Augustin Filon

“ Campbell’s province as an actress is more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating delicious fear that I would describe as the curiosité de souffrir. You feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. ”

“ A fair way to measure any dramatist is to ask this question of his work: “Does he make human life as small as his own theatre, so that there is nothing more to be said about either; or does he hint that human life so far transcends any theatre that all attempts to deal with it on the boards, even the highest, even Hamlet, even Œdipus, even Faust, are but shadows and guesses and perishable toys of the stage?” ”

“ The privileged theatres had no other course than to emulate the unprivileged ones. They produced Shakespeare in the form of curtain-raisers, or to wind up the evening before half-empty benches. They sliced him, carved him limb from limb, and served him up in bits, or floating in a dish of music, with a garnishment of loud and vulgar mise en scène, of which the contemporaries of Elizabeth would have been ashamed. And, in spite of all, in spite even of Macready’s talent (Kean had died in 1833) , they could not get the public to accept him. ”

“ There are two flirtation scenes, one following the other, full of childishness, but full of naïveté, freshness, and charm. There is question of the distance from the earth to the moon, of the play of light and shade, of a little milk-jug which it takes two to carry, of the Crimean War, and of Othello. Of love there is no word, but it underlies their every feeling, hides behind every word, peeps out through every glance, mingles with the very air they breathe. ”

“ If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips, with scarcely a moment’s pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. ”

“ Thus it comes that Pygmalion’s feeling upon first noting the aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the first question of Galatea, “Who am I?”—“A woman.” “And you, are you also a woman?”—“No, I am a man.” “What, then, is a man?” ”

“ Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing—she ought to love her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good. ”

“ Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise all his gifts at once—to put his whole strength into one important work. But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose? Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the favour of the public. ”

“ It is the custom to abuse the actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. ”

“ The Colleen Bawn is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant girl to become worthy of the man she loves,—her discouragement, which yet cannot exhaust her devotion,—all this is depicted by touches so suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. ”

“ Jones has done just the opposite. Judah’s first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy. Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience, terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights. ”

“ If there are to be masterpieces at all, they will be of to-morrow, not to-day. What I have set out to do is to ascertain at what temperature the drama comes to flower, to see how a great section of the human race sets about making to itself a new vehicle of enjoyment, of emotion, of thought, and, I may even add, of moral education. ”

“ What culture, though—what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician, psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for his calling.
Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. ”

“ The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to time,—now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally, will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama, freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. ”

“ The English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch; despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen’s, in which for the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.
It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Björnson its Spring. This Björnson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament have made a battlefield of his life. ”

“ Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant’s—a century a day. And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction (and the drama) then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why, when you [Pg 24] behold it you love it,—and you will not encourage it?—or only when presented by dead hands? ”

“ Humour flows in such abundance through Mr. Grundy’s theatrical work that it floods even his serious dramas. A Fool’s Paradise, that sombre story of poisoning, is so saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish; and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good humour by the sight of her agonies. In The Late Mr. Castello there is nothing at all of tragedy—nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex ”

“ There cannot be an intellectual effort in any province of art without a moral implication.
But France, though her great band of playwrights is broken up, still lords it over the European drama, or rather, over the European theatre. There is still a feeling among our upper-class English audiences that a play, an author, an actor and actress, are good because they are French. There is, or has been, a sound reason for that feeling. And there is still, as M. Filon says in his Preface, a corresponding feeling in France that “there is no such thing as an English drama.” ”

“ And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of his youth, or even from such pieces as The Squire and Lord and Commons, to a work like The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. His career as an author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.
In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he knew nothing of the theatre. ”

“ These comings and goings, the journeyings over green fields, the stoppages and ample breakfastings at little hillside inns, while the horses browsed at large along the hedges,—the freshness and peaceful rusticity of all these things, alternating with the tinsel of the theatre and the applause of the audiences, with the artificiality and feverishness of theatrical life,—must have been a constant entertainment to the little actors and actresses of eight or nine. For the adults, however, the life was a hard one, and only too often their roman comique was a roman tragique in reality. ”

“ His name was John Hare. He was still quite young, and he had wished for this strange rôle in which to make his début. Profiting by the example of Garrick, Hare had realised that an actor does not make his name by giving out a witticism or telling phrase with effect, but by putting before us a live human figure, if only a silent figure, in all its eccentricity of brain. His facial expression was wonderful, and his mimicry excellent;—he had in him the genius of metamorphosis ”

“ Where, then, was the problem? All Augier’s wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman. Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence of a grande passion, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not succeed? ”

“ The peasant, one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was the captain, the “man about town,” addicted to drink, with a diamond pin resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. ”

“ But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how suggestive, is everything she says—even her most trifling remarks; with what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. ”

“ It is necessary, therefore, in order to study the drama, to become a regular frequenter of the theatre; or rather, it is necessary to have followed its course for a number of years in order to note, season by season, the changes it has been undergoing, the tendencies which have been developing, the growth or disappearance of foreign influences, and, finally, the course of each individual talent and of the taste of the public. This study, direct from nature—from the life—is not without difficulty, even to Englishmen; how much less easy must it be to a Frenchman? ”

“ But if anyone will take the trouble to examine the leading English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings, the first shoots of an English drama of greater import and vitality and of wider aim than any school of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans. The brilliant Restoration comedy makes no pretence to be a national drama: neither do the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith. ”