Welsh Journals

much intellect to be quite content with the well-nigh incredible badness of the typical mid-nineteenth century play. And thirdly, there is Ibsen to count with. As Mr. Shaw himself said, in that wonderful lecture he delivered in Cardiff, people may not like Ibsen, but after seeing his work they are no longer quite so satisfied with the conventional play. Hence the remarkable success of such a drama as Milestones. For the present method of this school is to write a work, which is thoroughly conventional at heart, and to tag it out with details which look like Ibsenism, and are not. The audience finds nothing to cause hostility or misgiving, and yet it has a delicious sense of being in the movement, of facing the music. Take the old Robertsonian formula, but instead of a hero in the Heavy Dragoons give us a hero in shirt- sleeves instead of militiamen, talk of aviation and don't make all your foreigners either fools or scoun- drels. You will thus win the respect due to antiquity and the admiration deserved by originality. Thus Mr. Besier's play, Don, made a notable stir at the time. There was the framework of a gentle, scholarly ecclesiastic and his wife (both devoted to their brilliant son), the 'choleric' old general and his wife, with a sweet wise daughter. The brilliant son and the sweet wise daughter are. one learns with little astonishment, engaged to be married. But now let us show we have a sense of the Zeitgeist. Instead of a comic Irishman or the sale of military plans to a foreign foe, let us depict a domestic problem. The son therefore runs away with a married woman. Your pseudo-advanced writer invariably reveals his calibre by this assumption that the problem-play always means marital infidelity there is only one sin-the Decalogue has become a monologue. But, to be fair, it must be owned that Mr. Besier has achieved novelty, for the brilliant son aforesaid has eloped for quite innocent reasons. The lady has a positive bogey-man for a husband, whose extra- ordinary bristliness is killing his wife. The hero, a very unworthy person, sees that she must be taken away for a little rest and petting. Accordingly he brings her to his own home, and hands her over to his mother. The husband follows, and there ensues what I suppose is to be termed a great scene between the gentle ecclesiastic (who positively reeks of Christchurch) and the fanatical Nonconformist ranter. This is what I mean by pseudo- Ibsenism. It is an unusually favourable specimen Mr. Besier's other play, Lady Patricia, is merely a card- board-drama after the model of Wilde. Still, Mr. Besier is the most real of all his school. His dialogue and his situations are natural and vigor- ous, at any rate in Don; there is not the least smell of the footlights. A good deal of this praise can be given to Mr. Arnold Bennett, whose Honeymoon and Milestones are innocent and entertaining works enough. The strike-atmosphere in the third part of Milestones is only adventitious modernity, and the whole idea of that play is, essentially, at least as old as Aeschylus; none the less the idea is worked out with admirable neatness and force. Next would come Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, who has poetical force and sincerity, also the rather amusing adapta- bility of his school. Compare The Silver King with Michael and his lost Angel, and note the change which has come over the technique and spirit even of an author who will have nothing to say to Ibsen (so one judges from his recent Divine Gift), Then follows Mr. Somerset Maugham, who is the Robertson of an England which supposes that when good Britons die they go to Monte Carlo. He is perhaps the most incurably stagey of the cohort. It is well nigh incredible that Jack Straw was produced as recently as 1908 it is obsolete beyond words, except that the foreign ambassador speaks excellent English-this daring touch shows that Mr. Maugham is upon his watchtower, reporting the time of day. Thus do we finally reach the portentous Sir Arthur Pinero. Of all dramatists whom one can pretend to take seriously Pinero is the most popular, the most prolific, and the worst. His earliest published work is The Magistrate (1885), and it is perhaps his best. Granted the old conventions of impossible misunder- standings, amazing and endless coincidences, and their farce is distinctly good. Gone-and without a cry-brave fellows is an inspiration in its kind. But when one considers that the plot hinges on the imposture of a mother who, in order to appear still young, knocks off several years from her son, with the result that a young fellow of more or less marriageable age is presented as a small boy to be kissed and petted by various ladies, and that these ladies one and all accept the fraud without murmur-when one considers this, one cannot award Sir Arthur any very conspicuous laurels. The Magistrate is, however, the cleverest, of the others I cannot attempt to give a catalogue. Suffice it is to say that, noticing the vogue which the incomprehensible Norwegian was gaining, even in London, he said to himself Britons never shall be slaves," and produced The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. These two celebrated works are the triumph of the pseudo- Ibsenist School. Mrs. Ebbsmith I have already mentioned. As for her colleague Mrs. Tanqueray, Pinero has obviously sat down to devise a" problem"- scene in the most advanced style, e.g. the conversation between the stepmother and the man, who is her step-daughter's accepted suitor, and whose mistress the stepmother herself has been. All the rest of the