The Connecticut Wits, and Other Essays

by Henry A. Beers

THACKERAY’S CENTENARY

AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it may represent, in some degree, the experience of others.

What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism—or rather by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said—what has been said—for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast.

The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection.

I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat overlapped at the edge—I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author’s masterpiece and we ought to like it best—only we don’t. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the genre. I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man—like Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them.

I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth.

The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold,

Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old.

But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power.

In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature—a very gross caricature—a piece of bouffe. But it lacks the true likeness which is the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the eccentric, the grotesque—sometimes the monstrous; his books, and especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as incredible as Jonson’s dramatis personae. In other words, he was a caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous exaggeration of character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous imitation for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad facetiae—“Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the prize poem of the year—a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad, “The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to

A violet shrinking meanly

Where blow the March winds[^[3]] keenly—

A timid fawn on wildwood lawn

Where oak-boughs rustle greenly.

I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose house in Hartford I once inhabited (et nos in Arcadia). The passage is in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings:—

“ ‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing,

O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string,

A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’

Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery), which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how

First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black,

Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back.

Chorus of Children:

Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back.

Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens’s clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the greatest of English realists. “I have no head above my eyes,” he said. “I describe what I see.” It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him, whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in special, Trollope writes, “The ear is never wounded by a tone that is false.” It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the roman naturaliste of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to forms of realism so much more drastic that Thackeray’s realism seems, by comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious, himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him and he submitted to them willingly. “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried,” he wrote, “no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict, to his utmost power, a Man.” Thackeray’s latest biographer, Mr. Whibley, notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a curtain over Etty’s nudities. Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas “profoundly immoral and absurd”; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blasphemer of Shakespeare, speaks of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool . . . but he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures; Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn—“the travesty of a man”; and even Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece, is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists.

Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that photographic fiction—the “mirror up to nature” fiction—exists or can exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the history of one day: everything—literally everything—that you have done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select, reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic or realistic fiction—and I don’t say it is—then it is an impossible ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why? Because, however well documented, his facts are selected to make a particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled grand monarque: and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man—a good illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat.

Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant . . . than any poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’: . . . Byron himself always drank gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!”

And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White Squall” closes:

And when, its force expended,

The harmless storm was ended,

And as the sunrise splendid

Came blushing o’er the sea;

I thought, as day was breaking,

My little girls were waking

And smiling and making

A prayer at home for me.

And such is the quality of all his best things in verse—“The Mahogany Tree,” “The Ballad of Bouillebaisse,” “The End of the Play”; a mixture of humor and pensiveness, homely fact and sincere feeling.

Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its worst in “The Newcomes,” from which a whole volume of essays might be gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert, and Maupassant. I am free to confess, that, while I still enjoy many of the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender, episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the old-fashioned, biographical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and says that “when Thackeray is reproached with ‘bad art’ for intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a different technique. And each man’s technique is his own.” The question, he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray’s subjectivity destroys illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not, Thackeray’s method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot, Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practise it; and he learned it from his master, Fielding.

Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a charge from which Shirley Brooks defended him in the well-known verses contributed to “Punch” after the great novelist’s death. Strange that such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as manifest in his books as in his life: “a big, fierce, weeping man,” as Carlyle grotesquely describes him: a writer in whom we find to-day even an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which sometimes irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He saw

How very weak the very wise,

How very small the very great are.

Moreover, as with many other humorists, with Thomas Hood and Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln (who is one of the foremost American humorists), a deep melancholy underlay his fun. Vanitas vanitatum is the last word of his philosophy. Evil seemed to him stronger than good and death better than life. But he was never bitter: his pen was driven by love, not hate. Swift was the true cynic, the true misanthrope; and Thackeray’s dislike of him has led him into some injustice in his chapter on Swift in “The English Humorists.” And therefore I have never been able to enjoy “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” which has the almost unanimous praises of the critics. The hard, artificial irony of the book—maintained, of course, with superb consistency—seems to me uncharacteristic of its author. It repels and wearies me, as does its model, “Jonathan Wild.” Swift’s irony I enjoy because it is the natural expression of his character. With Thackeray it is a mask.

Lastly I come to a point often urged against Thackeray. The favorite target of his satire was the snob. His lash was always being laid across flunkeyism, tuft hunting, the “mean admiration of mean things,” such as wealth, rank, fashion, title, birth. Now, it is said, his constant obsession with this subject, his acute consciousness of social distinctions, prove that he is himself one of the class that he is ridiculing. “Letters four do form his name,” to use a phrase of Dr. Holmes, who is accused of the same weakness, and, I think, with more reason. Well, Thackeray owned that he was a snob, and said that we are all of us snobs in a greater or less degree. Snobbery is the fat weed of a complex civilization, where grades are unfixed, where some families are going down and others rising in the world, with the consequent jealousies, heartburnings, and social struggles. In India, I take it, where a rigid caste system prevails, there are no snobs. A Brahmin may refuse to eat with a lower caste man, whose touch is contamination, but he does not despise him as the gentleman despises the cad, as the man who eats with a fork despises the man who eats with a knife, or as the educated Englishman despises the Cockney who drops his h’s, or the Boston Brahmin the Yankee provincial who says haöw, the woman who callates, and the gent who wears pants. In feudal ages the lord might treat the serf like a beast of the field. The modern swell does not oppress his social inferior: he only calls him a bounder. In primitive states of society differences in riches, station, power are accepted quite simply: they do not form ground for envy or contempt. I used to be puzzled by the conventional epithet applied by Homer to Eumaeus—“the godlike swineherd”—which is much as though one should say, nowadays, the godlike garbage collector. But when Pope writes

Honor and fame from no condition rise

he writes a lying platitude. In the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth, honor and fame do rise from condition. Now in the presence of the supreme tragic emotions, of death, of suffering, all men are equal. But this social inequality is the region of the comedy of manners, and that is the region in which Thackeray’s comedy moves—the comédie mondaine, if not the full comédie humaine. It is a world of convention, and he is at home in it, in the world and a citizen of the world. Of course it is not primitively human. Manners are a convention: but so are morals, laws, society, the state, the church. I suppose it is because Thackeray dwelt contentedly in these conventions and rather liked them although he laughed at them, that Shaw calls him an enslaved mind. At any rate, this is what Mr. Howells means when he writes: “When he made a mock of snobbishness, I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs: we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life. . . . This is the toxic property of all Thackeray’s writing. . . . He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different.” In other words, Thackeray was not a socialist, as Mr. Shaw is, and Mr. Howells, and as we are all coming measurably to be. Meanwhile, however, equality is a dream.

All his biographers are agreed that Thackeray was honestly fond of mundane advantages. He liked the conversation of clever, well-mannered gentlemen, and the society of agreeable, handsome, well-dressed women. He liked to go to fine houses: liked his club, and was gratified when asked to dine with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Devonshire. Speaking of the South and of slavery, he confessed that he found it impossible to think ill of people who gave you such good claret.

This explains his love of Horace. Venables reports that he would not study his Latin at school. But he certainly brought away with him from the Charterhouse, or from Trinity, a knowledge of Horace. You recall what delightful, punning use he makes of the lyric Roman at every turn. It is solvuntur rupes when Colonel Newcome’s Indian fortune melts away; and Rosa sera moratur when little Rose is slow to go off in the matrimonial market. Now Horace was eminently a man of the world, a man about town, a club man, a gentle satirist, with a cheerful, mundane philosophy of life, just touched with sadness and regret. He was the poet of an Augustan age, like that English Augustan age which was Thackeray’s favorite; social, gregarious, urban.

I never saw Thackeray. I was a boy of eight when he made his second visit to America, in the winter of 1855–56. But Arthur Hollister, who graduated at Yale in 1858, told me that he once saw Thackeray walking up Chapel Street, a colossal figure, six feet four inches in height, peering through his big glasses with that expression which is familiar to you in his portraits and in his charming caricatures of his own face. This seemed to bring him rather near. But I think the nearest that I ever felt to his bodily presence was once when Mr. Evarts showed me a copy of Horace, with inserted engravings, which Thackeray had given to Sam Ward and Ward had given to Evarts. It was a copy which Thackeray had used and which had his autograph on the flyleaf.

And this mention of his Latin scholarship induces me to close with an anecdote that I find in Melville’s “Life.” He says himself that it is almost too good to be true, but it illustrates so delightfully certain academic attitudes, that I must give it, authentic or not. The novelist was to lecture at Oxford and had to obtain the license of the Vice-Chancellor. He called on him for the necessary permission and this was the dialogue that ensued:

V. C. Pray, sir, what can I do for you?

T. My name is Thackeray.

V. C. So I see by this card.

T. I seek permission to lecture within your precincts.

V. C. Ah! You are a lecturer: what subjects do you undertake, religious or political?

T. Neither. I am a literary man.

V. C. Have you written anything?

T. Yes, I am the author of “Vanity Fair.”

V. C. I presume, a dissenter—has that anything to do with Jno. Bunyan’s book?

T. Not exactly: I have also written “Pendennis.”

V. C. Never heard of these works, but no doubt they are proper books.

T. I have also contributed to “Punch.”

V. C. “Punch.” I have heard of that. Is it not a ribald publication?

---

[3]	Unquestionably Lady Jane pronounced it wīnds.

RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA[^[4]]

THE English drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years. Mr. Gosse says that in 1700 the English had the most vivacious school of comedy in Europe. And, if their serious drama was greatly inferior, still the best tragedies of Dryden and Otway—and perhaps of Lee, Southerne, and Rowe—made not only a sounding success on the boards, but a fair bid for literary honors. Ten years later the drama was moribund, and in 1747 its epitaph was spoken by Garrick in the sonorous prologue written by Dr. Johnson for the opening of Drury Lane:

Then, crushed by rules and weakened as refined,

For years the power of Tragedy declined:

From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,

Till declamation roared whilst passion slept.

Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread;

Philosophy remained though nature fled.

But, forced at length her ancient reign to quit,

She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit:

Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,

And pantomime and song confirmed her sway—

That is, as has been complained a hundred times before and since, the opera and the spectacular show drove the legitimate drama from the stage.

The theatre, indeed, is not dead: it has continued to live and to flourish, and is furnishing entertainment to the public to-day, as it did two hundred—nay, two thousand—years ago. The theatre, as an institution, has a life of its own, whose history is recorded in innumerable volumes. Playhouses have multiplied in London, in the provinces, in all English-speaking lands. The callings of the actor and the playwright have given occupation to many, and rich rewards to not a few. Scholars, critics, and literary men are apt to look at the drama as if it were simply a department of literature. In reading a play, we should remember that we are taking the author at a disadvantage. It is not meant to be read, but to be acted. It is not mere literature: it is both more and less than literature. The art of the theatre is a composite art, requiring the help of the scene-painter, the costumer, the manager, the stage-carpenter, sometimes of the musician and dancer, nowadays of the electrician; and always and above all demanding the interpretation of the actor. It is not addressed to the understanding exclusively, but likewise to the eye and the ear. It is a show, as well as a piece of writing. The drama can subsist without any dialogue at all, as in the pantomime; or with the dialogue reduced to its lowest terms, as in the Italian commedie a soggetto, where the actors improvised the lines. “The skeleton of every play is a pantomime,” says Professor Brander Matthews, who reminds us that not only buffoonery and acrobatic performances may be carried on silently by stock characters like Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Punchinello; but a story of a more pretentious kind may be enacted entirely by gesture and dumb show, as in the French pantomime play “L’Enfant Prodigue.” A good dramatist includes a good playwright, one who can invent striking situations, telling climaxes, tableaux, ensemble scenes, spectacular and histrionic effects, coups de théâtre. These things may seem to the literary student the merely mechanical or technical parts of the art. Yet, without them, a play will be amateurish, and no really successful dramatist has ever been lacking in this kind of skill.

Still, although stage presentation, the mise en scène, is the touchstone of a play as play, it is of course quite possible to read a play with pleasure. It is even better to read it than to see it badly acted, just as one would rather have no pictures in a novel than such pictures as disturb one’s ideas of the characters. A musical adept can take pleasure in reading the score of an opera, though he would rather hear it performed. This is not to say that a play depends for its effect upon actual performance in anywhere near the same degree as a musical composition; for written speech is a far more definite language than musical notation. I use the latter only as an imperfect illustration.

This professional quality has been much insisted on by practical playwrights, who are properly contemptuous of closet drama. But just what is a closet drama? Let it be defined provisionally as a piece meant to be read and not acted. Yet a play’s chances for representation depend partly on the condition of the theatre and the demands of the public. Mr. Yeats, for example, thinks that a play of any poetic or spiritual depth has no chance to-day in a big London theatre, with an audience living on the surface of life; and he advises that such plays be tried in small suburban or country playhouses before audiences of scholars and simple, unspoiled folk. To the English public, with its desire for strong action and variety, Racine’s tragedies are nothing but closet dramas; and yet they are played constantly and with applause in the French theatre. In the eighteenth century, when the English stage still maintained a literary tradition,—though it had lost all literary vitality,—the rankest sort of closet dramas were frequently put on and listened to respectfully. No manager now would venture to mount such a thing as “Cato” or “Sophonisba” or “The Castle Spectre.” The modern public will scarcely endure sheer poetry, or long descriptive and reflective tirades even in Shakespeare. Such passages have to be cut in the acting versions. The Elizabethan craving for drama was such that everything was tried, though some things, when brought to the test of action, proved failures. Ben Jonson’s heavy tragedies, “Catiline” and “Sejanus,” failed on the stage; and Daniel’s “Cleopatra” never got so far as the stage, a rare example of an Elizabethan closet drama. Very likely, modern literary plays like “Philip Van Artevelde” and Tennyson’s “Queen Mary” might have succeeded in the seventeenth century. For the audiences of those days were omnivorous. They hungered for sensation, but they enjoyed as well fine poetry, noble declamation, philosophy, sweet singing, and the clown with his funny business, all in close neighborhood. They cared more for quantity of life than for delicate art. Their art, indeed, was in some ways quite artless, and the drama had not yet purged itself of lyric, epic, and didactic elements, nor attained a purely dramatic type. Since then, the French, whose ideal is not so much fulness of life as perfection of form, have taught English playwrights many lessons. Brunetière, speaking of the gradual evolution and differentiation of literary kinds (genres), says that Shakespeare’s theatre, as theatre, exhibits the art of drama in its infancy.

Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste. “Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit. Coleridge’s “Remorse,” a closet drama if there ever was one, and a very rubbishy affair at that, was put on by Sheridan, though with many misgivings, and lasted twenty nights, a good run for those days. No audience now would stand it an hour. And yet we have seen Sir Henry Irving forcing Tennyson’s dramatic poems into a temporary succès d’estime. “Samson Agonistes” is a closet play, without question; but is “The Cenci”? Shelley wanted it played, and had selected Miss O’Niel for the rôle of Beatrice. But it never got itself played till 1889, when it was given before the Shelley Society at South Kensington. The picked audience applauded it, just as an academic audience will applaud a rehearsal of the “Antigone” in the original Greek; but the dramatic critics sent down by the London newspapers to report the performance were unconvinced.

Let it be granted, then, that the question in the case of any given play is a question of more or less. Still, the difference between our modern literary drama, as a whole, and the Elizabethan drama,—which was also literary,—as a whole, I take to be this: that in our time literature has lost touch with the stage. In the seventeenth century, the poets wrote for the theatre. They knew that their plays would be played. In the nineteenth century, English poets who adopted the dramatic framework did not write for the theatre. They did not expect their pieces to be played, and they addressed themselves consciously to the reader. When one of them had the luck to get upon the boards, it was an exception, and the manager generally lost money by it. Thus, in the late thirties and early forties, in one of those efforts to “elevate the stage,” which recur with comic persistence in our dramatic annals, Macready rallied the literati to his aid and presented, among other things, Taylor’s “Philip Van Artevelde,” Talfourd’s “Ion,” Bulwer’s “Richelieu” and “The Lady of Lyons,” and Browning’s “Stafford” and “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” The only titles on this list that secured a permanent foothold on the repertoire of the playhouses were Bulwer’s two pieces, which were precisely the most flimsy of the whole lot, from the literary point of view. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” has been tried again. As I saw it a number of years ago, with Lawrence Barrett cast for Lord Tresham and Marie Wainwright as Mildred, it seemed to me—in spite of its somewhat absurd motivirung—decidedly impressive as an acting play. On the other hand, “In a Balcony,” though very intelligently and sympathetically presented by Mrs. Lemoyne and Otis Skinner, was too subtle for a popular audience, and was manifestly unfitted for the stage.

The closet drama is a quite legitimate product of literary art. The playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. Indeed, as the closet dramatist is not bound to consider the practical exigencies of the theatre, to consult the prejudices of the manager or the spectators, fill the pockets of the company, or provide a rôle for a star performer, he has, in many ways, a freer hand than the professional playwright. He need not sacrifice truth of character and probability of plot to the need of highly accentuated situations. He does not have to consider whether a speech is too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply thoughtful for recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain points, let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet dramatist is other than the playwright’s, so his methods may be independent.

In the rather bitter preface to the printed version of “Saints and Sinners” (1891), Mr. Henry Arthur Jones complains of “the English practice of writing plays to order for a star performer,” together with other “binding and perplexing . . . conventions and limitations of playwriting,” as “quite sufficient to account for the literary degradation of the modern drama.” The English closet drama of the nineteenth century is an important body of literature, of higher intellectual value than all the stage plays produced in England during the same period. It is not necessary to enumerate its triumphs: I will merely remind the reader, in passing, that work like Byron’s “Manfred,” Landor’s “Gebir,” George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy,” Beddoes’s “Death’s Jest-Book,” Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” Tennyson’s “Becket,” Browning’s “Pippa Passes” and Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,” is justified in its assumption of the dramatic form, though its appeal is only to the closet reader. I do not forget that one or two of these have been tried upon the stage, but they do not belong there, and, as theatre pieces, were flat failures.

It is hard to say exactly what qualities ensure stage success. As reading plays, Lillo’s “George Barnwell” is intolerably stilted, Knowles’s “Virginius” insipid, “The Lady of Lyons” tawdry; yet all of them took notoriously, and the last two—as any one can testify who has seen them performed—retain a certain effectiveness even now. Perhaps the secret lies in simplicity and directness of construction, unrelaxing tension, quick movement, and an instinctive seizure of the essentially dramatic crises in the action. In a word, the thing has “go”; lacking which, no cleverness of dialogue, no epigrammatic sharpness of wit or delicate play of humor can save a comedy; and no beauty of style, no depth or reach of thought, a tragedy. Hence it is pertinent to remark how many popular playwrights have been actors or in close practical relations with the theatre. In the seventeenth century this was a matter of course. Shakespeare was an actor, and Molière and Jonson and Marlowe and Greene and Otway, and countless others. Cibber was an actor and stage-manager. Sheridan and both Colmans were managers. Garrick and Foote wrote plays as well as acted them. Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, Pinero and Stephen Phillips have all been actors.

Conceded that this professional point of view has been rightly emphasized, yet before the acted drama can rank as literature, or even hope to hold possession of the stage itself for more than a season, it must stand a further test. It must read well, too. If it is no more than an after-dinner amusement, without intellectual meaning or vital relation to life: if it has neither strength nor truth nor beauty as a criticism of life, or an imaginative representation of life, what interest can it have for serious people? Let us stay at home and read our Thackeray. Eugène Scribe was perhaps the cunningest master of stagecraft who ever wrote. Schlegel ranked him above Molière. He left the largest fortune ever accumulated by a French man of letters. His plays were more popular in all the theatres of Europe than anything since Kotzebue’s melodramas; and all European purveyors for the stage strove to imitate the adroitness and ingenuity with which his plots were put together. But if one to-day tries to read any one of his three hundred and fifty pieces—say, “Adrienne Lecouvreur” or “La Bataille des Dames”—one will find little in them beyond the mechanical perfection of the construction, and will feel how powerless mere technical cleverness is to keep alive false and superficial conceptions.

When it is asserted, then, that the British drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years, what is really meant is that its literary vitality went out of it some two centuries ago, and has not yet come back. It is hard to say what causes the breath of life suddenly to enter some particular literary form, inspire it fully for a few years, and then desert it for another; leaving it all flaccid and inanimate. Literary forms have their periods. No one now sits down to compose an epic poem or a minstrel ballad or a five-act blank verse tragedy without an uneasy sense of anachronism. The dramatic form had run along in England for generations, from the mediaeval miracles down to the rude chronicle histories, Senecan tragedies, and clownish interludes of the sixteenth century. Suddenly, in the last years of that century, the spark of genius touched and kindled it into the great drama of Elizabeth. About the middle of the eighteenth century life abandoned it again, and took possession of the novel. Fielding is the point of contact between the dying drama and new-born fiction. The whole process of the change may be followed in him. “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” still rank as masterpieces, but who reads “The Modern Husband,” or “Miss Lucy in Town,” or “Love in Several Masques,” or any other of Fielding’s plays? How many even know that he wrote any plays? Mr. Shaw attributes Fielding’s change of base to the government censorship. He writes:

In 1737 Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakspere, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, devoted his genius to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary corruption. . . . Walpole . . . promptly gagged the stage by a censorship which is in full force at the present moment [1898]. Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then, the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace.

But Mr. Shaw’s explanation fails to explain, and his estimate of Fielding’s talent for drama is too high. With the exception of “Tom Thumb,” his plays are very dull, and it is doubtful whether, given the freest hand, he would ever have become a great dramatist. It was not Walpole but the Zeitgeist that was responsible for his failure in one literary form and his triumph in another. The clock had run down, and though Goldsmith and Sheridan wound it up once more towards the end of the century, it only went for an hour or so. It is usual to refer to their comedy group as the last flare of the literary drama in England before its final extinction.

In the appendix to Clement Scott’s “The Drama of Yesterday and To-day” there is given, by way of supplement to Genest, a list of the new plays put on at London theatres between 1830 and 1900. They number about twenty-four hundred; and—until we reach the last decade of the century—it would be hard to pick out a dozen of them which have become a part of English literature: which any one would think of reading for pleasure or profit, as one reads, say, the plays of Marlowe or Fletcher or Congreve. Of course, many of the pieces on the list are of non-literary kinds—burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and the like. Then there is a large body of translations and adaptations from the foreign drama, more especially from the French of Scribe, Sardou, Dumas, père et fils, d’Hennery, Labiche, Goudinet, Meilhac and Halévy, Ohnet, and many others. Next to the French theatre, the most abundant feeder of our modern stage has been contemporary fiction. Nowadays, every successful novel is immediately dramatized. This has been the case, more or less, for three-quarters of a century. The Waverley Novels were dramatized in their time, and Dickens’s stories in theirs, and there are a plenty of dramatized novels on Scott’s catalogue. But the practice has greatly increased of recent years. Now, for some reason, a dramatized novel seldom means a good play; that is to say, permanently good, though it may act fairly well for a season. One does not care to read the stage version of “Vanity Fair,” known as “Becky Sharp,” any more than one would care to read “The School for Scandal” diluted into a novel. The dramatist conceives and moulds his theme otherwise than the novelist. “Playwriting,” says Walter Scott, “is the art of forming situations.” To be sure, Shakespeare took plots from Italian “novels,” so called; that is, short romantic tales like Boccaccio’s or Bandello’s. But he took only the bare outline, and altered freely. The modern novel is a far more elaborate thing. In it, not only incident and character, but a great part of the dialogue is already done to hand.

Glancing over Clement Scott’s list, old playgoers will find their memories somewhat pathetically stirred by forgotten fashions and schools. There are Planché’s extravaganzas, and later Dion Boucicault’s versatilities—“classical” comedies like “London Assurance,” sentimental Irish melodramas—“The Shaughraun,” “The Colleen Bawn”—and popular favorites, such as “Rip Van Winkle”; the equally versatile Tom Taylor, with his “Our American Cousin,” “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” etc.; Burnand’s multifarious facetiae; the cockney vulgarities of that very prolific Mr. H. J. Byron; and, in the late sixties, Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer” comedies—“Ours,” “Caste,” “Society,” “School.” Three thousand representations of these fashionable comedies were given inside of twenty years. How gay, how brilliant, even, the dialogue seemed to us in those good old days! But take up the text of one of Tom Robertson’s plays now and try to read it. What has become of the sparkle? Does any one recall the famous “Ours” galop that we used to dance to consule Planco? Eheu fugaces!

The playwriters whom I have named, and others whom I might have named, their contemporaries, were the Clyde Fitches, Augustus Thomases, and George Ades of their generation. They provided a fair article of entertainment for the public of their time, but they added nothing to literature. The poverty of the English stage, during these late centuries, in work of real substance and value, is the more striking because there has been no dearth of genius in other departments. There have been great English poets, novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, historians. Moreover, the literary drama has flourished in other countries. France has never lacked accomplished artists in this kind: from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, from Hugo to Rostand, talent always, and genius not unfrequently, have been at the service of the French theatres. In Germany—with some breaks—the case has been the same. From Lessing and Goethe and Schiller down to our own contemporaries, to Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Halbe, Germany has seldom been without worthy dramatists. Both the Germans and the French have taken the theatre seriously. Their actors have been carefully trained, their audiences intelligently critical, their playhouses in part maintained by government subventions, as institutions importantly related to the national life.

It is not that English men of letters have been unwilling to contribute to the stage. On the contrary, they have shown an eager, although mostly ineffectual, ambition for dramatic honors. In the eighteenth century it was well-nigh the rule that a successful writer should try his hand at a play. Addison did so, and Steele, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Thomson, Mason, Mallet, Chatterton, and many others who had no natural turn for it, and would not think of such a thing now. In the nineteenth century the tradition had lost much of its force: still, we find Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, all using the dramatic form, and some of them attempting the stage. Charles Lamb, one of the most ardent of playgoers and best of dramatic critics, was greatly chagrined by the failure of his farce, “Mr. H——.” Dickens was a good actor in private theatricals, and was intensely concerned with the theatre and the theatrical fortunes of his own dramatized novels. So was Charles Reade, who collaborated with Tom Taylor in a number of plays, and whose theatre piece “Masks and Faces,” was the original of his novelette, “Peg Woffington”—vice versa the usual case. More recently we have seen Stevenson and Henley collaborating in three plays, “Deacon Brodie” and “Beau Austin,” performed at London and Montreal in 1884–87, and “Admiral Guinea,” shown at the Haymarket in 1890; the first and third, low-life melodrama and broad comedy, of some vigor but no great importance; the second, an unusually good eighteenth century society play. Most certainly these experiments do not rank with Stevenson’s romances or Henley’s poems. Another curious illustration of the attraction of the dramatic form for the literary mind is Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts” (1904), a drama of the Napoleonic wars, projected in nineteen acts, with choruses of spirits and personified abstractions; a sort of reversion to the class of morality and chronicle play exemplified in Bale’s “King John.” Mr. Hardy is perhaps the foremost living English novelist, but “The Dynasts” is a dramatic monster, and, happily, a torso. The preface confesses that the abortion is a “panoramic show” and intended for “mental performance” only, and suggests an apology for closet drama by inquiring whether “mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life.”

Mr. Henry James, too, has tempted the stage, teased, yet fascinated, by the “insufferable little art”; and the result is a dramatized version of “Daisy Miller,” and two volumes of “Theatricals”: “Tenants” and “Disengaged” (1894); “The Album” and “The Reprobate” (1895). These last were written with a view to their being played at country theatres (an opportunity having seemingly presented itself), but they never got so far. In reading them, one feels that a single rehearsal would have decided their chances. Mr. James, in the preface to the printed plays, treats his failure with humorous resignation. He complains of “the hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,” and of his own conscientious effort to avoid supersubtlety and to cultivate an “anxious simplicity” and a “deadly directness”—to write “something elaborately plain.” It was to be expected that Mr. James’s habit of refined analysis would prove but a poor preparation for acted drama; and that his singular coldness or shyness or reticence would handicap him fatally in emotional crises. Whenever he is led squarely up to such, he bolts. Innuendo is not the language of passion. In vain he cries: “See me being popular: observe this play to the gallery.” The failure is so complete as to have the finality of a demonstration.

What was less to be expected is the odd way in which this artist drops realism for melodrama and farce when he exchanges fiction for playwriting. Sir Ralph Damant, in “The Album,” is a farce or “humor” character in the Jonsonian sense, his particular obsession being a fixed idea that all the women in the play want to marry him. In “Disengaged,” Mrs. Wigmore, a campaigner with a trained daughter, is another farce character; and there are iterations of phrase and catchwords here and elsewhere, as in Dickens’s or Jonson’s humorists. In “The Reprobate,” Paul Doubleday and Pitt Brunt, M.P., have the accentuated contrast of the Surface brothers. In “The Album,” that innocent old stage trick is played again, whereby some article—a lace handkerchief, a scrap of paper, a necklace, or what not—is made the plot centre. In “Daisy Miller”—dramatized version—the famous little masterpiece is spoiled by the substitution of a conventional happy ending and the introduction of a blackmailing villain. All this insinuates a doubt as to the reality of a realism which turns into improbability and artificiality merely by a change in the method of presentation. But the doubt is unfair. No reductio ad absurdum has occurred, but simply another instance of the law that every art has its own method, and that the method of the novel is not that of the play. Of course, there are clever things in the dialogue of these three-act comedies, for Mr. James is always Mr. James. But the only one of them that comes near to being a practicable theatre piece is “Tenants,” which has a good plot founded on a French story.

The paralysis of the literary drama, then, has not been due to the indifference of the literary class. Perhaps it is time thrown away to seek for its cause. The fact is that, for one reason or another, England has lost the dramatic habit.

The past fifteen or twenty years have witnessed one more concerted effort to “elevate the English stage,” and this time with a fair prospect of results. There is a stir of expectation: the new drama is announced and already in part arrived. It would be premature to proclaim success as yet; but thus much may be affirmed, that the dramatic output of the last quarter-century outweighs that of any other quarter-century since 1700. Here, for instance, are the titles of a dozen contemporary plays which it would be hard to match with any equal number produced during an equal period of time since the failure of Congreve’s latest and most brilliant comedy, “The Way of the World,” marked the close of the Restoration drama: W. S. Gilbert’s “Pygmalion and Galatea”; Sydney Grundy’s “An Old Jew”; Henry Arthur Jones’s “Judah” and “The Liars”; Arthur Wing Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “The Benefit of the Doubt”; George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and “Arms and the Man”; Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Stephen Phillips’s “Ulysses”; and W. Butler Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” (I have gone back a few years to include Mr. Gilbert’s piece, first given at the Haymarket in 1871.)

Every one of these dramas has been performed with acceptance, every one of them is a contribution to literature, worthy the attention of cultivated readers. I do not say that any one of them is a masterpiece, or that collectively they will hold the stage as Goldsmith’s and Sheridan’s are still holding it a century and a quarter after their first production. But I will venture to say that, taken together, they constitute a more solid and varied group of dramatic works than that favorite little bunch of “classical” comedies, and offer a securer ground of hope for the future of the British stage. It will be observed that half of them are tragedies, or plays of a serious interest; also that they do not form a school, in the sense in which the French tragedy of Louis XIV, or the English comedy of the Restoration, was a school—that is, a compact dramatic group, limited in subject and alike in manner. They are the work of individual talents, conforming to no single ideal, but operating on independent lines. And it would be easy to add a second dozen by the same authors little, if at all, inferior to those on the first list.

Probably the foremost English playwriter of to-day is Mr. A. W. Pinero, whether tried by the test of popular success in the theatre, or by the literary quality of his printed dramas. He learned his art as Shakespeare learned his, by practical experience as an actor, and by years of obscure work as a hack writer for the playhouses, adapting from the French, dramatizing novels, scribbling one-act curtain-raisers and all kinds of theatrical nondescripts. There is a long list of failures and half successes to his account before he emerged, about 1885, with a series of three-act farces, “The Magistrate,” “The Cabinet Minister,” “The Schoolmistress” and the like, which pleased every one by their easy, natural style, their fresh invention, the rollicking fun that carried off their highly improbable entanglements, and the bonhomie and knowledge of the world with which comic character was observed and portrayed. Absurdity is the kingdom of farce; and, as in the topsyturvy world of opera bouffe, a great part of the effect in these plays is obtained by setting dignified persons, like prime ministers, cathedral deans and justices, to doing ludicrously incongruous actions. Thus, the schoolmistress, outwardly a very prim and proper gentlewoman, leads a double life, putting in her Christmas vacation as a figurante in comic opera; anticipating, and perhaps suggesting, Mr. Zangwill’s “Serio-Comic Governess.”

To these farces succeeded pieces in which social satire, sentimental comedy, and the comedy of character were mixed in varying proportions: “Sweet Lavender,” “The Princess and the Butterfly,” “Trelawney of the Wells,” and others. Of these, the first was, perhaps, the favorite, and was translated and performed in several languages. It is a very winning play, with a genuine popular quality, though with a slight twist in its sentiment. Pinero’s art has deepened in tone, until in such later work as “The Profligate,” “The Benefit of the Doubt,” “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith,” and “Iris,” he has dealt seriously, and sometimes tragically, with the nobler passions. His chef d’oeuvre in this kind, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” is constructed with consummate skill, and its psychology is right and true. This is a problem play (it is unfortunate that we apply this term exclusively to plays dealing with one particular class of problems), and its ethical value, as well as its tragical force, lies in its demonstration of the truth that no one can escape from his past. The past will avenge itself upon him or her, not only in the unforeseen consequences of old misdeeds, but in that subtler nemesis, the deterioration of character which makes life under better conditions irksome and impossible. The catastrophe comes with the inevitableness of the old Greek fate-tragedies. In this instance, it is suicide, as in “Hedda Gabler” or Hauptmann’s “Vor Sonnenaufgang.” Though criticised as melodramatic, the dramatist makes us feel it here to be the only solution. Mr. Pinero has already achieved the distinction of a “Pinero Birthday Book”; while “Arthur Wing Pinero: a Study,” by H. Hamilton Fyfe, a book of two hundred and fifty pages, with a bibliography, reviews his plays seriatim.

Without pushing the analogy too far, we may call Mr. Pinero and Mr. Bernard Shaw the Goldsmith and Sheridan of the modern stage. In Pinero, as in Goldsmith, humor more than wit is the prevailing impression. That “brilliancy” which is often so distressing is absent from his comedy, whose surfaces do not corruscate, but absorb the light softly. His satire is good-natured, his worldliness not hard, and his laughter is a neighbor to tears. Shaw is an Irishman, a journalistic free-lance and Socialist pamphleteer. He has published three collections of plays—“Pleasant,” “Unpleasant,” and “For Puritans”—accompanied with amusingly truculent prefaces, discussing, among other things, whether his pieces are “better than Shakespeare’s.” Two of his comedies, “Arms and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” were put on in New York by Mr. Mansfield as long ago, if I am right, as 1894 and 1897, respectively. “Arms and the Man” is an effective theatre piece, with a quick movement, ingenious misunderstandings, and several exciting moments. Like his fellow countryman, Sheridan, Mr. Shaw is clever in inventing situations, though he professes scorn of them as bits of old theatrical lumber, a concession to the pit. “Candida” was given in America a season or two ago, and the problems of character which it proposes have been industriously discussed by the dramatic critics and by social circles everywhere. The author is reported to have been amused at this, and to have described his heroine as a most unprincipled woman—a view quite inconsistent with the key kindly afforded in the stage directions. These, in all Shaw’s plays, are explicit and profuse, comprising details of costume, gesture, expression, the furniture and decorations of the scene, with full character analyses of the dramatis personae in the manner of Ben Jonson. The italicized portions of the printed play are little less important than the speeches; and small license of interpretation is left to the players. This is an extra-dramatic method, the custom of the novel overflowing upon the stage. But Mr. Shaw defends the usage and asks: “What would we not give for the copy of ‘Hamlet’ used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original ‘business’ scrawled by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had, in addition, the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage: above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate! Well, we should have had all this if Shakespeare, instead of merely writing out his lines, had prepared the plays for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Meredith.” “I would give half a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.”

Shaw’s appeal has been more acutely intellectual than Pinero’s, but his plays are less popular and less satisfying; while the critics, he complains, refuse to take him seriously. They treat him as an irresponsible Irishman with a genius for paradox, a puzzling way of going back on himself, and a freakish delight in mystifying the public. The heart interest in his plays is small. He has the Celtic subtlety, but not the Celtic sentiment; in this, too, resembling Sheridan, that wit rather than humor is the staple of his comedy—a wit which in both is employed in the service of satire upon sentiment. But the modern dramatist’s satire cuts deeper and is more caustic. Lydia Languish and Joseph Surface, Sheridan’s embodiments of romance and sentiment, are conceived superficially and belong to the comedy of manners, not of character. Sheridan would not have understood Lamb’s saying that Charles Surface was the true canting hypocrite of “The School for Scandal.” For nowadays sentiment and romance take less obvious shapes; and Shaw, who detests them both and holds a retainer for realism, tests for them with finer reagents.

And here comes in the influence of Ibsen, perhaps the most noticeable foreign influence in the recent English drama, from which it has partly driven out the French, hitherto all-predominant. Ibsen’s introduction to the English stage dates from 1889 and the years following, although Mr. Gosse’s studies and the translations of Mr. Havelock Ellis and others had made a few of his plays known to the reader. As long since as 1880, a very free version of “A Doll’s House,” under the title “Breaking a Butterfly,” had been made for the theatre by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and a collaborator. The French critic, M. Augustin Filon, in his book, “The English Stage” (1897), ventures a guess that the Ibsen brand of realism will be found to agree better with the English character than the article furnished by Dumas fils and other French dramatists; and he even suggests the somewhat fantastic theory that an audience of the fellow countrymen of Darwin and Huxley will listen with a peculiar sympathy to such a play as “Ghosts,” in which the doctrine of heredity is so forcibly preached. Ibsen’s masterly construction, quite as much as his ideas, has been studied with advantage by our dramatists. Thus it is thought that Pinero, who has shown, in general, very little of Ibsen’s influence, may have taken a hint from him in the inconclusive ending of “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” The inconclusive ending is a practice—perhaps a principle—of the latest realistic schools of drama and fiction. Life, they contend, has no artificial closes, but flows continually on, and a play is only a “bleeding slice of life.” In old tragedy, death is the end. “Troilus and Cressida” is Shakespeare’s only episodical tragedy, the only one in which the protagonist is not killed—and, perhaps for that reason, the quarto title-page describes it as a comedy. But in Ibsenite drama the hero or heroine does not always die. Sometimes he or she goes away, or sometimes just accepts the situation and stays on. The sound of the door shutting in “A Doll’s House” tells us that Nora has gone out into the world to begin a new career. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” one of Shaw’s strongest “Plays Unpleasant,”—so unpleasant that its production on the boards was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain,—when Vivie discovers what her mother’s profession is, and where the money comes from that sent her to Newnham, she does nothing melodramatic, but simply utilizes her mathematical education by entering an actuary’s office. The curtain falls to the stage direction, “Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.”

Shaw is a convinced Ibsenite and took up the foils for the master in a series of articles in the Saturday Review in 1895. The new woman, the emancipated woman so much in evidence in Ibsen, goes in and out through Shaw’s plays, short-skirted, cigarette-smoking, a business woman with no nonsense about her, a good fellow, calling her girl friends by their last names and treating male associates with a brusque camaraderie. But, as he satirizes everything, himself included, he has his laugh at the Ibsen cult in “The Philanderer.” There is an Ibsen Club, with a bust of the Norse divinity over the library mantelpiece. One of the rules is that no womanly woman is to be admitted. At the first symptom of womanliness, a woman forfeits her membership. What Shaw chiefly shares with Ibsen is his impatience of heroics, cant, social lies, respectable prejudices, the conventions of a traditional morality. Face facts, call things by their names, drag the skeleton out of the closet. Ibsen brushes these cobwebs aside with a grave logic and a savage contempt; he makes their hollow unreality the source of tragic wrong. But Shaw’s lighter temperament is wholly that of the comic artist, and he attacks cant with the weapons of irony. His favorite characters are audacious, irreverent young men and women, without illusions and incapable of being shocked, but delighting in shocking their elders. The clergy are the professional trustees of this conventional morality and are treated by Ibsen and Shaw with scant respect. Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” shows the same contemptuous toleration of the scruples of the rabbit-like Parson Manders, as Candida shows for her clerical husband’s preaching and phrase-making. The present season has witnessed the first appearance on the American stage of Mr. Shaw’s gayest farce comedy, “You Never Can Tell.”

I asked an actor, a university graduate, what he thought of the future of verse drama in acted plays. He inclined to believe that its day had gone by, even in tragedy; and that the language of the modern serious drama would be prose, colloquial, never stilted (as it was in “George Barnwell” and “Richelieu”), but rising, when necessary, into eloquence and a kind of unmetrical poetry. He instanced several passages in Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” and later plays. Still, the blank verse tradition dies hard. Probably the leading representative of ideal or poetic drama in the contemporary theatre is Stephen Phillips, whose “Paolo and Francesca” (1899), “Herod” (1900), and “Ulysses” (1902) have all been shown upon the boards and highly acclaimed, at least by the critics. There is no doubt that they are fine dramatic poems with many passages of delicate, and some of noble, beauty. But whether they are anything more than excellent closet drama is not yet proved. Mr. Phillips’s experience as an actor has given him a practical knowledge of technic; and it may be conceded that his plays are nearer the requirements of the stage than Browning’s or Tennyson’s. They are simple, as Browning’s are not; and they have quick movement, where Tennyson’s are lumbering. Neither is it much against them that their subjects are antique, taken from Dante, Josephus, and Homer. But they appear to me poetically rather than dramatically imagined. Shakespeare and Racine dealt with remote or antique life; yet, each in his own way modernized and realized it. It is a hackneyed observation that Racine’s Greeks, Romans, and Turks are French gentlemen and ladies of the court of Louis XIV. Shakespeare’s Homeric heroes are very un-Homeric. There is little in either of local color or historical perspective: there is in both a fulness of handling, an explication of sentiments and characters. The people are able talkers and reasoners. Mr. Phillips’s method is implicit, and the atmosphere of things old and foreign is kept, the distance which lends enchantment to mediaeval Italy, or the later Roman Empire, or the heroic age. It is as if the “Idylls of the King” were dramatized,—as, indeed, “Elaine” was dramatized for one of the New York playhouses by George Lathrop,—retaining all their romantic charm and all their dramatic unreality.

Still, there are moments of genuine dramatic passion in all three of these plays: in “Herod,” for instance, where Mariamne acknowledges to the tetrarch that her love for him is dead. And in “Ulysses,” Telemachus’s recognition of his father moves one very deeply, producing its impression, too, by a few speeches in a perfectly simple, unembroidered diction, by means properly scenic, not poetic like Tennyson’s. “Ulysses” seems the best of Mr. Phillips’s pieces, more loosely built than the others, but of more varied interest and more lifelike. The gods speak in rhyme and the human characters in blank verse, while some of the more familiar dialogue is in prose; Ctesippus, an elderly wooer of Penelope, is a comic figure; and there is a good deal of rough, natural fooling among the wooers, shepherds, and maids in the great hall of Ithaca. In its use of popular elements and its romantic freedom of handling, the play contrasts with Robert Bridges’s “The Return of Ulysses,” which Mr. Yeats praises for its “classical gravity” and “lyric and meditative” quality. Mr. Phillips opens his scene on Calypso’s island, and brings his wandering hero home only after making him descend to the shades. His Ulysses shoots the wooers in full view of the audience. In Mr. Bridges’s play the action begins in Ithaca, the unities of time and place are observed, and so is dramatic decency. The wooers are slain outside, and their slaying is described to Penelope by a handmaid who sees it from the door. Yet, upon the whole, Mr. Phillips’s constructive formula is more Sophoclean than Shakespearean. Not that he adheres to the external conventions of Attic tragedy, the chorus, the unities, etc., like Matthew Arnold in “Merope”; but that his plot evolution exhibits the straight, slender line of Sophocles, rather than the rich composite pattern of Elizabethan tragi-comedy. I have been told by some who saw “Ulysses” played, that the descent ad inferos was grotesque in effect. But “Paolo and Francesca” might have gained from an infusion of grotesque. D’Annunzio’s almost precisely contemporary version of the immortal tale has just the solid, materialistic treatment which makes you feel the brutal realities of mediaeval life, the gross soil in which this “lily of Tartarus” found root. Mr. Phillips’s latest piece, “The Sin of David,” a tragedy of Cromwell’s England, is now in its first season.

Among the most interesting of recent dramatic contributions are William Butler Yeats’s “Plays for an Irish Theatre.” Mr. Yeats’s recent visit to this country is still fresh in recollection; and doubtless many of my readers have seen his beautiful little fairy piece, “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Probably allegory, or at least symbolism, is the only form in which the supernatural has any chance in modern drama. The old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition to produce in a sceptical generation that “willing suspension of disbelief” which, says Coleridge, constitutes dramatic illusion. Hamlet’s father talks too much; and the ghosts in “Richard III” are so sociable a company as to quite keep each other in countenance. The best ghost in Shakespeare is Banquo’s, which is invisible—a mere “clot on the brain”—and has no “lines” to speak. The elves in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the elemental spirits in “The Tempest” are nothing but machinery. The other world is not the subject of the play. Hauptmann’s “Die Versunkene Glocke” is symbolism, and so is “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Maeterlinck’s “Les Aveugles” and Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” are more formally allegorical. The poor old woman, in the latter, who takes the bridegroom from his bride, is Ireland, from whom strangers have taken her “four beautiful green fields”—the ancient kingdoms of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connaught.

These Irish plays, indeed, are the nearest thing we have to the work of the Belgian symbolist, to dramas like “Les Aveugles” and “L’Intruse.” And, as in those, the people are peasants, and the dialogue is homely prose. No brogue: only a few idioms and sometimes not even that, the whole being supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic into standard English. Maeterlinck’s dramas have been played on many theatres. Mr. William Sharp, who twice saw “L’Intruse” at Paris, found it much less impressive in the acting than in the reading, and his experience was not singular. As for the more romantic pieces, like “Les Sept Princesses” and “Aglavaine et Sélysette,” they are about as shadowy as one of Tieck’s tales. Those who saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in “Pelléas et Mélisande” will doubtless agree that these dreamlike poems are hurt by representation. It may be that Maeterlinck, like Baudelaire, has invented a new shudder. But the matinée audiences laughed at many things which had thrilled the closet reader.

Yeats’s tragedies, like Maeterlinck’s, belong to the drame intime, the théâtre statique. The popular drama—what Yeats calls the “theatre of commerce”—is dynamic. The true theatre is the human will. Brunetière shows by an analysis of any one of Racine’s plays—say “Andromaque”—how the action moves forward by a series of decisions. But Maeterlinck’s people are completely passive: they suffer: they do not act, but are acted upon by the unearthly powers of which they are the sport. Yeats’s plays, too, are “plays for marionettes,” spectral puppet-shows of the Celtic twilight. True, his characters do make choices: the young wife in “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” the bridegroom in “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” make choices, but their apparently free will is supernaturally influenced. The action is in two worlds. In antique tragedy, too, man is notoriously the puppet of fate; but, though he acts in ignorance of the end to which destiny is shaping his deed, he acts with vigorous self-determination. There is nothing dreamlike about Orestes or Oedipus or Antigone.

It is said that the plays of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, are now great favorites in Germany: “Salome,” in particular, and “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “A Woman of No Importance” (“Eine unbedeutende Frau”). This is rather surprising in the case of the last two, which are society dramas with little action and an excess of cynical wit in the dialogue. It is hard to understand how the unremitting fire of repartee, paradox, and “reversed epigram” in such a piece as “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” the nearest recent equivalent of Congreve comedy—can survive translation or please the German public.

This “new drama” is very new indeed. In 1882, William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, published his book, “English Dramatists of To-day,” in the introduction to which he acknowledged that the English literary drama did not exist. “I should like to see in England,” he wrote, “a body of playwrights whose works are not only acted, but printed and read.” Nine years later, Henry Arthur Jones, in the preface to his printed play, “Saints and Sinners,” denied that there was any relation between English literature and the modern English drama. A few years later still, in his introduction to the English translation of M. Filon’s book, “The English Stage” (1897), Mr. Jones is more hopeful. “If any one will take the trouble,” he writes, “to examine the leading English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings of an English drama of greater import and vitality, and of wider aim, than any school of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans.”

In his book on “The Renaissance of the Drama,” and in many other places, Mr. Jones has pleaded for a theatre which should faithfully reflect contemporary life; and in his own plays he has endeavored to furnish examples of what such a drama should be. His first printed piece, “Saints and Sinners” (exhibited in 1884), was hardly literature, and did not stamp its author as a first-class talent. It is a seduction play of the familiar type, with a set of stock characters: the villain; the forsaken maid; the steadfast lover who comes back from Australia with a fortune in the nick of time; the père noble, a country clergyman straight out of “The Vicar of Wakefield”; and a pair of hypocritical deacons in a dissenting chapel—very much overdone, pace Matthew Arnold, who complimented Mr. Jones on those concrete examples of middle-class Philistinism, with its alliterative mixture of business and bethels. Mr. Jones, like Mr. Shaw, is true to the tradition of the stage in being fiercely anti-Puritan, and wastes many words in his prefaces in vindicating the right of the theatre to deal with religious hypocrisy; as if Tartuffe and Tribulation Wholesome had not been familiar comedy heroes for nearly three hundred years!

This dramatist served his apprenticeship in melodrama, as Pinero did in farce; and there are signs of the difference in his greater seriousness, or heaviness. Indeed, an honest feeling and an earnest purpose are among his best qualities. M. Filon thinks him the most English of contemporary writers for the stage. And, as Pinero’s art has gained in depth, Jones’s has gained in lightness. Crude at first, without complexity or shading in his character-drawing, without much art in comic dialogue or much charm and distinction in serious, he has advanced steadily in grasp and skill and sureness of touch, and stands to-day in the front rank of modern British dramatists. “The Crusaders,” “The Case of Rebellious Susan,” “The Masqueraders,” “Judah,” “The Liars,” are all good plays—or, at least plays with good features—and certainly fall within the line which divides literary drama from the mere stage play. “Judah,” for instance, is a solidly built piece, with two or three strong situations. The heroine is a fasting girl and miraculous healer, a subject of a kind which Hawthorne often chose; or reminding one of Mr. Howells’s charlatans in “The Undiscovered Country” and Mr. James’s in “The Bostonians.” The characterization of the leading persons is sound, and there is a brace of very diverting broad comedy figures, a male and a female scientific prig. They are slightly caricatured—Jones is still a little heavy-handed—but the theatre must over-accentuate now and again, just as actresses must rouge.

In this play and in “The Crusaders,” social satire is successfully essayed at the expense of prevailing fads, such as fashionable philanthropy, slumming parties, neighborhood guilds, and the like. There is a woman in “The Crusaders,”—a campaigner, a steamboat, a specimen of the loud, energetic, public, organizing, speech-making, committee and platform, subscription-soliciting woman,—nearly as good as anything in our best fiction. Mr. Joseph Knight, who writes a preface to “Judah” (first put on at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, 1890), compares its scientific faddists with the women who swarm to chemistry and biology lectures in that favorite Parisian comedy, “Le monde où l’on s’ennuie.” There is capital satire of the downright kind in these plays, but surely it is dangerous to suggest comparison with the gay irony, the courtly grace, the dash and sparkle of Pailleron’s little masterpiece. There are no such winged shafts in any English quiver. Upon the whole, “The Liars” seems to me the best comedy of Mr. Jones’s that I have read,—I have not read them all,—the most evenly sustained at every point of character and incident, a fine piece of work in both invention and construction. The subject, however, is of that disagreeable variety which the English drama has so often borrowed from the French, the rescue of a married woman from a compromising position, by a comic conspiracy in her favor.

The Puritans have always been halfway right in their opposition to the theatre. The drama, in the abstract and as a form of literature, is of an ancient house and a noble. But the professional stage tends naturally to corruption, and taints what it receives. The world pictured in these contemporary society plays—or in many of them—we are unwilling to accept as typical. Its fashion is fast and not seldom vulgar. It is a vicious democracy in which divorces are frequent and the “woman with a past” is the usual heroine; in which rowdy peers mingle oddly with manicurists, clairvoyants, barmaids, adventuresses, comic actresses, faith-healers, etc., and the contact between high life and low-life has commonly disreputable motives. Surely this is not English life, as we know it from the best English fiction. And, if the drama is to take permanent rank with the novel, it must redistribute its emphasis.

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[4]

This article was printed in the North American Review in two instalments, in May, 1905, and July, 1907. The growth of the literary drama in the last fifteen years has been so marked, and plays of such high quality have been put upon the stage by new writers like Barrie, Synge, Masefield, Kennedy, Moody, Sheldon, and others, that these prophecies and reflections may seem out of date. The article is retained, notwithstanding, for whatever there may be in it that is true of drama in general.