AT THE PLAY.
"LOYALTY."
If you are a pernickety intellectual (soi-disant) you may really permit yourself to be faintly amused at the fiery zeal of the mystery-wrapt author of Loyalty for his (or, quite possibly, her) country's cause in this difficult hour. If you are cast in the common human mould that nowadays is seen for the glorious thing it is, you will respond to many single-minded, wholesome thoughts in the impassioned statement of his thesis. And if you happen to belong to that simple discredited breed, the English, so long overshadowed by the nimbler Britons, you may have quite a nice little private thrill of your own, a thrill of pride in your precious stone, and begin to think with seriousness of the advantages of "home rule all round" in an England-for-the-English mood, and of the value of a nationalism that is as irrational as conjugal or mother love—and as fine.
The author's hero is an Englishman of the wandering type, assistant editor on a crank paper. The play is a protracted debate in four sessions, June, 1914; July, 1914; August, 1914; September, 1916. And here the author makes his most serious mistake, the mistake made by Mr. HENRY ARTHUR JONES in his recent squib. If he had contrived his Little Navy folk, the proprietor, editor and revolving cranks as something more than mere caricatures, brands of straw prepared for his consuming bonfires, he would have strengthened, not weakened, his excellent case. He has quoted his enemies' mistakes without their excuses, their texts without their contexts. And that is a form of propaganda which can only touch the converted, or such of them as are not stirred by a sporting instinct to a certain mood of protest and a wish that the other fellow should be given a better start in the heresy hunt.
The dramatis personae, then, divide themselves into the men of straw and the right sort. Of the former you have first Sir Andrew Craig, chairman of the party in his constituency and editor of The New Standard (there were indeed altogether new standards of efficiency, mentality and hospitality in that rather imaginative newspaper office of the First Act). Mr. FISHER WHITE gave us the courtly-obstinate old man to the life (this player has a way of removing straw). In the dramatic passage in which, returning after being broken in a German prison, he relates some of the horrors of which it is good for us to be reminded, he rose to the height of his fine talent. His exquisite elocution—a remarkable feat of virtuosity—was in itself a sheer delight.
Mr. Stutchbury, the editor, pacifist and sentimental democrat, was dealt to Mr. LENNOX PAWLE. He played his hand well. There was never such an editor outside Bedlam; but Mr. PAWLE is a resourceful person and by a score of clever tricks of gesture and business made a reasonable figure of fun for our obloquy. All but broken in the end, but still claiming that he had "the larger vision" (as he certainly had the larger diameter), there was a certain dignity of pathos in his exit, a late amende by an otherwise remorseless puppet-maker. Mr. SYDNEY PAXTON as a pillar of Nonconformity offered a clever study in the unctuous-grotesque; Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD sketched a portrait of a nut-consuming impenitent disarmamentist. The author is the first, so far as I know, to give public emphasis to the queer fact of natural history that there is some connection between extreme opinions and the prominence of the Adam's apple of the holder of them—a fact on which I have often pondered.
Mr. M. MORAND, the aggressive Scots member of the election committee, inspired to great heights of insobriety by the return of his London-Scottish nephew from the Front, sounded a welcome human note, as did Mr. SAM LIVESEY, the Labour Member of the committee, shaken out of his detachment into an extreme explicitness of language by a Zeppelin raid experience. Mr. GEORGE BELLAMY'S Welsh Disestablisher and Mr. GRIFFITH HUMPHREYS' exuberant German press-agent of the pre-war period were both really shrewd studies.
Of the right sort there were but five—and one of these, the editor's secretary, at heart an honest patriot, but in fact eating the bread of shame, was perhaps not altogether of the right sort. Still he did get off his chest at last the pent-up passion of years, and very well he did it, with the help of Mr. RANDLE AYRTON, whose subtle little touches, building up a picture of a disheartened hack, were very adroit indeed.
Then there was young Henry Craig, at the beginning an undergraduate in his last term, at the end a V.C. in his last resting-place. Mr. PERCIVAL CLARKE'S was an adequate pleasant study. So also was Mr. PHILIP ANTHONY'S of a Canadian, full of strange idioms, who butted in to just the wrong corner of Fleet Street to put the editor wise about the intentions of a Germany in which he had spent his last two years. And then there was splendidly English Frank Aylett, exile returned, unspoilt by the cynicism of party and paper, whose fortune came to him just at the psychological moment, enabling him to give his proprietor notice and fight and win a by-election in the astonied man's own constituency, besides carrying off his daughter (Miss VIOLA TREE), who was the fifth of the right sort. What more plausible English hero than Mr. C. AUBREY SMITH, except that he had to talk a good deal more than seemed appropriate to his type? There was a well-managed post-election scene when he was at his best (as was the author). And all through there was good and sometimes glorious sense for those to hear who had ears.
The programme promised us about a month's interval between Acts I. and II. It was actually less than that; but if Mr. J.H. SQUIRE's musicianly orchestra had not been there to charm us we might conceivably have been bored.
T.