The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise all his gifts at once – to put his whole strength into one important work. But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose? Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the favour of the public.¹²

CHAPTER X

Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works – His Melodramas —Saints and Sinners– The Puritans and the Theatre – The Two Deacons; The Character of Fletcher —Judah—The Crusaders; Character of Palsam; the Conclusion of the Piece —The Case of Rebellious Susan—The Masqueraders– Return to Melodrama. Theories expounded by Mr. Jones in his book: The Renascence of the Drama.

The start of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones was not less difficult than that of Mr. Sydney Grundy. He could get only short and light pieces accepted at first. The earliest play of his within the memory of London play-goers was performed at the Court Theatre, and was entitled, A Clerical Error. The second was an idyll in two short acts, called An Old Master.

The young author found it necessary to seek refuge in provincial theatres. The world remained unwilling to learn his name – a somewhat undistinguished name, and easily forgotten. When, in 1882, Mr. Archer included him in his Dramatists of To-day, there were many who asked, “Who is this Mr. Jones?”

It was then he worked at melodrama. He served seven years with Laban, and married Leah, upheld by the hope of one day obtaining Rachel. This was his apprenticeship. As Mr. Grundy had learnt his craft by adapting our French authors, Mr. Jones learnt his by writing great popular dramas. It was in this genre, one which gives full scope to the imagination, that he came to know his own individual temperament, and developed those poetical faculties which were to be put to better uses; it was by this unlikely pathway that he found the road to Shakespearian emotions. His qualities and his defects date from this time.

The great success of The Silver King set Mr. Jones at liberty. I have neither seen nor read the piece, which has not been printed. It is a good melodrama, I understand. People found in it, together with some new types and coups de théâtre, observation, gaiety, a rare freedom of handling, some really moving touches, and, here and there, flashes of imagination and poetry.

Mr. Jones thought he could now take a step further, and please himself, having succeeded in pleasing the public. He wrote Saints and Sinners. The little Margate Theatre was the scene of the first performance of the new play in September 1884, this first performance having for object only the perfecting of the actors in their parts, and the testing of the public. The piece passed thence to the Vaudeville, where it held the bills until the middle of the following year, much talked about and applauded.

It marks an important date, not merely in the career of Mr. Jones, but in the history of the English drama. It denotes the revival of active hostility, in that ancient conflict between the Puritans and the stage, which began in 1580, and will last as long as English literature and English civilisation. This conflict had assumed a sluggish and inactive character in the nineteenth century. Shattered by the scorn of the Puritans, the stage had not dared to raise its arm for a blow. Suddenly it took the offensive, and carried the war into the enemy’s camp. Saints and Sinners is only the first of a series of dramas and comedies, in which Mr. Jones has fearlessly attacked the hypocrisies of religion, in their most characteristic form. He has let fly some darts, indeed, which have sped even further, and which he has not shot at random. Has he not declared, in his high-spirited and witty preface to The Case of Rebellious Susan, that the theatre was perhaps destined to succeed to the tottering pulpit, and to teach morality to the professional moralists?

Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.

He seems to say – and this boldness does not displease in a man of talent – “We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed.”

What Mr. Jones satirised in Saints and Sinners, was the money-making spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own stamp.

Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative stores by which his shop is being ruined. “I keep up his chapel. He ought to keep up my custom.” Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic emotions of the dénouement, when he wishes to express to the minister they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday – just one word about the co-operative stores!

Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason and act otherwise at bottom, than did the great king when he allied his throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved successful – at least, for a time.

“You know, my dear Prabble,” Hoggard says to his friend, “it is we who are the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is.” And what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy, which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our Classe Moyenne, is regarded with real contempt by superior intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and – I shall venture to add – like creed.

In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand) would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be robbed by a poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real life, but from The Vicar of Wakefield, – Goldsmith’s irrational, delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in Les Miserables, and it is not at these times I like him best. I acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter’s sin, and relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There is real grandeur in this self-abasement – a dignity full of impressiveness in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate, they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, “Christians, will you never learn to forgive?” – the words thrill me, and I change my mind again – I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the pitiless.

Mr. Jones’s talent achieved a fresh advance in Judah, produced on May 21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in Saints and Sinners, are used as motives again in Judah, with great power, and form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the rôle of clairvoyante and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried perhaps to the point of terrorising, – she has abundant excuses for adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an imposture which she loathes.

We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung, nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when, by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become too real, the young girl’s heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her – we are all for the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.

These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, “I believe what I say.” This faith, which carries away the uncultured, inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in his words.

This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a superior being – privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate efforts of Vashti’s father to get some food to her during her fast. At once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done just the opposite. Judah’s first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy. Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience, terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.

To all appearances Judah and Vashti are triumphant: they are to be united; Lord Asgarby’s daughter, the subject of the imposture, is cured because she believes herself cured; the world pays its homage at once to Vashti’s miraculous powers, and to the virtue and eloquence of the man she is to marry. What is lacking? Peace of mind, self-respect. In what poignant terms Judah recounts to Vashti his mental agony! With what imagination of poet, or of the lost, does he give voice and form to all the terrors of the Puritan mind, – those terrors which, for some mere trifle, some shadow of a sin, so tortured Bunyan, and prostrated Cromwell, pallid, gasping, on the bare boards of his chamber! Yet love has not gone from Judah’s heart. Better Hell with her than Heaven without!

The champion of science, Dr. Jopp, for his part, has instituted an inquiry into the whole thing; he is inclined to bracket Dethic and his daughter together. Judah becomes aware of what is in preparation, is free to separate his lot from that of Vashti; but he does not do so. Then when Jopp, on the entreaty of his old friend Lord Asgarby, has consented to spare Vashti, it would be easy for Judah to maintain silence, and to accept, together with his wife, the favours with which they are being overwhelmed. But no, he must speak; he must confess himself! The confession issues with the explosive violence born of long compression, in a strange frenzy of humiliation and of repentance, impetuous, vibrating, almost triumphant, like a blare of trumpets. Beyond the awful but not impassable ordeal, the guilty man and woman see the divine horizon of paradise regained.

“You won’t? Then hear me, hear me, all of you! I lied! I lied! Take back my false oath; let the truth return to my lips! Let my heart find peace and my eyelids sleep again! You all know me now for what I am; let all who honoured me and followed me know me too. Hide nothing! Let it be blazed about the city. (Pause. To Lord A.) Take back your gift. (Gives deed to Lord A.) We will take nothing from you! Nothing! Nothing! (Goes to Vashti.) It’s done. (Takes her hand.) Our path is straight; now we can walk safely all our lives.”

It is the pride of penitence, and this expression of feeling has never been given a prouder tone. In the previous play, Saints and Sinners, old Fletcher, on learning of his daughter’s shame, had cried out, “How shall I ever hold up my head again?” To hold up his head, that is an Englishman’s first need. And when Letty Fletcher had effaced her transgression by dint of heroism and devotion, she said, not, “I have expiated my sin,” but, “I have conquered.” By such expressions it is that I can see that the artificial psychology of the drama is yielding place to a truer and more real psychology. Hitherto, almost everything that has been written in England, would seem to have had for object, to conceal and not to make clear the English mind. A new generation of writers has come forth, whose work it will be to depict this mind as it really is, and to make its confession with the fierce sincerity of Judah.

The Crusaders, produced on November 2, 1891, is a piece of quite another stamp. It is not the unfolding of a character contending with circumstances: it is a satirical representation of a côterie, a group, a social movement. This kind of piece has but a first act, in which the theme is expounded and a brilliant array of characters presented to the audience. The plot of The Crusaders is a mere imbroglio, fastened on somewhat artificially to a satirical and ethical homily; it turns upon an open window and shut door, which endanger the reputation of a young widow. Unfortunately, we do not take much interest in this young widow, or in the two men who love her; one of them is a faded copy of Judah, the other is nothing at all.

But what is a mere accessory in the view of the ordinary playgoer, constitutes the essential part of the play for the critic, for the historian of the drama and of life.

When the time comes for depicting the state of English society during the last years of the nineteenth century, this curious first act of The Crusaders will certainly be drawn upon for material. There will be found in it the confusion of elements that stir and mingle, without uniting, in the vague social movement of this period: enthusiasm lacking a clear end in view, devotion lacking a definite object, a pilgrimage which leads no one knows whither, and on which no single pilgrim will reach his destination. It deals with the reformation of London; a programme so vast and complex as to be none at all. This association counts amongst its members a number of pretty women who play at charity; young idlers for whom the reformation of London is merely an opportunity for flirting, just like private theatricals, tableaux vivants, and garden parties; pushing women who turn the occasion to their own profit by bringing about relations with this “dear Duchess of Launceston,” and who raise themselves thus in the world, step by step. One of these good ladies, Mrs. Campion Blake, invites an old statesman to dinner, to meet a kind of apostle whom she defines as a “new variety of inspired idiot – something between an angel, a fool, and a poet! And atrociously in earnest! a sort of Shelley from Peckham Rye. He’s rather good fun, if you take him in small doses.” After dinner, an American lady gymnast will give a performance in the dining-room. “She’s adorable. She gives drawing-room gymnastics after dinner. It isn’t the least indelicate – after the first shock.” Be sure the Minister will accept the invitation. He is quite ready to reform London, provided only that no one calls upon him to alter his own mode of life. He acknowledges that he has no ideals. No ideals! his hearers exclaim horrified. Alas! no; had he not become a member of the House of Commons in his twenty-second year! Which of the two is Mr. Jones turning into ridicule? Idealism, or the House of Commons? Both, I fancy. Why should there not be a double irony for the clever, just as there is a galimatias double for the dull?

In this movement there are many who are in earnest. First of all we have the credulous, ingenuous Ingarfield, dragging in his train Una, the petticoated apostle of the prison and the house of ill-fame, the young virgin whose joy it is to attempt the conversion of rogues and prostitutes. But the most real type is that of Palsam. This individual is wholly repulsive. A voluntary spy, a detective by his own choice, he is the incarnation of that spirit of sneaking, which rages so cruelly in certain sections of English society. Basile, in comparison with him, is a “good sort,” an amiable companion. He stoops to expedients to which an agent de mœurs would blush to have recourse against an habituée of Saint Lazare; and it is against women of the world, too, that he resorts to them! He is so insensible to indignity that a box on the ear has no effect upon him. How do people put up with him? How is it they let him into their houses? In France we would throw him out without troubling about his calumnies, which would be welcomed only by the lowest kind of newspaper; or rather, a complete Palsam, a perfect Palsam could not be found in France. In England he is a reality and a power. But is he so vile as he seems, as at first we are inclined to regard him? No; his conduct seems mean to the utmost degree; but consider, please, two things: first, that he acts thus, quite disinterestedly; secondly, that he deprives himself of those incorrect enjoyments of which he is so bent upon depriving others. Give him the benefit of these two admissions, and, little by little, the man will begin to wear for you a different aspect. The ascetic will rehabilitate the spy, you will be forced to find a kind of heroism in his meanness, and to admire, while you hate, his hideous virtue, which is perhaps one of the hundred ways of doing good to men in their own despite.

Perhaps it was not Mr. Jones’s intention to suggest so many reflections by his Palsam, but whether he wishes it or no, his work is thus suggestive, and it is the special note of this very straightforward, very masculine, very generous satire, that it never ridicules the enemy without letting us see the redeeming traits in his character, and the good motives which he might plead in self-defence, thus putting the real man before us whole and entire.

Mr. Jones ridicules the would-be reformers of London, and represents their efforts as resulting in a pitiable fiasco. But he has not contended, of course, that London is all right as it is, and that the bringing of the great city into a state of moral health has ceased to be one of the dark problems which demand, and baffle, the good intentions of honest folk. He himself has indicated a solution, and the true solution; “To reform London, it is necessary, first of all, that each of us should reform himself.” Such is the moral of the piece; and this sermon is worth more than many others.

Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones’s popularity has gone on increasing during the last four years. The Tempter, it is true, gave the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised splendours of the mise en scène, and the admirable resources of his own talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in bringing his audience round to his way of thinking. In the Triumph of the Philistines, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the public would not have known à quoi se prendre, had not the piece been given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the état d’âme, of another nation, differentiating it from his own.

The Case of Rebellious Susan is a very amusing comedy. I know of none with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should be one in it, he tells her – indeed, there should be several; they have but to be looked for.

I don’t know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy’s researches. I, for my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon with certain differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her nature much more of pride than of love. Susan’s grief is not a tearful grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first. She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies; I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the end to lay down the moral of the whole business.

Very different is the heroine of The Masqueraders, who, as impersonated by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season of 1894. Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength and oppress her will.

Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write Judah; he returned to it in The Masqueraders, not from listlessness or unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his wife at a game of écarté – is not this melodrama? But what cares the author of The Masqueraders, whether the incidents be improbable and his situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the “well-made” piece; he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing. Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a store-room of materials. As for logic, it may be left to the professors who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements, amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements are – Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of human life.

And if the critic press too hard upon the author of The Masqueraders, he has recourse for his defence – and quite rightly – to the great name which is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted, Shakespeare’s plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas, traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some passing glimpses of real life.

To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw Judah and The Crusaders in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this cloud, he has already played a great part in the resuscitation of the drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists; the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his generation and of his race.