"DISRAELI."
Our early-Victorian oligarchs disdained their DISRAELI as a mountebank
because he wore the wrong waistcoats and had genius instead of
common-sense. If he had grown to be the least like Mr. LOUIS NAPOLEON
PARKER'S _Disraeli_, if he had taken to standing over Governors of the
Bank of England and forcing them to sign documents under threat of
smashing up their silly old bank, if he had been such a judge of men as
to have made that prize ass, _Lord Deeford_, his secretary, or conducted
his _menage_ at Downing Street in the highly diverting manner exhibited
in Mr. PARKER's second Act, one trembles to think what they would have
called him--and done to him. And whether, if the Bank had ever had such
a Governor as _Sir Michael Probert_, England would have ever been in a
position to buy a single share in the Suez Canal or any other venture,
is a question for the curious to consider.
No wonder the Americans enjoyed _Disraeli_! REINHARDT should pirate it
for Berlin, as it would lend some colour to the imaginative Dr.
HELLFERICH's airy dissertations on English finance. Can it be that our
author is a hyphenated patriot in disguise and that this is merely a
ramification of the so thorough German Press Bureau's activities? Perish
the thought!
At the opening of the play, with _Mr. Disraeli_ and his wife as guests
at Glastonbury Towers, all went well. The almost uncanny lifelikeness of
Mr. DENNIS EADIE's make-up, the steady flow of the great man's good
things, which had been discerningly culled and quite skilfully put
together, his swift parries and kindly thrusts, his charming tenderness
towards that best of wives, the shining heroine of the crushed thumb,
all this was admirable, was eminently believable--that is if you except
the exaggerated futility and insolence of the aristocratic background.
It was when the adventuress got going; when casements began to be
mysteriously unlocked by fair hands, and pretty ears applied to
key-holes at vital moments of quite improbable disclosures to more than
improbable young men; when important despatches and secret codes began
to be left about in conspicuous places, in rooms conveniently vacated
for notoriously suspect plotters; when the Prime Minister began to
bounce and prance and to lay booby traps, into which not his enemies but
his incomparable secretary promptly blundered--it was then that things
went crooked.
It is perhaps not to be regretted. Nothing is more diverting to the
perceptive playgoer than these little dramatic-simplicities; as when,
the great Suez deal having been completed--a fact that it was enormously
important to conceal from the Press and the country (and the
adventuress)--a telegram with full details in the plainest of plain
English is despatched from the local post-office to the great financier
who had made the deal possible. The charming _naïveté_ of the family
gathering at the Foreign Office (it might have been Mme. TUSSAUD's) and
the adorable ingenuousness of the idea of bringing down a great
international financier by holding up his cargo of bullion in a foreign
port, should lead no one to complain that high politics are dull.
I wouldn't have missed Mr. DENNIS EADIE's _Disraeli_ for a good deal.
Where it was at all possible--which it was in general; Mr. PARKER only
sprinkled his extravagances--the ease and plausibility of it were quite
admirable. This adroit player gave us the tact, the wit, the gallantry,
the generosity, the romantic exuberance. It was a fine performance, and
it will be finer as its firm outline is filled in. The play, for all its
vagaries, may even serve to remind a careless age of its too lightly
forgotten spacious dead. Miss MARY JERROLD'S _Lady Beaconsfield_ was, I
suppose, more in the nature of an imaginary portrait. It was beautiful
and convincing. As a stage adventuress MME. DORZIAT was most attractive,
if only she had been credible. She had no business to be in any of the
situations in which she found herself, and must have needed all her
skill to conceal the fact from herself. Miss MARY GLYNNE as _The Lady
Clarissa_, the portentous _Duchess of Glastonbury's_ pretty daughter and
the doomed bride of the egregious _Deeford_, was quite charming to watch
and hear. Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND should, I am sure, mitigate the asinine
priggishness of the young viscount's bearing in the First Act. His
conversion from this to the merely crass stupidity of the second was too
much for us to bear. Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD as Mr. _Hugh Meyers_ looked
quite as if he might have been able to put his hand on two million; Mr.
HARBEN as _Sir Michael Probert_ just as if he would sign any document
which was put before him under threat or suggestion. Mr. CAMPBELL
GULLAN, as the adventuress's husband, made himself the kind of clerk
that no one would have trusted for a moment with even the petty cash.
These things I know are necessary and I acquit him of any artistic
impropriety. But you will go to see this piece chiefly for the sake of
Mr. EADIE's _tour de force_, for the thrill of the rather pleasant
sensation (mingled with a slightly horrified suspicion of sacrilege) of
seeing a queer resurrection, and for the fragrance of a touching little
idyll of married friendship--one of the most enduring of _Disraeliana_.