The Case of Mr. Pinero

The Speaker, September 13, 1902

The controversy that has arisen between Sir Edward Russell and Mr. Pinero relative to the strictures used by the former upon The Gay Lord Quex, one of the most celebrated plays of the latter, has the incidental advantage of raising in a definite and discussable form a great number of the questions which have been floating about, nameless and disembodied, in the dramatic world for many years past. Sir Edward Russell unmistakably accuses The Gay Lord Quex of being an immoral play. Upon such an issue there are many things to be said, but one particularly deserves attention. It is undoubtedly, to start with, one of the great disadvantages of a modern dramatic critic in the position of Sir Edward Russell that he has to regard a play as moral or else immoral. The breakdown of dogmatic morality has enormously increased the importance of morals, just as the breakdown of dogmatic theology has enormously increased the controversial importance of religion. Christ during those triumphant ages in which he was treated as God was never discussed or considered to one quarter of the extent to which he has been discussed and considered in the new centuries during which he occupies a doubtful and daring position between a god and a myth and a maniac. In the same way the present age, which is superficially characterised by a revolt against morality, is profoundly and intrinsically characterised by an absorbing interest in morality, which has scarcely ever been seen in the world before. The plain and final outcome of such attacks as that of Sir Edward Russell is in reality this: that in this age we are all moralists. When Catholic and Christian dogma extended themselves easily all over Europe there was abundance of room for the sceptical drama, and the cynical drama, and the profligate drama. Under the shadow of the Eternal Cross there was room for Congreve. But in these days the moral sense being liberated has become omnipotent. Men apply this ethical test strictly and severely to the plays of Mr. Pinero, for the very reason that they live in a world of transient and bewildering ethics. Nothing can prevent the modern man from being moral. And in consequence of this it must always be remembered that plays are judged morally and technically which would never at any other period of the world's history have been so judged at all. In criticising, for example, a play of Ibsen, the modern critic always assumes deduction is to be drawn from it about the rules of morals or the rules of marriage or education or socialism or free-love. Some people, for instance, think that Ghosts is an argument against certain forms of married life. Of them it can only be said that if King Lear were written in modern times by a Norwegian they would think it an excellent argument against parents bringing up their own children. It never occurred to anyone in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries to regard King Lear as a controversial pamphlet against parents, or to regard Hamlet as a controversial pamphlet against a university education, or to regard Othello as a controversial pamphlet against mixed marriages between white people and black. In the times when these tragedies were written men accepted them as tragedies, that is to say, as simple stories of the ancient sadness of the world. The moral of King Lear was not and is not that a gentleman should hand over his daughters to be educated by County Council experts; there is no moral to the story, except the monotonous "sunt lachrymae rerum." The curious thing is that man is hopeful in the face of sorrow, so long as that sorrow is hopeless. But in these days we are forced even against our will to judge everything, even plays, morally. A crowd of artists and aesthetes have declared in this age that art is immoral; but the fact plainly and obviously remains that there never was a time in the history of the world when art was so moral. If there be a fault in the popular criticism of the day, it is that it is far too much so.

Mr. Pinero's difficulty, therefore, is that in this highly sceptical and therefore highly puritanical age he cannot get a play like The Gay Lord Quex judged with that levity and detachment which characterised the ages of religion. No one can altogether contrive to take it exactly as a story of Boccaccio's or a story of Rabelais's or one of the "Tales of the Queen of Navarre" would have been taken. On the other hand, if we take such a play with the moral gravity which is the mark of our age, we find that there is indeed in it a certain suggestion of an ethical idea, the idea of a greatly increased charity and consideration for all sorts and conditions of men, but that this idea is scarcely strong enough to support itself against the superficially repellent and nauseous elements of the story. Upon the surface Sir Edward Russell is wrong, for the moral tone of The Gay Lord Quex is as high as that of David Garrick or Charley's Aunt, and immeasurably higher than that of The Sign of the Cross and The Sorrows of Satan. But fundamentally, and at the back of all, Sir Edward Russell is right, for Mr. Pinero and the school to which he belong are immoral in this sense, that they can only unsettle morals and have not the most glimmering idea of how they are going to settle them. They are immoral in this sense, that they have neither the healthiness of the medieval buffoon nor the importance of the genuine moral reformer. They cannot, like Rabelais and Sterne, tell men weighty truths as though they are frivolities; they can only tell them frivolous doubts as though they were weighty truths. At the back of all Sir Edward Russell is right, for the drama was in the beginning, and ever shall be, a festival in honour of a god. It was, and it ever shall be, a splendid and exceptional thing, a celebration either of the joy or the faith of life. The old jesters like Aristophanes and Wycherley at least heartily expressed the joy, the old believers in the Greek feasts of Dionysus and the Miracle plays of the Middle Ages expressed fully the faith that is more joyful than any joy. But what is to be said of an era in dramatic literature which has neither the joy of Paganism nor the faith of Christianity?