MICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGELPREFACEAUTHOR’SNOTEPERSONSREPRESENTEDACT ANDSCENEDESCRIPTIONACTIACTIIACTIIIACTIVACTVTranscriber’s NoteMICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGELA PLAY IN FIVE ACTSBYHENRY ARTHUR JONESAUTHOR OF “THE TEMPTER,” “THE CRUSADERS,” “THE CASE OF REBELLIOUS SUSAN,” “THE MIDDLEMAN,” “THE DANCING GIRL,” “JUDAH,” “THE MASQUERADERS,” “THE TRIUMPH OF THE PHILISTINES,” ETC.New YorkTHE MACMILLAN COMPANYLONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.1920All rights reservedCOPYRIGHT, 1895,BYMACMILLAN AND CO.Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1896.Norwood PressJ. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.PREFACEMICHAEL, though styled by Milton “of celestial armies prince,” has found his sword unequal to the task of combating the well-ordered hosts of darkness,By thousands and by millions ranged for fight.The author of “Michael and his Lost Angel” seeks accordingly in print consolation for the rebuffs he has experienced upon the stage. Some comfort in the midst of defeat may be found in the fact that the gods themselves fight vainly against prejudice and stupidity. I am not in the least seeking to set aside the verdict pronounced by the majority of “experts” upon Mr. Jones’s latest play and subsequently accepted if not ratified by the general public which would not be induced to see it. All I seek to do is to deal so far as I am able with the adverse influences to which it succumbed, and to explain why I think it a fine work and in many respects a triumph.The misfortunes of “Michael and his Lost Angel” attended, if they did not anticipate, its conception. Like Marina in Pericles it had at leastas chiding a nativityas play has often encountered. Before it saw the light a war had been waged concerning its name. That the name itself involved as some seemed to think a gratuitous insult to any form of religious connection or was even ill chosen I am not prepared to grant. Michael is not a scriptural character, and his functions, civil and militant, and his place in the celestial hierarchy are assigned him by uninspired writers. But for the use made of him in art and by Milton it is doubtful whether his name would be familiar enough to the general public to provoke a discussion. A discussion was, however, provoked and with a portion of those present the verdict was pronounced before the piece had been given. An opening scene, meanwhile, in which the very raison-d’être of the play is found, an indispensable portion of the motive began too soon and was, through the noise and disturbance caused by late arrivals, practically unheard. The difficulty thus caused was never quite overcome, and the nature of Michael Feversham’s offence and the value of his expiation were both partially misunderstood.That the display of human passions in a sacred edifice and the lavish use of ecclesiastical ceremonial might cause offence I could have conceived, had there not been the immediately previous proof of the success of another play in which the very words of the Inspired Teacher are used with a background of pagan revelry and a lavish and superfluous display of nudity of limb. Paul of Tarsus is surely a more recognisable personage, and one more closely connected with Christian faith than a nebulous being such as Michael. While, however, the slight banter in the title of Mr. Jones’s play and the reproduction of the rather florid pageant of the highest Anglican service has in a work of earnest purpose and masterly execution wounded sensitive consciences, the presentation as vulgar as inept of a portion of the holiest mysteries of religion has been received with sacerdotal benediction as well as with public applause. Foreign opinion concerning English hypocrisy and prudery finds frequent utterance, and our witty Gallic neighbours have excogitated a word they believe to be English and take as the cant phrase of the Briton,schoking.We do at times our bestto furnish foreigners with a justification for their views; and in the present case at least, we have shown our capacity to “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.”That the author has overburdened his work with dialogue is shown by the result, since a play that the public will not have is naturally a play unsuited to the public.Some measure of the blame, to my thinking, almost the whole of the blame, rests with the audience. In seeking to interest his world in a series of duologues Mr. Jones has credited it with a knowledge of dramatic art and an interest in psychology it does not possess. His experiment is analogous to that undertaken in France by the younger Dumas. Apremièreof Dumas was one of the most fashionable and intellectual of Parisian “functions.” With ears sharpened to acutest attention the Parisian public listened not only to dialogue thrice as long as any Mr. Jones has attempted, but also to monologue of the most didactic kind. In the case of Victor Hugo again there is more than one soliloquy of length absolutely portentous. These things have never wearied a public art-loving, theatre-loving, before all appreciative of literary subtlety and conscious of what are the true springs of dramatic interest.At the moment when these lines are written, the London playgoer, not perhaps of the most fashionable class, receives with delight a scene in which a hero swims to the rescue of injured innocence, which a generation ago established the fortunes of a dramatist and a theatre. I refer, of course, to the Colleen Bawn of Dion Boucicault, which has once more been revived. The rescue scene in this hit exactly the sense of the English public and fulfilled its ideal. For a year or two afterwards the intellect of our dramatists was exercised as to the means by which virtue imperilled could be rescued, whether by climbing a tower or swinging by a tree, or by any other contrivance involving the risk of a broken neck. Those days, happily, are past. We have not, however, made great progress in our education, and seem yet to have to learn that the most telling drama is the psychological, and that dialogue moves us, or should move us, more than incident. Othello, in some respects the most poignant of tragedies, is nearly all duologue, the gradual poisoning of the Moor’s mind by Iago being one of the most tremendous scenes ever attempted. The Greeks, the great art-loving people of antiquity, banished in tragedy all incident from the stage, and in thisrespect have been copied by the great school of French classicists.So far, without any very direct purpose or intention, I have been posing, apparently, as the apologist for Mr. Jones’s play. Underneath this, perhaps, some few may have traced a design still less definite of apologising for the English public. Nothing is further from my intention than to proffer an excuse for what I regard as a fine and most moving drama. For myself, I can only say that rarely indeed have my entrails been stirred by more forcible pathos, my attention been rapt by more inspiriting a theme, and my intellect been satisfied by dialogue more natural, appropriate, and, in the highest sense, dramatic. In one respect, I am disposed at times to agree with some of Mr. Jones’s censors. The logic of events which brings about the scene in the island is, perhaps, not sufficiently inexorable. That Mrs. Lesden is, in the eyes of the world, hopelessly compromised when she spends a night alone on the island with her lover, I will concede. I can conceive, however, Michael treating her with the more delicacy therefor, abandoning to her his house, and spending a summer night, no enormous penalty, in the open air, on the seashore.This, however, only means that the overmastering influence of passion over Michael has not been fully exhibited in action.With Mr. Jones’s previous works—with “Judah,” “The Crusaders,” “Saints and Sinners”—“Michael and his Lost Angel” is connected by strong, albeit not too evident, links. The bent of Mr. Jones’s mind, or the effect of his early environment, seems to force him into showing the struggle between religious or priestly training, and high and sincere aspiration, on the one hand, and, on the other, those influences, half earthly, half divine, of our physical nature, which sap where they cannot escalade, and, in the highest natures, end always in victory. There is nothing in Michael Feversham of the hypocrite, little even of the Puritan. Subject from the outset to priestly influences, and wedded to theories of asceticism, the more binding as self-imposed, he has come to look upon the renegation of the most imperative as well as, in one sense, the holiest functions of our nature as the condition of moral regeneration.Sic itur ad astra.Crime, generally, he holds as condemnable, but murder and theft are things aloof from the human nature with which he has to deal. They are exceptionalproducts of diseased organisations or untoward surroundings. Not one of his flock that he is conducting peacefully and unwittingly to Rome, is coming to him to own in confession to having stolen an umbrella from a rack or a book from a stall, still less to having slain his enemy on a secret path. Had such confession been made, it would have been an episode of comparatively little interest, a mere skirmish in the war he constantly sustains against the forces of evil. Uncleanness, on the other hand, as he elects to describe it, is the one offence against the higher life, in regard to which, whether as concerns inward promptings or outside manifestation, it behooves him to be ever armed and vigilant. Accepting this theory, which, though subversive of the highest and most obvious aims of nature, is still held by a considerable section of civilised humanity, the conduct of Michael wins a measure of sympathy. In imposing upon Rose Gibbard the unutterably shameful and humiliating penance, the nature of which reaches us from the ferocious Calvinism of the Puritan rather than from the gentler moral discipline of the Romish church, to which he is hastening, Michael is thoroughly sincere and conscientious. He believes itthe best, nay, the only way to save her soul and restore her to the self-respect and dignity of pure womanhood. So much in earnest is he that, when Mrs. Lesden propounds the theory, which among the virtuous and generous wins acceptance, that “it is nearly always the good girls who are betrayed,” he resents the utterance as a levity, not to say a profanity. A character such as this is not only conceivable, it is well known. There is nothing in its psychology to scare the unthinking or alarm the vulgar. In the humiliation which Michael is himself compelled to undergo, I find at once the vindication of a morality immeasurably higher and more Christian than that taught by any of the churches, and a soul tragedy of the most harrowing description. My words will to some appear irreverent. I am sorry, but I cannot help it. It is not I who said of the woman taken in adultery, “Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in illa lapidem mittat”; and again, “Nec ego te condemnabo. Vade et jam amplius noli peccare.”That a nature such as that of Michael would be likely to provoke the curiosity and interest of an Audrie Lesden, few will contest. Vain, frivolous, passionate, mutinous, sceptical, defeated, unhappy,with the sweet milk of true womanhood curdled in her breast, Audrie Lesden sets herself the task of breaking through the defences of this “marble saint.” She succeeds. Under her temptations the icy image thaws. That she herself thaws also, is a matter of which she scarcely takes cognisance. In her mood of irritation and defiance what happens to herself is a matter of comparative indifference. She has abandoned her positions and called in her reserves, concentrating all her forces for a combat, in which victory is, if possible, more disastrous than rout.Let us take then the position. A man resolute as he thinks in the maintenance of a standard of scarcely possible and wholly undesirable purity, a woman bent at first in wantonness of spirit upon his subjugation, but finding as she progresses that her heart is in the struggle, and that instead of being engaged in a mere sportive encounter she is playing for her life, her all. Here are the materials for a tragedy, and a tragedy is the outcome. The idea is happy, the execution is superb, and the result is a play that must be pronounced so far Mr. Jones’s masterpiece, and that is in effect one of the worthiest and in the highest sense of the word, putting apart the financial result and judging only from thestandpoint of art, one of the most successful dramas of the age. For the first time the dramatist has divested himself of all adventitious aid or support, swimming boldly and skilfully on the sea of drama. The melodramatic devices on which he has leant disappear, the sketches of eccentric character by which he strove to fortify past stories have vanished. A tale of ill-starred love is told with simple downright earnestness, simplicity, and good faith. Not a character unnecessary to the action is introduced, not a word that is superfluous or rhetorical is spoken. Free from obstruction, unpolluted and undefiled, a limpid stream of human life and love flows into the ocean of defeat and death.In some respects the loves of Michael Feversham and Audrie Lesden seem to take rank with the masterpieces of human passion, if not with Romeo and Juliet, with Cupid and Psyche, with Paul and Virginia, and shall I add with Edgar of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton, at least with Helen and Paris, Antony and Cleopatra, and Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier des Grieux. Just enough of fatefulness as well as of human wilfulness is there to add the crowning grace of tragedy by showing man the sport of circumstance. Michael dwells on this point andfinds “a curious bitter amusement” in tracing out the sequence of events. “The hundred little chances, accidents as we call them, that gave us to each other. Everything I did to avoid you threw me at your feet. I felt myself beginning to love you. I wrote urgently to Uncle Ned in Italy, thinking I’d tell him and that he would save me. He came. I couldn’t tell him of you, but his coming kept Withycombe [the boatman] from getting your telegram. I went to Saint Decuman’s to escape from you. You were moved to come to me. I sent away my own boat to put the sea between us: and so I imprisoned you with me. Six years ago I used all my influence to have the new lighthouse built on Saint Margaret’s Isle instead of Saint Decuman’s, so that I might keep Saint Decuman’s lonely for myself and prayer. I kept it lonely for myself and you. It was what we call a chance I didn’t go to Saint Margaret’s with Andrew and my uncle. It was what we call a chance that you telegraphed to my boatman instead of your own. If any one thing had gone differently—” Even so. In this world, however, “nothing walks with aimless feet” and the most commonplace and least significant of our actions may have world-reaching results.“Oh, God bring back yesterday” is the despairing cry which, since the beginning of time, has been wrung from human lips.The scene on the island seems to me admirable in management. I am not sure that I care for Audrie’s confession concerning the conquest of the heart of “a cherub aged ten,” though that leads to the very humorous illustration of his sister’s treason. Michael’s own confession on the other hand of his one flirtation with Nelly, the tender osculation never repeated, and her farewell words “Good-night, Mike” serve a distinct purpose in preparing Michael’s ultimate subjugation. “She called you Mike?” says Audrie with some surprise and more bitterness. He is human then, this austere, ice-bound man only just beginning to relent to her. His lips, those lips for which she hungers, have been pressed upon a woman’s face, and he has had a boy’s name by which another woman has dared to call him, a name her own lips tremble to frame. She is long before she does frame it aloud. The idea of that woman however dwells in her mind, and its full influence and the extent of her surrender are shown when at what might be quite, and is almost, the close of the third act she looksback and says, “Listen to this. Whatever happens, I shall never belong to anybody but you. You understand? I shall never belong to anybody but you, MIKE.” All this is supreme in tenderness and truthfulness and is the more dramatic and convincing on account of its simplicity.So it is throughout the play. There is not a moment when the effort after rhetorical speech interferes with or mars the downright earnestness and conviction of the language and the fervour of the underlying emotion. The love-making so far as we are permitted to see it is on the woman’s side. Hers are the raptures, the reproaches, the protestations. Only in the moment of supreme difficulty or defeat is Michael tortured into amorous utterance, and then even it is the idea of responsibility and possession that weighs upon him. The deed is done, he belongs to the woman with whom he has sinned, the past is ineffaceable: no expiation can alter, even if it may atone. He is, moreover, impenitent in the midst of penitence, fiercely glad, fiercely happy, in what he has done, ready to face all tribulation, loss, and reproach, rather than sacrifice the burning, maddening, joyous knowledge of his guilt. This is the spirit in which love in strong,austere, unemotional natures manifests itself. “All for love or the world well lost” is the title Dryden gives his alteration of Antony and Cleopatra. All for love or heaven well lost is the phrase Mr. Jones in effect puts into the lips of his Michael, a phrase used not for the first time, and savouring of blasphemy or sanctity according to the point of view of the audience.There are perhaps higher ideals of love. What dramatist or preacher has said anything finer than the words of the great cavalier lyrist:—I could not love thee, dear, so much,Loved I not honour more.One of the best known of the Tudor dramatists, Habington, says:—He is butA coward lover, whom or death or hellCan fright from ’s Mistress.The enormity of Michael’s sacrifice, the very unpardonableness of his offence, constitute the sweetest savour to him as to her. To her it brings an intoxicating, a delirious triumph, to him a sense how much he must hug to himself and cherish a possession secured at so fearful a price.It is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Michael’s madness that the sin once committed is not repented. Landor talks ofModesty who when she fliesIs fled for ever.This is true of other things beside modesty. Not seldom it is true of virtue. Sin is our sad portion, let us make the best of it. If we may not have a “stately pleasure-house” of love, let us get what shelter we may and at least cling close together while the winds of censure rebuke and the rains of scandal chill. This is, of course, what Audrie would suggest. “My beloved is mine and I am his.” What matter concerning other things, what other thing is there to matter? Not so Michael. Lead me back, he says, to the ways of peace and purity. Let us march hand in hand to the throne of forgiveness. There is no such throne, says the moralist and the priest within him. “Can one be pardoned and retain the offence?” he asks with Claudius, and the answer extracted from his conscience is a negative. After her death, a death for which he is, as he knows, mainly responsible, he abandons all struggle, resigns his volition and his being into the hands of a church that demands implicit obedience and pardons no questioning of its decisions and decrees, and taking upon himself monastic vows enters permanently a cloister.If this is not according to the present reading of the word “tragedy,” I know not where tragedy is to be sought. It may be that the subject is one that cannot with advantage be set before the public with the fierce and brilliant illumination of stage presentation. Compare however the method of treatment, earnest, severe, resolute, unfaltering, with that which was adopted by novelists dealing with clerical trials and offences of the sort from the time of Diderot to that of L’Abbé Michon, the reputed author of “La Réligieuse,” “Le Maudit,” and other works of the class.Once more I repeat that “Michael and his Lost Angel” is the best play Mr. Jones has given the stage and is in the full sense a masterpiece. It is the work of a man conscious of strength, and sure of the weapons he employs. Whether the stage will know it again who shall say? It will at least take rank as literature and in its present shape appeal to most readers capable of having an independent opinion and clearing their minds of cant.From the figures as to the receipts which are published it appears that a full chance of recording its opinion was scarcely given the public. On this point I am not prepared to speak. Such rebuff as the play encountered was, I fear, due to the preconceived attitude of some representatives of public opinion rather than to any misunderstanding between Mr. Jones and the public. Mr. Forbes Robertson’s performance of the hero was superb in all respects. The refusal of the part of the heroine by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, its destined exponent, was so far a calamity that it fostered the belief that there was something immoral in the part. In other respects I cannot regard the substitution for that actress of Miss Marion Terry as a misfortune.JOSEPH KNIGHT.LONDON, 12th February, 1896.AUTHOR’S NOTETHISplay was produced at the Lyceum Theatre on the 15th January, 1896, and was withdrawn on the 25th, the management suddenly announcing the last three nights in the morning papers of the 23d. An impression has therefore prevailed in the public mind that the piece was a great financial failure. So far was this from being the case that the receipts for the first ten nights during which it was played were more than £100 higher than the receipts for the first ten nights of my play “The Middleman,” which proved so great a financial success in England and America. The takings during the brief run at the Lyceum were as follows:—January 15.£2097s.6d.January 21.£999s.11d.“ 16.12893“ 22.114144“ 17.123123“ 23.121180“ 18.20355“ 24.146127“ 20.9994“ 25.23170The great number of sympathetic letters that I have received about the play and its cordialreception on the later nights of the run show that it created a deep impression on those who did see it, and encourage me to hope that I may introduce it again to the English public under happier auspices.HENRY ARTHUR JONES.PERSONS REPRESENTED.THEREVERENDMICHAELFEVERSHAM.SIRLYOLFFEVERSHAM.EDWARDLASHMAR(FATHERHILARY).ANDREWGIBBARD.THEREVERENDMARKDOCWRAY.WITHYCOMBE.AUDRIELESDEN.ROSEGIBBARD.MRS. CANTELO.FANNYCLOVER.Villagers, Congregation, Choristers, Priests.ACT I.THEVICARAGEPARLOUR ATCLEVEHEDDON.(Four months pass.)ACT II.THESHRINE ONSAINTDECUMAN’SISLAND.(Two nights and a day pass.)ACT III.THEVICARAGEPARLOUR AS INACTI.(A year passes.)ACT IV.THEMINSTERCHURCH ATCLEVEHEDDON.(Ten months pass.)ACT V.RECEPTIONROOM OF THEMONASTERY OFSANSALVATORE ATMAJANO, ITALY.
MICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGELPREFACEAUTHOR’SNOTEPERSONSREPRESENTEDACT ANDSCENEDESCRIPTIONACTIACTIIACTIIIACTIVACTVTranscriber’s Note
MICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGEL
PREFACE
AUTHOR’SNOTE
PERSONSREPRESENTED
ACT ANDSCENEDESCRIPTION
ACTI
ACTII
ACTIII
ACTIV
ACTV
Transcriber’s Note
MICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGELA PLAY IN FIVE ACTSBYHENRY ARTHUR JONESAUTHOR OF “THE TEMPTER,” “THE CRUSADERS,” “THE CASE OF REBELLIOUS SUSAN,” “THE MIDDLEMAN,” “THE DANCING GIRL,” “JUDAH,” “THE MASQUERADERS,” “THE TRIUMPH OF THE PHILISTINES,” ETC.New YorkTHE MACMILLAN COMPANYLONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.1920All rights reserved
MICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGEL
A PLAY IN FIVE ACTSBY
HENRY ARTHUR JONESAUTHOR OF “THE TEMPTER,” “THE CRUSADERS,” “THE CASE OF REBELLIOUS SUSAN,” “THE MIDDLEMAN,” “THE DANCING GIRL,” “JUDAH,” “THE MASQUERADERS,” “THE TRIUMPH OF THE PHILISTINES,” ETC.
New YorkTHE MACMILLAN COMPANYLONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.1920All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1895,BYMACMILLAN AND CO.Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1896.Norwood PressJ. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
COPYRIGHT, 1895,BYMACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1896.Norwood PressJ. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
MICHAEL, though styled by Milton “of celestial armies prince,” has found his sword unequal to the task of combating the well-ordered hosts of darkness,
By thousands and by millions ranged for fight.
By thousands and by millions ranged for fight.
The author of “Michael and his Lost Angel” seeks accordingly in print consolation for the rebuffs he has experienced upon the stage. Some comfort in the midst of defeat may be found in the fact that the gods themselves fight vainly against prejudice and stupidity. I am not in the least seeking to set aside the verdict pronounced by the majority of “experts” upon Mr. Jones’s latest play and subsequently accepted if not ratified by the general public which would not be induced to see it. All I seek to do is to deal so far as I am able with the adverse influences to which it succumbed, and to explain why I think it a fine work and in many respects a triumph.
The misfortunes of “Michael and his Lost Angel” attended, if they did not anticipate, its conception. Like Marina in Pericles it had at least
as chiding a nativity
as chiding a nativity
as play has often encountered. Before it saw the light a war had been waged concerning its name. That the name itself involved as some seemed to think a gratuitous insult to any form of religious connection or was even ill chosen I am not prepared to grant. Michael is not a scriptural character, and his functions, civil and militant, and his place in the celestial hierarchy are assigned him by uninspired writers. But for the use made of him in art and by Milton it is doubtful whether his name would be familiar enough to the general public to provoke a discussion. A discussion was, however, provoked and with a portion of those present the verdict was pronounced before the piece had been given. An opening scene, meanwhile, in which the very raison-d’être of the play is found, an indispensable portion of the motive began too soon and was, through the noise and disturbance caused by late arrivals, practically unheard. The difficulty thus caused was never quite overcome, and the nature of Michael Feversham’s offence and the value of his expiation were both partially misunderstood.
That the display of human passions in a sacred edifice and the lavish use of ecclesiastical ceremonial might cause offence I could have conceived, had there not been the immediately previous proof of the success of another play in which the very words of the Inspired Teacher are used with a background of pagan revelry and a lavish and superfluous display of nudity of limb. Paul of Tarsus is surely a more recognisable personage, and one more closely connected with Christian faith than a nebulous being such as Michael. While, however, the slight banter in the title of Mr. Jones’s play and the reproduction of the rather florid pageant of the highest Anglican service has in a work of earnest purpose and masterly execution wounded sensitive consciences, the presentation as vulgar as inept of a portion of the holiest mysteries of religion has been received with sacerdotal benediction as well as with public applause. Foreign opinion concerning English hypocrisy and prudery finds frequent utterance, and our witty Gallic neighbours have excogitated a word they believe to be English and take as the cant phrase of the Briton,schoking.We do at times our bestto furnish foreigners with a justification for their views; and in the present case at least, we have shown our capacity to “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.”
That the author has overburdened his work with dialogue is shown by the result, since a play that the public will not have is naturally a play unsuited to the public.
Some measure of the blame, to my thinking, almost the whole of the blame, rests with the audience. In seeking to interest his world in a series of duologues Mr. Jones has credited it with a knowledge of dramatic art and an interest in psychology it does not possess. His experiment is analogous to that undertaken in France by the younger Dumas. Apremièreof Dumas was one of the most fashionable and intellectual of Parisian “functions.” With ears sharpened to acutest attention the Parisian public listened not only to dialogue thrice as long as any Mr. Jones has attempted, but also to monologue of the most didactic kind. In the case of Victor Hugo again there is more than one soliloquy of length absolutely portentous. These things have never wearied a public art-loving, theatre-loving, before all appreciative of literary subtlety and conscious of what are the true springs of dramatic interest.
At the moment when these lines are written, the London playgoer, not perhaps of the most fashionable class, receives with delight a scene in which a hero swims to the rescue of injured innocence, which a generation ago established the fortunes of a dramatist and a theatre. I refer, of course, to the Colleen Bawn of Dion Boucicault, which has once more been revived. The rescue scene in this hit exactly the sense of the English public and fulfilled its ideal. For a year or two afterwards the intellect of our dramatists was exercised as to the means by which virtue imperilled could be rescued, whether by climbing a tower or swinging by a tree, or by any other contrivance involving the risk of a broken neck. Those days, happily, are past. We have not, however, made great progress in our education, and seem yet to have to learn that the most telling drama is the psychological, and that dialogue moves us, or should move us, more than incident. Othello, in some respects the most poignant of tragedies, is nearly all duologue, the gradual poisoning of the Moor’s mind by Iago being one of the most tremendous scenes ever attempted. The Greeks, the great art-loving people of antiquity, banished in tragedy all incident from the stage, and in thisrespect have been copied by the great school of French classicists.
So far, without any very direct purpose or intention, I have been posing, apparently, as the apologist for Mr. Jones’s play. Underneath this, perhaps, some few may have traced a design still less definite of apologising for the English public. Nothing is further from my intention than to proffer an excuse for what I regard as a fine and most moving drama. For myself, I can only say that rarely indeed have my entrails been stirred by more forcible pathos, my attention been rapt by more inspiriting a theme, and my intellect been satisfied by dialogue more natural, appropriate, and, in the highest sense, dramatic. In one respect, I am disposed at times to agree with some of Mr. Jones’s censors. The logic of events which brings about the scene in the island is, perhaps, not sufficiently inexorable. That Mrs. Lesden is, in the eyes of the world, hopelessly compromised when she spends a night alone on the island with her lover, I will concede. I can conceive, however, Michael treating her with the more delicacy therefor, abandoning to her his house, and spending a summer night, no enormous penalty, in the open air, on the seashore.This, however, only means that the overmastering influence of passion over Michael has not been fully exhibited in action.
With Mr. Jones’s previous works—with “Judah,” “The Crusaders,” “Saints and Sinners”—“Michael and his Lost Angel” is connected by strong, albeit not too evident, links. The bent of Mr. Jones’s mind, or the effect of his early environment, seems to force him into showing the struggle between religious or priestly training, and high and sincere aspiration, on the one hand, and, on the other, those influences, half earthly, half divine, of our physical nature, which sap where they cannot escalade, and, in the highest natures, end always in victory. There is nothing in Michael Feversham of the hypocrite, little even of the Puritan. Subject from the outset to priestly influences, and wedded to theories of asceticism, the more binding as self-imposed, he has come to look upon the renegation of the most imperative as well as, in one sense, the holiest functions of our nature as the condition of moral regeneration.Sic itur ad astra.Crime, generally, he holds as condemnable, but murder and theft are things aloof from the human nature with which he has to deal. They are exceptionalproducts of diseased organisations or untoward surroundings. Not one of his flock that he is conducting peacefully and unwittingly to Rome, is coming to him to own in confession to having stolen an umbrella from a rack or a book from a stall, still less to having slain his enemy on a secret path. Had such confession been made, it would have been an episode of comparatively little interest, a mere skirmish in the war he constantly sustains against the forces of evil. Uncleanness, on the other hand, as he elects to describe it, is the one offence against the higher life, in regard to which, whether as concerns inward promptings or outside manifestation, it behooves him to be ever armed and vigilant. Accepting this theory, which, though subversive of the highest and most obvious aims of nature, is still held by a considerable section of civilised humanity, the conduct of Michael wins a measure of sympathy. In imposing upon Rose Gibbard the unutterably shameful and humiliating penance, the nature of which reaches us from the ferocious Calvinism of the Puritan rather than from the gentler moral discipline of the Romish church, to which he is hastening, Michael is thoroughly sincere and conscientious. He believes itthe best, nay, the only way to save her soul and restore her to the self-respect and dignity of pure womanhood. So much in earnest is he that, when Mrs. Lesden propounds the theory, which among the virtuous and generous wins acceptance, that “it is nearly always the good girls who are betrayed,” he resents the utterance as a levity, not to say a profanity. A character such as this is not only conceivable, it is well known. There is nothing in its psychology to scare the unthinking or alarm the vulgar. In the humiliation which Michael is himself compelled to undergo, I find at once the vindication of a morality immeasurably higher and more Christian than that taught by any of the churches, and a soul tragedy of the most harrowing description. My words will to some appear irreverent. I am sorry, but I cannot help it. It is not I who said of the woman taken in adultery, “Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in illa lapidem mittat”; and again, “Nec ego te condemnabo. Vade et jam amplius noli peccare.”
That a nature such as that of Michael would be likely to provoke the curiosity and interest of an Audrie Lesden, few will contest. Vain, frivolous, passionate, mutinous, sceptical, defeated, unhappy,with the sweet milk of true womanhood curdled in her breast, Audrie Lesden sets herself the task of breaking through the defences of this “marble saint.” She succeeds. Under her temptations the icy image thaws. That she herself thaws also, is a matter of which she scarcely takes cognisance. In her mood of irritation and defiance what happens to herself is a matter of comparative indifference. She has abandoned her positions and called in her reserves, concentrating all her forces for a combat, in which victory is, if possible, more disastrous than rout.
Let us take then the position. A man resolute as he thinks in the maintenance of a standard of scarcely possible and wholly undesirable purity, a woman bent at first in wantonness of spirit upon his subjugation, but finding as she progresses that her heart is in the struggle, and that instead of being engaged in a mere sportive encounter she is playing for her life, her all. Here are the materials for a tragedy, and a tragedy is the outcome. The idea is happy, the execution is superb, and the result is a play that must be pronounced so far Mr. Jones’s masterpiece, and that is in effect one of the worthiest and in the highest sense of the word, putting apart the financial result and judging only from thestandpoint of art, one of the most successful dramas of the age. For the first time the dramatist has divested himself of all adventitious aid or support, swimming boldly and skilfully on the sea of drama. The melodramatic devices on which he has leant disappear, the sketches of eccentric character by which he strove to fortify past stories have vanished. A tale of ill-starred love is told with simple downright earnestness, simplicity, and good faith. Not a character unnecessary to the action is introduced, not a word that is superfluous or rhetorical is spoken. Free from obstruction, unpolluted and undefiled, a limpid stream of human life and love flows into the ocean of defeat and death.
In some respects the loves of Michael Feversham and Audrie Lesden seem to take rank with the masterpieces of human passion, if not with Romeo and Juliet, with Cupid and Psyche, with Paul and Virginia, and shall I add with Edgar of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton, at least with Helen and Paris, Antony and Cleopatra, and Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier des Grieux. Just enough of fatefulness as well as of human wilfulness is there to add the crowning grace of tragedy by showing man the sport of circumstance. Michael dwells on this point andfinds “a curious bitter amusement” in tracing out the sequence of events. “The hundred little chances, accidents as we call them, that gave us to each other. Everything I did to avoid you threw me at your feet. I felt myself beginning to love you. I wrote urgently to Uncle Ned in Italy, thinking I’d tell him and that he would save me. He came. I couldn’t tell him of you, but his coming kept Withycombe [the boatman] from getting your telegram. I went to Saint Decuman’s to escape from you. You were moved to come to me. I sent away my own boat to put the sea between us: and so I imprisoned you with me. Six years ago I used all my influence to have the new lighthouse built on Saint Margaret’s Isle instead of Saint Decuman’s, so that I might keep Saint Decuman’s lonely for myself and prayer. I kept it lonely for myself and you. It was what we call a chance I didn’t go to Saint Margaret’s with Andrew and my uncle. It was what we call a chance that you telegraphed to my boatman instead of your own. If any one thing had gone differently—” Even so. In this world, however, “nothing walks with aimless feet” and the most commonplace and least significant of our actions may have world-reaching results.“Oh, God bring back yesterday” is the despairing cry which, since the beginning of time, has been wrung from human lips.
The scene on the island seems to me admirable in management. I am not sure that I care for Audrie’s confession concerning the conquest of the heart of “a cherub aged ten,” though that leads to the very humorous illustration of his sister’s treason. Michael’s own confession on the other hand of his one flirtation with Nelly, the tender osculation never repeated, and her farewell words “Good-night, Mike” serve a distinct purpose in preparing Michael’s ultimate subjugation. “She called you Mike?” says Audrie with some surprise and more bitterness. He is human then, this austere, ice-bound man only just beginning to relent to her. His lips, those lips for which she hungers, have been pressed upon a woman’s face, and he has had a boy’s name by which another woman has dared to call him, a name her own lips tremble to frame. She is long before she does frame it aloud. The idea of that woman however dwells in her mind, and its full influence and the extent of her surrender are shown when at what might be quite, and is almost, the close of the third act she looksback and says, “Listen to this. Whatever happens, I shall never belong to anybody but you. You understand? I shall never belong to anybody but you, MIKE.” All this is supreme in tenderness and truthfulness and is the more dramatic and convincing on account of its simplicity.
So it is throughout the play. There is not a moment when the effort after rhetorical speech interferes with or mars the downright earnestness and conviction of the language and the fervour of the underlying emotion. The love-making so far as we are permitted to see it is on the woman’s side. Hers are the raptures, the reproaches, the protestations. Only in the moment of supreme difficulty or defeat is Michael tortured into amorous utterance, and then even it is the idea of responsibility and possession that weighs upon him. The deed is done, he belongs to the woman with whom he has sinned, the past is ineffaceable: no expiation can alter, even if it may atone. He is, moreover, impenitent in the midst of penitence, fiercely glad, fiercely happy, in what he has done, ready to face all tribulation, loss, and reproach, rather than sacrifice the burning, maddening, joyous knowledge of his guilt. This is the spirit in which love in strong,austere, unemotional natures manifests itself. “All for love or the world well lost” is the title Dryden gives his alteration of Antony and Cleopatra. All for love or heaven well lost is the phrase Mr. Jones in effect puts into the lips of his Michael, a phrase used not for the first time, and savouring of blasphemy or sanctity according to the point of view of the audience.
There are perhaps higher ideals of love. What dramatist or preacher has said anything finer than the words of the great cavalier lyrist:—
I could not love thee, dear, so much,Loved I not honour more.
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.
One of the best known of the Tudor dramatists, Habington, says:—
He is butA coward lover, whom or death or hellCan fright from ’s Mistress.
He is but
A coward lover, whom or death or hell
Can fright from ’s Mistress.
The enormity of Michael’s sacrifice, the very unpardonableness of his offence, constitute the sweetest savour to him as to her. To her it brings an intoxicating, a delirious triumph, to him a sense how much he must hug to himself and cherish a possession secured at so fearful a price.
It is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Michael’s madness that the sin once committed is not repented. Landor talks of
Modesty who when she fliesIs fled for ever.
Modesty who when she flies
Is fled for ever.
This is true of other things beside modesty. Not seldom it is true of virtue. Sin is our sad portion, let us make the best of it. If we may not have a “stately pleasure-house” of love, let us get what shelter we may and at least cling close together while the winds of censure rebuke and the rains of scandal chill. This is, of course, what Audrie would suggest. “My beloved is mine and I am his.” What matter concerning other things, what other thing is there to matter? Not so Michael. Lead me back, he says, to the ways of peace and purity. Let us march hand in hand to the throne of forgiveness. There is no such throne, says the moralist and the priest within him. “Can one be pardoned and retain the offence?” he asks with Claudius, and the answer extracted from his conscience is a negative. After her death, a death for which he is, as he knows, mainly responsible, he abandons all struggle, resigns his volition and his being into the hands of a church that demands implicit obedience and pardons no questioning of its decisions and decrees, and taking upon himself monastic vows enters permanently a cloister.
If this is not according to the present reading of the word “tragedy,” I know not where tragedy is to be sought. It may be that the subject is one that cannot with advantage be set before the public with the fierce and brilliant illumination of stage presentation. Compare however the method of treatment, earnest, severe, resolute, unfaltering, with that which was adopted by novelists dealing with clerical trials and offences of the sort from the time of Diderot to that of L’Abbé Michon, the reputed author of “La Réligieuse,” “Le Maudit,” and other works of the class.
Once more I repeat that “Michael and his Lost Angel” is the best play Mr. Jones has given the stage and is in the full sense a masterpiece. It is the work of a man conscious of strength, and sure of the weapons he employs. Whether the stage will know it again who shall say? It will at least take rank as literature and in its present shape appeal to most readers capable of having an independent opinion and clearing their minds of cant.
From the figures as to the receipts which are published it appears that a full chance of recording its opinion was scarcely given the public. On this point I am not prepared to speak. Such rebuff as the play encountered was, I fear, due to the preconceived attitude of some representatives of public opinion rather than to any misunderstanding between Mr. Jones and the public. Mr. Forbes Robertson’s performance of the hero was superb in all respects. The refusal of the part of the heroine by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, its destined exponent, was so far a calamity that it fostered the belief that there was something immoral in the part. In other respects I cannot regard the substitution for that actress of Miss Marion Terry as a misfortune.
JOSEPH KNIGHT.
LONDON, 12th February, 1896.
THISplay was produced at the Lyceum Theatre on the 15th January, 1896, and was withdrawn on the 25th, the management suddenly announcing the last three nights in the morning papers of the 23d. An impression has therefore prevailed in the public mind that the piece was a great financial failure. So far was this from being the case that the receipts for the first ten nights during which it was played were more than £100 higher than the receipts for the first ten nights of my play “The Middleman,” which proved so great a financial success in England and America. The takings during the brief run at the Lyceum were as follows:—
January 15.£2097s.6d.January 21.£999s.11d.“ 16.12893“ 22.114144“ 17.123123“ 23.121180“ 18.20355“ 24.146127“ 20.9994“ 25.23170
The great number of sympathetic letters that I have received about the play and its cordialreception on the later nights of the run show that it created a deep impression on those who did see it, and encourage me to hope that I may introduce it again to the English public under happier auspices.
HENRY ARTHUR JONES.
THEREVERENDMICHAELFEVERSHAM.SIRLYOLFFEVERSHAM.EDWARDLASHMAR(FATHERHILARY).ANDREWGIBBARD.THEREVERENDMARKDOCWRAY.WITHYCOMBE.AUDRIELESDEN.ROSEGIBBARD.MRS. CANTELO.FANNYCLOVER.Villagers, Congregation, Choristers, Priests.
ACT I.
THEVICARAGEPARLOUR ATCLEVEHEDDON.
(Four months pass.)
ACT II.
THESHRINE ONSAINTDECUMAN’SISLAND.
(Two nights and a day pass.)
ACT III.
THEVICARAGEPARLOUR AS INACTI.
(A year passes.)
ACT IV.
THEMINSTERCHURCH ATCLEVEHEDDON.
(Ten months pass.)
ACT V.
RECEPTIONROOM OF THEMONASTERY OFSANSALVATORE ATMAJANO, ITALY.