-phi o^ Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924091180061 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 2001 fyxmll ^vmxmif Jib«atg BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Mt:nvQ m. Bags 1S91 .£.2rj.i^.^.&f: -..., ■d:i^'j.i»..,bl. 9963 DRAMA AND LIFE DRAMA AND LIFE A. B. WALKLEY METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published in igaj NOTE 'T'HESE papers are reprinted, with alterations, from The Tiwes, except the first and second, which are from The Edinburgh Review. To the respective proprietors, who have courteously permitted republication, I tender my grateful thanks. A.B. W. CONTENTS Modern English and French Drama . Some French and English Plays The Modernity of the Poetics Processes of Thought in Playmaking Laws of Change .... The Art of Acting The Dynasts and the Puppets Curiosity and Horror in the Theatre Euripides— HiPPOLYTVS Electra .... Shakespeare— The Two Gentlemen of Verona Much Ado about Nothing . Hamlet .... Professor Bradley's Hamlet Measure for Measure Henry Irving— Dante Westminster Abbey . A. W. Pinero — Jris . . ■ ■ Letty .... His House in Order . I 46 78 85 91 ICX} 106 "5 120 127 132 137 142 148 156 160 166 170 175 i8s VIU DRAMA AND LIFE J. M. Barrie— PAGE Quality Street 194 The Admirable Crichton . 198 Peter Pan .... 209 Bernard Shaw— Candida ..... 214 John Bull's Other Island . 219 Man and Superman . 224 Major Barbara • 233 The Doctor's Dilemma • 239 The Philanderer • 24S Eleonora Duse — La Gioconda .... . 251 Francesca da Rimini 255 La Seconda Moglie . 260 La Locandibra . 263 Sarah Bernhardt — As Moralist .... . ?68 Andromaque . • 274 Adrienne Lecouvreur 279 RfijANE— La Parisienne .... . 283 Zaza . 287 La Robe Rouge • 293 The Voysey Inheritance . 298 The Way of the World • 304 The Irish National Theatre . • 309 Warp and Woof ... . 316 A Cinderella Ballet • 324 The D&butante .... . 328 DRAMA AND LIFE MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA WHAT do we mean precisely by " modern " and "ancient"? Each term implies the other, and Messrs. Taper and Tadpole are not the only phrase- mongers who have found it impossible to keep them apart. It was Mr. Taper, according to the author of Coningsby, who suggested to Mr. Tadpole the electioneering cry of " Our Young Queen and our Old Institutions." " The eyes of Tadpole sparkled as if they had met a gnomic sentence of Periander or Thales ; then, turning to Taper, he said : " ' What do you think of" ancient " instead of " old " ? ' " ' You cannot have " Our Modern Queen and our Ancient Institutions,"' said Mr. Taper.'' Ingenious writers sometimes amuse themselves by explaining how many things that pass for ancient are of all things most modern ; how the Darwinian hypothesis may be discovered lurking in the specula- tions of some forgotten Greek philosopher, and how the Pickwick Papers may be discerned, by those who have eyes to see, in the Odyssey. Thus Matthew Arnold exhibited the modernity of the chattering Sicilian women in a Theocritean idyll. M. Jules Lemattre 2 DRAMA AND LIFE points out how Euripides, in Ion, "m^prise Scribe vingt-quatre si^cles d'avance, ce qui est prodigieux" — as prodigious it assuredly is — and how — (he is speaking of Herondas) " certains dialogues de la Vie Parisienne, du Journal ou de L'Echo de Paris vous donnent une idte fort exacte de ce que furent les mimes grecs." And what chiefly interests Mr. Herbert Paul in the Poetics of Aristotle is the fact that they are " intensely modern." This is to darken counsel, as well as to fly in the face of Moli^re's common-sense observation that " les anciens sont les anciens et nous sommes les gens d'aujourd'hut" It may be thought that, whatever the general vague- ness about " ancient " and " modern," there can be no difficulty in assigning them a precise meaning when applied to drama. There is the " ancient " drama of the Greeks and Romans, the drama about which the Examiners were expected to interrogate the Heathen Passee, with his " notes on the rise of the Drama, A question invariably set ; " and there is the " modem " drama which came into being towards the end of the sixteenth century. It should not, however, be difficult to show that this line of cleavage between ancient and modern drama is misplaced. Where then is the true line of cleavage to be found ? In order to answer that question an obvious course is to examine a few typical plays, selected from successive theatrical periods, and to seek the causes which differ- entiate them from the drama of to-day, or rank them with it, as the case may be. By common consent, the most " modern " of all Shakespeare's plays is the tragedy of Hamlet, Its hero exhibits what the MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 3 nineteenth century was fond of calling "la maladie du si^cle," as something pre-eminently its own. His case is, in Shelley's phrase, " a pure anticipated cogni- tion" of the late lamented Henri Frdddric Amiel. Hazlitt discerned a Hamlet in all modern men. Musset wrote a Lorenzaccio so rife with Hamletism that Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, after appearing as the protagonist of that play, was in the nature of things bound to undertake the Prince of Denmark. One peculiarly " modern " novelist, Tourgenev, cannot choose but write a " Hamlet russe," while another, M. Paul Bourget, reproduces the whole story in Andri Comdis, Then there is the veteran author of John Gabriel Borktnan, who gives us a Hamlet, as it were, reversed, a Hamlet who makes " il gran rifiuto," and blithely refuses to take up the burden of the old generation under which the Shakespearian Hamlet was crushed. Nevertheless, it has to be asked, does Hamlet show the dis- tinguishing marks of the drama as we understand it to-day? Does every scene contribute to the advancement of the story? Do every action and word take their due place in the composition of a character? Nothing of the kind. With the data of the play, its business, according to modern ideas, is to exhibit the progress of the conflict between Hamlet's temperament and his duty, between his irresolution and his revenge " mission." But this business is persistently neglected. Any irrelevance serves to set Hamlet off at a tangent. While he is waiting on the platform at Elsinore for the Ghost, someone drops an observation about the King keeping "wassail," whereupon he moralises upon the general passion for strong drink. Meanwhile the 4 DRAMA AND LIFE play marks time. When the players arrive, Hamlet puts aside his revenge project in order to deliver a lecture upon histrionics. If he meditates on suicide, he must bring in a reference to the law's delay and the insolence of office — matters which have nothing to do with his case. In the church- yard he must "draw" the gravedigger. It is in complete forgetfulness of his " mission " that he accepts the challenge to a bout of fence with Laertes. His mind, on this side of it, is like Squire Brooke's, "a jelly that runs easily into any mould." The obvious truth is that Shakespeare, having, as Walter Bagehot said, the "experiencing temperament," must needs endow Hamlet with that temperament too. He expressed himself in Hamlet in disregard of dramatic propriety. The story might get on as best it could ; what he was intent upon was exhausting the possi- bilities of the moment — "enjoying the moment for the moment's sake," as Pater might have said. The same disregard of dramatic propriety runs through the other characters. Polonius, a fool at one moment, is a sage at another, so that Coleridge was driven to contend that he is not a comic character. Laertes cannot take leave of his sister without generalisations about princes' love and maidens' modesty, so that, only half in jest, a former Examiner of Plays described him as an instance of heredity.^ Gertrude, rushing in with the shocking news of Ophelia's death, pauses to deliver a set piece of poetic description — "There is a willow grows aslant a brook," ' Mr. Bodham Donne. See More Letters of Edward FitzGerald, p. 131 : "Had any one quoted to me Laertes' parting advice to his sister, I should have sworn it was Polonius." Donne thinks that Shakespeare may have intended pedantry in the blood." MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 5 with eighteen lines to follow — during which Laertes has to stand aside and bottle up his emotion. It comes to this, that, any topic once started, Shakespeare proceeds to expatiate upon it at large, and he is com- paratively indifferent as to which character shall be his mouthpiece or to the progress of the dramatic action. Clearly Hamlet bears the marks of some- thing essentially different from a " modern " play. To draw attention to these points of technical method is not, of course, to call in question for a moment the virtues of Hamlet as a poetic tragedy, its "noble excess" as the fine fleur of Renaissance romanticism, its triumphant fulfilment of the test laid down by Goethe for all work really classic — namely, that it shall be "energetic, fresh^ and well-liking." Such aspects of the matter are beyond discussion. But Shakespeare was no more free than any other man from the material limitations of the theatre in which his plays were produced ; and it is in those material conditions that the explanation of his crafts- manship is to be found. Yet how seldom is that explanation sought in this the only proper quarter! We have seen S. T. Coleridge and Bodham Donne, two men of letters, explaining Polonius, one solemnly, the other only half jocularly, by purely literary and logical means. To this day our Shakespearian com- mentators, in the seclusion of their studies, pursue this false method — the bookman's method — of exegesis. If they would only come out of their studies and look at the stage — at some picture or model of the Elizabethan playhouse — they would save themselves the discovery of many mares' nests. There was not long ago a project for the erection of an Elizabethan playhouse in facsimile, as a Shakespeare memorial, 6 DRAMA AND UFE in one of the new London thoroughfares. I can perceive one, and only one, good reason for this otherwise fanciful scheme ; it would provide an object- lesson for the bookmen. Meanwhile one may refer them back to their Aristotle. The author of the Poetics — whom nothing could escape — saw the dis- tinction between what I have called the bookman's point of view in regard to drama and that which will be taken in the present inquiry, "Whether tragedy is to be judged in itself, or in relation also to the stage {irpix} Th diarpa) " — that, he said, is aWo? Xoyo^, another question.^ Here, however, it happens to be not another question, but tAe question. The bookmen have been used to consider drama exclusively " in itself." It is high time to consider drama Trpo? ra Oearpa, in its relation to the material conditions of the stage. This aspect of the matter, so strangely neglected, is quite simple. That has happened in the theatre which has happened in every congregation gathered round the same centre of interest. Whether it be John Wesley preaching to the miners on a Cornish hillside, or a socialist haranguing the loafers in Hyde Park, or an acrobat tumbling for pence in a by-street, he chooses his " pitch " and the crowd forms a ring. The earliest theatres, then, were naturally circular, with the stage in the centre. Naturally, too, the stage was bound to gravitate towards the circum- ference, in order that the performers might reach their platform and retire from it without traversing the crowd. It is superfluous to describe the minor modifications of this arrangement in the Elizabethan playhouse — everybody knows them — but it is not superfluous to point out the effects of this arrangement ' Poetics, ch. W. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 7 on the Elizabethan play. With actors on a raised platform, devoid of scenery and surrounded by the spectators on three sides, there could be no such thing as illusion, in the modern sense of the term, no attempt at a plastic reproduction of actual life. An Elizabethan actor was not, like his modern successor, a figure set in perspective in a framed picture whose conversation with his fellows is over- heard by the audience. He stood forth among the crowd, hardly separated from them, and addressed them as an orator would address them. The Eliza- bethan drama, then, was of necessity a rhetorical drama. Each successive passage of dialogue was not so much the link between what preceded and followed it as a new "topic," which the speakers between them were expected to exhaust. The scene in itself, the scene of the moment, was everything; the logical nexus of the scenes nothing or next to nothing. Internal evidence of this has been adduced from Hamlet. A curious piece of external evidence is forthcoming from a Frenchman who visited London shortly after the Restoration, one Samuel Sorbi^re. whose Relation of his visit was published in 1667. This, to be sure, was after Shakespeare's time ; but the point is immaterial, for the position of the platform stage in the playhouse was still what it had been in Shakespeare's time. Sorbi^re was struck by the indifference of the English audience to logical nexus of scenes in their drama, and gives the explanation furnished to him : " II ne leur importe que ce soit un pot-pourri, parce qu'ils n'en regardent, disent-ils, qu'une partie apr^s I'autre, sans se soucier du total." Sorbi^re's English friends here put him on the right track, and our bookmen should lose no time in adding 8 DRAMA AND LIFE the Relation to their libraries. " Ne regarder qu'une partie apr^s I'autre sans se soucier du total:" that was the inevitable frame of mind in the spectator of a platform-drama. It is a simple fact, little suspected by the bookmen, or indeed by the common-sense students of our stage, that its history up to a period so recent as to be within the memory of people now living is the history of the platform-drama. As time went on, the dimensions of this platform gradually shrank, like the shagreen skin in Balzac's story. A notable passage in CoUey Cibber throws light on this process. As a rule, the lives of the players may be said to belong to the least important branch of entomology; but an exception must be made in favour of Gibber's Apology, which is always interesting and sometimes, as in the ensuing extract, of great documentary value. Cibber is comparing Drury Lane, as altered by Rich, with the structure of the old theatre : — " It must be observ'd, then, that the Area or Platform of the old Stage projected about four Foot forwarder, in a Semi-oval Figure, parallel to the Benches of the Pit ; and that the former lower Doors of Entrance for the Actors were brought down between the two foremost (and then only) Pilasters; in the place of which Doors now the two Stage-Boxes are fixt. That where the Doors of Entrance now are, there formerly stood two additional Side- Wings, in front to a full set of Scenes, which had then almost a double Effect in their Loftiness and Magnificence. "By their original Form, the usual Station of the Actors, in almost every scene, was advanc'd at least ten Foot nearer to the Audience than they now can MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 9 be ; because, not only from the Stage's being shorten'd in front, but likewise from the additional Interposition of those Stage-Boxes, the Actors (in respect to the Spectators that fill them) are kept so much more back- ward from the main Audience than they us'd to be : But when the Actors were in Possession of that forwarder Space to advance upon, the Voice was then more in the Centre of the House, so that the most distant Ear had scarce the Least Doubt or Difficulty in hearing what fell from the weakest Utterance : All Objects were thus drawn nearer to the sense; every painted Scene was stronger; every grand Scene and Dance were extended ; every rich and fine-coloured Habit had a more lively Lustre : Nor was the minutest Motion of a Feature (properly changing with the Passion or Humour it suited) ever lost, as they frequently must be in the Obscurity of too great a Distance." Here is a striking confirmation of the view already set forth that the rhetorical drama was what the mathematicians would call a " function " of the platform- stage. The histrionic elements which Cibber singles out for mention are elements of rhetoric — the " voice," the "utterance." Cibber talks of the actors as we should now talk of orators — ^just as Plato had talked of them when proposing that KaWi(j>mvoL viroKptrai, " the actors with their beautiful voices," should be banished from his ideal State. The stage was still essentially a platform, projecting among the audience, though already showing a tendency to withdraw towards the curtain. Spectators still lined the sides of the stage as in Elizabethan times, no longer seated upon it, however, but placed in "stage-boxes." A full century passed and we find Jane Austen, in 181 3 ("September 15, lo DRAMA AND LIFE J past 8 " — " documentary " evidence is not always so precise) — writing from London to her sister Cassandra : " I talked to Henry at the play la£t night. We were in a private box — Mr, Spencer's — which made it much more pleasant The box is directly on the stage. One is infinitely less fatigued than in the common way." "^ Well into the last century, then, the boxes which Gibber had seen placed at the side of the stage were still in their old position. The stage remained even then, to all intents and purposes, a platform-stage. These facts account for the form not only of the Restoration but of the Georgian drama. The Restora- tion plots were beneath contempt. Who can remember Congreve's? From the modem point of view his dAiouements are childish ; some sudden " discovery," some hasty production of " a certain parchment," brings down the curtain to a general song and dance. " What," says Witwoud at the close of The Way of the World, " are you all got together, like players at the end of the last act ? " The players are, in fact, always got together, and the final direction is " Exeunt Omnes." Congreve, to be sure, made some pretence to concern for the logical nexus of his plot. In his Epistle Dedicatory to The Double Dealer, he asserts that " the mechanical part of it is regular. I made the plot as strong as I could because it was single, and I made it single because I would avoid confusion, and was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama." But in practice Congreve's notion of ortho- doxy was rather like that put into the mouth of one of his personages — " Orthodox is Greek for claret." Who cares about what is going to happen next in The Way of the World} Each scene of raillery between ' Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Lord Biaboume (1884), vol. ii, p. 147, MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA ii Millamant and Mirabell is self-contained. In the feigned madness of Valentine in Love for Love, there is a riot of rhetoric. " Mad scenes " were a constant feature of the platform-drama, because they gave the freest opportunity for bombastic, or discursive, or lyrical declamation. Valentine repeats some of Hamlet's very phrases. " Sir," said Johnson of Garrick and Irene, " the fellow wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels." Tilburina went mad in white satin. The stage vogue of lunacy in those days is only to be matched by the vogue of hysteria — the hysteria of the Saphos and the Zazas — in our own. The contrast is worth passing notice, as showing how the change from the platform to the modern picture-stage has affected the field of histrionic representation, even in the matter of physical ailments. As to Congreve's practice, it accorded, whatever he may have said, with the theory of Vanbrugh, which was the true theory of the platform-stage. " I cou'd say a great deal against the too exact observance of what's called the Rules of the Stage, and the crowding of a Comedy with a great deal of Intricate Plot. I believe I cou'd show, that the chief entertainment, as well as the Moral, lies much more in the Characters and the Dialogue, than in the Business and the Event." ^ And why? The justification had already been anticipated by Sorbi^re : " II ne leur importe que ce soit un pot-pourri, parce qu'ils n'en regardent qu'une partie apr^s I'autre, sans se soucier du total." We have seen that Congreve by no means practised what he preached. The fact is, in his theories of drama • From Vanbrugh's reply to Jeremy Collier in A Short Vindication, 1698. 12 DRAMA AND LIFE he was curiously ahead of his age. " In any part of a play," he says, " if there is expressed any knowledge of an audience, it is insufferable." ^ That would be true of our modern illusion-stage; it was not true of the platform-stage. In the rhetorical drama the actor, under the pretext of conversing with his fellows, was in reality talking at his audience. The original players of the The School for Scandal, as Elia pointed out in a famous essay, surpassed their successors precisely because they recognised this. The " teasings " of Sir Peter (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage. The original players gave the true spirit of the play because they treated it frankly as a piece of rhetoric. Kemble is singled out by Lamb on this very account. " His exact declamatory manner " (in Charles Surface) " as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision ; it seemed to head the shafts, to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost" This was over a hundred years ago. To-day every so-called " revival " of The School for Scandal is an absolute counter-sense. What was written as a platform-play is presented as a picture-play. But the platform-play di6d hard. It even survived the platform. It was kept alive by a succession of declamatory actors steeped in the traditions of the platform-stage, from Kemble and Siddons to Macready and Phelps. An amusing side-light is thrown on those traditions by the descriptions of amateur theatri- cals so frequent in the women novelists of the " palmy days " — Miss Burney, Miss Ferrier, and Jane Austen. Lionel (in Camilla) " returned to ask who would come > Dedication to The Double Dealer. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 13 forth to spout with him." " Spouting " was the proper business of the platform-stage. An amateur actor (in Patronage) is condemned because " he would regularly turn his back upon the audience" — an absurdity on a platform-stage, a perfectly legitimate effect on our modem illusion-stage. M. Antoine, when he played La Mortdu Due eFEnghien in London a few years ago, turned his back upon the audience throughout a long scene. Perhaps the best indirect evidence that a play was naturally assumed to be a piece of rhetoric, and that acting was identical with spouting, is supplied by Miss Austen. When the private theatricals at Mansfield Park were afoot, Tom Bertram asserted of his father that " for anything of the acting, spouting, reciting kind, I think he has always a decided taste. I am sure he encouraged it in us as boys. How many a time have we mourned over the dead body of Julius Caesar, and to be'd, and not to be'd, in this very room, for his amuse- ment ! And I am sure, my name was Norval, every evening of my life through our Christmas holidays." All that Mr. Yates, another of the amateurs, demanded from a part, we are told, was " good ranting ground," and his great objection to one character was that " there was not a tolerable speech in the whole." This remark, curiously enough, gets repeated almost word for word by the old-fashioned tragedian in Mr. Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells, who objects to a new piece that "there isn't a speech — not what you call a real speech — in it" Gradually the platform-drama sank into the inanimate or semi-animate condition of a " survival." The sham Elizabethanisms which passed for tragedy were begin- ning to pall. Thomas Lovell Beddoes called the 14 DRAMA AND LIFE drama of his time " a haunted ruin," and advocated the policy of "a clean slate." "Say what you will," he wrote, " I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow — no reviver even, however good. These re-animations are vampire cold. . . . With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think we had better beget than revive." The works of Talfourd and Sheridan Knowles — nay, even Money and The Lady of Lyons — were rhetorical plays, and are now, indeed, " vampire cold." One of the latest efforts to keep the old art alive was The Patrician's Daughter of West- land Marston (1842), which aimed at establishing "the principle of characters talking poetically in plain dress " — a principle which resulted in the description of a marriage settlement by a family solicitor as " the accustomed deed Determining the rights and property Of such as stand affianced." When some years later one of the last of the rhetorical actors quitted the stage, Tennyson addressed a sonnet to " Macready, moral, grave, sublime," and in the last epithet hit off the ideal of platform tragedy. Rhetor- ical comedy had its " sublimities " too. In Dion Boucicault's London Assurance {id,^!) Grace Harkaway talks as no young lady ever talked in 1 841, or, we may be sure, in any other year, but as players were expected to talk in the platform period of drama : — " I love to watch the first tear that glistens in the opening eye of morning, the silent song that flowers breathe, the thrilling choir of the woodland minstrels, to which the modest brook trickles applause; these, MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 1$ swelling out the sweetest chord of sweet creation's matins, seem to pour some soft and merry tale into the daylight's ear, as if the waking world had dreamed a happy thing, and now smiled o'er the telling of it." Then there is Lady Gay Spanker's description of the hunt and its emotions : — " Time then appears as young as love, and plumes as swift a wing. Then I love the world, myself, and every living thing — a jocund soul cries out for very glee, as it would wish that creation had but one mouth that I might kiss it." These, and such as these, were the " real speeches " to which Mr. Pinero's broken-down actor referred. Surely here is ample evidence that down to the very middle of the last century the modern English drama, the drama as we know it to-day, had not come into being. From the reign of Queen Elizabeth right into the reign of Queen Victoria there had been a con- tinuous tradition of a stage technique which is not ours. It was a technique, as has been seen, conditioned by the material arrangements of the playhouse, and chiefly by the situation of the stage with respect to the audience. The history of the gradual modification of that technique is the history of the gradual withdrawal of the stage from the pit to the curtain line. Here, then, is another of the many cases in which art has been shaped less by its own inherent needs than by external causes, economic and social. For it was the pressure of population that step by step forced the stage back into its present place — changed it from a platform into the lower plane of a framed picture. While the number of London theatres was strictly limited by 16 DRAMA AND LIFE privilege, the number of people desiring to frequent them steadily increased. Rich, as we have seen, in Gibber's time, tried to meet the increasing demand by contracting Drury Lane stage in order to expand the pit. But this measure was insufficient, and every time Drury Lane was burnt down it rose from its ashes more vast than before, until the younger Colman declared that a semaphore was needed to signal the actions of the players to the occupants of the topmost gallery. The result was twofold : the shrinking of the stage made it as absurd to retain the old rhetorical methods of the platform drama as the enlargement of the house itself made it impossible to abandon them. In such conditions no new drama could be born. That was not possible until the privilege of the " patent houses " was abolished, and theatres could be built of reasonable size and in sufficient numbers to satisfy the popular demand. The necessary change was effected by the Theatres Regulation Act of 1843, which established free trade in drama. In addition to free- dom, the change meant specialisation. A patent house had been justly called by Charles Matthews " a huge theatrical omnibus." When Macready took over Covent Garden in 1837, he had to provide a company for tragedy, another for comedy, a third for opera, to say nothing of a staff of pantomimists. Now every manager was free to form a repertory suited to his house and the talents of his players. The stage was in the picture-frame, rhetoric an anachronism, and the natural action and talk of actual life a possibility. From this moment the birth of the modern drama in England was only a question of time. In what way and to what extent the drama is a " function " of the stage on which it is played should MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 17 now be clear. The transformation of the old drama of rhetoric into the modem drama of illusion is the artistic outcome of a mechanical transformation — the transformation of the platform-stage into the picture- stage. This process of evolution is, of course, not peculiar to England. Throughout Western Europe it has been the same story — the platform superseded by the picture ^ theatrical monopoly superseded by free trade, rhetoric superseded by illusion. The only foreign theatre, however, with which we need concern ourselves is the French, for that is the only foreign theatre which has exercised a continuous and vital influence upon our own. It is a noteworthy fact that, whatever other differences there may have been between the French and English stages, there has been next to no difference in the particulars which we have been considering. It is sufficient to say that down to 1759 spectators lined both sides of the Parisian stage, being actually seated upon it, and that, placed in boxes, they continued to line it until the eighteenth century had come to a close. A well-known drawing by Moreau le Jeune, illustrating the crowning of Voltaire's bust at the Theatre Frangais in 1778, shows these side-boxes and shows, too, how far the stage projected as a platform into the auditorium. When, then, did the picture-stage make its appearance in France ? A casual entry in the Journal des Goncourt, curiously enough, supplies the answer : — " Dimattcke, 31 Mars, 1861. — Dejeuner chez Flaubert avec Sari et Laugier, et conversation toute sp^ciale sur le theatre. . . . Ce n'est que depuis ce si^cle que les acteurs cherchent en leurs silhouettes I'effet tableau : ainsi Paulin M^nier montrera au public des effets de dos pris aux dessins de Gavarni; ainsi Rouvi^re 2 1 8 DRAMA AND LIFE apportera k la sc^ne les poses tordues et les epilepsies de mains, des lithographies du Fausi de Delacroix," It is piquant to find a French actor deliberately essaying those very " effets de dos " for which, as we saw, the amateur in Miss Ferrier's Patronage was ridiculed. With the "effet tableau'' the modern French drama has arrived. It arrived a little in advance of our own, and it is not very difficult to see why. For one reason, theatrical "privilege" — we have already seen the relation between that and the rhetorical drama — was abolished earlier on the other side of the Channel than on this. Article I. of a decree of the National Assembly, dated November 19, 1791, runs as follows : — " Tout citoyen pourra Clever un th^itre public, et y faire repr^senter des pieces de tous les genres." It is true that monopoly was restored by an imperial decree of 1 807, and that France had to wait for the definitive establishment of free trade in drama until 1864. But the point is that, decrees or no decrees, for full fifty years before theatres began to multiply in London they were numerous in Paris, and their number steadily increased.^ A much more important reason, however, for French priority in modem drama is to be found not in the history of French institutions, but in the mental constitution of the French race. It is a race with a peculiar turn for logic ; and even when the drama of both countries was acted upon a platform-stage this peculiarity of the French gave a symmetry of ' Eleven in 1791, eighteen in 1829, twenty-one in 1833. See, on the whole question, Fougin, Dictionnaire du Tkidtre, 1885, art. " Liberte des Theatres." MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 19 structure and a progressiveness of development to their drama which were not to be detected in ours. In ours we have seen the platform-stage producing two effects — discursive rhetoric and a certain discon- tinuity of action. It was this second effect which struck the attention of our French visitor Sorbi^re, in that an English play seemed to him a pot-pourri. Our playgoers, as they admitted to him, considered only each facet of the play as it came into view, without regard to the play as a whole. But the French, with their logical instinct, did care for the play as a whole, and were concerned not merely for each scene as it passed, but for its relation to the other scenes, for the growth, that is to say, of the action. Here was the difference between the French platform-drama and ours. Theirs was quite as rhetorical ; indeed, it was far more rhetorical. From Racine to Voltaire, from Voltaire to Campistron, there was a maximum of tirades, " confidences," monologues, " forensic " dialogues — all the artifices of rhetoric — to a minimum of action. Another racial characteristic, no doubt, contributed to this excess of rhetoric : I mean the French turn for didactic moralis- ing. French tragedy might or might not be a poem ; it was always a sermon. Thus Sterne, while professing to think French tragedies " absolutely fine," significantly added, " and whenever I have a more brilliant affair upon my hands than common, as they suit a preacher quite as well as a hero, I generally make my sermon out of 'em; and for the text, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, is as good as any one in the Bible." This persistent didacticism of French drama found its reductio ad absurdum in botli the theory and the practice of 20 DRAMA AND LIFE Diderot. " It is always," said he, " virtue and virtuous people that a man ought to have in view when he writes. Oh, what good would men gain if all the arts of imitation proposed one common object, and were one day to unite with the laws in making us love virtue and hate vice I " In Diderot's Pire de Fatnille a father addresses his child in this strain : " Marriage, my daughter, is a vocation imposed by Heaven. . . . If marriage exposes us to cruel pain, it is also the source of the sweetest pleasures. . . . O sacred bond, if I think of thee, my whole soul is warmed and elevated." Mr. John Morley's comment on this passage is much to the point. If the drama is to be a great moral teacher, " it will not be by imitating the methods of that colossal type of histrionic failure, the church pulpit" ^ It may be added that the moralising strain in French drama is to be found a full century after Diderot in the raisonneurs of the younger Dumas. But the important fact is that with all this excess of moralising rhetoric over action, the French turn for logic had its way. Such action as there was tended steadily to an ordained end, never zigzagging or marking time or deviating into mere irrelevance, as was, for the most part, the case with our English platform-drama. Logical, well ordered, as French drama was by comparison with our own, it was not logical enough for the French critics. The aim of their playwrights is all the more unmistakable from the frequency with which they deplored failure to attain it. We have heard Diderot as a dramatist, but listen to him as a critic of drama : — " En g^n^ral il y a plus de pieces bien dialogu^es, que de pieces bien conduites. Le g^nie qui dispose » Diderot, vol. i. p. 327 (1886). MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 21 les incidents parait plus rare que celui qui trouve les vrais discours. Combien de bellies scenes dans Moli^re ! On compte ses ddnouemens heureux. On serait tentd de croire qu'un drame devrait ^tre I'ouvrage de deux hommes de g^nie, I'un qui arrange^t et I'autre qui fit parler." ^ Here is Diderot virtually passing the very criticism on Moli^re that I have passed on Congreve. In both the dialogue surpasses the " conduct of the fable." How many " belles scenes " in both ! How few " ddnouemens heureux " ! And by this time the cause of the resemblance between the two national dramas, in so far as resemblance there was, ought to be manifest enough ; it was the common factor in each, the platform- stage, always favourable to rhetoric and unfavourable to the strict ordering of plot. But there is this great difference between the two cases, that the French spirit, its turn for logic, almost from the first reacted against the influence of the platform-stage, whereas the English did not. Nothing could be more significant on this head than a remark of Voltaire's in his commentary on Horace. " Tout doit ^tre action dans la tragddie," he says ; " chaque sc^ne doit servir 4 nouer et k ddnouer I'intrigue, chaque discours doit 6tte preparation ou obstacle.'' Voltaire failed to observe his own precepts ; but he has here stated in the clearest terms what is nothing else than the ideal of modem drama. For that ideal, whatever else it may cover, includes simplicity and strict economy of plot, and in these respects the French have always been ahead of us. Go back as far as " that memorable day, in the first ' Cideiot, De lapoisie dramatique. 22 DRAMA AND LIFE summer of the late war, when our navy engaged the Dutch "1 (June 3, 1665), and you will find the English and the French ideals compared by Dryden. It was one of the objects of his Essay, as all readers know, to contrast the two national theatres and to make the best case he could for the English. Lisideus, the advocate for France, observes that "another thing in which the French differ from us is that they do not embarrass or cumber themselves with too much plot ; they only represent so much of a story as will con- stitute one whole and great action sufficient for a play ; we, who undertake more, do but multiply adventures, which, not being produced from one another, as effects from causes, but barely following, constitute many actions in the drama, and consequently make it many plays." To which Dryden, in the character of Neander, answers by decrying the " barrenness " of the French plots and praising the " variety and copiousness " of the English. But the point is that he never attempts to dispute Lisideus's main fact : " The French carry on one design, which is pushed forward by all the actors, every scene in the play constituting and moving towards it." It was because the French did this, even in the period of the platform-stage, that, so soon as that stage had given place to the picture-stage, they were the first to create what is legitimately entitled to be called modem drama. Literary historians, each docilely repeating the commonplaces of his predecessors, were for long accustomed to trace the modem French drama back to the great Romantic movement of the thirties. The best opinion of to-day is dead against that attribution. What is there in the contemporary French theatre that can be shown to owe its origin ^ Essay of Dramatic Poesy : opening paiagiaph. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 23 to Romanticism ? People talk of a " romantic " revival, but these are the people who cannot [see any further than Cyrano's nose. M. Rostand's plays are " romantic " in a sense — because the word " romance " can be used in almost any sense, the sense of anti-classicism or of anti-realism or of mere troubadourism — and out of these senses one or more can be found to fit M. Rostand. But Cyrano de Bergerac and L'Aiglon and La Princesse Lointaine are not romantic in the sense of 1 830. Must we come to the conclusion that the Romantic movement was merely an episode in the history of the French stage ? We can hardly recognise Victor Hugo's plays as modern drama ; they belong to the old drama of rhetoric. Every one of them is based upon an antithesis — a king at odds with a bandit, a queen enamoured of a lackey, a court fool turned tragic pro- tagonist — and antithesis is a figure of rhetoric. Rhetoric, the monologue of Charles Quint before the tomb of Charlemagne. Rhetoric, the " sc^ne des portraits." Rhetoric, the address of Ruy Bias to the ministers. That grotesque document the preface to Cromwell, so far as it had any intelligible meaning whatever, meant a rhetorical dramaturgy. The author of Hernani was not the first of the modern dramatists; he was the last of the rhetoricians. So much was written about the excitement over the " premiere " of Hernani, to say nothing of Gautier's red waistcoat, that at last the public was fooled into believing that there must be something in it. The legend grew up, and " epoch- marking" became the cant word about it. But an ounce of fact is worth a pound of legend. And the fact is that the first of the moderns was the author of Antony, a. play which substituted for the Romantic formula a brand-new formula of its own. 24 DRAMA AND LIFE Here at last was a tale in plain (indeed, in bad) prose about the actual life of the day as Dumas saw it. Dumas, to be sure, saw life neither steadily nor whole. But what he saw, or thought he saw, he took bodily into the theatre. For he was a born dramatist Antony is all rapidity and fire, all action and passion. It is easy to laugh at the Byronic, Wertherian, Satanic hero. But Antony was a true type of his time, brother to Stendhal's Julien Sorel, and to the exor- bitant adventurers of Balzac — ^the men of a generation burning with the Napoleonic fever driven inwards. This type of ferocious egoist had a long stage posterity down to the " homme fort " of Feuillet and the " strugfor- lifeur" of Alphonse Daudet. Countless, too, are the descendants in French drama of Ad^le d'Hervfiy, at once heroine and adulterous woman. But Dumas did some- thing more important than fix types of modem stage- character. He hit in Antony upon the great modem dramatic theme, the conflict of passion and the social world, of the individual and opinions — the very stuff out of which his son's plays were afterwards to be made. While Dumas /«r« supplied the motive power of the new drama. Scribe perfected its mechanism. It is the present fashion to speak contemptuously of Scribe, as a mere manufacturer, turning out machine- made plays by the gross. But that is because we are wise after the event. Scribe triumphantly vindicated in practice a position of Aristotle's, which has been violently but by no means intelligently assailed — the position that while you can have drama without character you cannot have drama without plot.^ No doubt Aristotle overestimated the importance of plot. I suspect that he did so deliberately, in the belief that in neglect of ' Poetics, ch. iv. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 25 plot lay the special pitfall for the " bas-relief" drama of his time. Be that as it may, it would be untrue to say to-day, as Aristotle said, that plot was the end of drama; but it is, assuredly, the beginning. Scribe made too much of it, made everything of it. Never- theless, he fulfilled a purpose useful for the moment A new craftsmanship was wanted for the picture-stage, the old craftsmanship of the platform-stage being as useless as a sedan-chair on a railway. Scribe supplied what was wanted, just when it was wanted. If he was only a craftsman, he could at least make instru- ments which others were to put to real use; and that is what Scribe actually did for Augier and the younger Dumas. He gave them the neat framework of the " well-made piece," and within that framework they did what he could not do, they worked out ideas of their own. What ideas were these ? Of what kind were they ? What relation had they to reality, to the practical conduct of life? To answer these questions is to indicate the fundamental difference between modern French and English drama. The ideas of Augier and Dumas fits were ideas about society, its economic structure, its hierarchy of castes, its pressure on the individual ; and they were ideas about private ethics, the relations of men and women, fathers and children, the disparity between the Civil Code and the moral law. In other words, these men made the French drama, in Matthew Arnold's phrase about poetry, a " criticism of life." That has been the vital, the prime characteristic of the French stage for half a century and more — its rule — whereas with our modem English drama it has been the exception. Only in quite recent years have one or two English plays attempted anything like a " criticism of life," and even in the rare 26 DRAMA AND LIFE instances wherein these plays have been accepted by the public, they have been accepted against the grain. The English attitude in this matter is well illustrated in a brief passage of irony from the Critic : — "Mrs. Dangle. Well, if they had kept to that \i.e. " serious " comedy from the French], I should not have been such an enemy to the stage ; there was some edification to be got from those pieces, Mr. Sneer ! " Sneer. I am quite of your opinion, Mrs. Dangle : 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 I " Mrs. Dangle. It would have been more to the credit of the managers to have kept it in the other line. " Sneer. Undoubtedly, madam ; and hereafter perhaps to have it recorded that, in the midst of a luxurious and dissipated age, they preserved two houses in the capital, where the conversation was always moral at least, if not entertaining ! " What Sheridan said wittily enough over a hundred years ago the majority of English playgoers are tire- somely repeating to-day. We go to the theatre, they say, for " entertainment " ; we want to leave the world behind us, to escape from the pressure of reality ; we do not go there for a criticism of life. There is a double fallacy underlying this popular statement of the case. " Entertainment," in the fullest sense of the term, is, of course, the aim of all drama, from the Prometheus Bound or Lear down to Box and Cox or Charleys Aunt. Further, to treat reality as a spectacle is in the very act to relieve it of its pressure. Art, however faithfully it may follow the lineaments of life, is not life itself; it is life which MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 27 has undergone a Kd0apai<;, life purged of the will- to-live. What the popular statement merely means is that the typical English playgoer does not find entertainment where the typical French playgoer does, in a criticism of life. And in that sense the statement is undeniable. If the English playgoer stopped there, if he were content with the admission that he found moral questions in drama a bore, whatever we might think of his intelligence, we could not contest his right to choose his own pleasures. But he goes further. He considers it " immoral " to raise moral questions on the stage. This habit he acquired, it would seem, from the moment that Dumas _/?/j began to raise those moral questions. La Dame aux Camdlias was produced in 1852. At the Theatri- cal Fund dinner of 1853 a speaker, after admitting that the English owed much to the French stage (it was, indeed, living upon French adaptations), went on to say : " But we should limit our obligations to the French, in order to keep our own drama pure; and, in availing ourselves of their art, we should be careful to avoid their immorality." Unfortunately, his very next sentence gave the case away. " We cannot be insensible to the changes that are taking place around us in our theatres. Covent Garden is given up to the seductions of a foreign opera, and the legitimacy of Old Drury is displayed by the antipodean feat of a gentleman who walks on the ceiling with his head downwards." ^ Such was the result of " availing ourselves of French art," in so far as it was mere amusement, and of " limiting our obligations " so as to keep out anything like a criticism of life. The French playgoer was being introduced to the master- > J>ramatic Register foi 1853. 28 DRAMA AND LIFE pieces of Augier and Dumas fils, while the English playgoer was gazing at a gentleman walking upside down. Fortunately, we have done something since towards mending our ways. The contrast between the two stages has long ceased to be as tragi-comic as it was in 1853. B"* i* ^^ still sufficiently humili- ating. It is no exaggeration to say that while in the intervening half-century every social and ethical question of importance has found its way into the French theatre, from the English theatre all, or nearly all, such questions have been rigorously excluded. There is no need to recite the long catalogue of plays, sufficiently well known and more than sufficiently dis- cussed, by which Augier and Dumas fits, in their several ways, converted the French drama into an active social force. It is impossible to dissociate these twain, because they worked to the same end ; but there is a marked difference in their work. Augier was much less of a preacher than Dumas, and much more of a bourgeois; but, though he had the " burgess mind," we must be cautious about disparaging a mind which has given the world Le Gendre de M. Poirier. He took that "respectable," comfortable, tolerant view of men and things which one finds so complacently adopted in the novels of Anthony Trollope. He disliked the " idle rich," the haughty aristocrat, the Bohemian journalist, the " Daughters of Joy " — and everything else which the bourgeois disliked. His plays (have aged now, as TroUope's novels have aged, but, like those, they can still be read with pleasure. Notably, he was a good- humoured man ; whereas Dumas, like the medical gentleman in Pickwick when he forbade his patient crumpets, was " werry fierce." It is the foible of earnest reformers, and Dumas believed in his mission, MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 29 and the mission of the stage, if ever man did. He ascribed to himself priestly functions. In his preface to Le Fils Naturel (dated 1868, though the piece was begun in 1853, the year of the topsy-turvy gentleman at Drury Lane — annus mirabilis /) he actually put the theatre alongside the Catholic Church : — " The Church is wrong to attack us, for we are both marching willy-nilly towards the same end, since we start from the same principle: the representation of the Idea by man. Under penalty of death or degrada- tion we can only proceed, like her, by propagating the highest morality. Like her we address assemblies of men, and you cannot speak long and effectively to the multitude save in the name of the higher interests." The drama, he went on, was doomed " unless we hasten to press it into the service of the great social reforms and the great hopes of humanity." " Inaugurons done, he cried, " le theatre utile'' To the theorists of art for art's sake, to say nothing of mere playhouse loafers, these may seem wild and whirling words j but to question the sincere conviction, the true vocation, of the writer is impossible. His conception of his priestly duties certainly brought him into queer company. Fallen — or falling — women became his especial care. There is an elderly rake in one of Mr. Pinero's plays who confesses he could never approach women " in the missionary spirit." Dumas fils could do nothing else. Everyone knows how modern art has turned to account what a learned professor of the University of Finland calls the "veiled polyandry and polygamy which lie at the bottom of modern society." ^ Dumas fils may be considered to have exhausted all the variations and ' The Origins of Art, by Yrjo Him, p. 240. 30 DRAMA AND LIFE combinations afforded by this subject. Sometimes he had the offenders taken out and shot, at other times he brought in a verdict of " Not guilty, but don't do it again." Then he attacked the Code, pleading the right to prove affiliation, the right of divorce, and the identical responsibility of both parties in cases of seduction and adultery. He did it all "in the missionary spirit," and yet the missionary never got the better of the dramatist. For, with all his ideas and moral aims, he had his father's dramatic instinct and adhered to the Scribe technique. He took care that his plays should always fulfil the ultimate end of every play, the end of " entertainment," so that, while appealing to Mrs. Dangle, he would also have conciliated Mr. Sneer. And yet there was a great difference between the earlier and the later Dumas, the Dumas of La Dame aux Cam^lias and the Dumas of Francillon. The one play was written as M. Sarcey^ said, ct la diable, dashed off by a young fellow in the twenties who was making theatrical " copy " out of his own experience. The other was formed upon a deliberately conceived plan, to demonstrate in action a proposition about the lex talionis in conjugal relations. The fact is, between the two, his first piece and his last, Dumas had invented the thesis-play. What is a thesis ? In general, of course, any kind of proposition ; in drama, a proposition about life and conduct. And a thesis about life and conduct neces- sarily implies a moral precept. " Honesty is the best policy " is a thesis ; the implied precept is " Be honest." There is a general thesis at the back of every drama which makes any appeal to the intellect. Take two ex- amples from the platform-stage. The general thesis of 1 Quarante Am de TTUitre, p. 191. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 31 Shakespeare's Chronicle plays is that the king is very human, but still your king; their implied precept is " Honour the king and behave like a true-born English- man." The general thesis of Moli^re's comedies is the Horatian one that nature, though you expel it with a fork, will yet recur; their implied precept is " Follow Nature, avoid affectation, and don't be a 'crank.'" But the thesis-play proper, invented by Dumas as his contribution to the picture-stage, deals with a particular proposition, and is constructed from first to last to demonstrate that proposition. It is a play, as people say, with a purpose. This is a peculiarly French product. Even the French farce- writers, the mere amusers, cannot resist a thesis. Labiche, for instance, abounds in theses. His Voyage de M. Perrichon — to take his most characteristic work — is framed with geometrical symmetry round the Rochefoucauldian thesis that we like the people we have benefited more than the people from whom we have received benefits. But the conscious, deliberate thesis-playwright was Dumas ^/j. The later history of the thesis-play is rather curious. When Dumas died in 1895 it had already fallen into disfavour. The public had accepted his theses because of his dramatic verve inherited from his father, and because he could " tell a story " as neatly as Scribe, or as the second and greater Scribe, Sardou. If he had made the theatre an active social force, it was because of his saev* indignation, the " fire in his belly," not because of his ratiocination. A thesis, after all, holds good only for the particular case. Gustave Flaubert hits upon this objection in one of his letters to George Sand : — " Put what genius you like into a fable, taken as an example, some other fable can be 32 DRAMA AND LIFE adduced to the contrary, for denouements are not con- clusions. From a particular case you cannot proceed to a general induction, and those who try to do so are flying in the face of modern science, which insists upon the accumulation of innumerable facts before establishing a law." The real truth is that a dramatic thesis proves nothing, for the simple reason that you cannot prove a case by manufacturing the evidence. These were, and are, the objections to the thesis judged by the "practical reason." But if we look for the immediate causes of its temporary eclipse, we shall find them in an artistic movement Before the end of the eighties, a new generation of French playgoers had had time to grow up since the war, and, like all new generations, it demanded a new art. For a time it seemed as though the new art had been found in naturalism. That was, of course, originally a novel- istic movement, and Flaubert and Zola and Daudet all failed in the theatre, where novelists generally do fail. A dramatist, however, was not long wanting for the movement. This was Henri Becque, who in Les Corbeaux (1880) and La Parisienne (1885) established a formula for naturalism in the theatre. The ingeni- ous plot of Scribe and Dumas and Sardou was abandoned. No " exposition," no " denouement"^ no " sympathetic personage " ; only what M. Jean Jullien, the theorist of the school, called " slices of lifei" ^ The new school found a home in the Theatre Libre, founded in 1887 by M. Andr^ Antoine, who also instituted a new school of " naturalistic " acting for the interpretation of the new plays. After a brief career of audacities, too often merely scandalous, naturalism fell by its own excesses, but not without impressing an ' Le TJUitre Vivant (1892), p. 2. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 33 indelible mark on the stage. It left the French drama more simple in construction than it found it, more accurately observant, and, it must be added, a little more insidiously erotic. Though sexual passion had been the chosen subject of Dumas, he had always painted it in the blackest colours ; it is the perpetual theme of men like Donnay and Lavedan and Porto- Riche, whose moral purpose in the exposure of its seamy side is by no means so apparent. It must be remembered that the French theatre has always been, like St. Augustine in his youth, " in love with love," from Racine to Marivaux, from Musset to Meilhac. The present men are only carrying on an historic tradition, though one may think that tradition better served by the old idealism than by the new realism. Be that as it may, the amorists hold only a secondary position in the French drama of to-day. The primacy belongs to Paul Hervieu and Eugene Brieux. The one has been called a second Dumas, the other a second Augier; and not without reason, for they have revived the vogue of the thesis-play. But they are more austere men than their prototypes, without a tincture — they would consider it a taint — of Scribism. With them the thesis is presented in all its simplicity, naked and not ashamed. Nothing, for example, could be simpler than the thesis of M. Hervieu's La Course du Flambeau, a play which has been presented to Londoners by Madame R^jane. It is the familiar figure which Lucretius took from the Greek torch-race: — "Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt." Each generation has to sacrifice the last to itself and then itself to the next ; thus is the torch of life carried on. You have a widowed mother renouncing her chance 3 34 DRAMA AND LIFE of second marriage because her daughter is not yet married and settled ; later, becoming a forger to save her son-in-law from ruin ; ultimately confronted by a choice between the death of her daughter and that of her mother, the consumptive daughter needing a high altitude in the Engadine which is fatal to the grand- mother's heart-disease. " Pour sauver ma fille j'ai tu6 ma m^re," cries the heroine, or rather the middle term of the " rule of three " sum, as the curtain descends. Q.E,D. Everything in the play is conditioned not by the probabilities and proportions of life, but by the mathematical requirements of the thesis, and the conse- quence is that you cannot believe a word of it. Again, nothing could be simpler than the thesis of Les Trots Filles de M. Dupont, by M. Brieux, which is that women, whether they elect to be dependent on men in either regular or irregular relations, or to be independent of men, are all equally badly off. To prove this, one of the daughters marries, another goes on the streets, and the third withers in single-wretchedness. Ultim- ately they compare notes, and each admits herself to be as dissatisfied as either of the other two. Indeed, the play might almost be rewritten as a mediaeval morality, and called Everywoman : or Dame Goodwife, Dame Lechery, and Dame Maidenhood. Here, again, the thesis, not life, dictates the form of the play, which is not a play but a triangle ; and once more you cannot believe a word of it. We leave the French, then, with their turn for logic more in evidence than ever. We have seen how it gave them a formula for modern drama, a vehicle for a true criticism of life. Now we see the formula piercing through the drama, and life subordinated to the criticism. The French stage is suffering from intellectual hypertrophy. Where is the MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 35 remedy to be found ? Assuredly not, as some enthusi- asts deceive themselves into believing, in the rhymed fantasies of M. Rostand. Practical conduct, life as we know it, is the staple commodity of French drama. This does not exclude great poetry, for a great poet will always have a " message " for his day. M. Rostand only offers it a copy of verses. An inspired schoolboy, like our own Landor, he can turn anything into metre — gasconnades, a duel, patisserie, a protuberant nose, the Old Guard, a battlefield. Napoleon's cocked hat, what you will. He was with difficulty dissuaded from addressing the French Academy in verse. // ne manquait que ga ! No, the French drama is not to be saved by prosody. One prefers to regard Rostandism as a passing mirage, if, indeed, it be not a mirage already dispelled. If a French Ibsen . . . but a French Ibsen is a contradiction in terms. And, in any case, it is no business of ours to prescribe. Were we English to offer the French that impertin- ence, nothing but their traditional politeness could save us from the obvious retort about the mote and the beam. The English stage of to-day is in little danger of intellectual hypertrophy ; in mid-nineteenth century — the point at which we left it — it was in no danger at all. It was cm absent-minded drama. It whistled as it went, for want of thought. And it went in another sense, it went into the Ewigkeit. Where is that drama now? The French drama of that date still lines our shelves — volume after volume of Augier and Dumas and even of Labiche. These French playwrights still permit themselves to be read and not seldom to be played. But who can read the Thi&tre Complet of Bulwer Lytton or the " acting editions " of Boucicault or Tom Taylor or Charles Reade or John Oxenford ? 36 DRAMA AND LIFE It is impossible even to think of the early Victorian theatre without a yawn, so "unidea'd" was it, so ephemeral, so paltry and jejune. One shrinks from dwelling on this tedious theme. Our concern here is not with the imitators, the adapters, the mere purveyors, but with the elect few who have done something new — no matter whether good or bad, so long as it is new to drama — the Fortschrittsmdnner as the Germans call them, the men who give a new lead in art. The first of these men, in the history of the modern English theatre, was T. W. Robertson. In the Robertsonian drama — which includes not merely the author of Caste and Society and School, but minor and coarser Robertsons like H. J. Byron and James Albery — is to be found the first intelligent employment in England of the picture-stage. A plausible representation of actual life and manners and speech, with all rhetoric and rhetorical conventions abolished, with no aim but the aim of illusion, was for the first time presented to an English playhouse audience. The world of the sixties is now so remote from us — are not the humours of its remote- ness the very point of Mr. Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells') — that it is odd to think of Robertson as a realist ; nevertheless, a realist he was in his day. I am not referring to the " real door-handles " of Society or the "real snow" of Ours, or the other novelties of accurate mise-en-scine of which the history is written in the annals of the old Prince of Wales's Theatre under the rigime of the Bancrofts. These mechanical details were bound in time to be invented for the new require- ments of the picture-stage, though that consideration does not detract from the credit of the actual inventors. Still less am I referring to the structure of the Robertsonian drama, the " motivation " of its plot. It MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 37 is here, of course, that realism can best justify itself — in the action and the springs of action — so that the impression produced on the spectator's mind may be the exact opposite of Judge Brack's, the impression that " these are the very things people do." Robertson was no realist in this sense. His plots are always feeble, often merely silly, and the motives of his character have little in common with those of live people. Nevertheless Robertson was a true realist in aim, and more often than not he did succeed in trans- ferring to the stage certain types of character, the current ideals and ambient atmosphere of so much of the outside world as he had the opportunity of studying. That was a limited opportunity, no doubt ; Robertson's was a cockney and a middle-class world ; but then so much of England in the sixties was cockney and middle-class. This was the new, the " forward," ele- ment in Robertson's plays that ranks him among our Fortschrittsmdnner ; he did, however imperfectly, bring the stage into some sort of relation to life. As with all new developments, the method was a method of exaggeration. Hawtrey and Eccles and Polly and Sam Gerridge are caricatures, but the basis of observed fact underlies them all. Hawtrey is a caricature which might have been signed " John Leech," as Eccles or Sam Gerridge might have been signed " Charles Keene." Robertson, then, accomplished something. The Robertsonian drama counts. It gave a lead, and a fairly good one, for the picture-stage. But, English in its many good qualities, it was English also in its chief defect ; it was " unidea'd." Happily no quotation in proof of this statement is called for — happily, because Robertsonian prose is absolutely unreadable. School and Ours and Caste have been revived in quite recent 38 DRAMA AND LIFE years, so that the present generation of playgoers has had ample opportunity of acquaintance with some typical Robertsonian plays. They show that, while Robertson observed his time and responded to its pressure, he had no critical ideas about it. By ideas one does not, of course, mean the puerile commonplaces of the copybook. In harping upon this question of ideas, their presence or their absence, I do not forget that I am presenting only one aspect — important as that aspect may be — of a many-sided matter. The future historian of the English stage — unhappily the epithet " future," which has long since become stale in this connection, is still obligatory — the future historian of the English stage will have to describe many phases of it which are here left out of account. My less ambitious endeavour is to contrast the modern French and English theatres, and that contrast turns upon the inequality in their stock of ideas : abundance, even to excess, on the one hand, on the other a lamentable penury. To such an inquiry the theatrical record for many years after Robertson's death is scarcely relevant. Those years witnessed the rise of Henry Irving, the return of London society, at his call, to a theatre from which it had long held aloof, the gradual perfection of the art of mise-en-sdne, and many other important things. But none of these important things had aught to do with the theatre of ideas. That suited neither Sir Henry Irving's interest- ing qualities as a romantic actor nor his still more conspicuous ability as a manager, a generalissimo of stage forces. Sir Henry, to be sure, added Tennyson to our list of acted poets, but only, I fancy, with the result of bringing the world in general to the mind of Tennyson's candid friend " Old Fitz," who " wished MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 39 A. T. had not tried the stage." ^ And, of course, there were those gorgeous Shakespearian revivals which it is a duty to remember, as well as those pseudo-poetic plays of W. G. Wills which it is a pleasure to forget. Of the Shakespearian revivals there is one thing to be said germane to the present purpose. They represented an effort to pour old wine into new bottles : to accom- modate the platform-drama to the picture-stage. Charles Kean had made a similar attempt in the fifties, which failed, because the new conditions were imperfectly understood, and because public opinion had not yet escaped from the bondage of the old rhetorical ideal. In the eighties this ideal had vanished, and though a few veterans grumbled, the Lyceum experi- ment did achieve a certain success. It was Walter Bagehot who said that, though Eton boys might not learn much Latin or Greek, they left school with the firm impression that there were such languages. So the Lyceum public, all agape at the " solid sets " and the rich costumes, carried away a conviction that there had indeed been a Shakespeare. As to the difference between the old and the new styles one cannot do better than give the unconscious evidence of FitzGerald and his cronies, who had seen both. They found the scenery of the Lyceum Much Ado " too good," while " Irving was without any humour. Miss Terry with simply animal spirits." * On the other hand, of Macready's Macbeth FitzGerald remembered the actor's "Amen stu-u-u-u-ck in his throat."* In other words, over- elaboration of scenery was the besetting sin of the picture-stage, as that of the platform-stage had been ' Mare Letters of Edward FitzGerald, p. 273. 2 Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny KembU, p. 255. » Ibid. p. 4S. 40 DRAMA AND UFE over-emphasis of delivery or " ranting." The truth is, Sir Henry Irving stood apart. By sheer force of individuality he impressed himself on the time; he rendered signal service to the playhouse by making it once more a social institution, and to the actor's calling by making it, perhaps for the first time, an entirely respectable profession ; but in the development of modem drama, as I am considering it, he took no share. This complete, if " splendid," isolation of the Lyceum in the later eighties reminds one of those enthusiastic Parisian anglers who, so the story runs, continued to fish for gudgeon under the Pont-Neuf while the Revolution was raging overhead. The Seine might run with blood, a stray body might be hurled over the parapet, incendiary fires might " incarnadine " the sky, but still they placidly fished on. Not otherwise was the " ancien regime " of the theatrical world solemnly keeping up its consecrated ritual inside the Lyceum walls, while the world outside resounded with the din of two new factions, the Ibsenites and the Anti-Ibsenites. Translated by Mr. William Archer, explained and pierced to his " substantificque moelle " by Mr. Bernard Shaw,^ played by a little band of enthusiasts and even by Mr. Beerbohm Tree, the Norwegiain dramatist for a brief moment frighted the isle from its propriety. Conservative playgoers mistook for a new Reign of Terror what proved to be little more than a storm in a teacup. " Ibsenism " soon passed away without establishing itself in this country as a vital force. Nevertheless it left its mark upon our drama. Without the Ibsen episode we could hardly have had the serious plays of Mr. Pinero, of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, or of • 7"(5« Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891. MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 41 Mr. Sydney Grundy. Without the Ibsen episode the world would certainly have been the poorer by the brilliant dramatic vagaries of Mr. Bernard Shaw. In the eighties Mr. Pinero, who had learnt the technical tricks of the stage as an apprentice to the actor's calling, was known as the author of a series of farces brimful of "modernity" and bubbling over with wit. Then came the Ibsen movement, which gave Mr. Pinero " furiously to think." The result of his furious thinking was The Profligate (1889), followed by a group of plays beginning with The Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 1890, and ending with Iris (1901), which represent the high-water mark of our modern English drama. They are our closest approximation to the theatre of ideas, to a criticism of life through the medium of drama. One is constrained to say approximation, for the impression left on the mind by the whole group of plays is that Mr, Pinero, in the expressive Americanism, never quite "gets there." Perhaps exception should be made in favour of Iris, which does not shirk the logical conclusion from its premises ; but Iris is a character-study rather than a play, a picture of woman's weakness and self-indulgence coarsening to vice and ending in degradation worse than death. The other plays of the group, also studies in feminine perversity, but studies which show the collision of wills, and are therefore strict drama, do not offer a valid criticism of life because they shirk a real d/nouement. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray is an arbitrary termination, not a conclusion; the "white- washing " of Agnes Ebbsmith and of the frail woman in The Benefit of the Doubt is logically an absurdity as well as a concession to English cant. The truth, apparently, is that Mr. Pinero has lacked the courage 42 DRAMA AND LIFE to defy his audience, as Dumas fits defied it and as Ibsen defied it. He has tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds ; to be the " disinterested " artist and yet to please the " compact majority." This means a lack of single-minded purpose; we do not get ideas, but half-ideas, or adumbrations of ideas. The spectator is always asking himself: What does Mr. Pinero really think ? That is not only a natural but an inevitable question about all serious drama, which, however " objective " it may be in comparison with other arts, should still be a projection, a revelation of the dramatist In all art the really interesting thing is the "^tat d'a,me," the temperament, the outlook upon life of the artist behind it. What is Mr. Pinero's " ^tat d'Ame " ? What, in the colloquial phrase, is he driving at? Probably he would reply that he is driving at simple realism ; that he gives us studies from life, as accurate as he can make them. That, however, is not to give us the drama of ideas, a criticism of life. One is in much the same state of dubiety about Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. His language, especially in his prefaces, papers, and manifestoes, is that of an earnest man, almost a Hot-gospeller ; but what is he earnest about ? At first while vowing he would ne'er consent he consented to become an Ibsenite. He talked of Ibsen's " drains " or " cesspools " or whatever the elegant figure was ; but he nevertheless wrote " con- fession " dramas under the inspiration of The Pillars of Society. At another moment he was inventing Ouidaesque dukes or Corellian barmaids. Then he turned to France and produced The Case of Rebellious Susan, which is a vulgarised Francillon. Two later plays. The Liars and Mrs. Danis Defence, are tolerable MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 43 achievements from the mere "story-telling" point of view ; but what is their moral ? In the one case, that an elopement is a mistake because you will be cut by your friends and " the world," whereas it is better to be taken out to supper by a brute of a husband ; in the other, that an unprotected female, trying to conceal a doubtful " past," must expect to be bullied and hounded out of Society by a shrewd lawyer, and serve her right ! The Ibsenite malgri lui has now become fugleman of the compact majority ! Upon errors like The Lackeys Carnival and The Princess's Nose, with their coarseness of feeling and their provinciality of thought, it is better not to dwell. But what a chaotic output ! How is Mr. Jones's criticism of life to be disengaged from this tangle of themes and modes, schools and styles, violent affirmations and flat contra- dictions ? He flouts Mrs. Grundy in Lady Susan ^ and brings her in as " dea ex machine " for The Liars. He was an idealist in The Crusaders, and a sentiment- alist in The Dancing Girl and a cynic in The Tempter, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman in Mrs. Dane and goodness knows what in The Princess's Nose. Is it permissible to suppose that a hodge-podge like this was ever inspired by any constant ideal, directed towards any definite end ? Your serious French dramatist knows his own mind and takes care that we shall know it too. The purpose of Dumas fils we have seen emphatically declared in the preface to Le Fils Naturel, and Dumas kept his word. M. Hervieu says his purpose is to plead the cause of the oppressed ; M. Brieux regards himself as the " commis voyageur de I'intellectualitd" We all know, then, what these men are driving at. ' Of malice prepense it would seem ; see the pre&ce to the printed play. 44 DRAMA AND LIFE But what Mr. Jones or Mr. Pinero is driving at remains an inscrutable mystery. It is a refreshment to glance for a moment at a man with real ideas and a definite purpose which he is at no pains to conceal — Mr. Bernard Shaw. No one need ask what Mr. Shaw's " message " is ; he is always ramming it down our throats. For his general philosophy you have this : " The tragedy and comedy of life lie in the consequences, sometimes terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our persistent attempts to found our institutions on the ideals suggested to our imagination, by our half-satisfied passions, instead of on a genuinely scientific natural history." ^ There it is, as circumstantial, and almost as long-winded, as a power of attorney. Mr. Shaw's plays are so many attacks upon what he considers our false ideals, and so many attempts to illustrate what he calls a scientific natural history. The only drawback is that "with such a being as man, in such a world as the present," Mr. Shaw's plays do not count as plays at all. They offer such a criticism of life as the average man cannot even begin to understand. Mr. Shaw assumes a world of unimpeded intellect; he addresses himself to the pure reason ; his characters do not love or hate, laugh or cry, they merely argue it out. It is the Euclidean drama — or would be, if Euclid had set himself to prove that two sides of a triangle are not greater than the third, and that it is a vulgar error to suppose a point to be without parts or magnitude. It is better not to enter, however, into so dangerously controversial a subject as the value of Mr. Shaw's criticism of life ; nor is there any need, seeing that he fails to express it in terms of drama. The essential law of the theatre is ' Preface to Unpleasant Plays (1898). MODERN ENGLISH AND FRENCH DRAMA 45 thought through emotion. No character exhibits real emotion (though occasionally there is a show of " temper ") in those fascinating exercises in dialectic which Mr. Shaw miscalls plays. This fatal defect long condemned him to remain a dramatist of the study or, at best, the dramatist of a coterie. If any one of our playwrights who appeal to the public at large had only a tithe of Mr. Shaw's independence and originality of thought, to say nothing of his vivacity and wit, the reproach that the modern English drama is " unidea'd " would be heard no more. It is, of course, irrelevant to this inquiry to consider the case of Mr. Stephen Phillips. One has been examining the modern French drama and the English on a specific point, appraising their relative contributions to a criticism of life, contrasting the ample stock of ideas in the one with the intellectual poverty of the other. The drama of beauty and mystery and passion enshrined in verse — and some of Mr. Phillips's work takes high rank in that dramatic region — stands outside the present comparison. How far the vogue of Mr. Phillips has been a vogue of pure poetry, what, on the other hand, has been the amount of its debt to two enterprising actor-managers of the moment — Mr. Alexander and Mr. Tree — may some day be an interesting question. But here it is what Aristotle would call aX\o9 X0709. July 1902. SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS IF it be true that every nation has the drama which it deserves, we English can scarcely plume our- selves on our present merits. Our old theatrical hands are not idly so called, for theirs is handiwork rather than head-work. If there are one or two younger men of promise, they are still in the stage in which promise makes a better display than performance. We have no Experimental Theatre, no laboratory for the culti- vation of dramatic germs ; and we have no Repertory Theatre, no museum for the permanent exhibition of classic specimens. One or both of these institutions may in time be provided by such organisations £is the Stage Society and the Irish National Theatre; but that is mere conjecture. There is a small minority of the playgoing public which shows symptoms of discontent Its artistic conscience, if not deeply stirred, is at any rate gently pricked. It signs manifestoes, writes to the newspapers, and in other futile ways gives vent to its suspicions that something ought to be done. But what precisely ought to be done nobody knows. Meanwhile, the music-halls, along with the theatres which are music-halls in everything but name and an atmosphere of tobacco-smoke, have it all their own way. The vast majority of the public takes its theatrical amusement, as it takes its newspaper information, in snippets. It is a public without patience, without the capacity for sustained attention, and, like Lady Teazle 48 SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 47 when she married Sir Peter, it has no taste. To speak of the drama as an art to such a public as this is to talk a language which it does not understand, and has no inclination to learn. Vox clamantis in deserto. If we turn to Paris — and in the discussion of any theatrical question it is as obligatory to turn to Paris as for a Mahomedan to turn towards Mecca — we find a not altogether unlike posture of affairs. There, also, the caf^-concert triumphs over the playhouse. There, also, the theatre of ideas has to maintain an incessant fight for life. But it continues to keep its flag flying. The Frangais has its habituks as well as its subvention ; Antoine and Lugn^ Poe have their subscribers as well as their intelligent audacity. And the merely frivolous theatres, whatever we may think of their ethics, main- tain a level of workmanship which, compared with that of our " musical comedies," may almost be called intellectual. It is true that the entertainments offered by the Athdn^e and the Nouveautds, the Capucines and the Grand Guignol — the favourite resorts of " mundane " pleasure-seekers — are more often than not quite heartless and conscienceless ; but it is also true that they are anything but silly. Paris has not been Theatropolis all these years for nothing. Its playhouses are for the most part more stuffy than ours, more uncomfortable, far less pleasant houses than ours to gossip or to lounge or to slumber in; for French audiences concern themselves far less than ours about these subsidiary matters. What they do concern themselves about is the play. By tradition and temperament the Parisian is a playgoer, and, from practice, an expert playgoer. Herein he differs from an Englishman of the same class. No doubt, in all our modern democracies the average citizen is largely 48 DRAMA AND LIFE dependent on fiction for his means of realising the stratum of society in which he lives, and, still more, those strata in which he does not live. But while it is a typical English habit to seek this fiction in print and nowhere else, it is a typical French habit to seek it on the other side of the footlights. To this constant and urgent theatrical demand in France corresponds an unfailing and abundant supply. Playwrights are as numerous in that country as beggars in Spain or Grand Army veterans in the United States. One summer the Figaro invited some two or three score playwrights to say how they were spending their holidays, and it appeared that they were all busy over several plays apiece for next season, plays in verse and in prose, plays of ideas and plays of mere amusement — all the items of Polonius's lengthy catalogue. The plays of ideas were, of course, a small minority, as they always must be. But plays of idecis have an import- ance out of all proportion to their number. It is by virtue of these plays that the theatre becomes, a vital part of the national organism. It is well to call them plays of ideas not only because that is what they are, but because one may thereby hope to satisfy M. Paul Hervieu, who protests against the common label of " thesis - play " as intended to imply something essentially tiresome. "From every piece" (says M. Hervieu) ^ "that is not a piece of sheer farcical foolishness, you may dis- engage a signification which you may, if you like, call a ' thesis.' Le Voyage de M. Perrkhon, by Labiche, contains and demonstrates from beginning to end the 'thesis' that men prefer those whom they have ' L' Annie Psychologijue, tome x. Conveisation with M. A, Binet. SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 49 benefited to their benefactors. The very titles of many plays announce a ' thesis,' if you will have the word — Vacquerie's Souvent homme varie ; Pailleron's L'Age Ingrat and Le Monde oic Von s'ennuie ; Musset's On ne badine pas avec I'amour and // ne faut jurer de rien. The point at which a play of senti- mental demonstration or social bearing begins to be called a 'thesis play' has always seemed to me as arbitrarily fixed as that where the Boulevard des Capucines becomes the Boulevard des Italiens." This is obvious enough; so obvious, indeed, that some time ago I happened to make the same remark, and to choose the very same illustration from Labiche.^ Nevertheless, the use of " thesis-play " as a term of reproach is not without a certain justification. When M. Hervieu speaks of " disengaging " a signification, or thesis, he is really begging the question at issue. The objection to so many of these plays is that the thesis, instead of being something implied and latent in the piece, something which you may, if you will, disengage, is thrust under your -nose, meets you at every turn, interrupts and in the end destroys your sense of illusion. It is the primary business of a play to persuade you that what you are witnessing has happened, or might happen. And this business is only executed to perfection when the resultant impression is one of inevitability, the feeling that the thing could not have happened otherwise. But let the dramatist for one moment excite the suspicion that this or that incident is there merely because his thesis requires it to be there, and the game is up. The truth is that plays of ideas must, first of all, be ' See preceding article. so DRAMA AND LIFE plays of emotion. " Primum vivere, deinde philosophari." The " idea " is excellent, as giving a meaning and unity to the play, but if it be allowed to obtrude itself so as to impair the sense of reality the flow of emotion is immediately arrested. Emotion, not logic, is the stuff of drama. A play that stirs our emotions may be absolutely " unidea'd." That is a case of emotion for emotion's sake — the typical case of melodrama. The play really great is the play which first stirs our emotions profoundly and then gives a meaning and direction to our feelings by the unity and truth of some underlying idea. Such a play, if I am not mistaken, is M. Hervieu's work Le D^dale. It is a play with a guiding idea — one of those ideas about sexual relation- ship which would have delighted Dumas ^/r — but it is also a play which sounds emotional deeps quite beyond the reach of Dumas. It aches and throbs with passion, but is chastened by a certain austerity, the vague dread of calamity to come. Its high seriousness, the dignity of its style, its torrential force, its inexorable catastrophe constitute it a real tragedy. Its governing idea, right or wrong, is simple enough : that a woman who abandons the father of her child under the law of man does so at her peril because she is infringing a higher law of Nature. Marianne has divorced her vicious husband Max. With a child of tender years to bring up, and still in the heyday of her youth, she has every inducement to marry again ; and in Guillaume she finds a second husband with all the virtues which her first husband lacked. But her second marriage is not brought about without grave diflfiGulty. Her mother, a fervent Catholic, who cannot contemplate the marriage of a divorced person without horror, is dead against the project. That is the veto of Religion. SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 51 There is also the veto of Social Opinion. Marianne's cousin Paulette tells her that a woman cannot afford to run the risk of being seen in a drawing-room between her first and her second husband ; a thing " good society will never stand." And yet, replies Marianne, you are not ashamed to be seen in a drawing-room between your husband and another man who is secretly your lover. Oh, rejoins Paulette, the secrecy makes all the difference 1 This is scarcely the sort of argument to convince a woman like Marianne, the soul of frankness and loyalty. She is also a woman of clear head and strong will. All objections duly weighed, she decides that she ought to marry again ; and she does. But she has reckoned without the veto of Nature. There comes a time when Max and she are again in presence. The purport of his visit is to ask for more frequent access to their little son, and this request Marianne cannot refuse. The matter, however, does not end there. Marianne is unsettled by the sight of her first husband, who is a changed man, repentant, subdued, haggard with grief at the thought of the happiness that he has wickedly thrown away. He has no hope of recapturing the woman ; nor she any fear of falling again under his sway. But the mere juxtaposition of two people whose relations, however distant now, have been of all human relations the closest, is not without its silent effect. Nothing is openly said, or even definitely realised, by either party ; but the subconscious influence of sex is at work. Time, complete separation, new interests, might avert all danger. But again there is juxtaposition, and of the closest kind. The boy falls ill, and the father obtains permission to aid the mother in watching over S2 DRAMA AND LIFE the sick-bed. At the moment when the child is declared to be out of danger and the father comes to take his leave, the smouldering ashes of past affection burst into flame. The woman's nerves are unstrung; she has been worn out by vigils shared with the man who once had been to her what no other man ever can be. " L'homme qui m'a rendue m^re," she cries, " je ne peux pas I'arracher de mes entrailles." And so, almost automatically and unconsciously, they fall into each other's arms. It is a physical accident The catastrophe swiftly follows. In her hysterical anguish over the horrible trick that fate has played her, Marianne could not keep the truth to herself, even if she would. She feels that she can never again be Guillaume's wife ; nor will she disgrace herself by living in open sin with Max. What is to be the way out of this didale, this " maze " ? Clearly there is no way out so long as all three parties remain alive. The only question is, which of the three will the dramatist kill off Marianne ? Assuredly not ; there would be too savage a cynicism in leaving the two husbands flying at one another's throats over the corpse of the wife. But if Marianne is not to die, then there are tremend- ous objections against sparing the lives of either of the men. Kill Max, and you leave Marianne alone with Guillaume, whom she does not love and whose wife she has sworn never to be again. Kill Guillaume, and you rebuild the happiness of Max and Marianne over the grave of the one just man. Irresistible logic, then, condemns both men to death ; and accordingly they pull one another over a precipice. Ignorant of what has happened, the woman passes across the scene, answering the call of her child. In the child you see the only hope for her future life. SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 53 It will be observed that in Le DMale, as in all his plays, M. Hervieu's method is that of the logician. And, like the Living Skeleton, he is "proud of the title." Replying to M. Binet's questions^ as to his mental processes in play-writing, he says: "The in- dispensable quality, as it seems to me, is logic ... to be quite sure where you are going ... to see that your conclusion follows from your premises." And he gives an illustration from Le Didale. The child of Paulette, Marianne's frivolous cousin, is stricken by the same malady as Marianne's. " I was two days hesitating whether Paulette's child ought to die or to survive. The child dead, the mother in black ... an ugly black dress ... it will be painful, disagreeable . . . the child alive, she will appear in a pink hat. . . . But, the child dead, there was the means of regenerating Paulette's character. Also a winding up of the subsidiary in- trigue, the principal intrigue having to be continued without Paulette. . . . Logic triumphed over the fear of risking the success of the play by sombreness." But what distinguishes this play of M. Hervieu's from the others is that its logic is never obtrusive; closely reasoned out though it is, step by step, its strongest appeal is always an appeal to the emotions. In the scenes between mother and daughter the case of religious convictions versus common sense is argued out for all it is worth ; but what is chiefly brought home to us is the anguish of a breach Ipetween mother and daughter, both good women. Paulette's child dies from logical necessity, as we have just seen ; but what concerns the spectator of the play is the agony of Paulette's grief. ■ V Annie Psychologique, tome x. 54 DRAMA AND LIFE Though Marianne falls into Max's arms to illustrate M. Hervieu's thesis, what affects us is the swift in- evitability with which the "' circuit " of passion between the two is " completed." And when Max and Guillaume go over the precipice, while we know that it is the pro- cess of reasoning by " exhaustion " which dictates their fate, we are none the less shaken by the horror of it, none the less thrilled by the little piping treble of the child's call to its mother at the next moment. Best of all, the play has the true tragic dignity. Its whole fabric is reared upon a physiological fact — or assump- tion ; its chief scene turns upon a surprise des sens ; it might easily have been coarse, ignoble, even repulsive. It might have been, but never is ; so tactfully has the subject been handled, with restraint so perfect, with so fastidi- ous a taste. Beyond cavil Le Didale confers upon M. Hervieu the primacy of the contemporary French stage. If M. Hervieu is a dramatic artist, working in the region of ideas, M. Brieux is an ideologue, for whom dramatic art is only an instrument of propagandism. Indignation, on very old authority, " makes verses " ; with M. Brieux it also makes plays. He desires to awaken the collective conscience ; his plays are fierce exposures of social abuses, injustices, impostures. In n&vasion he denounced the tyranny of medical pseudo-science, in Les Trots Filles de M. Dupont he handled the " woman question," in Blanchette he exhibited the evils of educating people beyond their station, and in Les Bienfaiteurs his moral was " O Charity, what crimes are committed in thy name ! " One of his latest plays, MatemiU, deals with the population question. It is, as everybody knows, a burning question in France, where the birth-rate is, or until the other day was, steadily decreasing. A senator, SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 55 M. Piot, has founded a League for the encouragement of large families. Thereupon it occurs to M. Brieux to play the part of devil's advocate by marshalling the various cases in which births are not a blessing but a curse — as, e.g., when they are illegitimate or when there are no means to maintain the offspring. As generally happens with M. Brieux, his play is a series of variations on a single theme; his personages are not so much human beings as the helpless puppets of his id^e fixe; his plot is a mere revolving platform designed to bring each aspect of the one subject in turn under the eye of the spectator. The Sub- Prefect Brignac zealously distributes the Ministerial circular on the duty of all good citizens to repopulate the country. He admires its style, and reads it aloud to the Mayor and the Commandant of the Garrison and Mme. Brignac. Madame does not share her husband's enthusiasm ; perpetual child-bearing has brought her to the condition of a slave. There is another sense, as the Sub-Prefect soon finds, in which maternity, like charity, begins at home. His wife's young sister Annette has a shameful confession to make. She has been betrayed and abandoned. Appeal to her seducer's family — promptly made by Mme. Brignac — is fruitless, for Annette is sans dot. Then the Sub-Prefect forgets all his fine phrases about maternity and turns Annette out of doors. There are establishments, says he, for such cases as hers where no questions are asked and no names divulged. In such an establishment Annette dies from an illegal operation, and the play concludes in an Assize Court where the sage-fetnme is brought to trial, together with some of her customers — unlike poor Annette, married, but too poor to rear children. The judge 56 DRAMA AND LIFE bullies everybody, the counsel hurl insults at one another, Mme. Brignac, called as a witness for the prosecution, goes into hysterics, and the curtain comes down on a scene of ignominy and confusion. Nearly all the matters which M. Brieux here discusses with emphatic frankness would in England rank among the tacenda. They are matters for the legislator and the physician, and M. Brieux's play affords no evidence that they gain anything by being treated in the theatre. MatemiU shocks our feelings without con- tributing any solution of the difficulties attending the question at issue. It merely leaves the spectator in a mood of what Dr. Johnson called "inspissated gloom." Art that merely depresses — Aristotle long ago laid down a canon about that — is bad art And Maternity is not even good propagandism. It is a relief, if only a slight relief, to turn to another play of idejis, L'Oasis, by M. Jean Jullien. This curious work preaches the religion of humanity in a vein of optimistic idealism and with a deluge of rhetoric. Its Eastern atmosphere revives one of the classic literary traditions of the eighteenth century, a tradition that assigned to Persians and to Chinese virtuous sentiments calculated to put our Western civilisation to shame. Somewhere in the desert the children of Islam have sought refuge from the European invader. The chief, Mohamed ben Moktar, having captured a Catholic nun, marries her by force (the incident was less revolting as presented at the CEuvre Theatre than might have been feared), and carries' her off to an oasis, where he proposes to live for climate and the affections and the "higher life." It is to be a humanitarian oasis, where every- body is to be as happy as the day is long, uttering SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 57 sententious platitudes like the people in Rasselas. But this Utopian community, oasis and all, is captured by the " Europeans " — dressed in the uniform of the French colonial army — who bum and slay in the interests of " civilisation." European civilisation is made to look the poor thing that M. Jullien evidently thinks it when Mohamed's wife, the ex-nun, declines to return to Christianity and vows that she never, never will desert Mr. Micawber — I should say, Mohamed ben Moktar. Ultimately Mohamed and his wife are allowed to retire to another oasis, where they found a second Utopian community, and this time are left in peace. There is some effective satire on European methods of " civilising " what it considers " inferior " races, but the play is drowned in verbiage and cloyed with a rather namby-pamby sentimentalism, and the total impression is of something slightly absurd. Such ideas as it deals in might fitly have been expressed in a conte moral, just as the ideas of M. Brieux's play might fitly have been expressed in a medico-legal treatise. It is significant of the paramount importance of the theatre in France that it tends to become a Universal Provider and to impress all ideas, all questions, into its service, even those unsuited to its purpose. It is the national system of conscription transferred to the world of art. Every Frenchman must serve in the army, and every French author must be enlisted for the theatre. Another " pressed man " is M. Anatole France. It is a great pity. M. France's genius and method are everything but theatrical. It is not in his way to construct a "story," in the novelist's sense, far less a play-plot. He deals not in action, but in contemplation. His gentle irony, his 58 DRAMA AND LIFE air of perpetual negation, his subdivisions of the infinitely little in thought and feeling, his Shandean humour, the fastidious charm of his style, and every- thing that is his — what have they to do with the hard, emphatic, garish art of the theatre ? And yet he has been induced in an evil hour to bring his other self, M. Bergeret, before the footlights. It is the M. Bergeret of Le Mannequin cTOsier, the M. Bergeret of the conjugal misadventure, the M. Bergeret who was so distressingly interrupted in the composition of his Virgilius Nauticus by the plaints of the servant girl Euph^mie. Of course the inevitable happens. What the play succeeds in rendering is just that part of the book which is devoid of significance and passes almost unobserved by the reader — the mere external incidents, incidents of no account apart from the com- ments for which they are the pretext. What the play does not and cannot render is the quintessence of Bergeret, the strange blend in him of ordinary human weaknesses and what he would call philosophic " ataraxy." Take the " adventure " of the faithless Mme. Bergeret and M. Roux. In the book the brut- ality of the incident only serves as a foil to Bergeret's queer reception of it — the obsession of a physical picture amid the details of notes on etymology, the anguish of a deceived husband tempered by the reflec- tion that M. Roux is a good Latinist. On the stage, while the brutal element is necessarily softened into something comparatively decent and at the same time commonplace, not so much as a hint can be given of M. Bergeret's quaint mental state. And all the pro- portions, all the "values," as the painters would say, are spoiled. In the book Mme. Bergeret is merely dull and mean and small ; raised to theatre-pitch she SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS sgi acquires all the dignity of a " protagonist." Bergeret himself, a will-less person in the book, has to have a will and to take action, since will and action are indispensable to a stage-character. Further, the story has to be padded out with stupid stuff about the " engagement " of one of Bergeret's daughters, while our ecclesiastical friends of the book, the Ahh6 Guitret and the Abbd Lantaigne, are reduced to the ranks of " supers." And so M. France has been butchered, or rather has immolated himself, in order that M. Guitry of the Renaissance may show how cleverly he can " make up " as M. Bergeret ! To all good Anatolians the affair must have been deplorable. Probably there would have been no such affair to deplore had it not been for M. Guitry's earlier success in his adaptation of M. France's pathetic little story Crainquebille, But that was, in more senses than one, another story. The misfortunes of the old costermonger have no kinship with the psychological subtleties, the complicated vie intirieure, of a Bergeret ; on the stage a sequence of simple scenes, just as in the book a bare recital of a few external facts, serves to bring out the full pathos of them. Moreover, old Crainquebille is not a great classic type like Bergeret, of whom multitudes of readers have formed their own cherished image and are sure to resent another image thrust upon them by this or that actor. There is something indecent in the spectacle of a stage-player pretending to be Mr. Pickwick or Mr. PecksnifiF, Major Dobbin or Captain Costigan, Mr. Elton or Mr. Collins ; one feels that a gross liberty has been taken with one's most intimate friend. M. Bergeret belongs to that sacrosanct body. There is, however, just one feature in this stage version of Le Mannequin d'Osier which relates its 6o DRAMA AND UFE intention, if not its actual accomplishment, to a vener- able tradition of the French Theatre. Its main interest is an interest of character. It is primarily an answer to the question, not What happened in the Bergeret household ? but What sort of a man is Bergeret ? No doubt there is a sense in which Aristotle's assertion that plot is more important than character must always remain true. But it is only true in a very limited sense of the comedy of character, a dramatic genre virtually unknown to Aristotle (who, for that matter, made his assertion about tragedy); and it counts for next to nothing in the comedy of " static " character. Such a comedy is Les Affaires sont les Affaires, by M. Octave Mirabeau. By a "static" character I mean one that is a fixed quantity in the play; essentially the same force in magnitude and direction from the rise to the fall of the curtain. It does not move ; it is we who are taken all round it, so that we may see its various facets. It is not moulded by the successive incidents of the play, but only disclosed by them ; sibi constat. This " static " treatment is familiar enough in universal drama, from Plautus to Ben Jonson ; but it has perhaps been practised most continuously and successfully in France ever since Moli^re drew his " miser " and his " vale- tudinarian." M. Mirabeau's " static " character, Isidore Lechat, is the bom virtuoso in the art of money- making, the ferocious egoist who lives for the main chance, who is in the cant phrase a " Napoleon of finance." And, like Napoleon, he is non-moral, a natural force, like gravity or heat. Just as this is one of the most familiar types in the actual world, so it is one of the stock figures of novel and dramsL In John Gabriel Borkman Ibsen gave the type a touch of the SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 6i grandiose by a quasi-poetic treatment. M. Mirabeau, too, sees that in any great force, even a force that makes for evil, there is an aspect of grandeur. A colossal egoist is, at any rate, colossal. The colossal egoist Lechat compels admiration by his devout self- worship, his expansive geniality, his sheer delight in the exercise of his own ruthless force. He is odiously vulgar, thick-skinned, and conscienceless, but almost captivating by virtue of his buoyancy, indomitable courage, and gigantic strength. He is a Nietzschean who has never heard the name of Nietzsche. For three out of four acts M. Mirabeau exhibits this character exclusively by the " static " method, " sampling " it as it were at all points, showing you the millionaire — for of course Lechat is a millionaire — as host, as parent, as bargainer, and so forth. Then comes a final act of tragic catastrophe, when the millionaire, in the supreme moment of his triumph, is stricken down by the sudden death of his son, the only creature, next to himself, that he loves in the world. For sheer brute vitality this character of Lechat is one of the most notable achievements of the contemporary French stage. It Wcis magnificently acted at the Theatre Fran^ais by M. de Fdraudy, who, not long afterwards, again distinguished himself by his performance of a very different part in M. Marcel Provost's comedy. La Plus Faible. What a contrast to Isidore Lechat this Louis Gourd, grotesquely ugly, painfully timid, hopelessly inarticulate, craving for a woman's love but without any of the showy qualities by which a woman's love is too often won ! There comes a moment when he confronts a rival endowed with those showy qualities, and proves himself the better man of the two — Dobbin, say, asserting himself for once and making George 62 DRAMA AND LIFE Osborne look small — and that is the moment in which M. de F^raudy almost persuades you that M. Marcel Provost has written a play of sterling worth. But one good moment does not make a play, and in fact M. Provost's comedy is only a conventional exercise in story-telling over which there is no profit in lingering. It deals with a subject sufficiently time-worn — the struggle between passion which seeks to be free and the prejudices, interests, and ordinances of the social and family environment. Incidentally the point is urged that an irregular union, however " distinguished," however deliberately entered upon by two advanced " intellectuals " as a protest against orthodox marriage, is in the long run a less convenient and on the whole less rational arrangement than the institution against which it is a protest. These, to be sure, are " ideas " — there are ideas, as M. Hervieu has pointed out, underlying every play — but La Plus Faible, for all that, is not entitled to rank as a play of idezis. Its ideas are merely a pretext for its story, and as the story, in one form or another, has often been told before, and as it is not very strikingly told now, one need say no more about it. Paris is seldom without a " success of scandal," and a specimen of this disagreeable class is Le Retour de Jerusalem, by M. Maurice Donnay. Much excellent work stands to M. Donnay's credit in the past — artistically excellent work, be it understood, for the ethical quality of such plays as Amants and La Douloureuse is quite another matter — but this Anti- Semitic exploit of his cannot but have disappointed and disconcerted his more judicious admirers. Exploitation, perhaps, would be a fitter word, did the English language permit its use ; for M. Donnay has SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 63 deliberately chosen to make capital out of a racial prejudice and to flatter the baser instincts of the Boulevard mob. Stripped of its Anti-Semitism, Le Retour de Jerusalem would offer little that is distinguishable from the orthodox elements of an elopement drama. A. (with a placid wife, whom he despises) " bolts " with B. (wedded to a man whom she detests). Then the new couple find in time that they too are unsuited for each other, and they part, with hearty expressions of mutual dis-esteem. This is one of the patterns which every theatrical emporium always keeps in stock, and, accordingly, to give it a specious air of novelty M. Donnay tacks on to this old framework an assortment of the caricatures by which an outwitted, outpaced, and outbidden society seeks to take its revenge on the modern Jew. He makes A. a French aristocrat and B. a Jewish " intellectual " (" une sale Juive " is the less complimentary description of A.'s wife Suzanne), who is seen gradually disenchanting and finally revolting A. by exhibiting the supposed characteristics of her race. She exhibits them in the garish colours of her costumes, in her " practical " instincts, and, worst of all, in the composition of her salon. Here we meet with the " pushful " Jew, and the cosmopolitan Jew (a gross caricature of Dr. Max Nordau), and the Jew who reviles the army, and the Jew who wants to know what on earth people mean by "patrie." A., after defining "patrie" in a tirade which sends every Chauvinist amongst the audience into an apoplexy of delight, turns B.'s Jewish friends out of the house, and the m/nage comes to an abrupt end. Then A. would like to be reconciled to his wife Suzanne, but she, too, has had enough of him, and so everybody lives unhappy ever afterwards. I said that 64 DRAMA AND LIFE the formula of the play was a stale one, but perhaps an exception has to be made in favour of the con- clusion which concludes nothing. For there we have a distinct departure from the old, or Dumasian, practice, which would certainly have brought down the curtain upon a pistol-shot or some other violent catastrophe — such a catastrophe, for instance, as terminates Antoinette Sabrier, by M. Romain Coolus. Here, again, you have a dissatisfied wife who seeks " consola- tion " in an elopement ; or would seek it, were not the plan frustrated at the critical moment by the ruin of the lady's husband. To run away from a bankrupt husband is apparently a breach of the theatrical point of honour. Unfortunately things have gone too far to be successfully concealed, and the husband, under the shock of the truth, blows out his brains. The treatment of this play, however, is neither so banal nor so brutal as its plot. M. Coolus writes with sobriety and distinction, and the capital scene of the play, in which an unforeseen but entirely natural accident makes all things only too plain to the husband, reveals the true " fingering of the dramatist." Once more, in L'Adversaire, by MM. Alfred Capus and Emmanuel Ar^ne, the Parisian playgoer has been oifered his favourite " thrill," the detection of a wife's infidelity by the pertinacious questionings of a husband, and, as in M. Donnay's case, there is to be noted a revolt against the Dumasian denouement. A Dumasian husband would have fought the lover ; but this one has the sense to see that a duel would prove nothing and settle nothing. He sees also that his wife, despite her infidelity, still loves him, as he still loves her. Shall, then, bygones be bygones ? No, for though you may forgive, you cannot by effort of the will forget. The SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 65 only sensible course is for the husband and wife to remain apart. No doubt that is the true ending, viewed in the cold light of reason ; but Joe Gargery would say that it " do not overstimulate " the spectator in search of an evening's amusement. It is only right to add that M. Capus is as a rule the most joyous of playwrights. Londoners have had the opportunity of seeing three of his most characteristic performances, La Veine, Les Deux Scales, and La Bourse ou La Vie, plays with a morality which may be charitably called " easy " and a sense of the joie de vivre which may not uncharitably be called exorbitant. I confess to preferring M. Capus the madcap "amuser" of these plays to M. Capus the austere moralist of L'Adversaire. For his fun, if not very straitlaced, is always good- humoured ; his great success — he is the most popular playwright in France at the present day — may be taken to mark the complete and final rout of that morbid product of a few years ago, the deliberately and callously offensive play, the genre rosse. It will have been seen that the French theatre, on the whole, is still able to show a continuous and an abundant supply of plays really alive. What a painful contrast confronts us in the English theatre — anaemia, sluggish circulation, a general condition of depressed vitality ! Our stage is languishing for lack of fresh blood and fresh air. We have a handful of accomplished playwrights with commonplace ideas or no ideas at all, and we have one or two men with ideas, but only an imperfect mastery of dramatic resources. The unidea'd experts seem to have grown of late a little tired, and have communicated part of their fatigue to their audiences, while the comparatively unskilled men of ideas either enjoy public fame by a 5 66 DEAMA AND LIFE very precarious tenure or have altogether to dispense with it. There are, to be sure, some adroit purveyors of light " digestive " entertainments — plays which have their interest from the point of view of box-office receipts, but which it would be absurd to reckon as substantial assets in any other than a commercial estimate of our theatrical possessions. This is a meagre display. We are occasionally reminded that, bad as things are to-day, they were worse only a few years ago, in the period, say, immediately preceding that lively time when Mr. Pinero dazzled the town with TAe Second Mrs. Tangueray, and Mr. Jones announced what he was pleased to call " The Rena- scence " of the English Drama. That is true, but not exactly consoling. For it comes to this, that the brisk movement of the nineties has left us in a condition only a degree less stagnant than that of the eighties. Our stage needs a current of fresh ideas, a spirit of eager and audacious experimentation ; even a little reckless iconoclasm would do no harm. For its fresh ideas it is at present almost entirely dependent on two men, Mr. Barrie and Mr. Bernard Shaw. Not that Mr. Barrie is an ideologue. He has no foible for intellectual gymnastic. Such philosophy as he has to offer is by no means profound. His ideas and his philosophy are only interesting be- cause they are his; because they go with his other qualities, his fancy and whim and tenderness, to make up a character of rare charm. For we must not be duped by the cant about the " impersonality " of drama. Like any other art, drama is in the last analysis a revelation of the artist, and Barrie's plays charm us because we are aware of a lovable nature at the back of them. His most felicitous thing, so far, is TAe SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 67 Admirable Crichton, a Voltairean conte philosophigue, told, however, with a simple kindliness of tone which suggests anyone in the world rather than Voltaire. It showed how a very slight modification of the material conditions of life will at once upset all the " values " of the social hierarchy and turn the personnel of a fashionable West-End mansion topsy-turvy. Trans- ferred from Mayfair to a desert island, the butler becomes King and the Earl a slave. In " natural " conditions it is only "natural" capacity that tells. So overwhelming is its advantage that the butler- King is in danger of developing into a despot ; but the arrival of a rescue party from a man-of war at once restores the artificial standards of "civilisation," and " . . . . tout rentre ici dans I'ordre accoutum^." Back again in Mayfair, the born ruler of men becomes once more the butler, quite content with the prospect of retirement to a snug little public-house in the Harrow Road. The logical circle is complete. Notable as the dialogue was for its rippling flow of good- humoured gaiety, the play disclosed something more notable still in its use of that pantomime which, at the right moment, is far more significant than speech. It is just there that the true dramatic instinct reveals itself, in the practical application of the principle that what is shown counts on the stage for much more than what is said. For evidence of Mr. Barrie's dramatic instinct one need only mention two scenes of panto- mime : that wherein the party who have revolted from Crichton's leadership slink back silent and subdued, drawn by the sheer force of hunger to the stew he is preparing, and that of the sudden arrest of the dance at the booming of the ship's gun. In each of these 68 DRAMA AND LIFE scenes not a word was uttered ; it was the action that "spoke volumes." A slighter effort of Mr. Barrie's, Quality Street, had the delicate fragrance of Jane Austen, whose period it recalled. Even slighter was Little Mary, a prank rather than a play, flimsy in texture, with something of the facile cleverness of an improvisation, but redeemed by the humour of its episodic scenes and by a character of exquisite pathos — one of those tender little maidens with a gift for " mothering " whom Mr. Barrie has more than once portrayed. What is the quintessence of Mr. Barrie's_ charm ? Kindliness, perhaps; a pervading, but never jcloying, sweetness of nature. With this supreme quality goes an'tinfafling ffesHiiess of observation. For Mr. Barrie is a close and patient observer. Thus he is perpetually annexing new corners of life for stage use, tapping new sources of theatrical supply. This faculty of minute and accurate observation is as rare as it is valuable. It is, so far as one can tell, almost entirely lacking in Mr. Bernard Shaw, and there perhaps is the ultimate reason why this original thinker and brilliant writer stops just a little short of complete success in his stage work. One has to put it conjecturally, for Mr. Shaw's case is a little puzzling. You recognise, with the joy of a collector in a new curio, the unique personality revealed in his plays. They delight most of us, with reservations, when acted, and without reservation when read. You revel in their waywardness, their unex- pectedness, their audacious self-confidence, not to say self-worship. They wake up a somnolent world and set it furiously thinking. It is possible to hold that he not seldom talks nonsense and at the same time to have a sneaking affection for his nonsense as more SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 69 diverting and stimulating than other men's sense. But I am dealing here with the art of drama and the effective forces of the stage, and the fact is not to be ignored that, with all one's delight over Mr. Shaw's plays, there remains in the mind a vague sense of balked expectation, a feeling that there is a screw loose somewhere. In the familiar phrase, the plays do not exactly "come off." Is the real secret of this what I have suggested — Mr. Shaw's lack of observation ? Close observers of human nature are so because they love it, because they are keenly interested in what men and women are like. The facts of life fascinate them as facts — " theirs not to reason why." Evidently that is not Mr. Shaw's nature. He takes little, if any, pleasure in the mere contemplation of the conUdie humaine and the registration of its minute peculiarities. His pleasure only begins with the reasoning why. He recalls a certain brilliant talker, described by R. L. Stevenson, who was perpetually interrupting his interlocutor with " Wait a moment, I should have a theory for that." The only difference is that Mr. Shaw never needs this moment's grace ; his theory arrives with the fact, and sometimes precedes it. The ordinary everyday surface of the universe is to him only a spring-board from which he jumps into the space of ratiocination — his own peculiar space, a space of four dimensions. This is not the frame of mind for seeing facts clearly and reporting them faithfully. Whatever other qualities a dramatist may require, he must have something in him of the painter, must desire to reproduce what he sees, just as it is, merely because it is a pleasure to him to see it as it is. But Mr. Shaw is never in love with the thing as it is; he is in love with his own thoughts about it 70 DRAMA AND LIFE How, for that matter, can he love the thing when his thoughts have a perpetual tendency to tell him that it is a wrong thing ? Most of the facts of human nature seem to Mr. Shaw to be egregious blunders. Our ideals are wrong, our conduct is irrational, we " found our institutions on the ideals suggested to our imagina- tion by our half-satisfied passions," instead of on a genuinely scientific natural history. The right theory of life and conduct, which its author is fond of calling Shawism or the " Shavian philosophy," is revealed to us in Mr. Shaw's plays. Apparently this philosophy, though it is not without its obligations to Schopenhauer and Ibsen and Nietzsche, is mainly of Mr. Shaw's own invention. But one need not discuss it here, for it does not affect the question of Mr. Shaw's dramaturgic quality. Before one can consider its philosophic content, a play must give the illusion of life, and to put it most favourably, in Mr. Shaw's plays that illusion is intermittent If, for example, you take Candida, one of the best of Mr. Shaw's plays, written a few years ago, but only recently performed in London, you get the illusion of life from some of the characters and some parts of the action, but not from all the characters or from the action as a whole. The young wife of a hard-working East End clergyman finds that her husband's religious activity and zeal for good works do not help her to live her own life. (Every young wife who has seen Nora in A DolFs House must now live her own life.) A boyish poet woos her, offers her the large and liberal life of romance, all rhapsody and colour — a love, in short, that shall be richer than her present mere sentimentalisation of con- jugal duty. In the end Candida decides in favour of the prosaic life, and remains with her husband. She SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 71 arrives at this conclusion by a strict process of ratiocination, summoning parson and poet to her presence, weighing their respective claims upon her affections, and finally opting for the parson, not because he is her husband, but because he needs her most. Of these three characters, Candida is real — the sensible, helpful "managing" woman that everybody knows — and so is the parson ; but the poet seems a mere patchwork from biographies of Shelley, a walking symbol of the poetic temperament. The glaring unreality, however, of the play is its denouement, with its preposterous assumption that such a choice as Candida's is to be made by reason instead of by feeling. In real life the sole question (our conventional morality as to the obligation of marriage vows being ex hypothesi ruled out) would be, Which of the two men does the woman love? Passion, not ratiocination, would decide it. But Mr. Shaw seems wholly incapable of repre- senting passion. He thinks the world and the stage make too much of it already ; he reproves it severely in more than one of his prefaces. In that case, he ought to avoid dramatic situations which are essentially situations of passion ; to drain them of their passion and then fill them with the workings of the pure intellect deprives them of all resemblance to life. The fact is, a writer who represents men and women carrying on their lives by the light of reason is offering us a world as fantastic as anything imagined by Swift or M. Jules Verne or Mr. H. G. Wells. A " scientific natural history " that leaves out of account our subconscious states, our animal appetites, the unchastened will-to-live, all the blind forces of which human action is the resultant, strikes one as a fearful kind of wild-fowl. Of the existence and potency 72 DRAMA AND LIFE of these brute natural forces Mr. Shaw must of course be as well aware as anyone else ; only they do not happen to fit in with his dramatic method. He has tried to represent one of them in his Man and Super- man, and has signally failed. This work is Mr. Shaw's response to a casual suggestion that he should write a Don Juan drama. Nowadays, says Mr. Shaw, the relations of Don Juan and his victims are reversed. It is woman who pursues, man who is her prey. Nature, working out her own ends, has contrived (it is the familiar theory of Schopenhauer) that man, with all his boasted superiority, shall be the helpless fly caught in the web of the spider — woman. And lo ! in illustrat- ing this theory Mr. Shaw gives us a heroine who has not a particle of womanly attraction. It is true that her weak victim is constantly declaring himself sub- jugated, constantly crying out in affright that he is caught in the toils ; but we feel all the time that he only does so because Mr. Shaw's thesis requires it. To give dramatie existence and force to the typical woman of Mr. Shaw's case you must be able to paint passion, the obscurer instincts and emotions of sex, and that is just what Mr. Shaw always fails to do. Of course, the play is full of good things — Mr. Shaw could not be dull if he tried — though its very best thing, an ironic dialogue in Hades presenting a new analysis of Old Nick, can hardly be said to belong to the play, but to be tacked on to it from outside. When all is said, however, it remains true that for sheer energy and fineness of brain, as well as for pioneering quality — the spirit which attacks fresh problems and carries the drama into unexplored regions — we have no one on the English stage comparable to Mr. Shaw. Our drama needs pioneers even more SOME FRENCH AND ENGLISH PLAYS 73 than expert dramatists. And it is for that reason that we all ought to welcome such experiments as Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton's Warp and Woof, which was doubtless weak from the point of view of technical skill, but which did attempt to deal with an actual question of social economics. How far Mrs. Lyttelton's picture