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To reduce a good novel into a good play is, as Mr. Boucicault's success with _Effie Deans shows, a perfectly practicable task ; but to attain a similar result with a novel which consists of a penny- journal plot, spun out through three volumes, constantly inter- rupted by patchwork illustrative digressions, in imitation of Thackeray, and disfigured by the endless blunders which a woman, ostentatiously affecting to be conversant with the general tone and all the details of the army, commercial, country-house, racecourse, and public-house life of men, must make, is simply impossible. To those, too, who have not been carried away by this sudden cropping up of penny literature in the thirty-one and sixpenny session, the fact that the adaptation of Aurora Floyd, produced at the Princess's Theatre on Wednesday last, was under the express sanction of the authoress, scarcely gave it any very great addi- tional attraction over that to be produced at another theatre next week. Given the aforesaid penny-journal plot, and the denoue- ment in the style of " Watirs," of Aurora Floyd, and it is a great question whether it is not desirable that its dramatic fozm should resemble the general tone of the novel just as little as possible, if anything like an effective play is to result. Putting this wide, however, there are inherent and insuperable difficulties in dramatizing Aurora Floyd which rendered the perfect failure of the version at the Princess's no less a certainty beforehand than it is now a fact. The story of Miss Braddon's novel, as everybody knows, is that of the daughter of a banking Crcesus who runs away from school to marry a handsome scoundrel of a groom. She soon discovers that he is unfaithful to her, returns home, tells her father he is dead, and meets his demands for money by threats of obtaining a divorce at the cost of her own exposure. Soon after she hears of his death, and after a brief engagement with a perfect lusus naturte of an aristocratic hussar officer, with a taste for the severe sciences, broken off by him on a partial suspicion of her secret, she marries a noisy, stupid, sporting York-
shire squire, who takes her unexplained secret and all. Her first husband, however, turns up as trainer to the squire, and her connection with him comes to the knowledge of a malignant lady "companion," and an idiot—a " Softy" stableman, whom she had once impulsively horsewhipped. She agrees with the trainer to leave the kingdom for a sum of money ; is seen with him in the park late at night ; a shot is heard ten minutes after, and the trainer is found dead close to the spot where they were seen to- gether. Of course suspicion fastens upon her, and the clearing away of the strong circumstantial evidence against her, and bring- ing home the crime by a clever piece of detectivism to the "Softy," who had committed it for the sake of the money he had seen the trainer receive, and who revenges himself on Aurora by producing her certificate of marriage found on the body of the trainer, form, perhaps, the best part of the book. In conclusion, she and her husband are re-married, and the "Softy" hanged.
Now this makes a fair enough plot in its style, such as that style is, but it is scarcely enough to account for the celebrity attained by the novel, and the literary style of the work is even less calcu- lated to do so. The fact is, that throughout the first half of the story there is a constant and pervading reference to some great mystery, and at the same time such a carefully studied absence of any possible clue to the real character of those concerned in that mystery, as to keep up the curiosity of the reader to a far greater pitch than many a novel with a far better, more complicated, and really artistic plot ; and as the excitement of curiosity seems to be the one qualification desired by a great class of novel readers in the present day, Aurora Floyd has met with a success scarcely to be accounted for on any other theory. But this very ground of success as a novel is absolutely fatal to it as a play. Positively, all one knows of Aurora in the first half of the novel is that she has thickly plaited jet-black hair, splendid eyes, a low forehead, and that she is somehow mysteriously in communication with the dregs of society, while her father, though a participator in the mystery, is a perfect nonentity. Unless, then, an actress possesses these physical characteristics of the Aurora of the novel, it is simply impossible for her to represent her on the stage— any acting whatever would give a clue to her character, and, therefore, to the mystery, which is precisely the object avoided in the novel. There only then remains the development of the story after the secret becomes known to the audience ; and as this is done in the novel by a long series of smell and consecutive steps, similar treatment on the stage would have necessitated half the time being taken up in scene-shifting. Incidents, accordingly, are so compressed that the action becomes nearly unintelligible to those who have not read the novel, while the absence of room for delinea- tion of character renders it wearisome to those who have. Of this compressionof scenes one instance will suffice. Bulstrode, the hussar, offers to Aurora, and is refused. She changes the subject, goes on talking, takes up a copy of Bell's Life—the exaggerated dirtiness of which sends the gallery into screams of laughter—reads of the death of her husband, turns round and accepts the hussar all within less than five minutes. Again, as the only touch of humour in the book is a description, in Dickens's worst style, of a man under strong excitement, showing it by "spreading mustard on his muffins," and so on, there is a desperate effort in the play to remedy this by diverting a low dog-fancier into a feeble kind of imitation of Mr. Robson's humorous tinker in Camilbes Husband. With regard to the acting, the disadvantages I have mentioned quite excuse Miss Amy Sedgewick's praiseworthy attempt from criticism. Mr. Herman Vezin could not even attempt the Yorkshire squire, with his loud laugh, broad shoulders, big whiskers, and the other phy- sical characteristics without which no acting would be of avail, so wisely confined himself to being as gentlemanly and accomplished in all the general qualifications of an actor as he always is. Mr. Wallace might have attempted the character of the rigid, proud, and coldly aristocratic hussar, but did not. The one thing that saved the piece from condemnation, and would have saved a worse, was Mr. Belmore's excessively clever acting as the" Softy," stunned by a fall into idiocy, white-faced, low-voiced, sullenly malignant, and avari- cious. The audience, who either understood nothing whatever of the piece, or were bored with it, according as they had or had not read the novel, combined in calling loudly for Mr. Belmore at the con- clusion. His personification was both faithful to the only attempt at a character in the novel, and quite intelligible in itself.
Nothing of any musical importance has occurred during the week, except a Philharmonic concert of the usual character. I see in the Gazette Musicale that the Lily of Killarney is being per- formed, or rehearsed, at Berlin, Brunswick, Stutgard, Hamburg,
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