The Drama

To offer a few reflections on current theatrical matters in a department devoted to the fine arts may seem to indicate a rather startling measure of audacity, and we confess that if under this title we proposed to take a general view of the field, we should be open to the charge of making, as the French idiom says, an arrow of any wood. The drama at large in America, just now, is certainly neither artistic nor fine; but this is a reason for caring with some tenderness for what it may be in particular cases. And indeed we are by no

means sure that its usual vulgarity is not in itself a signal occasion for criticism. If tawdry plays, and acting to match, were things that began and ended with themselves, we could certainly very well afford to let them alone ; for one of the least comfortable signs of the times, to our sense, is the extension, the resonance, as it were, given by voluminous criticism to poor performances. But a thousand theatres full of people contemplating every night in the year spectacles artistically, at least, more or less pernicious, suggest a number of accessory ideas. The pertinence of these reflections depends very much of course upon one’s measure of the strict importance to people in general of the artistic quality of their diversions. When a play is barbarous both in form and in rendering, and ignoble in sentiment, there is little doubt but that it can do no one any good. Often, however, one is struck with the high — the oppressively high — moral tone of dramas replete with æsthetic depravity; and we are thinking just now of pieces in which sentiment is maintained at a reasonable level, but machinery, using the term broadly, comes out with especial strength. Does it really much matter, one sometimes wonders, whether such machinery is made to produce vulgar effects or charming ones ? Is there any very tangible relation between the working consciousness and the play-going consciousness of people in general ? American audiences are not demonstrative, and it has often seemed to us that, for good or for evil, impressions at the theatre are not penetrating. People go thither to be amused, and tacitly assume that amusement is one thing and workaday life another, and that the world exhibited in plays is a purely fictive and artificial world, with a logic quite distinct from that of the dusky world of umbrellas and street-cars, into which they hustle hack when the play is over. If plays are artificial, so, in a minor degree, are pictures and novels; part of the machinery of that pleasure which is indeed in some degree tributary, as rest and relief, to the business of life, but not harmoniously interfused with it and animated by the same energies. We are inclined to think, in spite of the evidence, that this view of the case is exaggerated, and that it does seriously matter whether even uncultivated minds are entertained in good taste or in bad. Our point would be simply that it matters rather less than many of the people interested in the moral mission of art are inclined to admit. We are by no means sure that art is very intimately connected with a moral mission; and a picture that one dislikes, or a novel that one cannot read, or a play that one cannot sit out, is therefore to our sense a less melancholy phenomenon than to that of more rigid philosophers. We see no reason to believe that the mass of mankind will ever be more “artistic” than is strikingly convenient, and suspect that acute pleasure and pain, on this line, will remain the privilege of an initiated minority. A great many poor plays and pictures and novels will continue to be produced, in order that a few good ones may be floated to the front; and the few good ones, after all, will have but a limited influence. A brilliant work of art will always seem artificial —a fact, it seems to us, not on the whole to be deplored.

It is because our plays are trivial and our acting crude, and because, even if of necessity they awaken no echoes in the daylight world, they usurp for the evening the place of better things, and because, lastly, any marked exception to a vulgar fashion is agreeable, that the discriminating play-goer should make a note of the excellent performance of the School for Scandal given during the past month at the Boston Museum. The School for Scandal leads off the rather dreary list of the so-called old English comedies, but it stands a head and shoulders higher than its companions. Like most of the better pieces in the English repertory, it is more than a trifle threadbare, and has seen, in its day, no small amount of service. One should speak of it with respect, for, with all its faults, it has played a very useful part. It has often kept a worse play from being acted, and, odd as the fact may appear, it has been almost solely charged, for upwards of a century, with representing intellectual brilliancy on the English stage. There is Shakespeare, of course, but Shakespeare stands apart, and it never occurs to the critic to call him brilliant. We commend him in less familiar phrase. There are the old English comedies just mentioned, which, from Mrs. Inchbald down to London Assurance, are universally acknowledged to be very knowing affairs, and to contain a vast amount of talent, and of that superior sparkle and movement which is independent of the gas-man and the machinery. But for real intellectual effort, the literary atmosphere and the tone of society, there has long been nothing like the School for Scandal. It has been played in every English-speaking quarter of the globe, and has helped English wit and taste to make a figure where they would otherwise, perhaps, have failed to excite observation. It has therefore, by this time, a certain venerable air; it is an historical relic, an ethnological monument. One might have fancied that it had earned its rest and passed into the province of the archæologists, but we find it summoned once more to the front and bearing the brunt of the battle. It was revived a year ago in London under circumstances which gave it a new lease of life. These circumstances, it must he confessed, were for the most part chairs and tables, melancholy tokens that, for a skeptical age, even the School for Scandal cannot maintain itself on its intellectual merits alone. The spectacle in London was brilliant and the furniture very clever, being made up for the most part of genuine antiques of the Teazle period, in which the strongest opera-glass was challenged to detect a flaw. But if the chairs and tables in London were very natural, the actors were rather stiff, and the thing, on the whole, is better done at the Boston Museum. It is perhaps because here the acting is commendably natural, that the comedy, in spite of the traditional glamour that surrounds it, seemed to us so strangely lifeless and ghostly. For so lively an affair, the performance was almost funereal. The play must have been in its day prodigiously clever, and we are not at all surprised that with its first representation it should have taken its ticket for an apparently endless journey through the ages. We are far from saying too that its cleverness has altogether evaporated. When, on Lady Teazle’s saying that her friends at Lady Sneerwell’s are “ people of fortune and remarkably tenacious of reputation,” Sir Peter replies that, egad! they are tenacious of reputation with a vengeance, for they don’t choose anybody shall have a character but themselves, one smiles as frankly as ever at the honest retort. When Mrs. Candour pretends to defend her near relation by marriage, Miss Sallow, by saying that great allowances should be made for her, and that a woman labors under many disadvantages who tries to pass for a girl of six and thirty, we are still struck not perhaps with the delicacy, but at least with the alertness, of the humor. But on the whole, to compare the School for Scandal with the part it has played seemed to us the other evening to tell a rather dismal tale of the poverty of the English stage. Here was the great comedy, the comedy par excellence, and yet, in sentiment, what a singularly meagre affair it seemed! Its ideas, in so far as it has any, are coarse and prosaic, and its moral atmosphere uncomfortably thin. The main idea is that gossips and backbiters are brought to confusion, that hypocrisy is a nasty vice, and that a fine young fellow who lives freely and sociably and has a kindly word for great and small is likely to turn out better, in the long run, than his elder brother, who is an economist and a “man of sentiment.” The types are coarsely depicted, and the morality is all vulgar morality. The play is of course positively none the worse for this latter fact; it is only less imaginative. It has hardly a ray of fancy, of the graceful or the ideal, and even its merit — its smartness and smoothness and rapidity — has something hard and metallic. Sir Peter Teazle rather forfeits our commiseration by his crossgrained temper, and his wife our charity by her cynicism. An ever very flighty young wife, who tells her husband that she wishes he was dead, goes rather too far to recover lost ground within the five acts. Sir Oliver Surface is the regular old oncle de comédie, Joseph is a mere walking gentleman who stands for hypocrisy and is labeled in very large letters, and Charles, who is better, is rather a low fellow, even if he would not sell his uncle’s portrait. He is made at the Museum, indeed, a much lower fellow than he need be. The gentleman who should deliver himself in the leering, hiccoughing manner adopted by Mr. Barron, as he makes his exit after having overturned Lady Teazle’s screen, would have no allowable claim to the hand of the exemplary — the too exemplary — Maria. Mr. Barron’s acting at this point is the one distinctly bad thing in the play, and it is the more regrettable as the scene can ill afford to be made coarse. Sheridan’s sense of the delicate, we think, was not a very fine one, but it told him that the situation should not be treated as broadly comical. The speech he has put into Charles Surface’s mouth is therefore one that may be uttered with a sort of ceremonious irony, much more effective than the uproarious laughter and the incoherent shouts with which Mr. Barron goes reeling away. The distinctively amusing scenes in the School for Scandal are those in which Lady Sneerwell’s guests assemble to pull their acquaintance to pieces. They are brilliantly clever, but they perhaps best illustrate our charge of coarseness and harshness. Crabtree and Mrs. Candour are absolutely brutal, and the whole circle settles down to its work with the ferocity of vultures and wolves.

To measure the difference between small art and great, one should compare the talk of Sheridan’s scandal-mongers with that scene in Molière’s Misantrope in which the circle at Célimène’s house hit off the portraits of their absent friends. In the one case one feels almost ashamed to be listening ; in the other it is good society still, even though it be good society in a heartless mood.

And yet there are numerous good reasons why the School for Scandal should have had a great popularity. The very fact that its wit is such as all the world can understand, at the same time that it has point enough to make the spectator, who seizes it as it flies, think himself a rather clever fellow ; the fact, too, that it hits the average sense of fair play, and does not attempt too fine a discrimination of character; its robustness and smoothness of structure, and its extreme felicity and finish of style, — these things sufficiently account for its continued vitality. On its recent revival in London the play was remodeled in accordance with modem notions of symmetry, and to this version the Museum has apparently conformed. It is a very good one, and the only liberty it takes with the text is to transpose certain scenes and run others together. We have a great deal of tolerance for all audacities based on a desire to resolve an act into a single picture. Visible change of scene is rapidly becoming a barbarism, and we strongly suspect that this circumstance will end by giving a deathblow to Shakespeare as an acting dramatist. The Museum has blown its trumpet rather too loudly over its upholstery and costumes, on this occasion. Things at the Museum are not exactly shabby, but a manager, nowadays, has no right to boast of his scenery who fails to close in his rooms with a ceiling and spare us the horrible little fringed curtains, like the valances of oldfashioned bedsteads, which hang down from the roof. This is rudimentary. It is to be observed also that the ladies walk through the play without a change of toilet; but on the other hand, Mr. Le Moyne wears a most beautiful embroidered coat, and Miss Clarke, indeed, looks so handsome from the first, that one feels sure she could not change her dress for the better. The play, as a whole, is acted with extreme finish and skill; the first act, in especial, is really artistic. The two scenes at Lady Sneerwell’s have been compressed into one, and the manner in which they are rendered at the Museum touches the maximum of so-called genteel comedy on the American stage. Every one here is good, and Miss Clarke, and Mr. Le Moyne as Crabtree, prove themselves artists. Mrs. Vincent’s Mrs. Candour is extremely amusing; the actress has a capital sense of humor. The fine lady is rather missed; but morality gains, perhaps, by so pernicious a personage not having even that claim to our esteem. Miss Clarke has rarely done better than in Lady Teazle; we prefer her comic manner to her sentimental. The two disputatious scenes with Sir Peter are charming, and the serious side of the character is very discreetly lighted. Lady Teazle has a serious side, and she seems to us the only figure in the play who is anything of a creation. Both in her folly and in her penitence she has a certain natural air, which loses nothing in Miss Clarke’s hands. We have seen Mr. Warren do better than in Sir Peter; but it is not weakly good-natured to remember, apropos of Mr. Warren, that even Homer sometimes nods.

A noticeable feature in the performance at the Museum is the minuet danced at the end of the first act. It is thrust in by the shoulders, but if we suppose Lady Sneerwell to be giving a party, it may pass for picturesqueness’ sake. It is very prettily done, and it justifies itself by reminding us of a statelier age than ours. People were coarse, in a thousand ways, a hundred years ago, and if you wish to know the books Lady Teazle read, you may turn and see what Lydia Languish, in the sister comedy of The Rivals, hides under her sofacushion when her aunt comes up-stairs. But it is nevertheless obvious that the men and women who found a pleasure in dancing a minuet had a certain gravity and dignity which has passed out of the habits of the heroes and heroines of the “ German.” A straw may show how the wind blows, and a minuet may testify to a civilization. We watched the dance the other evening with an almost foolish pleasure ; by way of a change, it was not realistic ! The play-goer in search of realism will have gone to see Belle Lamar, by Mr. Boucicault, at the Boston Theatre, and have discovered into what swamps of vulgarity that ignis fatuus, in its duskier moods, may lead him.