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Then there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian chemist; Alcee Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist; and Will Maidenwood, the editor of Woman. Then there is my second cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero's comedy last winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld.
No, I don't despise Ibsen; and I have found Mr. Pinero's plays good reading." "Oh," the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. "'The Gay Lord Quex'; Miss Vanbrugh was great in that. But now don't get off on the theatre, grandfather, or there will be no end to it. Which of the old, old poets before Burns or Shelley even do you like?"
It would be absurd to deny that modern stagecraft has made possible in the theatre many excellent effects that were not dreamt of in the philosophy of Shakespeare. Sir Arthur Pinero's plays are better made than those of the Elizabethans, and in a narrow sense hold the mirror up to nature more successfully than theirs.
After living in that beautiful palace of Morgan's, it just needed five days of the "Pinero's" to make us enjoy life at a hotel If we can make connections, I think I will go over to Santo Domingo, and study up that subject, too. But, even if we go no where else the trip to the I. of P. was alone well worth our long journey.
Wherever the middle way is divined, there is the possible entrance of the Spirit of Comedy. It is certainly a detriment to the purely Tragic effect of Pinero's greatest play, that the middle way, the possibility of reconciliation, is shadowed forth in the last word, the cry of the stepdaughter of the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, "If I had only been more merciful!"
Dumas found one in Denise, and another in Francillon, where the famous "Il en a menti!" comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's Iris is a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's Candida and The Devil's Disciple; so is Mr. Galsworthy's Strife.
Among his most successful farces are The Magistrate , The School Mistress , and The Amazons . Clever invention of absurd situations and success in starting infectious laughter are the prime qualities of these plays. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is by most critics considered Pinero's masterpiece.
And I doubt whether a man would fare much better trying to play nothing but Shakespeare in London. No, this man can play virtually anything; he made his first big hit in recent years, that is playing Maldonado in Pinero's 'Iris." "But go back to Sothern and Marlowe. They go on Shakespearing, world without end." "If you can call it Shakespeare.
There were two brief interesting comic periods: the period of Congreve at the close of the seventeenth century, and of Goldsmith and Sheridan nearly a hundred years later. The literary plays of the Victorians, Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, were lacking in dramatic essentials. The modern drama has accomplished certain definite results. Pinero's work is typical of vast improvement in technique.
The English tradesman can assure his customers that with such an "old-established" firm as his not even war can interfere; but France, with war actually on her soil, has gone further and has accepted war as part of her daily life. She has not merely swallowed, but digested it. It is like the line in Pinero's play, where one woman says she cannot go to the opera because of her neuralgia.
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