Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  The play ran throughout the season to excellent houses, and prepared the way for the three successive plays which were to throw open not only the St. James’ but all the theatres to the freer expression of ideas and to a natural treatment of them exempt from the tricks and traps and surprises which had for so long held the field. Characters were no longer to remain static, they were to develop under the pressure of circumstance. A neat effectiveness was to give way to truth. Those three plays were Lady Windermere s Fan, Liberty Hall, and The Second Mrs Tanqueray. It is to be remembered to Alexander’s great credit that these plays were produced not at one of the small theatres supported by a subscription, where a group of superior people took the drama under its care. “The stage”, Mrs Pearl Craigie wrote to him, “was never meant for six admirers, a syndicate, and the chimney corner.” The three most influential plays of modern times saw the light in what was stigmatised as a commercial theatre.

  CHAPTER III

  Lady Windermere s Fan — Wilde’s wit — Troubles at rehearsals — Success of the play — Liberty Hall — Casting of The Second Mrs Tanqueray

  OSCAR WILDE WAS born to write plays, but he did not at the first write them with ease. The art of the playwright demands an apprenticeship even from the most gifted. A novelist may, and times out of mind has, set out with no more than a group of characters, and caught his nitrogen from the air as he went along. It is at once his danger and his comfort that there are no rules to bind him. He can be as long as Clarissa or as short as The Bridge of San Luis Rey. A tact of a kind is his obligation. By it he stands or falls; and it is his own particular tact and not his neighbour’s. A play, on the other hand, has its precise conditions. There is a limit of time within which it must be conducted to its end. The playwright’s intention must be as clear as daylight to him before he sets his pen to paper. Otherwise his audience with the quick instinct of a crowd will immediately distrust him. He must know where he is going and step by step how to get there. Yet he himself must never seem to be getting there. His characters must be such and in such a relationship to one another that they arrive there unavoidably and by the compulsion of nature.

  Lady Windermere’s Fan fulfilled the conditions better than nine-tenths of the current plays even in those days of Wilde’s novitiate. But at times the playwright was too obviously in evidence. He committed the crime forbidden at the St. James’ Theatre; he took the centre of the stage. Thus in Lord Darlington’s rooms he set the scene for fireworks. They were admirable fireworks and they coruscated delightfully, but it was Oscar Wilde who touched them off and not the characters. This is not to say that the rest of the play lacked wit. On the contrary, there was a bushel of it to the average playwright’s peck. But in the other scenes it shone more naturally and with a less expected brilliancy. Here the stage was deliberately set for witty passages, and the scene led more than one spectator to crack an easy joke about the output of “The Oscar Wilde Epigram and Paradox Company, Limited”. But in fact Wilde’s wit was spontaneous. In any congenial company it played without effort about whatever was the subject of the talk. He never diverted the conversation to a topic upon which he was prepared to be brilliant. Nor did he seek to dominate it. He slipped into it. His heavy cheeks and thick lips would become sensitive and alert; a gaiety changed his face; he took the ball which was thrown and tossed it back upon the instant, but never so sharply that it hurt. For his was the rarest wit, for it was without malice; it was the readiest, for it had not to seek its occasion.

  He had revisited Oxford when the O.U.D.S. produced the Alcestes of Euripides, and at supper after the first performance I, who had been playing Herakles, sat opposite to him. I met him afterwards when I had come to London and was writing my first book; and he said, no doubt with the thought that a square meal might be useful, “There is always luncheon at i o’clock at the Café Royal”. From time to time various young people gathered at his table. I remember Harry and Laurence Irving in particular, and at times William Heinemann. Wilde was always stimulating and kindly. He would listen to what we were doing, or trying to do, and offer here a criticism and there an encouragement; and his wit was always ready at his lips. I was writing a short novel which was afterwards published under the bad title of A Romance of Wastdale, and as I told him the story he shook his head. For instead of being a story about lovers, it was a story about a brother and sister.

  “No”, he said, nodding his head, “that won’t do. Everything in life has its symbol. Passion has its flower. And affection between a brother and a sister has its symbol too. But, my dear fellow, it’s cold boiled mutton.”

  On another occasion Heinemann was very annoyed because Richard Le Gallienne had published a book called The Religion of a Literary Man. He was extremely pettish about it. What was the difference, he wanted to know, between the religion of a literary man and anybody else’s religion. Wilde gazed at Heinemann sorrowfully. “My dear fellow,” he protested, nodding his head like a mandarin with his knuckles to his teeth, “how far you are behind the times! Of course Le Gallienne is right. He knows that nowadays a man’s religion is a thing solely between himself — and the public.”

  It was at one of these luncheons, too, when someone spoke with triviality about George Meredith, for whom Wilde had a profound admiration, that he cried: “Oh, Meredith is a prose Browning”, and then with a chuckle of delight at the good thing which he had just discovered— “and so’s Browning”.

  His wit bubbled fresh from the source, and the suggestion of labour and the midnight lamp which the first half of the third act of Lady Windermere s Fan did convey was due to nothing more than that he was working rather uneasily in a medium to which he was not as yet accustomed. He felt crowded, he had not time enough, space enough for all the amusing quips and comments he wished to make. So he crammed them into an enclave too narrow. They were not too good, but too many to be true. Wilde made no such mistake when he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. He was the master of his machine by then and he wrote that best of farces within a month.

  It is impossible, however, to read the letters which during the rehearsals passed between the author and the manager — very feudal and lordly letters from Wilde and purely practical ones from Alexander — without realising that it was the manager at this time who was the more conscious of the two of the creaking conventions, the clever twists, the impossible transitions of character which were making the drama of the day a by-word; who was the more anxious of the two to discard them. The worn-out machinery was still rumbling, the fan in fact was still fluttering. At the end of the second act, as Wilde designed it, Mrs Erlynne was to tear off the stage in a tempest of words, the man to whom they were addressed was for the moment to cease to be, the audience was to be carried away by the acting of the leading lady. It was to be the conventional act-drop of a hundred sensational plays. Alexander, on the other hand, wanted the act to end not upon a tirade by the leading lady but upon a humorous and apposite comment by the man. The scene was to end on a stroke of comedy rather than on a blare of sensation.

  The story of Lady Windermere s Fan needs here only the shortest summary. Lady Windermere, a beautiful prude of an extreme severity, believes that her mother died when she herself was a baby and idolises the old portrait of her which she possesses. But in fact Lady Windermere’s mother bolted with a lover, and after twenty disordered years upon the Continent she is now, under the name of Mrs Erlynne, forcing her way back into society by blackmailing Lord Windermere with the truth of her identity. So long as he pays for her house and her parties, and secures her the invitations she wants, she’ll hold her tongue. She has already a rather battered Lord Augustus Lorton seeking her hand. But a certain amount of scandal is awakened. Young Lord Windermere has taken a mistress and housed her in Curzon Street. So the gossip runs, and in due course reaches Lady Windermere’s ears. She refuses to believe the gossip until on her own birthday ball Windermere sends a card to Mrs Erlynne and welcomes her to his mansion. Lady Windermere, like any other dra
matic prude, flies off to the rooms of a courtier of her own, to pay her husband back in his own coin. But she leaves a letter of farewell for her husband. Mrs Erlynne discovers it, tears it open, reads it, realises that she is destroying her daughter’s happiness, and in a revulsion of feeling dashes off to the courtier’s rooms, to straighten things out if she can. This is the position at the end of the second act; and if the Importance of Mrs Erlynne’s Secret is granted, the action of the play follows naturally.

  LORD AUGUSTUS: Dear lady, I am in such suspense! May I not have an answer to my request?

  MRS ERLYNNE: Lord Augustus, listen to me. You are to take Lord Windermere down to your club at once, and keep him there as long as possible. You understand? LORD AUGUSTUS: But you said you wished me to keep early hours!

  MRS ERLYNNE (nervously): Do what I tell you. Do what I tell you. LORD AUGUSTUS: And my reward?

  MRS ERLYNNE: Your reward? Your reward? Oh! ask me that tomorrow. But don’t let Windermere out of your sight to-night. If you do I will never forgive you. I will never speak to you again. I’ll have nothing to do with you. Remember you are to keep Windermere at your club, and don’t let him come back to-night.

  Act-Drop

  Thus the play was written, but Alexander wanted another ending. Wilde wrote it reluctantly — an admirable little speech which completed the scene:

  LORD AUGUSTUS: Well, really, I might be her husband already. Positively I might. (Follows her in a bewildered manner.)

  Wilde having written the speech, retired to his bed at the Hotel Albemarle and fulminated in pencil:

  With regard to the speech of Mrs Erlynne at the end of Act II, you must remember that until Wednesday night Mrs Erlynne rushed off the stage leaving Lord Augustus in a state of bewilderment. Such are the stage directions in the play. When the alteration in the business was made I don’t know, but I should have been informed at once. It came on me with the shock of a surprise. I don’t in any degree object to it. It is a different effect, that is all. It does not alter the psychological lines of the play.... To reproach me on Wednesday for not having written a speech for a situation on which I was not consulted and of which I was quite unaware was, of course, a wrong thing to do. With regard to the new speech written yesterday personally I think it adequate.

  Alexander, however, was not inclined to accept the rebuke. He replied:

  The end of the 2nd att is now better, but it could be better still and you could make it so if you took the trouble. I have pointed this out to you at almost every rehearsal but you only received my suggestion with contempt.

  The change was made, and of course it was a small matter. The play was not endangered by either the presence or the absence of the two lines. But it is worth a moment’s notice that it was the manager, the cockshy of the intellectuals, who stood out for the more natural and the more modern conclusion.

  The second alteration was of a more vital importance. Wilde was anxious to keep altogether from the audience the knowledge that Mrs Erlynne was Lady Windermere’s mother until the last act. To disclose the secret before, he writes, would destroy the dramatic wonder excited by the incident of Mrs Erlynne taking the letter (i.e. the letter of Lady Windermere to her husband in which she abandons him) and opening it and sacrificing herself in the third act. If they knew Mrs Erlynne was the mother there would be no surprise in her sacrifice — it would be accepted. But in my play the sacrifice is dramatic and unexpected. The cry with which Mrs Erlynne flies into the other room on hearing Lord Augustus’ voice, the wild pathetic cry of self-preservation, “Then it is I who am lost”, would be repulsive from her, coming from the lips of one known to be the mother by the audience. It seems maternal and is dramatic coming from one who seems to be an adventuress, and who, while anxious to save Lady Windermere, thinks of her own safety when the crisis comes. Also it would destroy the last act; and the chief merit of my last act is to me the fact that it does not contain, as most plays do, the explanation of what the audience knows already, but that it is the sudden explanation of what the audience desired to know, followed immediately by the revelation of a character as yet untouched in literature.

  Alexander nevertheless persisted. He was not likely to be persuaded into a discussion as to whether Mrs Erlynne was a character as yet untouched in literature. He was quite certain that to allow the audience to remain unaware of the reason of Lord Windermere’s submission to the demands of Mrs Erlynne for the greater part of the play and then with a sharp twist to let them into the secret, would introduce a trickiness quite alien from and probably fatal to the success of the play. Lady Windermere s Fan would become a riddle long drawn out, instead of a play of real emotion and suspense.

  I am perfectly certain, too [Alexander writes], that for the good of the play the audience should know very early in the second act, or at any rate at the end of it, that Mrs Erlynne is the mother — this too I have impressed upon you over and over again, but you have refused even to discuss it. The interest would be increased by this knowledge and Mrs Erlynne and Lord Windermere would not be in a false position.

  It was an old question. Should the audience be given the key to the play’s problem, as Iago gives it in the tragedy of Othello, at the first possible moment? Should the interest to the audience lie in watching, itself freed from perplexity, the perplexed characters seeking the issue according to their natures and revealing their idiosyncrasies, their humours, their beliefs in the process? Or should the reason why of the play be held up until the last five minutes and disclosed to the audience and the personages on the stage in a coup de théâtre just before the final curtain is due to descend? Each spectator shall choose for himself and receive no blame whichever mode he prefers. But one is an appeal to the audience’s ingenuity; the other to its pleasure in the development of character; or to put it in other words, the merit of the one lies in a puzzle, of the other in the telling of a story; and it is worth noting in any record of George Alexander that it was he who preferred the higher road of the story to the lower road of the acrostic.

  Wilde in the end gave way. That Mrs Erlynne was Lady Windermere’s mother was hinted at in the first act and disclosed in the second. Wilde rose from his bed and announced that he would return to the rehearsals.

  With regard to matters personal between us, I trust that to-night will be quite harmonious and peaceful.

  It was a pretty quarrel. Both author and manager were overworked and harassed. But it was a quarrel for which an enthusiastic reception on the first night and crowded houses afterwards provided a sufficiently alleviating balm; and in any case, as will be seen not once nor twice by any persistent reader of this history, quarrels between author and actor-manager, though they were less frequent, I think, at the St. James’ Theatre than elsewhere, were still deeply planted in the natural order of things.

  The Press was more divided than the public upon the attractiveness of the play. William Archer praised it with a rare warmth. Walkley was of the same opinion. Joseph Knight and his brethren scoffed; impervious people, they might have been born in Missouri, you had got to show them. Amongst the early visitors was H. D. Traill, an eminent man of letters who was the chief leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph under the editorship of the first Lord Burnham and an ardent playgoer. He wrote a longish letter to Alexander to which reference has already been made. He commented on the difficulty of the part of Lord Windermere; congratulated Alexander on his acting; argued that some less awkward way of bringing mother and daughter into collision might have been discovered; jested over the epigrams and continued:

  On the other hand the dramatic quality of the whole play and the strength of the character-drawing seem to me considerable and not to have had justice done them. The play had to me the great attraction of increasing in interest throughout and the extremely rare merit of a strong fourth act. That I thought excellent in construction and the whole scene between you and Miss Marion Terry admirable and admirably acted. The cynical solution of the dramatic knot

  on
which the critics had so much to say is no more entirely satisfactory than the sentimental one would have been. Cynicism and sentiment divide life between them; if they didn’t you could predict human action much more often than you can. Still it is refreshing to get the unmixedly cynical solution for a change.

  Wilde, to be sure, never looked upon his solution as cynical at all. The second title of Lady Windermere s Fan is A Play about a Good Woman. But, I think the truth is that even the intellectual playgoer had grown so used to discovering in innumerable last acts that the characters had been wrangling to the point of tragedy over nothing more than a mistake, that he was baffled by a more genuine presentation of people and of knots which can never be quite straightened out again.

  Yet bring into the silent gallery Some live thing to contrast in flesh and blood Some lion with the painted lion there You think she’ll understand composedly?

  Not so!

  The debate went on. There had been no play for years so debated; with so much bitterness or with so keen an admiration. There was still a trace of affectation no doubt, a clumsiness in the handling, a set piece too publicly prepared. But the play was not based upon an accident misunderstood. It dealt truly with the primitive emotions, and these are the foundations of literature throughout the world. A new dramatist had come to town, however Joseph and his brethren might dislike it. Old expedients began to look uncommonly shabby. Alexander and the St. James’ Theatre and Wilde reaped their reward. The play ran through to the end of the year (with the interval of a short tour) and made way on December 3rd, 1892, for Liberty Hall, by R. C. Carton.