Images de page
PDF
ePub

Mr. Pinero's play. Words are used to convey ideas, and I cannot think the idea which the word "profligate" suggests is answered by Mr. Pinero's portrait of Dunstan Renshaw. There are persons, excellently fanatical, who regard the drinking of a glass of wine as an act of profligacy; a Cromwellian Ironside would have branded a boy who kissed a girl under a bough of mistletoe as a profligate. But the man who drinks a glass of wine, the boy who kisses a girl "underneath the bough," are not termed profligates in the words of the world, and I do not think that the term is a happy term as applied to Dunstan Renshaw. He has acted like a scoundrel, most certainly, and like one of the most dangerous of scoundrels, a weak scoundrel; but a man may be a scoundrel without being a profligate, even though he scarcely can be a profligate without being a scoundrel. The story of Mr. Pinero's play is familiar to all students of the stage of to-day. Still, for the purpose of discussion, I may be permitted, rapidly, to follow its course once again, in order to analyse its result.

Dunstan Renshaw is a young man of means, who has seduced a young girl, and to whose easy-going mundane mind it has not occurred to make reparation by marrying his victim. This is a grave offence against the moral law, against the social comity; but it does not make its perpetrator a profligate. A persistent seducer would be a profligate; so, too, would be the man who, although no seducer, passed his life in the perpetual gratification of sensual passions with the varying objects of his temporary emotions. But Dunstan Renshaw is a weak youth, with higher capabilities, for he falls in love with and marries a penniless school-girl, Leslie Brudenell. After marriage his love for her deepens to adoration, and she on her side worships him so profoundly that she wishes she might be his slave. Yet when she learns of his sin-the sin committed before he saw her she banishes him from her presence and from her life, and sends him, helpless and hopeless, to a suicide's death. It is a tragic story, powerfully told, a strong and painful sermon on the old text of the sin that will find out the sinner. It is impossible not to pity Dunstan Renshaw; it is impossible to admire Leslie, the girl who, because she chose to paint a fancy picture of the man she married, deserts him and betrays him because he does not come up to the school-girl's ideal. We may think that Dunstan deserved his punishment; we must refuse to praise the wifely hand that dealt the punishing stroke.

IT

MR. BEERBOHM TREE ON IBSEN AND MAETERLINCK.

T is a satisfactory sign of the quickened public interest in the stage, and of the closer relationship between the actors on one side of the footlights and the audience on the other side of the footlights, that a leading London manager like Mr. Beerbohm Tree should be found addressing a gathering of the earnest and enthusiastic body known as the Playgoers' Club. But if I find the manner of Mr. Tree's address so satisfactory, I must inevitably find the matter of it largely unsatisfactory. The opinions of Mr. Tree are entitled to all respect. He is an actor-manager; but he is something more than an actor-manager. He is a man of a wide range of reading, a man of scholarly tastes, with a knowledge of more than one language and literature; an agreeable blend of the student and the man of the world. When such a man delivers a public address upon two foreign dramatists-the one famous, the other notorious-his utterances are sure not to be the mere echo of the war-cries of the Philistines. As Mr. Tree does therefore speak with so considerable a degree of authority, I may naturally be permitted to feel pleasure where I agree with him, and to regret where I do not agree. I cannot share the enthusiasm for the works of Maeterlinck which animates certain fellow-workers of mine, with whom I am always glad to stand side by side; and I find that Mr. Tree's opinion is very much my own opinion. But on the subject of Ibsen, Mr. Tree seems to me to speak as a man living in some fog-bound city of Dreadful Night might speak of the sun if he were suddenly transported to a Nilotic town. He is, apparently, unable to see anything but ugliness in the power which, to do him justice, he so frankly recognises. I do not know, I have no means of knowing, the extent of Mr. Tree's reading in the work of Henrik Ibsen. It may embrace the whole range of the author's work; it may be limited to those plays which have been acted on the English stage. If even the discussion be limited to those plays from the "Doll's House" to "Hedda Gabler," it is to me inconceivable how a man like Mr. Tree can read them and find in them only ugliness, only horror. To me the sense of beauty is as conspicuous in Ibsen's plays as their grasp of human character and their great dramatic force. It seems but a gaze, through deliberately narrowed eyelids, that sees in them nothing but a pessimistic portraiture of hideous dehumanised humanity. To contest the influence of Ibsen upon this country would be needless. Mr. Tree's own words are among the strongest of the daily manifold proofs of its effect. It may be said of Ibsen's

influence, as Napoleon said of the French Republic, that it is obvious as the sun in Heaven, and asks for no recognition.

PER

"BRIGHTON."

ERHAPS the most significant dramatic event of the month has been the revival of "Brighton" at the Criterion, with Mr. Wyndham in his old part of Bob Sackett. It is a good many years now since "Brighton" was first played, and though I saw most of the famous Criterion farces, somehow or other I missed seeing "Brighton." I always regretted the omission, and I can say very cordially that I am glad the omission has been at last repaired. Mr. Wyndham has played in better pieces, it may be, than "Brighton," but he has never played better himself. The play, for all its merriment, does seem old-fashioned; its mechanism for producing mirth appears to creak a little; since "Saratoga" was converted into “Brighton,” even the wildest farcical comedy has accepted the influence of the realistic movement, and the buffoon muse wears her motley after the naturalistic mode. So long, however, as Mr. Wyndham is playing Bob Sackett one can think only of the many merits of "Brighton," and be grateful for full laughter. But I used the term "significant" in connection with this revival, and I used it for a special reason. Some few years ago, Mr. Wyndham, having no novelty on hand, thought of adopting one of two courses, of reviving "Brighton" or of playing in "Wild Oats." "Wild Oats" carried the day, was a success, showed Mr. Wyndham the direction of a new departure in his way of art, and was succeeded in its turn by "David Garrick." The enduring, the persistent success of "David Garrick" was Mr. Wyndham's greatest triumph; it endured so long that it seemed as if the actor was never going to return to those extravagant fantastics, those Agreeable Rattles, who had increased the gaiety of London. Is the revival of "Brighton" a sign that Mr. Wyndham is returning for a season to his service of the frolic muse of farcical comedy?

M

"THE RECKONING."

R.SYLVANUS DAUNCEY, the author of "The Reckoning," is really a brother of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and the triumphs of his kinsman have moved him to break a lance in the same lists. There is a good deal in "The Reckoning" to justify Mr. Dauncey's dating. He has produced a strong story, with one very powerful situation, and a large amount of really very clever

comic dialogue. This is not bad for the equipment of a beginner, and in the consideration of a first attempt it is the good points that are of importance to the critic, not the defects. Curiously enough, Mr. Dauncey's hero is in the very same position as the hero of "The Profligate." He has seduced a girl in his youth, and has since fallen devotedly in love with another woman. His victim induces him by a trick to marry her on what seems to be her death-bed; and then, rising up, confronts him, a living barrier between him and his hopedfor heaven. But Mr. Dauncey's moral is quite different from Mr. Pinero's. The fact that the man has behaved like a rascal is scarcely brought home to the beholder at all; while the victim, whose only offence is that she extorts by artifice the reparation which was due to her, is represented as a traditional villainess. If Mr. Pinero ignored the way of the world too much, Mr. Dauncey may be said to accept the way of the world with a vengeance.

THE

OTHER PLAYS.

HE other events of the month were not very important. A play called "Her Oath," by Mrs. Wylde, produced at a matinée at the Princess's Theatre, proved to be a complicated legend of the Indian Mutiny, without the animation or the appropriateness of Boucicault's "Jessie Brown." "Miss Decima" has been transferred from the Criterion to the Prince of Wales's, where, with dainty, clever Miss Decima Moore in the part of her namesake, it should find its home for long enough. It is preceded by "The Prancing Girl," a travesty of "The Dancing Girl," which ought to be better than it is. At the Court Theatre Mrs. John Wood, after two unlucky campaigns, has retired from the field of battle, and the famous triplebill company, under the lead of Mr. Brandon Thomas, have occupied the ground. The "Pantomime Rehearsal" and "The Commission go as well as ever, and a revival of "Good for Nothing" gives Mr. Brandon Thomas another opportunity of showing his varied power, and enables Miss Norreys to add to her successes a most delightful Nan.

JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY.

TABLE TALK.

MASTER AND SERVANT.

ELATIONS between master and servant, or employer and

R employed, have undergone the same kind of change that has

come over our general life. In place of the welcome of mine host or mine hostess in the old hotel, the resident in one of the huge caravansaries recently built finds indifference and apathy. The employer of thousands of hands knows perhaps five per cent. of them by sight, and men with large establishments may easily be unable to tell the names of some at least of their servants. Everywhere the relations become more purely business-like and financial. Human nature changes little, however, and human sympathies put forward their tentacles now as before. Not wholly extinct is "the constant service of the antique world," though pessimists have through all ages insisted upon a continuous decline that would long ago have brought about its destruction. In a delightful book, called "Faithful Servants," Mr. Arthur J. Munby, M.A., F.S.A., has collected close upon seven hundred memorial records by masters to the worth of their servants. I have found the volume enchanting. Its perusal is like sauntering and lingering in a quiet country churchyard, and, without the trouble of stooping through the long grasses or paining the eyes in the effort to decipher, reading the quaint, touching, and instructive legends carved upon the stones. All ranks of life are included in the collection. Among those who have borne testimony to the worth of their servants or the affection they have felt towards them are Queen Victoria, Alexandra Princess of Wales, Charles II., George III., William Hayley, Robert Southey, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift.

M

[ocr errors]

SERVANTS' EPITAPHS.

ANY of these epitaphs are supremely touching, and most of them are honourable to all concerned. Now and then I find an attempt to inculcate the doctrine that the poor are to be contented with their lot, and imitate the virtues of a day labourer who, Reeves & Turner.

« PrécédentContinuer »