M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND

An excellent Parisian company from the Varietes has been playing "La Veine" of M. Alfred Capus, and this week it is playing "Les Deux Ecoles" of the same entertaining writer. The company is led by Mme. Jeanne Granier, an actress who could not be better in her own way unless she acquired a touch of genius, and she has no genius. She was thoroughly and consistently good, she was lifelike, amusing, never out of key; only, while she reminded one at times of Rejane, she had none of Rejane's magnetism, none of Rejane's exciting naturalness.

The whole company is one of excellent quality, which goes together like the different parts of a piece of machinery. There is Mme. Marie Magnier, so admirable as an old lady of that good, easy-going, intelligent, French type. There is Mlle. Lavalliere, with her brilliant eyes and her little canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M. Numes, M. Guy, M. Guitry. M. Guitry is the French equivalent of Mr. Fred Kerr, with all the difference that that change of nationality means. His slow manner, his delaying pantomine, his hard, persistent eyes, his uninflected voice, made up a type which I have never seen more faithfully presented on the stage. And there is M. Brasseur. He is a kind of French Arthur Roberts, but without any of that extravagant energy which carries the English comedian triumphantly through all his absurdities. M. Brasseur is preposterously natural, full of aplomb and impertinence. He never flags, never hesitates; it is impossible to take him seriously, as we say of delightful, mischievous people in real life. I have been amused to see a discussion in the papers as to whether "La Veine" is a fit play to be presented to the English public. "Max" has defended it in his own way in the Saturday Review, and I hasten to say that I quite agree with his defence. Above all, I agree with him when he says: "Let our dramatic critics reserve their indignation for those other plays in which the characters are self-conscious, winkers and gigglers over their own misconduct, taking us into their confidence, and inviting us to wink and giggle with them." There, certainly, is the offence; there is a kind of vulgarity which seems native to the lower English mind and to the lower English stage. M. Capus is not a moralist, but it is not needful to be a moralist. He is a skilful writer for the stage, who takes an amiable, somewhat superficial, quietly humorous view of things, and he takes people as he finds them in a particular section of the upper and lower middle classes in Paris, not going further than the notion which they have of themselves, and presenting that simply, without comment. We get a foolish young millionaire and a foolish young person in a flower shop, who take up a collage together in the most casual way possible, and they are presented as two very ordinary people, neither better nor worse than a great many other ordinary people, who do or do not do much the same thing. They at least do not "wink or giggle"; they take things with the utmost simplicity, and they call upon us to imitate their bland unconsciousness.

"La Veine" is a study of luck, in the person of a very ordinary man, not more intelligent or more selfish or more attractive than the average, but one who knows when to take the luck which comes his way. The few, quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains; the people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours, and they often say humorous things, not in so many set words, but by a clever adjustment of natural and probable nothings. Throughout the play there is an amiable and entertaining common sense which never becomes stage convention; these people talk like real people, only much more a-propos.

In "Les Deux Ecoles" the philosophy which could be discerned in "La Veine," that of taking things as they are and taking them comfortably, is carried to a still further development. I am prepared to be told that the whole philosophy is horribly immoral; perhaps it is; but the play, certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughtiness is so naive, so tactfully frank, that even the American daughter might take her mother to see it, without fear of corrupting the innocence of age. "On peut tres bien vivre sans etre la plus heureuse des femmes": that is one of the morals of the piece; and, the more you think over questions of conduct, the more you realise that you might just as well not have thought about them at all, might be another. The incidents by which these excellent morals are driven home are incidents of the same order as those in "La Veine," and not less entertaining. The mounting, simple as it was, was admirably planned; the stage-pictures full of explicit drollery. And, as before, the whole company worked with the effortless unanimity of a perfect piece of machinery.

A few days after seeing "La Veine" I went to Wyndham's Theatre to see a revival of Sir Francis Burnand's "Betsy." "Betsy," of course, is adapted from the French, though, by an accepted practice which seems to me dishonest, in spite of its acceptance, that fact is not mentioned on the play-bill. But the form is undoubtedly English, very English. What vulgarity, what pointless joking, what pitiable attempts to serve up old impromptus rechauffes! I found it impossible to stay to the end. Some actors, capable of better things, worked hard; there was a terrible air of effort in these attempts to be sprightly in fetters, and in rusty fetters. Think of "La Veine" at its worst, and then think of "Betsy"! I must not ask you to contrast the actors; it would be almost unfair. We have not a company of comedians in England who can be compared for a moment with Mme. Jeanne Granier's company. We have here and there a good actor, a brilliant comic actor, in one kind or another of emphatic comedy; but wherever two or three comedians meet on the English stage, they immediately begin to checkmate, or to outbid, or to shout down one another. No one is content, or no one is able, to take his place in an orchestra in which it is not allotted to every one to play a solo.



A DOUBLE ENIGMA

When it was announced that Mrs. Tree was to give a translation of "L'Enigme" of M. Paul Hervieu at Wyndham's Theatre, the play was announced under the title "Which?" and as "Which?" it appeared on the placards. Suddenly new placards appeared, with a new title, not at all appropriate to the piece, "Caesar's Wife." Rumours of a late decision, or indecision, of the censor were heard. The play had not been prohibited, but it had been adapted to more polite ears. But how? That was the question. I confess that to me the question seemed insoluble. Here is the situation as it exists in the play; nothing could be simpler, more direct, more difficult to tamper with.

Two brothers, Raymond and Gerard de Gourgiran, are in their country house, with their two wives, Giselle and Leonore, and two guests, the old Marquis de Neste and the young M. de Vivarce. The brothers surprise Vivarce on the stairs: was he coming from the room of Giselle or of Leonore? The women are summoned; both deny everything; it is impossible for the audience, as for the husbands, to come to any conclusion. A shot is heard outside: Vivarce has killed himself, so that he may save the reputation of the woman he loves. Then the self-command of Leonore gives way; she avows all in a piercing shriek. After that there is some unnecessary moralising ("La-bas un cadavre! Ici, des sanglots de captive!" and the like), but the play is over.

Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, very intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking dramatic situation. Above all, it is frank; there are no evasions, no sentimental lies, no hypocrisies before facts. If adultery may not be referred to on the English stage except at the Gaiety, between a wink and a laugh, then such a play becomes wholly impossible. Not at all: listen. We are told to suppose that Vivarce and Leonore have had a possibly quite harmless flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Leonore's room, he has merely been walking with Leonore in the garden: at midnight remember, and after her husband has gone to bed. In order to lead up to this, a preposterous speech has been put into the mouth of the Marquis de Neste, an idiotic rhapsody about love and the stars, and I forget what else, which I imagine we are to take as an indication of Vivarce's sentiments as he walks with Leonore in the garden at midnight. But all these precautions are in vain; the audience is never deceived for an instant. A form of words has been used, like the form of words by which certain lies become technically truthful. The whole point of the play: has a husband the right to kill his wife or his wife's lover if he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him? is obviously not a question of whether a husband may kill a gentleman who has walked with his wife in the garden, even after midnight. The force of the original situation comes precisely from the certainty of the fact and the uncertainty of the person responsible for it. "Caesar's Wife" may lend her name for a screen; the screen is no disguise; the play; remains what it was in its moral bearing; a dramatic stupidity has been imported into it, that is all. Here, then, in addition to the enigma of the play is a second, not so easily explained, enigma: the enigma of the censor, and of why he "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform." The play, I must confess, does not seem to me, as it seems to certain French critics, "une piece qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la tragedie des maitres antiques et de Shakespeare." To me it is rather an insubstantial kind of ingenuity, ingenuity turning in a circle. As a tragic episode, the dramatisation of a striking incident, it has force and simplicity, the admirable quality of directness. Occasionally the people are too eager to express the last shade of the author's meaning, as in the conversation between Neste and Vivarce, when the latter decides to commit suicide, or in the supplementary comments when the action is really at an end. But I have never seen a piece which seemed to have been written so kindly and so consistently for the benefit of the actors. There are six characters of equal importance; and each in turn absorbs the whole flood of the limelight.

The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version of "Au Telephone," one of Antoine's recent successes at his theatre in Paris. It was brutal and realistic, it made just the appeal of an accident really seen, and, so far as success in horrifying one is concerned, it was successful. A husband hearing the voice of his wife through the telephone, at the moment when some murderous ruffians are breaking into the house, hearing her last cry, and helpless to aid her, is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as uncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has absolutely no artistic value, because terror without beauty and without significance is not worth causing. When the husband, with his ear at the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing the window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "La Mort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death. In his acting Mr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling; it would be difficult to say, under the circumstances, that he was extravagant, for what extravagance, under the circumstances, would be improbable? He had not, no doubt, what I see described as "le jeu simple et terrible" of Antoine, a dry, hard, intellectual grip on horror; he had the ready abandonment to emotion of the average emotional man. Mr. Warner has an irritating voice and manner, but he has emotional power, not fine nor subtle, but genuine; he feels and he makes you feel. He has the quality, in short, of the play itself, but a quality more tolerable in the actor, who is concerned only with the rendering of a given emotion, than in the playwright, whose business it is to choose, heighten, and dignify the emotion which he gives to him to render.



DRAMA



PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL

Last week gave one an amusing opportunity of contrasting the merits and the defects of the professional and the unprofessional kind of play. "The Gay Lord Quex" was revived at the Duke of York's Theatre, and Mr. Alexander produced at the St. James's Theatre a play called "The Finding of Nancy," which had been chosen by the committee of the Playgoers' Club out of a large number of plays sent in for competition. The writer, Miss Netta Syrett, has published one or two novels or collections of stories; but this, as far as I am aware, is her first attempt at a play. Both plays were unusually well acted, and therefore may be contrasted without the necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was interpreted on the stage.

Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and eye for what is telling, a cynical intelligence which is much more interesting than the uncertain outlook of most of our playwrights. He has no breadth of view, but he has a clear view; he makes his choice out of human nature deliberately, and he deals in his own way with the materials that he selects. Before saying to himself: what would this particular person say or do in these circumstances? he says to himself: what would it be effective on the stage for this particular person to do or say? He suggests nothing, he tells you all he knows; he cares to know nothing but what immediately concerns the purpose of his play. The existence of his people begins and ends with their first and last speech on the boards; the rest is silence, because he can tell you nothing about it. Sophy Fullgarney is a remarkably effective character as a stage-character, but when the play is over we know no more about her than we should know about her if we had spied upon her, in her own way, from behind some bush or keyhole. We have seen a picturesque and amusing exterior, and that is all. Lord Quex does not, I suppose, profess to be even so much of a character as that, and the other people are mere "humours," quite amusing in their cleverly contrasted ways. When these people talk, they talk with an effort to be natural and another effort to be witty; they are never sincere and without self-consciousness; they never say inevitable things, only things that are effective to say. And they talk in poor English. Mr. Pinero has no sense of style, of the beauty or expressiveness of words. His joking is forced and without ideas; his serious writing is common. In "The Gay Lord Quex" he is continually trying to impress upon his audience that he is very audacious and distinctly improper. The improprieties are childish in the innocence of their vulgarity, and the audacities are no more than trifling lapses of taste. He shows you the interior of a Duchess's bedroom, and he shows you the Duchess's garter, in a box of other curiosities. He sets his gentlemen and ladies talking in the allusive style which you may overhear whenever you happen to be passing a group of London cabmen. The Duchess has written in her diary, "Warm afternoon." That means that she has spent an hour with her lover. Many people in the audience laugh. All the cabmen would have laughed.

Now look for a moment at the play by the amateur and the woman. It is not a satisfactory play as a whole, it is not very interesting in all its developments, some of the best opportunities are shirked, some of the characters (all the characters who are men) are poor. But, in the first place, it is well written. Those people speak a language which is nearer to the language of real life than that used by Mr. Pinero, and when they make jokes there is generally some humour in the joke and some intelligence in the humour. They have ideas and they have feelings. The ideas and the feelings are not always combined with faultless logic into a perfectly clear and coherent presentment of character, it is true. But from time to time we get some of the illusion of life. From time to time something is said or done which we know to be profoundly true. A woman has put into words some delicate instinct of a woman's soul. Here and there is a cry of the flesh, here and there a cry of the mind, which is genuine, which is a part of life. Miss Syrett has much to learn if she is to become a successful dramatist, and she has not as yet shown that she knows men as well as women; but at least she has begun at the right end. She has begun with human nature and not with the artifices of the stage, she has thought of her characters as people before thinking of them as persons of the drama, she has something to say through them, they are not mere lines in a pattern. I am not at all sure that she has the makings of a dramatist, or that if she writes another play it will be better than this one. You do not necessarily get to your destination by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey. The one certain thing is that if you take the wrong turning at the beginning, and follow it persistently, you will not get to your destination at all. The playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath out of life before he has suited it to his purpose, is at the best only playing a clever game with us. He may amuse us, but he is only playing ping-pong with the emotions. And that is why we should welcome, I think, any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as it is does not always come into the picture.



TOLSTOI AND OTHERS

There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi. Those novels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed into dramas. The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly unemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of painter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense, monotonous, and it is meant to be monotonous. Tolstoi endeavours to give us something more nearly resembling daily life than any one has yet given us; and in daily life the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in which external action takes part. In the drama we can only properly realise the soul's action through some corresponding or consequent action which takes place visibly before us. You will find, throughout Tolstoi's work, many striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can bear detachment from that network of detail which has led up to it and which is to come out of it. Often the scene which most profoundly impresses one is a scene trifling in itself, and owing its impressiveness partly to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II., chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the eternal 'Dame aux Camelias,' in which a foreign actress once again, and in a novel manner, showed how women died of consumption." The General's wife, Mariette, smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, outside, in the street, another woman, the other "half-world," smiles at him, just in the same way. That is all, but to Nekhludoff it is one of the great crises of his life. He has seen something, for the first time, in what he now feels to be its true light, and he sees it "as clearly as he saw the palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats and the Stock Exchange. And just as on this northern summer night there was no restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was no longer the restful darkness, ignorance." The chapter is profoundly impressive; it is one of those chapters which no one but Tolstoi has ever written. Imagine it transposed to the stage, if that were possible, and the inevitable disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!

In Tolstoi the story never exists for its own sake, but for the sake of a very definite moral idea. Even in his later novels Tolstoi is not a preacher; he gives us an interpretation of life, not a theorising about life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of more consequence) it gives a great part of its value to his "realism" of prisons and brothels and police courts. In all forms of art, the point of view is of more importance than the subject-matter. It is as essential for the novelist to get the right focus as it is for the painter. In a page of Zola and in a page of Tolstoi you might find the same gutter described with the same minuteness; and yet in reading the one you might see only the filth, while in reading the other you might feel only some fine human impulse. Tolstoi "sees life steadily" because he sees it under a divine light; he has a saintly patience with evil, and so becomes a casuist through sympathy, a psychologist out of that pity which is understanding. And then, it is as a direct consequence of this point of view, in the mere process of unravelling things, that his greatest skill is shown as a novelist. He does not exactly write well; he is satisfied if his words express their meaning, and no more; his words have neither beauty nor subtlety in themselves. But, if you will only give him time, for he needs time, he will creep closer and closer up to some doubtful and remote truth, not knowing itself for what it is: he will reveal the soul to itself, like "God's spy."

If you want to know how, daily life goes on among people who know as little about themselves as you know about your neighbours in a street or drawing-room, read Jane Austen, and, on that level, you will be perfectly satisfied. But if you want to know why these people are happy or unhappy, why the thing which they do deliberately is not the thing which they either want or ought to do, read Tolstoi; and I can hardly add that you will be satisfied. I never read Tolstoi without a certain suspense, sometimes a certain terror. An accusing spirit seems to peer between every line; I can never tell what new disease of the soul those pitying and unswerving eyes may not have discovered.

Such, then, is a novel of Tolstoi; such, more than almost any of his novels, is "Resurrection," the masterpiece of his old age, into which he has put an art but little less consummate than that of "Anna Karenina," together with the finer spirit of his later gospel. Out of this novel a play in French was put together by M. Henry Bataille and produced at the Odeon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was called, Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M. Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'on est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. Are those quite the words one would use about the play in English?

They are not quite the words I would use about the play in English. It is a melodrama with one good scene, the scene in the prison; and this is good only to a certain point. There is another scene which is amusing, the scene of the jury, but the humour is little more than clowning, and the tragic note, which should strike through it, is only there in a parody of itself. Indeed the word parody is the only word which can be used about the greater part of the play, and it seems to me a pity that the name of Tolstoi should be brought into such dangerous companionship with the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I heard people around me confessing that they had not read the book. How terrible must have been the disillusion of those people, if they had ever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed that this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle of drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing disbelief, was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simple little gospel. Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I should be inclined to define him; but I must give Mr. Tree his full credit in the matter. When he crucifies himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the door of the jury-room, remarking in his slowest manner: "The bird flutters no longer; I must atone, I must atone!" one is, in every sense, alone with the actor. Mr. Tree has many arts, but he has not the art of sincerity. His conception of acting is, literally, to act, on every occasion. Even in the prison scene, in which Miss Ashwell is so good, until she begins to shout and he to rant, "and then the care is over," Mr. Tree cannot be his part without acting it.

That prison scene is, on the whole, well done, and the first part of it, when the women shout and drink and quarrel, is acted with a satisfying sense of vulgarity which contrasts singularly with what is meant to be a suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene preceding. Perhaps the most lamentable thing in the play is the first act. This act takes the place of those astounding chapters in the novel in which the seduction of Katusha is described with a truth, tact, frankness, and subtlety unparalleled in any novel I have ever read. I read them over before I went to the theatre, and when I got to the theatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more than a sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, in short, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage, dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at which one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an "adaptation" from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated by some translators and by many critics; in his own country, if you mention his name, you are as likely as not to be met by a shrug and an "Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu!" In his own country he has the censor always against him; some of his books he has never been able to print in full in Russian. But in the new play at His Majesty's Theatre we have, in what is boldly called Tolstoi's "Resurrection," something which is not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated. Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M. Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been left well alone?



SOME PROBLEM PLAYS

I. "THE MARRYING OF ANN LEETE"

It was for the production of such plays as Mr. Granville Barker's that the Stage Society was founded, and it is doing good service to the drama in producing them. "The Marrying of Ann Leete" is the cleverest and most promising new play that I have seen for a long time; but it cannot be said to have succeeded even with the Stage Society audience, and no ordinary theatrical manager is very likely to produce it. The author, it is true, is an actor, but he is young; his play is immature, too crowded with people, too knotted up with motives, too inconclusive in effect. He knows the stage, and his knowledge has enabled him to use the stage for his own purposes, inventing a kind of technique of his own, doing one or two things which have never, or never so deftly, been done before. But he is something besides all that; he can think, he can write, and he can suggest real men and women. The play opens in the dark, and remains for some time brilliantly ambiguous. People, late eighteenth-century people, talk with bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point; they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight. Some of the dialogue is, as the writer says of politics, "a game for clever children, women, and fools"; it is a game demanding close attention. A courtly indolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; people walk, as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on; it fills one with excitement, the excitement of following a trail. It is a trail of ideas, these people think, and they act because they have thought. They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, their hearts are in their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; but these people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding one's mind in suspense.

Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family, and he interests us in every member of that family. He plays them like chessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind. They express ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads. They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is part of their keen sense of the game. They talk at cross-purposes, as they wander in and out of the garden terrace; they plan out their lives, and life comes and surprises them by the way. Then they speak straight out of their hearts, sometimes crudely, sometimes with a naivete which seems laughable; and they act on sudden impulses, accepting the consequences when they come. They live an artificial life, knowing lies to be lies, and choosing them; they are civilised, they try to do their duty by society; only, at every moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their path, and they have to stop, consider, choose a new direction. They seem to go their own way, almost without guiding; and indeed may have escaped almost literally out of their author's hands. The last scene is an admirable episode, a new thing on the stage, full of truth within its own limits; but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less a solution. Mr. Barker can write: he writes in short, sharp sentences, which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing, from every corner of the stage. He brings his people on and off with an unconventionality which comes of knowing the resources of the theatre, and of being unfettered by the traditions of its technique. The scene with the gardener in the second act has extraordinary technical merit, and it has the art which conceals its art. There are other inventions in the play, not all quite so convincing. Sometimes Mr. Barker, in doing the right or the clever thing, does it just not quite strongly enough to carry it against opposition. The opposition is the firm and narrow mind of the British playgoer. Such plays as Mr. Barker's are apt to annoy without crushing. The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewilders the world with what is novel in his art; the great artist convinces the world. Mr. Barker is young: he will come to think with more depth and less tumult; he will come to work with less prodigality and more mastery of means. But he has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd and honest in the spectacle of this game, in which the pawns seem to move themselves.



II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"

On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the performance of the Stage Society. The play is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the problem is the problem of all Ibsen's plays: the desire of life, the attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only, we see the eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea calls to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and the sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who has talked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes seem to her to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirable symbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on his back climbs over the garden wall and says: "I have come for you; are you coming?" and then tells the woman that he has read of her marriage in the newspaper, it seemed as if the symbol had lost a good deal of its meaning in the gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is, but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witchcraft if the Stranger had never appeared upon the stage. Just as Wagner insisted upon a crawling and howling dragon, a Fafner with a name of his own and a considerable presence, so Ibsen brings the supernatural or the subconscious a little crudely into the midst of his persons of the drama. To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory.



III. "THE NEW IDOL"

It was an interesting experiment on the part of the Stage Society to give a translation of "La Nouvelle Idole," one of those pieces by which M. Francois de Curel has reached that very actual section of the French public which is interested in ideas. "The New Idol" is a modern play of the most characteristically modern type; its subject-matter is largely medical, it deals with the treatment of cancer; we are shown a doctor's laboratory, with a horrible elongated diagram of the inside of the human body; a young girl's lungs are sounded in the doctor's drawing-room; nearly every, character talks science and very little but science. When they cease talking science, which they talk well, with earnestness and with knowledge, and try to talk love or intrigue, they talk badly, as if they were talking of things which they knew nothing about. Now, personally, this kind of talk does not interest me; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But I am ready to admit that it is justified if I find that the dramatic movement of the play requires it, that it is itself an essential part of the action. In "The New Idol" I think this is partly the case. The other medical play which has lately been disturbing Paris, "Les Avaries," does not seem to me to fulfil this condition at any moment: it is a pamphlet from beginning to end, it is not a satisfactory pamphlet, and it has no other excuse for existence. But M. de Curel has woven his problem into at least a semblance of action; the play is not a mere discussion of irresistible physical laws; the will enters into the problem, and will fights against will, and against not quite irresistible physical laws. The suggestion of love interests, which come to nothing, and have no real bearing on the main situation, seems to me a mistake; it complicates things, things which must appear to us so very real if we are to accept them at all, with rather a theatrical kind of complication. M. de Curel is more a thinker than a dramatist, as he has shown lately in the very original, interesting, impossible "Fille Sauvage." He grapples with serious matters seriously, and he argues well, with a closely woven structure of arguments; some of them bringing a kind of hard and naked poetry out of mere closeness of thinking and closeness of seeing. In "The New Idol" there is some dialogue, real dialogue, natural give-and-take, about the fear of death and the horror of indestructibility (a variation on one of the finest of Coventry Patmore's odes) which seemed to me admirable: it held the audience because it was direct speech, expressing a universal human feeling in the light of a vivid individual crisis. But such writing as this was rare; for the most part it was the problem itself which insisted on occupying our attention, or, distinct from this, the too theatrical characters.



IV. "MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION"

The Stage Society has shown the courage of its opinions by giving an unlicensed play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession," one of the "unpleasant plays" of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, at the theatre of the New Lyric Club. It was well acted, with the exception of two of the characters, and the part of Mrs. Warren was played by Miss Fanny Brough, one of the cleverest actresses on the English stage, with remarkable ability. The action was a little cramped by the smallness of the stage, but, for all that, the play was seen under quite fair conditions, conditions under which it could be judged as an acting play and as a work of art. It is brilliantly clever, with a close, detective cleverness, all made up of merciless logic and unanswerable common sense. The principal characters are well drawn, the scenes are constructed with a great deal of theatrical skill, the dialogue is telling, the interest is held throughout. To say that the characters, without exception, are ugly in their vice and ugly in their virtue; that they all have, men and women, something of the cad in them; that their language is the language of vulgar persons, is, perhaps, only to say that Mr. Shaw has chosen, for artistic reasons, to represent such people just as they are. But there is something more to be said. "Mrs. Warren's Profession" is not a representation of life; it is a discussion about life. Now, discussion on the stage may be interesting. Why not? Discussion is the most interesting thing in the world, off the stage; it is the only thing that makes an hour pass vividly in society; but when discussion ends art has not begun. It is interesting to see a sculptor handling bits of clay, sticking them on here, scraping them off there; but that is only the interest of a process. When he has finished I will consider whether his figure is well or ill done; until he has finished I can have no opinion about it. It is the same thing with discussion on the stage. The subject of Mr. Shaw's discussion is what is called a "nasty" one. That is neither here nor there, though it may be pointed out that there is no essential difference between the problem that he discusses and the problem that is at the root of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray."

But Mr. Shaw, I believe, is never without his polemical intentions, and I should like, for a moment, to ask whether his discussion of his problem, taken on its own merits, is altogether the best way to discuss things. Mr. Shaw has an ideal of life: he asks that men and women should be perfectly reasonable, that they should clear their minds of cant, and speak out everything that is in their minds. He asks for cold and clear logic, and when he talks about right and wrong he is really talking about right and wrong logic. Now, logic is not the mainspring of every action, nor is justice only the inevitable working out of an equation. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves like clockwork; and must be regulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed simply in proportion to its exactitude in keeping time. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does not move by clockwork, and the ultimate justice will have to take count of more exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of. There is a great living writer who has brought to bear on human problems as consistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together with something which Mr. Shaw disdains. Mr. Shaw's logic is sterile, because it is without sense of touch, sense of sight, or sense of hearing; once set going it is warranted to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi's logic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness, because it understands, and because to understand is, among other things, to pardon. In a word, the difference between the spirit of Tolstoi and the spirit of Mr. Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Euclid.



"MONNA, VANNA"

In his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his own, which was a sort of projection into space of the world of nursery legends and of childish romances. It was at once very abstract and very local. There was a castle by the sea, a "well at the world's end," a pool in a forest; princesses with names out of the "Morte d'Arthur" lost crowns of gold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness of eternal terror. Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, and destiny the stage-manager. The people who came and went had the blind gestures of marionettes, and one pitied their helplessness. Pity and terror had indeed gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more literal than Aristotle's.

In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the words were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasants or children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque. Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in an essay in "Le Tresor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said which mattered.

Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With "Aglavaine et Selysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which people thought about action and talked about action, and discussed the morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.

"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et Selysette," and in it for the first time Maeterlinck has represented the conflicts of the inner life in an external form, making drama, while the people who undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment of their happening.

In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destinee," Maeterlinck says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragedies ne nous offrent pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalite. Je crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragedie ou la fatalite regne reellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas une ou le heros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poetes tragiques osent tres rarement permettre au sage de paraitre un moment sur la scene. Ils craignent une ame haute parce que les evenements la craignent." Now it is this conception of life and of drama that we find in "Monna Vanna." We see the conflict of wisdom, personified in the old man Marco and in the instinctively wise Giovanna, with the tragic folly personified in the husband Guido, who rebels against truth and against life, and loses even that which he would sacrifice the world to keep. The play is full of lessons in life, and its deepest lesson is a warning against the too ready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of morality. Here is a play in which almost every character is noble, in which treachery becomes a virtue, a lie becomes more vital than truth, and only what we are accustomed to call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and even criminal. And it is most like life, as life really is, in this: that at any moment the whole course of the action might be changed, the position of every character altered, or even reversed, by a mere decision of the will, open to each, and that things happen as they do because it is impossible, in the nature of each, that the choice could be otherwise. Character, in the deepest sense, makes the action, and there is something in the movement of the play which resembles the grave and reasonable march of a play of Sophocles, in which men and women deliberate wisely and not only passionately, in which it is not only the cry of the heart and of the senses which takes the form of drama.

In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Interieur," and even "Pelleas et Melisande," he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashion of his own; "Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word. The action moves, and moves always in an interesting, even in a telling, way. But at the same time I cannot but feel that something has been lost. The speeches, which were once so short as to be enigmatical, are now too long, too explanatory; they are sometimes rhetorical, and have more logic than life. The playwright has gained experience, the thinker has gained wisdom, but the curious artist has lost some of his magic. No doubt the wizard had drawn his circle too small, but now he has stepped outside his circle into a world which no longer obeys his formulas. In casting away his formulas, has he the big human mastery which alone could replace them? "Monna Vanna" is a remarkable and beautiful play, but it is not a masterpiece. "La Mort de Tintagiles" was a masterpiece of a tiny, too deliberate kind; but it did something which no one had ever done before. We must still, though we have seen "Monna Vanna," wait, feeling that Maeterlinck has not given us all that he is capable of giving us.



THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.

The letter of protest which appeared in the Times of June 30, 1903, signed by Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Meredith, and Mr. Hardy, the three highest names in contemporary English literature, will, I hope, have done something to save the literary reputation of England from such a fate as one eminent dramatic critic sees in store for it. "Once more," says the Athenaeum, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, and makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The Morning Post is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the unfortunate censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting the most beautiful play of his time, and must live to be the laughing-stock of all sensible people."

Now the question is: which is really made ridiculous by this ridiculous episode of the prohibition of Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," England or Mr. Redford? Mr. Redford is a gentleman of whom I only know that he is not himself a man of letters, and that he has not given any public indication of an intelligent interest in literature as literature. If, as a private person, before his appointment to the official post of censor of the drama, he had expressed in print an opinion on any literary or dramatic question, that opinion would have been taken on its own merits, and would have carried only the weight of its own contents. The official appointment, which gives him absolute power over the public life or death of a play, gives to the public no guarantee of his fitness for the post. So far as the public can judge, he was chosen as the typical "man in the street," the "plain man who wants a plain answer," the type of the "golden mean," or mediocrity. We hear that he is honest and diligent, that he reads every word of every play sent for his inspection. These are the virtues of the capable clerk, not of the penetrating judge. Now the position, if it is to be taken seriously, must require delicate discernment as well as inflexible uprightness. Is Mr. Redford capable of discriminating between what is artistically fine and what is artistically ignoble? If not, he is certainly incapable of discriminating between what is morally fine and what is morally ignoble. It is useless for him to say that he is not concerned with art, but with morals. They cannot be dissevered, because it is really the art which makes the morality. In other words, morality does not consist in the facts of a situation or in the words of a speech, but in the spirit which informs the whole work. Whatever may be the facts of "Monna Vanna" (and I contend that they are entirely above reproach, even as facts), no one capable of discerning the spirit of a work could possibly fail to realise that the whole tendency of the play is noble and invigorating. All this, all that is essential, evidently escapes Mr. Redford. He licenses what the Times rightly calls "such a gross indecency as 'The Girl from Maxim's.'" But he refuses to license "Monna Vanna," and he refuses to state his reason for withholding the license. The fact is, that moral questions are discussed in it, not taken for granted, and the plain man, the man in the street, is alarmed whenever people begin to discuss moral questions. "The Girl from Maxim's" is merely indecent, it raises no problems. "Monna Vanna" raises problems. Therefore, says the censor, it must be suppressed. By his decision in regard to this play of Maeterlinck, Mr. Redford has of course conclusively proved his unfitness for his post. But that is only one part of the question. The question is: could any one man be found on whose opinion all England might safely rely for its dramatic instruction and entertainment? I do not think such a man could be found. With Mr. Redford, as the Times puts it, "any tinge of literary merit seems at once to excite his worst suspicions." But with a censor whose sympathies were too purely literary, literary in too narrow a sense, would not scruples of some other kind begin to intrude themselves, scruples of the student who cannot tolerate an innocent jesting with "serious" things, scruples of the moralist who must choose between Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio, between Tolstoi and Ibsen? I cannot so much as think of a man in all England who would be capable of justifying the existence of the censorship. Is it, then, merely Mr. Redford who is made ridiculous by this ridiculous episode, or is it not, after all, England, which has given us the liberty of the press and withheld from us the liberty of the stage?



A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC

John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for the stage have done without thinking about art at all.

She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of good manners. The game is after all the thing, and the skill of the game. When the pawns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns, they are hushed before they become disturbing. It is in this power to play the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with pieces made scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie's skill, in this play, seems to me to consist.

Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief, to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seen treating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of the play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen. How this kind of work will appeal to the general public I can hardly tell. When I saw "Sweet and Twenty" on its first performance, I honestly expected the audience to burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled with delight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling with delight. If the caricature of the natural emotions can give so much pleasure, will a delicate suggestion of them, as in this play, ever mean very much to the public?

The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell of Old Drury," I happened to be in the last row of the stalls. My seat was not altogether well adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it was admirably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my attention to my neighbours there. Whenever a foolish joke was made on the stage, when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell, the orange girl, stuttered with laughter or romped heavily across the stage, the pit thrilled and quivered with delight. At every piece of clowning there was the same responsive gurgle of delight. Tricks of acting so badly done that I should have thought a child would have seen through them, and resented them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect good faith, and gloated over. I was turning over the matter in my mind afterwards, when I remembered something that was said to me the other day by a young Swedish poet who is now in London. He told me that he had been to most of the theatres, and he had been surprised to find that the greater part of the pieces which were played at the principal London theatres were such pieces as would be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower class theatres, and that nobody here seemed to mind. The English audience, he said, reminded him of a lot of children; they took what was set before them with ingenuous good temper, they laughed when they were expected to laugh, cried when they were expected to cry. But of criticism, preference, selection, not a trace. He was amazed, for he had been told that London was the centre of civilisation. Well, in future I shall try to remember, when I hear an audience clapping its hands wildly over some bad play, badly acted: it is all right, it is only the children.



THE TEST OF THE ACTOR

The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such a play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a complimentary preface, has said: "The claim of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's more ambitious plays to rank as literature may have been in some cases grudgingly allowed, but has not been seriously contested." Mr. Jones himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the Nineteenth Century: "O human life! so varied, so vast, so complex, so rich and subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim of silver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell of insight, who of us can govern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages to any utterance of harmony, or pluck out the heart of thy eternal mystery?" Does Mr. Jones, I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates, in "The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not to "rank as Literature"? The audience, for once, was unanimous. Mr. Jones was not encouraged to appear. And yet there had been applause, prolonged applause, at many points throughout this bewildering evening. The applause was meant for the actors.

If Mr. Jones had shown as much tact in the construction of his play as in the selection of his cast, how admirable the play would have been! I have rarely seen a play in which each actor seemed to fit into his part with such exactitude. But the play! Well, the play began as a comedy, continued as a tragedy, and ended as a farce. It came to a crisis every five minutes, it suggested splendid situations, and then caricatured them unintentionally, it went shilly-shallying about among the emotions and sensations which may be drama or melodrama, whichever the handling makes them. "You see there is a little poetical justice going about the world," says the Princess, when she hears that her rival, against whom she has fought in vain, has been upset by Providence in the form of a motor-car, and the bridge of her nose broken. The broken nose is Mr. Jones's symbol for poetical justice; it indicates his intellectual attitude. There are many parts of the play where he shows, as he has so often shown, a genuine skill in presenting and manipulating humorous minor characters. As usual, they have little to do with the play, but they are amusing for their moment. It is the serious characters who will not be serious. They are meant well, the action hovers about them with little tempting solicitations, continually offering them an opportunity to be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can be grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material is wasted; only the actress makes anything of it. We know how Sullivan will take a motive of mere farce, such words as the "O Captain Shaw!" of "Iolanthe," and will write a lovely melody to go with it, fitting his music to the feeling which the words do but caricature. That is how Miss Irene Vanbrugh handled Mr. Jones's unshapen material. By the earnestness, sincerity, sheer nature, power, fire, dignity, and gaiety of her acting, she made for us a figure which Mr. Jones had not made. Mr. Jones would set his character in some impossible situation, and Miss Vanbrugh would make us, for the moment, forget its impossibility. He would give her a trivial or a grotesque or a vulgar action to do, and she would do it with distinction. She had force in lightness, a vivid malice, a magnetic cheerfulness; and she could suffer silently, and be sincere in a tragedy which had been conceived without sincerity. If acting could save a play, "The Princess's Nose" would have been saved. It was not saved.

And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, as we may realise any day when Sarah Bernhardt acts before us, there is a certain kind of frankly melodramatic play which can be lifted into at all events a region of excited and gratified nerves. I have lately been to see a melodrama called "The Heel of Achilles," which Miss Julia Neilson has been giving at the Globe Theatre. The play was meant to tear at one's susceptibilities, much as "La Tosca" tears at them. "La Tosca" is not a fine play in itself, though it is a much better play than "The Heel of Achilles." But it is the vivid, sensational acting of Sarah Bernhardt which gives one all the shudders. "The Heel of Achilles" did not give me a single shudder, not because it was not packed with the raw material of sensation, but because Miss Julia Neilson went through so many trying experiences with nerves of marble.

I cannot help wondering at the curious lack of self-knowledge in actors. Here is a play, which depends for a great deal of its effect on a scene in which Lady Leslie, a young Englishwoman in Russia, promises to marry a Russian prince whom she hates, in order to save her betrothed lover from being sent to Siberia. The lover is shut in between two doors, unable to get out; he is the bearer of a State secret, and everything depends on his being able to catch the eleven P.M. train for Berlin. The Russian prince stands before the young Englishwoman, offering her the key of the door, the safety of her lover, and his own hand in marriage. Now, she has to express by her face and her movements all the feelings of astonishment, horror, suspense, love, hatred, distraction, which such a situation would call up in her. If she does not express them the scene goes for nothing. The actress stakes all on this scene. Now, is it possible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined herself to be capable of rendering this scene as it should be rendered? It is a scene that requires no brains, no subtle emotional quality, none of the more intellectual merits of acting. It requires simply a great passivity to feeling, the mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and the body like drenching waves. The actress need not know how she does it; she may do it without an effort, or she may obtain her spontaneity by an elaborate calculation. But to do it at all she must be the actress in every fibre of her body; she must be able to vibrate freely. If the emotion does not seize her in its own grasp, and then seize us through her, it will all go for nothing. Well, Miss Neilson sat, and walked, and started, and became rigid, and glanced at the clock, and knelt, and fell against the wall, and cast her eyes about, and threw her arms out, and made her voice husky; and it all went for nothing. Never for an instant did she suggest what she was trying to suggest, and after the first moment of disappointment the mind was left calmly free to watch her attempt as if it were speculating round a problem.

How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of dealing adequately with such a scene as that? I take it, not because it is a good scene, but because it affords so rudimentary a test of the capacity for acting. The test of the capacity for acting begins where words end; it is independent of words; you may take poor words as well as fine words; it is all the same. The embodying power, the power to throw open one's whole nature to an overcoming sensation, the power to render this sensation in so inevitable a way that others shall feel it: that is the one thing needful. It is not art, it is not even the beginning of art; but it is the foundation on which alone art can be built.

The other day, in "Ulysses," there was only one piece of acting that was quite convincing: the acting of Mr. Brough as the Swineherd. It is a small part and an easy part, but it was perfectly done. Almost any other part would have been more striking and surprising if it had been done as perfectly, but no other part was done as perfectly. Mr. Brough has developed a stage-personality of his own, with only a limited range of emotion, but he has developed it until it has become a second nature with him. He has only to speak, and he may say what he likes; we accept him after the first word, and he remains what that first word has shown him to be. Mr. Tree, with his many gifts, his effective talents, all his taste, ambition, versatility, never produces just that effect: he remains interestingly aside from what he is doing; you see his brain working upon it, you enjoy his by-play; his gait, his studied gestures, absorb you; "How well this is done!" you say, and "How well that is done!" and, indeed, you get a complete picture out of his representation of that part: a picture, not a man.

I am not sure that melodrama is not the hardest test of the actor: it is, at least, the surest. All the human emotions throng noisily together in the making of melodrama: they are left there, in their naked muddle, and they come to no good end; but there they are. To represent any primary emotion, and to be ineffective, is to fail in the fundamental thing. All actors should be sent to school in melodrama, as all dramatic authors should learn their trade there.



THE PRICE OF REALISM

Modern staging, which has been carried in England to its highest point of excellence, professes to aim at beauty, and is, indeed, often beautiful in detail. But its real aim is not at the creation of beautiful pictures, in subordination to the words and actions of the play, but at supplementing words and actions by an exact imitation of real surroundings. Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in its attempt to imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to the substitution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory indications of them. "Real water" we have all heard of, and we know its place in the theatre; but this is only the simplest form of this anti-artistic endeavour to be real. Sir Henry Irving will use, for a piece of decoration meant to be seen only from a distance, a garland of imitation flowers, exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where two or three brushes of paint would have supplied its place more effectively. When d'Annunzio's "Francesca da Rimini" was put on the stage in Rome, a pot of basil was brought daily from Naples in order that it might be laid on the window-sill of the room in which Francesca and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere. In an interview published in one of the English papers, d'Annunzio declared that he had all his stage decorations made in precious metal by fine craftsmen, and that he had done this for an artistic purpose, and not only for the beauty of the things themselves. The gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to his lips a cup of finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than that of the actor who uses a gilded "property."

If so, I can but answer, the actor is no actor, but an amateur. The true actor walks in a world as real in its unreality as that which surrounds the poet or the enthusiast. The bare boards, chairs, and T-light, in the midst of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as all the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumber the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who are speaking for them.

This costly and inartistic aim at reality, then, is the vice of the modern stage, and, at its best or worst, can it be said that it is really even what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of the real thing? I said once, to clinch an argument against it, by giving it its full possible credit, that the modern staging can give you the hour of the day and the corner of the country with precise accuracy. But can it? Has the most gradual of stage-moons ever caught the miraculous lunar trick to the life? Has the real hedgerow ever brought a breath of the country upon the stage? I do not think so, and meanwhile, we have been trying our hardest to persuade ourselves that it is so, instead of abandoning ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of the play itself.

What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns, teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and painted gables.

I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr. Tree's boats on real Thames water.

Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation of real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem, will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical plays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of nature.



ON CROSSING STAGE TO RIGHT

If you look into the actors' prompt-books, the most frequent direction which you will find is this: "Cross stage to right." It is not a mere direction, it is a formula; it is not a formula only, but a universal remedy. Whenever the action seems to flag, or the dialogue to become weak or wordy, you must "cross stage to right"; no matter what is wrong with the play, this will set it right. We have heard so much of the "action" of a play, that the stage-manager in England seems to imagine that dramatic action is literally a movement of people across the stage, even if for no other reason than for movement's sake. Is the play weak? He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending it out walking for its health.

If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well as an improvisation, we shall realise that one of its main requirements is that it should make pictures. That is the lesson of Bayreuth, and when one comes away, the impression which remains, almost longer than the impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. But here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does not aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinck should be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention; but I admit that you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way.

The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier's company came over here to give us some lessons in acting, I watched a little scene in "La Veine," which was one of the telling scenes of the play: Guitry and Brasseur standing face to face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and then waiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in which the whole temperament of each is summed up. One is inclined to say: No English actor could have done it. Perhaps; but then, no English stage-manager would have let them do it. They would have been told to move, to find "business," to indulge in gesture which would not come naturally to them. Again, in "Tartuffe," when, at the end, the hypocrite is exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin simply turns his back on the audience, and stands, with head sullenly down, making no movement; then, at the end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the nearer side of the stage, giving you no more than a momentary glimpse of a convulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross, raging mood. It would have taken Mr. Tree five minutes to get off the stage, and he would have walked to and fro with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on one face, so to speak, after another. Would it have been so effective, that is to say, so real?

A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and how not to do things. Their blood helps them, for there is movement in their blood, and they have something to restrain. But they have realised the art there is in being quite still, in speaking naturally, as people do when they are really talking, in fixing attention on the words they are saying and not on their antics while saying them. The other day, in the first act of "The Bishop's Move" at the Garrick, there is a Duchess talking to a young novice in the refectory of a French abbey. After standing talking to him for a few minutes, with only such movements as would be quite natural under the circumstances, she takes his arm, not once only but twice, and walks him up and down in front of the footlights, for no reason in the world except to "cross stage to right." The stage trick was so obvious that it deprived the scene at once of any pretence to reality.

The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference between what is dramatic and what is merely theatrical. Drama is made to be acted, and the finest "literary" play in the world, if it wholly fails to interest people on the stage, will have wholly failed in its first and most essential aim. But the finer part of drama is implicit in the words and in the development of the play, and not in its separate small details of literal "action." Two people should be able to sit quietly in a room, without ever leaving their chairs, and to hold our attention breathless for as long as the playwright likes. Given a good play, French actors are able to do that. Given a good play, English actors are not allowed to do it.

Is it not partly the energy, the restless energy, of the English character which prevents our actors from ever sitting or standing still on the stage? We are a nation of travellers, of sailors, of business people; and all these have to keep for ever moving. Our dances are the most vigorous and athletic of dances, they carry us all over the stage, with all kinds of leaping and kicking movements. Our music-hall performers have invented a kind of clowning peculiar to this country, in which kicking and leaping are also a part of the business. Our melodramas are constructed on more movable planes, with more formidable collapses and collisions, than those of any other country. Is not, then, the persistent English habit of "crossing stage to right" a national characteristic, ingrained in us, and not only a matter of training? It is this reflection which hinders me from hoping, with much confidence, that a reform in stage-management will lead to a really quieter and simpler way of acting. But might not the experiment be tried? Might not some stage-manager come forward and say: "For heaven's sake stand still, my dear ladies and gentlemen, and see if you cannot interest your audience without moving more than twice the length of your own feet?"



THE SPEAKING OF VERSE

Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far they were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not apparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stage traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly contorted species of prose.

An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr. Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr. Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech of actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says Lamb, in the profoundest essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to hear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if he were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to do it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here, in the rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, if he is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of the actor, but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of the "dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had not been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra. When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of even the "solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that poetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?

The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the sound. I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard a lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comedie Francaise, on the art of speaking on the stage.

The method of M. Silvain (who, besides being an actor, is Professor of Declamation at the Conservatoire) is the method of the elocutionist, but of the elocutionist at his best. He has a large, round, vibrating voice, over which he has perfect command. "M. Silvain," says M. Catulle Mendes, "est de ceux, bien rares au Theatre Francais, qu'on entend meme lorsqu'ils par lent bas." He has trained his voice to do everything that he wants it to do; his whole body is full of life, energy, sensitiveness to the emotion of every word; his gestures seem to be at once spontaneous and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt for prose, as an inferior form. In all his renderings of verse, he never forgot that it was at the same time speech, the direct expression of character, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence. He gave La Fontaine in one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in another, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the same attempt: to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade from Corneille's "Cinna," he followed the angry reasoning of the lines by counting on his fingers: one, two, three, as if he were underlining the important words of each clause. The danger of this method is that it is apt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely, is the danger of the French conception of poetry, and M. Silvain's method brings out the worst faults of that conception.

Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do, we are at least safe from this danger. Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows that verse is first of all song. In purely lyrical verse, with which he is at present chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody which demands expression by the voice, not only when it is "set to music," but when it is said aloud. Every poet, when he reads his own verse, reads it with certain inflections of the voice, in what is often called a "sing-song" way, quite different from the way in which he would read prose. Most poets aim rather at giving the musical effect, and the atmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at emphasising individual meanings. They give, in the musician's sense, a "reading" of the poem, an interpretation of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeats thinks that this kind of reading can be stereotyped, so to speak, the pitch noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help of a simple stringed instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr repeated one of Mr. Yeats' lyrics, as nearly as possible in the way in which Mr. Yeats himself is accustomed to say it. She took the pitch from certain notes which she had written down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch's psaltery. Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and a genuine feeling for the beauty of verse. She said the lines better than most people would have said them, but, to be quite frank, did she say them so as to produce the effect Mr. Yeats himself produces whenever he repeats those lines? The difference was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing, profoundly felt; the other, a deliberate imitation in which the fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or bad, impossible.

I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is so deplorable that there is much to be said for a purely mechanical method, even if it should turn actors into little more than human phonographs. Many actors treat verse as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aim in saying it is to conceal from the audience the fact that it is not prose. They think of nothing but what they take to be the expression, and when they come to a passage of purely lyric quality they give it as if it were a quotation, having nothing to do with the rest of the speech. Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things, either M. Silvain's oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats' method would almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel that it is possible to do much good by a ready-made method of any kind. Let the actor be taught how to breathe, how to articulate, let his voice be trained to express what he wants to express, and then let him be made to feel something of what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr. Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach him to unlearn something and to learn something more. But then let him forget his notes and Mr. Yeats' method, if he is to make verse live on the stage.



GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH

Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England? We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern?

The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor, is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition, the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen bars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the 'cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which would slightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he rearranged the composer's score for the convenience of his own orchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the horn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectly accomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he altered the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is presented with any sort of public appeal.

In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids: the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small, unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with show, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of imaginative work on the stage?