Aet. 46, to Henry William Massingham, editor of the Daily Chronicle. These notes provide context for George Moore’s letter.
The letter continued a “controversy” that was triggered or inflamed by William Archer’s unfriendly review of Evelyn Innes in the Daily Chronicle (8 June 1898), reprinted in Archer’s new book Study and Stage (1899).
In January 1899, George returned the favor in his introduction to Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field and Maeve where he accused Archer of personally impeding the development of literary theatre in London (a cause to which Archer was devoted).
Archer responded to that attack with “Mr. George Moore as a Dramatic Critic” in the Daily Chronicle (20 January 1899). His intemperate rejoinder was sprinkled with insults and innuendos.
Among other nits, Archer rejected George’s comparison of Yeats to Homer (a comparison previously made by Oscar Wilde). In his introduction, George had asserted that The Countess Cathleen had “a beauty of verses equal to Homer” and that Yeats was “a survival of… the prophet and the seer of old time.” Archer believed Yeats was comparable to Maurice Maeterlinck.
In a comment following George’s letter, Yeats in the Daily Chronicle (30 January 1899) confirmed his intention to mount plays with minimal costumes and scenery: “I want to be able to forget everything in the real world, in watching an imaginative glory.”
Years before the current controversy, in 1893 the actor-manager George Alexander had offered to stage Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field but never did. George Moore believed the change of plan was indirectly caused by Archer’s praise of Alexander’s production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a purportedly literary play that was commercially successful.
Other rejections of The Heather Field came from Johnston Forbes-Robertson and the New Century Theatre Society led by Archer, Massingham (editor of the Daily Chronicle) and actress Elizabeth Robins. In his introduction, George wrote that the New Century rejection confirmed Archer as a “degraded” drama critic.
George’s mocking reference to W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson’s Admiral Guinea (Avenue Theatre, 29 November 1897) concerned a one-act warm up by Margaret Young entitled Honesty — A Cottage Flower. This comic trifle portrayed an aspiring young playwright loved by an otherwise obligated young lady and a maidservant who altruistically helps him win the young lady’s heart. The plays were produced by Archer’s New Century Theatre.
Clement Scott was the conservative drama critic for the socially conservative Daily Telegraph. He felt that T. W. Robertson’s plays were the high-point in late nineteenth century English theatre; School (1869) was one of his masterpieces. In “Ave, Atque Vale,” The World (19 October 1892), Archer ranked Scott as “the most eloquent and influential dramatic critic of our day,” with a “unique talent, amounting almost to genius.”
Regarding theater subsidies, Archer argued that an experimental theatre was for unpopular plays such as The Heather Field, and an endowed State theatre was for plays that have proved “their power of appealing to the intelligent public, as distinguished from an enthusiastic clique.”
George had proposed an endowed experimental theatre in “The Secret of Immortality,” The Hawk (29 April 1890). He wanted a noncommercial forum for staging literary plays. The idea was resurrected with Harley Granville-Barker in Chapter 17 of Conversations in Ebury Street.
William Archer’s review of Evelyn Innes had mocked George Moore for his devotion to Richard Wagner in the novel. Actually Wagner’s Artwork of the Future (1849) and the opera Parsifal were critically dismissed in Evelyn Innes (Chapter 21 and elsewhere).
George accurately defended his years-long devotion to Henrik Ibsen in this letter, but curiously apologized for his lack of feeling for A Doll’s House. In January 1886 Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, George Bernard Shaw and May Morris gave a private reading (the first in English) of that play which George attended. In his 1915 Preface to Muslin, George admitted that A Drama in Muslin (1886) and A Doll’s House were identical in subject and theme.
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