John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's
Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for
the stage have done without thinking about art at all.
She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead
of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead
of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a
comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of
good manners. The game is after all the thing, and the skill of the
game. When the pawns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns,
they are hushed before they become disturbing. It is in this power to
play the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with pieces
made scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie's
skill, in this play, seems to me to consist.
Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seen
treating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of the
play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen. How this kind of work
will appeal to the general public I can hardly tell. When I saw "Sweet
and Twenty" on its first performance, I honestly expected the audience
to burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled with
delight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling with
delight. If the caricature of the natural emotions can give so much
pleasure, will a delicate suggestion of them, as in this play, ever mean
very much to the public?
The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder
and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to
understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell of
Old Drury," I happened to be in the last row of the stalls. My seat was
not altogether well adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it was
admirably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my attention
to my neighbours there. Whenever a foolish joke was made on the stage,
when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell, the orange girl, stuttered with
laughter or romped heavily across the stage, the pit thrilled and
quivered with delight. At every piece of clowning there was the same
responsive gurgle of delight. Tricks of acting so badly done that I
should have thought a child would have seen through them, and resented
them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect good faith, and gloated
over. I was turning over the matter in my mind afterwards, when I
remembered something that was said to me the other day by a young
Swedish poet who is now in London. He told me that he had been to most
of the theatres, and he had been surprised to find that the greater part
of the pieces which were played at the principal London theatres were
such pieces as would be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower class
theatres, and that nobody here seemed to mind. The English audience, he
said, reminded him of a lot of children; they took what was set before
them with ingenuous good temper, they laughed when they were expected to
laugh, cried when they were expected to cry. But of criticism,
preference, selection, not a trace. He was amazed, for he had been told
that London was the centre of civilisation. Well, in future I shall try
to remember, when I hear an audience clapping its hands wildly over some
bad play, badly acted: it is all right, it is only the children.