II
The two lightest plays—Beau Austin and Macaire—are experiments, the one in manner, the other in bizarre or, as it is styled by the authors, “melodramatic farce.” The manner of Beau Austin is the manner of the costume play. It is highly sophisticated, and its keynote is powder and patches. The beau is at his toilet, and one of the women he has betrayed is in the town, still sick with despair at her soiled virtue. Her true love hears from the lady’s lips the story of her betrayal, and, on being forbidden to challenge the beau, contents himself with demanding a marriage ceremony. His flatteries are effective, the beau consents, and the formal proposal is made, only to be rejected by the lady, whose hauteur is aroused. So matters stand when the lady’s brother, learning by chance of the betrayal, insults the beau before an important personage. As climax, the beau proposes publicly, and is as publicly accepted. It will be seen that the play could not claim, excepting in respect of verbal artifice, to be more than a pretty jig-saw. It could have no effect of reality: the effect desired by the authors was one purely of the stage. Verbally it is exquisitely dexterous. That is its undoing. The attempt is made to convey in words something more than the action of the piece would successfully carry: words are to create an atmosphere of the eighteenth-century fashionable life, to indicate the possibility that calm picturesque heartless exteriors shielded even then hearts that beat warmly beneath lace and brocade. The play was a pretence that nothing was something, a pretty moving picture under the perception of which, beating out in pianissimo airs from appropriate music, and the faint throb of an unseen minuet, was the delicate heart of the period. It was an æsthetic view of the eighteenth century, the century of Fielding and of Smollett, tinkered about to make a perpetual bal masque, or, shall we say, a picture by Watteau or Fragonard. In point of fact the play is too slight to bear its weight of intention: it remains verbal. As drama it is more negligible than “Monsieur Beaucaire” or “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” because its literary pretensions are so much more elaborate. It has sometimes fine shades of close verbal fence that are Meredithian: it is better to read than it could be to see. But it is an attempt, one might say an almost basely cunning attempt, to capture the theatre as a place where costumes grace a barren play. It failed because its authors were two conscientious literary men, bent upon a superficial perfection undreamed of by practical dramatists. Just as Cowper, in translating Homer, made an epic for a tea-party, so Henley and Stevenson made about the rational and cynical eighteenth century a sophisticated play for a boudoir. They concentrated upon the superficial, and only said, but did not show, that the men and women of the eighteenth century had hearts as true and passionate as those of our day. The play lacked realism, and, more disastrously, it lacked reality.
On the other hand, Macaire has a thin air of jocularity which almost carries it through. It has a sententious cleric, a drunken notary, a repetitious father for the bride, a courteous host, a little mystery of the bridegroom’s nurseling days, the facetious Macaire and his companion. It has all these things, and it has an idea, strong enough for a single act, stretched to its thinnest over several acts which demand cuts more severe than the authors allow.
Macaire escaping from justice, threatened each moment, in the face of the audience, with instant arrest, carries himself with unfailing sang-froid through all his difficulties but the last. Finding a chance of sport, and possibly of profit, he impersonates an erring father. The real father appears. Macaire still, after the manner of Mr. Jingle, is imperturbable. Competition follows, until the desire for the genuine father’s money becomes too strong for Macaire. Then only does he show the blackness of his heart, which does not shrink, in such desperate situations, from murder. So Macaire, still talking, still watchful and unscrupulous, is brought to bay. Fiercely turning, in a picturesque situation, upon the stairs, he is shot by a gendarme on the stage. That is a skeleton of the play; but the play is again a literary play, so that sensationalism will not redeem it. By repetitions of catch-phrases and by trivial incidents which (e.g. the exchanging of the wine-bottles) are not unknown to the humbler kinds of drama, the story is continued until its idle joking can no longer be suddenly stirred into flaming melodrama by the noise and zest of bloody crime. It has many shrewd bids for theatrical effectiveness; but it faints for want of a fabric upon which its devices might flourish and triumphantly justify themselves.