The start of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones was not less difficult than that of Mr. Sydney Grundy. He could get only short and light pieces accepted at first. The earliest play of his within the memory of London play-goers was performed at the Court Theatre, and was entitled, A Clerical Error. The second was an idyll in two short acts, called An Old Master.

The young author found it necessary to seek refuge in provincial theatres. The world remained unwilling to learn his name—a somewhat undistinguished name, and easily forgotten. When, in 1882, Mr. Archer included him in his Dramatists of To-day, there were many who asked, “Who is this Mr. Jones?”

It was then he worked at melodrama. He served seven years with Laban, and married Leah, upheld by the hope of one day obtaining Rachel. This was his apprenticeship. As Mr. Grundy had learnt his craft by adapting our French authors, Mr. Jones learnt his by writing great popular dramas. It was in this genre, one which gives full scope to the imagination, that he came to know his own individual temperament, and developed those poetical faculties which were to be put to better uses; it was by this unlikely pathway that he found the road to Shakespearian emotions. His qualities and his defects date from this time.

The great success of The Silver King set Mr. Jones at liberty. I have neither seen nor read the piece, which has not been printed. It is a good melodrama, I understand. People found in it, together with some new types and coups de théâtre, observation, gaiety, a rare freedom of handling, some really moving touches, and, here and there, flashes of imagination and poetry.

Mr. Jones thought he could now take a step further, and please himself, having succeeded in pleasing the public. He wrote Saints and Sinners. The little Margate Theatre was the scene of the first performance of the new play in September 1884, this first performance having for object only the perfecting of the actors in their parts, and the testing of the public. The piece passed thence to the Vaudeville, where it held the bills until the middle of the following year, much talked about and applauded.

It marks an important date, not merely in the career of Mr. Jones, but in the history of the English drama. It denotes the revival of active hostility, in that ancient conflict between the Puritans and the stage, which began in 1580, and will last as long as English literature and English civilisation. This conflict had assumed a sluggish and inactive character in the nineteenth century. Shattered by the scorn of the Puritans, the stage had not dared to raise its arm for a blow. Suddenly it took the offensive, and carried the war into the enemy’s camp. Saints and Sinners is only the first of a series of dramas and comedies, in which Mr. Jones has fearlessly attacked the hypocrisies of religion, in their most characteristic form. He has let fly some darts, indeed, which have sped even further, and which he has not shot at random. Has he not declared, in his high-spirited and witty preface to The Case of Rebellious Susan, that the theatre was perhaps destined to succeed to the tottering pulpit, and to teach morality to the professional moralists?

Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.

He seems to say—and this boldness does not displease in a man of talent—“We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed.”

What Mr. Jones satirised in Saints and Sinners, was the money-making spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own stamp.

Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative stores by which his shop is being ruined. “I keep up his chapel. He ought to keep up my custom.” Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic emotions of the dénouement, when he wishes to express to the minister they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday—just one word about the co-operative stores!

Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason and act otherwise at bottom, than did the great king when he allied his throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved successful—at least, for a time.

“You know, my dear Prabble,” Hoggard says to his friend, “it is we who are the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is.” And what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy, which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our Classe Moyenne, is regarded with real contempt by superior intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and—I shall venture to add—like creed.

In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand) would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be robbed by a poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real life, but from The Vicar of Wakefield,—Goldsmith’s irrational, delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in Les Miserables, and it is not at these times I like him best. I acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter’s sin, and relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There is real grandeur in this self-abasement—a dignity full of impressiveness in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate, they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, “Christians, will you never learn to forgive?”—the words thrill me, and I change my mind again—I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the pitiless.

Mr. Jones’s talent achieved a fresh advance in Judah, produced on May 21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in Saints and Sinners, are used as motives again in Judah, with great power, and form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the rôle of clairvoyante and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried perhaps to the point of terrorising,—she has abundant excuses for adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an imposture which she loathes.

We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung, nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when, by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become too real, the young girl’s heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her—we are all for the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.

These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, “I believe what I say.” This faith, which carries away the uncultured, inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in his words.

This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a superior being—privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate efforts of Vashti’s father to get some food to her during her fast. At once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done just the opposite. Judah’s first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy. Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience, terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.

To all appearances Judah and Vashti are triumphant: they are to be united; Lord Asgarby’s daughter, the subject of the imposture, is cured because she believes herself cured; the world pays its homage at once to Vashti’s miraculous powers, and to the virtue and eloquence of the man she is to marry. What is lacking? Peace of mind, self-respect. In what poignant terms Judah recounts to Vashti his mental agony! With what imagination of poet, or of the lost, does he give voice and form to all the terrors of the Puritan mind,—those terrors which, for some mere trifle, some shadow of a sin, so tortured Bunyan, and prostrated Cromwell, pallid, gasping, on the bare boards of his chamber! Yet love has not gone from Judah’s heart. Better Hell with her than Heaven without!

The champion of science, Dr. Jopp, for his part, has instituted an inquiry into the whole thing; he is inclined to bracket Dethic and his daughter together. Judah becomes aware of what is in preparation, is free to separate his lot from that of Vashti; but he does not do so. Then when Jopp, on the entreaty of his old friend Lord Asgarby, has consented to spare Vashti, it would be easy for Judah to maintain silence, and to accept, together with his wife, the favours with which they are being overwhelmed. But no, he must speak; he must confess himself! The confession issues with the explosive violence born of long compression, in a strange frenzy of humiliation and of repentance, impetuous, vibrating, almost triumphant, like a blare of trumpets. Beyond the awful but not impassable ordeal, the guilty man and woman see the divine horizon of paradise regained.

“You won’t? Then hear me, hear me, all of you! I lied! I lied! Take back my false oath; let the truth return to my lips! Let my heart find peace and my eyelids sleep again! You all know me now for what I am; let all who honoured me and followed me know me too. Hide nothing! Let it be blazed about the city. (Pause. To Lord A.) Take back your gift. (Gives deed to Lord A.) We will take nothing from you! Nothing! Nothing! (Goes to Vashti.) It’s done. (Takes her hand.) Our path is straight; now we can walk safely all our lives.”

It is the pride of penitence, and this expression of feeling has never been given a prouder tone. In the previous play, Saints and Sinners, old Fletcher, on learning of his daughter’s shame, had cried out, “How shall I ever hold up my head again?” To hold up his head, that is an Englishman’s first need. And when Letty Fletcher had effaced her transgression by dint of heroism and devotion, she said, not, “I have expiated my sin,” but, “I have conquered.” By such expressions it is that I can see that the artificial psychology of the drama is yielding place to a truer and more real psychology. Hitherto, almost everything that has been written in England, would seem to have had for object, to conceal and not to make clear the English mind. A new generation of writers has come forth, whose work it will be to depict this mind as it really is, and to make its confession with the fierce sincerity of Judah.

The Crusaders, produced on November 2, 1891, is a piece of quite another stamp. It is not the unfolding of a character contending with circumstances: it is a satirical representation of a côterie, a group, a social movement. This kind of piece has but a first act, in which the theme is expounded and a brilliant array of characters presented to the audience. The plot of The Crusaders is a mere imbroglio, fastened on somewhat artificially to a satirical and ethical homily; it turns upon an open window and shut door, which endanger the reputation of a young widow. Unfortunately, we do not take much interest in this young widow, or in the two men who love her; one of them is a faded copy of Judah, the other is nothing at all.

But what is a mere accessory in the view of the ordinary playgoer, constitutes the essential part of the play for the critic, for the historian of the drama and of life.

When the time comes for depicting the state of English society during the last years of the nineteenth century, this curious first act of The Crusaders will certainly be drawn upon for material. There will be found in it the confusion of elements that stir and mingle, without uniting, in the vague social movement of this period: enthusiasm lacking a clear end in view, devotion lacking a definite object, a pilgrimage which leads no one knows whither, and on which no single pilgrim will reach his destination. It deals with the reformation of London; a programme so vast and complex as to be none at all. This association counts amongst its members a number of pretty women who play at charity; young idlers for whom the reformation of London is merely an opportunity for flirting, just like private theatricals, tableaux vivants, and garden parties; pushing women who turn the occasion to their own profit by bringing about relations with this “dear Duchess of Launceston,” and who raise themselves thus in the world, step by step. One of these good ladies, Mrs. Campion Blake, invites an old statesman to dinner, to meet a kind of apostle whom she defines as a “new variety of inspired idiot—something between an angel, a fool, and a poet! And atrociously in earnest! a sort of Shelley from Peckham Rye. He’s rather good fun, if you take him in small doses.” After dinner, an American lady gymnast will give a performance in the dining-room. “She’s adorable. She gives drawing-room gymnastics after dinner. It isn’t the least indelicate—after the first shock.” Be sure the Minister will accept the invitation. He is quite ready to reform London, provided only that no one calls upon him to alter his own mode of life. He acknowledges that he has no ideals. No ideals! his hearers exclaim horrified. Alas! no; had he not become a member of the House of Commons in his twenty-second year! Which of the two is Mr. Jones turning into ridicule? Idealism, or the House of Commons? Both, I fancy. Why should there not be a double irony for the clever, just as there is a galimatias double for the dull?

In this movement there are many who are in earnest. First of all we have the credulous, ingenuous Ingarfield, dragging in his train Una, the petticoated apostle of the prison and the house of ill-fame, the young virgin whose joy it is to attempt the conversion of rogues and prostitutes. But the most real type is that of Palsam. This individual is wholly repulsive. A voluntary spy, a detective by his own choice, he is the incarnation of that spirit of sneaking, which rages so cruelly in certain sections of English society. Basile, in comparison with him, is a “good sort,” an amiable companion. He stoops to expedients to which an agent de mœurs would blush to have recourse against an habituée of Saint Lazare; and it is against women of the world, too, that he resorts to them! He is so insensible to indignity that a box on the ear has no effect upon him. How do people put up with him? How is it they let him into their houses? In France we would throw him out without troubling about his calumnies, which would be welcomed only by the lowest kind of newspaper; or rather, a complete Palsam, a perfect Palsam could not be found in France. In England he is a reality and a power. But is he so vile as he seems, as at first we are inclined to regard him? No; his conduct seems mean to the utmost degree; but consider, please, two things: first, that he acts thus, quite disinterestedly; secondly, that he deprives himself of those incorrect enjoyments of which he is so bent upon depriving others. Give him the benefit of these two admissions, and, little by little, the man will begin to wear for you a different aspect. The ascetic will rehabilitate the spy, you will be forced to find a kind of heroism in his meanness, and to admire, while you hate, his hideous virtue, which is perhaps one of the hundred ways of doing good to men in their own despite.

Perhaps it was not Mr. Jones’s intention to suggest so many reflections by his Palsam, but whether he wishes it or no, his work is thus suggestive, and it is the special note of this very straightforward, very masculine, very generous satire, that it never ridicules the enemy without letting us see the redeeming traits in his character, and the good motives which he might plead in self-defence, thus putting the real man before us whole and entire.

Mr. Jones ridicules the would-be reformers of London, and represents their efforts as resulting in a pitiable fiasco. But he has not contended, of course, that London is all right as it is, and that the bringing of the great city into a state of moral health has ceased to be one of the dark problems which demand, and baffle, the good intentions of honest folk. He himself has indicated a solution, and the true solution; “To reform London, it is necessary, first of all, that each of us should reform himself.” Such is the moral of the piece; and this sermon is worth more than many others.

Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones’s popularity has gone on increasing during the last four years. The Tempter, it is true, gave the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised splendours of the mise en scène, and the admirable resources of his own talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in bringing his audience round to his way of thinking. In the Triumph of the Philistines, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the public would not have known à quoi se prendre, had not the piece been given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the état d’âme, of another nation, differentiating it from his own.

The Case of Rebellious Susan is a very amusing comedy. I know of none with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should be one in it, he tells her—indeed, there should be several; they have but to be looked for.

I don’t know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy’s researches. I, for my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon with certain differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her nature much more of pride than of love. Susan’s grief is not a tearful grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first. She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies; I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the end to lay down the moral of the whole business.

Very different is the heroine of The Masqueraders, who, as impersonated by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season of 1894. Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength and oppress her will.

Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write Judah; he returned to it in The Masqueraders, not from listlessness or unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his wife at a game of écarté—is not this melodrama? But what cares the author of The Masqueraders, whether the incidents be improbable and his situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the “well-made” piece; he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing. Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a store-room of materials. As for logic, it may be left to the professors who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements, amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements are—Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of human life.

And if the critic press too hard upon the author of The Masqueraders, he has recourse for his defence—and quite rightly—to the great name which is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted, Shakespeare’s plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas, traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some passing glimpses of real life.

To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw Judah and The Crusaders in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this cloud, he has already played a great part in the resuscitation of the drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists; the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his generation and of his race.

CHAPTER XI

And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of his youth, or even from such pieces as The Squire and Lord and Commons, to a work like The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. His career as an author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.

In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H. J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of others.[13] He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving’s company and then with the Bancrofts’.

After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of plays then in vogue,—farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an articulated skeleton. It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed, and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely, that was weak in Mr. Pinero’s earliest efforts.

The Squire was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.

Lords and Commons carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her. She has a double end in view—to win back her husband’s love in her new guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to that other, thus torturing him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his heart torn in twain, to a rendez-vous with his former victim to obtain her pardon. When Mr. Pinero was content to write a dénouement of this kind, who could have divined in him the future creator of Mrs. Tanqueray?

But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the same province of the drama as Divorçons, sometimes on a higher plane, sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and D’Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. The Magistrate is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in appearance),—this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even to English humour. In Dandy Dick and in The Hobby-Horse, I find, in the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur,—a woman jockey,—whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our répertoire. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in The Times and The Cabinet Minister. I have read these two pieces a number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration. But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm; and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon’s part is not to accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties, and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is through his carefulness in aspirating his h’s, his punctiliousness in the matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants’ livery, of his stud, and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would be—failure. And he is on his guard.

I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero’s comedies, although very pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they are looked at side by side with that first act of The Crusaders, in which the satire is so modern and so full of life.

Mr. Pinero had not renounced the serious drama, and all his theatrical friends, watching his progress in light comedy, yet expected to see him in this field in which, so far, he had achieved but half-successes. On April 24, 1889, the Garrick opened its doors with a drama of his, entitled The Profligate. Marvels were expected from the new theatre which John Hare had erected for himself and his company. As had been the case with the opening of the Prince of Wales’s, it was felt that the first night at the Garrick ought to mark a date in the history of the drama. The critics, “old” and “new,” were enthusiastic. “At last,” exclaimed Mr. Archer, “we have a real play; a play which has faults, with a third act which has none!” Those triumphant assertions, made in the heat of the moment, must unfortunately be taken with a considerable discount. The Profligate is a melodrama, treated with delicacy and distinction, but incontestably a melodrama in every aspect and in every part, that wonderful third act included; it is even one of the most fanciful, most romantic melodramas that have been written in England for fifteen years.

Whom shall I recognise as an English character, or even as a human type? Hugh Murray, the sentimental lawyer, who loses his heart at first sight to a schoolgirl, and who buries this beautiful passion in the depths of his heart, to disinter it just at the wrong moment? Janet?—who has given herself, without the temptation of love, to a seducer in the forties, and who, during the remainder of the piece perseveres in the accomplishment of acts of delicacy, of renunciation and of self-abnegation without number, veritable tours de force—morale. Leslie?—the heroine of the play, a schoolgirl who giddily exclaims, a quarter of an hour before her wedding, that she wonders whether the world will seem of the same colour when she is the wife of Duncan Renshaw; and who, after a month spent tête-à-tête with her husband in a villa near Florence, where a fresco of Michael Angelo is to be seen, seems to know life better than we do ourselves. I know, of course, the explanation that is forthcoming: only a single moment was required to alter this character, to bring light to that one. It is precisely in this explanation that I find the mark of melodrama. In serious psychology, it is not so easy to believe in these “moments”—in these sudden revelations, these flash-like crises, which transform an individuality completely, annulling nature and education.

And what is one to say of the “Profligate” himself? He is just the traditional libertine of all the innumerable English novels published during the last fifty years, nor is he unknown to our own old Boulevard du Crime. We see him coldly and deliberately cynical up to the moment when love touches him with its magic ring. That is a kind of conception that has passed its prime. Nowadays we are inclined to regard Don Juan as a kind of dupe, the plaything of woman from puberty to decrepitude. We picture him to ourselves more engaging when he first begins to sin, and less easy to convert when he has become hardened to it. We find it difficult to believe that thirty days of wedded bliss suffice to awake a conscience which has lain dormant for forty years. If the sense of morality were innate, it must have shown itself earlier; to have been acquired and to have reached such a degree of perfection and sensitiveness, it would have needed more time than the average duration of a honeymoon.

The situation which delighted so the English critics may be thus described. The seducer’s wife has, without knowing it, given shelter to his victim. She wishes to help her to confront the man who has wronged her, and her heart breaks when she sees upon whom the penalty has to fall. I admit that the scenes leading up to this discovery, contrived with great ability, produce a veritable anguish in the spectator’s mind, and that the scene between the husband and the wife, which follows after it, is on the same plane of emotion. But by what a number of improbable coincidences had this precious moment to be bought! Chance had to take Janet to Paddington station at the same moment as Leslie and her brother; Chance had to give this same Janet as “companion” to Miss Stonehay, Leslie’s school friend; to send the Stonehays travelling towards the environs of Florence and the villa of the Renshaws; to synchronise Janet’s illness and Dunstan’s departure so that the two women may interest themselves in each other. And it is Chance again that makes Janet see Dunstan in Lord Dangars’ company in order that the confusion may arise regarding the two men, and that this Lord Dangars, who is Dunstan’s friend, may become engaged to Irene Stonehay, the friend of Leslie. And even after Chance has made all these thoughtful arrangements, Renshaw’s happiness might yet be saved, and this terrible danger by which it is threatened be avoided (and this great scene of Mr. Pinero’s never come to pass), if only Janet were allowed to go as she desires, and as good sense and modesty make it right that she should. What is it that makes her stay? Who is it that advises her to bring about this scandal? No one but Leslie, and I cannot but think her ideas on the subject singularly gross for so refined a person. This advice she gives is grounded on the slenderest and most irrational of arguments; a score of conclusive replies could be given to the pitiful considerations she puts forward. But Janet has to be convinced. Otherwise, what would become of the crisis of this “Faultless Third Act”?

What surprises me most of all is the number of useless excrescences with which the author has encumbered his piece. What is the point of this solicitor who bores us, and who gives himself such important airs throughout the play without having the slightest influence upon the development of the plot? When, by a final stroke of chance, Leslie has come to know of the absurd love of which he is the victim, why should she let him see that she has heard? All she can find to say to him is, “Good-night.” And “Good-night” is all he has to say in reply. This scene in four words could only be sublime or grotesque: I am inclined towards the latter view of it.

Had I been present at one of the first performances of The Profligate, I should have imagined myself in the presence of a talent that had lost its way, turning its back on the goal to which it should direct its steps, seeking beyond the confines of reality for some imaginative source of tears. I should have been wrong. Mr. Pinero is of a reflective turn of mind; he learns from his mistakes, and is not blinded by his successes. Before the echoes of the applause which greeted The Profligate in London had yet died out in the provinces and abroad, Mr. Pinero was at work upon another drama, conceived after a fashion quite different—quite contrary, in fact—a drama in half tints, with realistic touches; a sort of novel in dialogue. This was Lady Bountiful, produced on March 7, 1891.

In Lady Bountiful there is no question of any great fundamental truth, no great human interest. It is a very unequal piece of work, in turn very moving and very irritating, for of the two women in whom its interest centres, it happens unfortunately that one has the sympathy of the author and the other that of the public. But it showed, at least, that its author had found its way into the domain of psychological observation.

It was on May 27, 1893, that The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was performed for the first time at the St. James’s Theatre. It must be said, to the credit of the public, that its success was immediate, universal, and continued. The critic whom I have quoted so often exclaimed in a burst of joy, that here was a piece “which Dumas might sign without a blush.” No one is entitled to speak in the name of our greatest dramatist; but quite recently, when I re-read The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, I said to myself that if the greatest gift of M. Alexandre Dumas was that of embodying deep psychological and social observation in splendid eloquence or dazzling wit, this rare faculty is to be found almost in an equal degree in Pinero’s masterpiece.

“The limitations of Mrs. Tanqueray,” Mr. Archer goes on to say, “are really the limitations of the dramatic form.” I would go further still, and say that such a piece enlarges the province of the theatre. Minute details are to be found in it, brought out by intelligent and carefully thought-out acting, which one would have regarded as too small to attract attention on the stage, shades that the theatre had left to the novel up till then. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is, like Lady Bountiful, an acted novel, but a novel excellently constructed. Its four acts are its four chief chapters, and it should be noticed that the first two of these chapters are purely analytical; but emotion is introduced imperceptibly into the play, and we step from psychology into drama without being conscious of the passage.

It is not the old, old subject of the courtesan in love, but that of the mistress raised to the dignity of wife. One of Mr. Pinero’s clever notions is that of having in a sense left passion out of the question. It is clear, of course, that Tanqueray is very sensible of Paula’s personal attractions. Who would not be, in the presence of so charming a woman? But there is another feeling mingled with this. He is neither a satyr nor a stoic, he assures his friend Cayley; he has a quite rational affection for “Mrs. Jarman”; hitherto she has never met a man who has been good to her; he, Tanqueray, will be good to her, that is all. Is he absolutely sincere? Is his affection quite so rational as he asserts? Cayley has his own ideas upon the subject, and so have we. Mr. Pinero has been charged with not having told us to what extent philanthropy—the craze for redeeming—entered into Tanqueray’s marriage, to what extent the desire to have a pretty woman all to himself. But after all, was it incumbent on the author to give us Tanqueray’s psychology? Was it not rather an indication of his æsthetic sense to keep the husband in the background, to leave him in half-tints so as not to mar the effect of the principal figure? That excellent actor, Mr. Alexander, seems to have felt this, for he effaced himself in the presence of Mrs. Campbell, though quite capable of filling the stage unassisted, as he showed in The Masqueraders and many other pieces. In regard to Tanqueray’s character, this, however, should be noted, that, being rich and young enough to keep a mistress without looking ridiculous, he might, if he chose, have become Paula’s lover. If he decided to make her his wife, it was first of all to give her pleasure, but also to satisfy a sense of devotion and of virtue in himself. This I believe to be quite true to life. He was born to believe in women—not to be deceived by them, but to deceive himself in their regard: which is a different thing, and perhaps more serious. His first wife was like a nun. He ends with a courtesan. The law of moral oscillation requires that he should go from the iceberg (it is thus the first Mrs. Tanqueray is described to us) to a volcano. Like all weak men, he would play the part of un homme fort. With Paula’s arm passed through his, he is ready to look the world in the face; but when on the eve of their wedding she comes to see him at eleven o’clock at night, his first remark is, “What will your coachman say?” This remark lights up his whole character, and for my part I require nothing more.

But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how suggestive, is everything she says—even her most trifling remarks; with what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. There are women who traverse muddy ways with so light a step that they do not sink in them, and that one but guesses where they have passed from little stains upon the tips of their shoes. One or two traits reveal to us the irregularity of Paula’s life; the mobility of her impressions, the manner at once fanciful and passive in which she allows chance to regulate her actions. She has forgotten to order her dinner; her cook, a “beast” who “detests” her, has pretended to believe that she was not dining at home, and has given himself an evening out. So she has got herself up in grande toilette and has taken up her position in her dining-room, her feet on the fender. Here she has fallen asleep and dreamt. She tells us her dream later, the while she sups off the dessert of the farewell dinner Tanqueray had given to three old bachelor friends. To sup instead of dining, does not this in itself suggest a whole conception of life? Whoever gets into the way of it will never be able to reconcile himself to the respectable regularity of the family joint.

Thus it is with her in everything. She has acquired a certain ton, now brusque, now bewitching, an air of Bohemianism, and a whole host of opinions which could never tally with the rôle of married woman; and these characteristics have become embedded in her nature. Her irregularity of word and deed goes with a like incoherence of thought and feeling. Sombre moods succeed suddenly to extreme gaiety and vanish as suddenly again. The idea of suicide comes to her; next moment she bursts into laughter at the sight of the mournful expression she has evoked on Aubrey’s countenance. She has so serious a way of saying the wildest things, and says the most serious things so frivolously, that you don’t know what to believe; her every word leaves you under her spell, and this effect is intensified more and more. She is a really “good” woman, Tanqueray will declare just now to his friend. It is neither an illusion on his part nor even an exaggeration. Paula is “good” and loyal; she has kept back from Aubrey nothing of her past. Better still, she has spent this last day writing out a general confession, with a precision and scrupulousness in which there is a touch of childishness, a touch of cynicism, and a touch, I think, of heroism. She weighs the letter with a smile. It is heavy! She wonders if the post would take all that for a penny! She says to Aubrey, quite simply, without affectation of any kind, without any airs of tragedy about her, that she wants him to read this letter and to think over it; and then, on the morrow, at the last moment, if he changes his mind, let him send her a line before eleven o’clock, and—“I—I’ll take the blow!” Aubrey puts the letter into the fire and she throws her arms round his neck; she tells him quite frankly she had counted upon his doing so, an admission which would quite spoil her “effect,” had she sought one.

Has the question ever been better set? Think of the Mariage d’Olympe. The insolent and hypocritical gueuse stood revealed before she had uttered half a dozen words. We knew she could never become acclimatised to that family of honest folk, amongst whom fortune had thrown her. Where, then, was the problem? All Augier’s wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman. Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence of a grande passion, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not succeed?

We learn in the second act. First of all, because, once she is married, Paula gets bored. The world will not visit her, and custom does not permit of her taking the initiative. She is a kind of prisoner in the beautiful country-house in Surrey. The monotonous tranquillity of “home” oppresses her after the feverish, exciting existence she has led; the quiet wearies her to death. Here is her account of her day’s occupations from hour to hour.

“In the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my orders to the tradespeople. At lunch, you and Ellean. In the afternoon, a novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive—if fine! Tea—you and Ellean. Then two hours of dusk; then dinner—you and Ellean. Then a game of Bésique, you and I, while Ellean reads a religious book in a dull corner. Then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from Ellean, three figures suddenly rise—‘Good-night! good-night! good-night!’ (Imitating a kiss.) ‘God bless you!’ Ah!”

With Cayley she speaks out more strongly. He asks her how she is.

Paula (walking away to the window): “Oh, a dog’s life, my dear Cayley, mine.”

Drummle: “Eh?”

Paula: “Doesn’t that define a happy marriage? I’m sleek, well-kept, well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon. (Gazing out of the window.) Oh, dear me!”

Drummle: “H’m, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The view from the terrace is superb.”

Paula: “Yes, I can see London.”

Drummle: “London! Not quite so far, surely?”

Paula: “I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (Impulsively) Oh, Cayley! do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman’s yacht, when we lay off”—(Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her).

Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever want to be married? Because the other women of her world were not. The title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?

But these are Paula’s least serious trials. There is another woman in the house—the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing—she ought to love her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good. It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her into deeds of rashness and folly.

A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible (it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character, embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to learn about her.

When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in which the young girl’s heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl is one of the former lovers of the woman!

This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious—after the author has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of analysis—to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable, crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant land:—She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees herself tête-à-tête with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had suffered and had wrought.... I shall never forget this scene. How her hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of hers, that morbidezza which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell’s province as an actress is more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating delicious fear that I would describe as the curiosité de souffrir. You feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the victim and the instrument of destiny.

It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt, justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a dénouement,—not a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop, provisionally, with this admirable Mrs. Tanqueray, which submits and solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to its natural close a drama of domestic life.

CHAPTER XII