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Here she is no longer transforming a foreign conception of character into her own conception of what character should be; she is embodying the creation of an Italian, of an artist, and a creation made in her honour. D'Annunzio's tragedy is, in the final result, bad tragedy, but it is a failure of a far higher order than such successes as Mr. Pinero's.
Nowadays the four-act form with a strong climax at the end of the third act seems to be most often used. This is the form, for instance, of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, of Mr. Jones's Mrs. Dane's Defense, and of Sir Arthur Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and The Gay Lord Quex. Each begins with an act of exposition, followed by an act of rising interest.
No doubt, prosperity being essential, the audience of our theaters must share the blame with their favorites. Too idle to listen to exquisite prose or splendid verse, they prefer the quick antics of comedians, and in their ear, as in Mr. Pinero's, "theatrical," has a far more splendid sound than "dramatic."
Pinero's plays when they were produced in Simla and was invariably considered up there to have done them better than any professional they have at home, though he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment happened to be a burlesque.
Had the play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, His House in Order.
Pinero's acute lecture on the probable success of Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, if only the Scots romancer had taken the trouble to learn the rules of the game, as it is played in the theater of to-day. In thus centering the interest of their public utterance upon the necessities of craftsmanship, the dramatists are in accord with the customs of the practitioners of all the other arts.
I don't know what they put on the posters; but the plays are written and acted produced with great success. Dorriforth. Produced partly. A play isn't fully produced until it is in a form in which you can refer to it. We have to talk in the air. * Since the above was written several of Mr. Pinero's plays have been published. Florentia. The authors are not bound to publish them if they don't wish.
If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest in his characters. A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero's Letty.
But no! the Scotch reviewer's weapon is merely a rose-water squirt. You see, therefore, how well-balanced we are in this "happy isle, set in a silver sea." The Fogeys are respectful to the young men, and the young men actually admire the Fogeys. That the young men admire one another goes without saying. Here surely is "the atmosphere of praise" of Mr. Pinero's hortation.
A stand-up fight between will and will such a fight as occurs in, say, the Hippolytus of Euripides, or Racine's Andromaque, or Molière's Tartufe, or Ibsen's Pretenders, or Dumas's Françillon, or Sudermann's Heimat, or Sir Arthur Pinero's Gay Lord Quex, or Mr. Shaw's Candida, or Mr. Galsworthy's Strife such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest forms of drama.
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