But it must be remembered, as a matter of fact, such a sweeping conclusion may not only be unjust but even impertinent. For where in all the theatres of the London of the nineties would the plays (if they had been written) of these young men have found a home? Probably the dramatic output of the nineties was nil because there were no small theatres in London at that date of the type to give these young men a hope that any works they might write could be produced. So only at the end of the decade do we see the dramatic outburst when the Irish movement founded a theatre of its own and produced J. M. Synge, and also when Miss Horniman gave Manchester a repertory theatre, and then Stanley Houghton came.
True, at the same period as the nineties Oscar Wilde was producing plays burlesquing the world of Society, and Bernard Shaw was getting ready to launch his own works by bombasting every one else’s; but the little movement of the younger men remained dramatically dumb. Nothing came even when George Moore produced The Strike at Arlingford and John Todhunter The Black Cat. It is a hard thing to believe that all these young men were devoid of the dramatic instinct. I prefer for my part to blame the London theatrical world for the lack of those minute theatres which have become so much a part of the night life of big continental cities and are so admirably adapted for the production of the works of new dramatists.
Indeed, the theatrical atmosphere of London at that time was in its usual perpetual state of stuffiness. There was not even a beneficent society then such as we now have in the Pioneer Players, whose theatre (if one may so symbolise it) is the charity house for emancipated dramatists. Ibsen’s Doll’s House had been produced in London just before the nineties’ epoch began, and, like anything new in popular art over here, raised the hue-and-cry. Then, too, the big ‘star’ curse, which Wilde himself so justly spurned, was permanently settled on our own insular drama like a stranglehold on the author.
Outside England, in the big art world of the continent, Schnitzler was beginning in Vienna.[22] Maurice Maeterlinck, in Belgium, had begun[23] too the drama of expressive silences which came to light in Paris. There were Sudermann and Hauptmann in Germany; Echegaray in Spain; D’Annunzio in Italy; Ibsen and Björnstjerne Björnson finishing their work for the Scandinavian drama; while the playwrights of Paris were, as always, feverishly fabricating all sorts of movements, as when Paul Fort, a boy of eighteen, founds in 1890 the Théâtre d’Art. But what was going on in England? Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Wilde’s Salomé, and his light comedies, together with stuff by Henry Arthur Jones, Sydney Grundy, etc., represented the serious drama. The critics were perturbed, as they generally are. The musical comedy and its singing, pirouetting soubrettes deluded the populace into the belief that it had a great drama, when all these spectacles should really have been housed in London in spacious tearooms for the benefit of that multitude which is fond of tinkling melody and teapots. There was not even in London a single Überbrettlbuhnen, as the Germans mouth it, where those who love beer could go to hear poets recite their verse à la Otto Bierbaum, let alone little theatres where what we so dolefully term the serious drama could be played.
[22] Anatol, 1889–90.
[23] La Princesse Maleine, 1889.
Even, too, in those days, the newspaper critics, muzzled by the business department, which has never any wish to lose its theatrical advertisements, said little, with a few honest exceptions like Bernard Shaw. Max Beerbohm, when he took over the critical work of Shaw on The Saturday Review was obviously unhappy. English theatres rapidly became as elaborate and as pompous as the Church Militant in its palmy days. They kept growing in size. In London, indeed, the small theatre never had its boom. Indeed, the nineties was the age when the big theatres were being built to fill their owners’ pockets and the men of the nineties themselves (be it for whatever reason you like) did not produce a single play.