 Section 6 of Arthur Wing Panaro, Playwright. I am not sure whether the term satirical will be held to cover the three plays which I come now to consider. They are, in order of production, the Hobby Horse, Lady Bountiful, and the Princess and the Butterfly. They are certainly not farces, and they are not altogether plays of sentiment. For sentimental drama must be sentimental with a whole heart, with a relish for sentimentality. But in each of these pieces Mr. Panaro is inclined to poke fun at sentiment, to indicate at all events that it is an unsafe basis to build upon for life. I think satirical comedy would perhaps best describe the class into which these three plays fall. They may justly be termed comedy, since, in Mr. George Meredith's phrase, they deal with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes to make the correctness of the representation convincing. In each of the three Mr. Panaro sought to throw reflections upon social life, the treatment of the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Spencer German, and their philanthropic enterprises, of Miss Moxon, and Mr. Pinching, of Shaddick and Pews, of Roderick Heron, and the whole tone of the earlier acts of The Princess and the Butterfly justify us in calling them satirical. The hobby horse is, to my mind, a very pleasant, amusing, and interesting piece. Its serious side is treated with a light hand. Its fun is rooted in character, and never degenerates into buffoonery. But the hobby horse did not at first hit the taste of any large section of play-goers. Some people said it was too serious, others said it was not serious enough. One party cried out that the author had ruined a fine situation by handling it wittily and with humor. The opposing group declared that they expected to laugh and were made to cry. Therein lies the great merit of the play. The elements of humor and of pathos are so mixed in it as they are mixed in life. The whole plot springs naturally out of the leading motive of the play. Mrs. German's anxiety to work in the East End leads directly both to her acquaintance with Noel Brice and to the discovery of German's lost son, and upon these threads the embryo is woven. Of course there are more coincidences in the play than one can reconcile with absolute probability. But coincidences only annoy us when we feel that the dramatist would have been unable to work out his theme without them. In a piece which shows us such genuine characters as are drawn into hobby-horse, we take little heed of the means employed to exhibit and contrast them to the best advantage. Both the Germans are quite real people within limitations, but limitations to wit of the author's interest in them. Noel Brice is a really well-drawn parson of the muscular Christian type, a charming fellow as well as a good man. When he finds that he has let himself think with affection of one whom he mistakenly supposed to be an unmarried woman, we sympathize sincerely with his pain and shame. But he does not sentimentalize over his mistake and his bitter disillusionment. He bears his trouble like a man, and we cannot sentimentalize over him. This affords one reason for the small amount of popularity which the piece won in 1886. The vast majority of playgoers wanted to snuffle, to have their less noble emotions titillated gently instead of having their finer feelings brought into play, and their mind and heart braced up by the dramatist's sane outlook upon life. By this time, I fancy, the class of theatre-goers has been sufficiently leavened by persons of wider culture and keener intelligence to provide as many audiences as would make a play like The Hobby Horse, a success instead of a failure. In 1886 the new dramatic movement had scarcely begun so far as England was concerned. Of Ibsen as yet only a very few people knew anything at all. With Dumas, Fees, and O'Gyr and Fouillet, we had scraped a bowing acquaintance, but they dealt so largely in sentiment themselves that they scarcely served as a tonic. They did not greatly encourage us to look at things as they are, and to develop our dramatic ideas inexorably in accordance with the laws of nature and of common life. When we thought of the German drama we thought of Kloppstock and Kotzabu and sentimentality run mad, what the playgoer of 1886 felt, then, with regard to The Hobby Horse, was that he had been defrauded of the De Numeau which he had been led to expect. If Noel Brice, the heroic young clergyman, was allowed to fall in love with Mrs. German, then the unfortunate Mr. German ought to have fallen a victim in the nick of time to the familiar Maledi Dusenkem Act, and the curtain could have come down upon a purpose of marriage, or in the alternative course the audience ought to have been treated to some scene of maudlin tears and sugary sweet, unmanly lamentation against fate. To send the poor young man about his business with never so much as a single appeal to the lacrimose sensibility of the easily moved was an unheard-of departure from precedent. And yet who can read or hear the last little scene in which Brice figures, without a glistening beneath the eyelids? It is as far away from sentimentality as can be, but it strikes a deep true note of real emotion. Mrs. German. Spencer, you know the mistake that has occurred. Say what you like to me, but beg his pardon, for I can't. Mr. German. Mr. Brice, Mrs. German tells me I am to beg your pardon. I do so. I have married a very foolish headstrong lady. I beg your pardon. Mrs. German keeps your niece company and assists you in your parish work without my permission. I beg your pardon. In the meantime you fall in love with my wife, sir, and you ultimately propose marriage to her in my presence. I beg your pardon. Mrs. German. Oh, dear, oh, dear, you're not doing it properly. Noel Brice. Mr. German, the tone you speak in spares me the pain of thinking you believe and apology is necessary. As for my mistake, it is slider than you imagine. Mr. German. Slider? Noel Brice. Yes, sir. The only great mistake possible in proposing marriage is to select an unworthy object. I fell into no such error. I believed Miss Moxon to be a generous, warmhearted lady whom any man should be proud to call his wife. I thought that, and I think it still. Mr. German. But your Miss Moxon is Mrs. German, Mr. Brice. Noel Brice. So I find, and upon that I congratulate you with all my heart. Tom Clark, otherwise Alan German, and Bertha, Noel's niece, are the pleasantest pair of boy and girl lovers we can recall out of endless plays in which such characters borrowed originally from the French have been held to be necessary. If ever they were tolerable on the stage it would be in the persons of this breezy young sailor and the charming little person to whom he loses his boyish heart. Tom's explanation of the manner in which he proposes to inform his father of his marriage is delicious in its humor and simplicity. He has just opened his heart to the supposed Miss Moxon, who is really Mrs. German, his stepmother. She questions him about his prospects. Mrs. German. Are you very well off, then? Tom Clark. Haven't the brass button, you know? Mrs. German. Really, Mr. Clark? Tom Clark. But my dear old father is rich. He and I quarrel awfully. Mrs. German. Well, then, how? Tom Clark. Why, the moment I marry I write and break it gently to the dad. Dear dad, I'm married. Yours, etc. See? Mrs. German. Perfectly. That couldn't be a shock to him, could it? Tom Clark. No. Well, then, what's the result? Dad burning with anxiety to see my wife. My wife? Oh, doesn't it sound jolly? Mrs. German. It sounds pretty well. Tom Clark. I take her home. I can picture father standing glum and sulky at the gate. Who's this? I can hear him saying it. My wife, dad. Your wife? What, that pretty little fairy? I like your taste, my boy. Come in. We dine at seven. See? Mr. Pinching, the solicitor who always thinks of the right thing to say just a moment too late, is amusing, though cut a little too rigidly to pattern. Ms. Muxin has more actuality, and perhaps the author meant her to be not quite a lady. The broken-down jockeys whom German does his best to reclaim and benefit are very funny and really not exaggerated. The workmanship of the play is excellent, even above Mr. Pinaro's very high level of excellence in this direction. In the last act of Lady Bountiful, I cannot help thinking that the workmanship sank below that level, and to this sinking was partly due the poor success of the play in London. To drop the curtain for a few moments, to indicate the flight of hours, is a permissible device in certain cases. But is this such a case? Here you have Ms. Brent, who has long loved and been loved, by Dennis Herron, about to marry a worthy, but tedious old gentleman. Why has she consented? Dennis has not seemed worthy of a woman's love. Recollect the scene in which he asks her to marry him. Camilla, you've no right to speak to me like this. Dennis, no right? Why a man doesn't love by right? Camilla, a man should love by right, by the right of some achievement which deserves reward, or some failure which earns consolation, but you. Dennis, I know what you mean. Idle at school, in the wrong set at college, and now if I started in the race a boy would beat me. Camilla, to herself. Ah. Dennis. And so I beg your pardon for dreaming you could stoop to pick a weed from the bricks of your stable yard. Camilla. Dennis, it isn't great men, women love dearest, or even fortunate men. Often I tell you their deepest love goes out to those who labor and fail, but for those who make no effort, who are neither great nor little, who are the nothings of the world. Dennis, who are the Dennis Herons of the world. Camilla. For those a true woman has only one feeling, anger and contempt. Camilla Brent is quite right, right in her opinion, and right in telling her cousin what it is. Stung to action by her plain speaking, he determines to do something for his living. Naturally he flies to an extreme. He has little aptitude for any of the ordinary pursuits of workaday life, but he is thoroughly at home with horses, so he takes a situation as a riding master. To his genially selfish, worthless, and unprincipled father, whose relationship to the well-known family of the skim-poles, Mr. Panero acknowledged on the playbill, this decision seems little short of madness. Why should they be ashamed of living on Camilla's bounty? Quote, Camilla is wealthy, no credit to her, she can't help it. We are poor, no discredit to us, we can't help it. Camilla has a large house with empty rooms and beds in them. Why on earth shouldn't we occupy those rooms and air those beds? Camilla's cook prepares a dinner for four persons. A dinner for four is a dinner for six. Really, you know, an extra oyster in the oyster sauce, or an additional pinch of curry in the mullagatani represents, looked at in the right way, the extent of our obligations to Camilla. So do, dear Dennis, abandon this crazy desire to earn your own living. It's not even original. So many men have it. And great heavens, you'll compromise us, you really will. If people learn that my son is a cad of a writing master, they'll think I, I've no means, you know. End quote. However, Dennis sticks to his determination, and when he finds that the pretty, gentle little daughter of the worthy man he serves has lost her heart to her father's assistant, he feels that he is bound to her in gratitude and honor. So he marries this pretty, gentle, little Margaret Veal. This brings us to the end of the second act. In the third act, Margaret dies. Dies in a scene that is imagined with rare tenderness, written with sympathy and power, a scene that rings the heart. Dies and leaves Dennis free to find the happiness he surrendered in giving up all thought of Camilla. Five years pass before he does find it. In the meantime he has prospered in America, and Camilla has agreed to marry an old admirer. He reaches England on the eve of the wedding, meets Camilla in the village church, asks her to reconsider the answer she gave him six years before, and learns that her truth is plighted to another. Then the momentary curtain parts one day from the next, and we see the church next morning filled with guests and villagers. The bride enters, sees Dennis, who is standing in her path, totters back with her hand to her brow, and murmurs his name. Then the old gentleman sees that his chance has fled, and says, There shall be no marriage today. I think I know, I think I know. It is not the melodrama of this ending that spoils it. It is its ineffectiveness. Often a daring melodramatic touch will help to carry off a situation that is otherwise of the serious order. But here the melodrama falls absolutely flat. The lowering of the curtain leads the audience to look for some final scene of an unexpected, interesting nature. This tame conclusion sends them away disappointed, and in their disappointment they forget how good the rest of the play has been. Mr. Panero indeed must have forgotten this himself when he wrote such a finish to it. The interest has been an interest of character, and there is quite enough of it left to carry the drama to its close. No Cudat theatra was needed. Only a sincere gathering up of threads in such a manner as the author might have thought most natural. But the courage which has supported Mr. Panero in his desire to make the play depend for its interest upon character deserted him at the end. He leans upon the broken reed of a well-worn theatrical device, and lo, it breaks in his hand. The repetition of the letter trick, too, is a trifle lacking in ingenuity. Dennis finds a letter and learns that Margaret loves him. Another letter, which falls into his hands by chance, tells him that Margaret, before she died, foresaw that he and Camilla would come together in the end. In a drama of action, of violent emotions, of scenes that carry the spectator irresistibly with them, in a gust of passion, almost any expedient for arriving at the necessary juxtapositions of character will pass muster. But Lady Bountiful is a play so slight in texture that its theme demands all the vraise emblance possible in treatment. Quote, My masters, will you hear a simple tale, no war, no lust, not a commandment broke by sir or madam, but a history to make a rhyme to speed a young maid's hour. End quote. So the author himself described it, and some critics have found here the reason for its failure to attract audiences. The kind of play, these critics call it, of which everyone approves in theory and from which they unanimously stop away in practice. There is a good deal of truth in this view. We English do undoubtedly try to make each other, and even try to make ourselves, believe that we are more strictly moral and fonder of conventional virtue than we should be found if our hearts could be surprised and set in shop windows. We could never bring ourselves as a nation to confess that we accepted anything lower than the standards of the highest morality. Charriere, in Les affrontés, excuses his philosophy of life thus. Quote, Mon Dieu, Je sais bien que ce n'est pas la morale de l'évangile, mais c'est celle du monde. End quote. That is the French view of the case. We prefer to practice la morale de monde while we profess loudly all the time that we are trying to live up to l'évangile. Perhaps a good many of us are trying, but the fact remains that very few succeed. At the same time, numbers of plays have succeeded which were equally qualified with Lady Bountiful to speed a young maid's hour. Liberty Hall, for example, and One Summer's Day, and A Pair of Spectacles, and The Popular Little Minister. I look for the reasons of Lady Bountiful's small success rather in the fact that it tried to combine two kinds of play in one, that it fell between two stools. In a play of character, the dramatist must devote himself entirely to the few characters which he seeks to exhibit. He does not want subsidiary personages to fill up gaps or striking episodes to clear up situations. There are three or four personages in Lady Bountiful who would be better out of the way. They contribute no variations to the real theme and the space which their removal would release could have been used by Mr. Pinheiro in making clearer the characters of Dennis and Camilla. We could then have had more of Roderick Heron, too, who was well worth more elaboration and a more intimate connection with the thread of the story. As it is, he disappears after the third act, and all we hear of him is that in America he has revealed capabilities hardly suspected in England, and is doing rather well, which, of course, we do not for an instant believe. The skimpole family remains skimpoles to the end. In a play of sentiment, on the other hand, the whole thing may be as unreal as the playwright pleases. He may bring in characters simply for the sake of extracting an extra tear, invent the unlikeliest episodes merely in order to pile up the agony, break all the rules of drama and probability, so he is rewarded by the facile sob, the girdon of how pretty or how sweet. Lady Bountiful is not a play of sentiment, nor altogether a play of character. It did not appeal sufficiently to the admirers of either of these classes of peace to win their whole-hearted adherence. Nor did it offer a mixture of styles so bizarre as to please the large body of playgoers who seek ever some new thing. Its elements were not so lively in themselves as to gain applause for their own sake. Therefore, like many another experiment, it failed. The Princess and the Butterfly mixed up almost equally sentiment and character. It defied tradition. It outraged the accepted canons of form and symmetry. Its originality even hurled itself against the salutary barriers of common sense. But, unlike Lady Bountiful, this play had separate elements which gave it a vogue. The first three acts are occupied with exposition. They have little interest in themselves. And the scene with the boys in the song-rocious smoking-room is tiresome, and only serves a far-off dramatic purpose. Yet the attention of the spectator is held, not firmly it is true, but with a gentle grip which seems to herald developments of the gradually unfolding plot. In the fourth act, better late than never, these developments are reached. And from this point until the end, the play is of a charm and an interest that have not been surpassed in any of Mr. Panero's works before or since. The ostensible subject of the drama is the malady of middle age. Both the Princess Pannonia and Sir George Lamarant have reached this period of life. Both feel that they have tasted the best that existence has to offer, and that the future lies before them joyless and unexciting. This is chiefly because they have never had anything to do but amuse themselves. Because they have never really come to grips with life, have never suffered, and have never loved. They almost make up their minds to end their long platonic affection, their perfunctory flirtation of so many years, by a marriage which shall enable them to drift quietly into old age, holding each other's hands. Not with the close grip of passion, but with the gentle clasp of a moderate tenderness, based partly on convenience and partly upon mutual esteem. Sir George, well, suppose you and I became husband and wife. I am sufficiently your senior. You are rich. I am far from the state of a beggar. The world could not throw up its hands in surprise. Would it not be in all ways a suitable match? We both suffer morbidly, fantastically it may be, but we suffer. Should we not find in each other a cure? You dread being tempted to marry unwisely. No such temptation, I believe, is likely to befall me. But at any rate, you are honoring me as I propose would make both safe. The Princess. Safe. Sir George, what do you say? The Princess, her eyes closed. We should not naturally love each other. Sir George, at our age I suppose there is no love, but in folly. She makes a movement. Forgive me. The expression our time of life was your own. She is sensed by a nod. I speak, of course, of passionate love. Otherwise, am I quite outside the reach of your tender regard? As for passion, let us make ourselves believe that we could not be five and twenty if we could. Passion. My dear Laura, has it ever happened to you to stroll through a garden on the morning following a great letting off of fireworks? O the hollow blackened shells of the spent cartridges trodden into the turf. We should at least be spared the contemplation of that. But you and I are already fast linked by many associations, and sympathy is affection. Certainly in that spirit I love you most sincerely. The Princess, in a strange voice. Say three times you love me. Sir George, puzzled. Three times? The Princess, I love you, thrice. Sir George, as if repeating a lesson. I love you, I love you, I love you. She throws her head back and breaks into a peel of hysterical laughter. What reason has the Princess for this strange request? Simply that a few minutes earlier she has heard such a triple declaration of love from the fervent lips of a young man really in love with her. She has won the heart of the preternaturally grave Edward Oriole, and his habitual reserve has broken down before the flood tide of his emotion. Fear of ridicule hinders her admission that she loves Oriole. And she strives to persuade herself that she must accept Sir George's lukewarm proposal. But before the passing of the month for which she has bargained with each of her suitors, Sir George's heart is also engaged in earnest. He has taken under his protection almost adopted an Italian girl whom he believes to be his brother's child. She is a wayward charming creature with a very tender heart hidden beneath her gaiety and mischief. When he discovers first that she is not his brother's child, and next that she has learnt to love him, he very quickly passes from affection to adoration. He and the Princess make an effort to clinch their half-concluded bargain, but it fails. And they each take up their newly found happiness to the tune of a Hungarian march called a zerelem mendig if you maraud, which, according to Mr. Panero, means, love is ever young. Unquestionably, the last two acts of the Princess and the Butterfly are fashioned with a skill compelling admiration, and touched with a certain charm that prevents us from analyzing too closely the kind of happiness which the Princess and the Butterfly have found. At the moment we accept our author's conclusion. The strains of the march bring in our ears. The glamour of romantic attachment dazzles our eyes. Yes, we cry, love is ever young. It can bring a fresh interest and a vivifying tempest of emotion, even into the lives of the jaded victims of society. Man and women who have done nothing in the world but, eddy about, here and there, eat and drink, chatter, without even the stimulus of love or hate, without striving, though it be but blindly, towards any aim. But when you think it over quietly, as one should think over any play that pretends to offer us sincere criticism upon life, you have an uncomfortable suspicion, not only that the world would write the Princess Penonia and Sir George Lamarant down as foolish people, but that the world would probably be right. For on what basis have they founded their determination to defy the opinion of the world, so far as we can judge upon the fugitive attraction of sex. Now marriages of men and women of tolerably equal age and of tolerably common tastes may be based upon this attraction with every hope of success. It is, after all, the natural basis. Even when its first fine careless rapture has waned, the leaping flames of the fresh lit bonfire are succeeded by a steady glow which gives out more warmth and comfort. But a marked disparity of age and a striking dissimilarity of taste and inclination, our seldom, very seldom, blended into harmony at the bidding of passion. They are stubborn bars of iron which cannot be permanently fused by the mere white heat of a sudden infatuation. If Mr. Panero had shown us that there was more than infatuation in the loves of his strangely assorted lovers, his conclusion would possibly bear the test of reflection. If he had put the whole story of their loves upon a higher plane and hinted to us that it is never too late to hope that we may come upon the key to life's puzzle, he would have given us a poetic and a satisfying thought to take away with us. Quote, Only, but this is rare, when a beloved hand is laid in ours, when jaded with the rush and glare of the interminable hours, our eyes can in another's eyes breed clear, when our world-deafened ear is by the tones of a loved voice caressed, a bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, and a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward and the heart lies plain, and what we mean we say, and what we would we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, and hears its winding murmur, and he sees the meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze, and there arrives a lull in the hot race wherein he doth forever chase that flying and elusive shadow rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, and an unwanted calm pervades his breast, and then he thinks he knows the hills where his life rose, and the sea where it goes. End quote. No one expects Mr. Panero to be a Matthew Arnold, but there in those beautiful lines of Matthew Arnold is a subject that a playwright of poetic feeling might well essay. A true and tender devotion must always help to make the path of life plainer, to clear up the mists that gather round the wayfarer, to show that there is a definite plan of existence, which perhaps he has before never suspected. We may analyze this devotion as we will. We may take the calm, considered view of Gibbon, who understood by the passion of love the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being. Or we may incline to a more mystical transcendental view. But however we regard it, we can only reason deductively from its manifestations, and here is the dramatist's opportunity. Mr. Panero had such an opportunity in The Princess and the Butterfly, but he hardly made the most of it. It scarcely seems to have possessed much interest for him. If it had, he would surely have given us more of an insight into the characters of The Princess and Sir George, and also of Edward Oriol and Faye Zuliani. But he only elaborates those characters just enough for the purposes of the play. This is his way in all his plays, with the exception of Iris and the second Mrs. Tancray. There he does appear to have been genuinely interested in the problems of character that lay before him. In all the other plays he gives his creations only just enough individuality to be effective on the stage, to serve the ends of his dramatic scheme. They are so cleverly presented that they leave the impression of real characters, but they are, as a rule, not more than half characters. The author does not turn the light of his revealing lantern all round them, upon every side of their personality in turn, but only upon the one or two sides that will be useful to him. In other words, Mr. Panero does not pursue character for the sake of character, but for the sake of making stage plays. He does not take a handful of people and let them work out their own destinies. He is not so much the observer, the recorder, as the puller of strings. He plays with his characters as you play with chessmen, moving them here and there wherever he sees the opportunity for an effective combination. The combinations he makes are immensely effective, but they cannot, in the nature of things, produce upon the spectator who looks closely into them the effect of an unconstrained sincerity. Like Dr. Ibsen, Mr. Panero is a master of theatrical craft, and if he had the same interest in the things of the mind that inspires Dr. Ibsen, he might have gained an equal reputation as a philosopher without any more deserving it than Dr. Ibsen deserves his fame. A genuine philosopher who wrote plays would have to be very emphatically un philosophe sans la savoie, but a dramatist who has the gift of fashioning his dramas with a complete knowledge of stage effects and how to produce them, and who further is sincerely interested in the particular questions of mind and morals which occupy his age, can easily win the name of a philosopher. Mr. Panero may indeed win it yet. If our playwrights would make a close study for a year of the modern French drama since about 1860, and of the serious German drama during the last ten years, I believe they would see the advantage of dealing in a sincere spirit with the manners and problems of their time, and if they could at the same time preserve their English sense of humor, they would probably end by writing much better plays than either the Germans or the French. Section 7 of Arthur Wing Panero playwrights. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Campbell Shelp. Arthur Wing Panero playwright, a study by Hamilton Fife. Section 7. Nationality in Drama. The digression into which the princess and the butterfly has carried me leads up, I find, to a branch of my subject in which I must plead guilty to being greatly interested, and with which I may as well now deal. This is the extent generally to which nationality can be embodied and revealed in dramatic art, and the extent in particular to which Mr. Panero's have been essentially English in character. The point which I have reached in the consideration of Mr. Panero's plays is sufficiently appropriate for this discussion. I have just spoken of the hobby horse and lady bountiful, of the second Mrs. Tanqueray and the benefit of the doubt, I am just about to speak. These plays are the four out of all Mr. Panero's work which, to my mind, really are distinctively English in tone and feeling. The people to whom they introduce us are the kind of people who form the mass of the middle class of the nation. They could not belong to any nation but the English nation. You are in no danger of thinking that the pieces have been adopted from the French or the German or the Norwegian or the Japanese. They are contributions therefore, in a real sense, towards a national modern English drama. Such a drama as we shall only possess in full measure when our vast society, or a sufficient section of it, is united in a common view of life, and in common ideals capable of serving as a basis for it. It is very important that we should understand what are the qualities and plays which go to make up a national drama, because, if ever we are to have such a form of art flourishing amongst us again, we must be on the lookout for its earliest manifestations and be ready to encourage them with an intelligent sympathy. Now, when we English people speak of our national drama, we mean 9 in 10 of us, the drama of the Elizabethan poets, that is the only dramatic literature we have had which fully expressed the character and the ideas and the aspirations of the English race. You often hear it asked and wonder why the theater was in Shakespeare's day, the constant popular resort of all classes, and why it has never enjoyed anything like the same popularity since. The reason is clear. The Elizabethan dramatists were closely in touch with national sentiment. They bodied forth in stirring language, they interpreted by means of rich imagery the thoughts and feelings that were in the mind and breast of every Englishman. The court gallant and the careful tradesmen and the ruffling prentice took an equal delight in these dramas, though possibly in different aspects of them. Each knew that the plays expressed what he himself and everybody else felt but could not put into words. The rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the sublimity, the rant and the buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developments of human temper which characterized the English stage, J. R. Green, history of the English people. Thus the sense of sympathy grew to be an active principle of life. All classes of the community were brought closer together by the theatre. The theatre was one of the main arteries of national life. Since then we have had a drama of the town, the plays of the late 17th and the 18th centuries, stretching from Etheridge and Sedley down to Goldsmith and Sheridan, a drama which expressed merely a phase of society and appealed only to a small class. The solid elements of English life no longer frequented the theatre. It was no longer a national institution. It had ceased to be a national institution, not so much because of the puritanical dislike and distrust of art in any shape, as for these reasons, that a national sentiment with power upon the whole race no longer existed, that the breakup of the Elizabethan social system ordered into planetary infunctions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Arapagite had plunged all but frivolous or philosophic minds into the all-absorbing tussle with religious and political problems, that the writers for the stage appealed to the frivolous alone, and only recognized the existence of the rest by an occasional sneer or jibe. I think it is possible that if a group of dramatists had set themselves to deal seriously with noble themes and to carry on the traditions of the Elizabethan stage before its decline, they would have won back the nation to the theatre. But no such dramatists were found, and the mass of the nation, deprived of the emotional and imaginative stimulus of the play, found substitutes for it in the theatrical preaching of Whitefield and the fervent sweetness of Charles Wesley's hymns. The Puritans had tried to stamp out of the English race its capacity for emotion, and had completely failed. They had, it is true, hindered sorely the development of the art of England, we feel the hindrance sorely to this day. But they had only succeeded in turning emotion into another channel. This turned intellectuality, the chill repression of the Puritan faith, could never keep a hold upon the English race. Persuaded that emotion called forth by art was immoral, the nation surrendered its ideals and groveled for a period and a slough of grossness and skepticism. From that slough it only escaped by making religion emotional and finding in it the solace it had once derived from drama, the one art which had gained a really national influence. All that was best in England answered to the call, the larger number in the religious revival of the 18th century, a smaller yet a more picked band, not quite a hundred years later when the Oxford movement gained its fullest force. All this while then the drama has lain outside the track of English national life. So completely outside that only within recent years has it occurred to anyone to suggest that someday it might possibly recapture the place it once held. The suggestion once made however found ready welcome. The subject of a national drama is now a stock subject for discussion wherever interests go a little beyond the material concerns of the moment. It may be a mirage, a will of the wisp that we follow. But it does seem that, if ever we are to see the revival for which so many of us hope, the times are ripening towards it now. The emotional force of the religious revivals has spent itself. Formalism and eccentricity have damped down the fires of devotional fervour. For a while it seemed as if the novel might take its place as a vehicle for the expression of ideas held in common by the nation at large. Thackeray and Dickens between them covered the whole ground but neither was able to cover it alone. And then even while we awaited the arrival of the man who could make a wider appeal, the reading class for which novelists of intelligence wrote was swamped by the Education Act and the day when a book should be able to reveal the nation to itself was postponed for many a long year. But the drama is not in the same case as the novel. It makes a more direct call upon the emotions. It does not demand for its comprehension the same training of the mind as would be required to grasp the same ideas conveyed in a book. A fine play is like life itself. Some see in it meanings and suggestions that are hidden from others. This man's delight in it is intellectual, that man's purely sensuous. You perhaps are content merely to watch and smile while your neighbour is busy with analysis and introspection but all have their interest aroused and find in it some kind of stimulus. Shakespeare makes some impression upon everyone but makes it in wildly differing ways. One man after a performance of Macbeth will go home like De Quincey and write a philosophical essay upon the knocking at the gate. Another will say, with the North Country working man of whom Mr. Frank Benson once told us that it has helped him to do a better week's work. Hamlet is the most popular drama in the world because everyone can find in it something to engage his attention and to occupy his mind. We can scarcely expect another Shakespeare. For myself I doubt, as Lowell doubted, whether any language be rich enough to maintain more than one truly great poet, and whether there be more than one period, and that very short, in the life of a language when such a phenomenon as a great poet is possible. But surely we can have a national drama without another Shakespeare. Other nations give expression to their national characteristics through dramatic art, and yet the supply of great poets is not any more plentiful with them than it is amongst ourselves. What do these other nations possess which we lack? They possess a class of writers for the stage who strive to awaken an intelligent interest in drama and to make it contribute to the general flow of ideas, who are not content simply to provide entertainment which shall distract after dinner audiences and enrich theatrical managers. These writers, unlike ours, have sentiments in common with the audience they write for. They are moved by the same springs of passion and emotion. They are interested in the same themes and in the same modes of expression. They appeal to their audiences not by a process of calculation, but because both they and play-goers are, in virtue of their nationality, imbued with the same feelings, the same general aspirations, and because they take, in a broad sense, the same view of life and of dramatic art. Consider for a moment a few of the foreign plays with which English-played-goers are most familiar. Plaus-au-dames? Take France first. Monsieur Rostin's L'Auglion is not, to us, a good acting play. The poetry that we find in Monsieur Rostin's noblest imaginings fails to get over the footlights. Read the wagram scene, and you are struck by its power and beauty. Pity and terror cleans your soul. It is mysterious, haunting, wonderful. On the stage, with the crowd of horse-supers bawling behind the scene, and with Madame Sarah Bernard in incredibly tight uniform, going off like an alarm clock every few moments. The poetry, the imagination, the mysteries have evaporated. What is left appeals not to the deeper emotions, but to the theatrical sense, to the fondness for resonant declamation, and striking contrast, in a word, to the traditional French hankering after all that savers of la gloire. That is why the piece carries a French audience irresistibly along with it, whereas it leaves us cold and dissatisfied. We English people love poetry, the French people love rhetoric and la gloire. We would have the poet suggest to us more than he could put into words, to give us huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, to leave something to our imagination. Says the scoffing student in Rosetti's hand and soul. Whereas the French mind dislikes anything that is not logical, clearly expressed, while within the four corners of its comprehension. It agrees with Rosetti's other painter in the pity palace. Here, then, is one side of the French national character successfully appealed to by la gloine, as it has been appealed to in the past by Victor Hugo and Dumas Baer, and Monsieur Copay, and a host of others. Again, the average Frenchman's ideal of life is the ideal, to use a phrase now classic of La Homme since your Moyen. See how faithfully the modern French play represents that the dame au camiles represents it on the sentimental side. Saffo and La Périssienne, in which Madame Rejare exhibits the immense coverness of her realist method, reveal it upon its moralizing and its cynical sides. La Toscaire is the kind of piece which gratifies the appetite for horrors and harlotry which La Homme since your Moyen must now and then indulge. La course de flambeau catches him in a reflective mood, the mood of the morning after, when he feels doubtful about the welfare of the human race. The main thing I want to insist upon is that you can trace in all of these plays, and they are a fair selection from the modern French drama, the existence of the ideal of the Homme sensual Moyen, which is the ideal both of the playwright and of the spectators, and which therefore gives the modern French drama the title to be called a national drama in the natural sense of the words. You find when you examine the modern German drama that it can make good the same claim to this epithet, national. Its ideals are quite different from the French ideals. It sets itself for the most part to discuss heavily, and without the smallest spice of humor, the problems of our super civilized existence. It offers pictures of provincial and metropolitan life that are strangely real and externals and strangely exaggerated in essence. But this exaggeration is inevitable considering the methods employed. The characters are scarcely human beings, studied for their own sake, so much as abstract types of passion or peculiarly set up for the purpose of the dramatist's theme. Colonel Schworzy and Magda, for example, is an embodiment of the parental idea. Von Rocknitz and Gluck in Winkle merely sums up the German notion of a full-blooded madroful Coréa de Femmes. Even in Johannesfuhr, the interest of the problem is rather universal than personal, as it is with Sudermann, so it is with Hauptmann as well, perhaps even more so. In Diveber, the characters are the playwright's puppets. It is the atmosphere and the episodes that give the drama its marvellous power and intensity, and some mention has more individual interests, but here too the people of the play are all carefully labelled. This is in accordance with the German audience's view of life, with the teutonic attitude of mind which prefers a studied philosophic generalization to the presentment of a particular human being. The serious drama of Germany, in fact, expresses the serious side of the national character, just as the comic drama keeps touch with the German weakness for fun cut in thick slices and for elephantine gambles. Both varieties are unmistakably German, as much an expression as an idea. Turn now to a drama that is based upon ideals very unlike those both of France and of Germany, to the drama of Japan, as we have had it interpreted for us by Japanese players, the exquisite Sarayako, Mr. Kawakami, and their troop. Here is a form of art that proceeds directly from national character. What do the Japanese chiefly delight in? In beauty of colour and form from the simplest manifestations of natural loveliness to the strange exotic imaginings of an art based upon traditions of incalculable antiquity, and followed with a passion for perfection that is shown as clearly in trifles as in its most ambitious attempts. First of all then, the Japanese drama satisfies this desire for beauty. The very scenery brings to us Western folk a sense of refreshment and satisfaction. The dresses are things of rare delight. Everyone, all the movements and gestures of the actors fall into rich harmonies of expression, and an entire absence of self-consciousness lends them a charm like that of music, or the ordered inevitable processes of nature. And what of the matter of their plays? They are rooted nearly all in that conception of duty which is so strong an element in the Japanese character, the duty which men and women owe to themselves, to one another, and to the eternal verities of justice and of truth. In minor ways the drama of Japan satisfies to the full the Japanese sense of the mysterious, the terrible, the inevitable, and it satisfies as well their childlike delight in combat and in playfulness. These players have studied every means of heightening the effect of their efforts. Think of the intermittent striking of the gong throughout the intensely moving last act of the wife's sacrifice, the wailing voice raised now and again in melancholy chant, the stillness broken only by these ominous sounds and by the pathetic chipping of the birds without symbolic of the heedlessness of nature to the little tragedies of humankind. If this simple and unfamiliar art, with its unsophisticated directness of method, can produce so deep an effect upon us with our abnormally developed sense of the ridiculous, imagine how it must affect the people out of whose passion for beauty and out of whose simple ethical code it has been gradually developed. And now let us think of our own drama and ask ourselves how far it expresses any aspect of our national character. We can claim to have evolved, during the past generation, two art forms which are distinctively English, the Savoy opera and Mr. Panero's farces of character. But then neither of these have made school. Both depend, for the most part, upon the humor of individual men. They are not the inevitable outcome of a generally accepted view of life. They are rather the creations of personal talent, forcing a certain number of people to look at themselves and the world in distorting mirrors. It is true that our peculiar humor makes us, as a race, derive a certain enjoyment from being shown our own absurdities by keen-witted satirists. We have no objection because we feel all the while that, even with our absurdities, we are immeasurably superior to all nations else. Indeed, the possession of a few absurdities which, amongst our noble qualities, past almost unnoticed, serves to point and emphasize our superiority. Exaggeration, too, seems to come natural to us on this stage. So far, then, these two forms of drama are based upon national characteristics, but so far only and no farther. They are, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, at the bottom fantastic, not so utterly untrue to our real selves as the sugar pump play, or as the many deodorized farces which we borrow from the French in spoil in borrowing, but still fantastic in being removed from the main currents of the English spirit. A more serious drama is needed to reflect these, and that we lack. Mr. Panero, as I have said, seemed to be striving towards it when he wrote the Hobby Horse and Lady Bountiful, and later on when he gave us the second Mrs. Tanqueray and the benefit of the doubt. The pity of it is that he did not persevere. The two later plays of those just mentioned come now in the natural order of our survey to be considered, and I must try to show in what way they reflected, more than Mr. Panero's other dramas, the spirit of the times as it affects the English race. 8. Serious Intent, Part I. When Mr. Panero wrote The Prophlegate, in 1887, he followed up, after a long interval, the line of advance upon which he had started with the squire. Whether he chose to deal with a grave problem of life, one of the problems which face every man when he enters the manly state, and which may be offered for the solution of any woman who has become a wife, whether he left the comic and the sentimental high roads of drama for this more strenuous path because he felt impelled there too by sympathy and interest, or whether he merely judged that the time was ripe for plays of serious intent, I cannot tell. One is inclined to pin one's belief to the former alternative when one recollects that he has given us, since, the second Mrs. Tanqueray, the notorious Mrs. Ebsmith, and the benefit of the doubt. But we must also remember the Princess and the Butterfly, and the Gay Lord Quex. Trelawney of the Wells he may have written by way of recreation. The Princess and the Butterfly even may have been treated as he treated it of a set purpose, though, as I suggested just now, a deeper interest in the eternal verities of existence would probably have brought the theme nearer home to the mind and the heart of a time. The Gay Lord Quex is on a different plan altogether. Here Mr. Panero took no side, did not even show which way his sympathy tended. He drew a picture, an exaggerated picture in most respects, of society in its most corrupt and unpleasing aspects, and made the best use he could of his materials from the point of view of theatrical effect without offering any moral or pairing to enforce any lesson. What moral there was the spectator had to draw for himself. How can we explain this change of plan? Had Mr. Panero changed his outlook in the interval between 1887 and 1899? If not, and it scarcely seems probable, how can we reconcile the two methods of treatment, the one bracing, ennobling, full of a stimulating sincerity, the other, frankly cynical, making its appeal by dint of cleverness and not by dignity of purpose? Only by concluding that Mr. Panero has no particular fondness for either method, and that he adopts the one or the other as his own fancy in the fashion of the hour may dictate. To this it may be answered that Mr. Panero is a writer not of one mood but of many, that it is stupid to expect him always to produce the same kind of play, that, in short, his versatility of method is his greatest merit and assurus proof of his genius. Well, for those to whom this is so, it is so. It is, I grant with the utmost readiness, a great merit to be versatile. But versatile authors do not, as a rule, leave a deep impression upon their age. Even when a man has the brain and a heart of a Robert Buchanan, he cannot afford to squander his genius in every direction. Furthermore, an ingrained habit of mine must leave its mark upon everything which the mind produces. Over Mr. Meredith's work broods always the spirit of comity, over Mr. Hardy's always the tragic muse. Richard Fervel and Bocamp both come to an end that might be, and generally is, termed tragic. But consider cases closely, and you will find in each a certain freakishness of circumstance which is alien to the tragic manner. In neither case has the end been foreseen as inevitable. In neither case is it the result of conflict with one of the great obstacles to the human will, destiny, providence, a law of nature, or a grand passion. In Mr. Meredith's books we see a man contending with his fellow men and with the obstacles which their conventions and prejudices set in his path. In Mr. Hardy's novels, on the other hand, the catastrophe is to be apprehended from the first. Humanity always appears on the scene hand and hand with trouble, trouble not created by its own actions, but trouble which has its root in the very nature of things. Now, if Mr. Panero had an ingrained habit of mind, a steadfast persistency of vision, they would color all that he wrote. They might tinge it lightly, or they might deeply dye it to a uniform hue. What is certain is that at all his work we should find some evidence of the point of view from which he surveyed existence. Any such evidence I must admit that I have failed to find. It may be my own fault, my own dullness of perception, but I have never found anyone else claim to have found it, and until such a claim is put forward and justified, I do not see that we can come to any conclusion, save that Mr. Panero has no particular point of view, and that his plays must be judged one by one, each on its own merits, not in bulk, as a body of work expressing a considered and consistent criticism of life. This, it will have been noticed, is the plan I have adopted in discussing the plays. In succession we have had, under the glass, Mr. Panero's early efforts, his farces, his dramas of sentiment, his satirical comedies, and now we come to his plays of serious intent. It is in these that I personally am mainly interested, and since I believe the majority of my readers will share this predilection, I shall offer no excuse for dealing with them at some length. There is an increasing number of playgoers who agree with Alexander de Montfie that, while it is good to laugh, it is not good to laugh at everything, and that there are certain subjects which ought to be treated seriously, even in the theatre. Holders of this opinion have had to bear a good deal of ridicule in England as well as in France, and also a good deal of abuse. For a good many years, Ibsenite was a term of reproach implying in the person at whom it was hurled not only lack of taste but irreligion. To admit a liking for the problem play was to write oneself down in general estimation a raker among unsavory garbage. Any drama that dared to hold the mirror up to nature and to reveal what the polite world, in the matter of Mr. Podsnap, preferred to wave aside was decried as morbid, unwholesome, unpleasant. Any dramatist who, in pursuit of better things, ventured to take the suffering human race to read each wound, each weakness clear, to strike its finger on the place, and say, Thou ailest here and here. What's convicted not only of tiresomeness, but of immorality, whereas, of course, the only immoral plays are the plays which represent vice, both as being attractive, and as having no necessary unpleasant consequences, which vice always has. In a preference to a drama produced at the Comedy Falsé as far back as 1840, Mr. Walyski wrote a few sentences on this subject which sum it up very pithily and briefly. Pour voiler la misère des civilisations corrompues et des âges perverties. Now in the profligate, Mr. Panero set out to do just what the author of the play of 1840 did, to stand on the edge of a precipice, and to warn all passers-by to give it a wide berth. He set out to show, in a word, that the man who leads a desolate life before marriage will pretty certainly have bitter cause to repent it afterwards. It is a good and soothfast saw, half-roasted never will be raw. No dough is dried once more to meal, no coach new-shaven by the wheel. You can't turn curds to milk again, nor now by wishing back to then, and having tasted stolen honey, you can't buy innocent full money. These were the lines Mr. Panero set upon his play-bill. They strike the keynote of the play as he wrote it. Not, however, as it was acted at the Garrick Theatre. Mr. Hayer lacked Mr. Panero's courage. As he afterwards admitted in a public letter, he felt afraid of braving the popular prejudice in favour of a happy ending. He suggested that Mr. Panero should give the go-by to the stern logic which made Dunson-Renshaw bear the consequences of his profligacy. A council of expediency prevailed, the ending was rewritten. A happy ending was contrived, and there was lost more than half the force of the lesson Mr. Panero set out to teach. The original ending, the ending which Mr. Panero printed, and to which he presumably adheres, is painful. It presses home with uncompromising force the truth embodied in the lines just quoted. The stage ending was not really happier, but it seems so to the people who regarded only the outside of things. How could Renshaw and his wife ever be happy again, she knowing the life he had lived and he knowing that she knew? It was not merely that he had lived what is called, with unconscious irony, a man's life. That might have been forgiven, as Hugh Ardale's past is forgiven by Aline. Forgotten even, as Leslie only knew of it vaguely, and had no hideous detail seared into her brain. One can never tell of what a loving woman's heart may be capable. Renshaw, it is true, is a kind of man for whom it seems at first impossible to feel much sympathy. On the very eve of his marriage to the girl who has, he declared, changed and purified his whole nature. He indulges in a vulgar corouse. On his wedding morning he shows no sign of shame or regret when Murray speaks of the mismurched love he offers Leslie. He jauntily says that he has taken the world as he found it, and prates fatuously about happy marriages being the reward of men who have sown their wild oats. Women, however, have loved such men, even when they have guessed pretty shrewdly at the truth about them and will go on loving them without a doubt. Disappation of the ordinary kind has been forgiven, and will be forgiven so long as men are weak and women steadfast. But Renshaw was not the mere dissipated man about town. He was of a treyre, a seducer, as well as a common courier of defams. His character is a character overpufflegate without any redeeming feature. It is not suggested that the episode of Janet Priest stood alone. No doubt, Lawrence Kenward had duped and ruined other poor girls under the cowardly refuge of a false name. But even if it did stand alone, is such an episode ever to be forgiven by a wife who knows all its foul details, and has realized with agonizing exactness what its consequences have been? If Leslie could have pardoned Renshaw, could he ever have been forgiven by her brother Wilford, who has loved Janet and whose life is embittered by Renshaw's crime? No, between Leslie and her husband would have always stood the shadow of Janet Priest. No happiness was possible to them. Renshaw's misery in the last act may incline us to be merciful in our views of his fault. It is difficult to withhold from him a measure of pity, even of sympathy, when the change which his marriage has made in him becomes clear. I'm married, he tells Murray, in darkness as it were. She seemed to take me by the hand, and to lead me out into the light. Murray, the companionship of this pure woman is a revelation of life to me. But, you know, because you read my future, you know what my existence has become. The past has overtaken me. I am in deadly fear. I dread the visit of a stranger or the sight of a strange handwriting, and in my sleep I dream that I am muttering into her ear the truth against myself. Be sure your sin will find you out, had been Murray's warning, and Renshaw can only groan out that he spoke truly. But neither pity, nor the latent tendency in nearly all of us to believe in the efficacy of 11th hour repentances, must blind us to the realities of things. Or a mean, despicable, unmanly sin like the sin of Dunstan Renshaw, there is no forgiveness. And to make thoughtless people believe that a happy ending is possible to a story such as the story of a profligate, is to paltre with truth and to do an ill service to the cause of morality. It is this willingness to paltre with truth and conscience which has hindered the drama in England from taking the place it has taken in other countries. For a writer to write against his own judgment what will please the majority of people is fatal to the interest of art. It robs the artist's work of his interest. It robs his calling of its dignity. Imagine a publisher suggesting to Mr. Meredith or Mr. Hardy that they should alter their novels in order to make them more acceptable to the purchasing public. It is difficult to imagine this. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Meredith or Mr. Hardy consenting to such a proposal. How can the theatre, so long as managers and authors treat it in this fashion, expect to be regarded as anything but a form of light entertainment? And if our leading playwright, with his position assured, is so easily persuaded to sacrifice his ideas on the alter of expediency, what courage or consistency can be looked for in authors who are struggling hard to make a living and a name? If their profligate were not a fine play, one would less regret its author's instability of purpose. It is a fine play in spite of its occasional theatricality. It is now and then a little too well-made to be absolutely convincing. But the theme is handled with remarkable power. The story holds the attention firm, and the pity and pathos of broken lives touch the heart with poignant force. Upon the reader it produces almost as much effect as upon the spectator in the playhouse, in the later acts quite as much. This is the test of good drama now as it was in the days of Aristotle. In the Poetics we read that the plot of a tragedy ought to be so constituted that, even without the aid of the eye, anyone who is told the incidents will thrill with horror and pity at the turn of events. But to provide this effect by the mere spectacle is a less artistic method and one dependent upon the extraneous aid of stage management. Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense, not of the terrible but of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of tragedy. The profligate is as truly a tragedy as any of the great dramas of the Greeks which showed men struggling in the grip of fate. Fate is, after all, only the nickname we give to retribution. Retribution for our own follies and blunders, or, it may chance, for the long past sin or thoughtlessness of others. The Greeks bridged over the dim relation between cause and effect by inventing a stern power which compelled men hither and thither as it willed. Now injustice, now an irony. We see more clearly that they are the victims, not of any agency outside themselves but of their own acts. Destiny is, in short, nothing but character. Here is the modern basis of tragedy and upon this basis both the profligate and the second Mrs. Tancere are founded. The one indeed is a pendant, a corollary to the other. The story of Dunstan-Renshaw shows us that the profligate must always buy a minute's worth to wail a week and sell eternity to gain a toy that a man cannot escape from his past. The story of Paula Tancere enforces the same truth as it applies to the woman. Paula, like Dunstan, wanted to leave behind all that had marred her life, to let it be as if it had never been. But she finds the burden of her former self dogging her every footstep just as he did. It is not merely that the outward consequences of her acts rise up to cloud her horizon. Her very nature bears the impress of perverted instincts. There's hardly a subject you can broach, Aubrey tells Cayley-Drummel, on which poor Paula hasn't some strange, out-of-the-way thought to give utterance to, some curious, warped notion. They are not mere worldly thoughts, unless, good God, they belong to the little hellish world which our black-artism has created. No, her ideas have too little calculation in them to be called worldly. But it makes it the more dreadful that such thought should be ready, spontaneous, that expressing them has become a perfectly natural process, that her words, acts even, have almost lost their proper significance for her, and seem beyond her control. Paula cannot do or be what she would. She wants to be a kindly, trusty, comrade to Aubrey. But she could never miss an opportunity of saying an ill-natured word. She longs to make Aline love and confide in her. But she is always on the watch for signs of distrust, and is for ever revealing her morbid jealousy of the tie that binds Aline and her father together. She would like to receive Mrs. Cornelion in such a manner as she knows both prudence and politeness dictate. But instead of this, she behaves like a madwoman. She could not go back to her former friends. She has outgrown them. The vulgarity of Lady Oryde, and the topping imbecility of Sir George, fill her with disgust. The past hangs its lonesome weight about her memory. The present leaves her unsatisfied and no content. The future terrifies her with its long vistas of weariness and horror. Read her long-last speech to Aubrey. Is there any passage in contemporary literature which compresses into more striking words the nemesis that waits for all, man or woman, who live as Paula Tankeray had lived? The sudden appearance of Captain Ardale has shown her in a flash that the past can never be shaken off. Her husband tells her that her nerves are unstrung, that sort of thing isn't likely to recur. The world isn't quite so small as all that. Paula. It isn't. The only great distances it contains are those we carry within ourselves. The distances that separate husbands and wives, for instance. And so it'll be with us. You'll do your best. Oh, I know that. You're a good fellow. But circumstances will be too strong for you in the end, mock my words. Of course I'm pretty now. I'm pretty still. And a pretty woman, whatever else she may be, is always, well, endurable. But even now I notice that the lines of my face are getting deeper, so are the hollows about my eyes. Yes, my face is covered with little shadows that use them to be there. Oh, I know I'm going off. I hate paint and die in those messes, but by and by I shall drift the way of the others. I shan't be able to help myself. And then, some day, perhaps very suddenly, under a queer, fantastic light at night, or in the glare of the morning, that horrid, inevitable truth that physical repulsion forces on men and women will come to you, and you'll sicken at me. You'll see me then at last with other people's eyes. You'll see me just as your daughter does now, as all wholesome folks see women like me. And I shall have no weapon to fight with. Not one serviceable little bit of prettiness left me to defend myself with. A worn-out creature, broken up, very likely some time before I ought to be. My hair light, my eyes dull, my body too thin or too stout, my cheeks rattled and wruddled, a ghost, a wreck, a caricature, a candle that gutters, call such an end what you like. Oh, Aubrey, what shall I be able to say to you then? And this is the future you talk about. I know it. I know it! This is an awful speech, as Apollos. A speech that rings in the ears for days. And it is, every word of it, true. Not of Apollos' case alone, but of every case like hers, and in a modified degree its truth comes home to all who wantonly break the laws which the experience of the world has made for men and women. There may, for certain people, be a higher morality than the world's, but in their individual equation whartonness can be no factor. Many are offended by plain speaking on these points. We need no such warnings, they say. Why recognize the existence of women of Apollos' class at all? These subjects are not for public discussion even by the preacher. We should be kept from all knowledge such things. Yet neither the preacher nor the dramatist do their duty to their age if they see a precipice yawning in the path and fail to warn the passersby. The social evil with which Mr. Panera dealt in the profligate, and in the second Mrs. Tankarday, is a precipice that has engulfed more lives than can be counted, and it is not by looking away from it that the evil can be cured. Cured perhaps it never can be, but to make manifest its hideousness is the best means of lessening the number of its victims, and that is what Mr. Panera did in these two plays, with the skill of the artist as well as the philosopher's calm insistence upon the lesson he has in mind. Compare with this pitiful prophecy of Apollos the speech in which Wrenshaw forecast the only life which he and Leslie could live in common. Supposing there is some chance of me regaining her. Regaining her? How dull sleeplessness makes me. How much could I regain of what I've lost? Why, she knows me. Nothing can ever undo that. She knows me. Every day would be a dreary hideous masquerade, every night a wakeful, torturing rentalspect. If she smiled I should whisper to myself, yes, yes, that's a very pretty pretense, but she knows you. The slamming of a door would shout it. The creaking of a stair would murmur it. She knows you. I went she thought herself alone, or while she lay in her sleep, I should be always stealthily spying for that dreadful look upon her face, and I should find it again and again as I see it now, the look which cries out so plainly, profligate, you taught one good woman to believe in you, but now she knows you. The same note of hopelessness sounds here, the same terrible certainty that, as men and women shape their lives, so they must live them until the end. It was this hopelessness that made Mr. Panera close both plays with the suicide of the being whose existence was thus blighted. This was another concession, surely, to the fashion which demands that play shall come to some definite conclusion. Would it not have been even more effective to leave Dunstan and Paula face to face with the necessity of living on somehow? Suicide ought only to be permitted in fiction to characters which we may justly regard as heroic. It ought not to be allowed to dignify weak characters which have no heroic elements about them. It is, in no sense, an expiation. It is merely a way of escape, and a way which very few of the Paulas and Dunstan's take, however much they may talk about it. The total number of people who kill themselves is quite small, and of this total number there is but a small percentage who are driven to commit suicide by any real trouble or misfortune. I quite admit that neither the average reader of books nor the average spectator at plays likes to be left with a problem unsolved. Either there must be a happy ending, which need not trouble the mind with speculation, or the knot must be cut by death. This is not the way of life at all, and it is a pity that the unthinking should be encouraged to suppose that it is. The make of the second Mrs. Tanqueray is more finished, and therefore more convincing in detail than that of the Prophlegate. Or perhaps I should say than of the earlier part of the Prophlegate. Compare the openings. Hugh Murray's conversation with Lord Dangers scarcely bears upon it the stamp of nature. Arbery's dinner party is a perfect piece of exposition. The whole situation is unfolded simply, easily, naturally, not a word too little or too much. We are interested at once, and our attention is never allowed to wander for a moment from the problem at hand. The author's purpose is affected without any straining of probability, without even making the spectator or the reader conscious of the artifice that is used. There are coincidences in either piece, but they need not trouble us. It might be better if they were less long-armed, but coincidence is always permissible on the stage, so it be not merely episodic. Here it matters little by what means Janet and Ardale are brought into the lives of Leslie and of Eileen. The great matter is to press home the author's conclusions, and this demands their presence in the plot. They are brought in to serve the definite end of the whole play. The coincidences, in themselves, are of no interest at all. On the other hand, the characters are all drawn so as to interest us for their own sake, as well as in their general bearing upon the leading motive. Eileen is typically of a certain kind of girlhood, particularly English. Hershrinking from Paula and her swift accusation of herself at the end of having helped to kill her stepmother are equally true to this type. So is the illogical, but very natural feeling which prompts her to her give Ardale for having been a bit wild at one time, because of what he has done since in India. Cayley-Drummel is delightful, as shrewd, as kind-hearted, and as amusing a little man as ever wasted his time in hanging about London clubs half the year and country houses the next. Sir George and Lady Oride, nay, Miss Mabel Hervey, type of a class which is immortal, may seem a trifle overdrawn, but could be amply justified by human documentation. The dialogue all through is admirable, witty when the occasion permits, one thinks at once of Cayley's description of the first Mrs. Tankeray, indeed of Cayley's talk throughout the play. At a high level of seriousness and power in the long closing scenes, indeed the piece, regarded as a whole, strikes one as being finer and more worthy of respect every time one sees or reads it or fresh. The French writer, Mr. Charles Hastings, was not going beyond the generally accepted opinion when he wrote of it. While I subscribe readily to this opinion, I am inclined, as a matter of personal preference, to regard the benefit of the doubt as the play of Mr. Panero's witch on the whole has given me the most pleasure. It had nothing like the success of the second Mrs. Tankeray, a great many people who hardly admire Mr. Panero's work look blankly at you when you mention it, and admit they have never seen this excellent piece. I think its failure to hit at the popular taste must be set down to the fact that its theme is not direct and single like that of the earlier work, but complicated and of a crisscross texture. That sympathy is drawn different ways in the spectator compelled to consider the nature of the situation, instead of being allowed to start from a point at which everything can be taken for granted. Furthermore, there is nothing heroic about any of the characters. Fraser of Lockleen is a dull fellow who has married the wrong woman. Theo is a poor, tawdry, flighty little person who has accepted the wrong man. Jack Allingham and his wife are an equally ill-assorted pair. Her jealousy makes his existence with her unendurable, because he has not strength of mind enough to endure and to convince her by degrees that her state of mind is absurd. Nor has he sufficient consideration for his old friend Theo to prevent him from compromising her reputation by stupid thoughtfulness. Sir Fletcher Portwood is a windbag. Claude Emtage of Ribble. Justine a little better than a minx, and Mrs. Emtage a fit mother for such children. Remains Mrs. Cloise, the bishop's wife. Well, and Mrs. Cloise there is an element which does approach the heroic, but it stops short at the approach. It may be heroic to flout the prejudices of the world, but it can never be heroic, however judicious and proper it may be, to shape one's conduct with the view of conciliating the world. And that, after all, is what Mrs. Cloise thinks about principally when she plays the dea imagina and offers to rehabilitate Theo in society's esteem by taking her niece under her wing. What does she say herself? Not that it is a censorious, evil thinking world, and that no heed need be paid to what scandal-mongers and worldings may say. Oh, no, that would not be at all when keeping with Mrs. Cloise's character. It is of the effect of her actions upon the world that she is thinking all the time. Both in London and in St. Orffords the Ophelia will be my close companion. In our little London gayities she will figure prominently. At certain formal gatherings she will share the responsibility of the hostess. If any paragraph concerning our doing should creep into the newspaper it will concern the bishop of St. Orffords, Mrs. Cloise, and Mrs. Frazier of Joaquin. Oh, I don't think there will be many to wag evil tongues against Mrs. Frazier a few months hence. Kindly speech, if you will, and a speech wise from the world's point of view, but not heroic.