The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his First
Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_, _A Pair of
Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original Plays--His Style--His
Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which
has not done growing.
If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular
dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell
most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I
think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips,
with scarcely a moment's pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing
Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be
some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who
will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely
with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its
sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to
whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time
to study the vagaries of individual minds. A _plebiscite_ of West-End
playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have
mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.
They all began work about the same time--a score of years ago, as nearly
as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress
has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts
and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or
that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence
of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest
works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they
were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their
originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something
almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical _autodidactes_,
but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging
along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding
science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are
only half-way along their arduous paths.
So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are
dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one
commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who
adheres still--largely through his antecedents, and partly through his
natural disposition--to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of
the French: with Sydney Grundy.
If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long
intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small
pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial
theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity--an affray
with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three
acts, entitled _The Snowball_. There was question, in the first case, of
an adaptation of _La Petite Marquise_, which he wrote in collaboration
with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain
nothing more frankly moral than _La Petite Marquise_. The story of the
piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a
virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its
moral is a moral of--shall I say?--fastidious abstention; a moral it is
difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when
passion has lost its fire and its poison.
It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no
more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English
censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the
posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had "passed" the _Petite
Marquise_ in French in all her original licence; he refused her his
sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his
fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater,
perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have
wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and
indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people
who were destined to keep it in mind.
_The Snowball_ is an English version of _Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa
femme_. Mr. Sydney Grundy's originality consists in his having introduced
into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this
species--cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a
single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his
finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening
to or reading _The Snowball_, you look out for a single trait of English
manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.
The well-merited success of _The Snowball_ retarded Mr. Grundy's dramatic
career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation--so ungrateful
in those days--for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good
side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter,
obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy
Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead
of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his
business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail
these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none
of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these
adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his
personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of
another.
The first in date, _In Honour Bound_, is at once a condensation and a
critical commentary on Scribe's piece, _Une Chaine_. The heroine is a
young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought
distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it
is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of
a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders
throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young
man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has
had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty
happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that
is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl's
guardian gives his consent. Now--and it is here that Scribe's hand is
discovered--this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been
threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir
George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is
unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands,
under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George
know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow
every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose
happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that
he never for a moment loses his _sang-froid_, his grace, or his wit. At
bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the
woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of
Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her
guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the
confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.
There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all
the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly,
breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence,
cunningly distilled.
_A Pair of Spectacles_ is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a
translation) of _Les Petits Oiseaux_, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject
is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through,
sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He
passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a
more moderate estimate of average human nature--prepared now and again to
come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow
natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this
easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory
of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow's future daughter-in-law
congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. "You are so good!"
she cries; "but people are so ungrateful!" "What does that matter?" she
makes answer; "I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my
window-sill. They never say 'Thanks.' Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier
than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from
feeding them again next day." At the _denouement_, he recalls this lesson
read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience.
The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for
the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in
that--the sparrows don't say "Thanks!"
It is a symbol, nothing more nor less,--a symbol in a play by Labiche!
Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written _Solness, the
Master-Builder!--n'est ce pas un comble!_ A second symbol is added to the
first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the
English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is
not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this
moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory,
the misanthrope. At the _denouement_, his own come back to him from the
optician's. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to
prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from
believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of
these pairs of spectacles. The author's idea is obvious to all. Our mind
is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we
look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is
probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The
pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend
them again.
In France the _Petits Oiseaux_ had a provincial success. In Paris the
piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at
the Comedie Francaise some years ago, the critics thought it childish.
In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was
given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I
myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority
of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our _amour
propre_. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with
this one. Namely, that _Les Petits Oiseaux_ is a fairy tale, and that
Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands--I speak
figuratively, never having seen the author of _Perrichan_ and _La
Grammaire_--were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of
realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real
writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and this is why I think the
copy is better than the original.
The third adaptation which has struck me is that of _Montjoye_. So far
back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of
_Mammon_, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions
already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of
the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was
the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye's son, and the
introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose
fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his
employer's secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart
all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires
his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master's master.
_Mammon_ is certainly a better made piece than _Montjoye_, but this was
not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the
same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points
of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the
course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator
differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which
Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old
schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his
belief in mankind. "That is all rubbish," Montjoye declares,--"_Tout
cela, c'est du bleu!_" Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be
expressed clearly in black and white, he calls "Bleu." Poetical illusions,
childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities,
sonorous and empty sayings--"_Voila le royaume de bleu!_"
Thus Montjoye, "_ou l'homme fort_," declaimed, in language which now seems
somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed roles with Saladin. He is
the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous,
he is the _virtuoso_ of sickly sensibility--the Paganini of the sonorous
and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the _Royaume du Bleu_.
His _Tartufferie_ is social rather than religious. He is not content to
issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to
the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve
the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and
finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and
through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that
hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir
Philip Marchant, the hero of _A Bunch of Violets_.
Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree,--like
a college boy who has been out of bounds,--and who sacrifices his
financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an
adventuress, escorted and aggravated by a Palais Royal husband, would
never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would
refuse to stand him.
I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a
man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects
of the _vie mondaine_ and _demi-mondaine_ of 1865 from afar and _de chic_.
Mr. Grundy eliminated this naive and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In
order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The
expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it
gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.
Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. "What
would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it
to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?" The objection
is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public
to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all
events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His
second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we
escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet
to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir
Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a
hair--a method of settling one's differences with social morality and the
criminal code resorted to, as we know, in every country, when no other
method is available.
On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and
sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets
which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler,
who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his
own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his
daughter's present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five
thousand pounds--a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for
another twenty-four hours and--who knows?--perhaps escape bankruptcy and
suicide. "These violets are not for sale," he thunders, and the audience
is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait
the criminal is redeemed and absolved.
Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of
his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having,
now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it
were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more
serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great
portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding
our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he
is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has
employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to
produce some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe's marionettes
moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters
unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much
like ours. Thus, in _The Glass of Fashion_, we have depicted for us the
havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who
has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying
a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very
wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for
libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners,
thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which
women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger's peas, in
accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to
Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter,
and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic
contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not
essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may
contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to
combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many
still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.
In every play of Mr. Grundy's there is to be found an element which is
very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new
and very personal in the treatment, the working out,--the individual
note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them
with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy
the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it
is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has
entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.
This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in
brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our
writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick
rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such
abundance through Mr. Grundy's theatrical work that it floods even his
serious dramas. _A Fool's Paradise_, that sombre story of poisoning, is so
saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish;
and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself
considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good
humour by the sight of her agonies. In _The Late Mr. Castello_ there is
nothing at all of tragedy--nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose
amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing
general indignation.
The author's wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous
gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken
neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy,
endearing terms used in earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion
artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of
expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer,
nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss--the
tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can
understand, then, why Mr. Grundy's plays are popular with the public,
without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of
his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the
truth of his thesis.
One of Mr. Grundy's peculiarities--and, together with his fancy and his
originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in
him--consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work
between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe
judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful
love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from
one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to
lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness
to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set
about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature
that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which
strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little
rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems
us in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one
which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but
by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.
In _Sowing the Wind_, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate
children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to
acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken
part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not
surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a
suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had
really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in
which the scene is laid.
But I shall cite _An Old Jew_ as the best example of those plays of his
which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better
and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its
faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been
deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving
her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be
suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do
without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into
despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption,
her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is
ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent
children than of his guilty wife? Has he not run too great a risk in
confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The
dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say,
because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one
point,--on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter's
caresses, and the companionship of his son.
He returns therefore, and draws near to his deserted family; he remains in
concealment, but close beside them, ready to guard and help them.
His daughter plays _ingenue_ parts in a London theatre, and although the
morality of the wings is a little better on the other side of the channel
than on ours, the girl is exposed to such proposals as that of a certain
Burnside, who asks her calmly and coolly, without any pretence of love or
any beating about the bush, to come and live with him. It is time for the
father to show himself. But Julius has a method all his own for watching
over his daughter. Every evening he goes to see her act, and, the piece
over, returns to bed. As for the young man, his dream is of literary
glory, and it is now that the second subject is introduced, a satire upon
the ways of contemporary English journalism, which is made to go side by
side with the domestic drama of the Sterns. How do we find Julius
intervening in the interests of his son? First he buys him a rare edition
of "The Dramatists of the Sixteenth Century," which he seems to recommend
to him as a model (a mistaken and ill-timed recommendation, as I think,
for the reasons I have indicated already in a previous chapter). The young
man has written a comedy. Without having read it, and, in consequence,
without knowing whether he is encouraging a real or only an imagined
vocation, Julius buys a theatre in which the piece may be performed, and
he buys also two or three newspapers wherewith to secure its success. Here
he assumes proportions that are almost fantastic. His sadness, his
wandering and mysterious life, his authority of voice and bearing, that
fatal gift of his for turning everything he touches into gold, point to
some symbolical intention in the author's mind, and to a _third_ subject.
It is no longer _A Jew_; it is _The Jew_--the Jew rehabilitated, and
becoming now, in his turn, a dispenser of social justice. But how does he
set about it, this reformer? By loading rascals with gold. Not a good way,
truly, of closing the _marche aux consciences_. And then the whole
structure falls to pieces before a very simple reflection. The newspapers
that give success are not to be bought. Those that are to be bought don't
give success.
I could proceed with these criticisms, but I am almost ashamed really, as
it is, of having gone so far, for they make me look ungrateful. If the
play be theoretically bad, how is it that we listen to it, moved or
amused, without a moment of fatigue? It is a play without love, for one
cannot regard the incident of Burnside's base proposal as a love scene. A
whole act passes in the smoking room of a club, in which we do not catch
sight of even the shadow of a petticoat. But one would not miss a line of
this frank, direct, live dialogue; one is thrilled by certain sentences,
strangely deep or bitterly eloquent, as by lightning flashes; one feels
that there are real souls behind these unreal incidents. And then,--shall
I acknowledge it?--one is keenly interested in the absurd but affecting
spectacle of this father, who thirsts for his daughter's forehead, as a
lover thirsts for the lips of his mistress. Why should not such love as
this have its drama and its romance, as it has its anguishes, its
sacrifices, and its joys?
_The New Woman_, played in the autumn of 1894, gives us the same emotions,
without suggesting to the mind the same doubts and objections. It had a
well-merited success. It is, of course, open to criticism. It is a wholly
modern picture of manners, the _dernier cri_ of social satire, serving as
a background to the working out of a very old dramatic subject. Does the
play bear out the promises of its title? I see in it three episodical
types, of which two, at least, are caricatures; an impudent lady-doctor,
who takes herself very seriously; a sort of _garcon manque_, who smokes
and wears her hair short; and a sort of half-faded flirt, who is much more
taken up with angling for a husband in troubled waters than with the
reformation of society.
I see also a married woman, who bores herself at home, and who tries to
appropriate another woman's husband, by collaborating, or pretending to
collaborate, with him on a book. But I have no difficulty in recognising
in her the everlasting would-be adulteress, of whom our drama has made
such abuse. Her case is complicated with literature; she is the old
Blue-Stocking darned anew. Thus escapes us once more the New Woman, this
obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen.
The real theme of the play is the folly of a man of the world in marrying
a little farmer's daughter, who has been brought up at home in the
country. I have said that it is an old subject, but it is well to remark
that it is generally approached from another side. The authors of a
certain epoch were fond of describing the origin of one of these passions
which level the differences of rank and education. They led the hero and
heroine up to the point of marriage, but it is the morrow of their
marriage, and the day after that still more, that one would like to hear
of. This is precisely what Mr. Grundy sets out to show us, but is his
representation of it accurate, lifelike, credible?
In reality, were this marriage to come off, it is very likely that the
newly-wedded wife, made giddy by the sudden plunge, would surpass in
frivolity those who belong to the gay world into which she has been
introduced, and who have lived in it. But this idea would be too true and
too simple for the theatre. Or else this little country girl would show
herself inferior to the people amongst whom she has to mix, as much by the
vulgarity of her ideas as that of her manners. It is not the world who
would repulse her, it is she who would be unable to suit herself to the
world; whence it would come, that her husband must either cast her off or
become a pariah with her. This version, also, would fail to please the
pit. Mr. Grundy, therefore, has preferred to devote all his _savoir
faire_, his wit and his emotional power, to the task of making us accept,
as a compromise between realism and idealism, a solution as pleasing as it
is illogical and essentially theatrical. In the second act, Marjery
commits blunder upon blunder. Everybody makes fun of her, and her husband
declares she is "hopeless." In the third act she is the admired of all,
for her eloquence and dignity, her virtue and tact; those who made fun of
her have prostrated themselves at her feet. Is it possible that she has
learnt all this during the entr'acte, whilst the orchestra got through a
waltz? She takes refuge with her father, whose country dialect is just
strong enough to raise a smile. She milks the cows and plucks the apples,
the only occupations permissible on the stage to a pretty farmer's lass.
The youthful husband comes in search of her to this retreat, and obtains
her pardon. She will never be a lady, but she will be a "woman" _par
excellence_. The public seemed to me to be delighted with this conclusion.
An assembly of two thousand snobs will never stint its applause to an
author who chastises snobbery.
To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise
all his gifts at once--to put his whole strength into one important work.
But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous
comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with
living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose?
Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the
favour of the public.[12]