The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

CHAPTER XI

Two Portraits – Mr. Pinero’s Career as an Actor – His Early Works —The Squire, Lords and Commons– The Pieces which followed, half Comedy, half Farce —The Profligate; its Success and Defects —Lady Bountiful—The Second Mrs. Tanqueray– Character of Paula – Mrs. Patrick Campbell —The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.

Meanwhile, it was to Mr. Pinero that fell the lot of writing the most human work yet known to modern English dramatic literature, – the work, too, approaching most nearly to perfection.

I have never gazed on Mr. Pinero in the flesh, but I have seen two portraits of him which have struck me. In one I seem to discover the pensive bonhomie of a philosopher, who looks on at the world from afar; the other suggests rather the frequenter of drawing-rooms – the look in the eyes is more alive, the smile more knowing, less calculated to leave one at one’s ease. Which of these portraits tells the truth? Both of them perhaps. There are aspects of Mr. Pinero’s work which respond to these different moods of a single mind. Then, the two physiognomies, which I try to reconcile with each other, have this trait in common: they both show us a man who observes and who reflects.

And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of his youth, or even from such pieces as The Squire and Lord and Commons, to a work like The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. His career as an author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.

In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H. J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of others.¹³ He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving’s company and then with the Bancrofts’.

After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of plays then in vogue, – farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an articulated skeleton. It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed, and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely, that was weak in Mr. Pinero’s earliest efforts.

The Squire was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.

Lords and Commons carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her. She has a double end in view – to win back her husband’s love in her new guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to that other, thus torturing him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his heart torn in twain, to a rendez-vous with his former victim to obtain her pardon. When Mr. Pinero was content to write a dénouement of this kind, who could have divined in him the future creator of Mrs. Tanqueray?

But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the same province of the drama as Divorçons, sometimes on a higher plane, sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and D’Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. The Magistrate is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in appearance), – this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even to English humour. In Dandy Dick and in The Hobby-Horse, I find, in the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur, – a woman jockey, – whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our répertoire. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in The Times and The Cabinet Minister. I have read these two pieces a number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration. But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm; and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon’s part is not to accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties, and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is through his carefulness in aspirating his h’s, his punctiliousness in the matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants’ livery, of his stud, and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would be – failure. And he is on his guard.

I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero’s comedies, although very pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they are looked at side by side with that first act of The Crusaders, in which the satire is so modern and so full of life.

Mr. Pinero had not renounced the serious drama, and all his theatrical friends, watching his progress in light comedy, yet expected to see him in this field in which, so far, he had achieved but half-successes. On April 24, 1889, the Garrick opened its doors with a drama of his, entitled The Profligate. Marvels were expected from the new theatre which John Hare had erected for himself and his company. As had been the case with the opening of the Prince of Wales’s, it was felt that the first night at the Garrick ought to mark a date in the history of the drama. The critics, “old” and “new,” were enthusiastic. “At last,” exclaimed Mr. Archer, “we have a real play; a play which has faults, with a third act which has none!” Those triumphant assertions, made in the heat of the moment, must unfortunately be taken with a considerable discount. The Profligate is a melodrama, treated with delicacy and distinction, but incontestably a melodrama in every aspect and in every part, that wonderful third act included; it is even one of the most fanciful, most romantic melodramas that have been written in England for fifteen years.

Whom shall I recognise as an English character, or even as a human type? Hugh Murray, the sentimental lawyer, who loses his heart at first sight to a schoolgirl, and who buries this beautiful passion in the depths of his heart, to disinter it just at the wrong moment? Janet? – who has given herself, without the temptation of love, to a seducer in the forties, and who, during the remainder of the piece perseveres in the accomplishment of acts of delicacy, of renunciation and of self-abnegation without number, veritable tours de force—morale. Leslie? – the heroine of the play, a schoolgirl who giddily exclaims, a quarter of an hour before her wedding, that she wonders whether the world will seem of the same colour when she is the wife of Duncan Renshaw; and who, after a month spent tête-à-tête with her husband in a villa near Florence, where a fresco of Michael Angelo is to be seen, seems to know life better than we do ourselves. I know, of course, the explanation that is forthcoming: only a single moment was required to alter this character, to bring light to that one. It is precisely in this explanation that I find the mark of melodrama. In serious psychology, it is not so easy to believe in these “moments” – in these sudden revelations, these flash-like crises, which transform an individuality completely, annulling nature and education.

And what is one to say of the “Profligate” himself? He is just the traditional libertine of all the innumerable English novels published during the last fifty years, nor is he unknown to our own old Boulevard du Crime. We see him coldly and deliberately cynical up to the moment when love touches him with its magic ring. That is a kind of conception that has passed its prime. Nowadays we are inclined to regard Don Juan as a kind of dupe, the plaything of woman from puberty to decrepitude. We picture him to ourselves more engaging when he first begins to sin, and less easy to convert when he has become hardened to it. We find it difficult to believe that thirty days of wedded bliss suffice to awake a conscience which has lain dormant for forty years. If the sense of morality were innate, it must have shown itself earlier; to have been acquired and to have reached such a degree of perfection and sensitiveness, it would have needed more time than the average duration of a honeymoon.

The situation which delighted so the English critics may be thus described. The seducer’s wife has, without knowing it, given shelter to his victim. She wishes to help her to confront the man who has wronged her, and her heart breaks when she sees upon whom the penalty has to fall. I admit that the scenes leading up to this discovery, contrived with great ability, produce a veritable anguish in the spectator’s mind, and that the scene between the husband and the wife, which follows after it, is on the same plane of emotion. But by what a number of improbable coincidences had this precious moment to be bought! Chance had to take Janet to Paddington station at the same moment as Leslie and her brother; Chance had to give this same Janet as “companion” to Miss Stonehay, Leslie’s school friend; to send the Stonehays travelling towards the environs of Florence and the villa of the Renshaws; to synchronise Janet’s illness and Dunstan’s departure so that the two women may interest themselves in each other. And it is Chance again that makes Janet see Dunstan in Lord Dangars’ company in order that the confusion may arise regarding the two men, and that this Lord Dangars, who is Dunstan’s friend, may become engaged to Irene Stonehay, the friend of Leslie. And even after Chance has made all these thoughtful arrangements, Renshaw’s happiness might yet be saved, and this terrible danger by which it is threatened be avoided (and this great scene of Mr. Pinero’s never come to pass), if only Janet were allowed to go as she desires, and as good sense and modesty make it right that she should. What is it that makes her stay? Who is it that advises her to bring about this scandal? No one but Leslie, and I cannot but think her ideas on the subject singularly gross for so refined a person. This advice she gives is grounded on the slenderest and most irrational of arguments; a score of conclusive replies could be given to the pitiful considerations she puts forward. But Janet has to be convinced. Otherwise, what would become of the crisis of this “Faultless Third Act”?

What surprises me most of all is the number of useless excrescences with which the author has encumbered his piece. What is the point of this solicitor who bores us, and who gives himself such important airs throughout the play without having the slightest influence upon the development of the plot? When, by a final stroke of chance, Leslie has come to know of the absurd love of which he is the victim, why should she let him see that she has heard? All she can find to say to him is, “Good-night.” And “Good-night” is all he has to say in reply. This scene in four words could only be sublime or grotesque: I am inclined towards the latter view of it.

Had I been present at one of the first performances of The Profligate, I should have imagined myself in the presence of a talent that had lost its way, turning its back on the goal to which it should direct its steps, seeking beyond the confines of reality for some imaginative source of tears. I should have been wrong. Mr. Pinero is of a reflective turn of mind; he learns from his mistakes, and is not blinded by his successes. Before the echoes of the applause which greeted The Profligate in London had yet died out in the provinces and abroad, Mr. Pinero was at work upon another drama, conceived after a fashion quite different – quite contrary, in fact – a drama in half tints, with realistic touches; a sort of novel in dialogue. This was Lady Bountiful, produced on March 7, 1891.

In Lady Bountiful there is no question of any great fundamental truth, no great human interest. It is a very unequal piece of work, in turn very moving and very irritating, for of the two women in whom its interest centres, it happens unfortunately that one has the sympathy of the author and the other that of the public. But it showed, at least, that its author had found its way into the domain of psychological observation.

It was on May 27, 1893, that The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was performed for the first time at the St. James’s Theatre. It must be said, to the credit of the public, that its success was immediate, universal, and continued. The critic whom I have quoted so often exclaimed in a burst of joy, that here was a piece “which Dumas might sign without a blush.” No one is entitled to speak in the name of our greatest dramatist; but quite recently, when I re-read The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, I said to myself that if the greatest gift of M. Alexandre Dumas was that of embodying deep psychological and social observation in splendid eloquence or dazzling wit, this rare faculty is to be found almost in an equal degree in Pinero’s masterpiece.

“The limitations of Mrs. Tanqueray,” Mr. Archer goes on to say, “are really the limitations of the dramatic form.” I would go further still, and say that such a piece enlarges the province of the theatre. Minute details are to be found in it, brought out by intelligent and carefully thought-out acting, which one would have regarded as too small to attract attention on the stage, shades that the theatre had left to the novel up till then. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is, like Lady Bountiful, an acted novel, but a novel excellently constructed. Its four acts are its four chief chapters, and it should be noticed that the first two of these chapters are purely analytical; but emotion is introduced imperceptibly into the play, and we step from psychology into drama without being conscious of the passage.

It is not the old, old subject of the courtesan in love, but that of the mistress raised to the dignity of wife. One of Mr. Pinero’s clever notions is that of having in a sense left passion out of the question. It is clear, of course, that Tanqueray is very sensible of Paula’s personal attractions. Who would not be, in the presence of so charming a woman? But there is another feeling mingled with this. He is neither a satyr nor a stoic, he assures his friend Cayley; he has a quite rational affection for “Mrs. Jarman”; hitherto she has never met a man who has been good to her; he, Tanqueray, will be good to her, that is all. Is he absolutely sincere? Is his affection quite so rational as he asserts? Cayley has his own ideas upon the subject, and so have we. Mr. Pinero has been charged with not having told us to what extent philanthropy – the craze for redeeming – entered into Tanqueray’s marriage, to what extent the desire to have a pretty woman all to himself. But after all, was it incumbent on the author to give us Tanqueray’s psychology? Was it not rather an indication of his æsthetic sense to keep the husband in the background, to leave him in half-tints so as not to mar the effect of the principal figure? That excellent actor, Mr. Alexander, seems to have felt this, for he effaced himself in the presence of Mrs. Campbell, though quite capable of filling the stage unassisted, as he showed in The Masqueraders and many other pieces. In regard to Tanqueray’s character, this, however, should be noted, that, being rich and young enough to keep a mistress without looking ridiculous, he might, if he chose, have become Paula’s lover. If he decided to make her his wife, it was first of all to give her pleasure, but also to satisfy a sense of devotion and of virtue in himself. This I believe to be quite true to life. He was born to believe in women – not to be deceived by them, but to deceive himself in their regard: which is a different thing, and perhaps more serious. His first wife was like a nun. He ends with a courtesan. The law of moral oscillation requires that he should go from the iceberg (it is thus the first Mrs. Tanqueray is described to us) to a volcano. Like all weak men, he would play the part of un homme fort. With Paula’s arm passed through his, he is ready to look the world in the face; but when on the eve of their wedding she comes to see him at eleven o’clock at night, his first remark is, “What will your coachman say?” This remark lights up his whole character, and for my part I require nothing more.

But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how suggestive, is everything she says – even her most trifling remarks; with what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. There are women who traverse muddy ways with so light a step that they do not sink in them, and that one but guesses where they have passed from little stains upon the tips of their shoes. One or two traits reveal to us the irregularity of Paula’s life; the mobility of her impressions, the manner at once fanciful and passive in which she allows chance to regulate her actions. She has forgotten to order her dinner; her cook, a “beast” who “detests” her, has pretended to believe that she was not dining at home, and has given himself an evening out. So she has got herself up in grande toilette and has taken up her position in her dining-room, her feet on the fender. Here she has fallen asleep and dreamt. She tells us her dream later, the while she sups off the dessert of the farewell dinner Tanqueray had given to three old bachelor friends. To sup instead of dining, does not this in itself suggest a whole conception of life? Whoever gets into the way of it will never be able to reconcile himself to the respectable regularity of the family joint.

Thus it is with her in everything. She has acquired a certain ton, now brusque, now bewitching, an air of Bohemianism, and a whole host of opinions which could never tally with the rôle of married woman; and these characteristics have become embedded in her nature. Her irregularity of word and deed goes with a like incoherence of thought and feeling. Sombre moods succeed suddenly to extreme gaiety and vanish as suddenly again. The idea of suicide comes to her; next moment she bursts into laughter at the sight of the mournful expression she has evoked on Aubrey’s countenance. She has so serious a way of saying the wildest things, and says the most serious things so frivolously, that you don’t know what to believe; her every word leaves you under her spell, and this effect is intensified more and more. She is a really “good” woman, Tanqueray will declare just now to his friend. It is neither an illusion on his part nor even an exaggeration. Paula is “good” and loyal; she has kept back from Aubrey nothing of her past. Better still, she has spent this last day writing out a general confession, with a precision and scrupulousness in which there is a touch of childishness, a touch of cynicism, and a touch, I think, of heroism. She weighs the letter with a smile. It is heavy! She wonders if the post would take all that for a penny! She says to Aubrey, quite simply, without affectation of any kind, without any airs of tragedy about her, that she wants him to read this letter and to think over it; and then, on the morrow, at the last moment, if he changes his mind, let him send her a line before eleven o’clock, and – “I – I’ll take the blow!” Aubrey puts the letter into the fire and she throws her arms round his neck; she tells him quite frankly she had counted upon his doing so, an admission which would quite spoil her “effect,” had she sought one.

Has the question ever been better set? Think of the Mariage d’Olympe. The insolent and hypocritical gueuse stood revealed before she had uttered half a dozen words. We knew she could never become acclimatised to that family of honest folk, amongst whom fortune had thrown her. Where, then, was the problem? All Augier’s wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman. Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence of a grande passion, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not succeed?

We learn in the second act. First of all, because, once she is married, Paula gets bored. The world will not visit her, and custom does not permit of her taking the initiative. She is a kind of prisoner in the beautiful country-house in Surrey. The monotonous tranquillity of “home” oppresses her after the feverish, exciting existence she has led; the quiet wearies her to death. Here is her account of her day’s occupations from hour to hour.

“In the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my orders to the tradespeople. At lunch, you and Ellean. In the afternoon, a novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive —if fine! Tea – you and Ellean. Then two hours of dusk; then dinner – you and Ellean. Then a game of Bésique, you and I, while Ellean reads a religious book in a dull corner. Then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from Ellean, three figures suddenly rise – ‘Good-night! good-night! good-night!’ (Imitating a kiss.) ‘God bless you!’ Ah!”

With Cayley she speaks out more strongly. He asks her how she is.

Paula (walking away to the window): “Oh, a dog’s life, my dear Cayley, mine.”

Drummle: “Eh?”

Paula: “Doesn’t that define a happy marriage? I’m sleek, well-kept, well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon. (Gazing out of the window.) Oh, dear me!”

Drummle: “H’m, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The view from the terrace is superb.”

Paula: “Yes, I can see London.”

Drummle: “London! Not quite so far, surely?”

Paula: “I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (Impulsively) Oh, Cayley! do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman’s yacht, when we lay off” – (Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her).

Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever want to be married? Because the other women of her world were not. The title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?

But these are Paula’s least serious trials. There is another woman in the house – the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing – she ought to love her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good. It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her into deeds of rashness and folly.

A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible (it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character, embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to learn about her.

When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in which the young girl’s heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl is one of the former lovers of the woman!

This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious – after the author has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of analysis – to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable, crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant land: – She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees herself tête-à-tête with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had suffered and had wrought… I shall never forget this scene. How her hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.