The poetry of this scene reaches back to the beautiful scene in Marriage à la Mode between Palmyra and Leonidas, though, as I have said, Dryden is more romantic, and so neither Palmyra nor Leonidas are of any age, they are merely the youth of all time. But surely no one can read the following passage without being moved to admiration of its beautiful ease, its romantic simplicity as contrasted with the romantic luxuriousness of the Elizabethans:
Leon.: How precious are the hours of love in courts!
In cottages, when love has all the day,
Full, and at ease, he throws it half away.
Time gives himself, and is not valued, there;
But sells at mighty rates, each minute, here:
There, he is lazy, unemployed, and slow;
Here he's more swift; and yet has more to do.
So many of his hours in public move,
That few are left for privacy and love.
Palm.: The sun, methinks, shines faint and dimly, here;
Light is not half so long, nor half so clear:
But oh! when every day was yours or mine,
How early up! what haste he made to shine!
Leon.: Such golden days a prince must hope to see,
Whose every subject is more blessed than he.
Palm.: Do you remember when their tasks were done,
How all the youth did to our cottage run?
While winter-winds were whistling loud without,
Our cheerful hearth was circled round about:
With strokes in ashes, maids their lovers drew;
And still you fell to me, and I to you.
Leon.: When love did of my heart possession take,
I was so young my soul was scarce awake:
I cannot tell when first I thought you fair;
But sucked in love, insensibly as air.
Palm.: I know too well when first my love began,
When at our wake you for the chaplet ran:
Then I was made the Lady of the May,
And, with the garland, at its goal did stay:
Still as you ran, I kept you full in view;
I hoped, and wished, and ran, methought, for you.
As you came near, I hastily did rise,
And stretched my arm outright, that held the prize.
The custom was to kiss whom I should crown;
You kneeled, and in my lap your head laid down:
I blushed, and blushed, and did the kiss delay;
At last my subjects forced me to obey:
But, when I gave the crown, and then the kiss,
I scarce had breath to say, Take that—and this.
The whole of this beautiful scene was delightful on the stage, and by Palmyra (Miss Rita Thom), in particular, the verse was exquisitely spoken. One had that experience, rare indeed in the modern theatre, of subconsciously feeling that the whole audience was hanging on the words.
Again, what could be finer in its way than the scene—greatly helped by the stage-production at the Lyric Theatre, and by Mr. Norman Wilkinson's setting giving it an appropriate atmosphere of masquerade—where Doralice and Melantha are in boys' habits? Here Melantha's French affectation is used with the greatest skill to bring about a scene which is the very essence of romantic swagger. There are few scenes, if any, in Congreve or Sheridan that equal in wit this repartee between the pretended boys, Doralice and Melantha, egged on by Palamede and Rhodophil, leading up to Melantha's final extravagance:
I'll sacrifice my life for French poetry,
and the audience rocked with laughter at Miss Athene Seyler (Melantha) and Miss Cathleen Nesbitt (Doralice), who were superb in their representation of the parts.
Whenever these old comedies are revived there is always bound to spring up from somewhere a demand that they should be bowdlerized. Really the misplaced squeamishness of some men and women is something to marvel at! I have seen nearly every revue, musical comedy, and play that has been produced in London during the last two years, and I declare unhesitatingly that there is something radically wrong with the mentality of the people who can go habitually to the London theatres and music-halls and yet find that there is anything "filthy" about Dryden. Certainly there is no innuendo in Dryden, he is frankly outspoken. But filthy! Shade of Charles Lamb! What is to be done with such people? Not once during the whole performance of Marriage à la Mode was there an occasion when the most sensitive of young girls could have felt even momentarily uncomfortable. Such was far from being the case with a play that had quite a long run at a London theatre not long ago, to which, as far as I know, no one objected!
But I do not want to resist any attempt to make the Phœnix Society bowdlerize Dryden on that ground. Dryden—even more than Congreve—is inoffensive. There are dramatists with dirty minds; we often have had their works performed in London—adapted from the French or in their native English—but even these no one, I hope, would suppress. Dryden emphatically is not one of this class. A cleaner, more wholesome writer never put pen to paper, and the morbid squeamishness that objects to Dryden is the squeamishness of ill-health. It is a case for the doctor, for it is expressive of a pathological malady. On the subject as a whole it would seem an apt occasion to quote some sentences of Lamb's celebrated defence of Congreve, Farquhar, and Wycherley, as there appear to be people who have not heard of it. Lamb explains that these comedies have disappeared from the stage of his day—and he lived at the beginning of the age of Mrs. Grundy—because "the times cannot bear them." It is not alone, he adds, the occasional licence of the dialogue, it is that they will not stand the moral test that is so ridiculously applied to them. The age screws everything up to that. "Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or a guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left." Pursuing this idea, he adds: "We carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades." Here Lamb with the extraordinary penetration characteristic of that rare mind hit upon one of the principal causes of the bankruptcy of the theatre during the hundred years that were to follow him. We are, even at this moment, struggling to get free from that literal-mindedness which is the soul of materialism and which would fetter us down to what it calls realism and will have no extravagance of thought or language, and for whom an escape into the free speech of the theatre—an escape most necessary and most salutary—is, if you please, filth! "All that neutral ground of character," laments Lamb, "that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning—the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted Casuistry—is broken up and disenfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold we wrap it up in a great blanket just out of precaution against the breeze and the sunshine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad of a reason to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me." And concludes Lamb, with fine common sense, "I come back to my cage and my restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom."
It is not often given to any one man to have said the last word on a subject, but I think that on this question Charles Lamb has said the last word. Modern science lends its support to his judgment. The psycho-analyst is beginning to realise that the damage inflicted by socially necessary inhibitions can only be cured by art. It is to be hoped that we will hear less and less of this canting nonsense of "filth" applied to such noble and beautiful work as Dryden's. It is also to be hoped that the Phœnix Society may have a long life, for in the two productions it has so far given us it has more justified its existence than has any society I know of founded in the last dozen years.
W. J. TURNER