Modesty who when she flies
Is fled for ever.
This is true of other things beside modesty. Not seldom it is true of virtue. Sin is our sad portion, let us make the best of it. If we may not have a “stately pleasure-house” of love, let us get what shelter we may and at least cling close together while the winds of censure rebuke and the rains of scandal chill. This is, of course, what Audrie would suggest. “My beloved is mine and I am his.” What matter concerning other things, what other thing is there to matter? Not so Michael. Lead me back, he says, to the ways of peace and purity. Let us march hand in hand to the throne of forgiveness. There is no such throne, says the moralist and the priest within him. “Can one be pardoned and retain the offence?” he asks with Claudius, and the answer extracted from his conscience is a negative. After her death, a death for which he is, as he knows, mainly responsible, he abandons all struggle, resigns his volition and his being into the hands of a church that demands implicit obedience and pardons no questioning of its decisions and decrees, and taking upon himself monastic vows enters permanently a cloister.
If this is not according to the present reading of the word “tragedy,” I know not where tragedy is to be sought. It may be that the subject is one that cannot with advantage be set before the public with the fierce and brilliant illumination of stage presentation. Compare however the method of treatment, earnest, severe, resolute, unfaltering, with that which was adopted by novelists dealing with clerical trials and offences of the sort from the time of Diderot to that of L’Abbé Michon, the reputed author of “La Réligieuse,” “Le Maudit,” and other works of the class.
Once more I repeat that “Michael and his Lost Angel” is the best play Mr. Jones has given the stage and is in the full sense a masterpiece. It is the work of a man conscious of strength, and sure of the weapons he employs. Whether the stage will know it again who shall say? It will at least take rank as literature and in its present shape appeal to most readers capable of having an independent opinion and clearing their minds of cant.
From the figures as to the receipts which are published it appears that a full chance of recording its opinion was scarcely given the public. On this point I am not prepared to speak. Such rebuff as the play encountered was, I fear, due to the preconceived attitude of some representatives of public opinion rather than to any misunderstanding between Mr. Jones and the public. Mr. Forbes Robertson’s performance of the hero was superb in all respects. The refusal of the part of the heroine by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, its destined exponent, was so far a calamity that it fostered the belief that there was something immoral in the part. In other respects I cannot regard the substitution for that actress of Miss Marion Terry as a misfortune.
JOSEPH KNIGHT.
LONDON, 12th February, 1896.