As half-churn’d butter. Seeming hawk is dove,
And dove’s a gaolbird now. Fie, out upon ’t!
I do not think that anyone has produced a more unforgettable line of heroic decasyllabic verse than:
The scandal, the incredible come-down!
Savonarola’s fame will be increased as a result of that exquisitely inappropriate line. It is infinitely regrettable that Brown did not live to write the fifth act of his masterpiece. Mr. Beerbohm has attempted a scenario for a fifth act, and it contains many admirable things. But Mr. Beerbohm lacks Brown’s “magnifical” touch, though he does his best to imitate it in the lines in which he makes Lucrezia say that she means:
To start afresh in that uncharted land
Which austers not from out the antipod,
Australia!
Good as this is, it seems just to verge on parody. It is grotesque where Brown would have been moving. The play as a whole, however, will find a place among the minor classics. It is far, far better than going to the pantomime. It is as good as the pantomime ought to be.
“Maltby and Braxton” is something new in literature—a comic ghost story. There are plenty of funny stories about ghosts that did not exist. This is a funny story about a ghost that did exist. It is a story of the jealousy of two novelists of the ’nineties, and tells how one of them was pursued by the ghost of his jealous rival to a week-end at a duchess’s. It is a nightmare seen objectively—everybody’s nightmare.