It is not as if there were no drama better than the Revue or the Musical Comedy, but the stupidity of the high-brows, their dull acceptance of the solemn and the pompous, of anything in fact that is not bright or imaginative or stirring, but is sufficiently pretentious, does incalculable harm to that annually growing fraction of the public which, fully appreciative of Revue and Musical Comedy, is yet unsatisfied and is really thirsting for finer things. This public is continually essaying samples of the drama of the high-brows and is continually being driven back from such dry, unprofitable verbiage to those theatres where there is humour, wit, charm and beauty. And for this evidence of good taste it is roundly abused. I frequently wonder whether anyone of these misguided zealots has ever been inside the popular theatre, the theatre of the Musical Comedy. Have they any idea what a revelation of beauty it is to large numbers of the population? I dare to assert that in London the popular theatre has done more to develop and educate the taste of the masses in dress, furniture, and decoration than fifty years of propaganda from Ruskin, William Morris, and all their disciples. The theatre, of course, has learnt from the artists of all countries, but it has been the great cultural organisation which has taken the fruits of the artists' work to the people and opened their eyes.
In educating the senses the popular theatre has done and is still doing invaluable work; it is when it comes to educating the finer emotions that it fails so lamentably, though hardly so utterly as the high-brow theatre, in which there are no emotions but those of despair, disillusionment and derision. And yet it is strange that in spite of the general abuse of the low standards of London plays, on the rare occasions when a really fine play is put on it is generally met by the critics with a chorus of disapproval or the praise that damns. We have had a good example in London recently. Mr. Henry Ainley, by common consent our finest actor, begins his management of the St. James's Theatre with Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, the title being changed to Reparation, in consideration of the mental state of a public frightened out of its wits by the high-brows and the cranks. Tolstoy was a great man, and The Living Corpse is a fine play, a play that ought to have a great success; but do the critics say, "Here at last is a magnificent play, a play which everyone must see"? Not a bit of it. The general spirit of their notices is one of chilly respect for the famous name of Tolstoy, with an insinuation that the play would have been much better if it had been handled by a competent dramatist like Sir Arthur Pinero or Mr. Sutro. "What is the central theme? We are not quite sure," says the critic of the leading London daily. Is it a mere coincidence that on the same page that journal's musical critic, in reference to Prometheus, the work of Tolstoy's compatriot, Scriabin, one of the greatest of modern composers, says he does not understand it and, asking himself whether Scriabin was "sane or deranged," declares that he does not know? Here is a lesson for Drama Leagues, for it is almost certain that when we do get good drama scarcely anyone will know it.
*****
A society called "The Phœnix," with headquarters at Dudley House, Southampton Street, Strand, has been formed to revive plays of Elizabethan, Restoration, and later times. The following plays have been selected for early production:
The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), Marriage à la Mode (John Dryden), The Fair Maid of the West, Part I. (Thomas Heywood), Don Carlos (Thomas Otway), Volpone (Ben Jonson). The Duchess of Malfi will be given on Sunday, November 16th.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
HEARTBREAK HOUSE, etc. By Bernard Shaw. Constable. 7s. 6d.
Mr. Shaw is one of the most consistent authors living. His readers know almost to a comma what he is going to give them every time they open his latest book. That is perhaps the chief reason why there has been such a falling off in Mr. Shaw's popularity of recent years. Another reason is, of course, the war; but it is strange that Mr. Shaw's opinions, or his particular way of expressing his opinion, during the war should have alienated and even made bitterly hostile men of wide knowledge and experience of his writings and his character who, if they could be persuaded momentarily to reflect without prejudice, would have to admit that what offends them now was precisely what offended so many others in the years before the war, when they on the contrary were Mr. Shaw's ardent champions or, at the very least, his apologists. It only goes to show how very far anyone of us is from being able to judge a man's work rationally once our own particular prejudice is touched. We are all raw somewhere, and woe to the man who touches us on the raw, for then all hope of dispassionate criticism, of Christian toleration even, is gone. It has been Mr. Shaw's most vivid characteristic that he has never lost his intellectual integrity. It is easy to be honest among one's enemies, but to be honest among one's friends is a virtue so rare, so uncomfortable, and outwardly so contrary to the spirit of fair play that it is not surprising it should be generally detested. Mr. Shaw has always retained what he believes, perhaps conceitedly, to be his right to say the worst that can be said of his dearest friends, and of the advocates of whatever cause happens at the moment to be nearest to his heart. However ruinous such conduct may appear to be to the immediate interests of the movement he is supposed to support, he will not abandon his right to forge weapons for the enemy more damaging than any discoverable by their own brains. When life or one's country or one's family is at stake, such conduct appears little less than devilish, yet Mr. Shaw has his right to express his opinions as lucidly and as pointedly as he can, and it may be that when we are far enough removed from the heat and blinding dust of the moment's conflict we shall realise that Mr. Shaw has been faithful to the truth that is in him, and if we have any reason to complain it is certainly not of Mr. Shaw, but of the God who made him.
It may seem that what the ordinary man would call, and call wrongly, Mr. Shaw's unreliability does not square with the assertion that he is consistent, and that his readers know beforehand exactly what Mr. Shaw is going to give them. But Mr. Shaw's consistency lies in his artillery, not in his object of attack. The enemy varies, but the same guns are always going off. In Heartbreak House there is at times all and more than all the old brilliancy. The dialogue of the first and third acts is concentrated, savage, and burns with an intensity that casts a dull imaginative glow over the play. The characters of the Hushabyes, of Captain Shotover, of the sham millionaire Mangan, of Mazzini Dunn, and the fluteplayer are drawn with a pen steeped in vitriol and, exaggerated as they are, they have a genuine imaginative reality deeper than most Shavian figures. There is a moral passion in this play gloomier and more savage than in anything Mr. Shaw has yet done, and an absence of that childish and inconsequent flippancy which so often mars his work. The other plays in the volume vary in quality from some excellent fooling in Great Catherine to a depressing mechanical liveliness, almost utterly without humour, in Augustus Does His Bit. The best of them is O'Flaherty, V.C.; but although it frequently makes one laugh one finds oneself, at the end, closing the book with that tired yawn that seems to be the fatal consequence of reading a great deal of Mr. Shaw at one time.