ARTHUR PINERO.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 285, 1 December 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

ARTHUR PINERO.

A PIONEER IN DRAMA

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE.

(By CYRANO.)

To many of the younger set in the world interested in drama Arthur Wing Pinero, who died a week ago, is hopelessly outmoded. He wrote the '"wellmade" play, and that will not do. Pinero, like all pioneers, was outdistanced by those who followed him, but his work as an innovation with ideas and courage is much too important to be ignored. It takes us back to a world that must seem strange indeed to a generation accustomed to the breadth and depth of Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Granville Barker, St. John Ervine, Clemence Dane and others, a generation which, whether it realises it or not, has witnessed a renaissance such as the English drama has not known since the days of Elizabeth. Indeed, despite its poverty in poetical drama, no less a person than William Archer has argued that tie period that began with Pinero in 1889 —the date of h : s first really serious play —is, by reason of its variety of themes and the number of prominent figures among dramatists, a greater period than the Elizabethan.

In the Gutter. The state of English drama in the middle of the nineteenth century was appalling. Since the Elizabethan age the condition of the stage had been unsatisfactory. ' The Puritan influence had caused the theatre to be classed as disreputable, and gifted writers were not disposed to writ© for it. The Restoration dramatists gave it a period of unclean brilliancy. Goldsmith and Sheridan restored .wit to the theatre. Yet in 1833 Macaulay could refer to a dramatist as "a writer of the class which in our time is at the very bottom of the literary scale." Tennyson and Browning made an attempt to restore poetry to the theatre, but they were lonely giants. Mr. St. John Ervine remarks that if Tom Robertson, the author of "Caste," had not lived, we might ask to be allowed to forget all the plays written between Sheridan and Pinero. Acting flourished, but not the contemporary drama. There was a lively trade in translation of I'rench plays, especially farces. "Bring me the plays of V. Sardou! lam the man to write a play!" run two lines in "The Ballade of Adaptation," by the eminent American critic Brander Matthews. The drama was hag-ridden by convention, as you will see in Dickens' superb burlesque of it in the Crummies chapters of "Nicholas Nickleby." Persona on the sta<*e threw purses at the feet of mendicants or dependents (the said purses stuffed with clinking pieces of china); wronged heroines tore their marriage lines °passionately from their bosoms; and stage Irishmen in knee-breeches and tail-coats whirled shillelaghs and said "Bedad!" and "Begorrah!"

Into this moribund world of dreary convention and humbug and makebelieve and cowardice a band of men forced their way, crying for real life. There was William Archer, immensely learned and entirely courageous; and there was Bernard Shaw, eminent as a dramatic critic before he was famous as a dramatist. Both of these men had sat at the feet of Ibsen. There was Henry Arthur Jones, who made a fortune oat of "The Silver King" before he produced more serious work: and there was Arthur Wing Pinero, once an actor in Irving's company, who pleased the town with a couple of bright and original farces (one was revived on the screen only the other day), and that classic of domestic sentiment "Sweet Lavender," before ho turned to what came to be known as the problem play. Mr. St. John Ervine places Pinero as the first in time of the pioneers, because he dates the modern renaissance from "The Profligate," produced in 1889. Pinero challenged the conventional conception of the theatre as "a place of easy and shallow amusement," says Mr. Ervine. "The idep. that any person could be entertained by a serious theme had not penetrated the mind of the average playgoer, who, if he thought about the matter at all, invariably asserted that serious subjects were not suitable for plays, but should be reserved for the pulpit, the Press and the study, and, even there, should be discussed with the greatest reticence. . . . Into this indecently delicate world Pinero charged announcing that death is death." (This idea is still held in some quarters.) He claimed the right to be a serious author, and "won a position which, in the technical term used by soldiers, was quickly consolidated by other authors."

Mrs. Tanqueray. Pineio's greatest triumph came when "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" was produced in 1893, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, till then unknown, as Paula. Alfred Sutro, a later dramatist, tells ns that when T. P. O'Connor came into the Garrick Club one day on hie return from America and described the heroine of a play he had seen in New York as "a cross between Letty and Paula, they all knew what he meant. The scope of the drama has widened so greatly and discussion has become so much franker that this generation may wonder why all this fuss was made of a play in which a man marries a woman with a past, who has been the mistress of the man destined to fall in love with her stepdaughter. But in the 'nineties "Mrs. Tanqueray" was a very novel and very daring play. It forced open a door and let in a draught of air. It gave the dramatist a status, "and in a comparatively short time, playgoers, who in a previous generation would have said they were going to sec Irving in his new play, were going to see the new Pinero, the new Henry Arthur Jones, the new Shaw, the new Barrie, and the new Galsworthy." Technically, "Mrs. Tanqueray" was a great advance, and if the characters appear to us rather wooden to-day, we should ask ourselves what characters, were like in the pre-Pinero era. Pinero's craftsmanship is finely exemplified in this and some of his later plays. He had a first-class sense of the theatre. It has been said that not a

linp could bo omitted from "Mrs. Tanqucray" without injury to the play, and it abounds in impressive situations. Or Jake what I think is the best of his later plays —excepting perhaps that delightful reconstruction of midVictoria nism, "Trelawney of the Wells" —"His House 111 Order." How skilful!y the play is constructed! Your attention is held from the start, and your sympathies with the downtrodden second wife are properly worked upon until the big moment comes. She finds letters showing that the sainted first wife, whose memory dominates the household, was no better than she should have been. The husband must be told, of course, but what you want to happen is that the odious family of the first wife shall be clothed in sackcloth and ashes. But Pinero is too wise for that. He packs tliem off, but they neverlearn the truth. Pinero was much occupied with moral questions. There are two in "Mrs. Tanqueray": the illustration of George Eliot's saying that we can strangle our children but we cannot strangle our deeds, and the duty of charity. The last words of the play (or almost the last; I haven't a copy by me) are the cry of the stepdaughter—if only she had been kinder to N the dead Paula! Too Neat.

This almost severely neat carpentering of Pinero's accounts largely for the decline of his reputation among the moderns. They argue that life is not like that, and that it should not be presented in chess-board patterns in novels or plays. Life does not consist of grea' moments, but of a long series of relatively small happenings. There is sometiling in this criticism of Pinero. There is a mechanical element in his art. He is a very competent craftsman, but ho is not inspired. His characters run to type, and their conversation is often conducted with a curious rigidity, as if the people were speaking by the book. Contrast his dialogue with that of, say, "Milestones," or "Jane Clegg." or "A Bill of Divorcement," and you will see the difference at once. The later plays read much more like real life. Also, for the most part, Pinero confined hi* work to one class —that which lives a life of leisure, dresses for dinner, and keeps a butler. He is said to have avowed that this was the only interesting class in the theatre. Here he did the drama a disservice, for he helped to fasten this relatively very small section of the community round the dramatist's neck. Novelists carry a similar dead bird about with them. I have always sympathised with Paula Tanqueray in her complaint that life in Aubrey's Surrey "cottage"— said cottage being really a mansion in the eyes of 90 per cent of the population-— was dull. The most exciting thing in the day was a visit to the village shops. It must have been very dull, and many wives similarly situated must have fel like Paula. The main reason is that there is so little for the master and mistress to do. With all his faults, however, Pinero had a dramatic power that greater men lacked. As a literary artist or an intellectual force he is not to be compared with Galsworthy, but he was a better play architect. And the drama, we may fairly argue, should be dramatic. It need not rant and rave, but equally it need not present merely a procession of repressed men and women reducing all emotion to a drab flatness.