The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

CHAPTER IX

The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day – Sydney Grundy; his First Efforts – Adaptations: The Snowball, In Honour Bound, A Pair of Spectacles, The Bunch of Violets– His Original Plays – His Style – His Humour – His Ethical Ideal —An Old Jew—The New Woman– A Talent which has not done growing.

If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips, with scarcely a moment’s pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time to study the vagaries of individual minds. A plébiscite of West-End playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.

They all began work about the same time – a score of years ago, as nearly as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical autodidactes, but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are only half-way along their arduous paths.

So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who adheres still – largely through his antecedents, and partly through his natural disposition – to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of the French: with Sydney Grundy.

If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity – an affray with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three acts, entitled The Snowball. There was question, in the first case, of an adaptation of La Petite Marquise, which he wrote in collaboration with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain nothing more frankly moral than La Petite Marquise. The story of the piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its moral is a moral of – shall I say? – fastidious abstention; a moral it is difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when passion has lost its fire and its poison.

It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had “passed” the Petite Marquise in French in all her original licence; he refused her his sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater, perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people who were destined to keep it in mind.

The Snowball is an English version of Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa femme. Mr. Sydney Grundy’s originality consists in his having introduced into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this species – cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening to or reading The Snowball, you look out for a single trait of English manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.

The well-merited success of The Snowball retarded Mr. Grundy’s dramatic career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation – so ungrateful in those days – for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter, obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of another.

The first in date, In Honour Bound, is at once a condensation and a critical commentary on Scribe’s piece, Une Chaîne. The heroine is a young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl’s guardian gives his consent. Now – and it is here that Scribe’s hand is discovered – this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands, under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that he never for a moment loses his sang-froid, his grace, or his wit. At bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.

There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly, breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence, cunningly distilled.

A Pair of Spectacles is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a translation) of Les Petits Oiseaux, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through, sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a more moderate estimate of average human nature – prepared now and again to come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow’s future daughter-in-law congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. “You are so good!” she cries; “but people are so ungrateful!” “What does that matter?” she makes answer; “I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my window-sill. They never say ‘Thanks.’ Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from feeding them again next day.” At the dénouement, he recalls this lesson read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience. The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in that – the sparrows don’t say “Thanks!”

It is a symbol, nothing more nor less, – a symbol in a play by Labiche! Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written Solness, the Master-Builder! – n’est ce pas un comble! A second symbol is added to the first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory, the misanthrope. At the dénouement, his own come back to him from the optician’s. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of these pairs of spectacles. The author’s idea is obvious to all. Our mind is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend them again.

In France the Petits Oiseaux had a provincial success. In Paris the piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at the Comédie Française some years ago, the critics thought it childish.

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.