Oscar Wilde Part 9

If this is not effective stagecraft, I do not know what is. And the dramatist strikes a deeper, and more tragic, note in the scene later on (in the same act) where Mrs Erlynne discovers the letter of farewell that Lady Windermere had written to her husband.

(_Parker enters, and crosses towards the ballroom, R. Enter Mrs Erlynne._)

_Mrs Erlynne._ Is Lady Windermere in the ballroom?

_Parker._ Her ladys.h.i.+p has just gone out.

_Mrs Erlynne._ Gone out? She's not on the terrace?

_Parker._ No, madam. Her Ladys.h.i.+p has just gone out of the house.

_Mrs Erlynne_ (_Starts and looks at the servant with a puzzled expression on her face_). Out of the house?

_Parker._ Yes, madam--her Ladys.h.i.+p told me she had left a letter for his Lords.h.i.+p on the table.

_Mrs Erlynne._ A letter for Lord Windermere?

_Parker._ Yes, madam.

_Mrs Erlynne._ Thank you.

(_Exit Parker. The music in the ballroom stops._)

Gone out of her house! A letter addressed to her husband!

(_Goes over to bureau and looks at letter. Takes it up and lays it down again with a shudder of fear._)

No, no! it would be impossible! Life doesn't repeat its tragedies like that! Oh, why does this horrible fancy come across me? Why do I remember now the one moment of my life I most wish to forget?

Does life repeat its tragedies?

(_Tears letter open and reads it, then sinks down into a chair with a gesture of anguish._)

Oh, how terrible! the same words that twenty years ago I wrote to her father! And how bitterly I have been punished for it! No; my punishment, my real punishment is to-night, is now!

I have quoted these two episodes from the second act to demonstrate how equal was the playwright to the exigencies of his art. But it is in the third act, laid in Lord Darlington's rooms, that he reaches the level of high dramatic skill. First, in the scene between the mother and daughter, written with extraordinary power and pathos, and later on, when each of the women are hidden, the "man's scene" which ranks with the famous club scene in Lord Lytton's "Money." The _blase_ and genial tone of these men of the world is admirably caught. Their conversation sparkles with wit and wisdom--of the world _bien entendu_. But it is in Mrs Erlynne's appeal to her daughter, with all its tragic intent that the author surpa.s.ses himself. Just read it over. It is a masterpiece of restrained emotion.

_Mrs Erlynne._ (_Starts with a gesture of pain. Then restrains herself, and comes over to where Lady Windermere is sitting. As she speaks, she stretches out her hands towards her, but does not dare to touch her._) Believe what you choose about me. I am not without a moment's sorrow. But don't spoil your beautiful young life on my account. You don't know what may be in store for you, unless you leave this house at once. You don't know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at--to be an outcast! to find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. You don't know what it is. One pays for one's sin, and then one pays again, and all one's life one pays. You must never know that. As for me, if suffering be an expiation, then at this moment I have expiated all my faults, whatever they have been; for to-night you have made a heart in one who had it not, made it and broken it. But let that pa.s.s. I may have wrecked my own life, but I will not let you wreck yours. You--why you are a mere girl, you would be lost. You haven't got the kind of brains that enables a woman to get back. You have neither the wit nor the courage. You couldn't stand dishonour. No! go back, Lady Windermere, to the husband who loves you, whom you love. You have a child, Lady Windermere. Go back to that child who even now, in pain or in joy, may be calling to you. (_Lady Windermere rises._) G.o.d gave you that child. He will require from you that you make his life fine, that you watch over him. What answer will you make to G.o.d, if his life is ruined through you? Back to your house, Lady Windermere--your husband loves you. He has never swerved for a moment from the love he bears you. But even if he had a thousand loves, you must stay with your child. If he was harsh to you, you must stay with your child. If he ill-treated you, you must stay with your child. If he abandoned you your place is with your child.

(_Lady Windermere bursts into tears and buries her face in her hands._)

(_Rus.h.i.+ng to her_). Lady Windermere!

_Lady Windermere_ (_holding out her hands to her, helplessly, as a child might do_). Take me home. Take me home.

Few people who witnessed that situation could have done so without being deeply moved. It is Oscar Wilde the poet who speaks, not to the brain but to the heart.

Then turn from the shadow of that scene to the s.h.i.+mmer of the one that follows immediately, full of smartness and _jeu d'esprit_. The sprightly and irresponsible chatter of men of the world.

_Dumby._ Awfully commercial, women nowadays. Our grandmothers threw their caps over the mill, of course, but, by Jove, their granddaughters only throw their caps over mills that can raise the wind for them.

_Lord Augustus._ You want to make her out a wicked woman. She is not!

_Cecil Graham._ Oh! wicked women bother one. Good women bore one.

That is the only difference between them.

_Dumby._ In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy.

_Cecil Graham._ What is a cynic?

_Lord Darlington._ A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

_Cecil Graham._ And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

_Dumby._ Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

_Lord Windermere._ What is the difference between scandal and gossip?

_Cecil Graham._ Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip.

But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I'm glad to say.

And so we take our leave of "Lady Windermere's Fan."

"A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE"

(_First produced at the Haymarket Theatre by Mr Beerbohm Tree on 19th April 1903_)

Perhaps of all Oscar Wilde's plays "The Woman Of No Importance" provoked the most discussion at the time of its production. It was his second venture in the histrionic field, and people expected much. They felt that he should now be finding his feet, that whatever shortcomings, from the point of view of stagecraft, there may have been in "Lady Windermere's Fan," should now be made good. His first comedy was a well-constructed play of plot and incidents. But now, expectation rose high, and required of the author something better, something greater, something more considerable than what he had achieved before. How far were these expectations realised? How did the first-night audience of public, and critics, receive the new play? It must be confessed it was with a feeling akin to disappointment. People at first were undeniably disconcerted. They had come prepared to witness drama, possibly of stirring interest, and what they heard was dialogue of brilliant quality, indeed, but which, up to a certain point, had little to do in forwarding the action of the piece. It was a surprise, and, to most of them, a not altogether grateful one. And it came in the first act. Here the author had actually been bold enough to defy popular traditions, and to place his characters seated in a semicircle uttering epigram after epigram, and paradox upon paradox, without any regard to whatever plot there might be; for it is not until the curtain is about to fall that we get an indication, for the first time, that something is going to happen in the next act. Here was an upset indeed! A subversion of all preconceived ideas as to how a play should begin! "Words! words!" they muttered captiously, although the words were as the pearls and diamonds that fell from the mouth of the maiden in the fairy tale. And so on, through scene after scene, until we come to the unexpected meeting of Lord Illingworth with the woman he had, long ago, betrayed and abandoned. Then quickly follows the pathetic interview between mother and son, culminating in Mrs Arbuthnot's confession that the man who would befriend her son is no other than his own father, to whom he should owe nothing, save the disgrace of his birth, leading up to the _scene-a-faire_ in the final act, where Lord Illingworth's offer to make reparation to the woman he has wronged is acknowledged by a blow across the face. Here at last was drama, treated in the right spirit, and of an emotional value that cannot be too highly recognised. But the shock of the earlier acts had been a severe one, and it took all the intense human interest of the last two acts to atone for the outraged conventions of the two first. It speaks volumes of praise for the playwright's powers that he was enabled to carry his work to a successful issue, and secure for it a long run. And not only that, but to stand the critical test of revival. For, at the moment of writing these words, Mr Tree has reproduced "The Woman Of No Importance" at His Majesty's Theatre, which is crowded, night after night, with audiences eager to bring a posthumous tribute to the genius of the author.

_Apropos_ of the first act where all the _dramatis personae_ are seated in a semicircle engaged only in conversation, and which was likened, on the occasion of the first production of the play, by an eminent critic to "Christy Minstrelism Crystallised," it may not be uninteresting to note, _en pa.s.sant_, a similar arrangement of characters in a play of Mr Bernard Shaw's recently performed at the Court Theatre. This is called "Don Juan in h.e.l.l"--the dream from "Man and Superman"--mercifully omitted when that play was produced. It had nothing whatever to do with the comedy in which it was included, but is a Niagara of ideas, clumsily put together, and is more or less an exposition of the Shawian philosophy.

"Hear the result"--I quote from the critique in one of our leading journals--"The curtain rose at half-past two on a darkened stage draped in black. Enter, in turn, Don Juan, Dona Ana de Ulloa, the statue of her father, and the devil. They sat down, and for an hour and a half delivered those opinions of Mr Shaw with which we are all so terribly familiar. Every now and then there was a laugh, as, for example, when Don Juan said: 'Wherever ladies are is h.e.l.l,' or, again, when he said: 'Have you ever had servants who were not devils?' It was all supposed to be very funny and very naughty, of course, especially when the statue said to Don Juan: 'If you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realise your advantages.' And so on, and so on, _ad nauseum_."

See now, how the parallel scene of "only talk" as written by Oscar Wilde was noticed upon its revival the other day. I quote from another journal. "Let all that can be urged against this play be granted. None the less is it worth watching the _dramatis personae_ do nothing, so long as the mind may be tickled by this unscrupulous, fastidious wit. And, even if all the characters speak in the same accents of paradox, their moods, the essentials of them, are differentiated with a brilliancy of expression which condones the lack of dramatic movement. These things, alone, evoke my grat.i.tude to Mr Tree for reviving so interesting and individual a comedy.... For even those utterances which seem to be mere phraseological inversions are fraught with much wisdom, and the major part of the dialogue reflects the mind of a subtle and daring social observer." And it was this "mind," keen of observation, and equipped with no ordinary wit, that dominates an audience and compels them to sit, as it were, spellbound before the demonstration of the power of its unique personality. I am informed that, to-day, in Germany, the only two modern English dramatists who are listened to are Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw--the poet and the proser. Truly may it be remarked: "_Les extremes se touchent_."

The story of "The Woman Of No Importance" is quickly told.

Lord Illingworth, a cynical _roue_, has, in his youth, betrayed a too trusting young lady, who, in consequence, gave birth to a son, by her named Gerald. When the play begins this young fellow is nineteen years old, and has, most hopelessly it would seem, fallen in love with an American heiress whose name is Hester Worsley. He is living with his mother, called Mrs Arbuthnot, at a quiet country village, where also resides Lady Hunstanton, who acts as hostess to all the smart Society folk who appear upon the scene, and among whom Lord Illingworth is the most prominent. His lords.h.i.+p, ignorant of their real relations.h.i.+p, has taken a fancy to Gerald, and offers him a private secretarys.h.i.+p.