CHAPTER IX
The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day—Sydney Grundy; his First Efforts—Adaptations: The Snowball, In Honour Bound, A Pair of Spectacles, The Bunch of Violets—His Original Plays—His Style—His Humour—His Ethical Ideal—An Old Jew—The New Woman—A Talent which has not done growing.
If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips, with scarcely a moment’s pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time to study the vagaries of individual minds. A plébiscite of West-End playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.
They all began work about the same time—a score of years ago, as nearly as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical autodidactes, but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are only half-way along their arduous paths.
So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who adheres still—largely through his antecedents, and partly through his natural disposition—to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of the French: with Sydney Grundy.
If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity—an affray with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three acts, entitled The Snowball. There was question, in the first case, of an adaptation of La Petite Marquise, which he wrote in collaboration with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain nothing more frankly moral than La Petite Marquise. The story of the piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its moral is a moral of—shall I say?—fastidious abstention; a moral it is difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when passion has lost its fire and its poison.
It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had “passed” the Petite Marquise in French in all her original licence; he refused her his sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater, perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people who were destined to keep it in mind.
The Snowball is an English version of Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa femme. Mr. Sydney Grundy’s originality consists in his having introduced into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this species—cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening to or reading The Snowball, you look out for a single trait of English manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.
The well-merited success of The Snowball retarded Mr. Grundy’s dramatic career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation—so ungrateful in those days—for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter, obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of another.