Dutiful Nephew (doing the sights of London for the benefit of his aunt from the country): "This is the famous 'Minotaur,' by Watts. What do you think of it?"
Aunt: "Well, it's a short-horn, whatever else it may be!"
DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC
The period which began with the triumphs of the late Mr. Penley, and ended with those of Mr. Ainley, was more remarkable for dramatic alarums, excursions, innovations, inventions and discoveries than any of those dealt with in my previous volumes. If one were asked to single out the most remarkable event in British Theatrical history in those twenty-two years, pre-eminence might fairly be awarded to the establishment and fruitful work of the repertory theatres in the provinces—Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Dublin. I mentioned in an earlier volume Punch's generous tribute to Calvert's services in Manchester, but if we except his references to the Irish players, little or nothing is said of this decentralizing movement. Where the theatre was concerned Punch, as in many other ways, was first and foremost a Londoner. But, with this reserve, most of the outstanding features of the drama and its presentation are recorded and commented on in his pages. New dramatic luminaries shot into his sphere, some of them too wildly to suit his Victorian tastes. Ibsen remained for a while as his chief bogy and butt, but was supplanted, as a target for caricature, by Maeterlinck, and to a certain extent by Rostand. But as time went on Punch was even more preoccupied with the experiments and achievements of native playwrights. The revival of the poetic or literary drama associated chiefly with the works of the late Mr. Stephen Phillips, met with a not unsympathetic reception at his hands. Mr. Shaw worried him from the very outset, but there is no notice of Arms and the Man in 1894, in which, by the way, Mr. Bernard Partridge, as Mr. Bernard Gould, greatly distinguished himself before he abandoned the boards for black-and-white. Punch contemptuously dismisses the piece with two lines and two villainous puns: "''Ave a New Piece?' They've got it at the Avenue. A shawt criticism on it is 'Pshaw! Absurd!'" It was only by slow degrees that Punch came to recognize the vivacity, the wit and the originality which redeemed Mr. Shaw's perversity, his lapses from taste and his consistent defiance of tradition and convention. It was, if my memory serves me aright, one of Punch's young men who was responsible for a poem, recited at a dinner of the Stage Society, which contained the couplet:—
And if The Lady from the Sea seems foreign,
For British matrons there is Mrs. Warren.
A Short Way with Shaw
Towards Barrie as a playwright Punch was at first much less benevolent than he had been to Barrie the novelist, and Mr. Granville Barker's plays depressed more than they impressed him. But for rather more than half the period under review Punch's critiques of plays were primarily a medium for jocular comment, for fun at all costs, for explosions of puns. As a devotee of cheerfulness he resented gloom; as a professional humorist he found himself out of touch with a good deal of the new humour, the new whimsicality, the new wit. These editorial limitations were made good by the oblique methods of parody adopted with brilliant results by some of his collaborators, but it is not too much to say that theatrical criticism was never so impartially and tactfully conducted as under the fifth editor of Punch, the only one who had never written for the stage.
Turning from the creative aspect of the drama to the organization and regulation of the theatre, we have to notice two important factors, one of which was increasingly active throughout these years. Societies for the production of new, and the revival of old plays on a non-commercial basis were already in existence, but an impetus was given to the movement by the establishment of the Independent Theatre by Mr. Grein in the 'nineties, and the Stage Society and other similar bodies have carried it on with undiminished vigour down to the present time. These activities did not always commend themselves to Punch, but at least he did not ignore them.
