On a Melodrama

thought the young man's costume was stark mad. But the old man did not think his own costume was natural. He thought it was the business of any gentleman's costume to be artificial. He did not pretend that his hair was naturally white with powder or grew in a pigtail, or that frills were sprouting on him like feathers on a chicken, or that high red heels had grown out of his feet. He simply was not competing with the young man at all, in the matter of naturalness. He belonged to an age when people thought that dress ought to be dressy.

Dion Boucicault belonged to an age when people thought that the stage ought to be stagey. I admit that the eighteenth century was in many ways much more intelligent than the nineteenth century. Therefore, an artificial comedy like The School for Scandal is not so easily made absurd as an artificial melodrama like The Streets of London. But The School for Scandal is artificial, and in some minor matters even absurd; that is, unintentionally absurd. There are always some stage properties of a period that look a little too stagey at a subsequent period. Nevertheless, when all this is allowed for, it must be admitted that the period of Victorian melodrama was a pretty ghastly period. The admirable setting and acting of The Streets of London brings out all that was most pompous and preposterous.

with a dexterity all the better for not being overdone. I appreciated especially the remarkable feat of writing a letter on the stage, as I have seen it done in all seriousness in my boyhood; when the squire conveys to his lawyer that his estate is to be divided between six different sons in six totally different ways,* with a curse or blessing attached to each, and does it all with one long scratching line, followed by a thunderous thump to represent the seal or stamp. It was also very pleasing to see the hero wandering about with a chair in his hand, which he offered to the mendicant from the streets, and pushed backwards or forwards according to whether the mendicant was or was not included in the conversation — if it can be called conversation. For some of it, of course, was soliloquy; and every now and then I drew in, with a deep breath of appreciation, the intensity of a hissing aside.

And yet, though nobody could see it without laughing, there are things to be thought about as well as things to be laughed at. To recur to the case of the Byronic young man and his frilled and powdered grandfather, there is one obvious moral to be drawn. The Byronic young man knew that his grandfather's dress had been more artificial, but there was one thing that the Byronic young man certainly did not know. He did not know that his own dress, the dress he considered natural, would also in thirty years be considered artificial. He did not know that his loosened hair would look like ridiculous ringlets, that his loosened cloak would look like the cloak of a comic conspirator; that the next generation or two would think that he was the artificial old dandy. Least of all would he think, and small blame to him, that he would look artificial to a son or grandson who was himself wearing a stove-pipe top-hat and mutton-chop whiskers or the preposterous trousers of the 'seventies. In other words, while we can say that those preposterous trousers were preposterous, and much more preposterous than the elegant knee-breeches of the powered ancestor, yet there will always be an additional absurdity which is relative and not positive, and conies solely from things being old-fashioned. And while we can say that the preposterous Victorian melodramas were preposterous, more preposterous than the elegant artificiality of The School for Scandal, yet some of the absurdity is only antiquity. And that absurdity we shall all inherit and exhibit, as soon as our own fashions have become antique.

For instance, it is more likely than not that, in eighty years, the little tricks and mannerisms of the new Noel Coward sort of comedy will seem utterly false and farcical. A new school of humour will produce a burlesque of the Noel Coward comedy, and every action will seem affectation. Whenever the hero or heroine lights a cigarette, a howl of joyful derision will go up, especially from the old playgoers, who can just remember that venerable and antiquated piece of mummery. When a servant comes in with a tray of cocktails, it will bring down the house with that deafening applause that is only given to really old and seasoned and almost prehistoric jokes. Almost every posture will look like a pose. Almost every word will be in the quaint old diction of the earlier twentieth century. In short, Sir Gerald du Maurier's way of being natural will be exactly like Shelley's way of looking natural; it may remain beautiful, but it will not remain young.

There is a queerer thing to be learnt from the stale and stagey melodrama. It is this; that if an old thing is old enough, and a new thing is new enough, nobody will notice if they are almost the same thing. I mean that if there has been a long interval of other fashions between the first fashion and the last fashion, the dead thing can return in a new disguise without ever being detected. I have mentioned those rusty devices of melodrama, the soliloquy and the aside. They were used by Shakespeare; they were used by Dion Boucicault; they were used down to Victorian rimes; and they were used because they are useful. It does definitely help, not merely the melodramatic trick, but the dramatic truth -£1563- of a scene, that the audience should hear something that the stage company do not hear. The result Is that this fiction has reappeared in ultra-modern drama, in the form of an entirely new psychological and metaphysical theory of the theatre. The characters will soliloquize as loud as they like, and utter asides that are not said aside. The old convention was that, when a man spoke to a woman, she was not supposed to notice that he also whispered behind his hand to the audience. The new convention is that she is to go suddenly stone deaf when he says certain things, and miraculously recover the power of hearing when he says other things. That is something much more melodramatic than a melodrama. That is something that could only be described as a Miracle Play. I do not object to that; I am very fond of Miracle Plays and rather fond of melodramas. But it is odd that something that was laughed off the stage when it was at least barely possible, should return to the stage in triumph in the form of a stark, staring impossibility. It looks as if we should all have to go back to Miracle Plays — and possibly to miracles.

XXV On the One-Party System

THERE are certain notions for which I have long argued, incompetently but industriously, in many places and for many years, seeking to make them prevail. Now nearly all of them are enjoying a triumph; and I do not like their triumph. This does not mean, the refined reader will be grieved to hear, that I have changed my mind about them; or that I feel even the faintest doubt that they are true. It only means that I fear that the world will see more of the triumph than of the truth. While they were hardly ever expressed, it was easier for them to be explained; when it is assumed that everybody understands them, it often only means that there are a great many more people to misunderstand them. It also means, I cannot but grieve to discover what many grey-bearded patriarchs must have discovered before me, that there are many more people than I had imagined who can only understand one idea at a time.

Sometimes the whole point of the real complaint is lost. The reaction is the very reverse of the right action. For instance, I was once concerned in controversy, along with Mr. Belloc and my friends, and did what I could