The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M. Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaître, and in what respects he differs from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it, now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more blasé than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate principles which, with us, are taken for granted, – to accomplish, in fact, a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the Dramaturgie of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.

His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a meeting-place, a rendez-vous, of all the arts. Its province, he holds, is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds, provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be folly to judge it by æsthetic laws. One does not take the height of a sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end? Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that they are sincere and independent.

Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment, and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a dilemma. “Either you show me on the stage,” he says, “what I see and go through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it – what do I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of truth and reality?” To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges us to observe – that is to say, to see and feel more intensely – what we see and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth, the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to the side of Rarahu or of Chrysanthème, an infallible instinct tells the reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be endowed with the same critical instinct?

Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama, Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth – it was neither realistic nor idealistic, but just “fantastic.” Mr. Archer took up Matthew Arnold’s idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral; the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got’s declaration, that our drama was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all. Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.

He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards better things, towards a life superior to our common life, – the life, perhaps, of to-morrow.

He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.

His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What is one to think of Diderot’s paradox about the actors’ art, and what do actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer, or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic? What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager, and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own opinions are at variance with his.

This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer’s rôle has consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted by Ibsen and Björnson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent, as it were, a character of scientific precision.

The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house, doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.

From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating sometimes a second and a third time the same inept vaudeville. A melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became the Ticket of Leave Man, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the indifference of the English pit, without anybody’s attempting to draw a moral from the event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the idea of international literary property had been started, and was making way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it, an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.

These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English drama.

It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the flair of the actor-manager.

From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in the domain of our Haute Comédie.

The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would be to spoil them —sint ut sunt aut non sint. It is different with the pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of work having a certain fascination for the playwright.

To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the performance of Dora on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself bought them from M. Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British amour propre. All the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, “But by jingo if we do.” The idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. “By the time we got out at Amiens to drink our bouillon,” one of them tells us, “the play was fully planned out.” And, under the title of Diplomacy, Dora enjoyed an even more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.

This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a new dénouement resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the two races, the two arts, and the two codes of morality.

This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.

CHAPTER IX

The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day – Sydney Grundy; his First Efforts – Adaptations: The Snowball, In Honour Bound, A Pair of Spectacles, The Bunch of Violets– His Original Plays – His Style – His Humour – His Ethical Ideal —An Old Jew—The New Woman– A Talent which has not done growing.

If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips, with scarcely a moment’s pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time to study the vagaries of individual minds. A plébiscite of West-End playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.

They all began work about the same time – a score of years ago, as nearly as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical autodidactes, but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are only half-way along their arduous paths.

So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who adheres still – largely through his antecedents, and partly through his natural disposition – to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of the French: with Sydney Grundy.

If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity – an affray with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three acts, entitled The Snowball. There was question, in the first case, of an adaptation of La Petite Marquise, which he wrote in collaboration with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain nothing more frankly moral than La Petite Marquise. The story of the piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its moral is a moral of – shall I say? – fastidious abstention; a moral it is difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when passion has lost its fire and its poison.

It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had “passed” the Petite Marquise in French in all her original licence; he refused her his sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater, perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people who were destined to keep it in mind.

The Snowball is an English version of Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa femme. Mr. Sydney Grundy’s originality consists in his having introduced into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this species – cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening to or reading The Snowball, you look out for a single trait of English manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.

The well-merited success of The Snowball retarded Mr. Grundy’s dramatic career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation – so ungrateful in those days – for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter, obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of another.

The first in date, In Honour Bound, is at once a condensation and a critical commentary on Scribe’s piece, Une Chaîne. The heroine is a young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl’s guardian gives his consent. Now – and it is here that Scribe’s hand is discovered – this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands, under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that he never for a moment loses his sang-froid, his grace, or his wit. At bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.

There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly, breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence, cunningly distilled.

A Pair of Spectacles is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a translation) of Les Petits Oiseaux, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through, sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a more moderate estimate of average human nature – prepared now and again to come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow’s future daughter-in-law congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. “You are so good!” she cries; “but people are so ungrateful!” “What does that matter?” she makes answer; “I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my window-sill. They never say ‘Thanks.’ Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from feeding them again next day.” At the dénouement, he recalls this lesson read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience. The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in that – the sparrows don’t say “Thanks!”

It is a symbol, nothing more nor less, – a symbol in a play by Labiche! Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written Solness, the Master-Builder! – n’est ce pas un comble! A second symbol is added to the first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory, the misanthrope. At the dénouement, his own come back to him from the optician’s. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of these pairs of spectacles. The author’s idea is obvious to all. Our mind is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend them again.

In France the Petits Oiseaux had a provincial success. In Paris the piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at the Comédie Française some years ago, the critics thought it childish.