I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects of the vie mondaine and demi-mondaine of 1865 from afar and de chic. Mr. Grundy eliminated this naïve and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.
Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. “What would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?” The objection is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a hair—a method of settling one’s differences with social morality and the criminal code resorted to, as we know, in every country, when no other method is available.
On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler, who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his daughter’s present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five thousand pounds—a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for another twenty-four hours and—who knows?—perhaps escape bankruptcy and suicide. “These violets are not for sale,” he thunders, and the audience is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait the criminal is redeemed and absolved.
Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having, now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to produce some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe’s marionettes moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much like ours. Thus, in The Glass of Fashion, we have depicted for us the havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners, thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger’s peas, in accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter, and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.
In every play of Mr. Grundy’s there is to be found an element which is very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new and very personal in the treatment, the working out,—the individual note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.
This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such abundance through Mr. Grundy’s theatrical work that it floods even his serious dramas. A Fool’s Paradise, that sombre story of poisoning, is so saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish; and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good humour by the sight of her agonies. In The Late Mr. Castello there is nothing at all of tragedy—nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing general indignation.
The author’s wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy, endearing terms used in earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer, nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss—the tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can understand, then, why Mr. Grundy’s plays are popular with the public, without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the truth of his thesis.
One of Mr. Grundy’s peculiarities—and, together with his fancy and his originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in him—consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems us in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.
In Sowing the Wind, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in which the scene is laid.
But I shall cite An Old Jew as the best example of those plays of his which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption, her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent children than of his guilty wife? Has he not run too great a risk in confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say, because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one point,—on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter’s caresses, and the companionship of his son.