Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones’s popularity has gone on increasing during the last four years. The Tempter, it is true, gave the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised splendours of the mise en scène, and the admirable resources of his own talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in bringing his audience round to his way of thinking. In the Triumph of the Philistines, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the public would not have known à quoi se prendre, had not the piece been given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the état d’âme, of another nation, differentiating it from his own.
The Case of Rebellious Susan is a very amusing comedy. I know of none with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should be one in it, he tells her—indeed, there should be several; they have but to be looked for.
I don’t know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy’s researches. I, for my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon with certain differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her nature much more of pride than of love. Susan’s grief is not a tearful grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first. She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies; I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the end to lay down the moral of the whole business.
Very different is the heroine of The Masqueraders, who, as impersonated by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season of 1894. Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength and oppress her will.
Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write Judah; he returned to it in The Masqueraders, not from listlessness or unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his wife at a game of écarté—is not this melodrama? But what cares the author of The Masqueraders, whether the incidents be improbable and his situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the “well-made” piece; he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing. Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a store-room of materials. As for logic, it may be left to the professors who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements, amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements are—Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of human life.
And if the critic press too hard upon the author of The Masqueraders, he has recourse for his defence—and quite rightly—to the great name which is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted, Shakespeare’s plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas, traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some passing glimpses of real life.
To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw Judah and The Crusaders in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this cloud, he has already played a great part in the resuscitation of the drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists; the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his generation and of his race.