“There are no scenes in it,” she said. “No cues. Nothing you can take hold of. I say my lines: the other people in the play don’t seem to take any notice of them, but just go on talking. I suppose it’s very clever, but it isn’t acting. I don’t believe even my uncle could do anything with it.”
He recommended her to read the play, and she procured a copy from the author. When she had read it she said:
“I know why nothing happens in it. There isn’t a soul in it who cares about anybody else. It’s all teasing. They can’t do anything else because they don’t care. And they have nothing really to talk about, so I suppose that’s why they discuss the Poor Law Commission, and the Cat and Mouse Bill, and the Social Evil and all sorts of things I never heard of.”
Old Mole read it, and found it clever, amusing, but sterilizing and exhausting, and, in its essence, he could not find that it was very different from “Lossie Loses” or the contrivances of the Butcher repertory. It was just as unimaginative. It had come into existence, not from any spiritual need, but entirely to rebut Butcherdom. Butcherdom shadowed it. The author in writing his play seemed first of all to have thought what would happen in a Butcher entertainment in order to decide on something different. He had not moved from Butcher back to life, but had run from Butcher down a blind alley. And the result was an almost brilliant hotchpotch with a strong savor of hatred and contempt and the tartness of isolation. Contempt for Butcher might be its strongest motive, but alone it could not account for it. Old Mole sought loyally for the best, but could find nothing nobler than the desire for admiration. The author was not scrupulous, nor was he ingenious; his bait for reputation was the ancient and almost infallible trick of measuring his cleverness by the stupidity of others.
It lacked theatrical effectiveness and therefore it was impossible to get its meaning or even a drift of it into Matilda’s head. She learned her lines like a parrot, delivered them like a parrot—(thoroughly to the satisfaction of the producer)—looked charming in her expensive gowns and attracted the notice of the critics. The author told an interviewer that his play was a masterpiece of its kind, and that Matilda was one of the most remarkable actresses on the English stage. The piece ran for its eight matinées and was then heard of no more, but to Old Mole it had much value. It set him wondering. The stage had nothing to show but the false emotions of Butcherdom and the absence of emotion of the “intellectuals.” The theater must express the life of the country or it could not continue to exist, as it indubitably did. There was always a new playhouse being built. Money was poured into the theater through the stagedoor and through the box-office, but its best efforts were shown in childish fancy. It was at its healthiest and least odiously pretentious in the presentation of melodrama, with its rigid and almost idiotic right and wrong, its stupid caricature of the workings of the human heart. If it had a tradition, melodrama was its only representative. The plays of Shakespeare were melodrama in the hands of a man of genius. Without genius the national drama was heavy and lumpish, stolidly clinging to unquestioned and untested values, looking for no higher rewards in life than riches and public esteem.
It was astonishing to Old Mole that he could be so deeply interested in these things. He had expected to be absorbed in his sorrow and the problem of handling it. Then he found that he was testing the two theaters, the Butcherish and the “intellectual,” by the passion that had flamed into his heart through his love for Matilda at the moment when it had been outraged. In neither was there a spark to respond to his fire. The Butcher theater was a corpse; the intellectual theater that same corpse turned in its grave. And it amused him to imagine how his case would be handled in them; in the one it would be measured by rule of thumb—the eternal triangle, halo’d husband, weeping wife, discomfited lover, or, if violent effects were sought for, the woman damned to an unending fall, the two men stormily thanking their vain and shallow God they were rid of her; in the other it would be talked out of court, husband and wife would never rise above a snarl, and lover would go on talking; in both men and women would be cut and trimmed to fit in with a formula. In the one the equation would be worked out pat; in the other it would go sprawling on and on like the algebraic muddle of a flurried candidate in an examination who has omitted a symbol and gone on in desperate hope of a result.
Old Mole had discarded formulæ. He was dealing with a thing that had happened. Judgment of it, he said, was futile. The issue of it depended not on himself alone. As its consequences unfolded themselves he must apply the test of passion, grasp and, so far as possible, understand, and let passion burn its way to an outlet.
Familiarity with this mystery, straining on from day to day, soon made it possible for him to accept the surface happenings of life without resentment.
For her part in the musical comedy Matilda took singing and dancing lessons, so that she was out all day and every day. She was to receive a salary twice as large as any she had yet earned, and would be financially independent even though she indulged her extravagance, than which nothing was less probable. In all the working side of her life he took a very comfortable pride. If she was not altogether his creation, at least he had helped her to shape herself, and it was a delight to see her character taking firm lines. And, as he watched her, he thought of the current sentimental prating of motherhood and its joys and its concomitant pity of men debarred from them, the absurdity of the segregation of the sexes: as if love were not in its essence creative; as if it had not begun to create before it reached consciousness; as if men could only take the love of woman, as in a pitcher, to spill it on the ground; as if love were not always beyond giving and taking, reaching out and out to create, lifting half-formed creatures into Being. . . . By the side of the other two theaters the musical comedy stage seemed almost to shine in candor, and he was glad that Matilda—the Matilda of his creation—should pass into it to charm the chuckle-heads out of their dullness.
She passed into it gleefully and he was able to separate her from that other Matilda in whom there was a passion at grips with his. He was certain now that it was passion and no vagary, for, day by day, under her working efficiency, she gained in force, and warmth and stature.