 Section 9 of Arthur Wing Pinero Playwright. 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 Elsie Selwyn. Arthur Wing Pinero Playwright, a study by Hamilton Fife. Section 9. Now the average audience in an English theatre likes the heroic and drama. The popularity of the melodrama is due to this taste more than to anything else. The average audience likes to see people performing noble and probable actions. For one thing, these actions remove the play so far outside the realm of reality that the spectator does not have to think much about it either at the time or afterwards. It will not bear thinking about. He is not meant to think about it. The benefit of the doubt does not at all gratify this taste for the heroic, but it does make an audience think. It ran about a hundred nights, which is as much as most really good plays can expect to do. It did not take hold of the average play going public, nor did it become fashionable. It has never been revived, though it is certainly a play which ought to be acted, and if we had anything in the nature of a repertory theatre, would be acted frequently. The opening is quite as clever and even more interesting and entertaining than that of the second Mrs. Tankery. With consummate skill, we learn the whole story up to the point at which the play starts from the snatches of conversation in the emptage's drawing room, while the verdict of the divorce court in the action of Allingham vs. Allingham, Fraser and Trevening, is being anxiously awaited. The arrival of successive friends from the court itself keeps the interest strung up to the highest dramatic pitch. By the end of the act, we know the outlines of the characters of all the persons who have been introduced, and the development of the imbroglio is attended with keen expectation. The second act certainly does not disappoint us. Theo, when she has left home after her husband's cold refusal to take her view of their position, goes straight to the man from whom she had got the sympathy which she asked in vain from Fraser of Luckine. Her action is wildly indiscreet, but her intentions are the most innocent in the world. All she wants is to borrow enough money to take her abroad to enable her to join a friend in Paris. At the moment when Allingham receives a note from her asking if he can see her at his Epson Country Cottage, he has on the house, not only his wife, who has come to see if some reconciliation can be arranged, but also Mrs. Cloy's, Sir Fletcher Portwood, and Claude, who have set off for Epson as soon as the Ophelia's flight became known. Allingham tells them all what Theo's note says. Mrs. Allingham seizes the opportunity at once. If the relations between Jack and Theo were entirely innocent, and if the judge was right in giving them the benefit of the doubt, let them prove it now. Let Theo be admitted and let her talk to Jack, imagining they are quite alone, while Mrs. Allingham is concealed in the enjoying room. For the sake of peace, Allingham consents. Theo's relatives are bundled into the dining room. Olive takes up her position in the library, and Theo is ushered in. At first, the result of the experiment justifies Allingham and permitting it. Theo explains her position, her husband to whom she looked to stand by her has failed. He doubts her innocence, and instead of facing the world boldly, he proposes to take her abroad. Therefore she has done with Fraser Locking. You know, she says, there's always a moment in the lives of man and woman who are tied to each other when the man has a chance of making a woman really, really his own property. It's only a moment. If he lets the chance slip, it's gone. It never comes back. I fancy my husband had his chance today. If he had just put his hand on my shoulder this afternoon and said, You fool, you don't deserve it, for your stupidity, but I'll try to save you. If he had said something anything of the kind to me, I think I could have gone down on my knees to him, but he stared at the carpet and held onto his head and moaned out that he must have time, time. What Theo says about her friendship with Jack is more than enough to convince Mrs. Allingham, but yet she delays to strike the bell, which was to be the sign that she had heard enough. At last Allingham persuades Mrs. Fraser, half-fainting as she is, to drink a glass of champagne, and then another. She has eaten nothing all day, she is beside herself with excitement and fatigue, and the wine affects her brain at once. She becomes loud and slangy and confidential as to her future, and then worked up to a state of delirium she wildly begs Jack to fly with her. At this moment, her relations, considering that the interview has lasted quite long enough, knock loudly for admittance. Their appearance naturally bewilders Theo, and before she is recovered from this shock, she receives another. Mrs. Allingham reveals herself. Theo understands the plot that has been laid for her and her mind gives way, as the curtain descends upon the axe she falls in a swoon at Allingham's feet. It is a situation full of significance charged with dramatic intensity. The whole act is brilliant in invention and construction, and this scene forms a climax to it that could not be more powerful. It has, however, this one drawback. It makes the writing of the third act in an extraordinarily difficult task. The solution to the problem is found eventually, as I have already indicated by Mrs. Cloyce, and this solution seemed to many critics to be weak and inconclusive. No play that deals sincerely with human beings can be brought to a conclusive finish, unless all the characters are killed off. Nothing in life is ever final, except death, but I cannot see that it is a weak ending. The charge of weakness seems to me to be the direct outcome of the hankering after the heroic, which I remarked upon a few pages back. It is a natural ending. It is just such a compromise as the English nature loves in practice, however much it may prefer in theory fireworks and beating of the breast. They are ordinary people, and this is an ordinary expedient for getting them out of their difficulties. One critic, whose appreciations as a rule are of more than ordinary insight and judgment, made complaint of a falling off in the last act, and then wrote as a justification for his discontent. The author has presented his problem, but not even he can offer a satisfactory solution for it. Surely this is to take a wrong-headed view of the play altogether. It is not intended by the author to be either a neatly rounded moral apologue or an ingeniously solved chess problem. The man who could offer a satisfactory solution of any of the real problems of life would be held as a great philosopher or the founder of a new religion. To such criticism as this, Mr. Pinero might well make answer with the king of Israel. Am I God to kill and make alive? All that a dramatist can do is tear you a page out of life. He is not concerned to get his characters out of all the difficulties into which they are involved. He is the holder of no universal pancia for the misfortunes of the human race. You may, if you like, hold the opinion that neither Theo and Frazier, nor Mrs. Einheim and Jack, could ever live happily together. But you must not imagine that, as Mr. Pinero said or thought they could, he does not pretend to leave them in a way of living happily ever after. He merely closes the particular episode of their history with which his play has been concerned. I have never heard anyone suggest a more natural or a more effective ending, however much they may have disliked the ending conceived by Mr. Pinero. And whatever has been urged against the conception, I have never heard anyone deny the skillful treatment of the last act of the benefit of the doubt. The interest is kept up with wonderful dexterity, and that we do not get any further light upon the characters of the four people whose fortunes we follow, yet they all behave as we should expect them to behave, knowing them already as we do. And really, after the two proceeding acts, there is nothing more to be done in the way of revealing character. By his daring expedient of the champagne, Mr. Pinero has opened to us the mind and heart even of the complex Theo, a tawdry little person, as I have said, who might seem at first scarcely worth studying even as a specimen of a large but not very interesting class. But the dramatist, like the naturalist, can find points of interest in every specimen that he places under the glass. Here, for instance, we have Theo proving to us the eternal truth that between a man and a woman of presentable appearance and of anything like an equal age, there can never exist a friendship which lacks altogether the disturbing element of sex. She and Jack Allingham have imagined, honestly, that there never was one single thought of anything but friendship on either side, but that something else was there, as it always must be, whether the man and the woman know it or not, and they very often do not know it. This may seem incredible to the people who think that all the mysteries of life can be solved by accepting the basest explanations of them. But it is a fact that must be apparent to anyone who has studied human nature as closely, for example, as Mr. Pinero has studied it. As soon as Theo is thrown off her balance, the something that has been at the back of her mind emerges into consciousness. The result is her delirious appeal to Jack. Her husband tells her that she was not herself, that the fatigue of the day and the preceding days, the excitement, the wine, had taken away her real personality. She replies truly enough that it was, on the contrary, her real personality which revealed itself. It was myself, the dregs of myself, that came to the top last night. The revelation is a bitter surprise, but it bids fair to leave a lasting effect for good upon Theo's nature. It is, in many a case, a sudden illuminating flash like this which alters the whole course of a life. Of course, the champagne was a block of offense to numbers of people. The sight of a woman affected by alcohol is so terrible and so revolting that the use of such a device certainly ought to be carefully hedged about. But in this instance, the device had a definite purpose to serve, a purpose which could have been achieved by no other means. Further was introduced with so careful a hand and in so artistic a spirit that it could not be regarded as offensive by anyone who judged the play as a whole. Interesting as the benefit of the doubt is to read it must be seen upon the stage to be fully appreciated. Yet it has never been acted in London since its original production in 1895, until we have a theatre which shall form a repertory of pieces and play them all in turn, adding to them gradually as time goes by. We shall be unable to judge fairly the life work of any British dramatist of our time. And not only is the student of a drama a loser by the absence of any machinery for keeping modern plays before the world, the dramatist must be sorely hindered and discouraged as well if his effort is merely to be in nine days' wonder, to occupy the boards for a season and then to be laid aside and forgotten. How can we expect him to put his best work into it? Must he not trim his sails to catch the passing breeze of popular favour instead of steering such a course as may if his vessel beastie worthy and built to endure, bringing him at last the harbor of lasting fame? For a spirit of any delicacy and dignity, wrote Matthew Arnold in his essay on Jobare, what a fate if he could foresee it to be an oracle for one generation and then of little or no account forever. But what a vastly more despicable fate to entertain a few hundred theatre fools of play-agoers and then to pass out of mind. How can the theatre expect to attract to its service the sufficient volume of talent to furnish forth a modern English drama? Mr. Panero has done his part well in face of discouragement, but one dramatist cannot make a school any more than one small stream can irrigate a wilderness. Of Sir Fletcher Portwood, I have said a word or two, but not enough to do justice to one of the most comical portraits Mr. Panero has drawn in any of his plays. Sir Fletcher is a perpetual joy. His cheery self-assertion and pomposity are hit off through the life. What a delicious scene that is in which he explains the true inwardness of his niece's acquittal. Mrs. Twelves, it has been awfully reassuring to see you beaming in court, Sir Fletcher. Sir Fletcher, ha! I dare say my attitude has been remarked. Beaming, why not? I've had no doubt as to the result. Mrs. Twelves, no doubt of thee is innocence, of course not. Sir Fletcher, innocent, that goes without saying, my niece, but the result, in any case, would have been much the same, I venture to think. Mrs. Twelves, really? Sir Fletcher, you see, my own public position, if I may speak of it. Mrs. Twelves, oh yes? Sir Fletcher, smiling. And I happen to know the judge slightly perhaps, but there it is. Mrs. Twelves, but the judges are not influenced by considerations of that kind. Sir Fletcher, heaven forbid, I should say a word against her method of administering law in this country. The House knows my opinion of the English judicial bench. At the same time, judges are mortal. I have never concealed that from myself, and Sir William and I have met. To Claude. You saw the judges look at me this morning, Claude. Claude. No. Sir Fletcher. No. Oh yes, and I have smiled in return. Yesterday I couldn't catch his eye, but today I've been half-smiling at him all through the proceedings. Again, Sir Fletcher's fussy anxiety in the last act to arbitrate between the husbands and the wisest, vastly entertaining. He has a recognizable figure in modern life, this respectable non-entity, who began to apply the lever to the mountain at an early age, and who ends with a seat in parliament and a knighthood. Thus, he is not only amusing, but a valuable record of a contemporary type. Claude M. Tej is very humorously sketched and also, and is equally true to life. He has all his uncle's sense of self-importance without the pushing energy which has made Sir Fletcher's position. All through the play, one is struck by Mr. Paneros' knowledge of stage-fact, and of the thousand little ways in which a dramatist can keep his audience interested and in good humor. Even when he introduces a servant for no more than a moment, he can contri to suggest character and to create amusement without hindering the development of the plot or deliberately turning aside to be funny. Consider the man-servant quay, for example. His wife is exceedingly healthy for a stout person. The boy is not ready to carry bags to the station, but he can be worried till he's ready. This may be called the mint and anise in the coming of playwriting, scarcely worth mentioning in comparison with the weightier matters of the dramatist art. But it all has its effect in building up a solid impression in creating an atmosphere of reality. Their will to revert for a moment to the main current of the play be always people who shrink from looking upon the petty tragedies of life with a sadder aside. Such people, while they are filled with admiration for the profligate and the second Mrs. Tankery, find in the benefit of the doubt a flavor that grates upon their palate. The same people would no doubt call Thakri cynical, as the fashion goes in words. They would avow their liking for plays, either avowedly comic and light-hearted, or else cast throughout in a serious mold. But they forget that life is a tangled web, good and ill together, serious and comic elements inexorably interwoven, and that often we know not whether to laugh or to cry at the fantastic tricks of our fellow creatures. Merely to laugh at the troubles of the Frazier's and the Allingham's would be to bring our merriment under the sentence of Solomon. It would be but the crackling of thorns under the pot. And yet to deal on a tragic spirit with Theo and her husband would be to dignify them unduly, and would point a faulty perspective in a dramatist mental picture of life. They have their moments of exaltation, as Becky Sharp and Rodin, for example, have theirs. Rodin rises to moral grandeur when he flings the jewel at Lord Stain. Every now and then Becky reveals some trait that seems to put her whole character on a higher plane. We forget Theo's tawdry nature when she falls senseless after realizing the full extent of her half delirious indiscretions at the Epson cottage. But it showed a just estimate on Panero's part of the theme dealt with in the benefit of the doubt that he treated it in the vein of satire. He lost nothing of the humanity of his characters, nothing of the interest of their story. He tore a leaf out of the Book of the Age. He exhibited at once his surpassing skills and maker of plays and the fruits of his labor as a student of human character. In both these respects, the notorious Mrs. Emsmith fell short of the benefit of the doubt. The first two acts and half of the third are written with a firm grip upon reality and a keen literary instinct as well. But after that, the play falls to pieces. The lesser characters are exceedingly well-sketched in. The Duke of St. Alfred's is drawn in a vein of literary sarcasm. But he is true in essence and also very amusing. The English parson is contrary to the customer of our stage. Not in any way exaggerated or held up to cheap ridicule. His sister, Mrs. Thorpe, is a woman who, in the hands of most playwrights, would have been a prig. As it is, she is sympathetic, natural, lovable. The persons who merely appear and disappear have each a subtle flavor of individuality. In 1895, Ibsen had begun to be generally recognized in this country as a master of dramatic craft. And the notorious Mrs. Emsmith shows more than any other of the plays the influence of Ibsen and especially the influence of Ibsen's studies in femininity. Even Mrs. Thorpe's fancy about her little boy's grave. You know I still tuck my child up at night time, still have my last paper and people going to my own bed. And it is awful to listen to these cold rains drip, drip, drip upon that little green coverlet of his. Even that reminds us of Agnes and Brand, placing her candle in the window so that its light may fall across the snow on her boy's grave and give him a gleam of Christmas comfort. But the scene in which Agnes hurls the Bible into the stove and then snatches it away is very far from the method of the Norwegian master. Nothing in the character of Agnes has prepared us for it, nor does the ending of the play seem any more natural. If Agnes had ever been convinced that she was grievously wronging Mrs. Lucas' cleave by keeping Lucas away from her she would have surely gone back to her old lonely life. Women of her temperament do not fall back upon the consolations of religious faith because they have never found in religion anything to console them. It is true that Agnes' sex has found her out, as she says in one direction but there is no reason to suppose that because a thwarted instinct takes its revenge the mental habits of a lifetime would give place to an attitude of mind to which she had never been anything but a complete stranger. There is nothing wonderful in the mutual confession of Theophilia and Jack Allingham that in their distress they have gone back to the habit of prayer for with them praying or saying their prayers had once been a habit and the mind slips back easily under stress of pain or deep emotion into grooves that have been formed in the impressionable early years of life. But Agnes' Ebsmith's father believed in nothing that people who go to church are credited with believing in and he brought her up to take his view of existence and of the world around her. When she cries out that she had trusted in the Bible and clung to it and that it failed her we feel that this must be some other woman who has strayed into the peace in order to help the author towards a striking finish to his third act. This is not the Mrs. Ebsmith we have known up to this point and we are sorely disappointed for up to that point Mrs. Ebsmith has aroused our intense interest and has seemed to be the finest most complex study of womanhood under the conditions of today that Mr. Pinero or any other modern playwright has drawn for us. In essence the notorious Mrs. Ebsmith enforces the same lesson as the benefit of the doubt. The lesson that a platonic relation between a man and a woman is impossible for 9 out of every 10 women and for 99 out of every 100 men. The lesson is of course weakened a little from one side by making Lucas so poor a creature but this, on the other hand, puts the woman's infatuation in a more striking light. Again if the man in the case had been drawn as an exception to all ordinary rules in the opposite sense of Lucas he would have been railed out as unnatural and also there would have been no play. Even as it is there is scarcely a complete play for such a subject cannot be fully discussed before a mixed theater full of men and women of all ages. It is not therefore I think quite a suitable subject for drama under present conditions. When Agnes resolves that if she cannot keep Lucas by her side in her way she will descend to his level and hold him by the power that all women can exercise over men and that is said to leave half of the spectators mystified and the other half uncomfortable yet the situation is not really made clear for the reason that it must remain obscure without the addition of what has to be left unsaid. It is really the whole mystery of the sex relation that we are invited to ponder. Agnes is too large a subject for the theater to tackle all at once in his present stage of development. For this reason however the notorious Mrs. Ebsmith with all its defects his drama is more stimulating to thought than any other of Mr. Panera's plays. Just because it casts into the arena of discussion a subject so important to nearly all the men and women in the world it gives us fruitful matter for reflection a mental cud to chew for as long as we choose to let our minds work upon it. Agnes tried to persuade herself that she was one of the exceptional women to whom the subject is unimportant. The process of her un-deceiving provides the stuff of drama. When she finds out that this weak, vain, egotistical Lucas has no idea of finding in her merely an intellectual comrade a spiritual affinity. Does she at once renounce their compact of partnership? Her head resents the intrusion of the flesh and blood element but her heart holds her back from any attempt at renunciation. Lucas' feeling towards her is the outcome of passion. She has learned to love him with the self-denying tenderness and seeks rather to offer service than to extract gratification. The greatest sacrifice that a woman like Agnes can make is the sacrifice of her convictions and ideals. Her love for Lucas persuades her to throw them over at the very first thought of the possibility of her losing him. The Duke of St. Alfred's verifies in his brutally frowned manner the impression of Lucas' character which has been gradually forcing itself upon Agnes. She sees that there is nothing for it but to surrender her own and to accept Lucas' standpoint. She is not the woman to be content with half-measures. Her mind is made up quickly and she acts at once upon her determination. The dress that Lucas has ordered for her comes into her thoughts. Only an hour before, she had expressed her disgust at the idea of wearing it and recollect her conversation about it with Lucas. Agnes, and when would you have me hang this on my bones? Lucas, oh when we are dining in your... Agnes, dining in a public place? Lucas, why not look your best in a public place? Agnes, look my best? Do you know I don't think of this sort of garment in connection with our companionship, Lucas? Lucas, it is not an extraordinary garment for a lady. Agnes, rustle of silk, glare of arms and throat, they belong in my mind to such a very different order of things than that we have set up. An hour afterwards, she has realized clearly the only condition upon which she can hold Lucas to her. It revolts her to submit to it, but she has no choice. She puts on the dress that has aroused her scorn. She transforms herself from a dowd into a beautiful woman. The effect upon Lucas is immediate. At first, he cannot understand the sudden alteration in her appearance. Lucas, why? What has brought about this change in you? Agnes, what? Lucas, what? Agnes, I know. Lucas, you know? Agnes, exactly how you regard me. Lucas, I don't understand you. Agnes, listen. Long ago in Florence, I began to suspect that we had made a mistake, Lucas. Even there, I began to suspect that your nature was not one to allow you to go through life sternly, severely, looking upon me more and more each day as a fellow worker, and less and less as a woman. I suspected this. Oh, proved it, but still made myself believe that this companionship of ours will gradually become, in a sense, colder, more temperate, more impassive. Beating her brow. Never, never! A few minutes ago this man, who means to part us if he can, drew your character disposition in a dozen words. Lucas, you believe him? You kind of what he says of me? Agnes, I declared it to be untrue. Oh, but... Lucas, but... but... Agnes... The picture he paints of you is not wholly a false one. Shh, shh, shh, Lucas. Hark, attend to me. I resign myself to it all, dear. I must resign myself to it. Lucas, resign yourself. Has life with me become so distasteful? Agnes, has it. Think, why, when I realize the actual conditions of our companionship, why didn't I go on my own waistoically? Why don't I go at this moment? Lucas, you really love me. Do you mean a simple tender woman are content to love? She looks at him, not slowly, then turns away and droops over the table. He raises her and takes her in his arms. My dear girl. My dear, cold, warm-hearted girl. Ha! You couldn't bear to see me packed up in one of the Duke's traveling boxes and borne back to London, eh? She shakes her head. Her lips form the word no. No fear that, my, my sweetheart. Agnes, quick. Dress, take me out. I won't oppose you. I won't repel you anymore. It is a powerful pitiful seenness. It is the tragedy of the exceptional woman's life. Few women, luckily for themselves, luckily for the continuance of the human race, are born like Agnes Ebb Smith. There are two ways of love, the man's and the woman's. Though sometimes we see the positions reversed. The woman, masterful, passionate, the man, patient, tender, serviceable. But the two ways and their extremes are seldom brought to clash so violently as they are in the case of Lucas Cleve and Agnes Ebb Smith. seldom is so complete a sacrifice of inclination and ideal called for as that which this scene presents to us. This is a tragedy in itself, this surrender of the higher nature to the lower, the failure of a strong soul to escape from the common burdens of humanity. But there is an even more poignant sequel. For no sooner has the sacrifice been offered than Agnes finds that has been ineffectual as a means of binding more closely to her the man who pretends to love her, who honestly believes that he loves her so low is his conception of the tie that means so much to her. A proposal was made that he shall consent to a feigned reconciliation with his wife an order that her position may be regulated and that he may resume his political career. His relations with Agnes are to continue as little change as need be but the situation is to be saved in the world's eyes and a scandal avoided. Of course Agnes expects that Lucas will repudiate this degrading suggestion with anger and contempt but the ratchet creature shows only too evidently that he would grasp at it if he dared. This is the final disillusioning touch and unfortunately it is here that we get our final glimpse of the real Mrs. Ebb Smith and Mr. Panera's play. We can all form our own notions of the further development of the situation at which we have arrived towards the close of the third act. Of one thing we may feel, I think, certain that the end which Mr. Panera gave us is neither likely nor convincing and that nothing in the play has prepared us for so strange in seemingly unnatural conclusion. Even Mrs. Thorpe startles us towards the end of the third act with a sudden declaration that she too had an unhappy married life. A declaration which was perhaps needed in order to lead up to the Bible-burning episode but which is so unexpected as to be almost laughable. One cannot but feel that the agony of unfortunate marriages is being piled up a little too high. It is the thousand pities that a drama of sincere analysis and great power, such as we find in the earlier part of the play, should remain merely a torso, a fragment, instead of growing under the dramatist's hand into a coherent and satisfying finished work of art. End of Section 9. Section 10 of Arthur Wing Panero playwright. 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 10, Manners and Morals. Up to 1899, then, Mr. Panero had written four plays of serious intent, all dealing with the relations between men and women. Two of them showed how impossible it is for a man or a woman to get rid of the burden of an evil past. The other two pointed out the obstacles that lie in the way of mere friendship between the sexes. So far Mr. Panero seemed to have based his serious work upon a settled view of life and human nature, a sound view, a broad view, a view that experience and intuition alike supported. But in 1899 came the Gay Lord Quacks. The theory of Mr. Panero's settled view seemed to be overturned. Most people could see no sign in this brilliantly clever play of anything but an anxiety to make the most of exceptionally interesting dramatic material. If the Gay Lord Quacks expressed any view at all, it appeared to be a view directly opposite to that which its author expounded in The Prophlegate. Here was Quacks, the wickedest man in London, according to Sophie Volgarny, who knows most things, able to shake off his burden of loose living and settle down, apparently a model husband with the typical creamy English girl Muriel Eden. He has reformed, it is true, but so had Dunstan Renshaw. He is genuinely in love, but Renshaw's passion was no less genuine. All the force that there was in Mr. Panero's handling of the Prophlegate theme seemed to be dissipated by the manner in which he treated the same subject in The Gay Lord Quacks. But was this the final word on the subject? How if the object of the latter play was to show what a low tone of morals and manners prevailed in society at the close of the nineteenth century? How if the whole piece was conceived in a mood of bitter irony? If it were so, you may reply, there would surely be one character to act the part of the ancient chorus, to indicate, not necessarily by words but by general attitude of mind, that the author's purpose was satire, to represent a higher type than the Quacks's and the Franes and the Baslings and the Mrs. Jack Eden's of this world. For dramatic purposes we must have contrast, and that is just what we miss in The Gay Lord Quacks. There is weight in these arguments, I admit, but I am inclined to believe, I wish to believe, that they can be answered. Look at the plays of the eighteenth-century dramatists. They are valuable beyond compare as evidence of the prevailing tone of the age in which they were written. It is not at least possible that Mr. Panero set himself the task of drawing a picture of Decadent Society as it appeared to him, and leaving the spectators each to draw the moral for himself. It is true the Gay Lord Quacks gives us the unpleasant sensation of having passed an evening with a collection of people whom we dislike and despise, but is not that just the impression which Mr. Panero intended it to produce? He takes a theatre full of people, five-sixths of whom are dominated by an absurd reverence for rank and fashion, and he shows them how exceedingly unpleasant people of rank and fashion can be. He shows that, to amplify a verdict said to have been passed by one ornament of society upon another in recent years, they have the manners of organ grinders and the morals of monkeys. Naturally then, instead of play as this, we miss any appeal to the heart. It makes its appeal entirely to the head. There is no one with whom we really sympathize, except perhaps the dear old lady whose hospitality and confidence are so shamefully abused. Muriel Eden is a featureless society doll with just enough cunning to carry on an intrigue, even after she is engaged to Quacks with the young man of whom she knows nothing. As for Captain Basling, the young man in question we know that he is stupid, and we are told that he is a moral, a very unattractive combination. Mr. Pinero, by the way, has a poor opinion of young men. Renshaw, Ardell, Basling, Denshtrode, all are of the same vicious type, and naturally enough they develop into the Quacks's and the Frayne's and the Peter Jarman's and the St. Alfort's of middle and later life. As for Sophie Folgarney, she is a wonderfully interesting study, but Quacks is right when he calls her in his elegant way, a low-spy and impudent bare-faced liar, a common kitchen cat who wriggles into the best rooms, gets herself fondled, and then spits. Quacks is interesting too, but he is three parts a cat as well as a hunter aftersworded, commonplace adventures lacking the excuse even of romance or passion. Consider the course of the plot for a moment. Sophie, the new Bond Street manicurist, is Muriel Eden's foster sister. She is capable, common to a degree in manner and mind, warm-hearted, excitable. She is the daughter of a bailiff on the Eden estates, but her character is that of a typical London gamming. The Eden's have set her up in Bond Street, which shows an amazing ignorance on their part of the usual nature of the manicuring industry, and the two girls have kept up their childish affection. When the Marquis of Quacks, with a reputation that is only faintly indumbrated by the epithet gay, has offered himself at the age of forty-eight and been accepted by Muriel under pressure of her family, Sophie is sorely troubled at the thought of her darling being sacrificed to an old rake. She determines to catch Quacks tripping, if she can, for Muriel, who has listened to squalid records of her future husband's gayities, avows that, if she found him up to anything of the sort now, she would break off her engagement in Mary Basling. But Quacks is not to be caught by the pretty manicurist's sly blendishments. A kiss or a squeeze of the waist, anything of that sort would do, but Sophie looks in size and pouts all in vain. This method failing, she will spy upon him and find out whether any other succeeds where she has failed. Soon she does find something out. The Duchess of Strud, a foolish, extravagantly sentimental creature of thirty-seven, has been one of Lord Quacks's charailles, and, much to his annoyance, she demands a farewell scene. She is staying with Quacks's aunt at Richmond, and for some unaccountable reason, he consents to a parting and keeping with their great attachment in the bourgeois adjoining her bedroom late at night. By chance, Sophie, who has been allowed to spend an afternoon in the grounds, overhears enough to guess that something of the kind is intended, and her suspicions are strengthened when the Duchess announces that she has had to send her maid home. She rises to the occasion and offers to take the absent maid's place. Then, of course, all happens in due course. Quacks goes to the Duchess's apartment merely to return her presents, and presently Sophie is discovered at the keyhole. The scene which follows between Quacks and the girl who is determined to ruin his chance with Miss Eden is the most ingenious Mr. Panero has ever written. The Duchess has been sent away by Quacks to share a friend's room on pretense of nerves. He remains to try and save her reputation, even if he cannot mend his own. His offers of money are scornfully rejected. Sophie will tell all she knows, which is not much, for Quacks has been iced to his old flame's blandishments, and disclosed the damning fact of his midnight visit. Quacks' next move is more effective than the attempt to buy silence. He has locked the doors of the rooms, and he declares that if Sophie denounces him, she shall denounce herself too. She may rouse the house, but the Duchess is safe. Sophie and Quacks will be found alone. Her story will not be believed. Her character will be gone. Neither her rage nor her appeals have any effect. At last in her dread of such an exposure, which would also mean the ending of her own engagement to a Bond Street palmist, the girl consents to hold her tongue. She is made to write a letter which puts her in Quacks' power, if ever he should produce it, and she turns to go. But suddenly the thought of Muriel comes into her head. Why? It's like selling Muriel, she cries. Just to get myself out of this, I'm simply handing her over to you. I won't do it. I won't. And she pulls violently at the bell. Her sudden, self-sacrificing change of front has a remarkable effect on the man. Mumbling words of admiration, he thrusts the letter into her hand, unlocks the door leading to her bedroom, and flings it open. But first the awakened servants at the other door must be dismissed with some explanation of the loud ringing. A message about the Duchess' letters in the morning is invented by Quacks, and when Sophie, all unnerved and almost hysterical, has repeated it and totters across the room, he speaks in an altered tone. Be off, he says kindly. Go to bed. Serve me how you please. Miss Fulgarney, upon my sole eye, I humbly beg your pardon. And the curtain falls on Sophie's. God bless you. You're a gentleman. I'll do what I can for you. No one, however much they disliked the piece as a whole, could deny the great power and grip of this remarkable scene. Given the characters of Quacks and Sophie, it is thoroughly natural, full of observation and of absorbing interest. No one who saw it on the night of the first performance, when the house was in the dark as to how the scene would end, is likely to forget the intensity with which it was followed or the outburst of applause, of pent-up excitement and admiration at the close of the act. Nothing more ingenious in this kind, nothing cleverer, has been written by an English playwright since Sheridan wrote the screen scene in The School for Scandal. After this nothing remains but to get Bastling out of the way, and this is accomplished by Sophie without any difficulty at all. She has somehow or other overlooked this delightful young man's real character. Quacks tells her, however, that he's just what I was at eight and twenty, what I was and worse, and Sophie now determines to apply to him the same test by which Quacks's fidelity to Muriel was proved. Bastling falls into the trap at once. Her suggestion that she would appreciate a little more than plain thanks for her help to him and to Muriel leads to a kiss. Muriel is a witness, and Bastling hurries out like a whipped dog. So far as the audience has had its sympathies aroused at all, they are now with Quacks, and the curtain falls upon the prospect of Muriel's early marriage to him. No romance here, and, according to my view, no suggestion of romance intended. Just a picture of the way in which marriage was regarded and everyday life in London lived at the end of the nineteenth century. Not a pleasant picture, not a picture that makes us feel more reconciled to the ugliness of life, but one that may brace us up, nevertheless, by bringing us face to face with facts, and filling us with a healthy disgust of the kind of world in which the Quacks's and the Sophie Folgarney's live and move and have their restless, worthless being. If a poet, and dramatists are poets, even though they never write verse, can make us face life with renewed confidence and vitality, and can tune our minds to, Oh, world as God has made it, all is beauty. He is beyond question a benefactor to his age. But as our bodies sometimes need unpleasant medicine, medicine which perhaps makes us worse before we are better, so do our minds now and then require an astringent tonic, some plain presentment of unpleasant facts that pulls us up short and sets us thinking of the goal wither we tend. Such a tonic was the Gay Lord Quacks. I am afraid most people regarded it merely in the light of an exciting entertainment, akin to lion-taming or walking the slack wire, a performance that stirred their sluggish interest and helped them to get through an evening without being bored. That is why, even though I cling to the hope that Mr. Panero meant it to be something more than this, I am sorry that a serious purpose was not more definitely indicated. Now, in Iris a serious purpose was indicated beyond all doubt. Everyone is agreed upon that, even the casual play-goer who pronounced it dull. But as soon as you inquire what Mr. Panero's purpose was, agreement vanishes. A hundred voices offer a hundred varying explanations. Here is one apologist inviting you to consider Mrs. Bellamy the victim of circumstances. The fate of Iris, he cries, might be the fate of any moderately good woman against whom chance and Mr. Frederick Maldonado incessantly ward. That acute student, Mr. W. L. Courtney, tells us that Iris is merely weak, not wicked, and that Mr. Panero meant to show how wrong it is to let oneself drift or to be too fond of soft cushions and the sunny side of the street of human life. A third suggestion is that Iris is a thoroughly bad woman. A fourth, that she is at heart a thoroughly good woman, sorely sinned against, and so on to the hundredth, possibly beyond. After studying the play with care, both in the theatre and from the printed page, I think there can be no doubt that Iris is a worthless woman, weak, self-indulgent, and incapable of appreciating what is right and what wrong. She is a moral woman, but a non-moral, one who lacks both the willpower and the intelligence to grasp even the outlines of morality. She seems to be, in this respect, intended as a contrast to Mrs. Tanqueray and even more so to Agnes Ebsmith. Both Paula and Agnes knew well enough when they were so acting as to be true to themselves, to the better instincts of their natures. When they were false to those instincts, they were deliberately false. Their passions or their worst instincts to carry them away with the full knowledge that they must in some way pay the price for self-indulgence. Of such natures is the stuff of drama compounded. In a play you want a conflict between the force of will and some opposing force. It may chance of nature or of some other will. Your characters must know their own minds. They must aim at something, whether a good end or a bad. In the larger drama of existence also, the men and women who play the prominent parts are those who have set purpose-shape means to ends. Of the nervous, the undetermined, nothing is to be hoped. The world has no use for them. If a man or a woman is wicked energetically and deliberately chooses to be wicked, there is a chance that some day they may alter their line of conduct and may benefit society instead of harming it. They say best men are molded out of faults and sometimes become much more the better for being a little bad. Much better have them in your community than people who are merely good from unthinking habit and who, if it became fashionable to lie and steal, would ask you truth and honesty as readily as they now profess these virtues. The bitterest fate of all in Dante's Inferno was reserved for the souls of those che viser senza infamia a senza lodo, who in their lives earned neither praise nor blame. Heaven cast them forth lest they should stain its fair courts. Hell would have none of them, for even in hell the wicked would have taken place above them. Gesti non hano speranza di morte e la lor si esa vita e tanto basa se indivosi son dognie altra sorbe. These have no hope of death and their blind life so meanly drags that they are envious of every other fate. Among these wretched spirits Dante would, I fancy, have placed the soul of Iris Bellamy. She answers to the letter, his description of the feeble folk, that catif choir of angels who are neither rebels nor gods faithful servants, but thought of their own selfish interests alone. Observe how this selfishness colors every act of Iris Bellamy's life. She cannot make up her mind to marry Laurence Trenwith because she loses her fortune if she marries again. Yet she feels that if she is left to herself, she is in danger of marrying him and so becoming poor. What does she do? Stiffen her resolution and stand firm? No, she decides to accept an offer of marriage from Maldonado, her millionaire admirer. She does not love him, she does not like him even as a lover. But he is rich, and her engagement sets up a barrier between Laurence and herself. Well, at all events, she has taken a step. I had nearly written a decisive step, but it is only decisive until she next sees Laurence alone, which is a few hours later. Looking into his eyes, feeling his kiss hot upon her lips, she casts away her anchor, breaks her word to Maldonado, and accepts Trenwith as a lover. She will not have a poor man for a husband, but she has no objection to making this young man play an unpleasantly equivocal part, no reluctance to become his mistress. The boy, however, has a sense of what befits a man. He cannot earn a living at home. His only chance is to farm in Canada. Iris is incapable of understanding why he declines to live upon her money, equally unable to see why he will not agree to accept some suitable occupation in town, a secretarieship, for instance, that imaginary refuge of the incapable and the unlucky. The sort of billet, as Laurence says, that provides a man with gloves and cab fares, and a flower for his coat. She has no conception of the feelings that spur a man on to be independent and to make a place for himself in the world. She has always taken, as they came, the good things with which from childhood fortune has furnished her, has always been profuse, extravagant, with money earned by other people. Why should Laurence insist upon talking about the terrible ranch at Chilcotin? What does his career matter? Why cannot he snuggle down comfortably, as she has done, and make an ignoble ease his only aim in life? Another time is her cry when he speaks of the possibility of her joining him on the ranch and becoming his wife. Let us discuss the point another time. Before another time arrives, the news comes that Iris has lost her fortune. Her solicitor and trustee has fled, leaving ruin behind him. A timely hit this in 1901. All that is left to her is a beggarly £150 a year. Surely she need not any longer stand out against Laurence's pleading. There is no reason whatever why she should. He offers her independence and a home, not luxurious, but as comfortable as she can make in England on her £150 a year, and if she loves him as she protests. But is it a case of the lady protesting too much? Yes, it is true. Announce her engagement to Tren with immediately, but she will not go to Canada with him. He can make a home and come back for her in a few years' time. Evidently she counts unconsciously upon something better turning up in the meantime. Thinks, perhaps, that her £150 will go somewhere towards comfort and cheap pensions. She knows little enough about them. Shrinks at any rate from the idea of the ranch. But, of course, she does not put it in this way, even to herself. She persuades herself that she is acting nobly. She tells Laurence that he would despise her if he recollected that she declined to marry him when she was well off. That it wasn't until I was poor, almost as poor as yourself, that I would marry you, and that then I promptly hung myself round your neck like a stone. And to Laurence, reminding her that, whenever she joins him, she will still be a poor woman, she talks in this exalted strain. She will go to him after I have had my own struggle, my own battle with poverty, singly, alone, after I have proved to you that I can live patiently, uncomplainingly, without luxury, willingly relinquishing costly pleasures, content with the barest comfort. Yes, yes, after I have shown you that there are other and better and deeper qualities in my nature than you have suspected, than I myself have suspected. Then, then I'll join you, Laurie. She deceives herself, she deceives her lover, she deceives her friends, and when a woman of this character begins to suffer from the delusion that there are hidden depths of gold in the trashy ore of her nature, she becomes more dangerous than ever. This is the mood in which she works the most complete destruction. One friend, however, is not deceived. Maldonado knows pretty well the nature of the woman in whose pursuit the sting of passion keeps him steadfast. He plays the part of the magnanimous friend, takes Lawrence under his special care, sees him off with false good nature and a devilish chuckle, then goes back to bid Iris farewell and to leave with her a checkbook that she can use at will. She protests that she will never use it, is angered when he insists upon leaving it for her to destroy. A sudden need for money to satisfy a generous impulse sends her to it, thoughtlessly, perhaps. Yet, when she realizes that she has used one of Maldonado's checks, she does not tear it up. Nor, when the servant comes to take her dressing bag, does she forget to drop the checkbook into it. And then, of course, almost from the very moment of my receiving it, my hand accustomed itself to scrolling checks for one object and another, until the account considerably opened by Maldonado is overdrawn. This, naturally enough, brings Maldonado to her side, pocketbook in hand. But the repulsion he excites is still strong enough to stimulate her to flight. Then follows a period of poverty. Why does not Iris write to Trenweth to say that she is in dire need? It is hard to say. Mr. Panero offers us no help. Perhaps she still calculated on something turning up. No doubt the idea of the ranch was still distasteful. She thought at first she could live upon her friends. But they turned their backs upon her, all but Maldonado. He had a flat close to his house in Mount Street. He kept it ready for occupation at any moment. He was always on the lookout for the tenant he meant to have. And one evening when Iris was at her last shilling almost, he met her and gave her the key, and she used it. Thus the fourth act of the play shows Iris in this flat with Maldonado still her lover. More her lover than ever, it seems, for he is urging her to marry him into accept-settled position. He admits that he has treated her a bit roughly, and frankly owns that he meant to have his revenge if he could get it, for her caprice and throwing him over for a lover. Now he is anxious to make it up to her. But Iris still dreams of the time for Trenweth's return. It does not occur to her that the altered state of her life will alter Lori's love for her or interview with their plans. By this time he must have made a fairly comfortable home. She will be delighted to leave Maldonado and to go away with the man she loves. So she puts Maldonado off, asks for time, promises to think it over. A few minutes later comes the one old friend who has been faithful with the news that Trenweth is back in England. Her instant thought is that the old friend shall act as a go-between. Her undeveloped, moral sense sees no reason why he should dislike the office. His protest she meets with an air of pain to surprise. In the end, however, he undertakes to let Trenweth know where she is. The same evening Trenweth appears and Iris stammers out her story. She is plainly incapable of perceiving anything in it except that she has had an unpleasant time and deserves sympathy. When Laurence has hurt her to the end and murmuring incoherent words takes up his hat and coat she finds it hard to believe that he intends to leave her. Even then she cannot see things as they are. It is the little good in her that has proved her downfall. It was her love for Laurence that prompted her first downward step. So she discovers her excuses. But they are powerless to stay Trenweth's steps. He stumbles out, dazed with the shame and distress of her story, and then comes Maldonado, wild with rage, having discovered his mistress's deceit and heard all from the neighbouring room. His first impulse is to kill her, but he subdues it and turns her out into the night. And when she has gone, his wild anger returns and the curtain falls upon him as he breaks everything within his reach. Not an edifying story, was the general verdict, but no doubt a lifelike picture. It lacked some of its likeness to life on the stage because Iris was played by an actress unsuited to the part. Miss Faye Davis was unequal to realising such a character as that of Iris. Her ingenue, moods and graces were irritating. They stood between the audience and the dramatist's intention. At least this is the impression that a reading of the play leaves on the mind. It is essentially a study of one woman, and it demands a really great actress to interpret it. An actress who can express experience and intuition in terms of emotion. Mr. Panero concentrated all his efforts upon the portrayal of Iris and his effort has lost half its effect so far as the theatre is concerned because it was not seconded by his chief player. The minor characters have less to do in this than in any other of the dramas we have been considering. The actual writing is simpler. The play contains few of these biting phrases that stick in the memory and show us the value to a playwright of a pretty wit aided by a full notebook. It is not even constructed with Mr. Panero's usual deftness. There is one piece of extremely clever stagecraft, the scene in which Maldonado finds the fragments of a letter that tells him of Trenwit's intended visit to Iris. By making him put the fragments together and then silently extract the latchkey from an ornament where he has placed it just before, the author conveys to the audience without a word spoken the nature of the development they are to expect. The scene which shows the reception of the news that Mr. Archie Keane, the well-known solicitor, has decamped is very naturally conceived and written too. But, taken as a whole, it is considered to represent worthily Mr. Panero's standard of craftsmanship. The division of acts in the scenes, the long interval which the spectator's imagination has to bridge over between the end of the third act, when Iris begins her life of hardship tempered by Maldonado's check-book and the opening of the fourth, which shows her in Maldonado's flat, the sketchy treatment of side-issues all are signs that the author's interest was in the play of character alone. And it was the least study of character that he gave us, even though Iris is not a masterly play. It is, it seems to me, the one play which he has written rather in order to follow out his own interest in his subject then to make an effective stage-piece. In each of the others he sacrificed something in order to be dramatic. In Iris it was drama that went by the board. We must look to Mr. Panero's future for a work that shall be, like Iris, the result of keen interest in some particular problem of character, and which shall, at the same time, be constructed with the ingenuity and the apt employment of convention that must go to the making of a perfect play. It was said that after Iris Mr. Panero had no intention to write more serious plays. The announcement was, of course, very wide of the mark. If we had no other indication that Mr. Panero feels within his mind the seeds of many other such works, we have at any rate the closing words of his introduction to Mr. W. L. Courtney's interesting and illuminating essay on The Idea of Tragedy 1900. And now, my dear Courtney, you tell us you perceive signs encouraging you to hope that the tragic idea may yet find fruitful stimulus in the great tumult of imperial emotions at present stirring the world's spirit of our peoples. With all my heart I trust it may prove so, and that we poor modern playwrights will not be found wanting, at least in the endeavour to respond to lofty and heroic inspiration. End of Section 10 Section 11 of Arthur Wing Panero Playwright. This is a LibriVox recording. While LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Betty B. Arthur Wing Panero Playwright. A Study by Hamilton Fythe Section 11 Mr. Panero's Actors A few words in conclusion about the actress and actresses who have helped to interpret Mr. Panero's plays to the world of theatre-goers and who have been helped by him to take leading rank in their profession. The benefit is mutual. A dramatist must have players of ability to act his plays and players must find clever inventors of character if they are to exhibit their ability to the best advantage. Mr. Panero like Dr. Ibsen is an actress dramatist. His plays never fail to offer to his players notable opportunities for the exercise of their art. All intelligent actors and actresses will tell you that it is a pleasure to perform in the plays of a man who is at once a student of humanity and a master of stage craft. That it is a task akin to the making of bricks without straw to aim at putting life into the stiff motions and awkward phrases of a mere stage puppet. There have been players it is true who have taken more pleasure in filling out and in endowing with the semblance of life some figure of straw imitated abominably from nature by a hacked playmaker and in carrying out the intention of a clever dramatist. But these are nowadays of an elder fashion. Note how eager are best graced actors and actresses are to act the characters of Ibsen. See how many reputations Mr. Panero has helped to make. The persons in his plays are so real that in many cases they play themselves as the phrase goes. To adopt another idiom they are actor-proof parts. Failure in them is scarcely possible. I have often been struck by this very great merit in Mr. Panero's plays when understudies have been playing leading parts or when I have seen provincial companies performing them. Two or three Paula Tankerays, notably Miss Granville's, though not Mrs. Kendall's, were worthy to be placed alongside of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's. No one has ever failed to get an immense amount of fun out of the magistrate or the Dean of St. Marvel's or Dick Fennell. On the other hand the parts written specially for Mrs. John Wood are by no means for every talent. Can one ever forget her George Nid in Dandy Dick? Yet Miss Violet Van Brug with all her distinction and cleverness was never the real sportswoman for a moment. She was a charming woman of the womanly type pretending to be mannish and horsey. Just as Miss Ellen Terry in Madame Solzhen is a delightful, refined captivating creature trying to persuade us that she is a vulgar washerwoman. Madame Rajen is for the time being in whose history and Mrs. Sardu have invented. Mrs. John Wood was the actual George Tid of Mr. Panero's brain. The notable acting quality in Mr. Panero's work was noticeable very early in his career. The money spinner with its deft and vigorous characterization has attracted a whole generation of amateurs. The squire found Mrs. Kendall, no bad judge of an effective part, ready to lend her art to the embodiment of Kate Verity. When Miss Kate Rourke revived this play in 1900, one saw the qualities in this piece which had appealed to Mrs. Kendall. Miss Rourke's was a performance instinct with charm and of a restrained intensity in the more strenuous scenes. It reminded one a little of her lady bountiful. Miss Rourke was the Leslie too in the profligate, a tender touching girlish figure. But it is to actresses of a more versatile talent than Miss Rourke's that Mr. Panero has been of most service. The second Mrs. Tankeray made Mrs. Campbell's reputation. The gay Lord, Quex, set the seal upon Miss Irene Van Brugge's patent of superiority and placed her definitely in the front rank. Miss Winifred Emery has never done anything so good as her Theo Frazier in The Benefit of the Miss Emery has unfortunately never had another part in a Panero play. Nor has Mr. Cyril Maud who caught so exactly the spirit of Kayleigh Drumley and who played Sir Fletcher Portwood with so exquisite a sense of character and humor ever been enlisted again under Mr. Panero's command. As a rule one success of this kind leads to others. Mrs. Campbell followed up Paula Tankeray with her exceedingly ever performance in The Notorious Mrs. Ebsmith. Miss Irene Van Brugge had proved herself in Trilani before she made her great hit as Sophie Fulgarney. Mrs. Kendall too was faithful to the author who had given her so fine an opportunity in The Squire. It is true that not even her brilliant ability could put life into the weaker sex. But her Mrs. German in The Hobby Horse was a performance that calls in the memory. Take Miss Faye Davis for another example of the actresses who have never found their Métier so truly as in Mr. Panero's drama. Never has Miss Davis made so deep an impression never has she acted better than in The Princess and the Butterfly. The reason must be that Faye Zuliani is a real person a distinct individuality standing well out in the mind as someone we have known and believed. Whereas most of Miss Davis's other parts have been mere stock stage types shadowy and incorporeal. These sentences were written before Iris was produced. Miss Davis failed in that because the part was altogether beyond her powers. Turning from actresses to actors the one who detaches himself from the rest as the player to whom Mr. Panero has given the greatest number of chances is surely Mr. Heir. Think of Mr. Heir as the good-hearted, irascible Spencer German. Recall the charming touch and go manner of his Roderick Heron. Pass in review the cleverly differentiated types of aristocratic Rue, which he offered in the parts of Lord Dangars, the Duke of St. Ulfort's and the Marquis of Quex. Mr. Heir's method in acting has indeed much in common with Mr. Panero's method in play writing. It is neat, incisive, fine down to a sharp point and a delicate edge. It aims just to shade more at effect than at nature. The actor is always perfect command over himself. The playwright never seems to let his emotions break a certain bound. By both, in short, emotions appear rather to be regarded as play things or as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves. Neither seems inclined to treat them seriously. In author and actor alike we mark the qualities proper to the polished, observant, rather cynical man of the world. We could never imagine Mr. Heir tearing passions to tatters or splitting the ears of the groundlings any more than we could figure to ourselves Mr. Panero's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, or Mr. Panero's pen running away with him and indicting rhapsodies of passion or mysticism. It is no wonder that such an affinity of spirit should have brought playwright and player together, or that such a partnership should have yielded such excellent results. Next to Mr. Heir, in the category of those actors who have shown especially in Mr. Panero's characters come Mr. Edward Terry, Mr. Arthur Cecil, Mr. John Clayton and perhaps Mr. Weedon Grossmuth. Has there ever been a Mr. Posket quite like Mr. Russell or a Dean of St. Marvel's in all respects so unimpeachably clerical and so irresistibly funny as Mr. Clayton? It may be that distance lends enchantment to the memory of the old playgoer, but we may safely say that the characters have never been played better. When Dandy Dick was revived in 1900, Mr. Alfred Bishop was certainly a delightful dean, suave and unkind to hint that Mr. Clayton got more out of the part. And yet, and yet, as for the blower of the revival, it could not be put anywhere near the inimitable blower of Mr. Cecil, the blower of cherubic countenance and deep underhand cunning, portliest and rosiest of deanery butlers most abandoned of gambling manservants. And Mr. Cecil's Vare Quequette, too, what a naughty little boy of a man of a childlike gamesomeness and infantile insouciance. What a delicious contrast with his inbred politeness and delicacy of manner to the noisy, outspoken admiral of Mr. Clayton, the very embodiment of all that we have agreed to denote by the useful adjective bluff. As the cabinet minister again, who could have hit off Sir Julian Twombly's peculiarities with so light a hand as Mr. Cecil? Could have played the flute with an air of such melancholy enjoyment or have endured public and private tribulations with so resigned afforditude? Only so long suffering a husband could have endured so irrepressible a wife as Lady Twombly became in the hands of Mrs. John Wood. The English stage lost a notable pair of comic actors when Mr. Clayton and Mr. Cecil died. Of Mr. Edward Terry, it is difficult to think about at the same time remembering Dick Finnell. Seldom has an actor identified himself so closely with a particular part what an immense amount of pleasure he is given by his vastly humorous impersonation of the broken down barrister. How deftly he drew a tear now and again by a pathetic touch among the comicalities of the repentant topper. The part might have been played in several ways other than that which Mr. Terry chose but he impressed his personality so firmly upon it that as Dick Finnell always seems to be the real one and those of other actors either imitations or deflections from the true type. Mr. Terry in The Times again had great opportunities and made the most of them. Edgerton Bompus was a genuine character in his hands. He hit off with a masterly breadth of treatment the frenzy determination of the parvenue to succeed in society his morbid self-consciousness and fear that the world as it eddied around him was thinking of his draper shops he caught to just the tone of pathos which was needed here and there to win our half scornful sympathy with Bompus's aspirations to keep the character human and prevent it from becoming a mere type held up to contempt and ridicule of Mr. Terry's earlier performances in The Rocket and one or two other of Mr. Panero's Prentice efforts I cannot speak but I have heard them as the invaluable Betteker says about hotels well spoken of Mr. Whedon Grosssmith made such excellent play with the parts of Mr. Joseph Lebanon and the Earl of Twinways in The Amazons that it has been a disappointment not to see him again in a Panero play how capitally the fatuous aristocratic manner of Twinways would have suited Sir Sanford Cleave how admirably would Mr. Whedon Grosssmith's other manner smug self-satisfied underbred have sat upon Claude EMPTAGE in the benefit of the doubt it is true that Mr. Aubrey Fitzgerald played Claude to perfection in another way and upon a method that is perhaps nearer to life than Mr. Grosssmith's think too of Mr. Fitzgerald's footmen in Trelawney but it would have been interesting to see what Mr. Grosssmith made of Theo Frazier's absurd brother such comparisons as this between the styles and conceptions of different actors we miss altogether in London if we had a repertory theater we should soon begin to take as a community more interest in acting as an art for we should see various actors in the same part to be able to contrast and judge between their renderings as the audience at the Teatro Française does in Paris there would be certain parts in the modern drama just as in the classic drama in which every actor on his way up the ladder would be anxious to appear and in which his admirers would wish to see him also we should watch the playing of small parts with more interest when they were in the hands of actors and actresses whose progress was from day to day but I will not digress further upon my e-day feaks we must return to Mr. Panero in serious parts Mr. Panero's chief exponents amongst actors have been Mr. Forbes Robertson and Mr. Alexander Mr. Forbes Robertson was just the figure for a Dennis Herron but he scarcely looked the kind of man who had led the life of Dunston Renshaw nor were his romantic personality a sympathetic method suited to the feebleness and petulance of Lucas Cleave Mr. Courtney Thorpe was much better fitted to give a convincing version of Agnes Ebsmus weak natured lover Mr. Alexander showed a capacity for self-sacrifice rare among actor managers when he cast himself for Aubrey Tankeray he certainly played the part well as well perhaps as it could be played but he gained little of the distinction which actor managers are reputed to covet. In The Princess and the Butterfly he had a better chance and his portrait of the man who was afraid of middle age was sketched with humor and a grasp of what small amount of character Sir George Lameron was allowed to exhibit it was throughout a pleasant performance ending the scenes with Faye Zuliani there was a pretty note of tenderness a grand passion was scarcely suggested but then lovemaking on the English stage seems bound to be of the cup and saucer variety it can be done in the intervals of afternoon tea Mr. Herbert Waring was a dignified earnest knoll brice many years ago and lent the same strenuous air which was in those days his specialty to the part of the young man in the cabinet minister who has no patience with the ways and manners of the polite world Mr. Oscar Osh made a consistent and impressive study of Maldonado in Iris and Mr. Dion Boussico gave a finished little sketch of Croker which was of service to the play just as his eccentric old vice chancellor was valuable in the representation of Trelawney Mr. Fred Kerr is another actor with a talent for neat characterization who Mr. Panero has provided with several good opportunities his horus veil his brim in sweet lavender his major tarvy and his literally were all performances that one can recall distinctly and with recollections of enjoyment this rose Leclerc left no actress behind her when her death bereft our stage of so bright an ornament who could rival her in parts of the grand dom order her lady Castle Jordan in the Amazons was a finished performance in delightfully rich humor and in touches of moving pathos when the scene called for a deeper note equally good in its way was her Mrs. Cloy's the capable practical woman of the world a Mrs. Proudy of later date with much less of the hard domineering qualities of a traditional bishops wife than Trollop's character the pleasure which a retrospect like this can give to the hardened playgoer is a sure proof of the notable qualities of Mr. Panero's drama you can think over his characters long after you have seen them embodied on the stage without feeling that they were merely children of fancy you chuckle over their eccentricities think kindly of their foibles recall their generous words and deeds with softened heart they dwell each distinct in the memory they are genuine creations not mere pastiches of scrappy observation in theatrical effect bibliography of Mr. Panero's plays this list is as complete as I can make it so far as London is concerned to include even notable casts in the country, or in America or in Australia would fill too many pages the writing of accurate theatrical history is made difficult by the absence of any regular record of productions I have had to hunt through many files to get some of these names and often the results did not seem worth I am in trouble however I have persevered and I have had much help from Mr. Panero's secretary Mr. F. A. Besant Rice for which I am exceedingly grateful and here the list is I hope it will be useful anyone who can help me to amend or extend it may be assured beforehand of my thankful readiness to accept suggestions I have not attempted to include all revivals only those of special interest 200 a year I hope theatre October 1877 2 can play at that game Lyceum Theatre 1877 Daisy's Escape Lyceum Theatre September 1879 Hester's Mystery Folly Afterwards Tools Theatre June 1880 Bygones Lyceum Theatre September 1880 The Money Spinner St. James Theatre November 1880 Imprudence Folly's Theatre July 1881 The Squire St. James Theatre December 1881 Girls and Boys Tools Theatre October 1882 The Rector Court Theatre March 1883 Lords and Commons Haymarket Theatre November 1883 The Rocket Geody Theatre December 1883 Low Water Globe Theatre January 1884 The Iron Master After Limito de Forge by Jean Chonnet May 1884 Enchancery Geody Theatre December 1884 Revival Terry's Theatre November 1890 The Magistrate Court Theatre March 1885 Mayfair Adapted from Maisonneux by Sadoo St. James Theatre October 1885 The School Mistress Court Theatre March 1886 The Hobby Horse St. James Theatre October 1886 Dandy Dick Court Theatre January 1887 Revival Wyndham's Theatre February 1900 Sweet Lavender Terry's Theatre March 1888 The Magistrates Court Theatre March 1889 The Prophlegate Garrick Theatre April 1889 The Cabinet Minister Court Theatre April 1890 Lady Bountiful Garrick Theatre March 1891 The Times Terry's Theatre October 1891 The Amazons Garrick Theatre March 1893 The Second Mrs. Tanqueray St. James's Theatre May 1893 Revival Royalty Theatre September 1901 The Notorious Mrs. Ebsmith Garrick Theatre March 1895 Revival Royalty Theatre February 1901 The Benefit of the Doubt Comedy Theatre October 1895 The Princess and the Butterfly St. James's Theatre March 1897 Trollani of the Wells Court Theatre January 1898 The Gay Lord Quex Globe Theatre April 1899 Iris Garrick Theatre September 1901 End of Section 12 Recording by Todd End of Arthur Wing Panero Playwright A Study by Hamilton Fife