AT THE PLAY.
"Kultur at Home."
Each of the authors—Mr. Rudolf Besier and Mrs. John Spottiswoode—has personal knowledge of the home-life of the Bosch; and their excellent sketch of Prussian manners might have served usefully as a warning to us if we could have seen it a few years ago. But at this time of day, after nineteen months' experience of the enemy, I doubt its utility as a source of illumination.
It would be futile to represent the Prussian officer as an angel in the house, for we have long since learned to know him as a devil in the field. And it is almost as futile to picture his prodigious self-conceit, his vile taste in dress and furniture, his conjugal infidelity, his habit of treating his women-folk as menials, since these vices are human and venial in comparison with what the War has revealed. Anyone might easily hazard the conjecture that the murderers of Belgium had never entertained too fastidious a respect for womanhood; and after the destruction of Louvain and Ypres it is mere bathos to insist that the perpetrators of these outrages against art had previously cherished a Philistine affection for antimacassars and plush sofas.
A common difficulty with me when I witness stage tragedies arising out of a marriage of uncongenial types is to understand how the couple ever came together. And so here, when the English girl, Margaret Tinworth, in face of poverty and parental disapproval, marries a Prussian officer in a small garrison town, and then finds all sorts of unbearable conditions in her surroundings, one asks oneself, and fails to discover, what kind of glamour he had cast over her that most of these conditions, already patent enough in the society in which she had moved, had contrived either to escape her notice or to appear tolerable. True, she had gone to Germany to find release from the solitude of a motherless home, where an unsympathetic father had no attention to spare from his art treasures; but, with so admirable an aunt as Lady Lushington to chaperon her in her own country, it was not easy to see why she must needs resort to exotic consolation.
GERMAN FRIGHTFULNESS REPULSED.
Lieutenant Kurt Hartling ... Mr. Malcolm Cherry Margaret Tinworth ... Miss Rosalie Toller.