Mr. Henry James, too, has tempted the stage, teased, yet fascinated, by the “insufferable little art”; and the result is a dramatized version of “Daisy Miller,” and two volumes of “Theatricals”: “Tenants” and “Disengaged” (1894); “The Album” and “The Reprobate” (1895). These last were written with a view to their being played at country theatres (an opportunity having seemingly presented itself), but they never got so far. In reading them, one feels that a single rehearsal would have decided their chances. Mr. James, in the preface to the printed plays, treats his failure with humorous resignation. He complains of “the hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,” and of his own conscientious effort to avoid supersubtlety and to cultivate an “anxious simplicity” and a “deadly directness” – to write “something elaborately plain.” It was to be expected that Mr. James’s habit of refined analysis would prove but a poor preparation for acted drama; and that his singular coldness or shyness or reticence would handicap him fatally in emotional crises. Whenever he is led squarely up to such, he bolts. Innuendo is not the language of passion. In vain he cries: “See me being popular: observe this play to the gallery.” The failure is so complete as to have the finality of a demonstration.
What was less to be expected is the odd way in which this artist drops realism for melodrama and farce when he exchanges fiction for playwriting. Sir Ralph Damant, in “The Album,” is a farce or “humor” character in the Jonsonian sense, his particular obsession being a fixed idea that all the women in the play want to marry him. In “Disengaged,” Mrs. Wigmore, a campaigner with a trained daughter, is another farce character; and there are iterations of phrase and catchwords here and elsewhere, as in Dickens’s or Jonson’s humorists. In “The Reprobate,” Paul Doubleday and Pitt Brunt, M.P., have the accentuated contrast of the Surface brothers. In “The Album,” that innocent old stage trick is played again, whereby some article – a lace handkerchief, a scrap of paper, a necklace, or what not – is made the plot centre. In “Daisy Miller” – dramatized version – the famous little masterpiece is spoiled by the substitution of a conventional happy ending and the introduction of a blackmailing villain. All this insinuates a doubt as to the reality of a realism which turns into improbability and artificiality merely by a change in the method of presentation. But the doubt is unfair. No reductio ad absurdum has occurred, but simply another instance of the law that every art has its own method, and that the method of the novel is not that of the play. Of course, there are clever things in the dialogue of these three-act comedies, for Mr. James is always Mr. James. But the only one of them that comes near to being a practicable theatre piece is “Tenants,” which has a good plot founded on a French story.
The paralysis of the literary drama, then, has not been due to the indifference of the literary class. Perhaps it is time thrown away to seek for its cause. The fact is that, for one reason or another, England has lost the dramatic habit.
The past fifteen or twenty years have witnessed one more concerted effort to “elevate the English stage,” and this time with a fair prospect of results. There is a stir of expectation: the new drama is announced and already in part arrived. It would be premature to proclaim success as yet; but thus much may be affirmed, that the dramatic output of the last quarter-century outweighs that of any other quarter-century since 1700. Here, for instance, are the titles of a dozen contemporary plays which it would be hard to match with any equal number produced during an equal period of time since the failure of Congreve’s latest and most brilliant comedy, “The Way of the World,” marked the close of the Restoration drama: W. S. Gilbert’s “Pygmalion and Galatea”; Sydney Grundy’s “An Old Jew”; Henry Arthur Jones’s “Judah” and “The Liars”; Arthur Wing Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “The Benefit of the Doubt”; George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and “Arms and the Man”; Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Stephen Phillips’s “Ulysses”; and W. Butler Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” (I have gone back a few years to include Mr. Gilbert’s piece, first given at the Haymarket in 1871.)
Every one of these dramas has been performed with acceptance, every one of them is a contribution to literature, worthy the attention of cultivated readers. I do not say that any one of them is a masterpiece, or that collectively they will hold the stage as Goldsmith’s and Sheridan’s are still holding it a century and a quarter after their first production. But I will venture to say that, taken together, they constitute a more solid and varied group of dramatic works than that favorite little bunch of “classical” comedies, and offer a securer ground of hope for the future of the British stage. It will be observed that half of them are tragedies, or plays of a serious interest; also that they do not form a school, in the sense in which the French tragedy of Louis XIV, or the English comedy of the Restoration, was a school – that is, a compact dramatic group, limited in subject and alike in manner. They are the work of individual talents, conforming to no single ideal, but operating on independent lines. And it would be easy to add a second dozen by the same authors little, if at all, inferior to those on the first list.
Probably the foremost English playwriter of to-day is Mr. A. W. Pinero, whether tried by the test of popular success in the theatre, or by the literary quality of his printed dramas. He learned his art as Shakespeare learned his, by practical experience as an actor, and by years of obscure work as a hack writer for the playhouses, adapting from the French, dramatizing novels, scribbling one-act curtain-raisers and all kinds of theatrical nondescripts. There is a long list of failures and half successes to his account before he emerged, about 1885, with a series of three-act farces, “The Magistrate,” “The Cabinet Minister,” “The Schoolmistress” and the like, which pleased every one by their easy, natural style, their fresh invention, the rollicking fun that carried off their highly improbable entanglements, and the bonhomie and knowledge of the world with which comic character was observed and portrayed. Absurdity is the kingdom of farce; and, as in the topsyturvy world of opera bouffe, a great part of the effect in these plays is obtained by setting dignified persons, like prime ministers, cathedral deans and justices, to doing ludicrously incongruous actions. Thus, the schoolmistress, outwardly a very prim and proper gentlewoman, leads a double life, putting in her Christmas vacation as a figurante in comic opera; anticipating, and perhaps suggesting, Mr. Zangwill’s “Serio-Comic Governess.”
To these farces succeeded pieces in which social satire, sentimental comedy, and the comedy of character were mixed in varying proportions: “Sweet Lavender,” “The Princess and the Butterfly,” “Trelawney of the Wells,” and others. Of these, the first was, perhaps, the favorite, and was translated and performed in several languages. It is a very winning play, with a genuine popular quality, though with a slight twist in its sentiment. Pinero’s art has deepened in tone, until in such later work as “The Profligate,” “The Benefit of the Doubt,” “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith,” and “Iris,” he has dealt seriously, and sometimes tragically, with the nobler passions. His chef d’oeuvre in this kind, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” is constructed with consummate skill, and its psychology is right and true. This is a problem play (it is unfortunate that we apply this term exclusively to plays dealing with one particular class of problems), and its ethical value, as well as its tragical force, lies in its demonstration of the truth that no one can escape from his past. The past will avenge itself upon him or her, not only in the unforeseen consequences of old misdeeds, but in that subtler nemesis, the deterioration of character which makes life under better conditions irksome and impossible. The catastrophe comes with the inevitableness of the old Greek fate-tragedies. In this instance, it is suicide, as in “Hedda Gabler” or Hauptmann’s “Vor Sonnenaufgang.” Though criticised as melodramatic, the dramatist makes us feel it here to be the only solution. Mr. Pinero has already achieved the distinction of a “Pinero Birthday Book”; while “Arthur Wing Pinero: a Study,” by H. Hamilton Fyfe, a book of two hundred and fifty pages, with a bibliography, reviews his plays seriatim.
Without pushing the analogy too far, we may call Mr. Pinero and Mr. Bernard Shaw the Goldsmith and Sheridan of the modern stage. In Pinero, as in Goldsmith, humor more than wit is the prevailing impression. That “brilliancy” which is often so distressing is absent from his comedy, whose surfaces do not corruscate, but absorb the light softly. His satire is good-natured, his worldliness not hard, and his laughter is a neighbor to tears. Shaw is an Irishman, a journalistic free-lance and Socialist pamphleteer. He has published three collections of plays – “Pleasant,” “Unpleasant,” and “For Puritans” – accompanied with amusingly truculent prefaces, discussing, among other things, whether his pieces are “better than Shakespeare’s.” Two of his comedies, “Arms and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” were put on in New York by Mr. Mansfield as long ago, if I am right, as 1894 and 1897, respectively. “Arms and the Man” is an effective theatre piece, with a quick movement, ingenious misunderstandings, and several exciting moments. Like his fellow countryman, Sheridan, Mr. Shaw is clever in inventing situations, though he professes scorn of them as bits of old theatrical lumber, a concession to the pit. “Candida” was given in America a season or two ago, and the problems of character which it proposes have been industriously discussed by the dramatic critics and by social circles everywhere. The author is reported to have been amused at this, and to have described his heroine as a most unprincipled woman – a view quite inconsistent with the key kindly afforded in the stage directions. These, in all Shaw’s plays, are explicit and profuse, comprising details of costume, gesture, expression, the furniture and decorations of the scene, with full character analyses of the dramatis personae in the manner of Ben Jonson. The italicized portions of the printed play are little less important than the speeches; and small license of interpretation is left to the players. This is an extra-dramatic method, the custom of the novel overflowing upon the stage. But Mr. Shaw defends the usage and asks: “What would we not give for the copy of ‘Hamlet’ used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original ‘business’ scrawled by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had, in addition, the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage: above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate! Well, we should have had all this if Shakespeare, instead of merely writing out his lines, had prepared the plays for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Meredith.” “I would give half a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.”
Shaw’s appeal has been more acutely intellectual than Pinero’s, but his plays are less popular and less satisfying; while the critics, he complains, refuse to take him seriously. They treat him as an irresponsible Irishman with a genius for paradox, a puzzling way of going back on himself, and a freakish delight in mystifying the public. The heart interest in his plays is small. He has the Celtic subtlety, but not the Celtic sentiment; in this, too, resembling Sheridan, that wit rather than humor is the staple of his comedy – a wit which in both is employed in the service of satire upon sentiment. But the modern dramatist’s satire cuts deeper and is more caustic. Lydia Languish and Joseph Surface, Sheridan’s embodiments of romance and sentiment, are conceived superficially and belong to the comedy of manners, not of character. Sheridan would not have understood Lamb’s saying that Charles Surface was the true canting hypocrite of “The School for Scandal.” For nowadays sentiment and romance take less obvious shapes; and Shaw, who detests them both and holds a retainer for realism, tests for them with finer reagents.
And here comes in the influence of Ibsen, perhaps the most noticeable foreign influence in the recent English drama, from which it has partly driven out the French, hitherto all-predominant. Ibsen’s introduction to the English stage dates from 1889 and the years following, although Mr. Gosse’s studies and the translations of Mr. Havelock Ellis and others had made a few of his plays known to the reader. As long since as 1880, a very free version of “A Doll’s House,” under the title “Breaking a Butterfly,” had been made for the theatre by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and a collaborator. The French critic, M. Augustin Filon, in his book, “The English Stage” (1897), ventures a guess that the Ibsen brand of realism will be found to agree better with the English character than the article furnished by Dumas fils and other French dramatists; and he even suggests the somewhat fantastic theory that an audience of the fellow countrymen of Darwin and Huxley will listen with a peculiar sympathy to such a play as “Ghosts,” in which the doctrine of heredity is so forcibly preached. Ibsen’s masterly construction, quite as much as his ideas, has been studied with advantage by our dramatists. Thus it is thought that Pinero, who has shown, in general, very little of Ibsen’s influence, may have taken a hint from him in the inconclusive ending of “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” The inconclusive ending is a practice – perhaps a principle – of the latest realistic schools of drama and fiction. Life, they contend, has no artificial closes, but flows continually on, and a play is only a “bleeding slice of life.” In old tragedy, death is the end. “Troilus and Cressida” is Shakespeare’s only episodical tragedy, the only one in which the protagonist is not killed – and, perhaps for that reason, the quarto title-page describes it as a comedy. But in Ibsenite drama the hero or heroine does not always die. Sometimes he or she goes away, or sometimes just accepts the situation and stays on. The sound of the door shutting in “A Doll’s House” tells us that Nora has gone out into the world to begin a new career. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” one of Shaw’s strongest “Plays Unpleasant,” – so unpleasant that its production on the boards was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, – when Vivie discovers what her mother’s profession is, and where the money comes from that sent her to Newnham, she does nothing melodramatic, but simply utilizes her mathematical education by entering an actuary’s office. The curtain falls to the stage direction, “Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.”
Shaw is a convinced Ibsenite and took up the foils for the master in a series of articles in the Saturday Review in 1895. The new woman, the emancipated woman so much in evidence in Ibsen, goes in and out through Shaw’s plays, short-skirted, cigarette-smoking, a business woman with no nonsense about her, a good fellow, calling her girl friends by their last names and treating male associates with a brusque camaraderie. But, as he satirizes everything, himself included, he has his laugh at the Ibsen cult in “The Philanderer.” There is an Ibsen Club, with a bust of the Norse divinity over the library mantelpiece. One of the rules is that no womanly woman is to be admitted. At the first symptom of womanliness, a woman forfeits her membership. What Shaw chiefly shares with Ibsen is his impatience of heroics, cant, social lies, respectable prejudices, the conventions of a traditional morality. Face facts, call things by their names, drag the skeleton out of the closet. Ibsen brushes these cobwebs aside with a grave logic and a savage contempt; he makes their hollow unreality the source of tragic wrong. But Shaw’s lighter temperament is wholly that of the comic artist, and he attacks cant with the weapons of irony. His favorite characters are audacious, irreverent young men and women, without illusions and incapable of being shocked, but delighting in shocking their elders. The clergy are the professional trustees of this conventional morality and are treated by Ibsen and Shaw with scant respect. Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” shows the same contemptuous toleration of the scruples of the rabbit-like Parson Manders, as Candida shows for her clerical husband’s preaching and phrase-making. The present season has witnessed the first appearance on the American stage of Mr. Shaw’s gayest farce comedy, “You Never Can Tell.”
I asked an actor, a university graduate, what he thought of the future of verse drama in acted plays. He inclined to believe that its day had gone by, even in tragedy; and that the language of the modern serious drama would be prose, colloquial, never stilted (as it was in “George Barnwell” and “Richelieu”), but rising, when necessary, into eloquence and a kind of unmetrical poetry. He instanced several passages in Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” and later plays. Still, the blank verse tradition dies hard. Probably the leading representative of ideal or poetic drama in the contemporary theatre is Stephen Phillips, whose “Paolo and Francesca” (1899), “Herod” (1900), and “Ulysses” (1902) have all been shown upon the boards and highly acclaimed, at least by the critics. There is no doubt that they are fine dramatic poems with many passages of delicate, and some of noble, beauty. But whether they are anything more than excellent closet drama is not yet proved. Mr. Phillips’s experience as an actor has given him a practical knowledge of technic; and it may be conceded that his plays are nearer the requirements of the stage than Browning’s or Tennyson’s. They are simple, as Browning’s are not; and they have quick movement, where Tennyson’s are lumbering. Neither is it much against them that their subjects are antique, taken from Dante, Josephus, and Homer. But they appear to me poetically rather than dramatically imagined. Shakespeare and Racine dealt with remote or antique life; yet, each in his own way modernized and realized it. It is a hackneyed observation that Racine’s Greeks, Romans, and Turks are French gentlemen and ladies of the court of Louis XIV. Shakespeare’s Homeric heroes are very un-Homeric. There is little in either of local color or historical perspective: there is in both a fulness of handling, an explication of sentiments and characters. The people are able talkers and reasoners. Mr. Phillips’s method is implicit, and the atmosphere of things old and foreign is kept, the distance which lends enchantment to mediaeval Italy, or the later Roman Empire, or the heroic age. It is as if the “Idylls of the King” were dramatized, – as, indeed, “Elaine” was dramatized for one of the New York playhouses by George Lathrop, – retaining all their romantic charm and all their dramatic unreality.
Still, there are moments of genuine dramatic passion in all three of these plays: in “Herod,” for instance, where Mariamne acknowledges to the tetrarch that her love for him is dead. And in “Ulysses,” Telemachus’s recognition of his father moves one very deeply, producing its impression, too, by a few speeches in a perfectly simple, unembroidered diction, by means properly scenic, not poetic like Tennyson’s. “Ulysses” seems the best of Mr. Phillips’s pieces, more loosely built than the others, but of more varied interest and more lifelike. The gods speak in rhyme and the human characters in blank verse, while some of the more familiar dialogue is in prose; Ctesippus, an elderly wooer of Penelope, is a comic figure; and there is a good deal of rough, natural fooling among the wooers, shepherds, and maids in the great hall of Ithaca. In its use of popular elements and its romantic freedom of handling, the play contrasts with Robert Bridges’s “The Return of Ulysses,” which Mr. Yeats praises for its “classical gravity” and “lyric and meditative” quality. Mr. Phillips opens his scene on Calypso’s island, and brings his wandering hero home only after making him descend to the shades. His Ulysses shoots the wooers in full view of the audience. In Mr. Bridges’s play the action begins in Ithaca, the unities of time and place are observed, and so is dramatic decency. The wooers are slain outside, and their slaying is described to Penelope by a handmaid who sees it from the door. Yet, upon the whole, Mr. Phillips’s constructive formula is more Sophoclean than Shakespearean. Not that he adheres to the external conventions of Attic tragedy, the chorus, the unities, etc., like Matthew Arnold in “Merope”; but that his plot evolution exhibits the straight, slender line of Sophocles, rather than the rich composite pattern of Elizabethan tragi-comedy. I have been told by some who saw “Ulysses” played, that the descent ad inferos was grotesque in effect. But “Paolo and Francesca” might have gained from an infusion of grotesque. D’Annunzio’s almost precisely contemporary version of the immortal tale has just the solid, materialistic treatment which makes you feel the brutal realities of mediaeval life, the gross soil in which this “lily of Tartarus” found root. Mr. Phillips’s latest piece, “The Sin of David,” a tragedy of Cromwell’s England, is now in its first season.
Among the most interesting of recent dramatic contributions are William Butler Yeats’s “Plays for an Irish Theatre.” Mr. Yeats’s recent visit to this country is still fresh in recollection; and doubtless many of my readers have seen his beautiful little fairy piece, “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Probably allegory, or at least symbolism, is the only form in which the supernatural has any chance in modern drama. The old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition to produce in a sceptical generation that “willing suspension of disbelief” which, says Coleridge, constitutes dramatic illusion. Hamlet’s father talks too much; and the ghosts in “Richard III” are so sociable a company as to quite keep each other in countenance. The best ghost in Shakespeare is Banquo’s, which is invisible – a mere “clot on the brain” – and has no “lines” to speak. The elves in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the elemental spirits in “The Tempest” are nothing but machinery. The other world is not the subject of the play. Hauptmann’s “Die Versunkene Glocke” is symbolism, and so is “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Maeterlinck’s “Les Aveugles” and Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” are more formally allegorical. The poor old woman, in the latter, who takes the bridegroom from his bride, is Ireland, from whom strangers have taken her “four beautiful green fields” – the ancient kingdoms of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connaught.
These Irish plays, indeed, are the nearest thing we have to the work of the Belgian symbolist, to dramas like “Les Aveugles” and “L’Intruse.” And, as in those, the people are peasants, and the dialogue is homely prose. No brogue: only a few idioms and sometimes not even that, the whole being supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic into standard English. Maeterlinck’s dramas have been played on many theatres. Mr. William Sharp, who twice saw “L’Intruse” at Paris, found it much less impressive in the acting than in the reading, and his experience was not singular. As for the more romantic pieces, like “Les Sept Princesses” and “Aglavaine et Sélysette,” they are about as shadowy as one of Tieck’s tales. Those who saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in “Pelléas et Mélisande” will doubtless agree that these dreamlike poems are hurt by representation. It may be that Maeterlinck, like Baudelaire, has invented a new shudder. But the matinée audiences laughed at many things which had thrilled the closet reader.
Yeats’s tragedies, like Maeterlinck’s, belong to the drame intime, the théâtre statique. The popular drama – what Yeats calls the “theatre of commerce” – is dynamic. The true theatre is the human will. Brunetière shows by an analysis of any one of Racine’s plays – say “Andromaque” – how the action moves forward by a series of decisions. But Maeterlinck’s people are completely passive: they suffer: they do not act, but are acted upon by the unearthly powers of which they are the sport. Yeats’s plays, too, are “plays for marionettes,” spectral puppet-shows of the Celtic twilight. True, his characters do make choices: the young wife in “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” the bridegroom in “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” make choices, but their apparently free will is supernaturally influenced. The action is in two worlds. In antique tragedy, too, man is notoriously the puppet of fate; but, though he acts in ignorance of the end to which destiny is shaping his deed, he acts with vigorous self-determination. There is nothing dreamlike about Orestes or Oedipus or Antigone.
It is said that the plays of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, are now great favorites in Germany: “Salome,” in particular, and “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “A Woman of No Importance” (“Eine unbedeutende Frau”). This is rather surprising in the case of the last two, which are society dramas with little action and an excess of cynical wit in the dialogue. It is hard to understand how the unremitting fire of repartee, paradox, and “reversed epigram” in such a piece as “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” the nearest recent equivalent of Congreve comedy – can survive translation or please the German public.
This “new drama” is very new indeed. In 1882, William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, published his book, “English Dramatists of To-day,” in the introduction to which he acknowledged that the English literary drama did not exist. “I should like to see in England,” he wrote, “a body of playwrights whose works are not only acted, but printed and read.” Nine years later, Henry Arthur Jones, in the preface to his printed play, “Saints and Sinners,” denied that there was any relation between English literature and the modern English drama. A few years later still, in his introduction to the English translation of M. Filon’s book, “The English Stage” (1897), Mr. Jones is more hopeful. “If any one will take the trouble,” he writes, “to examine the leading English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings of an English drama of greater import and vitality, and of wider aim, than any school of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans.”
In his book on “The Renaissance of the Drama,” and in many other places, Mr. Jones has pleaded for a theatre which should faithfully reflect contemporary life; and in his own plays he has endeavored to furnish examples of what such a drama should be. His first printed piece, “Saints and Sinners” (exhibited in 1884), was hardly literature, and did not stamp its author as a first-class talent. It is a seduction play of the familiar type, with a set of stock characters: the villain; the forsaken maid; the steadfast lover who comes back from Australia with a fortune in the nick of time; the père noble, a country clergyman straight out of “The Vicar of Wakefield”; and a pair of hypocritical deacons in a dissenting chapel – very much overdone, pace Matthew Arnold, who complimented Mr. Jones on those concrete examples of middle-class Philistinism, with its alliterative mixture of business and bethels. Mr. Jones, like Mr. Shaw, is true to the tradition of the stage in being fiercely anti-Puritan, and wastes many words in his prefaces in vindicating the right of the theatre to deal with religious hypocrisy; as if Tartuffe and Tribulation Wholesome had not been familiar comedy heroes for nearly three hundred years!
This dramatist served his apprenticeship in melodrama, as Pinero did in farce; and there are signs of the difference in his greater seriousness, or heaviness. Indeed, an honest feeling and an earnest purpose are among his best qualities. M. Filon thinks him the most English of contemporary writers for the stage. And, as Pinero’s art has gained in depth, Jones’s has gained in lightness. Crude at first, without complexity or shading in his character-drawing, without much art in comic dialogue or much charm and distinction in serious, he has advanced steadily in grasp and skill and sureness of touch, and stands to-day in the front rank of modern British dramatists. “The Crusaders,” “The Case of Rebellious Susan,” “The Masqueraders,” “Judah,” “The Liars,” are all good plays – or, at least plays with good features – and certainly fall within the line which divides literary drama from the mere stage play. “Judah,” for instance, is a solidly built piece, with two or three strong situations. The heroine is a fasting girl and miraculous healer, a subject of a kind which Hawthorne often chose; or reminding one of Mr. Howells’s charlatans in “The Undiscovered Country” and Mr. James’s in “The Bostonians.” The characterization of the leading persons is sound, and there is a brace of very diverting broad comedy figures, a male and a female scientific prig. They are slightly caricatured – Jones is still a little heavy-handed – but the theatre must over-accentuate now and again, just as actresses must rouge.
In this play and in “The Crusaders,” social satire is successfully essayed at the expense of prevailing fads, such as fashionable philanthropy, slumming parties, neighborhood guilds, and the like. There is a woman in “The Crusaders,” – a campaigner, a steamboat, a specimen of the loud, energetic, public, organizing, speech-making, committee and platform, subscription-soliciting woman, – nearly as good as anything in our best fiction. Mr. Joseph Knight, who writes a preface to “Judah” (first put on at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, 1890), compares its scientific faddists with the women who swarm to chemistry and biology lectures in that favorite Parisian comedy, “Le monde où l’on s’ennuie.” There is capital satire of the downright kind in these plays, but surely it is dangerous to suggest comparison with the gay irony, the courtly grace, the dash and sparkle of Pailleron’s little masterpiece. There are no such winged shafts in any English quiver. Upon the whole, “The Liars” seems to me the best comedy of Mr. Jones’s that I have read, – I have not read them all, – the most evenly sustained at every point of character and incident, a fine piece of work in both invention and construction. The subject, however, is of that disagreeable variety which the English drama has so often borrowed from the French, the rescue of a married woman from a compromising position, by a comic conspiracy in her favor.