Scan 20
Musical Courier 1896-12-16: Vol 33 Iss 876, 1896
76 lines. Read by computer on 25 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 21. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE MUSICAL COURIER.
3RAconteur.
5THE TWO-SWORD MAN.
6With fingers o'er the strings that lightly glance
7Through bamboo lattices of fabric slight,
8She sees approach o'er sandy levels white
9The conqueror of her dreams of love's romance.
10Two-sworded, fan upraised, doth he advance.
11Red girdle, scarlet acorn, take the light
12Thwart the dark mail; and on his shoulder, bright,
13Hizen's or Tokungawa's cognisance. one of two readings
14Hizen's or Tokungawa's cognizance. one of two readings
15This warrior, brave with swords and plates ashine.
16Seems in his bronze, his silk and lacquer fine,
17Some great crustacean mailed in black and red.
18He sees her. Smiling 'neath his visor's mask,
19He makes the sunlight flash, with quickened tread,
20From gold antennae quivering on his casque.
21—Sonnet by M. de Heredia.
23LEW ROSEN, so well known in New York and London, has found time to absent himself from the beloved theatre and write a book about Napoleon and his relations with the stage. It is happily called Napoleon's Opera Glass, and is published by Elkin Mathews, of London. The volume is an amusing and readable one. Its motto is the gentle remark made by Pope Pius VII. to Napoleon during one of those fencing matches of wit and brain between the two rulers. "Commediante! Tragediant!" said the Pontiff of the Seven Hills, and Napoleon was furious and flattered, for he was both. With the exception of Nero, no man ever wore the purple that was such an arrant poseur as Napoleon. They say he took deportment lessons from Talma, and that his every action in public was calculated to a nicety. He had the histrion's face, he could scowl so that his marshals quaked in their boots, and we have abundant testimony that his violent explosions of wrath were partially affected: "I only get mad as far as my neck," he often said. A consummate actor in real life, he was inordinately fond of the stage. He presumed to criticise Talma's readings of the classics, and, worse than that, he actually suggested readings of his own.
25Napoleon would have made a great dramatic critic.
27He disliked Shakespeare, Mr. Rosen tells us, declaring that Voltaire, being anxious to ingratiate himself with the English, praised their dramatic poet.
29Napoleon liked Racine and Corneille, and at St. Helena he had these authors read to him very often. He had in his exile a sad way of joking.
31"To which theatre shall we go to-night? Shall we hear Talma or Fleury?" And his little circle of friends would laugh with him.
33A little storehouse of facts and fancies is Napoleon's Opera Glass, and it is a very apt contribution to the rapidly growing Napoleonic literature.
35Pilar-Morin, one of the most accomplished pantomimists alive, is playing in Chicago, and in the Clemenceau Case. She plays Iza, and her English is highly praised by the papers. Since the unfortunate Orange Blossoms she made up her mind to go in for legitimate acting. The art of pantomime is not appreciated in America, and as she knew English fairly well the clever and pretty little artist set herself to work, and is now acting with success. Still I am sorry her exquisite art is to be buried in cheap French plays.
37Will you ever forget her in L'Enfant Prodigue or Dresden China?
39Mr. G. Barney Shaw's criticism of the recent performances of Ibsen's Little Eyolf in London is well worth reading. It appeared in the Saturday Review of November 28. The position the Irish critic takes is a strong one. He catches at a phrase of Clement Scott's, and uses it as a leading motive in his article. Scott calls Ibsen "suburban." Quite right, says Mr. Shaw. Ibsen is suburban. He paints the inner and outer life of the middle class man and woman, the class to which we all belong; ergo, he is a universal playwright.
41This in effect is the clever, half-crazy Irishman's reasoning. There is some truth in it. Life is not only very "daily," to quote Jules Laforgue, but we are all very middle class, and Ibsen, the Ibsen who is supposed to dig and delve in the abnormal, in reality selects the most commonplace of mortals for his plays. It is their unredeemed mediocrity, their vulgar, petty, mean lives that he paints with such horrible, such mortifying and exquisite truth. And of course theatregoers do not care for the truth; they like the cunning implications of the clever dramatist, who shows them pretty magic lantern slides, on which they see depicted enlarged and ennobled images of themselves.
43The drama holds up the mirror to nature! What nonsense! If it did, the theatres would all close for want of patronage. The dramatist holds the mirror a little distance off from your own features, and then you are duly flattered, and speak loftily of the ideal, and the beautiful, and other sweet but often meaningless words.
45Truth never enters our playhouses nowadays. She would be led to the door by the ushers and summarily ejected. So let us enjoy our little illusions in peace, Mr. Shaw. Some of us agree with you, but after all, we are the groundlings, and crave not the frosty heights upon which waves the banner of realism.
47Besides, the groundlings pay their money at the box office!
49I started to tell you something of Little Eyolf, but I will not. We had it here at the Berkeley Lyceum several years ago, when Mr. Sargent's pupils made a very creditable showing in some excerpts. It is more than a mere morbid kindergarten play, but it is not for this generation. It is of Mr. Shaw's frantic eulogies and sloppy admiration of Janet Achurch that I would speak.
51Mr. Shaw, who is in matters dramatic a radical among radicals, says quite openly that Miss Achurch is the one peculiarly great actress of her generation. When Miss Achurch was imported by Mr. Mansfield, and left him in open revolt, she appeared in A Doll's House, at Hoyt's pretty play house. She played Nora Helmer like a virago who had lost her taste for dress. Her gown kept slipping down, and in her general sloppiness and dowdiness of work she reminded one of Wilkie Collins' "damp woman." Her Nora could no more be compared to Minnie Maddern-Fiske's, when Mrs. Fiske played it at the Empire, than—what comparison strained enough can I make? If Ibsen's Nora is a lumpy, animal, coarse woman, without a particle of magnetism or charm, why, then, we have all been reading our Ibsen awry!
53Yet Mr. Shaw piles up a column of agony about a woman who has not even mastered the art of walking across the stage. She is classed with Duse and Bernhardt, and called a beautiful woman. Little wonder Ibsen makes his way slowly in London, little wonder the public grows weary of the cant that clusters about all "cults"! The Ibsen "fad," the Browning "fad" have both done infinite damage to two original minds. Seen darkly through the rubbish written by self-seeking disciples, is it any wonder many cry aloud to be delivered of all such pests?
55I do not sound to-day as if I wrote with my accustomed suavity. It is true. There are times when the iron enters the soul of the critic, when he cries aloud for the heavens to fall upon him, for the earth to swallow him. Sometimes it is his liver, sometimes it is a bad play, a bad actor, or a bad opera. To-day I mentally rage because Miss Achurch is called a great actress. Wherefore? What is Miss Achurch to me? So mark you well my folly! Oh, to be sleek and amiable and admire everything! Your optimist is your only true philosopher.
57When it rains in London they say all good Anglo-Americans turn up their trousers and don their mackintoshes here. Sometimes they don't. Even the stoutest subjects of the Queen on this side of the water were last week fain to confess at Wallack's Theatre that the critical judgment of London could sometimes be at fault, for Henry Arthur Jones' new play, The Rogue's Comedy, proved a great success.
59Mr. E. S. Willard, an actor of sound methods and of an agreeable personality, made an individual success, slimly aided by a fair company.
61The play is enjoyable. It probably failed to achieve distinction in London because the English resented the outrageous types of gullible folk the dramatist gave them. The English are pre-eminently a sensible race. They despise satire of the Jonesian sort, and they reasoned that no such men and women could ever have existed, and it must be admitted that the master rogue of the play does enjoy a "corner in fools." However, if you accept Mr. Jones' premises you will presently find yourself enjoying the spectacle of fellow men being made arrant fools by the clever, slippery Bailey Prothero, professional clairvoyant and once named George Jackman, all-round swindler.
63By the aid of a highly sensitized "field of inner vision" he is able to get into the exclusive inner field of London's aristocratic set. He tells the past and guesses at the future. He makes many bull's-eyes, because he is posted by his wife, a lady's companion. This precious pair "work" society for all it is worth, and after drawing room successes Prothero flies for higher game. He organizes a stock company, and, like Law of old, he blows a fine South African, not South Sea, bubble. Nemesis comes at last in the shape of a discarded son, who has grown to manly estate, unconscious of his parents. He is on the high road to success at the bar—his father's talents doubtless modified by his honest education—and is a suitor for the hand of a girl of high birth.
65All this is told in three acts, the last of which is, singularly enough, the weakest, as the climacteric is reached in the second. There is little padding except in the last act, when a wholly unnecessary drunken episode disturbs the thread of the story. The subsidiary theme is hardly a ripple in the main current, which is chiefly breasted by the charlatan. Mr. Jones has made the scamp most sympathetic. He is a jolly good fellow, who loves his wife and pets her openly. He loves his boy and is proud of him, but the young fellow fights shy of him, and to the spectators seems a bit of a prig. I hope Mr. Jones is preaching no moral lesson in all this. If he is it is too esoteric for us to grasp it. As the dramatist has done his work in a straightforward fashion, and makes no concealment of his preference for his rogue, I suppose we must accept him at his full value. He is certainly an entertaining chap, and at the end goes off ruined, but without having revealed to his son a father's disgraceful life.
67Mr. Willard was in unusually fine fettle. He acted spiritedly and with more humor than I thought him capable of. He has several strong scenes, which he carried off surprisingly well, and his touch was almost light. If he would modify a shade or two his confidential attitude toward his audience he would heighten the illusion. He let us know too early what a humbug he was. He was warmly received and turned off a neat sincere little speech at the close.
69The author is almost epigrammatic. He says several good things, things that you can memorize and spring on innocent friends. He is very worldly and wings his shafts at the great world. Yet I can fancy London gazing superciliously at the specimens of titled people in this piece. They certainly are a queer lot. At a glance an average man or woman would pierce the veil of this Mr. Bailey Prothero who looked like a foreign concert pianist and a corn doctor shaken well together.
71There are suggestions of Judah and Gudgeons in the play. Mr. Willard's company is at its best point represented by Olga Brandon, who played with a fine tact of omission the part of the wife and mother. Several times she touched the hem of deep sensibility. In appearance she is as exotic as ever. Mr. Harry Cane contributed a capital low comedy sketch. The Rogue's Comedy is not a remarkable play, but it is an agreeable and perhaps a genuine antidote to the recent hypnotic craze in dramatic literature. Considered in that light it has a sweetly ironic meaning.
73Not a bad idea that, to make a play out of Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin. Mr. Mansfield announces it for production soon. The story is adored by sentimental music lovers, who found Charles Auchester tame and Mendelssohn a bore. It is rather a pretty than a strong novel, although I suppose much can be made of the inundation episode. Perhaps Mr. Mansfield will have a chance to play one of the many instruments he is supposed to master. The First Violin without a violin virtuoso would be inconceivable.
75The dramatization has been made by Miss Mary
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