MARRIAGE À LA MODE
IT was impossible to know from the reception of Marriage à la Mode at the Phœnix Society's production last month whether the numerous complaints of the behaviour of the audience when The Duchess of Malfi was performed had had effect or not, for Dryden's comedy puts no strain of any sort on the audience. It is a sign both of Dryden's greatness and of his weakness. For that "superhuman craftsmanship" of which Professor Saintsbury speaks is the privilege of a writer whose imagination does not outrun his powers. There is nothing in his mind that he finds difficult to express. And the difference in merit between one Dryden play and another is not a difference of degree in technical accomplishment—of success in expression—as it is with greater poets, but a difference in the value of the subject-matter. When Dryden gets hold of a good dramatic idea he writes a good play, when his material is deficient in interest his play is inferior. There are no violent ups and downs in any one play, whereas a poet of more passion and imagination does more mixed work. Some of Shakespeare's finest scenes and passages are in his least satisfactory plays, and though Shakespeare's natural genius for language was immeasurably greater than Dryden's so that it was impossible for him to write at any length without writing here and there wonderfully, yet he had, almost necessarily, less absolute command of it. Dryden's was an intellectual mastery that practically never failed him either in prose or verse. He is not considered to have had any natural gift for comedy. Hazlitt says: "Dryden's comedies have all the point that there is in ribaldry, and all the humour that there is in extravagance. I am sorry that I can say nothing better of them. He was not at home in this kind of writing, of which he was himself conscious. His play was horse-play. His wit (what there is of it) is ingenious and scholar-like, rather than natural and dramatic," and more recent critics have suggested that Dryden was unfitted for the new comedy that became universal after the Restoration—the comedy that held a mirror up to Society rather than to Nature—since Dryden "was not much a man of society."
It seems to me that this last criticism is largely true, but if he is not witty in the sense that Congreve and Sheridan are witty, he is often quite as amusing, and I cannot altogether agree with Hazlitt's pronouncement that his wit was "ingenious and scholar-like rather than natural and dramatic." Nothing could be more natural, for example, than the Epilogue to Marriage à la Mode, spoken by Rhodophil, which convulsed the house at the Lyric Theatre, and I doubt if it would be possible to find among all the Restoration Comedies an Epilogue so "dramatic"—revealing such insight into the feelings aroused by the play in the audience, and making such effective use of that knowledge. When Rhodophil says:
There are more Rhodophils in this theatre,
More Palamedes, and some few wives, I fear:
But yet too far our poet would not run;
Though 'twas well offered, there was nothing done.
He would not quite the women's frailty bare,
But stript them to the waist, and left them there:
And the men's faults are less severely shown,
For he considers that himself is one—
Some stabbing wits, to bloody satire bent,
Would treat both sexes with less compliment;
Would lay the scene at home; of husbands tell,
For wenches taking up their wives i' the Mall;
And a brisk bout, which each of them did want
Made by mistake of mistress and gallant.
Our modest author thought it was enough
To cut you off a sample of the stuff:
He spared my shame, which you, I'm sure, would not.
For you were all for driving on the plot:
You sighed when I came in to break the sport,
And set your teeth when each design fell short.
The audience at the Phœnix Society rose with uproarious laughter to each hit, it was so palpable. Again I find all the comedy scenes, the scenes between Palamede, Doralice, Rhodophil, and Melantha wholly admirable and exhilarating to a degree. I would almost gladly give up the whole of Congreve and Sheridan for this poetical, extravagant and romantic humour. The name of poet still clung to dramatic wits in the time of Congreve, and Congreve had perhaps some slight excuse for calling himself a poet, but when the eighteenth century had really arrived, when the abominable Sheridan came we had got into a prose age indeed. And yet I have no wish to call Sheridan—and still less Congreve—abominable, except by comparison with Dryden. We also have to acknowledge that the cultivation of verbal wit, of repartee, of elaborate social rococo, was the expression of the poetic fire instinctively preserving itself in an age so spiritually unfavourable to romance that it had to make itself externally romantic. Having lost imagination it fell back on decoration. A whole elaborate social ritual was built up to provide stimulants to the imprisoned senses. When in The Way of the World Mrs. Millamant says to Mirabell:
Good Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis: nor go to Hyde Park together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and whispers, and then never to be seen there together again; as if we were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one another ever after. Let us never visit together nor go to a play together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.
It is a cri-de-cœur. It is of the very essence of poetry in a narrow and worldly age. It is such passages in Congreve that justify Hazlitt in declaring—by comparison—that Dryden's wit was scholar-like rather than natural, for there is not a passage in Dryden's comedies so real, in the sense of being so local an expression of that passion for beauty which haunts the human heart and which in a society of the kind in which Mrs. Millamant moved will find such odd embodiment and be to ordinary eyes so completely disguised. In such a passage Congreve proves his right to be called a poet. What poetry there is in the society with which he is dealing he has expressed; for that appeal of the fine lady to Mirabell was a clutching at straws, a last despairing attempt at the preservation of some particle of beauty, of romance in the sordid life in which the married woman of fashion was about to be engulfed.
The poetry of this scene reaches back to the beautiful scene in Marriage à la Mode between Palmyra and Leonidas, though, as I have said, Dryden is more romantic, and so neither Palmyra nor Leonidas are of any age, they are merely the youth of all time. But surely no one can read the following passage without being moved to admiration of its beautiful ease, its romantic simplicity as contrasted with the romantic luxuriousness of the Elizabethans:
Leon.: How precious are the hours of love in courts!
In cottages, when love has all the day,
Full, and at ease, he throws it half away.
Time gives himself, and is not valued, there;
But sells at mighty rates, each minute, here:
There, he is lazy, unemployed, and slow;
Here he's more swift; and yet has more to do.
So many of his hours in public move,
That few are left for privacy and love.
Palm.: The sun, methinks, shines faint and dimly, here;
Light is not half so long, nor half so clear:
But oh! when every day was yours or mine,
How early up! what haste he made to shine!
Leon.: Such golden days a prince must hope to see,
Whose every subject is more blessed than he.
Palm.: Do you remember when their tasks were done,
How all the youth did to our cottage run?
While winter-winds were whistling loud without,
Our cheerful hearth was circled round about:
With strokes in ashes, maids their lovers drew;
And still you fell to me, and I to you.
Leon.: When love did of my heart possession take,
I was so young my soul was scarce awake:
I cannot tell when first I thought you fair;
But sucked in love, insensibly as air.
Palm.: I know too well when first my love began,
When at our wake you for the chaplet ran:
Then I was made the Lady of the May,
And, with the garland, at its goal did stay:
Still as you ran, I kept you full in view;
I hoped, and wished, and ran, methought, for you.
As you came near, I hastily did rise,
And stretched my arm outright, that held the prize.
The custom was to kiss whom I should crown;
You kneeled, and in my lap your head laid down:
I blushed, and blushed, and did the kiss delay;
At last my subjects forced me to obey:
But, when I gave the crown, and then the kiss,
I scarce had breath to say, Take that—and this.
The whole of this beautiful scene was delightful on the stage, and by Palmyra (Miss Rita Thom), in particular, the verse was exquisitely spoken. One had that experience, rare indeed in the modern theatre, of subconsciously feeling that the whole audience was hanging on the words.
Again, what could be finer in its way than the scene—greatly helped by the stage-production at the Lyric Theatre, and by Mr. Norman Wilkinson's setting giving it an appropriate atmosphere of masquerade—where Doralice and Melantha are in boys' habits? Here Melantha's French affectation is used with the greatest skill to bring about a scene which is the very essence of romantic swagger. There are few scenes, if any, in Congreve or Sheridan that equal in wit this repartee between the pretended boys, Doralice and Melantha, egged on by Palamede and Rhodophil, leading up to Melantha's final extravagance:
I'll sacrifice my life for French poetry,
and the audience rocked with laughter at Miss Athene Seyler (Melantha) and Miss Cathleen Nesbitt (Doralice), who were superb in their representation of the parts.
Whenever these old comedies are revived there is always bound to spring up from somewhere a demand that they should be bowdlerized. Really the misplaced squeamishness of some men and women is something to marvel at! I have seen nearly every revue, musical comedy, and play that has been produced in London during the last two years, and I declare unhesitatingly that there is something radically wrong with the mentality of the people who can go habitually to the London theatres and music-halls and yet find that there is anything "filthy" about Dryden. Certainly there is no innuendo in Dryden, he is frankly outspoken. But filthy! Shade of Charles Lamb! What is to be done with such people? Not once during the whole performance of Marriage à la Mode was there an occasion when the most sensitive of young girls could have felt even momentarily uncomfortable. Such was far from being the case with a play that had quite a long run at a London theatre not long ago, to which, as far as I know, no one objected!
But I do not want to resist any attempt to make the Phœnix Society bowdlerize Dryden on that ground. Dryden—even more than Congreve—is inoffensive. There are dramatists with dirty minds; we often have had their works performed in London—adapted from the French or in their native English—but even these no one, I hope, would suppress. Dryden emphatically is not one of this class. A cleaner, more wholesome writer never put pen to paper, and the morbid squeamishness that objects to Dryden is the squeamishness of ill-health. It is a case for the doctor, for it is expressive of a pathological malady. On the subject as a whole it would seem an apt occasion to quote some sentences of Lamb's celebrated defence of Congreve, Farquhar, and Wycherley, as there appear to be people who have not heard of it. Lamb explains that these comedies have disappeared from the stage of his day—and he lived at the beginning of the age of Mrs. Grundy—because "the times cannot bear them." It is not alone, he adds, the occasional licence of the dialogue, it is that they will not stand the moral test that is so ridiculously applied to them. The age screws everything up to that. "Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or a guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left." Pursuing this idea, he adds: "We carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades." Here Lamb with the extraordinary penetration characteristic of that rare mind hit upon one of the principal causes of the bankruptcy of the theatre during the hundred years that were to follow him. We are, even at this moment, struggling to get free from that literal-mindedness which is the soul of materialism and which would fetter us down to what it calls realism and will have no extravagance of thought or language, and for whom an escape into the free speech of the theatre—an escape most necessary and most salutary—is, if you please, filth! "All that neutral ground of character," laments Lamb, "that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning—the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted Casuistry—is broken up and disenfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold we wrap it up in a great blanket just out of precaution against the breeze and the sunshine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad of a reason to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me." And concludes Lamb, with fine common sense, "I come back to my cage and my restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom."
It is not often given to any one man to have said the last word on a subject, but I think that on this question Charles Lamb has said the last word. Modern science lends its support to his judgment. The psycho-analyst is beginning to realise that the damage inflicted by socially necessary inhibitions can only be cured by art. It is to be hoped that we will hear less and less of this canting nonsense of "filth" applied to such noble and beautiful work as Dryden's. It is also to be hoped that the Phœnix Society may have a long life, for in the two productions it has so far given us it has more justified its existence than has any society I know of founded in the last dozen years.
W. J. TURNER