HARD PRESSED.
A week or two later, while 'The Primate of Fiji' was still running
vigorously at the Ambiguities Theatre, Arthur Berkeley's second
opera, 'The Duke of Bermondsey; or, the Bold Buccaneers of the Isle
of Dogs,' was brought out with vast success and immense exultation
at the Marlborough. There is always a strong tendency to criticise
a little severely the second work of a successful beginner: people
like to assume a knowing air, and to murmur self-complacently that
they felt sure from the beginning he couldn't keep up permanently
to his first level. But in spite of that natural tendency of the
unregenerate human mind, and in spite, too, of a marked political
bias on the author's part, 'The Duke of Bermondsey' took the town
by storm almost as completely as 'The Primate of Fiji' had done before
it. Everybody said that though the principles of the piece were
really quite atrocious, when one came to think of them seriously,
yet the music and the dialogue were crisp and brisk enough to float
any amount of social or economical heresy that that clever young
man, Mr. Arthur Berkeley, might choose to put into one of his
amusing and original operas.
The social and economical heresies, of course, were partly due
to Ernest Le Breton's insidious influence. At the same time that
Berkeley was engaged in partially converting Ernest, Ernest was
engaged in the counter process of partially converting Berkeley.
To say the truth, the conversion was not a very difficult matter
to effect; the neophyte had in him implicitly already the chief
saving doctrines of the socialistic faith, or, if one must put it
conversely, the germs of the disease were constitutionally implanted
in his system, and only needed a little external encouragement
to bring the poison out fully in the most virulent form of the
complaint. The great point of 'The Duke of Bermondsey' consisted in
the ridiculous contrast it exhibited between the wealth, dignity,
and self-importance of the duke himself, and the squalid, miserable,
shrinking poverty of the East-end purlieus from which he drew his
enormous revenues. Ernest knew a little about the East-end from
practical experience; he had gone there often with Ronald, on his
rounds of mercy, and had seen with his own eyes those dens of misery
which most people have only heard or read about. It was Ernest who
had suggested this light satirical treatment of the great social
problem, whose more serious side he himself had learnt to look
at in Max Schurz's revolutionary salon; and it was to Ernest that
Arthur Berkeley owed the first hint of that famous scene where the
young Countess of Coalbrookdale converses familiarly on the natural
beauties of healthful labour with the chorus of intelligent colliery
hands, in the most realistic of grimy costumes, from her father's
estates in Staffordshire. The stalls hardly knew whether to laugh
or frown when the intelligent colliers respectfully invited the
countess, in her best Ascot flounces and furbelows, to enjoy the
lauded delights of healthful mine labour in propriâ personâ: but
they quite recovered their good humour when the band of theatrical
buccaneers, got up by the duke in Spanish costumes, with intent
to deceive his lawless tenants in the East-end, came unexpectedly
face to face with the genuine buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs,
clothed in real costermonger caps and second-hand pilot-jackets
of the marine-storedealers' fashionable pattern. It was all only
the ridiculous incongruity of our actual society represented in the
very faintest shades of caricature upon the stage; but it made the
incongruities more incongruous still to see them crowded together
so closely in a single concentrated tableau. Unthinking people
laughed uproariously at the fun and nonsense of the piece; thinking
people laughed too, but not without an uncomfortable side twinge of
conscientious remorse at the pity of it all. Some wise heads even
observed with a shrug that when this sort of thing was applauded
upon the stage, the fine old institutions of England were getting
into dangerous contact with these pernicious continental socialistic
theories. And no doubt those good people were really wise in their
generation. 'When Figaro came,' Arthur Berkeley said himself
to Ernest, 'the French revolution wasn't many paces behind on the
track of the ages.'
'Better even than the Primate, Mr. Berkeley,' said Hilda Tregellis,
as she met him in a London drawing-room a few days later. 'What
a delightful scene, that of the Countess of Coalbrookdale! You're
doing real good, I do believe, by making people think about
these things more seriously, you know. As poor dear Mr. Le Breton
would have said, you've got an ethical purpose--isn't that the
word?--underlying even your comic operas. By the way, do you ever
see the Le Bretons now? Poor souls, I hear they're doing very
badly. The elder brother, Herbert Le Breton--horrid wretch!--he's
here to-night; going to marry that pretty Miss Faucit, they say;
daughter of old Mr. Faucit, the candle-maker--no, not candles,
soap I think it is--but it doesn't matter twopence nowadays, does
it? Well, as I was saying, you're doing a great deal of good
with characters like this Countess of Coalbrookdale. We want more
mixture of classes, don't we? more free intercourse between them;
more familiarity of every sort. For my part, now, I should really
very much like to know more of the inner life of the working classes.'
'If only he'd ask me to go to lunch,' she thought, 'with his dear
old father, the superannuated shoemaker! so very romantic, really!'
But Arthur only smiled a sphinx-like smile, and answered lightly,
'You would probably object to their treatment of you as much as the
countess objected to the uupleasant griminess of the too-realistic
coal galleries. Suppose you were to fall into the hands of a logical
old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally
speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly
informed you that in his opinion you were nothing more than a very
empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman--perhaps even,
after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a regular downright
minx and hussey?'
'Charming,' Lady Hilda answered, with perfect candour; 'so very
different from the senseless adulation of all the Hughs, and Guys,
and Berties! What I do love in talking to clever men, Mr. Berkeley,
is their delicious frankness and transparency. If they think one
a fool, they tell one so plainly, or at least they let one see it
without any reserve. Now that, you know, is really such a very
delightful trait in clever people's characters!'
'I don't know how you can have had the opportunity of judging, Lady
Hilda,' Arthur answered, looking at her handsome open face with a
momentary glance of passing admiration--Hilda Tregellis was improving
visibly as she matured--'for no one can possibly ever have thought
anything of the sort with you, I'm certain: and that I can say
quite candidly, without the slightest tinge of flattery or adulation.'
'What! YOU don't think me a fool, Mr. Berkeley,' cried Lady Hilda,
delighted even with that very negative bit of favourable appreciation.
'Now, that I call a real compliment, I assure you, because I know
you clever people pitch your standard of intelligence so very,
very high! You consider everybody fools, I'm sure, except the few
people who are almost as clever as you yourselves are. However, to
return to the countess: I do think there ought to be more mixture
of classes in England, and somebody told me'--this was a violent
effort to be literary on Hilda's part, by way of rising to the
height of the occasion--'somebody told me that Mr. Matthew Arnold,
who's so dreadfully satirical, and cultivated, and so forth,
thinks exactly the same thing, you know. Why shouldn't the Countess
of Coalbrookdale have really married the foreman of the colliers?
I daresay she'd have been a great deal happier with a kind-hearted
sensible man like him than with that lumbering, hunting,
pheasant-shooting, horse-racing lout of a Lord Coalbrookdale, who
would go to Norway on a fishing tour without her--now wouldn't
she?'
'Very probably,' Berkeley answered: 'but in these matters we don't
regard happiness only,--that, you see, would be mere base, vulgar,
commonplace utilitarianism:--we regard much more that grand
impersonal overruling entity, that unseen code of social morals,
which we commonly call the CONVENANCES. Proper people don't
take happiness into consideration at all, comparatively: they act
religiously after the fashion that the CONVENANCES impose upon
them.'
'Ah, but why, Mr. Berkeley,' Lady Hilda said, vehemently, 'why
should the whole world always take it for granted that because
a girl happens to be born the daughter of people whose name's in
the peerage, she must necessarily be the slave of the proprieties,
devoid of all higher or better instincts? Why should they take it
for granted that she's destitute of any appreciation for any kind
of greatness except the kind that's represented by a million and a
quarter in the three per cents., or a great-great-grandfather who
fought at the battle of Naseby? Why mayn't she have a spark of
originality? Why mayn't she be as much attracted by literature,
by science, by art, by... by... by beautiful music, as, say, the
daughter of a lawyer, a doctor, or, or, or a country shopkeeper?
What I want to know is just this, Mr. Berkeley: if people don't
believe in distinctions of birth, why on earth should they suppose
that Lady Mary, or Lady Betty, or Lady Winifred, must necessarily
be more banale and vulgar-minded, and common-place than plain Miss
Jones, or Miss Brown, or Miss Robinson? You admit that these other
girls may possibly care for higher subjects: then why on earth
shouldn't we, can you tell me?'
'Certainly,' Arthur Berkeley answered, looking down into Lady
Hilda's beautiful eyes after a dreamy fashion, 'certainly there's no
inherent reason why one person shouldn't have just as high tastes
by nature as another. Everything depends, I suppose, upon inherited
qualities, variously mixed, and afterwards modified by society and
education.--It's very hot here, to-night, Lady Hilda, isn't it?'
'Very,' Lady Hilda echoed, taking his arm as she spoke. 'Shall we
go into the conservatory?'
'I was just going to propose it myself,' Berkeley said, with a faint
tremor thrilling in his voice. She was a very beautiful woman,
certainly, and her unfeigned appreciation of his plays and his
music was undeniably very flattering to him.
'Unless I bring him fairly to book this evening,' Hilda thought to
herself as she swept with him gracefully into the conservatory, 'I
shall have to fall back upon the red-haired hurlyburlying Scotch
professor, after all--if I don't want to end by getting into the
clutches of one of those horrid Monties or Algies!'