The first in date, In Honour Bound, is at once a condensation and a critical commentary on Scribe’s piece, Une Chaîne. The heroine is a young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl’s guardian gives his consent. Now—and it is here that Scribe’s hand is discovered—this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands, under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that he never for a moment loses his sang-froid, his grace, or his wit. At bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.
There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly, breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence, cunningly distilled.
A Pair of Spectacles is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a translation) of Les Petits Oiseaux, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through, sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a more moderate estimate of average human nature—prepared now and again to come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow’s future daughter-in-law congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. “You are so good!” she cries; “but people are so ungrateful!” “What does that matter?” she makes answer; “I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my window-sill. They never say ‘Thanks.’ Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from feeding them again next day.” At the dénouement, he recalls this lesson read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience. The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in that—the sparrows don’t say “Thanks!”
It is a symbol, nothing more nor less,—a symbol in a play by Labiche! Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written Solness, the Master-Builder!—n’est ce pas un comble! A second symbol is added to the first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory, the misanthrope. At the dénouement, his own come back to him from the optician’s. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of these pairs of spectacles. The author’s idea is obvious to all. Our mind is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend them again.
In France the Petits Oiseaux had a provincial success. In Paris the piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at the Comédie Française some years ago, the critics thought it childish.
In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our amour propre. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with this one. Namely, that Les Petits Oiseaux is a fairy tale, and that Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands—I speak figuratively, never having seen the author of Perrichan and La Grammaire—were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and this is why I think the copy is better than the original.
The third adaptation which has struck me is that of Montjoye. So far back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of Mammon, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye’s son, and the introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his employer’s secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master’s master.
Mammon is certainly a better made piece than Montjoye, but this was not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his belief in mankind. “That is all rubbish,” Montjoye declares,—“Tout cela, c’est du bleu!” Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be expressed clearly in black and white, he calls “Bleu.” Poetical illusions, childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities, sonorous and empty sayings—“Voila le royaume de bleu!”
Thus Montjoye, “ou l’homme fort,” declaimed, in language which now seems somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed rôles with Saladin. He is the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous, he is the virtuoso of sickly sensibility—the Paganini of the sonorous and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the Royaume du Bleu. His Tartufferie is social rather than religious. He is not content to issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir Philip Marchant, the hero of A Bunch of Violets.
Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree,—like a college boy who has been out of bounds,—and who sacrifices his financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an adventuress, escorted and aggravated by a Palais Royal husband, would never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would refuse to stand him.