Aet. 49, to a Scottish drama critic. The first of William Archer’s ’’Real Conversations” (Pall Mall Magazine, March 1901), was with A. W. Pinero; other interviewees were Thomas Hardy, Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes), Stephen Phillips, W. S. Gilbert, George Alexander, Henry Arthur Jones, and George Moore (August 1901). In 1904 the conversations were collected in a book.
Archer’s talk with Pinero commenced with allusion to the latter’s nearly dead dog, moving on to subjects including the abortions of Shakespeare characteristic of English theatre for two centures; the abysmal state of modern theatre architecture; the apparent impossibility of uniting literary and dramatic instincts in a single actor manager; the ignorant public; the ignorant press, and ignorant men of letters who, like George Moore, could not discern the highest dramatic standards in Pinero’s plays. Pinero told Archer that the future of English theatre lay in the star system, for its chief strength was the individualism of great actor managers. Archer pointed out that popular English dramatists, especially Pinero, seemed incapable of writing for anyone but such stars, and that their plays were limited to a delineation of life in high society. Pinero replied that high society was the proper subject of English drama, and that ’’Nothing of considerable merit, but low comedy, has ever come from the study of low life.” He added that the independent theatre was “foredoomed to be the home of mediocrity.” The interview was not meant to be comic.
Yeats did not participate in the conversation with George Moore, who discussed the aims of Irish revivalists relative to his own participation. “I am leaving my flat and going to Ireland in less than a month”, he explained, in order to escape England’s insidious vulgarity and join a renaissance.
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