Lamb called the artificial comedy of the seventeenth century. Lydia Languish, with her romantic notions, and Mrs. Malaprop with her “nice derangement of epitaphs” are artificial characters. Bob Acres is for the most part delightfully natural, but his system of referential or sentimental swearing—“Odds blushes and blooms” and the like—is an artificial touch. The weakest feature of “The Rivals” is the underplot, the love affairs of Faulkland and Julia. Faulkland’s particular variety of jealousy is a “humor” of the Ben Jonsonian sort, a sentimental alloy, as Charles Lamb pronounced it, and anyway infinitely tiresome. In modern acting versions this business is usually abridged. As Jefferson played it, Julia’s part was cut out altogether, and Faulkland makes only one appearance (Act II, Scene I), where his presence is necessary for the going on of the main action.

There is one particular in which Congreve and Sheridan sin alike. They make all the characters witty. “Tell me if Congreve’s fools are fools indeed,” wrote Pope. And Sheridan can never resist the temptation of putting clever sayings into the mouths of simpletons. The romantic Miss Languish is nearly as witty as the very unromantic Lady Teazle. I need not quote the good things that Fag and Lucy say, but Thomas the coachman, and the stupid old family servant David say things equally good. It is David, e.g., who, when his master remarks that if he is killed in the duel his honor will follow him to the grave, rejoins, “Now that’s just the place where I could make shift to do without it.” Sir Anthony is witty, Bob Acres himself is witty, and even Mrs. Malaprop—foolish old woman—delivers repartees. Mrs. Malaprop’s verbal blunders, by the way, are a good instance of that artificial high polish so characteristic of Sheridan’s art. There are people in earlier comedies who make ludicrous misapplications of words—Shakespeare’s Dogberry, e.g., or Dame Quickly, but they do it naturally and occasionally. Sheridan reduces these accidents to a system—a science. No one in real life was ever so perseveringly and so brilliantly wrong as Mrs. Malaprop.

Dramatically this is out of character and is, therefore, a fault, though a fault easy to forgive since it results in so much clever talk. It is a fault, as I have said, which Congreve shares with Sheridan, his heir and continuator. Perhaps the lines of character are not cut quite so deep in Sheridan as in Congreve nor has his dialogue the elder dramatist’s condensed, epigrammatic solidity. But on the whole, “The Rivals” and “The School for Scandal” are better plays than Congreve ever wrote.

THE POETRY OF THE CAVALIERS