The English Stage Part 13

In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an English version of _Emperor and Galilean_; three years later the British Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated _The Dolls' House_ under the t.i.tle of _Norah_, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman's Rights. Women like to form some concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, "a delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,"

small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly, and rarely gesticulates, and that his "self-command amounts to coldness, but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and pa.s.sionate power."

In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Cla.s.sics three of Ibsen's plays, _The Pillars of Society_, _Ghosts_, and _An Enemy of the People_, accompanied by a general study in which he pa.s.sed in review the dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine literary sense. To this library _Ondine_ was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877.

Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an a.n.a.lysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as final in some respects.

It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen's fame and influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon performances, or, as a last resource, as a _fin de saison_, when there was nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre, which is the _Theatre Libre_ of London, but which might be called even more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he "does not pay." Now Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving's which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success is most real when business is worst.

Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith, pa.s.sion, and courage, ready to "confess" him, and to endure for him, and with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins, and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open and unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.

It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics lost their temper and their manners, and pa.s.sed, without realising it, from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen's philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a "Pocket Ibsen" in the pages of _Punch_; these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who lower the rate of their wages.

Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now into the world of the theatre.

If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague, it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well equipped as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as 1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in _Brand_, which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort.

But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of translations, which are now in everybody's hands; not only do they convey into English the intense realism of Ibsen's dialogues, but young authors may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a step or two nearer to life.

Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers of the _Star_ as "Spectator," and to those of the _Speaker_ by his initials, "A. B. W." To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, whose articles in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ have attracted much notice during the year 1895, and have const.i.tuted a veritable campaign in Ibsen's honour.

The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr.

Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept--even, at need, to initiate--reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before the Playgoers' Club, he had given a very clever a.n.a.lysis of one of the most striking of M. Maeterlinck's plays. In 1893 he produced a play of Ibsen's at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was _The Enemy of the People_. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage, and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one with a piece of Bjornson's. Therein he has set a good example to a greater actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be, the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course, like _Charley's Aunt_! One must not expect too much when one has only genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a single one of lucky Mr. Penley's spectators.

Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what prejudices--religious, philosophical, aesthetic--has it been impeded? To what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist's art, or to the ideas which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before bringing my study to an end.

I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography; I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer, two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of Carlyle's last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the _livre de raison_, in which this soul of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders, it is the real Bible of his race.

Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the mediaeval world of the Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will not allow his descendants to exist in the present, and play their part in modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could not long hold up against the force of the current. These archaeologists, strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt, of the ancient Vikings,--as brave before the enigmas of thought as _they_ had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.

Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschlager before him and Bjornson in his own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen's historical and semi-legendary dramas than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no n.o.bility and no cla.s.s distinctions--Norway has been since 1814 very much what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.

In his strange poem, _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the princ.i.p.al features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure.

Peer Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the rest--grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that of a death agony! Peer Gynt's old mother is about to meet her end, and she is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart.

Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off they go to where G.o.d lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter for admission,--he's _got_ to let Peer Gynt's old mammy into Heaven! The old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic, cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the English mind--less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more intelligible than the Scottish peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.

Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen's methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America.

Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the public. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is an exception. It is a compromise between the dramatic system of _Francillon_ and that of _Hedda Gabler_--the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen's realism. They draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness's nine dolls produced some t.i.ttering in the stalls.[14] In _Little Eyolf_, if Alfred Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were, at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare.

Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is to pa.s.s quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world in which we live without ever seeing it,--of what is in it, and beside it, and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere pastime and amus.e.m.e.nt to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing.

It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange): In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.

If Ibsen's art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine, Ibsen's message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to this race more than to any other.

With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious episode in _The Dolls' House_, and which pervades _Ghosts_, and _Rosmersholm_, and _The Lady from the Sea_; does it not find a fit and well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Rorland and Pastor Manders these things find expression,--in the former violent, impetuous, fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is well aware that she has both her Rorlands and her Manders. When, too, she is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments, but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial _bavard_, this impa.s.sioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote, this Pangloss who would go to the martyr's stake, but prefers to stop on the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines them and criticises them. "Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a decent stone in the lot!" He has returned from a public meeting with his trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure: "When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be careful not to wear your best pair of breeches." If these traits are not English, I don't know what the English character is.

Were I to pa.s.s Ibsen's types in review one by one, I should find it easy to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand, the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Lovborg, that n.o.ble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest endeavour;--these would require no modification or commentary upon the London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of _The Dolls'

House_, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah's cry is indefinitely prolonged.

It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: "In democracy will be found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be devoted." I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.

Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in Ibsen's dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That _joie de vivre_, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which in Regina (in _Ghosts_) takes the form of a cold and marble-like indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the navely animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in _Little Eyolf_), who puts her husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which had gone from his heart--to secure the marital attentions which are her due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of the Sound.

I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed, whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of _The Master Builder_. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration, his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen's ideas; but he must have reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which conceived _Hedda Gabler_ is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.

As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both the artist and thinker in Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which he made of _A Dolls' House_, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play.

For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold,--symbols of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in it,--the authors of _Breaking a b.u.t.terfly_ subst.i.tuted a general reconciliation. They justified the optimistic _denouement_ by making the husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic, the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not turn out well, at least everything is true in this most disunited of _menages_.

Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian's heroines. It may be said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has pa.s.sed through all his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author of _Hedda Gabler_ and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch; despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen's, in which for the few smiling and sunlit s.p.a.ces, there frown such vast and mournful solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.

It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Bjornson its Spring. This Bjornson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under, and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself.

The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm than good. This connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long before Ibsen's name had been even mentioned in London, his _Arne_ and _Synnove Solbakken_ had been read there, two sketches of peasant life which will bear comparison with _La Mare au Diable_ and _La Pet.i.te Fadette_; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his ill.u.s.trious rival.

When Ibsen attacks that cla.s.s of puritans and hypocrites who turn away their faces when they pa.s.s the entrance to a theatre, there is no hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to follow him, for it feels that a portion of its clientele, and that the best,--that which has always been constant in its support,--will be startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege and tradition, against change and progress. It is on the side of those who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think; when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted, and gets even to like it. It is one of the amus.e.m.e.nts of the decadent.

Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen's adversaries, fascinated by his genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife's in _Little Eyolf_, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his flute.[15]

CHAPTER XIII

G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent Theatre and Matinee Performances--The Drama of To-morrow--A "Report of Progress"--The Public and the Actors--Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to the Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to its becoming Modern and National--Conclusion.

I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held back; have a.n.a.lysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon, and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of to-morrow.

There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the art? There are many of their kind whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away with, and whom we shall never get back.

I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte says in Moliere's _Misanthrope_--"_Belle Philis, on desespere alors qu'on espere toujours_." The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour, together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a c.o.c.kney, and nothing that belongs to c.o.c.kneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period in which you can really smell the East End, as the _maitre_ of Medan would say, is _The Lights o' London_, and that perhaps is why all the London managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, "with thanks."

_The Lights o' London_ got produced in the end, however, and had an immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.

Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will write the _Judahs_, _The Second Mrs. Tanquerays_ of to-morrow? Will it be Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it be Mr. Carton, author of _Liberty Hall_ (one of the successes of 1893) and of _The Squire of Dames_, an adaptation, or rather an abridged translation, of _L'Ami des femmes_, which has been attracting the public to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.

Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of his works, _The Fatal Card_, having crossed the channel? Since then he has written a piece ent.i.tled _John-a-Dreams_, played at the Haymarket in 1894, in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn.

Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold's father, a country clergyman.

"You do not know me, sir," she says to him (I quote from memory), "but I know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of ----. I was with Mrs. Withers then."

"Oh, indeed,--an excellent person," he replies; "but it is strange that I did not make your acquaintance."

"No, it is not strange, really,--do you remember the kind of work she was engaged upon?"

"The redemption of unfortunates, was it not."

"Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless--you helped her?"

"No," Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. "No, it was she who helped me." She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. "They came to my help," she goes on, "but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later on."

Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she had made herself an honest woman.

"Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?"

"Certainly, my child," the old man answers.