The Stage as Seen by a Novelist, Part 3

Evening News (London), 6 December 1887, page 1, 2,217 words

(By the Author of “The Mummer’s Wife.”)

I explained yesterday why, if the law forbidding stage plays in music-halls were rescinded, I would write for a music-hall in preference to a theatre audience. Music-halls being barred my choice would fall on German Reed’s. This will seem at first sight paradoxical, especially after what was said concerning the deteriorating influence of the family on art; but I would prefer to address the family to a heterogeneous crowd. I would prefer to write a serial story for “Good Words” than for any periodical that did not give me carte blanche to write as I pleased. All Art demands is an audience, not many audiences; you may have, as in the music-hall, the courtier and the coster, but you cannot wedge the family in between, if you do the artist is helpless; art becomes at once a litter of opposing elements — burlesques have to be made dramatic, dramas have to be made comic, comedies have to be made sensational, all limitations are lost, that is to say, all form. I have spent the most delightful afternoons at German Reed’s; there the charm of the entertainment is akin to that of family prayers in a quiet country house amid unsophisticated folk; and I often dream of writing for them, as I might of writing ballades or villanelles. And it was by adopting the German Reed audience that Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan created the Savoy Theatre. Mr. Gilbert refused to put the chorus ladies into tights, and the public was gently but firmly made to understand that “stage-dooring” was not allowed; that supper parties were forbidden — in a word, that the actresses at the Savoy were no less virtuous than the ladies presented at Court, and it became very generally understood that the actors there attended church and they are seen occasionally in society. By these means country parsons and their wives were induced to visit the theatre, and a clientèle has been established as immutable as that of St. Paul’s. It does not matter whether the opera is dull or witty, the theatre would be full nightly in either case. But to be just, the operas are not dull; they are original, and they are English. The amount of taste displayed in the Savoy is truly marvellous; it is, perhaps, the taste of a suburban  drawing-room idealised; but no matter. It is individual, it is unique. The librettos are dramatic versions of humorous little stories which Mr. Gilbert invents and giggles over, as he pulls his socks on in the morning; there is not much in them, the are all built on the same pattern, but there is a pattern, and the pattern is a pretty pattern, and nowhere else will you find a pattern at all; they are all prettily stitched; they are like fancywork done in a suburban drawing-room, and every year a new doll is turned out perfectly attired. Are they as good as Offenbach’s operas? Ah, that is a matter of taste. Their humour is too much that of a riddle for me. I like better the wild frolic of “La Grande Duchess.” But the point is not whether they are better or worse, but whether the author of “Sweethearts” will ever weary of making dolls for Sir Arthur to put squeaks in, and give us another play like “Sweethearts.” This and only this is important. For the fact must not be lost sight of that Mr. Gilbert is the only man, shallI say since the Restoration? who has created a new dramatic formula. I do not think it will endure; but I repeat that it is a formula — a recognizable formula, and that it is the first distinct variation in dramatic form that has appeared since the Restoration. “Engaged” and “Fogarty’s Fairy” are perfectly new things. Why the second should not have succeeded as well as the first I cannot say. I like neither. Their humour is that rasping, irritating kind peculiar to the riddle — and riddles that last respectively two hours and a half each are beyond me. But these comedies are new, and to create something absolutely new in art is a matter of something more than “some difficulty.” This riddle humour is the master characteristic of Mr. Gilbert’s talent; but unrelieved by music and dresses it was unbearable to a sufficient number, and Mr. Gilbert was forced into writing operas. “Pygmalion and Galatea” I have not seen, but I know it must be bad, because I know Mr. Gilbert is not a poet; “Gretchen” I read, and found it intolerable; “Sweethearts” was, I guess, a chance inspiration, happening between these different moods. It will, therefore, remain single amid the works of its author. The riddle-humour, the master characteristic, has now overcome all other potentialities, and it finds its best expression in comic opera. These little operas are but dolls, if you will, and the will, of course, go the way of dolls; but when they have slept, forgotten for a while, and are then brought forward into the garish light of new days, they will, I feel sure, charm those who shall succeed us, as the slippers, and wigs, and snuff-boxes of the eighteenth century charm us now.

Some two or three years ago, Mr. Wills published a long narrative poem in blank verse. The poem was based upon the poetical stock-in-trade of Morris, Swinburne, and Rossetti. It was thin in metre, and incoherent in composition: but it was from the first line to the last clearly the work of a man of artistic sympathies and of certain vague culture; it was wholly lacking in personality. It seems to me that this poem is very representative of Mr. Wills. You could not imagine its author successful either as a poet or novelist, but you could easily imagine Mr. Irving turning him to some account. Mr. Wills has been turned to account by Mr. Irving. For him he dished up “Faust” last year as he dished up “Charles the First” ten or twelve years ago, and he will, no doubt, continue to dish up from time to time an historical figure for that successful tragedian; and when any leading actress wants something less intolerably vulgar than the usual run of things, she will go to Mr. Wills. His work is often quite graceful and full of charming invention, and if he can be induced to weld the story together, it will probably prove successful; but I do not think that anything he has written will survive this century.

Mr. Jones designed a very successful play in conjunction with Mr. Herman, and he afterwards strove to prove that Mr. Herman had nothing to do with it. The question of the collaboration does not concern us here, except so far as it helps us to understand Mr. Jones’ position as an author. Those who collaborate are condemned beforehand, for by so doing they confess to partial impotency. I was, however, once very much interested in Mr. Jones. I did not fail to recognise that the background that interested me so deeply in “Saints and Sinners” was taken wholly from George Eliot’s novel, “Felix Holt”: indeed, the story was likewise merely a modification of the story of the novel. The critics spoke of the “Vicar of Wakefield,” but had it been only this Mr. Jones would be what I once thought him — a man of talent. The story was everybody’s story. What made the play was the background, and that was taken wholly from “Felix Holt.” But I was so anxious to find a new genius that I put “Felix Holt” out of my mind, and went into ecstasies over the setting of the story. “How fresh, how delightfully fresh; even if this man did not see this in nature he has adapted it delightfully. I am sure he can see nature, and next time he will take his subject straight from nature.” So I reasoned. I was wrong, hopelessly wrong, for if there is one man living who is powerless to see nature that man is Mr. Jones. He can build about and in and out of a situation; he can puff it out and squeeze it in, but he can breathe no one spark of life into it; and the characters are woeful rags and tatters with the sawdust running out of them as they walk. So I saw in “A Nobel Vagabond,” some beautiful construction, but no life anywhere — not even the blind bald pathos with which Mr. Pettitt fills up his scenes, and draws tears to the eyes of the vulgar. Nothing but dryness, and this dryness will remain until Mr. Jones finds another collaborator.

Mr. Buchanan began as a poet, and no bad poet either: but finding he could make no headway against the rising tide of Mr. Swinburne’s success he turned into the by-ways for prostitution. And, Heavens! what a prostitution is has been; and always unsuccessful until “Sophia,” last and final consummation of literary uncleanliness. The iconoclast is bad, the sanctimonious iconoclast is worse; but the insincere sanctimonious iconoclast is beyond sneers or scorn. When the author of “Madame Angot,” in his version of Balzac’s great novel, “La Cousine Bette,” turned Madame Marneff into a virtuous woman, he, at least, did not write slimy letters to the papers saying that Balzac was a genius in spite of his grossness; he did not pretend that Balzac should feel grateful to him for what he had done.

Of Mr. Pinero’s work I know little. I remember a comedy played at Toole’s, the scene of which was laid in a boarding-house. There was some personal observation of life in it, some facility  in using dramatic forms, but no power of recreating them was shown. I saw “The Squire,” an audacious but skilful plagiarism from “Far from the Madding Crowd.” I am aware that Mr. Pinero says he never read the book in question; but then, no author ever did read the book he is accused of plagiarising from. This has always seemed to me a curious argument. The object of a writer, I take it, is to write differently from other men. If we copy others intentionally, we may get over it, like drunkenness; but if we copy others unconsciously there is no hope; it is like stupidity, inherent and inveterate. There are people who draw up parallel passages showing how much Tennyson owes to Theocritus — an excellent device for getting over the editor of a staid review, but arrant nonsense, of course. Then there is another kind of plagiarism which is not easily explainable and is apparent only to those of the trade, and when Mr. Pinero says he never read “Far from Madding Crowd” until he had written his play, I listen and I strive to understand. Mr. Pinero write nicely, and he does in middling prose what Mr. Wills does in middling verse. I cannot call to mind any other writer whose work demands comment from me. There are shoals of them. To my mind Mr. Herman Merivale has never shown any literary talent on the stage, nor has Mr. Grundy, and it would scarcely be worth while to speak of Mr. Burnand’s adaptations from the French, or of those of the gentleman who adapts from the German.

But to affirm and prove the almost inconceivable abjectness of our dramatic literature, I cannot do better than to state the signal and conclusive fact that of all dramatists now writing, the most suitable to the age is Mr. Pettitt. In him more than in any one else the dramatic yearning of the nineteenth century finds its mouthpiece. His literary attainments are equal to those of a country schoolmaster and his mind is as commonplace as a nursemaid’s. He heard the story of an heir kept out of his property by villains, and he dishes up this story with appropriate sensational effects once or twice a year. All his pieces run 300 nights; he has made a fortune, and the public is pleased. In the face of facts like these what is the use of thinking of literature?

I will conclude, and, for conclusion I will repeat the theme of these articles. English dramatic art is in a last stage of decadence. It is rotten at the root, and it must fall of its own rottenness and a primitive art grow up in its place, before literature is again heard in a London theatre. We must, therefore, look up, not down, for regeneration. Any aspiration towards ancient ideals must result in a still deeper plunge in the mire of decay. We must turn, therefore, rather to the music-hall for regeneration. For in the hall you find the people seeking their amusement in a primitive manner — in the midst of beer and tobacco. It was once the laurel, now it is the tobacco leaf. There songs are sung of humble life; there little scenes are enacted without regard to what should be and has been. It was out of similar beginnings — the Rhapsodists — that the Greek drama was evolved. It was out of similar beginnings — the miracle plays — that the Shakesperian drama was evolved.