The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

by Augustin Filon

Two Portraits—Mr. Pinero’s Career as an Actor—His Early Works—The Squire, Lords and Commons—The Pieces which followed, half Comedy, half Farce—The Profligate; its Success and Defects—Lady Bountiful—The Second Mrs. Tanqueray—Character of Paula—Mrs. Patrick Campbell—The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.

Meanwhile, it was to Mr. Pinero that fell the lot of writing the most human work yet known to modern English dramatic literature,—the work, too, approaching most nearly to perfection.

I have never gazed on Mr. Pinero in the flesh, but I have seen two portraits of him which have struck me. In one I seem to discover the pensive bonhomie of a philosopher, who looks on at the world from afar; the other suggests rather the frequenter of drawing-rooms—the look in the eyes is more alive, the smile more knowing, less calculated to leave one at one’s ease. Which of these portraits tells the truth? Both of them perhaps. There are aspects of Mr. Pinero’s work which respond to these different moods of a single mind. Then, the two physiognomies, which I try to reconcile with each other, have this trait in common: they both show us a man who observes and who reflects.

And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of his youth, or even from such pieces as The Squire and Lord and Commons, to a work like The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. His career as an author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.

In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H. J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of others.[13] He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving’s company and then with the Bancrofts’.

After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of plays then in vogue,—farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an articulated skeleton. It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed, and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely, that was weak in Mr. Pinero’s earliest efforts.

The Squire was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.

Lords and Commons carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her. She has a double end in view—to win back her husband’s love in her new guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to that other, thus torturing him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his heart torn in twain, to a rendez-vous with his former victim to obtain her pardon. When Mr. Pinero was content to write a dénouement of this kind, who could have divined in him the future creator of Mrs. Tanqueray?

But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the same province of the drama as Divorçons, sometimes on a higher plane, sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and D’Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. The Magistrate is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in appearance),—this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even to English humour. In Dandy Dick and in The Hobby-Horse, I find, in the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur,—a woman jockey,—whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our répertoire. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in The Times and The Cabinet Minister. I have read these two pieces a number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration. But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm; and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon’s part is not to accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties, and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is through his carefulness in aspirating his h’s, his punctiliousness in the matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants’ livery, of his stud, and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would be—failure. And he is on his guard.

I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero’s comedies, although very pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they are looked at side by side with that first act of The Crusaders, in which the satire is so modern and so full of life.