(1891) he transferred his allegiance from Zola to Ibsen. His true originality first manifested itself in Die Weber (1892); and subsequently he produced plays in several different styles, all bearing the stamp of a potent individuality. His most popular productions have been the dramatic poems Hannele and Die versunkene Glocke, the low-life comedy Der Biberpelz, and the low-life tragedy Fuhrmann Henschel. Other remarkable playwrights belonging to the Freie Bühne group are Max Halbe (b. 1865), author of Jugend and Mutter Erde, and Otto Erich Hartleben (b. 1864), author of Hanna Jagert and Rosenmontag. These young men, however, so quickly gained the ear of the general public, that the need for a special “free stage” was no longer felt, and the Freie Bühne, having done its work, ceased to exist. Unlike the French Théâtre Libre and the English Independent theatre, it had been supported from the outset by the most influential critics, and had won the day almost without a battle. The productions of the new school soon made their way even into some of the subventioned theatres; but it was the unsubventioned Deutsches Theater of Berlin that most vigorously continued the tradition of the Freie Bühne. One or two playwrights of the new generation, however, did not actually belong to the Freie Bühne group. Hermann Sudermann produced his first play, Die Ehre, in 1888, and his most famous work, Heimat, in 1892. In him the influence of Ibsen is very clearly perceptible; while Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna, author of Liebelei, may rather be said to derive his inspiration from the Parisian “new comedy.” Originality, verging sometimes on abnormality, distinguishes the work of Frank Wedekind (b. 1864), author of Erdgeist and Frühlingserwachen. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (b. 1874), in his Elektra and Ödipus, rehandles classic themes in the light of modern anthropology and psychology.
The promoters of the Théâtre Libre had probably never heard of Ibsen when they established that institution, but three years later his fame had reached France, and Les Revenants was produced by the Théâtre Libre (29th May 1890). Within the next two or three years almost all his modern plays were acted in Paris, most of them either by the Théâtre Libre or by L’Œuvre. Close upon the heels of the Ibsen influence followed another, less potent, but by no means negligible. The exquisite tragic symbolism of Maurice Maeterlinck began to find numerous admirers about 1890. In 1891 his one-act play L’Intruse was acted; in 1893, Pelléas et Mélisande. By this time, too, the reverberation of the impulse which the Théâtre Libre had given to the Freie Bühne began to be felt in France. In 1893 Hauptmann’s Die Weber was acted in Paris, and, being frequently repeated, made a deep and lasting impression.
The English analogue to the Théâtre Libre, the Independent theatre, opened its first season (March 13, 1891) with a performance of Ghosts. This was not, however, the first introduction of Ibsen to the English stage. On the 7th of June 1889 (six weeks after the production of The Profligate) A Doll’s House was acted at the Novelty theatre, and ran for three weeks, amid a storm of critical controversy. In the same year Pillars of Society was presented in London. In 1891 and 1892 A Doll’s House was frequently acted; Rosmersholm was produced in 1891, and again in 1893; in May and June 1891 Hedda Gabler had a run of several weeks; and early in 1893 The Master Builder enjoyed a similar passing vogue. During these years, then, Ibsen was very much “in the air” in England, as well as in France and Germany. The Independent theatre, in the meantime, under the management of J. T. Grein, found but scanty material to deal with. It presented translations of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, and of A Visit, by the Danish dramatist Edward Brandes; but it brought to the front only one English author of any note, in the person of George Bernard Shaw, whose “didactic realistic play,” Widowers’ Houses, it produced in December 1892.
None the less is it true that the ferment of fresh energy, which between 1887 and 1893 had created a new dramatic literature both in France and in Germany, was distinctly felt in England as well. England did not take at all kindly to it. The productions of Ibsen’s plays, in particular, were received with an outcry of reprobation. A great part of this clamour was due to sheer misunderstanding; but some of it, no doubt, arose from genuine and deep-seated distaste. As for the dramatists of recognized standing, they one and all, both from policy and from conviction, adopted a hostile attitude towards Ibsen, expressing at most a theoretical respect overborne by practical dislike. Yet his influence permeated the atmosphere. He had revealed possibilities of technical stagecraft and psychological delineation that, once realized, were not to be banished from the mind of the thoughtful playwright. They haunted him in spite of himself. Still subtler was the influence exerted over the critics and the more intelligent public. Deeply and genuinely as many of them disliked Ibsen’s works, they found, when they returned to the old-fashioned play, the adapted frivolity or the homegrown sentimentalism, that they disliked this still more. On every side, then, there was an instinctive or deliberate reaching forward towards something new; and once again it was Pinero who ventured the decisive step.
On the 27th of May 1893 The Second Mrs Tanqueray was produced at the St James’s theatre. With The Second Mrs Tanqueray the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was obviously comparable with the plays of Dumas, of Sudermann, of Björnson, of Echegaray. It might be better than some of these plays, worse than others; but it stood on the same artistic level. The fact that such a play could not only be produced, but could brilliantly succeed, on the London stage gave a potent stimulus to progress. It encouraged ambition in authors, enterprise in managers. What Hernani was to the romantic movement of the ’thirties, and La Dame aux camélias to the realistic movement of the ’fifties, The Second Mrs Tanqueray was to the movement of the ’nineties towards the serious stage-portraiture of English social life. All the forces which we have been tracing—Robertsonian realism of externals, the leisure for thought and experiment involved in vastly improved financial conditions, the substitution in France of a simpler, subtler technique for the outworn artifices of the Scribe school, and the electric thrill communicated to the whole theatrical life of Europe by contact with the genius of Ibsen—all these slowly converging forces coalesced to produce, in The Second Mrs Tanqueray, an epoch-marking play.
Pinero followed up Mrs Tanqueray with a remarkable series of plays—The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Benefit of the Doubt, The Princess and the Butterfly, Trelawny of the “Wells,” The Gay Lord Quex, Iris, Letty, His House in Order and The Thunderbolt—all of which show marked originality of conception and intellectual force. In January 1893 Charles Wyndham initiated a new policy at the Criterion theatre, and produced an original play, The Bauble-Shop, by Henry Arthur Jones. It belonged very distinctly to the pre-Tanqueray order of things; but the same author’s The Case of Rebellious Susan, in the following year, showed an almost startlingly sudden access of talent, which was well maintained in such later works as Michael and his Lost Angel (1896), that admirable comedy The Liars (1897), and Mrs Dane’s Defence (1900). Sydney Grundy produced after 1893 by far his most important original works, The Greatest of These (1896) and The Debt of Honour (1900). R. C. Carton, breaking away from the somewhat laboured sentimentalism of his earlier manner, produced several light comedies of thoroughly original humour and of excellent literary workmanship—Lord and Lady Algy, Wheels within Wheels, Lady Huntworth’s Experiment, Mr Hopkinson and Mr Preedy and the Countess. Haddon Chambers, in The Tyranny of Tears (1899) and The Awakening (1901), produced two plays of a merit scarcely foreshadowed in his earlier efforts.
What was of more importance, a new generation of playwrights came to the front. Its most notable representatives were J. M. Barrie, who displayed his inexhaustible gift of humorous observation and invention in Quality Street (1902), The Admirable Crichton (1903), Little Mary (1903), Peter Pan (1904), Alice Sit-by-the-Fire (1905) and What Every Woman Knows (1908); Mrs Craigie (“John Oliver Hobbes”), who produced in The Ambassador (1898) a comedy of fine accomplishment;
