"Kultur at Home."
Each of the authors--Mr. RUDOLF BESIER and Mrs. JOHN SPOTTISWOODE--has
personal knowledge of the home-life of the Bosch; and their excellent
sketch of Prussian manners might have served usefully as a warning to us
if we could have seen it a few years ago. But at this time of day, after
nineteen months' experience of the enemy, I doubt its utility as a
source of illumination.
It would be futile to represent the Prussian officer as an angel in the
house, for we have long since learned to know him as a devil in the
field. And it is almost as futile to picture his prodigious
self-conceit, his vile taste in dress and furniture, his conjugal
infidelity, his habit of treating his women-folk as menials, since these
vices are human and venial in comparison with what the War has revealed.
Anyone might easily hazard the conjecture that the murderers of Belgium
had never entertained too fastidious a respect for womanhood; and after
the destruction of Louvain and Ypres it is mere bathos to insist that
the perpetrators of these outrages against art had previously cherished
a Philistine affection for antimacassars and plush sofas.
A common difficulty with me when I witness stage tragedies arising out
of a marriage of uncongenial types is to understand how the couple ever
came together. And so here, when the English girl, _Margaret Tinworth_,
in face of poverty and parental disapproval, marries a Prussian officer
in a small garrison town, and then finds all sorts of unbearable
conditions in her surroundings, one asks oneself, and fails to discover,
what kind of glamour he had cast over her that most of these conditions,
already patent enough in the society in which she had moved, had
contrived either to escape her notice or to appear tolerable. True, she
had gone to Germany to find release from the solitude of a motherless
home, where an unsympathetic father had no attention to spare from his
art treasures; but, with so admirable an aunt as _Lady Lushington_ to
chaperon her in her own country, it was not easy to see why she must
needs resort to exotic consolation.
[Illustration:
GERMAN FRIGHTFULNESS REPULSED.
_Lieutenant Kurt Hartling_ ... Mr. Malcolm Cherry
_Margaret Tinworth_ ... Miss Rosalie Toller.]
However, I do not propose to set my judgment up against that of the
authors, male and female, in regard to the credibility of her taste in
men, since, after all, the heart of a woman is a thing past finding out.
But I do venture to dispute the reasonableness of her ultimate attitude
in conditions where this enigmatic organ was not directly concerned. For
you are to understand that in the Third Act the brutality of her husband
and the insults hurled at England, which she was expected, as a
Prussianised wife, to approve, had become more than she could bear; and
in the last Act we find her in a Luxembourg hotel on her way home to
England under the care of _Lord_ and _Lady Lushington_. It is the 4th of
August, 1914; Germany has declared war; German regiments are marching
through the town; England has not yet spoken. The girl is in grievous
doubt as to whether she ought not, in the changed circumstances, to
return to her Prussian home. One could easily appreciate her attitude if
she had argued, "I am German by marriage; though I have lost my love for
my husband it is my duty, when he is risking his life for his country,
the country of my adoption, to go back and watch over his home for him."
But that was not her argument; her argument was that England--the
England that she had so stoutly defended against German ridicule and
contempt--had been false to her honour as the sworn friend of France,
and that it was her business to go back to Germany and eat humble pie.
Whatever the audience may have felt about these reflections on the
conduct of England, they must at least have been irritated by the
fantastic improbability of the girl's motive. Very fortunately at this
juncture the voice of the paper-boy is heard in the street conveying the
thrilling news of our tardy entry into the quarrel; and a glad
_Margaret_, having recovered her respect for her native land, consents
to return home to it.
Miss ROSALIE TOLLER played the part with great charm and sympathy, and
with a lightly-worn grace and dignity that were pure English. Serving as
a foil to her in taste and deportment and social tradition, the _Elsa
Kolbeck_ of Miss DOLLY HOLMES-GORE was extraordinarily German--a quite
remarkable performance.
Miss MARIANNE CALDWELL as _Frau Major Kolbeck_, the hostess of
_Margaret_, made a most lovable drudge; and Miss DORA GREGORY had no
difficulty in showing how the wife of a Prussian Colonel, though in her
husband's eyes her main purpose in life may be to minister to his inner
man, can wield an authority little less than that of the All-Highest
over the wives of the regiment. Female society in the little garrison
town was further represented by Miss MAY HAYSACK and Miss UNA VENNING,
who played, with more than enough vivacity, a brace of giggling
flappers, very curious about the more private portion of the bride's
trousseau.
Miss VANE FEATHERSTON, as _Lady Lushington_, had too little to do, and
did it most humanly; and Mr. OTHO STUART illustrated with a very natural
ease the kind of simple friendship, as between a man and a woman, which
it takes an Anglo-Saxon intelligence to understand.
The officers, though there might have been more of the blond beast about
them, were sufficiently Prussian, and Mr. MALCOLM CHERRY, as
_Margaret's_ husband, indicated with much precision the change in the
behaviour of a German gentleman, after marriage, towards the lady he has
consented to honour with the thing he calls his heart.
Apart from the one or two doubtful points which I have referred to, the
play went well, though it seems a pity that so much insistence should
have been laid upon the lack of culture (English sense) in households
where the strictest economy was essential. One was conscious of a rather
painful note of vulgarity in the attitude of _Margaret's_ father, where
he sniffs at the sordid environment of her German home. Impecuniosity is
of course a prevalent trouble among German officers in small garrison
towns; but one would have preferred that if bad taste in dress and
furniture had to be ridiculed the laugh should have been at the expense
of a richer society. Finally, I wonder a little that the authors, who
must have known better, should have helped to perpetuate the popular
misconception by which the German word "Kultur" is regarded as the
equivalent of our "culture."