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NOV 16 1898 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 IN 
 
 Dramatic Criticism 
 
 WITH 
 
 IMPRESSIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 SOME MODERN PLAYS 
 
 L. DUPONT SYLE 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 WILLIAM R. JENKINS, 
 
 851-853 Sixth Avenue. 
 
 C^rWv '^^ 
 

 Copyright, 1898. by L. DuPont Sylh. 
 
 4-U Bights Reserved. 
 
 PEINa^ED BY THE 
 
 PEESS or WILLIAM R. JENKINS 
 
 NEW YOKE 
 
 

 TO 
 
 Mrs. Phebp: A. Hearst 
 
 whose thoughtful and loving generosity 
 
 has made possible to so many 
 
 the attainment of ideals 
 
 this book is dedicated 
 
 (by permission) 
 
 as a mark of appreciation. 
 
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good 
 
 shall exist; 
 Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor 
 
 good, 7ior power 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives 
 
 for the melodist 
 When eternity affirms the conception of an 
 
 hour. 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for 
 
 earth too hard, 
 The passiofi that left the ground to lose itself in 
 
 the sky, 
 Are music sent zip to God by the lover and the 
 
 bard; 
 Enough that He heard it once : we shall hear 
 
 it by-and-by. 
 
 — Browning. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 We are just beginning to have a drama 
 in the United States : the Impressions 
 recorded in the second part of this little 
 book are an attempt to preserve material 
 that may (or may^ not) be useful to the 
 future historian of that drama. 
 
 In the Essays of the first part, I have 
 endeavored to deal with questions that 
 have a more permanent interest than 
 have those touched on in the Ivipressions. 
 
 About two- thirds of the contents of 
 this book has already appeared, in 
 slightly different shape, in the columns 
 of the San Fi'ancisco Exaininer. I have 
 to thank the Management of that paper 
 for permission to reprint here. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 I.-ESSAYS. 
 
 Page. 
 I. The Influence of Moliere Upon 
 
 Sheridan and Congreve 3 
 
 II. Is the Actor's Art Unworthy ? . . 48 
 
 III. Some Essentials of the Actor's 
 
 Art 58 
 
 IV. The Endowed Theatre 65 
 
 V. The Future of the Drama 84 
 
 IL— IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 I. Shall We Forgive Her? — The 
 
 Serenade 91 
 
 II. A Secret Warrant 103 
 
 III. Robin Hood iii 
 
 IV. The Geisha. — Rip Van Winkle 
 
 (Opera).— A Gilded Fool ii6 
 
 V. The Cat and the Cherub. — The 
 
 First Born. — A Gay Deceiver.. 125 
 
 VI. Shore Acres 135 
 
 ^11. Trilby. — The Purser 145 
 
 III. Niobe.— In Old Japan 154 
 
I. 
 
 ESSAYS. 
 
I. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF MOUERK 
 
 UPON CONGREVE AND 
 
 SHERIDAN. 
 
 If one could acquit Charles I. of the 
 cardinal crime of being a liar, there are 
 many aspects of his character that might 
 be dwelt upon with pleasure. Not the 
 least pleasing among these, is his patron- 
 age of the Fine Arts; to Vandyck he gave 
 free apartments in Blackfriars Palace, a 
 pension of ^200 a year, knighthood and 
 orders for numerous paintings,— some of 
 which were paid for while others were 
 not ; to Ben Jonson he not only continued 
 the Laureateship, a hundred pounds a 
 year and the tierce of Canary granted by 
 James I., but he was also pleased publicly 
 to indicate his interest in the drama by 
 considerable grants of money for Masks, 
 by allowing the Queen to appear in a 
 pastoral comedy and by himself acting a 
 
4 . KSSAYS IN 
 
 part in Jonsou's Mask oi Lovers Triumph 
 Through Callipolis (produced in 1630). 
 
 Such facts as these show palpably the 
 intimate connection between the Court 
 and the Theatre, — a connection which, 
 while apparently advantageous to the 
 drama, was, in reality, harmful to its 
 life and growth : for it tended to make 
 that drama a mere recreation for a small 
 aristocratic class and to remove it from 
 close contact with the sympathies of an 
 immense majority of the people. Even 
 before the death of Shakespeare the na- 
 tional life had begun to assume forms 
 which, in the eyes of the Couit, were 
 strange, fantastic, contemptible. Yet 
 these were the forms which in the end 
 must and did prevail, — forms which re- 
 presented, in spite of their outward ab- 
 surdities, a strong, inner, spiritual life, 
 the life of Puritanism. The dramatists, 
 blinded by their devotion to the Court, 
 were unable to perceive and to acknowl- 
 edge the purity and virility of Puritan 
 motives ; they recognized only the sur- 
 face ridiculosities and lent their willing 
 aid to expose and to deride what they 
 considered the hypocrisy of a class to 
 whom England owes Hampdon and Vane, 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 5 
 
 Milton and Cromwell. When, therefore, 
 king and parliament abandoned hard 
 words for harder blows, the theatrical 
 profession and all connected with it 
 were relieved fi om the embarrassment of 
 choosing a side : their side was chosen 
 for them by the stern exigencies of the 
 situation into which they had thrust 
 themselves. Their cause was lost even 
 before the king's : he was not executed 
 until 1649 ; ten years before this, theatri- 
 cal representations had all but ceased and 
 the theatre was legally abolished by the 
 parliamentary statute of 1642. This de- 
 clared that "while these sad causes and 
 set-times of humiliation do continue, 
 stage plays shall cease and be forborne." 
 For fourteen years there was hardly a 
 dramatic performance in Kngland ; in 
 1656 D'Avenant obtained permission to 
 produce a kind of musical dialogue which 
 he described as "after the manner of the 
 Ancients." In 1657 he was allowed to 
 give his Siege of Rhodes, which he was 
 careful to designate not as a play, but as 
 "a Representation by the Art of Pros- 
 pective in Scenes, and the Story Sung in 
 Recitative Music." This marks the be- 
 ginning of the end of Puritan regime^ and 
 
6 ESSAYS IN 
 
 with the restoration of Charles II. in 1660 
 the theatres were immediately reopened. 
 For the twenty years, then, from 1640 
 to 1660, the acting drama had been prac- 
 tically dead in England. When the cur- 
 tain fell in the first-mentioned year, there 
 were living not only many actors who 
 had been trained in the school of Bur- 
 bage, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, but 
 also some dramatists able to support not 
 unworthily the traditions of the Eh"za- 
 bethan stage. Among these were Web- 
 ster, Thomas Heywood, Massinger, Field, 
 John Ford and Shirley. When the cur- 
 tain rose again in 1660, the only one left 
 of this illustrious group was Shirley, and 
 he, poor, old and broken by misfortune, 
 never renewed his connection with the 
 stage during the six years of life that 
 were left to him. This fact, trifling as it 
 may appear, seems to me significant of 
 the complete break in the traditions of 
 the English stage caused by those twenty 
 years of Puritan ascendancy. Moreover, 
 the nation, though it had restored the 
 Stuarts as a political convenience, was 
 still Puritan by a large majority, and the 
 aversion from the stage which had crys- 
 talized in the drastic ordinance of 1642, 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 7 
 
 when bishops and actors were classed and 
 abolished together,— this aversion was 
 inherited as a tradition, not only by the 
 children of the men who had humbled 
 kings at Naseby and at Worcester, but 
 also by their children's children unto the 
 generations of to day. 
 
 This, then, was the condition of affairs 
 which confronted the would-be drama- 
 tists of 1660: — a stage with hardly an 
 actor, a broken tradition of great writers, 
 a nation a majority of whose members 
 regarded the stage as the invention of 
 Beelzebub. Under these circumstances 
 it is not surprising that the dramatic 
 authors turned again for audience to that 
 small and exclusive upper class which 
 had formerly been their patrons, and that 
 they sought models among the writers of 
 that nation which had welcomed the 
 king in his exile and had impressed upon 
 him many traits properly characterized as 
 French. While we have not here to deal 
 specifically with tragedy, it may be no- 
 ticed in passing that the influence of 
 Corneille and Racine is no less clearly 
 traceable in Dryden than is that of D'an- 
 court in Vanbrugh and of Moliere in 
 Wycherley and Congreve. 
 
8 KSSAYS IN 
 
 Here now it may be proper to describe 
 briefly the character and the environment 
 of that Moliere comedy which from the 
 time of that writer down to our own has 
 had so vast an influence upon the comedy 
 of every civilized nation. 
 
 In the lylh century, the theatre of 
 France, like that of England, was inti- 
 mately connected with a Court upon 
 whose favor and patronage it depended 
 for its very existence. While the English 
 people, through the stress and strife of 
 civil war, were pushing forward to the 
 goal of constitutional liberty, France, 
 thanks to Richelieu and Mazarin, seemed 
 not only to have lost sight of this goal, 
 but to have forgotten that such a thing 
 existed. While England gained in one 
 direction, she lost in another : the Fine 
 Arts languished and almost died. While 
 France lost in one direction, she gained 
 in another : the Fine Arts grew and 
 flourished, — and conspicuous among 
 these Arts was the drama. 
 
 After twelve years of experience as 
 author, manager and actor in the pro- 
 vinces, Moliere was invited to Paris in 
 1658 through the influence of the Prince 
 de Couti and the Bishop of Valence. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM () 
 
 His compaii)^ was taken under the pat- 
 ronage of Philip, Duke of xA.njou, younger 
 brother of Louis XIV. For six j^ears 
 Moliere grew steadily in the favor of 
 the King, who, in 1664, stood sponsor 
 to the poet's eldest son. The next year 
 the troupe was distinguished by the title 
 of The King's Comedians, and was 
 granted an annual subvention of 7000 
 livres ; nor in the eight years that were 
 to elapse before his death (1673) did 
 Moliere ever lose the friendship and 
 patronage of the King. Without the 
 royal protection some of his most famous 
 works, notably Tarhiffe and Le Festin de 
 Pierre, could never have been performed 
 and would probably never have been 
 written. Yet this patronage was far 
 from being an unmitigated blessing. To 
 please the callow taste of his royal mas- 
 ter, Moliere was compelled to waste 
 much of his time upon spectacles, ballets 
 and farces quite unworthy of him, and 
 whenever in his plays he touched upon 
 questions of politics he was obliged to 
 abandon the artistic attitude of satirist 
 for the degrading posture of flatterer. 
 A king became to him as a king 
 to Beaumont and Fletcher, a thing to 
 
10 ESSAYS tN' 
 
 be bowed down to and not to be 
 criticised. 
 
 But, royalty apart, the life of Paris 
 furnished Moliere an extensive field 
 wherein he might exercise his comic 
 genius. If kings could not be sacrificed 
 to the gaiety of nations, fops and mar- 
 quises could. Hence the long gallery of 
 exquisitely-painted fine gentlemen, con- 
 spicuous among whom hang Dorante, the 
 Marquis de Mascarille and the redoubt- 
 able Viscount Jodelet. Fine ladies also 
 are not wanting, — ladies who are witty 
 and amiable like Bliante, witty and heart- 
 less like Celimene. At the other end of 
 the social scale we have as foils and 
 critics to their superiors the downright, 
 common-sense servant girl, as in Nicole, 
 Dorine, Toinette, and by their side those 
 schemers in petticoats, Frosine and 
 Claudine. Nor is the middle class unre- 
 presented. Monsieur Jourdain needs but 
 mention to be recognized as a type of 
 that snobbishness to be seen in every 
 wealthy society ; while the miser, the 
 rake, the hypocrite, the blue-stocking, 
 have each a play. This enumeration, 
 incomplete as it will be recognized to 
 be, may serve to indicate the range of 
 
Dramatic criticism it 
 
 Moliere's observation. His strength lies, 
 it seems to me, in the depiction of this 
 wide range of character by means of just 
 and appropriate dialogue and by means 
 of situations which, though often re- 
 peated and seldom highly dramatic, are 
 nevertheless sufficient for their end. 
 While it cannot be denied that in some 
 of his farces he is exceedingly coarse, in 
 the great majority of his plays the moral 
 tone is pure, noble and elevated. For 
 surface polish he may owe something to 
 the refined paganism which was the prac- 
 tical creed of the Court of Louis XIV., 
 but for the deeper ethical treatment which 
 we find in his plays he must have been 
 indebted to his own serious nature, — 
 "this jester, thoughtful as an apostle," 
 as Voltaire has called him. 
 
 Moliere's work was completed thirteen 
 years after the English Restoration. 
 Some of the best of it, L'Acole des 
 Femmes^ for instance, was in existence as 
 early as 1662. With such a mass of 
 splendid material to draw from, with a 
 King and Court devoted to French litera- 
 ture and French fashions, with a stage 
 cleared of EJlizabethan traditions as above 
 
12 ESSAYS IN 
 
 described, small wonder is it that the 
 Restoration comedy writers helped them- 
 selves bountifully from the banquet 
 ajGforded by Moliere's table. Small won- 
 der is it also, if, lacking the fine dis- 
 criminating taste of the master of the 
 feast, they mingled courses which he had 
 kept separate. Moreover, whenever they 
 found the viands too delicate for their 
 coarse palate, they did not hesitate to 
 season them with ill-flavored and unsav- 
 ory condiments mixed to suit their 
 English audiences. This process they 
 often refer to as '' strengthening ' ' Moliere. 
 To us it seems rather a weakening and 
 debasing of that great writer's materials. 
 Chief among these dramatic criminals 
 stands Wycherley, who evidently influ- 
 enced Congreve's early work and who 
 himself shows unmistakable traces of the 
 influence of Moliere. Wycherley 's The 
 Country Wife (written about 1672), takes 
 its main incidents from two plays of 
 Moliere's, L^J^cole des Fem7ne5 2in6 L'Ecole 
 des Maris. So ingenious is the plot, so 
 diverting are the incidents of the French 
 author's works, that not even the be- 
 smirching hand of Wycherley has render- 
 ed it impossible to read with interest his 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM I3 
 
 English version. The extraordinary- 
 vitality of the Moliere elements is shown 
 by the fact that they still survive in a 
 play recently given by Mr. Daly's com- 
 pany, — The Cozcntry Girl. 
 
 Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1674), is a 
 debased and vulgarized version of 
 Moliere' s Le Misayithrope, showing cor- 
 respondencies in plot and characters as 
 follows : — 
 
 Plot. The plot in each play turns upon 
 the misfortunes and humiliations which 
 befall a man sincere and outspoken, 
 placed in a highly artificial and conven- 
 tionalized society. In each case this man 
 distrusts and rails at everybody in the 
 world save two, — himself and the woman 
 he loves In both plays the interest 
 culminates in the scene where the Mis- 
 anthrope or the Plain Dealer finds that 
 his mistress is false as the rest of her 
 world. In the sub-plot, Moliere relieves 
 this somewhat dark picture with light 
 and delicate touches of healthy sentiment 
 and of pure affection, wherein the tone of 
 high comedy and an organic connection 
 with the main plot are perfectly preserved. 
 In Wycherley, the sub-plot is low comedy 
 and has no more connection with the 
 
14 ESSAYS IN 
 
 main- plot than have negro dialect stories 
 with literature. 
 
 Characters. The Alceste of Moli^re, a 
 man of high temper and of high character, 
 incapable of an unworth}^ deed, appears 
 in the Manly of Wycherley as a surly, 
 foul-mouthed v/retch capable of actions 
 at which an lago would have shuddered. 
 Philante, the polished and sensible man 
 of the world, appears as Freeman, whose 
 highest ambition is to mend a broken 
 fortune by a doubtful marriage ; Oronte, 
 that deliciously absurd coxcomb, is trans- 
 formed to the traitor Vernish, aptly 
 described by Manly as a man of such 
 extraordinary merit in villainy that the 
 world and fortune can never desert him ; 
 Kliante, cousin to Celimene, appears as 
 Kliza, cousin to Olivia ; the scandal- 
 mongering Marquises appear as Novel 
 and Lord Plausible ; and lastly, Celi- 
 mene, whose faults are such as may 
 easily be forgiven to her age and sex, 
 appears as that Olivia whose character 
 may be fitly described by Congreve's 
 couplet — 
 
 " Heaven has no rage like love to hatred 
 
 turned, 
 Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 15 
 
 The further indebtedness of Wycherley 
 to Moliere may be traced in the con- 
 versation between Manly and Freeman 
 (Plain Dealer, I., j), in the scandal- 
 mongering scene of Act II., where Olivia, 
 like Celimene, leads and outrails the 
 railers, and in the incident of the two 
 letters sent by the heroine to her two 
 foppish admirers. To another play of 
 Moliere's, the Critique de V ^cole des 
 Feinmes, Wycherley is indebted for that 
 effective scene in the Plain Dealer where 
 he criticises his own play, the Country 
 Wife. 
 
 I have given this somewhat detailed 
 study of Wycherley 's borrowings from 
 Moliere, as they may serve as a type of 
 the adaptations made by many other Et]g- 
 lish dramatists during the Restoration 
 period. Among those who helped them- 
 selves freely and too often in Wycherley 's 
 manner may be mentioned Dry den, 
 Vanbrugh, Shadwell, D'Avenant, Sed- 
 ley, Ravenscroft, Crowne, Betterton, 
 Otway, Mrs. Behn. Most of these writers 
 preceded Congreve, and it is natural that 
 in his first play he should have followed 
 the fashion thus set and that he should 
 have imitated particularly the most pro- 
 
1 6 KSSAYS IN 
 
 iniuent comedy writer among those just 
 named, — Wycherley. Every young 
 writer is greatly affected by the literary 
 tone or school popular at the beginning 
 of his career ; coarse dialogue and risque 
 situations were all the fashion when Con- 
 greve began to v/rite, and this may serve 
 to account for and to palliate the presence 
 of these elements in his earlier work. 
 
 Congreve's first play, The Old Bachelor , 
 takes its name and its principal character 
 from the type set upon the stage by 
 Moliere in his Misafithrope and by 
 Wycherley in his Plain Dealer. Hartwell 
 approaches nearer to his French proto- 
 type than does Manly : he is a man of 
 good heart and a gentleman, — the only 
 one in the play. He has more wit than 
 Alceste and more refinement than Manly. 
 Like Alceste, the misfortunes which be- 
 fall him come from his trusting too well 
 the woman he loves ; he has the sym- 
 pathy of the audience, as has Alceste and 
 as Manly has not. When his difficulties 
 are straightened out Vv^e rejoice with him 
 that he is allowed to remain what God 
 and nature had evidently intended him 
 to be, — an old bachelor. In Congreve, 
 then, writing at the age of 22, we see 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 1 7 
 
 a finer art than in those comedy writers 
 who were his immediate predecessors and 
 his contemporaries, for in them, with 
 rare exceptions, every character is painted 
 black and every side of human nature is 
 equally despic^ible, — a mistaken method 
 of portrayal of which Moliere in his 
 comedies is never guilt5^ The other 
 characters in The Old Bachelor are of 
 narrow range and of purely conventional 
 types, drawn rather from a young man's 
 study of books than from observation 
 of actual life. It may be worth while to 
 notice in passing that the traditional 
 animus of the dramatists against the 
 Puritans comes out strongly in the types 
 of that class introduced into the play, — 
 Fondlewife and the spurious Spintext. 
 Three times in this piny Congreve em- 
 ploys that weakest of diamatic devices, 
 the Soliloquy. This is a marked feature 
 of Moliere's early style, noticeably in 
 L'^iojirdi and in Le Depit Afnoureux. 
 Moliere himself, so far as I know, never 
 took the trouble to defend the Soliloquy; 
 Congreve has seen its weakness and has 
 made as good a defense for it as has ever 
 been printed. In the preface to his next 
 play, The Double Dealer ^ he writes : — "I 
 
1 8 :essAYS m 
 
 grant that for a man to talk to liiaiself 
 appears absurd and unnatural, and in- 
 deed it is so in most cases ; but the 
 circumstances which may attend the 
 occasion make great alteration. It often- 
 times happens to a man to have designs 
 which require him to himself \_szc] and 
 in their nature cannot admit of a con- 
 fidant. Such for certain is all villainy, 
 and other less mischievous intentions 
 may be very improper to be communi- 
 cated to a second person. In such a case, 
 therefore, the audience must observe 
 whether the person upon the stage takes 
 any notice of them at all or no. For if he 
 supposes anyone to be by when he talks 
 to himself, it is monstrous and ridiculous 
 to the last degree. Nay, not only in this 
 case, but in any part of a play, if there 
 is expressed any knowledge of an audi- 
 ence, it is insufferable. But otherwise, 
 when a man in soliloquy reasons with 
 himself, and pro's and co?z's, and 
 weighs all his designs, we ought not 
 to imagine that this man either talks to 
 us or to himself ; he is only thinking, 
 and thinking such matters as were in- 
 excusable folly in him to speak. But 
 because we are concealed spectators of 
 
DRAMATIC CRiTlCIvSM I9 
 
 the plot in agitation, and the poet finds 
 it necessary to let us know the whole 
 mystery of his contrivance, he is willing 
 to inform us of this person's thoughts ; 
 and to that end is forced to make use 
 of the expedient of speech, no other 
 better way being yet invented for the 
 communication of thought." 
 
 In The Double Dealer, written some 
 two years after The Old Bachelor, Con- 
 greve is still in the imitative stage. In 
 this play the general design is modeled 
 upon that of Moliere's Tariuffe, and, 
 like that work, its artistic unity is in- 
 jured by the violent introduction of an 
 illogical element, forced in to save what 
 was intended to be a comedy from turn- 
 ing out a tragedy. For the logical out- 
 come of the Tarhiffe is truly tragical, not 
 comical. Orgon's infatuation with Tar- 
 tuffe, his incapacity for seeing through 
 the character of the impostor, his folly 
 in putting himself so thoroughly into the 
 power of that impostor, — all this should 
 consistently result in the ruin of the good 
 man, in the triumph of the bad. Nothing 
 could prevent this but the forced and 
 inartistic introduction of the King's 
 officer with his sycophantic praise of 
 
20 ESSAYS IN 
 
 his monarch's great discernment and lofty 
 soul. Similarly in The Double Dealer, 
 the folly of Lord Touchwood and of 
 Mellefonte in trusting Mask well in spite 
 of plain proofs of his insincerity, should 
 have logically resulted in the triumph 
 of villainy. This result is avoided only 
 by making the villain leave unguarded 
 so wide a gap in the fence of his deceit 
 that not even so trusting a fool as 
 Mellefonte could help noticing it. This 
 serious defect was so apparent at the 
 early representations, that the play was 
 practically a failure in spite of its brilliant 
 wit and the genuine comedy of some 
 of its scenes 
 
 Coming now to detailed resemblances 
 between The Do2Lble Dealer and works of 
 Moliere, we notice that the character of 
 Lady Froth, the best comedy character 
 in the play, described by Congreve in 
 his play bill as " a great coquette, pre- 
 tender to poetry, wit and learning," — this 
 delightful bluestocking who babbles of 
 "Racine and Dacier upon Aristotle," 
 is a compound of the two sisters in Les 
 Precieuses Ridicules, — Cathos, who con- 
 sidered extempore verses . . . "the 
 very touchstone of genius," and Madelon, 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 21 
 
 whose special talent consisted in turning 
 the whole Roman history into madrigals. 
 Scene lo of Act I. of Les Precieiises 
 Ridicules, where Mascarille reads his 
 verses to the ladies, and the second scene 
 of Act I. oi Le Misanthrope, where Oronte 
 demands that Alceste should criticise his 
 sonnet, — these are the prototypes of the 
 tenth scene of Act III. of The Double 
 Dealer, where Lady Froth receives the 
 admiration of Mr. Brisk for her poem of 
 "The Coachman in the Dair3^" I give 
 this episode entire, as it is in Congreve's 
 best style and may challenge comparison 
 with the original. 
 
 Lady Froth. Then you think that episode 
 between Susan, the dairymaid, and our coach- 
 man is not amiss; you know I may suppose the 
 dairy in town as well as in the country. 
 
 Brisk. Incomparable, let me perish ! But 
 then, being an heroic poem, had not you better 
 call him a charioteer ? Charioteer sounds great; 
 besides, your ladyship's coachman having a 
 red face, and you comparing him to the sun ; 
 and you know the sun is called Heaven's 
 charioteer. 
 
 Lady F. Oh, ir. finitely better! I am ex- 
 tremely beholden to you for the hint ; stay, 
 we'll read over those half a score lines again. 
 [Pulls out a paper.] Let me see here, you 
 
22 KSSAYS IN 
 
 know what goes before, — the comparison, you 
 know. [Reads] 
 
 For as the sun shines every day 
 So of our coachman I may say 
 
 B. I'm afraid that simile won't do in wet 
 weather; because you say the sun shines every 
 day. 
 
 Lady F. No, for the sun it won't, but it will 
 do for the coachman: for you know there's 
 most occasion for a coach in wet weather. 
 
 B. Right, right, that saves all. 
 
 Lady F. Then, I don't say the sun shines all 
 the day, but that he peeps now and then; yet 
 he does shine all the day too, you know, 
 though we don't see him. 
 
 B. Right ; but the vulgar will never com- 
 prehend that. 
 
 Lady F. Well, you shall hear. Let me see. 
 [Reads] 
 
 For as the sun shines every day, 
 
 So, of our coachman I may say, 
 
 He shows his drunken, fiery face. 
 
 Just as the sun does, more or less^ 
 
 B. That's right, all's well, all's well !— 
 "more or less." 
 Lady F. [Reads] 
 
 And when at night his labour's done. 
 Then, too, like Heaven's charioteer the sun- 
 Ay, charioteer does better. 
 
 Into the dairy he descends, 
 And there his whipping and his driving ends; 
 There he's secure from danger of a bilk, 
 His fare is paid him, and he sets in milk. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 23 
 
 For Susan, you know, is Thetis, and so 
 
 B, Incomparably well and proper, egad / 
 But I have one exception to make : don't you 
 think bilk — (I know it's good rhyme) — but 
 don't you think "bilk" and "fare" too like a 
 hackney coachman? 
 
 Lady F. I swear and vow, I am afraid so. 
 And yet our Jehu was a hackney coachman 
 when my lord took him. 
 
 B. Was he ? I'm answered if Jehu was a 
 hackney coachman. You may put that in the 
 marginal notes though, to prevent criticism. 
 Only mark it with a small asterism, and 
 say, "Jehu was formerly a hackney coach 
 man." 
 
 Lady F. I will; you'd oblige me extremely 
 to write notes to the whole poem. 
 
 B. With all my heart and soul, and proud 
 of the vast honor, let me perish ! 
 
 The same scene contains a fire of 
 scandal-mongering epigrams lighted by 
 the torches which wave so merrily in the 
 hands of Celimene, Clitandre and Acaste 
 as they march through the 5th scene 
 of the 2nd Act of Le Misanthrope. It may 
 be worth while to notice in passing that 
 the concluding couplet of the 3rd Act of 
 The Dotible Dealer is nothing but a rimed 
 expression of the thought contained in 
 Swift's famous definition of happiness,— 
 
24 ESSAYS IN 
 
 " the perpetual possession of being well 
 deceived." 
 
 The Double Dealer is the last of Con- 
 greve's plays that shows strong detailed 
 resemblances to specific works of Moliere. 
 In this play Congreve is still in the 
 imitative stage : his characters, though 
 witty, are seldom other than conventional 
 and are often not clearly distinguished. 
 Sir Paul Pliant and Lord Froth are prac- 
 tically one and the same : Mr. Brisk and 
 Mr. Careless could speak each other's 
 speeches with entire dramatic propriety : 
 Cynthia and Mellefonte are excellent 
 young people, but hardly anything more. 
 The pernicious habit of long soliloquies, 
 imitated from Moliere and noticeable in 
 The Old Bachelor, is carried to even 
 greater lengths in The Double Dealer. 
 But when we remember that when Con- 
 greve wrote this play he was only 23, 
 our wonder is not that the defects are so 
 many, but that they are so few. 
 
 Though of far more intrinsic interest, 
 Congreve' s third and fifth plays, Love 
 for Love and The Way of the World, 
 cannot long detain us here : their very 
 originality excludes all but a small por- 
 tion of them from the field marked off by 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 2$ 
 
 the limitations of our subject. In char- 
 acters they owe nothing to Moliere save 
 the types of gossipy, malicious fine ladies 
 and gentlemen, — Mrs. Frail, Scandal and 
 Tattle, in Love for Love ; Witwoud and 
 Millamant, in The Way of the World. 
 In general structure we still see the in- 
 fluence of Moliere's style: the action is 
 completed within a few hours: the scenes, 
 ordinary and realistic interiors such as a 
 drawing-room or a coffee-house, are sel- 
 dom changed. Turning from resem- 
 blances to contrasts, we notice that in the 
 principal characters of these two great 
 plays, Congreve is as thoroughly English 
 as Moliere is French. Foresight, Sir 
 Sampson Legend, Ben Legend, Sir Wil- 
 fuU Witwoud, Lady Wishfort, are all of 
 true British grain ; while the teasing per- 
 plexities of the Congreve plots carry us 
 far from that simplicity of construction 
 characteristic of Moliere. In ethical tone 
 and in artistic diction, Congreve, it must 
 be confessed, suffers by comparison with 
 Moliere. This is due, partly, to the 
 lighter and more superficial nature of the 
 Englishman, partly to the bad English 
 models which set the fashion for him, and 
 partly to his youth when he wrote. 
 
26 KSSAYS IN 
 
 Congreve's last and greatest play was 
 written when he was but thirty. At that 
 age Moliere had written nothing but 
 a few farces imitated from the Italian. 
 All the deep experiences of life recorded 
 in his great comedies were yet to come to 
 him : when they came they fell upon 
 a mind tried in the school of adversity, 
 thoughtful, mature, refined. Many like 
 experiences may have come to Congreve 
 in the 28 years that followed his master- 
 piece and in which he wrote almost 
 notbiDg ; if they did come, they fell upon 
 barren soil : unwatered by the dew of 
 emotion, they withered and died. Yet in 
 some obscure corner of Congreve' s hard 
 and cynical heart there must have been 
 one soft and tender spot, for into the 
 mouth of a Mrs. Marwood he has put one 
 divine phrase: " Srsy what you will, 'tis 
 belter to be left th:^r nev^ r to h^ve b?en 
 loved '' — a seiJtim : '- v.. : i-. ii , h-^ rdly bt-tter 
 e^T>resH-:d reapp- -r^ in Tennyson's 
 fam>ufr, 
 
 '• 'Ti^- b vner tc^ have loved and lost, 
 Tiian never to have loved at all." 
 
 This brief study of Congreve may fitly 
 
 close with a judgment upon him delivered 
 
 by a celebrated Frenchman, — no less a 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 27 
 
 man than Voltaire. In his Lettres sur 
 les Ayiglais he writes: '*Mr. Congreve 
 raised the glory of comedy to a greater 
 height than any English writer before or 
 since his time. He wrote only a few 
 plays, but they are excellent in their 
 kind. The laws of the drama are strictly 
 observed in them. They abound with 
 characters, all which are shadowed with 
 the utmost delicacy, and we do not meet 
 with so much as one low or coarse jest. (!) 
 The language is everywhere that of men 
 of fashion, but their actions are those of 
 knaves, a proof that he was perfectly well 
 acquainted with human nature and fre- 
 quented what we call polite company." 
 
 From The Way of the World in 1700 to 
 The School for Scandal in 1777 is a long 
 step, yet this distance must be traveled 
 before we can meet an English comedy 
 writer with wit enough to erect upon the 
 foundations of Moliere a superstructure 
 after the fashion of Congreve. During 
 this long period, while there had arisen 
 no great writer to carry on the Congreve 
 tradition, the art of play-writing (of 
 putting together what the French call 
 the ** well-made piece ")-— this had been 
 
28 ESSAYS IN 
 
 practised by a succession of clever men, 
 Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Gibber, Gay, 
 Hoadley, Coleman, Garrick, and bad 
 resulted in a decided improvement in 
 what may be called the mechanics of 
 construction. The advantage which 
 Sheridan thus inherited has been de- 
 scribed by Taine ("History of English 
 lyiterature," Book III., Chap. I., Sec- 
 tion lo) : "The farce-writer of to-day 
 sees that the catastrophe of half of 
 Moliere's plays is ridiculous ; nay, many 
 of them can produce effects better than 
 Moliere ; in the long run they succeed in 
 stripping the theatre of all awkwardness 
 and circumlocution. A piquant style, 
 and perfect machinery; pungency in all 
 the words and animation in all the scenes; 
 a superabundance of wit and marvels of 
 ingenuity; over all this, a true physical 
 activity and the secret pleasure of de- 
 picting and justifying oneself, of public 
 self-glorification : here is the foundation 
 of the School for Scandal^ here the source 
 of the talent and the success of 
 Sheridan." 
 
 Many sources have been suggested 
 whence Sheridan may have drawn his 
 School for Sca7idal, yet after all has been 
 
Dramatic criticism 29 
 
 said it is difficult to believe that he is 
 much indebted to any authors save 
 Moliere and the Restoration comedy 
 writers who copied him. The first indi- 
 cation of this is in the title of the play, 
 modeled upon the School for Wives and 
 the School for Husbands of Moliere. This 
 conception of the scandalous college (after 
 Le Misanthrope) seems to have been the 
 nucleus of the play, and the manuscript 
 draft of the scandal-mongering conversa- 
 tion shows a brutal coarseness of wit, 
 suggesting a close study of Wycherley 
 and Farquhar. Through repeated re- 
 visions this coarseness was gradually 
 polished away until it resulted in the 
 present version: even this is somewhat 
 broader than 19th century ears are 
 accustomed to, and suffers by comparison 
 with the tone of good taste preserved in 
 the corresponding scenes of Le Misayi- 
 thrope. This will be illustrated by an 
 extract further on: let it suffice now to 
 recall attention to the title of the play 
 and to the prominence assigned to I,ady 
 Sneerwell and Mrs. Candor in the open- 
 ing scene as indications of the probability 
 that Sheridan's original intention was to 
 write a comedy satirizing those fashion- 
 
30 ESSAYS IN 
 
 able lovers of scandal whom he had often 
 listened to at Bath and whose prototypes 
 he found already done to the life in 
 Moliere and in Congreve. But this he 
 must have found too thin a thread upon 
 which to hang a five-act play, and he 
 accordingly twisted in with it another 
 strand, — the story of the Teazles and of 
 the two brothers Surface. The character 
 of Sir Peter Teazle, originally intended 
 to be merely a vulgar city merchant, was 
 gradually sublimated and assimilated to 
 that of his prototype Alceste in Le 
 Misa7ithrope : when the outline is com- 
 pleted we find him placed outside the 
 envenomed circle of gossips, as was 
 Alceste, and voicing, as did he, the 
 comment and the rebuke of the just- 
 minded spectator. Sir Peter has the 
 violence of Sir Sampson I^egend without 
 his vindictiveness ; he has all the honesty 
 of Alceste without his moroseness. In 
 the character and actions of Joseph Sur- 
 face, Sheridan has again drawn heavily 
 upon Moliere, — this time upon Tartuflfe. 
 Both Joseph and Tartuflfe rise by hypo- 
 crisy; the object at which they aim is 
 the same, and whoever will compare the 
 arguments addressed by Tartuflfe to 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 3 1 
 
 Elraire {Tartu^e^ IV., 5), with those ad- 
 dressed by Joseph Surface to Lady- 
 Teazle {School for Scandal, IV., 3), will 
 see that Sheridan's treatment of this 
 delicate situation is directly based upon 
 Moliere's. In the management of his 
 denouement, in the working up of the 
 wonderfully effective climax wherein the 
 hypocrite is unmasked, Sheridan, it seems 
 to me, has surpassed not only Moliere, 
 who is here confessedly weak, but also 
 Congreve, who, in the 5th Act of the 
 Double Dealer, evidently saw that a 
 strong situation was here demanded, 
 but was as evidently unable to bring it 
 about. 
 
 In conclusion, I shall present the treat- 
 ment of the same theme by each of the 
 authors under consideration. This theme 
 shall be that which gives its title to 
 Sheridan's play, — the representation of 
 that careless, easy, malicious conversa- 
 tion which serves as the small change of 
 fashionable society. In Moliere the scene 
 selected is the 5th of the 2nd Act of Le 
 Misanthrope : the principal characters are 
 Celimene, the fine lady; Alce^te, her 
 honest and plain-speaking lover; Acaste 
 and Clitandre, Marquises. 
 
32 KSSAYS IN 
 
 Git. Egad! madam, I have just come from 
 the Louvre, where Cl^onte, at the levee, made 
 himself supremely ridiculous. Has he no 
 friend who could give him some charitable 
 advice on his behaviour? 
 
 Cell. It is true that he sadly compromises his 
 reputation ; his manners everywhere at once 
 strike us as odd ; and when after a short 
 absence we see him again, he seems even more 
 absurd than before. 
 
 Aca. 'Gad ! talking of absurd people, I have 
 just bad to bear with that most trying of tedious 
 bores, the arguer Damon ; if you will believe 
 me, he kept me out of my sedan-chair in the 
 broihng sun for a whole hour. 
 
 Cell. He certainly is a strange talker, and 
 knows how to make long speeches with no 
 meaning in them. No one understands a word 
 of what he says ; and in all that we hear, there 
 is nothing but noise. 
 
 Eli. (to Philinte). This is no bad beginning, 
 and the conversation is in a fair way against our 
 neighbors. 
 
 cut. Timante, madam, is another original. 
 
 Celi. He is a man all mystery from head to 
 foot. In passing he casts upon one a bewilder- 
 ed glance, and with nothing to do is always 
 busy. Grimaces abound in whatever he says, 
 and he wearies one to death with his cere- 
 monies. In the midst of a general conversation 
 he has always some secret to whisper, and that 
 secret turns out to be nothing. He makes a 
 wonder of the merest trifle, and even wishes 
 you "Good morning" mysteriously in your ear. 
 
DRAMA'KC CRITICISM 33 
 
 Aca. And Gerald, madam? 
 
 cm. Oh ! the tedious boaster ! You never 
 see him come down from his noble pedestal. 
 He is always mixing in the best society, and 
 never quotes anyone less than duke, prince, or 
 princess. Rank has turned his head, and all 
 his talk is of horses, carriages and dogs. He 
 " thou's " people of the highest position, and 
 the word "sir" is with him quite obsolete. 
 
 Oil. It is said that he is on the best terms 
 with B^lise. 
 
 Celi. Ah ! the poor creature ; and what dull 
 company she is ! I suffer martyrdom when she 
 comes to see me. In vain do I tax my powers 
 to the utmost, to find out what to say to her; 
 the barrenness of her talk destroys every 
 attempt at conversation. It is useless to have 
 recourse to the most commonplace topics to 
 overcome her stupid silence ; the fine weather, 
 the rain, the cold, and the heat are soon ex- 
 hausted. Yet her visits, in themselves so un- 
 welcome, drag their weary length along, and 
 you may consult the clock and yawn twenty 
 times, but she stirs no more than a log of wood. 
 
 Aca. And what do you think of Adraste? 
 
 cm. Ah ! what intolerable pride ! He is a 
 man puffed up with conceit, always dissatisfied 
 with the Court, and making it his business 
 daily to inveigh against it. There is neither 
 office, place nor living given away without 
 some injustice having been done to the import- 
 ant personage he fancies himself to be. 
 
 cut. But young Cleon, who is visited by the 
 best society, what do you say of him 1 
 
CSli. That his cook has all the merit, and 
 that it is to his table that each one pays 
 respect. 
 
 EH. He takes care to provide the most 
 dainty dishes. 
 
 Cell. Yes, but I wish he would not provide 
 himself; and I consider his stupid person a 
 most unpleasant dish, which, to my mindi 
 spoils the taste of all the others. 
 
 Phil. His uncle, Damis, is greatly esteemed: 
 what do you say of him, madam? 
 
 cm. He is one of my friends. 
 
 Phil. He is a gentleman, and has plenty of 
 good sense. 
 
 cm. Yes ; only the display of cleverness he 
 makes vexes me beyond measure. He is 
 always stiff and formal, and in all he says you 
 can feel the effort he is making to utter some 
 witticism. Since he has taken it into his head 
 to think himself clever, he is so exacting that 
 nothing can please his taste. He tries to see 
 defects in all that is written ; thinks that to 
 bestow praise is not worthy of a man of intelli- 
 gence ; that it is a sign of knowledge to find 
 fault with everything, the part of fools to 
 admire and to laugh ; and that in never ap- 
 proving the writings of our time he shows his 
 superiority to other people. He even finds 
 fault with ordinary conversations, and will not 
 condescend to utter common things ; but, his 
 arms crossed on his breast, looks down with 
 contempt from the height of his intellect on all 
 that is said. 
 Aca. Demmit, madam, his very picture ! 
 
r):RAMAl^IC CRITICISM 35 
 
 cut. Your skill in drawing character is ad- 
 mirable, madam. 
 
 Ale. Go on, go on, my dear courtly friends; 
 no one is spared, and each will have his turn; 
 yet, let any one of those people now appear, 
 and we shall see you rush in haste to meet him, 
 offer your hand, and with a flattering embrace 
 protest you are his sincere friend. 
 
 cut. Why do you call us to account? If 
 you object to what is said, you had better ad- 
 dress your reproaches to this lady. 
 
 Ale. No, upon my soul, no ! It is you who 
 deserve the blame ; your fawning smiles draw 
 from her these slanderous descriptions ; her 
 satirical turn of mind is constantly encouraged 
 by the criminal incense of your flattery. She 
 would find raillery less to her taste if she knew 
 that it is not approved of. Thus it is that 
 flatterers are always responsible for the vices 
 spread among mankind. 
 
 Phil. But why show such deep interest for 
 those people ? You would be the first to con- 
 demn in them the defects we find fault with. 
 
 Celt. But must not our friend always show 
 opposition? You surely would not have him 
 think like everybody else, and must he not 
 display everywhere the spirit of contradiction 
 with which Heaven has blessed him? What 
 others think never satisfies him ; he is always of 
 the opposite opinion, and he would fear to pass 
 for a vulgar-minded man if he were observed 
 to agree with anyone. The privilege of con- 
 tradicting has such charms for him, that he is 
 often in arms against himself; and to hear his 
 
36 ESSAYS m 
 
 own thoughts expressed by others is sufficient 
 to make him oppose them. 
 
 Here we notice that the method of 
 presentation is very simple and not par- 
 ticularly dramatic ; while it is true that 
 the interest is centred on the heroine by 
 giving her all the long character sketches 
 to declaim, there is no clash of mind 
 against mind, no repartee, no conflict of 
 character with character until Alceste 
 breaks in near the close of the scene. 
 
 Congreve's method is very difierent in 
 detail, as witness the following from the 
 2nd scene of the 2nd Act of The Way of 
 the World. Here the principal characters 
 are Millamant, the fine lady; Mirabell, her 
 lover, who grudges her society to every- 
 one but himself; Witwoud, the would-be 
 wit. 
 
 [Enter Mrs. Millamant, Wltwoud and Mincing.'] 
 
 Mir. Here she comes, i' faith, full sail, with 
 her fan spread and her streamers out, and a 
 shoal of fools for tenders ; ha, no, I cry her 
 mercy ! 
 
 Mrs. Fain. I see but one poor empty sculler, 
 and he tows her woman after him. 
 
 Mir. (to Mrs. Millamant). You seem to be 
 unattended, madam— you used to have the 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 37 
 
 beau monde throng after you; and a flock of 
 gay fine perukes hovering round you. 
 
 Wit. Like moths about a candle. I had 
 like to have lost my comparison for want of 
 breath. 
 
 Blrs, Mil. O, I have denied myself airs to- 
 day; I have walked as fast through the crowd — 
 
 TT7/'. As a favourite just disgraced, and with 
 as few followers. 
 
 Mrs. MiL Dear Mr. Witwoud, truce with 
 your similitudes ; for I'm as sick of 'em 
 
 Wit. As a physician of a good air. I cannot 
 help it, madam, though 'tis against myself. 
 
 Mrs, Mil. Yet again ! Mincing, stand be- 
 tween me and his wit. 
 
 Wit. Do, Mrs. Mincing, like a screen before 
 a great fire. I confess I do blaze to-day, — I am 
 too bright. 
 
 Mrs. Fain. But, dear Millamant, why were 
 you so long? 
 
 Mrs. MiL Long ! Lord, have I not made 
 violent haste ? I have asked every living thing 
 I met for you ; I have inquired after you, as 
 after a new fashion. 
 
 Wit, Madam, truce with your similitudes. 
 No, you met her husband, and did not ask him 
 for her. 
 
 Mrs. MiL By your leave, Witwoud, that 
 were like inquiring after an old fashion, to ask 
 a husband for his wife. 
 
 W^t. Hum, a hit ! a hit, a palpable hit ! I 
 confess it. 
 
 Mrs. Fain. You were dressed before I came 
 abroad. 
 
3« ESSAYS IN 
 
 Mrs. Mil. Ay, that's true. O, but then I had 
 — Mincing, what had I ? Why was I so long ? 
 
 Min. O, mem, your la'ship stayed to peruse 
 a packet of letters. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. O ay, letters— I had letters — I am 
 persecuted with letters— I hate letters — nobody 
 knows how to write letters, and yet one has 
 'em, one does not know why. They serve one 
 to pin up one's hair. 
 
 Wit. Is that the way? Pray, madam, do 
 you pin up your hair with all your letters? I 
 find I must keep copies. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. Only with those in verse, Mr. 
 Witwoud. I never pin up my hair with prose. 
 I think I tried once. Mincing. 
 
 Min. O, mem, I shall never forget it. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. Ay, poor Mincing tift and tift all 
 the morning. 
 
 Min. Till I had the cramp in my fingers, I'll 
 vow, mem : and all to no purpose. But when 
 your la'ship pins it up with poetry, it sits so 
 pleasant the next day as anything, and is so 
 pure and so crips. 
 
 Wit, Indeed, so crips ? 
 
 Min. You're such a critic, Mr. Witwoud. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. Mirabell, did you take exceptions 
 last night? O, ay, and went away. Now 
 I think on't, I'm angry — no, now I think on't, 
 I'm pleased, for I believe I gave you some pain. 
 
 Mir. Does that please you ? 
 
 Mrs. Mil. Infinitely ; I love to give pain. 
 
 Mir. You would affect a cruelty which is 
 not in your nature ; your true vanity is in the 
 power of pleasing. 
 
MAUA'TiC CRrTlCiSM 3^ 
 
 Mrs. Mil. Oh, I ask you pardon for that. 
 One's cruelty is one's power ; and when one 
 parts with one's cruelty, one parts with one's 
 power; and when one has parted with that, 
 I fancy one's old and ugly. 
 
 Mir. Ay, ay, suffer your cruelty to ruin the 
 object of your power, to destroy your lover, — 
 and then how vain, how lost a thing you'll be ! 
 Nay, 'tis true : you are no longer handsome 
 when you've lost your lover; your beauty dies 
 upon the instant; for beauty is the lover's gift; 
 'tis he bestows your charms — your glass is all a 
 cheat. The ugly and the old, whom the look- 
 ing-glass mortifies, yet after commendation can 
 be flattered by it, and discover beauties in it; for 
 that reflects our praises, rather than your face. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. O, the vanity of these men ! Fain- 
 all, d'ye hear him? If they did not commend 
 us, we were not handsome ! Now you must 
 know they could not commend one if one was 
 not handsome. Beauty the lover's gift ! Lord, 
 what is a lover, that it can give ? Why, one 
 makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they 
 live as long as one pleases, and they die as 
 soon as one pleases ; and then, if one pleases, 
 one makes more. 
 
 Wit. Very pretty. Why, you make no more 
 of making of lovers, madam, than of making so 
 many card-matches. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. One no more owes one's beauty 
 to a lover, than one's wit to an echo. They 
 can but reflect what we look and say; vain, 
 empty things if we are silent or unseen, and 
 want a being. 
 
40 :essAYS iisr 
 
 Mir. Yet to those two vain, empty things 
 you owe the two greatest pleasures of your life. 
 
 Mrs. Mil. How so ? 
 
 Mir. To your lover you owe the pleasure of 
 hearing yourselves praised ; and to an echo the 
 pleasure of hearing yourselves talk. 
 
 Wit. But I know a lady that loves talking so 
 incessantly, she won't give an echo fair play; 
 she has that everlasting rotation of tongue, that 
 an echo must wait till she dies before it can 
 catch her last words. 
 
 In this presentation the heroine is not 
 only witty herself, but is also the cause 
 of wit in others. Epigrams, repartee and 
 similes follow each other fast and brilliant 
 as shower of stars from exploding rocket. 
 There is nothing serious, as in the tem- 
 persome speeches of Moliere's hero ; all is 
 lightness, gaiety, ease. The bon mots are 
 distributed among the various characters 
 with an evenness that amounts almost to 
 balance. 
 
 .1 ; , From Sheridan we take a part of the 
 2nd sfeene of the 2nd Act of the School 
 for Scandal: the college of gossips is 
 holding a session in Lady Sneerwell's 
 house, with that lady as the presiding 
 genius. 
 
 Mrs. Can. Now, I'll die ; but you are so 
 scandalous, I'll forswear your society. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 4 1 
 
 LadyTeaz. What's the matter,Mrs. Candour? 
 
 Mrs. Can. They'll not allow our friend JMiss 
 Vermilion to be handsome. 
 
 Lady Siieer. Oh, surely she is a pretty 
 woman. 
 
 Crab. I am very glad you think so, ma'am. 
 
 Mrs. Can. She has a charming fresh colour. 
 
 Lady Teaz. Yes, when it is fresh put on. 
 
 Mrs. Ca7i. Oh, fie ! I'll swear her colour is 
 natural : I have seen it come and go ! 
 
 Lady Teaz. I dare swear you have, ma'am : 
 it goes off at night, and comes again in the 
 morning. 
 
 Sir Ben. True, ma'am, it not only comes 
 and goes ; but what's more, egad, her maid 
 can fetch and carry it ! 
 
 Mrs. Can. Ha ! ha ! ha ! how I hate to hear 
 you talk so ! But surely, now, her sister is, or 
 was, very handsome. 
 
 Crab. Who ? Mrs. Evergreen ? O Lord ! 
 she's six-and-fifty if she's an hour! 
 
 Mrs. Can. Now positively you wrong her ; 
 fifty-two or fifty-three is the utmost— and I 
 don't think she looks more. 
 
 Sir Ben. Ah ! there's no judging by her 
 looks, unless one could see her face. 
 
 Lady Sneer. Well, well, if Mrs. Evergreen 
 does not take some pains to repair the ravages 
 of time, you must allow she effects it with great 
 ingenuity ; and surely that's better than the 
 careless manner in which the widow Ochre 
 caulks her wrinkles. 
 
 Sir Ben, Nay, now. Lady Sneer well, you 
 are severe upon the widow. Come, come, 'tis 
 
42 ESSAYS IN 
 
 not that she paints so ill — but, when she has 
 finished her face, she joins it on so badly to her 
 neck, that she looks like a mended statue, in 
 which the connoisseur may see at once 
 that the head is modern, though the trunk's 
 antique. 
 
 Crab. Ha ! ha 1 ha ! Well said, nephew ! 
 
 Mrs. Can. Ha ! ha! ha! Well, you make 
 me laugh ; but I vow I hate you for it. What 
 do you think of Miss Simper? 
 
 Sir Ben. Why, she has very pretty teeth. 
 
 Lady Teaz. Yes, and on that account, when 
 she is neither speaking nor laughing (which 
 very seldom happens), she never absolutely 
 shuts her mouth, but leaves it always on ajar, 
 as it were — thus. {Shows her teeth. 
 
 Mrs. Can. How can you be so ill-natured ? 
 
 Lady Teaz. Nay, I allow even that's better 
 than the pains Mrs. Prim takes to conceal her 
 losses in front. She draws her mouth till it 
 positively resembles the aperture of a poor's- 
 box, and all her words appear to sHde out 
 edgewise as it were — thus : How do you do, 
 tnadani ? Yes, madam. S^Mhnics. 
 
 Lady Sneer. Very well. Lady Teazle ; I see 
 you can be a little severe. 
 
 Lady Teaz. In defence of a friend, it is but 
 justice. But here comes Sir Peter to spoil our 
 pleasantry. 
 
 Enter Sir Peter Teazle. 
 
 Sir Pet. Ladies, your most obedient. — 
 \^Aside.'\ Mercy on me, here is the whole set ! 
 a character dead at every word, I suppose. 
 
 Mrs. Cafi. I am rejoiced you are come, Sir 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 43 
 
 Peter. They have been so censorious — and 
 Lady Teazle as bad as any one. 
 
 Sir Pet. That must be very distressing to 
 you, indeed, Mrs. Candour. 
 
 Mrs Can. Oh, they will allow good qualities 
 to nobody ; not even good nature to our friend 
 Mrs. Pursy. 
 
 Lady Teaz. What, the fat dowager who 
 was at Mrs. Quadrille's last night ? 
 
 Mrs. Can. Nay, her bulk is her misfortune ; 
 and, when she takes so much pains to get rid of 
 it, you ought not to reflect on her. 
 
 Lady Sneer, That's very true, indeed. 
 
 Lady Teaz. Yes, I know she almost lives 
 on acids and small whey ; laces herself by 
 pulleys ; and often, in the hottest noon in sum- 
 mer, you may see her on a little squat pony, 
 with her hair plaited up behind like a drummer's, 
 and puffing round the Ring on a full trot. 
 
 Mrs. Can. I thank you, Lady Teazle, for 
 defending her. 
 
 Sir Pet. Yes, a good defence truly. 
 
 Mrs. Can. Truly, Lady Teazle is as censor- 
 ious as Miss Sallow. 
 
 Crab. Yes, and she is a curious being to 
 pretend to be censorious— an awkward gawky, 
 without any one good point under heaven. 
 
 Mrs. Can. Positively you shall not be so 
 very severe. Miss Sallow is a near relation of 
 mine by marriage, and as for her person, great 
 allowance is to be made ; for, let me tell you, 
 a woman labours under many disadvantages 
 who tries to pass for a girl of six-and-thirty. 
 
 Lady Sneer, Though, surely, she is hand- 
 
44 KSSAYS IN 
 
 some still — and for the weakness in her eyes, 
 considering how much she reads by candlelight, 
 it is not to be wondered at. 
 
 Mrs. Ca7i. True, and then as to her manner; 
 upon my word I think it is particularly graceful, 
 considering she never had the least education ; 
 for you know her mother was a Welsh milliner, 
 and her father a sugar-baker at Bristol. 
 
 Sir Ben. Ah ! you are both of you too good- 
 natured ! 
 
 Sir Pet. Yes, damned good-natured ! This, 
 their own relation ! mercy on me ! [Aside. 
 
 Mrs. Can. For my part, I own I cannot bear 
 to hear a friend ill spoken of. 
 
 Sir Pet. No, to be sure ! 
 
 Sir Ben. Oh ! you are of a moral turn. 
 Mrs. Candour and I can sit for an hour and 
 hear Lady Stucco talk sentiment. 
 
 Lady Teaz. Nay, I vow Lady Stucco is very 
 well with the dessert after dinner; for she's 
 just like the French fruit one cracks for mot- 
 toes — made up of paint and proverb. 
 
 Mrs. Can. Well, I will never join in ridicul- 
 ing a friend ; and so I constantly tell my cousin 
 Ogle, and you all know what pretensions she 
 has to be critical on beauty. 
 
 Crab. Oh, to be sure ! she has herself the 
 oddest countenance that ever was seen ; 'tis a 
 collection of features from all the different 
 countries of the globe. 
 
 Sir Ben. So she has, indeed— an Irish 
 front 
 
 Crab. Caledonian locks 
 
 Sir Ben. Dutch nose 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 45 
 
 Crab. Austrian lips 
 
 Sir Ben. Complexion of a Spaniard 
 
 Crab. And teeth h la Chinoise 
 
 Sir Ben. In short, her face resembles a table 
 d'hote at Spa — where no two guests are of a 
 nation 
 
 Crab. Or a congress at the close of a gen- 
 eral war— wherein all the members, even to 
 her eyes, appear to have a different interest, 
 and her nose and chin are the only parties 
 likely to join issue. 
 
 Mrs. Ca?u Ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 Sir Pet. Mercy on my life !— a person they 
 dine with twice a week ! [Aside. 
 
 Mrs. Can. Nay, but I vow you shall not 
 carry the laugh oflf so — for give me leave to say 
 that Mrs. Ogle 
 
 Sir Pet. Madam, madam, I beg your pardon 
 — there's no stopping these good gentlemen's 
 tongues. But when I tell you, Mrs. Candour, 
 that the lady they are abusing is a particular 
 friend of mine, I hope you'll not take her part. 
 
 Lady Sneer. Ha ! ha ! ha ! well said, Sir 
 Peter ! but you are a cruel creature — too phleg- 
 matic yourself for a jest, and too peevish to 
 allow wit in others. 
 
 Sir Pet. Ah, madam, true wit is more nearly 
 allied to good nature than your ladyship is 
 aware of. 
 
 Lady Teaz. True, Sir Peter ; I believe they 
 are so near akin that they can never be united. 
 
 Sir Ben. Or, rather, suppose them man and 
 wife, because one seldom sees them together. 
 
 Lady Teaz. But Sir Peter is such an enemy 
 
46 ESSAYS IN 
 
 to scandal, I believe he would have it put down 
 by parliament. 
 
 Sir Pet. 'Fore heaven, madam, if they were 
 to consider the sporting with reputation of as 
 much importance as poaching on manors, and 
 pass an act for the preservation of fame as well 
 as game, I believe many would thank them for 
 the bill. 
 
 Lady Sneer. O Lud ! Sir Peter ; would you 
 deprive us of our privileges ? 
 
 Sir Pet. Ay, madam ; and then no person 
 should be permitted to kill characters and run 
 down reputations but quaHfied old maids and 
 disappointed widows. 
 
 Lady Sneer, Go, you monster ! 
 
 Mrs. Can. But, surely, you would not be 
 quite so severe on those who only report what 
 they hear ? 
 
 Sir Pet. Yes, madam, I would have law 
 merchant for them too ; and in all cases of 
 slander currency, whenever the drawer of the 
 lie was not to be found, the injured parties 
 should have a right to come on any of the 
 indorsers. 
 
 Crab. Well, for my part, I believe there 
 never was a scandalous tale without some 
 foundation. 
 
 In this treatment we see a combination 
 of Moliere's method with Congreve's : 
 Sir Peter's attitude is similar to that of 
 Alceste, although we notice he is less 
 skilfully connected by the dramatist 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 47 
 
 with the main action : two of his most 
 important speeches are given as asides. 
 In the balancing distribution of his good 
 lines to several characters instead of cen- 
 tering them upon one, Sheridan has 
 followed Congreve. The wit of the latter, 
 it seems to me, is superior to that of 
 the former, for Congreve detects and 
 points out real resemblances between 
 things apparently incongruous, while 
 Sheridan throws a garish light upon re- 
 semblances that are often merely whim- 
 sical and fantastical. Congreve presents 
 us with a miniature of life firm in its 
 drawing, rich in its coloring; Sheridan 
 gives us a caricature, wonderfully clever 
 in its depiction of salient features, but 
 still a caricature. For the purpose of 
 interesting and amusing an average audi- 
 ence, the Sheridan method is undoubted- 
 ly the more effective : given the condi- 
 tions of the drama to-day, it is therefore 
 theatrically the better. Yet, when a 
 majority of us shall have risen from 
 what Mill justly calls our present low 
 plane of culture, we shall realize, I think, 
 that despite the defects of his age Con- 
 greve is a greater artist than Sheridan, 
 and that greater than either is Moliere. 
 
II. 
 
 IS THE ACTOR'S ART UNWORTHY? 
 
 Few things are more humorous than 
 the sight of a humorist taking himself 
 seriously. Such an edifying spectacle is 
 presented to the world in the person of 
 Mr. Augustine Birrell, barrister at-Iaw, 
 author of "Obiter Dicta" and other 
 delightful brochures. Readers of these 
 essays will agree with me, I am sure, 
 that humor is Mr. Birrell' s strong point, 
 and that so long as he sticks to his last 
 hardly a shoemaker of their acquaintance 
 could do better. But in his "Kssay on 
 Actors" Mr. Birrell has not only made 
 the mistake intimated above, but has also 
 committed the literary crime of printing 
 his opinions upon a subject with which 
 he seems to be but superficially acquaint- 
 ed. His condemnation of the actor's art 
 as unworthy is a conclusion which he 
 reaches by a method of argument any- 
 thing but judicial — a method which is, in 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 49 
 
 fact, notliing more nor less than a special 
 plea for the prosecution. Such a treat- 
 ment of a literary topic doubtless came 
 naturally to him as a result of his training 
 as a law5^er, whose business it must often 
 be to make out a strong case by the 
 simple process of selecting from a mass 
 of testimony all the facts that tell for his 
 side and suppressing or belittling all 
 those which tell for the other side. This 
 is good forensics ; it is excellent practice 
 for debaters ; but it is not criticism. 
 
 The actor's art, says Mr. Birrell, is un- 
 worthy of an artist, and the first argu- 
 ment he brings forward in proof of this 
 general proposition is the argument from 
 antiquity. By a trite story he proves, 
 easily enough, that among the Romans 
 the actor's art was held in light esteem ; 
 there he rests this portion of his case, 
 leaving the impression upon the reader's 
 mind that the wise men of the ancient 
 world thought as little of the histrio as 
 does Mr. Birrell. 
 
 To this argument there are two replies. 
 In the first place, the argument from an- 
 tiquity has here little force, because the 
 conditions of ancient and modern life are 
 so vastly different. I^ife in modern so- 
 
50 ESSAYS IN 
 
 ciety is far deeper, richer, fuller and more 
 complex than in ancient society; the art 
 of the modern actor, whose business it is 
 to represent this life, is therefore deeper, 
 richer, fuller and more complex than that 
 of his ancient prototype. It calls for a 
 higher intellectuality, and may reason- 
 ably be thought as much superior to 
 ancient acting as modern literature is to 
 ancient. The condemnation of the actor's 
 art, then, by the Roman world was a 
 condemnation of a very simple thing with 
 which that world was well acquainted. 
 To apply this condemnation to another 
 and a very complex thing, of which that 
 world knew nothing, is absurd and il- 
 logical. 
 
 In the second place, if the opinion of 
 antiquity upon a fine art is to be quoted, 
 why quote only the opinion of the Ro- 
 mans, one of the most inartistic peoples 
 that has ever existed and one that is 
 conspicuous for its failure in the particular 
 art under discussion ? In war and in law 
 the Romans were great and original ; in 
 the fine arts they were weak and imi- 
 tators of the Greeks. Roman painting, 
 so far as we know anything about it, 
 is based upon Greek masters ; Roman 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 5 1 
 
 sculpture is the same ; Roman archi- 
 tecture fails to unite the beautiful with 
 the useful. In Epic poetry Virgil is con- 
 fessedly the imitator of Homer ; in Lyric, 
 Horace is, strictly speaking, not a poet at 
 all, but an extremely clever man of the 
 world, expressing his sententious maxims 
 in art forms which he learned from the 
 Greek lyrists ; in dramatic poetry the 
 comedy writers, Plautus and Terence, 
 are little more than adapters of the Greek 
 writers Menander and Apollodorus, while 
 in tragedy Rome cannot show a single 
 name more distinguished than that of the 
 turgid Seneca. The opinion of such a 
 people upon a question of fine art is 
 worth very little ; the opinion of their 
 masters, the Greeks, may be worth a 
 great deal. Now, among the Greeks the 
 actor's art was not held in light esteem. 
 It was a common custom for the poet 
 who was honored by receiving from the 
 State a prize for his play, himself to 
 enact the principal part in that play. 
 This was done not only by Aeschylus, 
 but also by the most artistic poet of the 
 ancient world, — Sophocles, 
 
 * * * whose even-balanced soul 
 
 From first youth tested up to extreme old age, 
 
52 ESSAYS IN 
 
 Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; 
 Who saw life steadily and saw it whole; 
 The mellow glory of the Attic stage, 
 Singer of sweet Colonus and his child. 
 
 Turning from ancient to modern times, 
 Mr. Birrell next attempts to show the 
 actor's art unworthy because from its 
 very nature it leaves little or no record to 
 account for his fame. This argument 
 proves too much : it applies equally well 
 to great singers like Jenny Lind and 
 Patti ; yet who shall call their art un- 
 worthy? It applies also to such painters as 
 Zeuxis and Apelles, of whose work there 
 remains nothing but the names ; extend 
 your time-limit but a very little and it 
 will apply also to such painters as 
 Tintoretto and Reubens, whose handi- 
 work is fast fading from the perishable 
 canvas ; yet is their art unworthy ? 
 
 In support of this portion of his argu- 
 ment Mr. Birrell commits himself to the 
 astounding declaration that ' ' This, per- 
 haps, is why no man of lofty genius 
 or character has ever condescended to 
 remain an actor." (!) Now this remark 
 betrays such a profound ignorance of the 
 history of the drama as to make one 
 believe that Mr. Birrell has never heard 
 
 1 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 53 
 
 of a country called France and of a 
 certain actor-poet, there somewhat es- 
 teemed, called Moliere. As to character, 
 Moliere was one of the most beautiful 
 and unselfish souls the world has ever 
 seen. His life was one long struggle 
 against folly and superstition. His death 
 was hastened by his untiring devotion to 
 the members of the little company who 
 depended upon him for support. As to 
 his genius, I will merely quote from the 
 words of an English critic not given 
 to overpraise of anything French. In his 
 essay on "The French Play in London," 
 Matthew Arnold writes: '^ The Misan- 
 thrope and The Tarttiffe are comedy, but 
 they are comedy in verse, poetic comedy. 
 * * * Immense power has gone to the 
 making of them, — a world of vigorous 
 sense, piercing observation, pathetic me- 
 diation, profound criticism of life. Mo- 
 liere had also one great advantage as a 
 dramatist over Shakespeare : he wrote 
 for a more developed theatre, a more 
 developed society. Moreover, he was at 
 the same time, probably, by nature a 
 better theatre-poet than Shakespeare ; he 
 had a keener sense for theatrical situa- 
 tion. Shakespeare is not rightly to be 
 
54 ESSAYS IN 
 
 called, as Goethe calls him, an epitom- 
 ator rather than a dramatist ; but he may 
 rightly be called rather a dramatist than 
 a theatre-poet. Moliere — and here his 
 French nature stood him in good stead — 
 was a theatre-poet of the very first 
 order." Now this man was an actor 
 during his whole life ; yet Mr. Birrell 
 would have us believe that '' no man 
 of lofty genius or character has ever con- 
 descended to remain an actor." 
 
 Other instances, such as that of Kdwin 
 Booth, might be detailed to overthrow 
 Mr. Birrell's absurd generalization, but 
 for the purposes of the argument the case 
 of Moliere will perhaps suffice. 
 
 Mr. Birrell then quotes from the ' ' Son- 
 nets of Shakespeare " and the '' Memoirs 
 of Macready " and of Mrs. Siddons to 
 show that these actors despised their 
 calling, and concludes with another 
 generalization that must make logicians 
 weep: '*The volunteered testimony of 
 actors," he says, ''is both large in bulk 
 and valuable in quality, and it is all on 
 my side." 
 
 To dispose of the generalization first, 
 there is plenty of testimony to show that 
 fine actors do not despise their calling. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 55 
 
 It is too much, perhaps, to expect that 
 Mr. Birrell should be acquainted with 
 books published in a place so far beyond 
 his horizon-line as New Yoik, yet if he 
 could stretch his intellectual vision that 
 far he would discover there in the "Auto- 
 biography of Joseph Jefferson" and in 
 Winter's "Life of Kdwm Booth" con- 
 siderable testimony that is not on his 
 side Some acquaintance with the utter- 
 ances of the leading actor of his own 
 country Mr. Birrell might reasonably be 
 supposed to possess. Yet he seems never 
 to have heard of the following words of 
 Sir Henry Irving, spoken nearly seven 
 years ago before the Philosophical Insti- 
 tution of Kdinburgb : " * * * every 
 actor who is more than a mere machine, 
 and who has an ideal of any kind, has a 
 duty which lies beyond the scope of 
 his personal anabition. His art must be 
 something to hold in reverence if he 
 wishes others to hold it in esteem. There 
 is nothing of chance about this work. 
 All, actors and audience alike, must bear 
 in mind that the whole scheme of the 
 higher drama is not to be regarded as 
 a game in life which can be played with 
 varying success. Its present intention 
 
56 ESSA.YS IN 
 
 may be to interest and amuse, but its 
 deeper purpose is earnest, intense, sin- 
 cere." Ttiese are hardly the words of a 
 man who despises his calling. 
 
 As to Shakespeare's testimony, to quote 
 the passing emotion expressed in the one 
 hundred and tenth sonnet as if it were his 
 settled conviction as to the unworthiness 
 of his calling, this is as absurd as to say 
 that he deliberately attempted suicide 
 because, in the sixty-sixth sonnet, he 
 wrote, 
 
 Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, 
 
 absurd as it would be to represent 
 Shakespeare as a weak-minded railer at 
 destiny because in the twenty-ninth son- 
 net he tells us that he beweeps his out- 
 cast state, troubles deaf heaven with 
 bootless cries and curses his fate. All 
 such outbursts are lyrical — that is, they 
 are the powerful expression of some 
 single and transient emotion. From any 
 single utterance, little or nothing can 
 be inferred as to the writer's permanent 
 convictions on any large topic. 
 
 Finally, Mr. Birrell gives away his 
 whole case in the last paragraph but one 
 of his essay. He there allows that the 
 
Dramatic CRitidisM 57 
 
 actor's calling is "lawful, useful, de- 
 lightful," but still he will not allow that 
 it is "worthy." But one of the three 
 concessions here granted is necessary, 
 since things useful are things worthy. 
 The actor's art is useful because, like 
 that of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, 
 it tends to increase the amount of pleas- 
 urable emotions and so tends to make life 
 richer and fuller. Well has it been said 
 by one, himself an actor: "If he (the 
 actor) can smite water from the rock 
 of one hardened human heart, — if he can 
 bring light to the eye or wholesome color 
 to the faded cheek, — if he can bring or 
 restore in ever so slight degree the sun- 
 shine of hope, of pleasure, of gayety, — 
 surely he cannot have worked in vain.** 
 
III. 
 
 SOMB ESSENTIALS OF THE 
 ACTOR'S ART. 
 
 My friend Mr. Joseph Holland is a 
 delightful walking demonstration of so 
 much in the art of acting, that I hope he 
 will allow me to put his name at the top 
 of this essay as a pattern into which I 
 may weave the threads of my discourse. 
 If, when I stop work, the reader is un- 
 able clearly to distinguish the outlines 
 of the figure, I am willing to have him 
 believe that it is the fault of the weaver 
 and not of the pattern. 
 
 Mr. Holland has the first requisite for 
 the actor's art — sensibility, or an instinct- 
 ive feeling for histrionic effects. There- 
 fore is he a good actor without being 
 a great one. Were he the latter he would 
 have added to his sensibility an acute 
 and vigorous intellectuality : he would 
 not be playing this year in farce, however 
 good, but in high comedy or in tragedy. 
 
fiRAMAYie CRITICISM S9 
 
 In all presentations of the actoi's art, 
 save the very highest, it is indeed tem- 
 perament or sensibility which is most 
 important. Many clever people have 
 failed upon the stage and have found 
 their failure utterly inexplicable, because 
 they could not or would not recognize 
 this basal principle. On the other hand, 
 many people of the most ordinary in- 
 tellect have succeeded on the stage 
 because they possessed this temperament 
 or feeling. Such people, provided they 
 are not absolutely stupid, can be taught 
 to act just as anybody above the level of 
 a cre/i?i can be taught the elements of 
 drawing and of carpentry. Thackeray 
 saw this very clearly, and in the charac- 
 ter of Miss Fotheringay has described, in 
 his own inimitable manner, the process 
 by which a person who possesses this 
 temperament in even a slight degree may 
 achieve stage success. In '* Pendennis" 
 he writes : *'Bows * * * was a sin- 
 gular wild man of no small talents and 
 humor. Attracted first by Miss Fother- 
 ingay's beauty, he began to teach her 
 how to act. He shrieked out in his 
 cracked voice the parts, and his pupil 
 learned them from his lips by rote and 
 
60 ESSAYS IJ^ 
 
 repeated them in her full, rich tones. 
 He indicated the attitudes and set and 
 moved those beautiful arms of hers. 
 Those who remember this grand actress 
 on the stage can recall how she used 
 always precisely the same gestures, looks 
 and tones ; how she stood on the same 
 plank of the stage in the same position, 
 rolled her eyes at the same instant and to 
 the same degree, and wept with precisely 
 the same heart-rending pathos and ov^er 
 the same pathetic syllable." 
 
 To turn from fiction to history, we see 
 this same general principle illustrated in 
 the case of the most prominent actress of 
 our day, Sarah Bernhardt. Nearly twenty 
 years ago Matthew Arnold wrote of her : 
 " Temperament and quick intelligence, 
 passion, nervous mobility, grace, smile, 
 voice, charm, poetry — [she] has them all. 
 One watches her with pleasure, with 
 admiration, and yet not without a secret 
 disquietude. Something is wanting, or 
 at least not present in sufiicient force; 
 something which alone can secure and 
 fix her administration of all the charming 
 gifts which she has, can alone keep them 
 fresh, keep them sincere, save them from 
 perils by caprice, perils by mannerism. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 6t 
 
 That something is high intellectual 
 power." The prophecy implied in these 
 words has been remarkably fulfilled. In- 
 sincerity, caprice and mannerism have 
 become more and more prominent in 
 Sarah Bernhardt since those words were 
 written. With her great natural gifts 
 she can never sink to the level of the 
 mediocre, but, lacking this "high in- 
 tellectual power," she has never risen to 
 the level of the great — of that Rachel, for 
 instance, with whom Arnold compares 
 her and of whom he says that "she be- 
 gan almost where Mile. Sarah Bernhardt 
 ends." 
 
 If temperament unaided by high intel- 
 lectuality cannot make a great actor, 
 neither can this be accomplished by high 
 intellectuality unaided by the necessary 
 temperament. Sir Henry Irving, it seems 
 to me, is a proof of this : he is a man who 
 has made himself what he is by sheer 
 force of will and intellect unaided by any 
 particular natural aptitude for his profes- 
 sion. Only in those rare cases where 
 temperament and high intellect are united 
 do we find really great artists ; such were 
 Garrick, Talma, Rachel and Booth; such 
 an artist is Mr. Jefferson. 
 
62 MBAn fJsT 
 
 If we descend from these generals to 
 particulars, to what may be called the 
 minor requisites of the actor's art, we find 
 in Mr. Holland a model which all young 
 aspirants for stage honors would do well 
 to study. In the first place, he possesses 
 the rare art of Klocution, without which 
 the actor's voice is but as the sounding 
 brass and the tinkling cymbal. Nothing 
 is more justly infuriating to an audience 
 than to miss even a small portion of the 
 dialogue upon the stage, yet the actors 
 who can so speak as to make every word 
 audible in every portion of the house are 
 the exceptions and not the rule. This 
 comes either from incapacity or from 
 carelessness ; if from the former, the 
 actor should be retired to private life by 
 his manager ; if from the latter, it is 
 entirely inexcusable and should not be 
 tolerated by the audience. Such an actor 
 in England or in Italy would be hissed 
 off the stage ; that he is not so treated in 
 the United States is but another instance 
 of that easy-going indifferentism which 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer points out as among 
 our national failings. 
 
 Next among the minor graces of the 
 actor may be mentioned Repose, the 
 
objective manifestation of which is the 
 Art of Standing Still. Easy as this may 
 appear from the front, those on the stage 
 know (or should know) that it is indeed 
 difficult ; it is an art by most actors more 
 honored in the breach than in the observ- 
 ance. The reason for their common 
 failure in this respect is evident. Acting, 
 by its very name implies action, which 
 leads the actor to forget that not all 
 acting implies action. Many times in a 
 play the interest needs to be centered 
 upon the person speaking : these are the 
 times when the other people on the stage 
 need to cultivate the arts of listening and 
 of standing still, yet how few of them do ! 
 But when done, how greatly this enhances 
 the verisimilitude of the stage picture ! 
 Those who have seen Mr. McDowell in 
 Gismonda as he stands listening to the 
 impassioned speeches of the Duchess, 
 will recognize what I mean. There are 
 even occasions when, in the very torrent 
 and tempest of passionate declamation, 
 the actor who knows how to stand still 
 can give an appearance of solidity and 
 force to his work which cannot be 
 achieved by one who has not mastered 
 this art 
 
64 les^AYg m 
 
 Sir Henry Irving has pointed out that 
 a Bearing or Carriage suitable to the time 
 in which the play is set is a not unimpor- 
 tant detail in the actor's art ''The free 
 bearing of the sixteenth century," he 
 says, " is distinct from the artificial one 
 of the seventeenth, the mannered one of 
 the eighteenth and the careless one of the 
 nineteenth." This nineteenth century 
 bearing Mr. Holland has, it seems to me, 
 in perfection : his manner and tone are 
 thoroughly easy and careless, yet never 
 slipshod or vulgar. Nor is this easy 
 bearing such an easy thing to acquire. 
 Witness the case of Mr. I^ucius Henderson, 
 who, intelligent actor though he is, in 
 playing a modern part similar to Mr. 
 Holland's, makes the mistake of carrying 
 it with the " free bearing of the sixteenth 
 century." 
 
 Perfection, it has been well said, is 
 made up of little things, but perfection 
 is not a little thing. 
 
IV. 
 THE ENDOWED THEATRE- 
 
 I. 
 
 There is little doubt that of recent 
 3'ears Shakespeare has been more appre- 
 ciated as a playright in Germany than in 
 England. Not many years ago one 
 theatre in Berlin, the Koenigsliche 
 Schauspielhaus,* during a short season of 
 only four months, presented no less than 
 four Shakespearean plays, the Midsiim- 
 7ner NighV s Dream, the Winter' s Tale, 
 Havilet, Othello — the last-named fre- 
 quently. In the year ending December 
 31, 1896, there were one hundred and 
 thirty-five recorded performances of 
 Othello in Germany, and this year an 
 English company, headed by Mr. Forbes 
 Robertson, is to play Havilet and Macbeth 
 in Hamburg, Munich, Frankfort, Han- 
 
 *For the Koenigsliche .Schauspielhaus statis- 
 tics. I am indebted to an article by Mr. Wm. 
 Archer in the Fortnightly Review, Vol. 51, 
 page 610. 
 
66 ESSAYS IN 
 
 over and Berlin. If this state of affairs 
 does not entirely prove the modest claim 
 of our German friends — that Shakespeare 
 was a German — it may certainly afford 
 them at least reasonable ground for their 
 conviction that he ought to have been. 
 
 While the Germans have been en- 
 gaged in acting Shakespeare, Shake- 
 speare's own countrymen have been 
 engaged principally in writing books 
 about him — and such books! Most 
 of them fully justify the despairing 
 wail of one who exclaimed after wading 
 through an extensive slough of Shake- 
 spearean commentaries: "If you would 
 know the heights to which the human 
 intellect can rise, read Shakespeare ; if 
 you would know the depths to which it 
 can fall, read his commentators.'' To 
 such an extreme has the pedantry of the 
 English been carried that in many of their 
 annotated editions of Shakespeare the 
 notes actuallj^ occupy more space than 
 the text, and it is through the distorting 
 medium of these notes that the feeble 
 vision of the young student is expected 
 to pierce before he can see, face to 
 face, the clearest and greatest mind of 
 the poetic world. Some commentators, 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 67 
 
 such as Mr. Andrew Lang, liave even 
 argued themselves into the ridiculous 
 belief that the Shakespearean plaj-s 
 should never be acted, but simply be 
 read. Onl}^ thus, they seem to think, 
 can the supersensitive, ultra-refined, 
 delicately attuned, critical mind (of the 
 Lang type), only thus can it preserve 
 intact ideal conceptions of Shakespear- 
 ean characters ; ideals which would be 
 rudely shattered by seeing these char- 
 acters embodied in such flesh and blood 
 as Miss Ellen Terry. 
 
 Against this school of faddists and 
 against the general apathy of the English 
 people to their greatest dramatic writer, 
 Sir Henry Irving has combated long and 
 for many years single-handed. By means 
 of gorgeous mountings and elaborate 
 scenic eflfects the English people have 
 actually had to be coaxed to come and 
 see Shakespearean plays, while the same 
 plays, mounted simply but sufficiently, 
 were drawing steadily in Germany by 
 the intrinsic merit of their characteriza- 
 tion and their poetry. But the work 
 done at the Lyceum in London during 
 these long years is beginning to tell : 
 gentlemen interested in art in the pro- 
 
68 ESSAYS IN 
 
 vincial cities of England have formed 
 themselves into committees for the en- 
 couragement of the classical drama; they 
 provide funds for this purpose and under 
 their auspices some competent company is 
 engaged to present Shakespearean plays 
 at moderate prices. This plan has met 
 with great success, Mr. Benson's companj'-, 
 for example, having recently played for 
 two weeks in Glasgow to good houses, 
 presenting Hamlet^ Twelfth Nighty Henry 
 v., The Tammg of the Shrew and Julius 
 CcBsar. Nor is the interest confined to the 
 provinces. In London we have this year 
 three carefully prepared Shakespearean 
 revivals ; the Me^xhant of Ve7iice at the 
 Lyceum, Julms Ccesar at Her Majesty's 
 and Much Ado About Nothing at the St. 
 James. The wave has reached even the 
 universities. At Oxford, where, accord- 
 ing to Mr. Churton Collins, there is a 
 professorship of almost everything under 
 the sun, except English literature, — at 
 Oxford the Students' Dramatic Society 
 has played Romeo and Juliet with consid- 
 erable success for a whole week. 
 
 At last, then, the English are beginning 
 to remove from themselves the reproach 
 which I stated in the opening sentence of 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 69 
 
 this article. They are educating their 
 people up to an appreciation of the best 
 that has been thought and done in the 
 drama. They are doing this by the only 
 means possible, that is, by regarding the 
 drama seriously as a fine art, and not as 
 a form of speculative investment which 
 must be made to return fifteen or twenty 
 per cent, upon the capital put in. This 
 last-mentioned way of looking at the 
 drama is the one prevalent in the United 
 States ; the first-mentioned way has long 
 been prevalent in France and Germany. 
 That is why the French and German 
 theatres are so much better than ours, and 
 when I say the}^ are better, I mean that 
 they present in better shape than do ours 
 a larger number of plays that appeal to 
 moral and intelligent people, that is, to 
 the people whose hearts and brains keep 
 the world a-going and the race advancing. 
 This statement I shall now proceed to 
 prove first for Germany, then for France. 
 I shall then endeavor to show that it is 
 possible for Americans no less than for 
 Frenchmen and Germans to carry into 
 successful practice a theory of the drama 
 as a fine art as distinguished from the 
 drama as afield for mercantile speculation. 
 
70 ESSAYS IN 
 
 First, as to Germanj^ In addition to 
 the facts stated in the opening paragraph 
 of this article, I would mention that in 
 the same brief season and at the one 
 Berlin theatre there referred to, there 
 were also presented the following stand- 
 ard plays : Frey tag's Die Jotirnalisten^ 
 Heyse's Colberg^ Undau's Tayite Therese, 
 Calderon's La Vide es Sueno, Kleist's 
 Das Zerbrochne Krug^ Lessing's Emilia 
 Galotti and Min7ia von Barnhelm^ 
 Schiller's Wallenstein, Kabale und Liebe^ 
 Maria Stuart^ Goethe's Egniont. Is 
 there any theatre in London or New 
 York that can present such a record as 
 this or anything approaching to it ? I 
 fear we must hide our diminished heads 
 and sadly answer, No. 
 
 Now, this is not an exceptional record, 
 nor is it a picked case ; many other 
 German cities can make a showing quite 
 as creditable in proportion to their popu- 
 lation. Some of these cities are much 
 smaller than San Francisco ; the little 
 Saxon town of Halle, for instance, with 
 a population less than one-third of ours, 
 has a municipal theatre building which 
 it is a delight to the eyes to behold and 
 in which a well- organized company pre- 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 7 1 
 
 sents frequently the great classic plays of 
 the German and the English stage. If we 
 extend our view to the whole of Germany, 
 we find that during the year 1896, there 
 were performed twenty-three separate 
 Shakespearean plays with a total of 
 nearly a thousand representations. Had 
 we at hand the figures for the Goethe, 
 Lessing and Schiller performances, we 
 may be sure that they would show 
 equally remarkable results. 
 
 As to rendition, I wnll leave it to those 
 who have seen performances at the 
 endowed theatres of Halle, Munich and 
 Berlin to say whether these performances 
 are not decidedlj'- more artistic than what 
 one sees, with rare exceptions, in any 
 New York theatre. 
 
 Any candid person who will look the 
 facts squarely in the face will admit now, 
 I believe, that I have proved for Germany 
 the thesis with which I started — namely, 
 that the German stage presents in better 
 shape than does ours a larger number of 
 plays that appeal to moral and intelligent 
 people. 
 
 Turning now to France, I shall select, 
 almost at random, the record of a month's 
 performances — say, December last — at 
 
72 KSSAYS IN 
 
 the two best Parisian theatres, the 
 Comedie Fraiigaise and the Odeon, and I 
 shall compare this record with that of the 
 performances during the same month at 
 the two best San Francisco theatres, the 
 Baldwin and the Columbia. 
 
 Among the forty-two performances 
 given at the Comedie Frangaise there 
 were representations of the works of such 
 excellent minor playwrights as Pailleron, 
 Scribe and Erckman-Chatrian. Among 
 the great writers we find, of the moderns, 
 Dumas fils represented by four perform- 
 ances, at which were presented V ^tran- 
 gere and L'Ami des Femmes ; Augier, 
 five performances, at which were pre- 
 sented Les Effrontes and Le Gendre de 
 M. Powier. Among the French classic 
 writers Racine comes first with six per- 
 formances, two of Les Plaideurs and four 
 of Athalie. Then comes Moliere with 
 four performances, three of Les Femmes 
 Savantes 2iVLd, one oi L'Avare. Of writers 
 of the first rank, then, namely, Dumas 
 fils, Augier, Racine, Moliere, there were 
 nineteen performances out of a total of 
 forty-two ; that is, nearly half the plays 
 given were classics. A correspondingly 
 good record for New York or San 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 73 
 
 Francisco theatres would have to read 
 something like this : Bronson Howard, 
 four performances ; Goldsmith, five ; 
 Shakespeare, six ; Sheridan, four. And 
 even this is stretching the truth a bit in 
 our favor. Let us look at the record 
 of the Baldwin Theatre for the same 
 month of December ; it is brief and de- 
 cisive : 1)1 Gay New York (author un- 
 known), five performances ; The Jucklins 
 (Augustus Thomas), five performances. 
 
 This is the whole of the short, sad story. 
 Let it stand there, monumentally, in all 
 its sweet simplicity. 
 
 Lest it be claimed that the time cover- 
 ed by this record is too short to base 
 a fair comparison on, I will state that 
 I have made a list of every play given at 
 the Frangaise and at the Odecn during 
 the four months, December, 1897, to 
 April, 1898, and have compared this with 
 the record of the San Francisco theatres 
 mentioned above and of the two leading 
 New York theatres (Daly's and The 
 Empire). The publication of this list in 
 detail would make us appear in no better 
 light than we do above, but rather in 
 a worse — if that be possible. 
 
74 ESSAYS IN 
 
 111 his attempt to account for the 
 scarcity of good comedy in England, Mr. 
 George Meredith divides society mainly 
 into two classes. Firsts the Puritans or 
 Agelasts, who wdll laugh at nothing and 
 who never go to the theatre ; second, the 
 Bacchanalians, who are titillated by a 
 wink and will laugh at anything. To 
 neither of these classes does true comedy 
 appeal, and as these two classes constitute 
 a vast majority of English society, in that 
 society comedy does not flourish. 
 
 If one might draw an inference from 
 the plays presented at the San Francisco 
 theatres during the week in which I 
 write (April 17 — 24, 1898), one might 
 believe that Mr. Meredith's analysis is 
 as true of our society as of his. With 
 the exception of the opera, — of w^hich it 
 is not my province here to speak, — there 
 was certainly little or nothing to draw 
 the Puritans to the theatre ; or, to put it 
 conversely, every play presented — A 
 Stranger in New York^ Dehnonico' s at 
 SiXy The Strange Adventures of Miss 
 BrowHj Sinbad — appealed only to the 
 bacchanalians, that is, to the people who 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 75 
 
 can laugh at anything. Sympathizhig 
 with the latter class as little as I do with 
 the former, I must confess that I find 
 nothing in the plays above mentioned 
 that is worth even the briefest critical 
 notice. I shall, therefore, ask the reader 
 to transport himself once more with me 
 to Paris, where we shall consider the 
 plays presented last December at the 
 Odeon, and shall compare them with the 
 plays given during the same month at 
 our second theatre, the Columbia. 
 
 The Odeon is situated, as everyone 
 knows, at the north-east corner of the 
 Jardin du Luxembourg. Near it are the 
 buildings of the ficole des Mines, the 
 Bcole de Medecine, the Sorbonne and the 
 ficole Poly technique. In this quarter of 
 Paris, therefore, do students largel}^ con- 
 gregate, and this fact, for many years, 
 affected the character of the performances 
 given there. The educational authorities 
 recognized and still recognize the im- 
 mense educative force of the theatre, and 
 the Government took care to see that 
 a theatre largely patronized by students 
 should include in its repertoire many 
 standard classical dramas. Of recent 
 years less supervision seems to have been 
 
76 KSSAYS IN 
 
 exercised in this respect, and the Od6on 
 has run more to modern plaj^s, leaving 
 the classics to the Comedie Frangaise. 
 Yet these modern plays are the best 
 of their kind procurable, Richepin's Le 
 Chemineaic, for instance, of which there 
 were twenty-three performances at the 
 Odeon in December last, is a well-written, 
 highly poetical, pastoral comedy, which 
 would have been a dead failure on any 
 Knglish or American stage, — because 
 poetical. Nor were the classic dramatists 
 unrepresented at the Odeon during the 
 time under consideration. Moliere's Le 
 Sicilien ou V A^noiir Peintre was given 
 twice ; Racine's Phedj^e^ Athaliey Les 
 Plaideurs twice each. Out of a total 
 of thirty - seven performances, then, 
 twenty-three were of a modern play quite 
 as good as Henry Arthur Jones' Mas- 
 quer aders^ and eight were by Racine and 
 Moliere — a combination which represents 
 to the French mind about what we ex- 
 press by the one word Shakespeare. 
 
 If we turn now to our home theatre, 
 
 the Columbia, we find the following : 
 
 Two performances of Othello and three of 
 
 Julius CcBsar ; sixteen of Koyt's A Milk- 
 
 White Flag, six brandishings of a dra- 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 77 
 
 matic crazy-quilt (by one Williams) 
 called A Cavalier of France y one turning- 
 on of the blood-bath yclept Spartaais, 
 five rattlings of a child's kaleidoscope 
 labeled Li Gay Coney Island. If from 
 this ill assorted heap we pick out the 
 diamonds of Mr. William Shakespeare 
 and the rhinestones of Mr. Charles Hoyt, 
 I fear the rubbish that is left will not 
 compare favorably with the finished work 
 of Monsieur Jean Richepin. 
 
 There may be two ways of looking at 
 the facts suggested by this comparison. 
 One is to exclaim, as did Sir Sampson 
 Legend, at the ingratitude of his son, 
 "Body o' me, these things are unaccount- 
 able and unreasonable!" Another is to 
 acknowledge that our practice is lament- 
 ably deficient and to try and find out 
 upon what deficient theory this practice 
 is based. I^et us try the latter ; the pro- 
 blem is not a difficult one, and is practic- 
 ally solved by the statement of it made in 
 the first part of this article, namely, that 
 the French regard the drama seriously as 
 a fine art and as an educative force well 
 worth the attention of the best minds 
 in the community ; we regard it merely 
 
78 ESSAYS IN 
 
 as an amusement and abandon it as a 
 field for speculation to those whose prime 
 interest must be to get the largest pos- 
 sible return out of it. Now, you can treat 
 sheep and wheat and corner-lots in this 
 way with perfect reason and with entire 
 success, because your dealings with these 
 objects have very little effect upon 
 human character and human motives ; 
 but when you come to treat a fine art 
 such as painting or the drama in this 
 way, you invariably degrade it ; to make 
 it pay 3^ou must make it appeal to the 
 average moral sense and the average 
 intellect. Now this average moral sense 
 and this average intellect in our present 
 state of civilization are low, and an 
 art that appeals to them for support mu.st 
 necessarily be far from ideal. 
 
 Only by making your fine art, to some 
 extent at least, independent of popular 
 opinion and of popular approval, only 
 thus can you expect that it will live 
 and grow and develop into what it 
 should be. Strange as it may seem, too, 
 if you are careful to do this it will in the 
 long run really pay — not 20 per cent 
 on the investment, perhaps, but a thou- 
 sandfold — in the elevating and refining 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 79 
 
 influence it will exercise in the com- 
 munity. 
 
 Something of this kind has been dimly 
 perceived by many Americans, and clear- 
 ly by a few. These few are typified by 
 the generous men and women who, 
 within a few years, have given no less 
 than eleven million dollars to found the 
 University of Chicago. Their donation 
 has gone into what is technically known 
 in this country as higher education — 
 that is, education by means of libraries 
 and laboratories and professors. These 
 donors have done nothing for the drama 
 since they have not perceived, or have 
 not realized, the tremendous educative 
 power of that art. This has been per- 
 ceived by the Germans and the French, 
 whose governments subsidize their 
 theatres on exactly the same principles 
 as those on which they — and we — sub- 
 sidize pul^lic schools. 
 
 Admirably as this plan of govern- 
 mental subsidy works in Germany and 
 in France, no rational being would advo- 
 cate its adoption here. Kveu if desirable, 
 it would for many reasons be impossible, 
 and it is not desirable. Yet, before 
 tnany years, I believe, the problem of 
 
8o ESSAYS IN 
 
 organizing an endowed theatre will be 
 forced upon us, and we may learn some- 
 thing beforehand by noticing at what 
 cost and by what kind of an organization 
 the French people have made their 
 theatre the first in the world. 
 
 The site alone of the Grand Opera 
 House in Paris cost ten and a half 
 million francs; the building 35,600,000 
 francs. It receives from the government 
 an annual subvention of 800,000 francs. 
 The Theatre Frangais receives annually 
 240,000 francs ; the Odeon, 100,000 ; the 
 Opera Comique, 300,000 ; the Conserva- 
 toire and Snccursales, 220,000. The pro- 
 vincial cities also contribute generously 
 for a like purpose. From the latest 
 statistics I have been able to obtain, I 
 learn that the subvention at the Mar- 
 seilles theatre is 220,000 francs; at Lyons, 
 250.000; while even such small cities as 
 Toulouse and Lille contribute respectively 
 87,000 and 75,000 francs. France is not 
 as rich a country, either absolutely or 
 relatively, as the United States. If she 
 can afford to do this much surely we can 
 afford to do as much. But for my part 
 I should be satisfied if we could make a 
 start with one-half of what the French 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 8 1 
 
 people pay to one theatre, the Com6die 
 Fran^aise. That institution receives in 
 round numbers $50,000 a year from the 
 government ; this at 5 per cent represents 
 a capitalization of $1,000,000. Let some 
 rich man who wishes to see the theatre 
 v/hat it should be in our community — 
 let him give merely half a million for 
 endowment, and he will do more good, I 
 believe, with his money than he could in 
 any other way. 
 
 To make such a theatre a success the 
 first essential is a good organization, and 
 in affecting this we should not need to go 
 upon blind theories. The present organi- 
 zation of the Theatre Frangais has been 
 in successful operation for eighty-six 
 years, and contains several features that 
 could be incorporated in the plan of an 
 American-endowed theatre. By the con- 
 stitution of the Frangais the actors are 
 divided into two classes, sociitaires and 
 pensio7inah'es. The former only are stock- 
 holders and in addition to their salaries 
 receive a certain percentage of the profits. 
 The pensionnaires are younger and less 
 experienced actors, who are serving their 
 apprenticeship, and from their body the 
 societaires are elected. At the end of ten 
 
82 ESSAYS IN 
 
 years of service a sociiiaii^e may be 
 re-elected; at the end of 20 years' service 
 he ma}^ retire with a moderate pension. 
 If he be a distinguished artist, he has 
 then no trouble in securing profitable 
 engagements at other theatres, or he may 
 become a professor in the Conservatoire, 
 where the actors and actresses of the next 
 generation enjoy the immense advantage 
 of being taught by one who has devoted 
 his life to the subject in hand. So long 
 as this admirable plan is faithfully 
 adhered to, France can never lack 
 accomplished artists. 
 
 The Director of the Comedie Fran^aise 
 is always a man distinguished in litera- 
 ture and for his knowledge of the stage. 
 Such a man is the present Director, 
 M. Jules Claretie. He is appointed by 
 the Minister of Fine Arts. Together 
 with six societaires and two pe?tsio7inaires 
 he forms the administrative committee of 
 the organization. While he has great 
 weight in the matter of accepting new 
 plays, his word is by no means law on 
 this point, for he is assisted and largely 
 controlled by a Reading Committee 
 chosen from the actors and actresses. 
 
 Such is a very brief description of the 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 83 
 
 constitution of this famous company. It 
 has an unbroken tradition of great writers 
 and actors from the days of Moliere down 
 to our own ; a tradition that embraces 
 the names of Corneille, Racine, La 
 Fontaine, La Sage, Voltaire, Marivaux, 
 Beaumarchais, Diderot, Victor Hugo, 
 Alfred de Musset, Augier and Dumas ; 
 Floridor, Madame Champmesle, Baron, 
 Adrienne Lecouvreur, Le Kaim, Mile. 
 Clairon, Talma, Mile. Mars, Got, Rachel, 
 Coquelin and Sarah Bernhardt. It has a 
 magnificent library, and the foyer of its 
 theatre is an art gallery adorned with 
 statues and pictures of the great men and 
 women whose names are indissolubly 
 connected with its history. With such a 
 tradition, with such a home, small 
 wonder is it that the Comedie Fran^aise 
 stands an object-lesson to the world, an 
 exemplification of what the drama ought 
 to be and might be in every large and 
 wealthy community. 
 
V. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE DRAMA. 
 
 Theophile Gautier says somewliere that 
 the stage seldom gets hold of an idea 
 until it has been worn threadbare in other 
 places. This is largely true of the 
 English stage to-day, but it was not 
 always so and it need not be so in the 
 future. The reasons for this a little 
 consideration will reveal. 
 
 Those praisers of times past, who look 
 back with un alloy d regret to the glories 
 of Elizabethan days and who look 
 forward with entire hopelessness to the 
 budding promise of the future, — these 
 people fail to realize, it seems to me, the 
 conditions which made the seventeenth 
 century drama so rich in eloquence and 
 in poetry ; they fail, also, to realize that 
 these conditions have now given place to 
 others greatly different, which, in their 
 turn, we must believe, will give place to 
 another and a better state of things a 
 century or two hence. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 85 
 
 The study of sociology shows us clearly 
 that in all semi-civilized peoples the head 
 of the state combines in himself the 
 functions of leader-inwar, priest and 
 medicine man. As the political organism 
 becomes more complex these functions 
 become differentiated and are discharged 
 by separate officials. Now, just as the 
 tribal chief in primitive times united in 
 himself generalship, priesthood and thera- 
 peutics, so did the primitive drama of 
 Elizabethan days unite in itself the arts 
 of poetry and eloquence and the science, 
 so far as there was a science, of history. 
 What poetry, eloquence and history the 
 common people then got hold of, they 
 got chiefly through the drama : before 
 the invention of the school textbook of 
 history, the Shakespearean historical 
 plays, from King John to Henry VIII., 
 offered something more than an equiva- 
 lent ; before parliamentary and congres- 
 sional eloquence was hatched people 
 heard real eloquence in such compositions 
 as Antonj^'s speeches in Julius Ccesar; 
 before the time when degenerates like 
 Whitman could get themselves printed 
 and turned loose upon a suffering world, 
 people had to get most of their poetry 
 
S6 ItSSAYS IN 
 
 from such descriptive verse as the Queen 
 Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, and 
 from such lyrics as "O, mistress mine, 
 where are you roaming? " 
 
 Now, in the evolution of the drama, 
 poetry, eloquence and history have 
 become sharply differentiated ; improve- 
 ments in the art of printing have made it 
 possible for these branches of human 
 knowledge to grow to such immense 
 proportions that the primitive dramatic 
 form in which they were once encased 
 has long been outworn. The children 
 have deserted their mother, whom they 
 now look down upon from an eminence 
 of lofty intellectual and emotional 
 superiority, to which they think she can 
 never hope to climb. Stripped of her 
 history — that is, her ''philosophy teach- 
 ing by experience" — stripped of her 
 eloquence, stripped of her poetry, the 
 drama is reduced to a mere skeleton of 
 situations, and the art of play-writing has 
 become little more than the art of con- 
 structing situations. Now, that branch of 
 dramatic writing which depends for its 
 effects chiefly upon situation is farce, and 
 farce, if I mistake not, is the thing that 
 most interests theatre-goers to-day. 
 
DRAMATIC CRITICISM 87 
 
 Another setofcousideralions will bring 
 us, I think, to the same conclusion. In 
 Elizabethan times the stir and stress ot 
 life were not as feverish as they are now; 
 competition was less keen, men were less 
 eager after the material comforts of life 
 and did not so often lose sight of the ends 
 of existence through absorption in the 
 means. When they went to the theatre 
 then, they went with unjaded minds and 
 a keen intellectual curiosity. To-day 
 men go to the theatre fagged out with the 
 rush and toil of eight or ten hours' hard 
 work and suffering from the repletion of 
 facts crammed down their throats by the 
 thousand newspapers, books and maga- 
 zines of the day. To a man thus wearied, 
 the intellectual and emotional strain of 
 following such a play as Macbeth or 
 Philaster would be almost unendurable. 
 He does not seek in the drama any 
 serious food for thought or any high 
 emotional effects ; he seeks merely for 
 amusement and relaxation : now, high 
 comedy might amuse him if he were 
 quick-witted enough to follow it, but 
 it will hardly relax him, because it 
 calls for close attentioa in the spectator ; 
 farce will both amuse and will relax his 
 
88 ESSAYS IN 
 
 mental strain. Farces, therefore, or plays 
 of a farcical type, are what he seeks. 
 
 Merely to provide amusement ! Has 
 the stage then really sunk to this? Is 
 this the final step in the evolution of that 
 noble art which can number among its 
 practitioners such men as Sophocles, 
 Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Goethe 
 and Hugo ? I, for one, cannot believe it. 
 I must believe that when men come to 
 realize that railroads and factories and 
 huge wheat crops and gold mines are not 
 ends in themselves, but are only means 
 to something better and higher, then they 
 will spend less time and be less absorbed 
 in those means and will demand that the 
 drama shall graft into itself again those 
 poetical and ethical elements which we 
 see flourishing in the works of the great 
 playwrights I have named. This change 
 will hardly come in our day, and even 
 our children's children may not see it ; 
 but come some day it surely will, if our 
 civilization is ever to mean anything 
 more than big prices for wheat and a 
 perpetual boom in corner-lots. 
 
 I 
 
II. 
 
 IMPRESSIONS. 
 
I. 
 
 SHALL WK FORGIVE HER ?- 
 THE SERENADE. 
 
 {Sa7i Francisco^ February, i8g8,) 
 
 *' Criticism," says Matthew Arnold, " is 
 a disinterested endeavor to learn and pro- 
 pagate the best that is known and thought 
 in the world." Now, the conditions of 
 the acted drama are such that it is difficult 
 — except at rare intervals — for the local 
 critic and his public to attain to a sight of 
 that "best that is known and thought in 
 the [dramatic] world," For '' the best " 
 can seldom afford to travel three thousand 
 miles across the continent, and merely to 
 read about *' the best" is as tantalizing 
 as to think how many more good plays 
 Shakespeare might have written had he 
 not died at fifty-three. 
 
 Poor substitute for the delight of see- 
 ing, as reading must always be, 3'et by 
 reading something may be accomplished. 
 There are perhaps fifty plays in English 
 
92 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 — the delight of past generations and the 
 solace of this — the reading of which may 
 tend to form in our minds a standard or 
 model according to which such plays as 
 we see to-day may be judged. If one be 
 acquainted with French, this number of 
 standard plays may be increased to a 
 hundred and fifty. As to rendition, while 
 one must confess that a thoroughly artis- 
 tic play is a treat San Francisco enjoys 
 much less often than we could wish, yet 
 even in the way of rendition we have seen 
 performances that make us realize how 
 immensely effective is the actor's art 
 when practiced by a master of the pro- 
 fession. Coquelin's Tartuffe and Miss 
 Terry's Portia linger in my memory as 
 never-to-be forgotten ideals, while Miss 
 Kidder's presentation of Madame Sans- 
 Gene left nothing, so far as I could see, to 
 be desired. Nay, in the days when we 
 were in Mr. Froh man's good books, did 
 did not the Kmpire Theatre Company, 
 unshorn of any of its glory, pay us only 
 too short a visit ? And he who has seen 
 Miss Allen and Mr. Faversham in The 
 Masqueraders — that nineteenth century 
 School for Scandal — he has an ideal 
 for modern play- writing and modern act- 
 
SOME MODERN PLAYS 93 
 
 ing to which he may nail his faith with 
 justifiable confidence. 
 
 In the criticisms upon which I shall 
 now venture, I shall presuppose upon 
 the part of my readers some such desire 
 for knowing '^ the best " as Arnold's 
 definition implies, and as much acquaint- 
 ance with this "best" as is indicated 
 above. To such readers, the drama must 
 appeal as a fine art, with a history, with 
 an evolution, and with laws of its own. 
 Such an art is worth studying and worth 
 writing about. " The best that is known 
 and thought" in this art to-day should 
 challenge comparison with ** the best that 
 is known and thought " in any other art. 
 When it fails to do this the failure should 
 be pointed out; when it succeeds, the 
 success should be generously applauded 
 and the reason for it analyzed. In this 
 manner may the critical faculty subserve 
 the purposes of the creative faculty, blaz- 
 ing the path along which the creative 
 genius of the future must travel if he 
 would obtain to a Pisgah-view of the 
 premised land of perfection. 
 
 Shall We Forgive Her f the English 
 melodrama which Miss Wainwright has 
 
94 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 been presenting at the Columbia, is an 
 excellent example of the dismal divorce 
 which has taken place in English between 
 literature and the drama. Here is a play 
 which contains hardly a single thought — 
 hardly an expression v/hich rises above 
 the commonplace. The language is not 
 ungrammatical, and this is the only virtue 
 one can ascribe to it ; the thought is a 
 second-rate recasting of Mr. Pinero's 
 effort in The Second Mrs, Tanqueray, 
 The construction follows that of Haddon 
 Chambers' Captaifi Swift, the chief dif- 
 ference being that in this play Vve have 
 a heroine, while in Captain Swift we 
 have a hero. If the play were printed it 
 vv^ould be as dull to read as is a page of 
 Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy"; not 
 a shred of wit, humor or anything but 
 surface observation of life does it show. 
 Yet constructively the play is well made, 
 with one or two ingenious incidents and 
 a theme which, though well worn, must 
 command interest so long as women are 
 weak and men are cruel. 
 
 The success of this play, at such a thea- 
 tre as the Adelphi in London, shows us 
 that the questions presented in ''problem 
 plays " have begun to agitate the minds 
 
SOME MODERN PI,AYS 95 
 
 of the middle classes of English society 
 and are no longer confined to those classes 
 by courtesy called *' the upper." In order 
 to reach and stir the minds of this middle 
 class it is necessarj% perhaps, to state the 
 problem in its most elementary form and 
 in the simplest, baldest language. This 
 is what the author has done. Nobody 
 can possibly mistake his meaning or the 
 answer which he would have us give to 
 the question asked by the title of his play. 
 No man with his heart in the right place, 
 if asked, Shall We Forgive Her ? could 
 fail to answer *' Yes " ; in fact, the prob- 
 lem as thus presented is really so simple 
 as to be no problem at all. Any other 
 answer but "Yes" to such a question 
 would be impossible. When the curtain 
 falls you turn to your neighbor and say 
 with smug satisfaction, '' Yes, of course 
 we forgive her," and you go home with 
 little more food for thought than if you 
 had been studying the multiplication 
 table. Now, had the question been stated. 
 Should We Forgive Her? here would have 
 been something to think about ; some- 
 thing upon which to exercise a nice dis- 
 crimination and something w^hich might 
 make us doubt v^^hether all is to be for- 
 
96 IMPRESSIONS OT? 
 
 given to a woman because she hath greatly 
 loved. Here is precisely the weakest 
 point in the treatment. The woman with 
 a past, when justly reproached by the man 
 she has deceived, does but iterate and 
 reiterate " I am your wife." This is 
 evidently intended by the author to be 
 accepted as full justification for such con- 
 cealment as that of which poor Tess of 
 the D'Urbervilles was guilty toward 
 Angel Claire. Such a justification one 
 may well hesitate to accept, and in many 
 minds, Should We Forgive Her ? will be 
 answered *' No," rather than ''Yes." 
 
 To descend now from generals to par- 
 ticulars, the strength of this play seems 
 to me to lie in the first act and in the last, 
 rather than in the third or climacteric, 
 where one would expect it. The reasons 
 for this are, briefly, as follows : In the 
 first act the heroine stands out in sharp 
 contrast to the surrounding characters ; 
 in the other acts she moves in a social 
 atmosphere common to them and to her. 
 In the fourth act the interest is shifted 
 from the " eternal femininity " which has 
 thus far dominated the piece and of whose 
 monotonous weakness one gets somewhat 
 tired — the interest, I say, is shifted from 
 
SOMK MODERN PI.AYS 97 
 
 this and is concentrated upon the struggle 
 going on in the soul of a man — a man 
 much injured, much wronged, whose 
 sense of justice struggles against his love. 
 In these acts also — the first and fourth — 
 the element of suspense is skilfully intro- 
 duced and is thoroughly well managed. 
 In the other acts, with the exception of 
 the ingeniousl}^ caused disappearance of 
 the villain in Act II. there is nothing 
 one could not foresee after listening to the 
 opening speeches. 
 
 As to the author's character- drawing, 
 there is nothing calling for commendation 
 outside of two minor personages, which 
 owe their distinctiveness, perhaps, more 
 to the skill of the actor than to that of the 
 playwright. I refer to the characters of 
 Jerry Blake, the miner, and Dr. McKer- 
 row, the oculist, excellently rendered by 
 Mr. T. C. Hamilton. 
 
 On approaching now this question of 
 rendition, I realize that it is a most deli- 
 cate subject to handle. Protest as will the 
 critic, the actor may very naturally see in 
 a criticism of his acting a criticism of his 
 personality where none is intended. Yet 
 the true artist will welcome sincere criti- 
 cism if he be convinced it comes from one 
 
98 IMPRESSIONS O^ 
 
 who, like himself, is engaged in " a dis- 
 interested endeavor to learn and propagate 
 the best that is known and thought in the 
 (dramatic) world." 
 
 Nothing could be better than Miss 
 Wainwright's appearance and acting in 
 the first act. Here, it seems to me, she 
 was at her best, and the reason for this 
 is simple. The situation had a touch of 
 romance in it and was therefore better 
 suited to her than were those in any acts 
 that followed. Nature has endowed her 
 with an appearance and a voice that fit 
 her for a very much higher and more 
 poetical form of play than an Adeplhi 
 melodrama. Her peculiar field is the same 
 as that in which Miss Marlowe has won 
 her reputation— the realm of what Cole- 
 ridge, for lack of a better name, called 
 the Romantic Drama, and of which such 
 plays as Muck Ado and As You Like It 
 are types. Such plays call for sensibility 
 to poetic effects, lightness of touch, ease 
 and grace of elocution. All of these 
 qualities Miss Wainwright possesses, as 
 those who have seen her Rosalind q2M well 
 remember. In such plays and in high 
 comedy, crude and violent emotions have 
 little place ; now, crude and violent 
 
SOME MODERN PI,AYS 99 
 
 emotions are the life and breath of 
 melodrama. 
 
 The art of Writing light opera has been 
 practiced now for many years and experi- 
 ence has plainly demonstrated that there 
 are only two ways in which anything 
 worth calling an artistic success can be 
 achieved in this particular line of work. 
 The first is to invent or discover a prob- 
 able and entertaining plot wherein the 
 incidents shall be properly motived and 
 the characters shall so act and react upon 
 each other that we shall have that clash 
 and conflict of interests which are essential 
 to a play : in other words, construct your 
 dialogue as carefully as you would for a 
 comedy, then give the whole a musical 
 setting by inserting songs and choruses 
 where they will least hinder the action. 
 This is the French method, to the careful 
 handling of which we owe such artistic 
 gems as Olivette, Les Cloches de Corneville 
 and Girofle-Girofla. The second method 
 is to select some institution or fad or 
 fashionable folly which you wish to satir- 
 ize, turn into lyrical form your most 
 humorous excogitations upon this basal 
 theme and connect your lyrics as well as 
 
lOO IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 you can by means of dialogue, which by 
 its wit shall atone for itslac^ of coherence. 
 This is the common method in English 
 operettas, and according to Mr. Gilbert's 
 own confession it is the one which he 
 employs. To it we ov^^e such happy satire 
 upon ^stheticism as we find in Patience^ 
 upon the Admiralty as we find in Pi7ia- 
 fore, and upon the Army as we find in the 
 Pirates of Penzance. 
 
 I fear me that the author of The Sere- 
 nade, as a good American, must have 
 thought it unpatriotic to learn anything 
 from the practice of such authors as 
 Halevy and Gilbert, for his operetta has 
 nothing that can be called a plot nor has 
 it any basal or dominating idea. It con- 
 sists merely of a series of happenings — to 
 call them incidents were to use too digni- 
 fied a word — which allow certain excel- 
 lent singers to stroll upon the stage, 
 sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and 
 threes, and there to lift up their voices in 
 tones so mellifluous that they happily 
 cause us to forget the words. Should any 
 one unreasonably desire to know the 
 meaning of any of the things he sees 
 a-happening on the stage he must per- 
 force refer to his libretto, where he will 
 
SOMK MODKRN PIvAYS lOI 
 
 find the stage business carefully explained 
 — a most necessary precaution. He will 
 look in vain for lyrics and will find instead 
 a series of unrhythmical, prosy lines, 
 printed in the form usually reserved for 
 verse. Witness the following, a some- 
 what favorable specimen : 
 
 We can hear our own hearts beat 
 
 With a loud pit-pattering. 
 Knees together quaking meet, 
 
 And our teeth are chattering. 
 B-r-r-r-r. There's something there, 
 
 Ambushed thieves observe us. 
 B-r-r-r. To breathe we do not dare, 
 
 We're extremely nervous. 
 We may remark we are afraid 
 
 And wish that we at home had stayed. 
 
 Is it possible that these lines were writ- 
 ten by any but a deaf man ? 
 
 The only attempt at wit in The 
 Serenade is a number of atrocious puns, 
 and there is but one really humorous 
 situation — that in which the Duke, in 
 mad pursuit of the hated serenader, 
 comes upon an entire chorus of monks 
 singing that, to him, hateful melody. 
 But this one humorous situation cannot 
 save the rest of the opera from being 
 deadly dull. 
 
I02 IMPRESSIONS 01^ 
 
 The composer lias succeeded far better 
 than his librettist. The Serenade itself, 
 the Angelus song and the Dream song 
 are charming bits of composition. 
 
II. 
 
 A SECRET WARRANT. 
 
 (Columbia Theatre ^ San Francisco ^ 
 May, i8g8.) 
 
 The only play of serious interest pre- 
 sented during the past week was A Secret 
 Warrayit, with Mr. Robert Mantell in the 
 leading role. The method in which the 
 play is worked out raises it a step above 
 the melodrama ; yet this virtue is little 
 more than negative. Of the common- 
 place there is a depressing abundance : 
 of the elevated which may redeem this 
 commonplace there is but one element. 
 This gains perhaps by contrast with the 
 surrounding dreariness. 
 
 The element to which I refer is the 
 conception of the character of Marguerite 
 Bertrand. This is thoroughly human, 
 sympathetic and convincing. The girl's 
 love for the first gallant man she meets, 
 her entire forgetfulness of self where he 
 is concerned, her unwilling belief in his 
 
I04 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 apparent faithlessness, the crumbling of 
 this belief at the touch of his hand — all 
 this appeals, and rightly, to the common 
 heart which has not lost its faith and love 
 and hope. It is a thousand pities that 
 the author who could conceive such a 
 character had not imagination enough to 
 set it forth in truly poetic form. You can 
 see and feel what he is trying to do, and 
 you wish that he could express it better. 
 It is just as Thackeray said of The 
 Stranger : "In the midst of the balder- 
 dash [of expression] there runs that 
 reality of love, children and forgiveness 
 of wrong which wall be listened to 
 wherever it is preached and sets all the 
 world sympathizing." 
 
 The first act is entirely lacking in sus- 
 pensive interest. Long before the curtain 
 falls you can foresee that the villain will 
 insult the heroine, that the hero will 
 return just in the nick of time and will 
 knock him down. This is evident from 
 the mechanical way in which the hero's 
 exit is arranged : there is no reason for 
 his going off when he does except that he 
 must be off the stage before he can come 
 on again to repulse the aforesaid villain. 
 The second act is decidedly stronger and 
 
Some modern pi,ays 105 
 
 is the best in the play ; it contains a 
 charming love scene and an extremely 
 effective climax. The third act falls 
 away sadly ; the main situation has been 
 used a thousand times, and the climax is 
 so weak that the curtain seems to fall 
 before the scene is completed. A touch 
 of resistance here on the part of the hero 
 w^ould have increased his danger, our 
 sympathy for him and our corresponding 
 joy at his final deliverance. The fourth 
 act is too long. The one really good 
 scene it contains — that of the lettre-de- 
 cachet — to be effective should be intro- 
 duced more quickly. 
 
 In the comedy scene of the first act 
 Miss Knott was disappointing. Thanks 
 to the stage manager, I suppose, she 
 played this in a manner that can be 
 described only as "giggly" — a manner 
 about as inappropriate to the piece and 
 character as can be imagined. Through- 
 out this act, also, she wore a Three- 
 Little-Girls-From-School expression of 
 pained surprise at everybody and every- 
 thing which was entirely overdone. She 
 reminded you of what Charles I,amb said 
 of Munden : "He stands wondering, 
 among the commonplace materials of life, 
 
io6 iM^RESsioiTS OP 
 
 like primeval man with the sun and stars 
 about him." In the emotional scenes of 
 the later acts she showed decided 
 improvement and a capacity for attaining 
 real excellence in this line. Her faults 
 are evidently due to bad teaching. If 
 she aspire to be in the future anything 
 more than she is to-day these faults must 
 be remedied. They can be remedied by 
 a year or two of hard work with some 
 competent master in New York or Paris, 
 and this is the only way in which they 
 can be. Miss Julia Marlowe spent four 
 years studying only six Shakespearian 
 roles. Anybody who expects to rise, as 
 she has done, must be as willing to learn 
 as she was. 
 
 Nature has gifted Mr. Mantell with a 
 fine figure, an expressive countenance 
 and a voice over which he has less 
 control than the audience could wish. 
 For declamatory and tempestuous pas- 
 sages this voice is sufficient, but in 
 passages that call for the expression of 
 tenderness and pathos it is lacking in 
 shading, in delicacy, in refinement. 
 That so experienced an actor should be 
 nervous seems almost incredible, yet in 
 the first act his continual clutching at his 
 
SOME MODERN PI,AYS IO7 
 
 blue ribbon indicated either nervousness 
 or a mannerism that needs to be abated. 
 In spite of these defects, in the scenes 
 that call for serious and romantic action 
 Mr. Mantell is effective — as effective, per- 
 haps, as anyone on our stage to-day. It 
 is in the comedy scenes that he fails, and 
 fails woefully. This, too, not from any 
 lack of intelligence, not from ignorance 
 of what is the right thing to do, but 
 from a deliberate attempt to play down 
 (or, rather, up) to the gallery. This is 
 especially noticeable and especially 
 inartistic in the slipper scene of the first 
 act ; — that an accomplished man of the 
 world, a man seasoned by years of service 
 in camp and court, should be agitated as 
 a schoolboy and awkward as a rustic at 
 the thought of putting on a lady's slipper 
 — this is indeed incredible. 
 
 "A second lover came ambling by — 
 A timid lad with a frightened eye, 
 
 And a color mantling highly ; 
 He muttered the errand on which he'd come, 
 Then only chuckled and bit his thumb, 
 
 And simpered, simpered shyly." 
 
 This was Mr. Mantell' s attitude. It 
 raised a laugh both in the thinking and 
 in the unthinking portions of the audi- 
 
loS IMPRKSSIOKS 01^ 
 
 ence, but that which inspired the laugh 
 was not the same in both cases. 
 
 In the drinking scene of the last act Mr 
 Mantell shows the same tendency to play 
 down. There is some (but not sufficient) 
 excuse for this here, as the action requires 
 that De Beaumont should deceive De 
 Varennes by pretending drunkenness. 
 In this place Mr. Mantell would do well 
 to change the action, which is not only 
 stale and unnecessary, but even tends to 
 weaken the scene. Since De Varennes 
 is drunk and De Beaumont is not, the 
 audience feels there is no credit for De 
 Beaumont in vanquishing De Varennes 
 in the duel : a sword contest between 
 a drunken man and a sober one is too 
 one-sided to be interesting. Let De 
 Varennes be kept sober. This will 
 remove any possible excuse for horse-play 
 on the part of De Beaumont, and will, as 
 I have said, strengthen the interest. 
 
 The atmosphere of the play, in the two 
 scenes just spoken of, was thus spoiled by 
 Mr. Mantell. Among others who failed 
 to preserve this atmosphere the chief 
 sinner was Mr. Harry Saint Maur. This 
 excellent comedian has so long repre- 
 sented old men that are loudly humorous 
 
Some; modkrn pi, ays log 
 
 that he seems unable to transform himself 
 when called upon to play a character that 
 that is quietly witty, or at least intended 
 to be so. The author, I must confess, 
 though his intention is evident, has not 
 given Mr. Saint Maur much assistance. 
 I suggest that with Mr. Mantell's permis- 
 sion he strengthen his part by inserting 
 a few really witty expressions such as he 
 may easily cull from the maxims of La 
 Rochefoucauld or the " Polite Conversa- 
 tion " of Swift 
 
 It is pleasant to recall that at least two 
 members of the company did admirably 
 preserve the tone of the play and of the 
 characters they represented. These were 
 Mr. Howard Hall as Gaston de Varennes, 
 and Mr. Frank W. Smith as Phillippe, 
 Due d' Orleans. The former was rollick- 
 ing, dashing, yet always, even in his cups, 
 the gentleman ; the latter was dignified, 
 impressive, and bore himself most royally. 
 Mr. Smith has a face and figure that 
 would admirably fit hira to portray the 
 character of General Washington. If ever 
 the Father of His Country is put upon the 
 stage successfully — and several attempts 
 in this line have recently been made — 
 Mr. Smith is the man to play the part. 
 
110 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 With the exception of the costumes 
 little attempt was made in this play, so far 
 as I could see, to create an illusion that we 
 were looking at a picture of life in the 
 days of the Regency. Nineteenth century 
 sofas stood out in bewildering contrast 
 against I^ouis Quatorze walls, bringing 
 home to the audience painful realization 
 of a truth unnecessarily stated on the 
 programme : that the furniture used was 
 from a shop just around the corner. 
 Fearful, too, was the English pronuncia- 
 tion of some of the minor characters, and 
 more fearful their French ! 
 
 The avoidable defects pointed out in this 
 representation make one realize the neces- 
 sity of some such institution as I have 
 before advocated and still advocate : an 
 endowed theatre with a school attached, 
 where the actor shall be trained for his 
 profession as thoroughly as are the 
 lawyer, the doctor, the college professor, 
 for theirs. Until we have some such 
 institution we can hardly hope for per- 
 formances much more artistic than those 
 uneven representations given us by 
 Mr. Mantell's company — representations 
 where good material is misguided and 
 wasted through lack of intelligent training 
 in the higher details of the actor's art. 
 
III. 
 
 ROBIN HOOD. 
 
 (San Francisco^ Marchy i8g8.) 
 
 As I look over the playbills for this 
 week (March 19-26), I find that one can 
 choose only between two crude melo- 
 dramas and two pieces written solely to 
 amuse. Now amusement, though far 
 from the highest, is certainly a legitimate 
 end for the drama, and the amusement 
 offered shall therefore be my theme. 
 
 As to Robin Hood, to state the matter 
 negatively, it may be said that one's 
 enjoyment of this opera is greatly en- 
 hanced by not reading the libretto ; 
 positively, then, the chief interest lies in 
 the music. 
 
 Orchestration can be taught to anybody 
 with a good ear and enough brains to re" 
 member what he is taught ; but melody 
 comes by nature and the grace of inspira- 
 tion. Now Mr. de Koven is a born melo- 
 
Ii2 tMPRKSSIONS Oh' 
 
 dist ; like the lover in Keats' '' Ode on a 
 Grecian Urn," he is indeed a 
 
 Happy melodist, unwearied, 
 Forever piping songs — 
 
 Alas ! that we cannot truthfully applj'- 
 to his songs the closing words of Keats' 
 line, — [songs] '' forever new." 
 
 Robiji Hood is the one work in which 
 Mr. De Koven seems to have given com- 
 plete and beautiful expression to the 
 musical thought within his soul. Every- 
 thing that he wrote before Robin Hood is 
 crude and juvenile; nearly everything 
 that he has v/ritten since (in the w^ay of 
 operatic music) is commonplace or repeti- 
 tional. His one great success came to 
 him too early in life ; it came, evidently, 
 before he had realized the responsibility 
 which rests upon that one man in a 
 hundred million who possesses the divine 
 gift of melodious expression. Such a talent 
 should be sedulously nourished and 
 sparingly used. It should be increased 
 by assiduous study of the best models and 
 should be strengthened by innumerable 
 exercises v/hich should never reach the 
 ear of the public. Only in this way can 
 great results be attained. He who would 
 
SOME MODKRN PI.AYS II3 
 
 share the fame of a Mozart or a Beethoven 
 must model his practice upon theirs. 
 
 Mr. De Koven has, unfortunately for 
 his musical reputation, preferred money 
 to fame. Had he given us but one opera 
 every three or four years, each one of 
 these might have been a masterpiece, as 
 is Robin Hood. Instead of this, he has 
 averaged at least one opera a year since 
 1890 ; v^ho that has sat through the inan. 
 ities of his Fencing Master and other 
 tenth-rate work of that character, !but 
 must regret the squandering of a talent 
 v^ell worthy of being husbanded ! 
 
 The popularity oi Robin Hood, then, is, 
 in my opinion, due chiefly to the life and 
 grace of its melodies ; yet there are minor 
 elements in its phenomenal success which 
 may be worth noticing. The theme and 
 the setting are certainly well chosen. 
 " Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore — What a full 
 Skakespearian sound it carries!" says 
 Charles lyamb. Similarly, what associa- 
 tions of the merry greenwood and the 
 jovial outlaws cling around the names of 
 Robin Hood and Allan-a-Dale ! To the 
 German or to the French element in our 
 population this will hardly appeal, but to 
 
114 IMPRKSSIONS OP" 
 
 all those in whose veius runs Saxon 
 blood, to those whose youthful imagina- 
 tions have been nourished upon ''Ivan- 
 hoe," to those in whose ears echoes the 
 sound of old ballads : 
 
 When shaws beene sheene, and shradds full 
 fay re, 
 
 And leaves both large and longe, 
 Itt is merrye walking in the fayre forrest 
 
 To heare the small birdes songe. 
 
 The woodwheele sang, and would not cease, 
 
 Sitting upon the spraye, 
 See lowde, he awakened Robin Hood, 
 
 In the greenwood where he lay, — 
 
 to all such the name of Robin Hood must 
 ever be one to conjure with. 
 
 The story and the characters here are 
 so well-known to the audience beforehand 
 that little invention is necessary to carry 
 them along. The only character in which 
 any originality is displayed is in that of 
 the Sheriff, and what would that be with- 
 out Mr. Barnabee ? A priori, it would 
 seem impossible to extract any fun from 
 the stale and vulgar device of represent- 
 ing an old man as intoxicated, yet such is 
 the skill of this delightful actor that one 
 can really watch with interest the contrast 
 between his self-suflScient wisdom and his 
 
SOME MODERN PLAYS II5 
 
 foolish actions. It is only after you go 
 home and think it all over that you regret 
 that such skill should be displayed in so 
 unworthy a situation. 
 
 Nothing could better illustrate the dog- 
 gerel which the public will endure in 
 opera than the words of the famous intro- 
 duced song, "Oh, Promise Me." Here 
 is the first verse of this extraordinary 
 farrago : 
 
 Oh, promise me that some day you and I 
 
 Will take our love together to some sky 
 Where we can be alone, and faith renew, 
 
 And find the hollows where those flowers 
 grew. 
 The first sweet violets of early spring, 
 
 That come in whispers, fill our thoughts, 
 And sing of love unspeakable that is to be. 
 
 Oh, promise me, oh, promise me. 
 
 Compare this with the treatment of the 
 contrasting emotion by a great artist : 
 
 Dear as remembered kisses after death. 
 And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd 
 On lips that are for others ; deep as love. 
 Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
 O Death in Life, the days that are no more. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE GEISHA— RIP VAN WINKLE 
 (Opkra)— A GII.DED FOOL. 
 
 {San Francisco, March, i8g8.) 
 
 Why has the English-speaking race, 
 which has accomplished so much in all 
 forms of poetrj^ accomplished so little in 
 the other fine arts of painting, sculpture 
 and, above all, music ? Anything like a 
 complete answer to this question would 
 fill more pages than are contained in this 
 book, yet a brief consideration of histori- 
 cal causes may throw a little light upon 
 the subject. 
 
 Before the days of Puritan ascendancy 
 the English and the Flemish schools of 
 music were as strong and as original as 
 any in Europe. In proof of this, for 
 England suffice it to mention the names of 
 Tallis, Byrd and Orlande Gibbons, all of 
 whom died before 1626. The works of 
 the first-mentioned still serve a« models 
 
some; mode:rn pi,ays 117 
 
 for composers of church music, while the 
 madrigals of B3'rd and Gibbons are hardly- 
 surpassed by those of Sir Arthur Sullivan. 
 The glorious summer of English music, 
 which ended with the death of Gibbons 
 in 1625, was followed by the cruel winter 
 of Puritan discontent. Though the edu- 
 cated among the Puritans, such as Milton 
 and Cromwell, were able to disassociate 
 music from its use with the service of the 
 church, the great mass of the people were 
 unable to do this ; to them, music meant 
 ever ritual and liturgy. Now, ritual and 
 liturgy they were determined to stamp 
 out at any cost. And they did. 
 
 In the second part of the seventeenth 
 century we find but one great musical 
 composer — Purcell. He died in 1695 ^^ 
 the early age of thirty-seven and left no 
 successors — for the vast majority of the 
 nation was still Puritan and had no more 
 love for music than it had for that brilliant 
 and immoral Restoration comedy which 
 drove the Puritan from the theatre. Under 
 the early Planoverians matters were still 
 worse ; the little patronage which music 
 had received from the court was entirely 
 withdrawn by monarchs who confessed 
 themselves unable to see anything even 
 
1X8 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 in ** bainting and boetry," as they phrased 
 it, so that neither from the mass of the 
 nation below nor from the ruling classes 
 above could the unfortunate musician ex- 
 pect anything but neglect and contempt. 
 As Puritanism gradually lost force, and 
 when musical taste began to revive in 
 England, no native composers arose to 
 supply the demand. English music 
 became the thrall of German and Italian 
 masters, and a thrall it has remained 
 until very recently. The great mass of 
 the English people have not yet awakened 
 to the importance of music as a civilizing 
 agency. Until they do England can 
 hardly expect to develop a composer that 
 shall be to her what Wagner is to Ger- 
 many and Gounod to France. 
 
 What is true of old England is true of 
 new America. Our best music must long 
 continue to come from France, Germany 
 and Italy— for Dr. Damrosch's idea that 
 a national American music may be de- 
 veloped from negro melody seems to me 
 worthy of being regarded as the joke of 
 the century. 
 
 The poverty of ideas which still charac- 
 terizes English music is nowhere more 
 
SOMK MODERN PLAYS IIQ 
 
 painfully apparent than in music written 
 for the stage. Kugland has but one 
 master in this line of work — Sir Arthur 
 Sullivan — and the other composers try- 
 to copy him. Witness that musical 
 farce (not comedy), The Geisha. In this 
 production we have a second-rate attempt 
 to imitate Sullivan's manner, with an 
 entire absence of that individuality which 
 marks his work as unique. The com- 
 poser seems capable of better things, but 
 he has been compelled by the construc- 
 tion of the farce to write a mere succession 
 of ditties wherein the jingle and blare of 
 the music hall are painfully apparent. 
 
 In the libretto of The Geisha (happily 
 not printed) we see the same imitative- 
 ness which characterizes the music. Its 
 prototype, of course, is Gilbert's MikadOy 
 and the one distinct character in the play 
 — the Marquis Imari — is a transcript of 
 Poo-Bah, minus his wit. The one orig- 
 inal conception in The Geisha is the 
 introduction of foreign and native ele- 
 ments into the same play. This gives a 
 chance for picturesque contrasts in set- 
 ting and costuming, and this chance is 
 well utilized. 
 
 Vulgarity is not a necessary concomit- 
 
120 IMPRKSSIONS OV' 
 
 ant of comic opera, as Mr. Gilbert's 
 practice abundantly shows. He has also 
 demonstrated that witty and even poetical 
 elements may be effectively introduced. 
 Now TAe Geisha has neither wit nor 
 poetry, but abounds in vulgarity. The 
 depiction of Japanese life is bad enough, 
 but its coarseness is partially concealed 
 from the audience by their ignorance of 
 Japanese morals and customs. When we 
 come to the English side we are shown 
 characters that are supposed to represent 
 English ladies and gentlemen. But the 
 gentlemen — officers in Her Majesty's 
 navy — act and talk like fo' castle hands 
 off on a spree ; while the heroine — 
 wealthy and of good family—is endowed 
 with the manners of a Spiers & Pond 
 barmaid. Such a representation is bad 
 art as well as bad morals. Sir Joseph 
 Porter is intensely humorous, yet always 
 a gentleman; I^ittle Buttercup, though 
 only a bumboat woman, does not offend 
 with the Billingsgate manners of the 
 English heroine in The Geisha, 
 
 He attempts a dangerous task who 
 tries to do over again a thing already 
 once well done. To such a risk have Mr. 
 
SOME MODERN PI.AYS 121 
 
 Jordan and Mr. Barnabee exposed them- 
 selves by oj0fering to the puplic another 
 musical version of Rip Van Winkle. 
 The music of the first named suffers by 
 comparison with that of Planquette ; it is 
 lacking in distinctiveness and melody, is 
 full of repetitions and commonplace 
 cadences that remind one of " Darling I 
 am Growing Old " and other favorites of 
 the organ-grinder. The libretto is even 
 weaker and more pitiably amateurish 
 than the music. It is — like to Mr. Clayton 
 Hooper in The Rival Curates — the mildest 
 thing a-going ; to write such a libretto 
 the author must have gone through a 
 course of training like unto Mr. Hooper's, 
 who 
 
 Lived on curds and whey, 
 And daily sang their praises, 
 
 And then he'd go and play 
 With buttercups and daisies. 
 
 As to Mr. Barnabee' s acting, it is no dis- 
 courtesy to him to say that he is not a 
 Jefferson. Neither is it his fault that he 
 is left lying on the stage for twenty-five 
 minutes, during which there is being 
 performed music certainly well calculated 
 to put him to sleep were he not already so. 
 Mrs. Siddons during a shorter period of 
 
122 IMPRESSIONS OB^ 
 
 enforced inactivity on the stage used to 
 refresh herself from a pint of porter placed 
 behind a (painted) rock conveniently low; 
 let us hope that Mr. Barnabee's apparent 
 slumber was soothed by liquid ministra- 
 tions conveyed to him through some con- 
 cealed piping, conveniently long. 
 
 Mr. Belasco's attempt at the Alcazar to 
 establish a permanent stock company in 
 San Francisco is a step in the right direc- 
 tion. It would be gratifying to see this 
 attempt receive from the public a more 
 generous support. Only by recognition 
 of such efforts will the pernicious star 
 system be discouraged, and in stock com- 
 panies only, can the young actor acquire 
 that varied experience which shall make 
 him an artist. 
 
 If we except Robin Hood— which, every- 
 body by this time may be supposed to 
 have seen — the Alcazar revival of Henry 
 Guy Carleton's A Gilded Fool was the 
 most enjoyable performance given at any 
 San Francisco theatre last week. Here 
 we had a play — a natural and probable 
 story of human life presented by means of 
 action and dialogue, through a series of 
 properly motived incidents. Nothing in 
 
some: modern plays 123 
 
 the play is irrational or improbable, which 
 is more than can be said, I think, for the 
 majority of plays one sees nowadays. 
 Moreover, this play is actually based upon 
 an idea and has a decided ethical ten- 
 dency. Its purpose is to show how the 
 nature of a man once strong and true but 
 now weakened and warped by the acqui- 
 sition of sudden wealth, may be restrength- 
 ened and revivified by the touch of some 
 ennobling emotion ; this emotion is love 
 for a good woman. Innumerable poets 
 and playwrights have treated this theme 
 under different aspects — among others, 
 Dryden most beautifully in his Cymon and 
 Jphigenia. Mr. Carleton has given the 
 subject a thoroughly modern setting and 
 thus translated it into terms familiar to 
 nineteenth century hearers. Wonderful 
 to relate, also, he has managed to keep 
 some of the poetic elements which 
 many managers assure us that modern 
 audiences will not tolerate. I was inter- 
 ested to notice that no passages were 
 listened to with more attention than those 
 which, to use Ruskin's definition of 
 poetry, suggested noble grounds for the 
 noble emotions. 
 The presentation of the play, though in 
 
124 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 many ways excellent, was impaired by 
 unduehasteand insuflficiency of rehearsal. 
 This is unfortunately almost unavoidable 
 at a house where a different play has to be 
 presented every week in order to attract 
 the public. Were the patronage better, 
 were it as good as it should be in a city of 
 the size of San Francisco, such a play as 
 A Gilded Fool could run two — perhaps 
 three — weeks. This would give time for 
 iSfteen or twenty rehearsals of the next 
 play, and these would be none too many. 
 At the Comedie Frangaise twenty-five or 
 thirty rehearsals are common, and forty 
 or fifty are not unknown. The result is 
 a finish and a perfection in detail which 
 can be appreciated only when seen. 
 
 Mr. Pascoe, Mr. Huntington and Mr. 
 Bryant are all excellent actors. Were 
 they but allowed time fully to prepare 
 their work they would fill every require- 
 ment which the spectator may reasonably 
 demand from members of a stock com- 
 pany. 
 
V. 
 
 THE CAT AND THE CHERUB- 
 
 THE FIRST BORN— A GAY 
 
 DECEIVER. 
 
 {Sa7i Fra7idsco, ApriU i8g8.) 
 
 The appearance of The Cat ajid The 
 Cherub at the Baldwin may properly mark 
 the close of one of the most exciting and 
 most amusing controversies in the history 
 of the American drama. The pother all 
 started in San Francisco; in San Fran- 
 cisco, with dramatic propriety, it ends. 
 Now that the fuss is all over, now that 
 the clouds of dust raised by the friends ot 
 Mr. Fernald and of Mr. Powers have been 
 nearly blown away, now it may be possible 
 to get a clear view of the situation and to 
 draw up a last and impartial report upon 
 this famous battle of authors and man- 
 agers. 
 
 Mr. Fernald' s stories of Chinese life 
 had been published in New York and had 
 been well known in San Francisco many 
 
126 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 montlis before The First Born had its first 
 rehearsal. A priori^ it seems impossible 
 that a California author contemplating a 
 play upon a Chinese subject should have 
 failed to acquaint himself with these vivid 
 sketches. When we come to examine the 
 elements of Mr. Powers' play we find that 
 many of them are the same as those in 
 Mr. Fernald's stories. Just as the theme 
 of Othello is jealousy and of Macbeth 
 ambition, so the theme of The First Bom 
 is parental affection. Now, this is also 
 the theme in the narrative version of The 
 Cata7idThe Cherub. The adventure which 
 befell Hoo Chee could never have befallen 
 him had it not been for the situation in 
 which he was placed by the jealous love 
 of his father. The plot of The First Born 
 turns upon exactly the same motive. 
 Coming to characters, we find other 
 resemblances between The First Bor?i and 
 the Fernald stories. The learned doctor, 
 the amah, the pipe-smoking murderer 
 and the highbinders are in both ; like- 
 wise the enmity of the clans, which 
 furnishes much of the action of The First 
 Born, appears in the stories. The pathetic 
 episode of the slave girl is original with 
 The First Bor7t, and for this Mr. Powers 
 
some; modern pi,ays 127 
 
 is entitled to full credit, but for the other 
 characters, for much of the action and for 
 the color and atmosphere of his play, it 
 seems to me, he is indeoted to Mr. Fer- 
 nald's book. 
 
 Had this acknowledgment been made 
 at the first there need have been no contro- 
 versy, no charges of plagiarism, no recrim- 
 inations, and after this acknowledgment 
 there would still have remained large 
 praise for Mr. Powers. His originality 
 consists in this : he was the first to per- 
 ceive and actually to put into theatrical 
 shape the dramatic possibilities of the life 
 depicted in The Cataiid The Cherub stones. 
 So far as we can judge from the known 
 facts, Mr. Fern aid did not perceive the 
 dramatic possibilities in his own narrative 
 work until the success of Mr. Powers' 
 play had demonstrated them to him. 
 When these were brought to his notice 
 we can hardly blame him for wishing to 
 dramatize his own book. Our only regret 
 is that he should have descended into the 
 arena of music-hall politics, allowing his 
 manager to exploit his play by unworthy 
 dodges and tricks of the trade. If The 
 Cat and The Cherub is a better play than 
 The First Born it does not need to fear 
 
128 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 its rival : these mountings in hot haste, 
 these hurryings to and fro will not make 
 it a better play ; they simply tend to keep 
 away from the representations people who 
 thiak that one of the essentials of the best 
 dramatic art is dignity. 
 
 Is The Cat and The Cherub a better play 
 than The First Born ? To this I answer 
 No; and my reasons are briefly as follows: 
 The action of The Cat a^id The Cherub is 
 slow ; the action of The First Born is 
 rapid ; the dialogue of The Cat and The 
 Cherub abounds in monologues, while 
 that of The First Born is well broken and 
 distributed. In The Cat and The Cherub 
 there are really two stories between which 
 the interest of the audience is divided ; in 
 The First Born this interest is centered 
 and unified about one theme, and one 
 only. The climacteric situation (which 
 is the same in both plays) in The Cat and 
 The Cherub is treated with tedious lengthi- 
 ness ; in The First Born this same situa- 
 tion comes with the force, vividness and 
 unexpectedness of lightning-stroke from 
 summer sky. 
 
 The treatment of this last point is an- 
 other illustration of a fact familiar to any 
 one acquainted with stagecraft, namely, 
 
SOMK MODERN PI,AYS 1 29 
 
 that a man may write a very good narra- 
 tive and be much less competent to put it 
 into dramatic form than a man who could 
 never have written the narrative but who 
 has stage experience. Macready could 
 never have written Richelieu^ hni Richelieu 
 would never have been a successful play 
 had not Macready been consulted at every 
 important turn in its construction. Mr. 
 Paul Potter could never have written 
 Trilby, but he has put it into excellent 
 dramatic shape. Similarly, Mr. Powers 
 has done nothing to make us believe that 
 he could write such charming narrative 
 sketches as we find in Mr. Fernald's book, 
 but his experience as an actor has enabled 
 him to make a much better play out of 
 this same book. 
 
 There is a belief current among people 
 who cannot carefully have studied the facts 
 that there is something in the actor's pro- 
 fession which militates against his being 
 a good playwright. Among others, my 
 friend Mr. Birrell holds this view and 
 asks some one to point out what actor 
 has ever enriched the literature of his own 
 profession. To this I would reply, first, 
 that Shakespeare was an actor, and that 
 one reason why he wrote such good plays 
 
was that lie liad learned on the boards 
 the technique of his trade; second, it was 
 exactly the same with Moliere. Farquhar 
 was an actor before he was a playwright; 
 so were Garrick, Foote and Pinero. This 
 is a very respectable list of names. Some 
 of these men combined acting and play- 
 writing as long as they lived, and if others 
 abandoned the former for the latter, it 
 was not because the first-mentioned art 
 unfitted them for the second, but simply 
 because they found they had more talent 
 for the second than for the first. 
 
 This knowledge of stagecraft must 
 be acquired somehow. Congreve learned 
 it second-hand from Dryden, Goldsmith 
 from Garrick, Sheridan from his father 
 (an actor). Kach one of these writers 
 would have learned it quicker and better 
 from his own observation on the stage. 
 This is where Mr. Powers has learned it; 
 Mr. Fernald has yet to learn it — and I 
 believe he will. 
 
 When we come to rendition, Mr Fer- 
 nald' s play suffers by comparison with 
 Mr. Powers'. The actors in the former, 
 excellently as they had acquitted them- 
 selves in the preceding farce, failed to 
 adapt themselves to the tone and atmos- 
 
SOMK MODSRi^ PXAYS ijf 
 
 phere of a Chinese play. In seeking for 
 dignity they became cold and stilted ; in 
 bearing, gesture and manner they lacked 
 verisimilitude. With the exception of 
 Mr. Holland and Miss Deane, it was 
 impossible to imagine that we saw upon 
 the stage Chinese men and women. They 
 were too evidently foreigners masquerad- 
 ing in Chinese garments. In the First 
 Born the illusion was complete. Miss 
 Buckley, Mr. Benreimo and Mr. Osborne 
 sunk their personalities absolutely in the 
 characters they represented. 
 
 Another circumstance unfortunate for 
 Mr. Fernald is the position of his play on 
 the programme. By half-past lo people 
 are tired ; moreover, two hours spent in 
 the atmosphere of the vaudeville and the 
 cafi chayitant leave one in anything but 
 the proper frame of mind for tragedy. 
 
 As to this same preceding farce, A Gay 
 Deceiver^ it is excellently played and 
 abominably written. In modern plays of 
 a light order it is too often the case that 
 the actor, by his interpolations and busi- 
 ness, degrades the author; in this play 
 the reverse is the case; the authors 
 degrade the actor. 
 
i$i IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 The theme of the play holds up to ridi- 
 cule an institution which it has taken the 
 human race thousands of years to establish 
 on anything like a stable foundation. 
 This institution is the most valuable 
 which any society can possess. It is the 
 corner-stone upon which rest all decent 
 social relations. If this corner-stone were 
 destroyed modern society would rush 
 headlong to ruin and would crumble into 
 a state of primitive anarchy. This insti- 
 tution is marriage; upon this rests the 
 home, the family and the legitimate in- 
 heritance of property. To her insistence 
 upon the sancitity of this institution 
 ancient Rome owed much of her stability 
 and much of her greatness. History 
 shows very plainly that the society in 
 which this institution has become a pub- 
 lic jest is in a perilous condition. Such 
 was society in the time of Charles II ; 
 such was society in the time of Louis XV; 
 such is the society depicted in A Gay 
 Deceiver. The men are all rakes and liars; 
 the women are all shameless and vicious 
 except the wife who is represented as a 
 fool ; the authors heap the ridicule upon 
 her — the only woman in the play with 
 any pretension to virtue — and do their 
 
some; modern pi,ays 133 
 
 best to excite your sympathy for her 
 husband, the arch-rake and the arch-liar. 
 The latter's speech invoking the " mem- 
 ory of our sainted mother " is a slur upon 
 a feeling which honorable men hold most 
 sacred, and is an insult to every honest 
 woman in the audience. 
 
 For these reasons I say the play is 
 thoroughly immoral and is a disgrace to 
 the stage. 
 
 I am informed on what I believe to be 
 good authority that the play above de- 
 scribed is an adaptation from the French, 
 although there is nothing on the bill to 
 show it. If this be so one may pertin- 
 ently ask why (as in this case) American 
 audiences will so often accept the off- 
 scourings of Parisian gutters, and will 
 so seldom ask for the roses that grow in 
 the gardens of fair France. French 
 society, like every other society, contains 
 bad elements, but it is an injustice to 
 the French people to transfer to a foreign 
 stage innumerable representations of 
 those elements and to leave almost un- 
 represented those better elements reflected 
 in the works of the great French dra- 
 matic writers. Paris has several theatres 
 where such a play as A Gay Deceiver 
 
1J4 tMPRBJgSIO]^'^ 0^ 
 
 might have been running, say, during 
 the first week of March ; but she has 
 also a Comddie Frangaise and an Odeon 
 where during that same week one could 
 see the following plays : At the Fran- 
 gaise — Moliere's Le Mariage Force, and 
 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Dumas' 
 V Etrang'tre ; at the Odeon — U Aries- 
 ienne (from Daudet's Neuma ,Rou- 
 mestan) and La Fille du Cid. If The 
 Cat and The Cherub needed a French 
 prologue, why not give us something 
 good rather than something vile ? some- 
 thing elevating rather than something 
 debasing ? To use a Carylese metaphor : 
 Is it believed that San Francisco has 
 erected within her borders some huge 
 signpost whereon is inscribed in letters 
 so large that he who runs may read, 
 ^ 'DRY RUBBISH SHOT HKRK?" 
 
VI. 
 SHORE ACRES. 
 
 {Sa7i Frayicisco, April ^ i8g8.) 
 
 After all the foreign rubbisli which has 
 been shot upon our stage, it is refreshing 
 to find a really good play upon an Amer- 
 ican subject, written by an American, 
 excellently played by Americans in good 
 United States suitable to the time and 
 place of the action, and staged with a 
 perfection of detail that would reflect 
 credit upon any French or German pro- 
 duction. Such a play is Shore Acres. 
 If Mr. Augustin Daly and other high- 
 toned individuals who think no production 
 worth staging unless it has first received 
 the stamp of London or Berlin approval, 
 could give us anything as good as Shore 
 Acres, their audiences would feel they had 
 received full value for the two dollars 
 extracted from oft-befooled pockets. 
 
 The main theme of the play is the 
 devotion of a simple-minded New Eng- 
 
l^b IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 land farmer to a wonian who is worthy 
 and a brother who is unworthy of his 
 love. In early life he had sacrificed his 
 love for the woman in order that his 
 brother might marry her. As an old 
 man this long pent-up devotion flowed 
 forth in a stream of blessing upon her 
 children, and upon one of these (a girl) 
 in particular. At the time the play opens 
 she is supposed to be about eighteen. 
 Her love story and the complications 
 arising therefrom form the secondary 
 theme or sub-plot. This, it will be seen, 
 is thus organically connected with the 
 main plot ; each would be incomplete 
 without the other. They are fitted to- 
 gether, it must be confessed, by the hand 
 of a most skilful workman. 
 
 The first act and the third are, in 
 my opinion, stronger than either the 
 second or the fourth. The first contains an 
 intellectual element lacking in the others. 
 Its presentation of the narrow, provincial, 
 country life of New England stands out 
 in fine dramatic contrast with the wider, 
 freer range of thought and feeling sug- 
 gested by the mental tone of the young 
 physician. The utter impossibility of 
 life for him in a community whose most 
 
some: modern PI.AYS 1 37 
 
 advanced thinker believes that Darwinism 
 means that his grandfathers were monk- 
 eys ; the hopeless attempt of the young 
 scientist to adapt himself to such an 
 environment ; the faith of the young girl 
 who longs to believe in the new ideas 
 because he believes in them — all this 
 furnishes a most interesting psychological 
 problem, thoroughly modern and treated 
 in a thoroughly modern way. This alone 
 would serve to lift the play from the dead 
 level of that ordinary nineteenth-century 
 drama, which might be fittingly described 
 in words I once heard applied to William 
 Black's "Strange Adventures of a House 
 Boat:" "Just the thing for a summer 
 holiday ; not an idea in it." 
 
 In the third act, to a good many people 
 in the audience the strength seemed to 
 lie in the spectacle of the painted ship 
 upon the painted ocean. This bit of 
 melodrama, it seemed to me, was out of 
 keeping with the tone of the rest of the 
 piece. It was really in the preceding 
 scene of the same act that we had the 
 most powerful situation in the whole 
 play. Here was the real climax. Here 
 we were shown, swiftly and vividly, the 
 true nobility, the dauntless purpose 
 
138 IMPRESSIONS O^ 
 
 which lay deep hidden in a nature 
 apparently soft and sympathetic. 
 
 The fourth act — that terror to every 
 dramatic writer, however skilful — opens 
 delightfully in Mr. Heme's play with the 
 episode of the children's Christmas Eve. 
 It falls away as soon as the main action is 
 taken up again and threatens to end in a 
 perfectly mechanical resolution ; it is 
 saved, however, by one of those silent 
 closes — so dangerous to attempt — so effec- 
 tive when successful, and never in my 
 experience more effectively employed 
 than here. 
 
 Turning now to rendition, I can hardly 
 imagine how the principal part could 
 have been played better than it was by 
 Mr. Heme. Voice, gesture, bearing, — all 
 were perfectly fitted to the character. 
 Nobody in the audience could fail to hear 
 every word he said, and when he did not 
 speak his facial expression spoke clearer 
 than words. Only in one incident during 
 the long time he was on the stage did he 
 fail, and that was in the struggle with 
 his brother in the lighthouse. In a phy- 
 sical contest on the stage there should be 
 enough action displayed by both com- 
 batants to create an illusion in the mind 
 
SOME MODERN PI,AYS 1 39 
 
 of the audience that what they see is 
 actually a fight. Now, Mr. Fisher, who 
 plays Martin Berry, is a big, strong man 
 weighing over 200 pounds. Such a man 
 with murder in his heart is not to be 
 thrust aside by a blow that would hardly 
 have budged a ten-year-old boy. The 
 blow which Mr. Heme gave him in this 
 terrific encounter would, scarce have 
 felled a six weeks' lamb. Therefore, 
 when the audience should have been 
 roused to terror and admiration, they 
 were merely shaken by a very different 
 emotion. 
 
 Next to Mr. Heme, or rather on a level 
 with him, must I place the work of Mr. 
 James T. Galloway as Joel Gates. Mr. 
 Galloway plays the eccentric old man in 
 a manner worthy of the best traditions of 
 the French stage . Mezieres himself could 
 have taught him nothing. 
 
 The other minor parts are all admirably 
 done, showing a thoroughness and an 
 intelligence on the part of the stage 
 manager (Mr. Heme himself) which is 
 as rare as it is delightful. Here must be 
 mentioned the clever work of the children, 
 most of which, I suppose, must be as- 
 cribed to the same intelligent direction. 
 
I40 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Shore Acres and Little Lord Fatmtleroy 
 are among the few plays I know of where 
 the author's treatment of the child 
 element is unobjectionable. In most 
 plays (such as in that quintessence of 
 vulgarity, The Geisha), the author en- 
 deavors to get a striking eflfect by repre- 
 senting the child as endowed with the 
 '' smartness" of a vicious man. An 
 effect is thus obtained, but it is not really 
 humorous or entertaining ; it is rather 
 pitiable and disgusting to see the fresh 
 child-life thus polluted. This, the com- 
 mon type of stage-child, has been satirized 
 by Mr. Gilbert in his ballad of ''The 
 Precocious Baby," who 
 
 Early determined to marry and wive 
 
 For better or worse 
 
 With his elderly nurse, 
 Which the poor little boy didn't live to contrive. 
 
 His health didn't thrive — 
 
 No longer alive, 
 He died an enfeebled old dotard at five! 
 
 Do we call this description satiric ? No; 
 it seems rather the model according to 
 which many authors have fashioned 
 their conceptions of stage children. 
 While there is nothing of this kind in 
 Shore Acres, while the child life there is 
 
SOMK MODKRN PI.AYS 14I 
 
 really innocent and delightful, the ques- 
 tion still remains whether it is good for 
 the children themselves ; whether it is 
 right to subject any child to the late 
 hours, constant traveling, and irreg- 
 ular habits which are the necessary 
 drawbacks of the actor's life. In the 
 growing frame of the child nature is ever 
 working m3^sterious and subtle changes ; 
 she is making mighty draughts upon the 
 vitality of the little organism. To place 
 the child in those conditions which shall 
 be most favorable to the growth and de- 
 velopment of this organism is the first 
 duty of those responsible for the child's 
 existence. Now these favorable condi- 
 tions cannot be obtained for a child 
 whose life is on the stage, and for this 
 reason the child had better not be there. 
 If we must sacrifice something, it were 
 better to sacrifice a passing effect in a 
 play rather than the individual good of 
 the young life. 
 
 The least pleasant thing to be said 
 about this play I have reserved till the 
 last, and were it a defect necessarily 
 inherent and irremovable, I should place 
 very little emphasis upon it. But Shore 
 Acres is such a good play that it ought to 
 
142 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 be perfected in every detail possible, and 
 the defect to which I refer can easily be 
 remedied — from the front of the house it 
 is so palpable, that it is passing strange 
 it should have escaped the watchful eye 
 of Mr. Heme upon the stage. I fear me 
 that eye has been sicklied o'er with the 
 pale cast of parental thought, for it can- 
 not see what anyone else can see, that the 
 cast of Shore Acres would be greatly 
 improved by engaging a leading lady. 
 The company as at present constituted 
 has none. Miss Julie Heme makes an 
 attempt at the part of Helen Berry, but 
 it is only an attempt, and not a successful 
 one. Owing to her youth and inexperi- 
 ence, or possibly to her embarrassment, 
 she has not yet learned the art of standing 
 gracefully upon the stage or of walking 
 gracefully across it. In the earlier and 
 quieter scenes of the play she was too 
 slow and too drawling for even a country 
 girl ; in the later and more highly emo- 
 tional scenes she failed to rise to the level 
 which the situations called for. In a 
 minor part Miss Heme would doubtless 
 acquit herself creditably. With four or 
 five more years' experience she may make 
 a good leading lady. In her present role 
 
SOME MODERN PLAYS I43 
 
 she has been placed in the false position 
 of attempting a part beyond her years 
 and present capacity. If we be told 
 that the awkward pose and ungraceful 
 walk are a part of the character, to this 
 I reply that this is realism run mad and 
 degenerating into detailism, or mere 
 photograph] sm. Photographism is slavish 
 imitation of nature, and as such is not 
 art. Art selects for emphasis from a 
 multiplicity of details only those which 
 are congruous with the situation in which 
 the character is placed. The situation of 
 Helen Berry requires that she inspire 
 with love a man of taste and of refined 
 feeling : — such a man could never love a 
 girl whose pose is awkward and whose 
 walk is ungraceful. If, therefore, Mr. 
 Heme has deliberately taught the young 
 lady these mannerisms I hope he will 
 unteach her as quickly as possible, for I 
 can assure him that the effect is anything 
 but artistic. 
 
 Although Mr. Heme was for two 
 years stage manager at the Baldwin 
 Theatre, and although he has often 
 visited California, neither he nor his 
 work are as well known here as they 
 
144 IMPRKSSIONS OF 
 
 should be. Those who wish to know 
 something of his life in the old stock 
 days should read his entertaining auto- 
 biography in the "Arena," Vol. VI, 
 page 401 ; those who would like to know 
 how Shore Acres came to be written 
 should read his article in the same maga- 
 zine, Vol. XV, page 61. I quote the 
 concluding paragraph of the last-named 
 article and rejoice to find it placing Mr. 
 Heme on the side of those who have at 
 heart the best interests of the theatre: 
 
 ''It is generally held," writes Mr. 
 Heme, " that the province of the drama 
 is to amuse. I claim that it has a higher 
 purpose — that its mission is to interest 
 and instruct. It should not preach 
 objectively, but it should teach subjec- 
 tively ; and so I stand for truth in the 
 drama, because it is elemental, it gets to 
 the bottom of a question. It strikes at 
 unequal standards and unjust systems. 
 It is as unyielding as it is honest. It is 
 as tender as it is flexible. It has supreme 
 faith in man. It believes that that which 
 was good in the beginning cannot be bad 
 at the end. It sets forth clearly that the 
 concern of one is the concern of all. It 
 stands for the higher development and 
 thus for the individual liberty of the 
 human race." 
 
VII. 
 
 TRILBY— THE PURSER. 
 
 {San Francisco^ May^ i8g8.) 
 
 In turning a novel into a play it is by- 
 no means important that the dramatizer 
 should follow closely the details of the 
 story. Indeed, it is seldom that he can 
 profitably do so. All that the story can 
 furnish him is a setting — a main incident 
 upon which the plot revolves and sugges- 
 tions for the principal characters. The 
 minor incidents, the order in which these 
 shall follow one another, the subordinate 
 characters, the climaxes, the dramatic 
 distribution of dialogue, the hints that 
 prepare the audience for actions to follow, 
 the dhiouemejit and the best method of 
 closing the play — all these must be 
 worked up by the dramatizer with very 
 little aid from the narrative. His task is 
 fully as difiScult as that of the author of 
 the book — perhaps more so. As epic and 
 dramatic faculty are seldom found in the 
 same mind, there has grown up gradually 
 
I46 IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 a custom of collaboration in play- writing, 
 where one author furnishes the setting, 
 the main action and characters and the 
 other author the other details mentioned 
 above. In France, where the art of play- 
 writing has been carried further than in 
 any other country, collaboration is the 
 rule and single authorship the exception. 
 To collaboration we owe in French such 
 masterpieces as Le Gendre de M. Poiriet 
 and Madame Sans Gene. In English we 
 owe to collaboration the two most success- 
 ful plays of the last decade — ThePriso7ier 
 of Zenda and Trilby. 
 
 Mr. Potter's dramatization of this 
 famous story is now so well known that 
 to point out the details of his method of 
 construction would be indeed a work of 
 supererogation : all I shall attempt to do, 
 then, is to touch upon a few points which 
 have not been brought forward promin- 
 ently in any criticism that I have seen. 
 
 Mr. Frawley has a theory that what 
 the public wants in plays just now is 
 something that centers about a young and 
 lovely woman, and this theory Mr. Potter 
 has evidently worked upon in the open- 
 ing lines of the first act of Trilby. The 
 friendship between The Three Musketeers 
 
SOME MODERN PI<AYS I47 
 
 of the Bncshi which in the book is fully as 
 important and interesting as anything 
 else, in the play is entirely subordinated 
 to incidents based upon the young-and- 
 lovely-woman-theory. This is somewhat 
 of a shock to those who come to the play 
 with the book fresh in mind; but before 
 the play is ended you feel that in this case, 
 at least, Mr. Frawley and Mr. Potter are 
 right, both dramatically and from the box- 
 oflSce point of view. The interest excited 
 in the young and lovely woman is never 
 allowed to flag ; it is consistently main- 
 tained through the four acts and ceases 
 only when the curtain falls for the last 
 time. In this respect the play is a model 
 of construction. 
 
 The climax of each act is carefully led 
 up to and is thoroughly effective, with the 
 exception of the first. This is forced and 
 miserably weak. lyittle Billee, shocked 
 at Trilby's conduct, has strenuously 
 resisted all entreaties of friends to stay in 
 Paris and see her again. He leaves for 
 Florence. He suddenly returns. But 
 there is no reason for his returning, which 
 did not exist before he left. His return 
 is therefore unexplainable and is left un- 
 explained. This is a dramatic absurdity, 
 
148 IMPRESSIONS 01^ 
 
 and one, moreover, that could easily have 
 been avoided. Some accident, some stroke 
 of fate might have been inserted to bring 
 him back unexpectedly. The act could 
 then have closed logically with a strong 
 scene between him and Trilby, in which 
 his love shall conquer his sense of duty. 
 
 The tableau which closes the last act is 
 conceived and arranged with excellent 
 taste. It would have been so easy and so 
 entirely in accordance with stage tradi- 
 tions to spoil this by bringing on again 
 the principal male characters of the play. 
 Not to have done so, not to have broken 
 in upon the sanctity of Trilby's death by 
 the introduction of any but a woman 
 friend, this is indeed a beautiful and poetic 
 touch that thrills the heart. 
 
 Trilby would be a more pathetic and 
 more human story if the hypnotic ele- 
 ment were entirely omitted. Even the 
 greatest masters of dramatic art have sel- 
 dom succeeded in making credible the 
 supersensuous. In Cymbeline, the appari- 
 tion of Sicilius, the ghosts, and Jupiter 
 upon an eagle are not credible ; the ghost 
 in Hamlet is barely credible ; the witches 
 in Macbeth are credible, but only because 
 they are half human. Where Shakes- 
 
SOME MODKRN PI. AYS 1 49 
 
 peare has all but failed, we can hardly 
 expect Mr. Potter to succeed. And he 
 has not. Even in the book the hypnotic 
 part of the story is weak and unnecessary. 
 When put upon the stage its falsity comes 
 out in glaring colors. Not even Mr. 
 Paulding's art, admirable as it is, can 
 tone it down to such shades as we may 
 see in nature. 
 
 Mr. Potter has been careful to inform 
 the public that he scorned delights and 
 lived laborious days while reading pon- 
 derous tomes on hypnotism in order that 
 he might present the phenomena thereof 
 in truly scientific form. These days and 
 nights, my Paul, were wasted. Your 
 presentation of hypnotism might be worth 
 a two-inch notice in the "Journal of the 
 Society for Psychical Research"; but, 
 scientifically, there is nothing in it, and 
 dramatically, it verges on the farcical. 
 
 No one who has noticed the salacious 
 turn given by Mr. Potter to the character 
 of the Rev. Thomas Bagot need have 
 been surprised at the outrageous tone of 
 his last play, The Conquerors (happily a 
 failure in London, by the way). There 
 is nothing in Du Maurier's book to sug- 
 gest what Mr. Potter shows us. Its 
 
150 IMPRKSSIONS OF 
 
 introduction ruins the pure and whole- 
 some tone of an otherwise pathetic scene, 
 and all that is gained is an occasional 
 cheap laugh from the lowest element in 
 the house. I have met a great many 
 Knglish clergymen : none of them have 
 ever shown the slightest resemblance to 
 the creature conjured up by Mr. Potter's 
 loathsome imagination. Mr. Charters 
 did his best to soften the representation 
 of the character, and for this he is en- 
 titled to the thanks of the audience. 
 
 Mr. Paulding's Svengali was an ad- 
 mirable piece of work. The character 
 in itself is coarse and disagreeable ; the 
 only way in which it can be lifted from 
 its low plane on to a level with the sym- 
 pathy of the audience is by emphasizing 
 the intellectual element — the sole redeem- 
 ing feature in Svengali. This, Mr. 
 lyackaye was never able to do. His ren- 
 dition invariably made too prominent 
 the baser side of the man. His death 
 scene, in particular, was a piece of de- 
 basing realism quite as bad in its way as 
 Hardy's description of the pig-killing in 
 '*Jude, the Obscure." Mr. Paulding 
 makes this horrible scene less horrible,and 
 throughout surrounds the character with 
 
SOMK MODKRN PI^AYS I5I 
 
 an atmosphere of intellectuality through 
 the medium of which we can suffer our- 
 selves to gaze with interest upon a crea- 
 tion otherwise unendurable. 
 
 Miss Gillette is certainly the best 
 Trilby I have ever seen. In tenderness, 
 in grace, in strong yet artistically re- 
 strained emotion, she was decidedly 
 superior to the best Trilby who has yet 
 appeared on this coast. 
 
 The support was about evenly divided 
 between good and indifferent. Among 
 the good we must class the delightful 
 Mme. Vinard of Miss Phosa McAllister, 
 and the Gecko of Mr. Frank Clayton, — an 
 excellent local actor of whom we have 
 seen too little. Among the indifferent 
 must come the three painters, all of 
 whom, and especially I^ittle Billee, were 
 overweighted with their parts. The stage 
 management was good and reflects credit 
 upon Mr. George I^ask. 
 
 In spite of some deficiencies, then, the 
 performance on the whole was enjoyable. 
 That a hastily collected local company 
 can so creditably represent so difficult a 
 play, is only another proof of what I 
 have long firmly believed — that San 
 Francisco is quite capable of producing 
 
152 IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 in good shape, any play in the English 
 language, and that the sooner we assert 
 our independence and rally to the support 
 of a good stock company, the better it 
 will be for actors, audience and managers. 
 
 During the long years which Mr. Hart- 
 man was compelled to waste in stupid 
 burlesque at the Tivoli, many who 
 watched him must have felt that he had 
 capacity to become something more than 
 a mere caricaturist ; that, given the 
 opportunity, he would prove himself an 
 actor. Kven in those dreary years, on 
 the rare occasions when opportunity was 
 offered him, he justified this belief by the 
 manner in which he played such roles as 
 that of Rip Van Winkle, of the Happy 
 Father in Girofle-Girofla, and of Gaspard 
 in Les Cloches de Corneville. This last- 
 mentioned part he was even able to invest 
 with a tragic dignity which delighted 
 but did not surprise those who had 
 followed his career. 
 
 Mr. Hartman has now to be congratu- 
 lated upon having taken the first step 
 upon a path which shall lead him to a 
 temple of more permanent fame than he 
 could ever have hoped to reach as a 
 
some; modkrn pi, ays 153 
 
 player of burlesque. The Purser is not 
 a remarkable play in any way, but it 
 does contain some portrayal of human 
 nature and gives Mr. Hartman a mild 
 chance to display his excellent talent for 
 representing the humorous side of things. 
 Let us hope that his next play will be not 
 less humorous, and will contain at 
 least a trace of that intellectual interest 
 which is the only guarantee of perman- 
 ent success and an abiding reputation. 
 
 The stage effects in 7^^ A^^'^^r are thor- 
 oughly artistic, and there is some origin- 
 ality in the one really humorous scene of 
 the play, that in which Mrs. Stanley is as 
 fully convinced that Miss Somers is mad, 
 as is Miss Somers that Mrs. Stanley is 
 mad. How clever, too, was the acting 
 of Miss Merville in this scene! The 
 humorous portrayal of a woman's irra- 
 tional fright could no further go. 
 
VIII. 
 NIOBE— IN OLD JAPAN. 
 
 {San Francisco, May^ i8g8.) 
 
 No less an authority than Moliere has 
 assured us, that he who undertakes to 
 make intelligent people laugh, under- 
 takes a difficult task. A single stroke of 
 humor, a single flash of wit, may be 
 compassed at times even by ordinary 
 people, but to be humorous or witty 
 through a long narrative or play — and 
 this is what Moliere is referring to— this 
 is indeed a task to be approached with 
 fear and with trembling. 
 
 Now the process of being humorous, 
 like every other mental process, is cap- 
 able of being analyzed partially, if not 
 with entire satisfaction. To go back to first 
 principles, to the man of primitive times 
 (represented by the savage of to-day) noth- 
 ing is humorous. Everything about him is 
 entirely so inexplicable by his weak facul- 
 ties, that one phenomenon is to him 
 hardly more inexplicable than an- 
 
SOMK MODKRN PI,AYS 1$$ 
 
 Other. Things that impress the civilized 
 man as strange and incongruous, to the 
 savage are neither strange nor incongru- 
 ous, except so far as everything is so. 
 As time — say a few tens of thousands of 
 years — rolls rapidly on, man acquires, by 
 bitter experience, the conceptions of cause 
 and eflfect, of similarity, and dissimilarity, 
 of congruity and incongruity. These 
 conceptions are forced upon him by the 
 study of nature and gradually they 
 become hereditary in the race ; for every 
 effect the mind of man now instinctively 
 demands an adequate cause ; it expects 
 that where within its experience certain 
 effects have invariably followed certain 
 causes, these effects will never appear 
 without the precedent, adequate causes. 
 On those occasions where the effect 
 appears as the result of some cause not 
 ordinarily associated with it, or when it 
 appears apparently without cause — then, 
 the mind, expecting one thing and 
 getting another, receives a jar or shake 
 of surprise ; the physiological expres- 
 sion of this mental state is the nervo- 
 muscular phenomenon known as laughter. 
 To state it paradoxically, the ultimate 
 aim and object, then, of a man who 
 
156 IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 sets out to write a humorous play, 
 is to produce, through the mental, this 
 physiological phenomenon. This physio- 
 logical phenomenon is pleasurable, or 
 people would not pay 50 cents or $1 to ex- 
 perience it ; on this psychologico-hedon- 
 istic-physiological phenomenon, then, 
 rest the very existence and possibility of 
 the Alcazar Theatre and of the excellent 
 little company connected therewith. If 
 this statement come with a shock of sur- 
 prise to the energetic manager, I can say 
 only that this very fact is another proof 
 of the theory of the humorous here 
 expounded. 
 
 If one ask the subtler question, why 
 does the mental state above described 
 manifest itself in the contraction of cer- 
 tain face and chest muscles, and not of 
 others ? to this I would say that although 
 it is incomprehensible to us how nervous 
 energy should generate feeling or vice 
 versa, yet it is indubitable that there is a 
 bond of connection between them. Emo- 
 tion translates itself into nervous energy 
 and nervous energy discharges itself 
 (among other channels) through the 
 muscles ; why, in this particular case 
 through particular muscles were too long 
 
SOME MODERN PI^AYS. I57 
 
 here to be expounded. Those curious in 
 such matters may find it clearly set forth 
 in Mr. Herbert Spencer's essay on *'The 
 Physiology of Laughter." 
 
 MaiSy reve?ions. Granting the incon- 
 gruous as the largest (though not the 
 sole) element in the humorous, it is 
 evident that the writer who deliberately 
 and with malice prepense sets out to be 
 funny as before him two roads down 
 which he may travel in his search 
 for a subject. He may elbow his way 
 along the broad avenue of the Com- 
 monplace which he will find crowded 
 with men and women whose everyday 
 actions seem to afford little material for 
 humorous or poetic treatment ; yet, if he 
 be a real artist, his eye will often discern 
 among these trivialities some little thing 
 which, if treated seriously, may produce 
 an effect at once humorous and moral. 
 Such a method of treatment is difficult 
 and is possible, as said before, only to a 
 real artist. Such an artist is Boileau 
 when writing Le Lutrin ; such is Pope 
 in i\iQ^ Rape of the Lock,' such is Gilbert 
 in Patieyice. 
 
 If our searcher for humorous subject 
 
 refer to climb up the steep incline of the 
 
iSi IMPRESSIONS O^ 
 
 Elevated, lie will find tlie path lined witii 
 many noble statues embodying some 
 serious and affecting action. Any one of 
 tbese statues he may trick out in the rags 
 of the trivial and the ordinary : the effect 
 is incongruous and sometimes (though by 
 no means always) humorous. But the 
 nobility of the statue is spoiled. Such a 
 method of treatment is common and easy : 
 by such a method have parodists ruined 
 I<ongfellow's ''Excelsior": by such a 
 method have the Messrs. Paulton, in their 
 Niobe, dragged down the beautiful story 
 of Pygmalion and Galatea. 
 
 Yet it cannot be denied, as granted 
 above, that the effect is often humorous 
 on account of the sharp contrast between 
 the methods of thought of artistic Greece 
 as embodied in Niobe and of commercial 
 New York as embodied in Peter Amos 
 Dunn, President of the Universe Insur- 
 ance Company. Admirably, too, was this 
 contrast carried out by Miss Foster and 
 by Mr. Stockwell ; the former thoroughly 
 pagan, dignified and statuesque; the latter 
 thoroughly modern, ill at ease and fussy. 
 
 Outside of the two principal characters, 
 Niobe is about as uninteresting a play as 
 can well be imagined ; it contains neither 
 
BoUn MODERN PtAYg. i59 
 
 plot, wit, humor nor characterization. It 
 is to be supposed that the society depicted 
 in the play is not that of ladies and gentle- 
 men, but of what Walter Bagehot would 
 call "tenth-rate people striving to be 
 ninth-rate people " ; only on this suppo- 
 sition can we justify Mr. Huntington's 
 talking of "photos" when he means 
 " photographs " and his persistent fond- 
 ness for making plural nouns agree with 
 singular verbs. On the same supposition 
 we must explain MissKingsley's entirely 
 original pronunciation of the word 
 "phonograph." 
 
 Considering the length of the play and 
 the necessarily short time allowed for 
 rehearsals, the production reflects credit 
 upon that important and too little appre- 
 ciated official, the stage manager (Mr. 
 Charles Bryant). 
 
 As one looks at the pantomime one 
 feels, How clever, yet how little worth 
 doing ! For the pantomime is interesting 
 only as a tour-deforce ; as an exhibition 
 of what human beings can accomplish in 
 histrionics when they voluntarily deprive 
 themselves of the chief means of accom- 
 plishing it — the voice. It is as if a man 
 
166 iuPP.nQBioM Off* 
 
 should tie his feet together and yet 
 succeed in getting over a hundred yards 
 in twenty-five seconds. That would be a 
 remarkable thing to do, yet decidedly not 
 worth doing, for the free and graceful 
 motion of the unimpeded runner would 
 be a far more interesting exhibition of 
 physical activities at their highest. 
 
 The pantomime, like music, suffers 
 from vagueness and lack of definition. 
 Ivike music, it suggests different things to 
 different minds : it fails in unity of im- 
 pression. As you look at In Old Japan 
 you cannot possibly tell what the story is 
 about unless you know the scenario. It 
 might be about w^hat Mr. Vance Thomp- 
 son tells you ; it might be about half a 
 dozen other things ; and even when you 
 know the story many of the actions on 
 the stage leave you with a puzzled feeling 
 as to what they mean. Both Mile. Pilar 
 Morin and Mile. Severine are good 
 actresses and in the climax of the second 
 act show a real tragic power. This 
 power they are wasting upon a kind of 
 performance that might appeal to the 
 human race in its infancy, but which can 
 hardly expect to hold the attention of 
 men and women to-day. 
 
SOMR MODERN PI.AYS. l6l 
 
 The best thing about the performance 
 was the accompanying music of M. Aime 
 Lachaume — admirably descriptive so far 
 as music can be. 
 
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