Our Stage and Its Critics | Page 5

long time has been, a mania among playwrights for putting aristocratic characters upon the stage. It may be that this is due to the snobbishness of players, who, in comedy, love to represent a lord: they can be kings and queens only in tragedies; or to that of the audience, which likes to see the representation of the nobility; or, again, it may be caused by the snobbishness of the dramatist and his wish to suggest that he knows all about the "upper succles."
It need not be assumed that we are much worse in this respect than our neighbours across that Channel which some desire to have destroyed and so nullify the famous John of Gaunt speech. In books and plays the Gallic writers are almost as fond of presenting the French aristocracy as are our dramatists and novelists of writing works concerning the British Peerage. Even putting the actual peerage aside, the question is important, whether the pictures in fiction--particularly in drama--of what one may call Belgravia or Mayfair are correct. We critics hardly know; and it may be a solecism to suggest that the same applies to the studies of the Faubourg St Germain. Perhaps that famous faubourg has lost its distinction.
The question may seem a little difficult yet must be asked: How do our dramatists and the French manage to get a first-hand study of the real aristocracy? Of course, nowadays, there are a large number of houses owned by people with titles, and sometimes very noble titles, which can easily be penetrated. Speaking quite apart from politics, one may say that the British aristocracy year by year makes itself cheaper and cheaper, losing thereby its title to existence. The city clerk can do better than Dick Swiveller, and decorate his bed-sitting room with a photographic gallery of _d��collet��es_ duchesses, and bare-legged ladies of noble family, and he is able to obtain a vast amount of information, part of it quite accurate, concerning their doings.
Yet, even when we get far higher than the city clerk, and reach the fashionable playwright, to say nothing of the dramatic critic, there are mysteries unexplorable. There is a Lhassa in Mayfair, our efforts to attain which are Burked.
A big Bohemian, sporting "smart-set," Anglo-American, South African millionaire society exists which has in it a good many people acknowledged by Debrett, and this it is quite easy to enter. There are a score or so of peers, and twice the number of peeresses, as well as smaller fry, possessing titles by birth or marriage, with whom it is not difficult, and not always desirable, to become acquainted. The real aristocracy looks askance at them. When we see pictures of these, or studies on the French stage of the titled faiseurs, or _rastaquou��res_, we know that they may be correct, and indeed the figures in them have become to such an extent despecialised that we can judge of the truthfulness of the study by the simple process of assuming that they do not possess any titles at all.
Still, there remains a world beyond, where, to some extent at least, manners and ideas are different from those of the upper-middle-class, or the middle-middle-class, to whichever it may be that our craft belongs. People will recollect Thackeray's remarks concerning the impossibility of getting to know the real domestic life of your French friends; whether his words are well founded or not, they illustrate the essential unknowability to the outsider of some of the great noble and even untitled county families of the land. It is said that there still exist some great ladies who have not cheapened themselves by allowing their photographs to be published in the sixpenny papers. Yet our dramatists, or some at least, seem to think that a play is vulgar unless amongst the dramatis personae one can find a lord or two.
Perhaps indolence is their excuse. You call a character the Duke of Smithfield, and thereby save yourself much trouble; you need not explain that he is rich, or how he came to be rich, or why he has no work to do. You have ready-made for you the supposition of a mass of details as to manner and prejudices. If the heroine's father is an earl and the hero a commoner, such as a barrister or a doctor, the mere statement of these facts is useful matter for your story. If the dramatist writes about the kind of earl who belongs to that inner set of the aristocracy, in the existence of which some of us innocently believe, how does he set about his task?
Even when the ordinary playwright handles the ruck-and-run of the "nobs," his acquaintance with them can hardly justify him in regarding his studies as founded upon observation. To see people in the stalls and meet them at