"LOYALTY."
If you are a pernickety intellectual (_soi-disant_) you may really
permit yourself to be faintly amused at the fiery zeal of the
mystery-wrapt author of _Loyalty_ for his (or, quite possibly, her)
country's cause in this difficult hour. If you are cast in the common
human mould that nowadays is seen for the glorious thing it is, you will
respond to many single-minded, wholesome thoughts in the impassioned
statement of his thesis. And if you happen to belong to that simple
discredited breed, the English, so long overshadowed by the nimbler
Britons, you may have quite a nice little private thrill of your own,
a thrill of pride in your precious stone, and begin to think with
seriousness of the advantages of "home rule all round" in an
England-for-the-English mood, and of the value of a nationalism that is
as irrational as conjugal or mother love--and as fine.
The author's hero is an Englishman of the wandering type, assistant
editor on a crank paper. The play is a protracted debate in four
sessions, June, 1914; July, 1914; August, 1914; September, 1916. And
here the author makes his most serious mistake, the mistake made by Mr.
HENRY ARTHUR JONES in his recent squib. If he had contrived his Little
Navy folk, the proprietor, editor and revolving cranks as something
more than mere caricatures, brands of straw prepared for his consuming
bonfires, he would have strengthened, not weakened, his excellent case.
He has quoted his enemies' mistakes without their excuses, their texts
without their contexts. And that is a form of propaganda which can only
touch the converted, or such of them as are not stirred by a sporting
instinct to a certain mood of protest and a wish that the other fellow
should be given a better start in the heresy hunt.
The _dramatis personae_, then, divide themselves into the men of straw
and the right sort. Of the former you have first _Sir Andrew Craig_,
chairman of the party in his constituency and editor of _The New
Standard_ (there were indeed altogether new standards of efficiency,
mentality and hospitality in that rather imaginative newspaper office of
the First Act). Mr. FISHER WHITE gave us the courtly-obstinate old man
to the life (this player has a way of removing straw). In the dramatic
passage in which, returning after being broken in a German prison, he
relates some of the horrors of which it is good for us to be reminded,
he rose to the height of his fine talent. His exquisite elocution--a
remarkable feat of virtuosity--was in itself a sheer delight.
_Mr. Stutchbury_, the editor, pacifist and sentimental democrat, was
dealt to Mr. LENNOX PAWLE. He played his hand well. There was never such
an editor outside Bedlam; but Mr. PAWLE is a resourceful person and by a
score of clever tricks of gesture and business made a reasonable figure
of fun for our obloquy. All but broken in the end, but still claiming
that he had "the larger vision" (as he certainly had the larger
diameter), there was a certain dignity of pathos in his exit, a late
_amende_ by an otherwise remorseless puppet-maker. Mr. SYDNEY PAXTON
as a pillar of Nonconformity offered a clever study in the
unctuous-grotesque; Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD sketched a portrait of a
nut-consuming impenitent disarmamentist. The author is the first, so far
as I know, to give public emphasis to the queer fact of natural
history that there is some connection between extreme opinions and the
prominence of the Adam's apple of the holder of them--a fact on which I
have often pondered.
Mr. M. MORAND, the aggressive Scots member of the election committee,
inspired to great heights of insobriety by the return of his
London-Scottish nephew from the Front, sounded a welcome human note, as
did Mr. SAM LIVESEY, the Labour Member of the committee, shaken out of
his detachment into an extreme explicitness of language by a Zeppelin
raid experience. Mr. GEORGE BELLAMY'S Welsh Disestablisher and Mr.
GRIFFITH HUMPHREYS' exuberant German press-agent of the pre-war period
were both really shrewd studies.
Of the right sort there were but five--and one of these, the editor's
secretary, at heart an honest patriot, but in fact eating the bread of
shame, was perhaps not altogether of the right sort. Still he did get
off his chest at last the pent-up passion of years, and very well he did
it, with the help of Mr. RANDLE AYRTON, whose subtle little touches,
building up a picture of a disheartened hack, were very adroit indeed.
Then there was young _Henry Craig_, at the beginning an undergraduate in
his last term, at the end a V.C. in his last resting-place. Mr. PERCIVAL
CLARKE'S was an adequate pleasant study. So also was Mr. PHILIP
ANTHONY'S of a Canadian, full of strange idioms, who butted in to just
the wrong corner of Fleet Street to put the editor wise about the
intentions of a Germany in which he had spent his last two years. And
then there was splendidly English _Frank Aylett_, exile returned,
unspoilt by the cynicism of party and paper, whose fortune came to him
just at the psychological moment, enabling him to give his proprietor
notice and fight and win a by-election in the astonied man's own
constituency, besides carrying off his daughter (Miss VIOLA TREE), who
was the fifth of the right sort. What more plausible English hero than
Mr. C. AUBREY SMITH, except that he had to talk a good deal more than
seemed appropriate to his type? There was a well-managed post-election
scene when he was at his best (as was the author). And all through there
was good and sometimes glorious sense for those to hear who had ears.
The programme promised us about a month's interval between Acts I. and
II. It was actually less than that; but if Mr. J.H. SQUIRE's musicianly
orchestra had not been there to charm us we might conceivably have been
bored.