The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our amour propre. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with this one. Namely, that Les Petits Oiseaux is a fairy tale, and that Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands – I speak figuratively, never having seen the author of Perrichan and La Grammaire– were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and this is why I think the copy is better than the original.

The third adaptation which has struck me is that of Montjoye. So far back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of Mammon, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye’s son, and the introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his employer’s secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master’s master.

Mammon is certainly a better made piece than Montjoye, but this was not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his belief in mankind. “That is all rubbish,” Montjoye declares, – “Tout cela, c’est du bleu!” Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be expressed clearly in black and white, he calls “Bleu.” Poetical illusions, childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities, sonorous and empty sayings – “Voila le royaume de bleu!”

Thus Montjoye, “ou l’homme fort,” declaimed, in language which now seems somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed rôles with Saladin. He is the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous, he is the virtuoso of sickly sensibility – the Paganini of the sonorous and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the Royaume du Bleu. His Tartufferie is social rather than religious. He is not content to issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir Philip Marchant, the hero of A Bunch of Violets.

Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree, – like a college boy who has been out of bounds, – and who sacrifices his financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an adventuress, escorted and aggravated by a Palais Royal husband, would never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would refuse to stand him.

I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects of the vie mondaine and demi-mondaine of 1865 from afar and de chic. Mr. Grundy eliminated this naïve and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.

Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. “What would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?” The objection is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a hair – a method of settling one’s differences with social morality and the criminal code resorted to, as we know, in every country, when no other method is available.

On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler, who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his daughter’s present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five thousand pounds – a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for another twenty-four hours and – who knows? – perhaps escape bankruptcy and suicide. “These violets are not for sale,” he thunders, and the audience is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait the criminal is redeemed and absolved.

Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having, now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to produce some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe’s marionettes moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much like ours. Thus, in The Glass of Fashion, we have depicted for us the havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners, thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger’s peas, in accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter, and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.

In every play of Mr. Grundy’s there is to be found an element which is very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new and very personal in the treatment, the working out, – the individual note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.

This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such abundance through Mr. Grundy’s theatrical work that it floods even his serious dramas. A Fool’s Paradise, that sombre story of poisoning, is so saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish; and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good humour by the sight of her agonies. In The Late Mr. Castello there is nothing at all of tragedy – nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing general indignation.

The author’s wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy, endearing terms used in earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer, nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss – the tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can understand, then, why Mr. Grundy’s plays are popular with the public, without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the truth of his thesis.

One of Mr. Grundy’s peculiarities – and, together with his fancy and his originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in him – consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems us in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.

In Sowing the Wind, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in which the scene is laid.

But I shall cite An Old Jew as the best example of those plays of his which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption, her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent children than of his guilty wife? Has he not run too great a risk in confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say, because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one point, – on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter’s caresses, and the companionship of his son.

He returns therefore, and draws near to his deserted family; he remains in concealment, but close beside them, ready to guard and help them.

His daughter plays ingénue parts in a London theatre, and although the morality of the wings is a little better on the other side of the channel than on ours, the girl is exposed to such proposals as that of a certain Burnside, who asks her calmly and coolly, without any pretence of love or any beating about the bush, to come and live with him. It is time for the father to show himself. But Julius has a method all his own for watching over his daughter. Every evening he goes to see her act, and, the piece over, returns to bed. As for the young man, his dream is of literary glory, and it is now that the second subject is introduced, a satire upon the ways of contemporary English journalism, which is made to go side by side with the domestic drama of the Sterns. How do we find Julius intervening in the interests of his son? First he buys him a rare edition of “The Dramatists of the Sixteenth Century,” which he seems to recommend to him as a model (a mistaken and ill-timed recommendation, as I think, for the reasons I have indicated already in a previous chapter). The young man has written a comedy. Without having read it, and, in consequence, without knowing whether he is encouraging a real or only an imagined vocation, Julius buys a theatre in which the piece may be performed, and he buys also two or three newspapers wherewith to secure its success. Here he assumes proportions that are almost fantastic. His sadness, his wandering and mysterious life, his authority of voice and bearing, that fatal gift of his for turning everything he touches into gold, point to some symbolical intention in the author’s mind, and to a third subject.

It is no longer A Jew; it is The Jew– the Jew rehabilitated, and becoming now, in his turn, a dispenser of social justice. But how does he set about it, this reformer? By loading rascals with gold. Not a good way, truly, of closing the marché aux consciences. And then the whole structure falls to pieces before a very simple reflection. The newspapers that give success are not to be bought. Those that are to be bought don’t give success.

I could proceed with these criticisms, but I am almost ashamed really, as it is, of having gone so far, for they make me look ungrateful. If the play be theoretically bad, how is it that we listen to it, moved or amused, without a moment of fatigue? It is a play without love, for one cannot regard the incident of Burnside’s base proposal as a love scene. A whole act passes in the smoking room of a club, in which we do not catch sight of even the shadow of a petticoat. But one would not miss a line of this frank, direct, live dialogue; one is thrilled by certain sentences, strangely deep or bitterly eloquent, as by lightning flashes; one feels that there are real souls behind these unreal incidents. And then, – shall I acknowledge it? – one is keenly interested in the absurd but affecting spectacle of this father, who thirsts for his daughter’s forehead, as a lover thirsts for the lips of his mistress. Why should not such love as this have its drama and its romance, as it has its anguishes, its sacrifices, and its joys?

The New Woman, played in the autumn of 1894, gives us the same emotions, without suggesting to the mind the same doubts and objections. It had a well-merited success. It is, of course, open to criticism. It is a wholly modern picture of manners, the dernier cri of social satire, serving as a background to the working out of a very old dramatic subject. Does the play bear out the promises of its title? I see in it three episodical types, of which two, at least, are caricatures; an impudent lady-doctor, who takes herself very seriously; a sort of garçon manqué, who smokes and wears her hair short; and a sort of half-faded flirt, who is much more taken up with angling for a husband in troubled waters than with the reformation of society.

I see also a married woman, who bores herself at home, and who tries to appropriate another woman’s husband, by collaborating, or pretending to collaborate, with him on a book. But I have no difficulty in recognising in her the everlasting would-be adulteress, of whom our drama has made such abuse. Her case is complicated with literature; she is the old Blue-Stocking darned anew. Thus escapes us once more the New Woman, this obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen.

The real theme of the play is the folly of a man of the world in marrying a little farmer’s daughter, who has been brought up at home in the country. I have said that it is an old subject, but it is well to remark that it is generally approached from another side. The authors of a certain epoch were fond of describing the origin of one of these passions which level the differences of rank and education. They led the hero and heroine up to the point of marriage, but it is the morrow of their marriage, and the day after that still more, that one would like to hear of. This is precisely what Mr. Grundy sets out to show us, but is his representation of it accurate, lifelike, credible?

In reality, were this marriage to come off, it is very likely that the newly-wedded wife, made giddy by the sudden plunge, would surpass in frivolity those who belong to the gay world into which she has been introduced, and who have lived in it. But this idea would be too true and too simple for the theatre. Or else this little country girl would show herself inferior to the people amongst whom she has to mix, as much by the vulgarity of her ideas as that of her manners. It is not the world who would repulse her, it is she who would be unable to suit herself to the world; whence it would come, that her husband must either cast her off or become a pariah with her. This version, also, would fail to please the pit. Mr. Grundy, therefore, has preferred to devote all his savoir faire, his wit and his emotional power, to the task of making us accept, as a compromise between realism and idealism, a solution as pleasing as it is illogical and essentially theatrical. In the second act, Marjery commits blunder upon blunder. Everybody makes fun of her, and her husband declares she is “hopeless.” In the third act she is the admired of all, for her eloquence and dignity, her virtue and tact; those who made fun of her have prostrated themselves at her feet. Is it possible that she has learnt all this during the entr’acte, whilst the orchestra got through a waltz? She takes refuge with her father, whose country dialect is just strong enough to raise a smile. She milks the cows and plucks the apples, the only occupations permissible on the stage to a pretty farmer’s lass. The youthful husband comes in search of her to this retreat, and obtains her pardon. She will never be a lady, but she will be a “woman” par excellence. The public seemed to me to be delighted with this conclusion. An assembly of two thousand snobs will never stint its applause to an author who chastises snobbery.

To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise all his gifts at once – to put his whole strength into one important work. But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose? Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the favour of the public.12

CHAPTER X

Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works – His Melodramas —Saints and Sinners– The Puritans and the Theatre – The Two Deacons; The Character of Fletcher —Judah—The Crusaders; Character of Palsam; the Conclusion of the Piece —The Case of Rebellious Susan—The Masqueraders– Return to Melodrama. Theories expounded by Mr. Jones in his book: The Renascence of the Drama.

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.