DRAMA 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; Posmersholm vf&s 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 Mr J. T. Grein, found but scanty material to deal with. It presented translations of Zola’s Therese llaguin, 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 Mr George Bernard Shaw (6. 1856), whose “didactic realistic play,” Widowers' Houses, it produced in December 1892. In France and Germany the Free Theatres were like artesian wells, tapping rich subterranean reservoirs which only awaited an outlet. In England it must be owned that the most industrious boring (ominous word !) produced only a meagre trickle. It appeared that all the available talent was already at the surface. 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. Rumours (some of them too well founded) of the excesses of cynical crudity perpetrated in the French theatres a cote established a very general prejudice against the whole movement. Nor did the productions of Ibsen’s plays tend to soothe the alarmed susceptibilities of the critics and the public. They were received with an outcry of horror and reprobation, the echoes of which have not yet died away. A great part of this clamour was due to sheer misunderstanding, but some of it, no doubt, arose from genuine and deep-seated distaste, which even perfect comprehension would have left unaltered. 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. To represent that they imitated him would be to misrepresent them grossly. Consciously and voluntarily they did nothing of the sort. 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 home-grown sentimentalism, that this they disliked still more. On every side, then, there was an instinctive or deliberate reaching forward towards something new; and once again it was Mr Pinero who ventured the decisive step. On 27th May 1893 The Second Mrs Tangueray was produced at the St James’s Theatre. This is not the place for a detailed criticism of the play, or an attempt to forecast its ultimate status in English literature. Whether it will be acted fifty years hence is a question which the future may safely be left to answer. What here concerns us is the historical fact—questioned only by critics who have been denied a sense of proportion—that with The Second Mrs Tangueray 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 Bjornson, of Echegaray. It might be
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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 Camelias to the realistic movement of the ’fifties, The Second Mrs Tangueray has been 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 Tangueray, an epoch-marking play. Even the critics, few but insistent, who deny all merit to The Second Mrs Tangueray, cannot fail to be struck by what, on their theory, must seem an extraordinary coincidence: the fact that the English plays produced since 1893 have been, on an average, incomparably better than those produced before that date. Mr Pinero himself has given us five plays—The Notorious Mrs Ehbsmith, The Benefit of the Doubt, The Princess and the Butterfly, Trelaivny of the “ Wells," and The Gay Lord Quex—any one of which it would be absurd to compare with the very best of his earlier productions. Though more unequal in workmanship than The Second Mrs Tangueray, they all show a marked advance even upon that play in originality of conception and intellectual force. In January 1893 Mr Charles Wyndham initiated a new policy at the Criterion Theatre, and produced an original play, Tice Bauble-Shop, by Mr Henry Arthur Jones. Though not quite without merit, it belonged very distinctly to the pre-Tanqueray order of things; whereas in The Case of Rebellious Susan, produced in the following year at the same theatre, Mr Jones showed an almost startlingly sudden access of talent. From this level he has never seriously declined, and in some plays, notably in Michael and his Lost Angel (1896), in that admirable comedy The Liars (1897), and in Mrs Dane's Defence (1900), he has risen well above it. Mr Sydney Grundy has produced since 1893 by far his most important original works, The Greatest of These (1896) and The Debt of Honour (1900). Mr R. C. Carton, breaking away from the somewhat laboured sentimentalism of his earlier manner, has given us since 1898 three light comedies of thoroughly original humour and of excellent literary workmanship—Lord and Lady Algy, Wheels within Wheels, and Lady Huntworth's Experiment. Mr Haddon Chambers, in The Tyranny of Tears (1899) and The Awakening (1901), has produced two plays of a merit scarcely even foreshadowed in his earlier efforts. Moreover, a new generation of playwrights has come to the front which, if it has not as yet produced any quite masterly work, has time before it in which to fulfil its high promise. Its most notable representatives are Mr J. M. Barrie, whose Wedding Guest (1900), amid many crudities, showed real power; Mrs Craigie (“ John Oliver Hobbes ”), who has produced in The Ambassador (1898) a comedy of fine accomplishment; and Mr H. V. Esmond, who has passed from light comedy in One Summer's Day (1897) to sentimental tragedy in Grierson's Way (1899), and back to social comedy in The Wilderness (1901). The indubitable though too self-sufficient talent of Mr George Bernard Shaw defies classification. Passing, often in one and the same play, from serious drama to the most whimsical extravaganza, it entirely subordinates the S. III.— 66
