Paula: “Yes, I can see London.”
Drummle: “London! Not quite so far, surely?”
Paula: “I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (Impulsively) Oh, Cayley! do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman’s yacht, when we lay off”—(Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her).
Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever want to be married? Because the other women of her world were not. The title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?
But these are Paula’s least serious trials. There is another woman in the house—the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing—she ought to love her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good. It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her into deeds of rashness and folly.
A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible (it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character, embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to learn about her.
When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in which the young girl’s heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl is one of the former lovers of the woman!
This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious—after the author has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of analysis—to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable, crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant land:—She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees herself tête-à-tête with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had suffered and had wrought.... I shall never forget this scene. How her hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of hers, that morbidezza which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell’s province as an actress is more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating delicious fear that I would describe as the curiosité de souffrir. You feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the victim and the instrument of destiny.
It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt, justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a dénouement,—not a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop, provisionally, with this admirable Mrs. Tanqueray, which submits and solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to its natural close a drama of domestic life.