W. G. WILLS, PAINTER AND DRAMATIST.•

THE first feeling which will occur to every reader interested. in poetry, after making full acquaintance with this fantastic and singular volume of biography, will be one of deep' regret that Mr. Wills's last tragedy, King Arthur, was not produced upon the stage; and that owing to the rules of pur- chase and copyright, it will never, as far as we can see, be acted or published either. It was bought by Sir Henry

Irving for the Lyceum, but set aside after Wills's death in• favour of another version of the same legend, differing from it very widely indeed both in treatment and in scope. The poet's brother and biographer " fortunately succeeded in winnowing the loose pages of his brother's drama from masses of old papers, and was rewarded by successfully putting together the whole play, written in his minute pencil-.

ling." Looseness of construction and a certain lack of humour were Wills's principal defects as a dramatist. But

the latter fault would not seriously injure a subject like King Arthur any more than Charles the First, and to remedy the

former Sir Henry Irving has shown himself more capable than any man of his day. What he did for Beckett he ought certainly to have done for Arthur, and if any additional lines or scenes were required, there are not wanting men who could have supplied them without asking credit to themselves. "King Arthur," associated as it is with the Idylls of Tennyson, is a very difficult theme to treat for the stage, to whose demands chivalry has never lent itself since Cervantes laughed it away. Twice only in all his plays does Shakespeare allude to Arthur

at all,—once when Dame Quickly speaks of Falstaff as having gone to King Arthur's bosom, and again when the fool in Lear says characteristically in one of his quips : "This prophecy shall Merlin make ; for I live before his time." But

Wills faced the difficulty and solved it ; for from the sketch given of his plot it must have been very effective, and the writing is as beautiful as it is strong. It shows distinct advance in his art, and is moreover commendably free from another of his weaknesses,—abuse of the irregular line,. which is a tower of strength only when not abused. The

dramatist's ear was not always correct when he employed the method; and in the specimen given from Eugene Aram the effect is simply discordant. The verse in his King, Arthur sails statelily along, and the farewell to Guinevere,.

differently as it is treated for the purpose of the play, may be read without shrinking by the side of Tennyson's most famous passage :—

" No more for me shall love of ladye fair Rouse to the battle and the flash of swords. The songs of minstrels, uninformed by love, Which are the history of chivalry, All dead to me ! and thou hast left me only A sickening at the flushing of the morn, Despair to see the loveless shut of day. Oh! to bring back the hour of thy first welcome But since I cannot—since there is no pardon— Would I could lay upon my riven heart The pain that is laid up in store for thee. Never in hall or bower, in weal or woe, On any pleasant path beneath the sun, Queen Gaenever, can I.e'er meet thee more."

And take this passage from a speech:of Merlin's, freed from the tree in which a spell had bound him :-

" Of an old oak I was the living pith,

As close as toad in rock tombed in its trunk By a most potent spell she learned of me. I heard the blind mole stirring 'neath its roots, The owl hoot by, the everlasting song

Of minstrel birds that sometimes paused to listen, Scared by my groans. I had no night nor day. The wind unkempt in tresses of the rain Would rush upon my gnarled and leafy prison, And wrestle with big branches breast to breast, To free me from my coil, but all in vain."

But apart altogether from poetry and from quotation, Mr. Wills's design in his treatment of the famous legend ig

forcible, dramatic, and new. He has avoided altogether, if from the selection given us by his editor we may judge, the danger which on the surface seemed to us unavoidable, of making of King Arthur himself an unsympathetic, if not something of a ridiculous, figure. The deceived husband is an old and unattractive type who never secures much meed of appreciation, and even in Tennyson'e famous idyll he is more of a connecting link than anything else, nowhere com-

• W. G. Will,. Dramatist and Painter, By Freeman Wills. London: Lang- mans and Co. [10 . Gd.] manding much of our sympathies, except in the one famous speech. Sir Walter Scott, with his marvellous instinct, came nearer the mark in the " Bridal of Triermain" when he made of Arthur only another example of human weak- ness and susceptibility. Wills's King Arthur is stately, stirring, new, and we highly commend his brother's account of the play to all who are interested in such reading. It will be too bad if the fact that Sir ,Henry Irving purchased it, and set it aside for another and an unattractive version not likely to be revived, should prevent it from being added to our scanty list of acting plays of the kind. It should be exactly suitable to Mr. Forbes-Robertson. The rest of the book before us, from its dramatic side, is less attractive than the part which deals with Arthur. Wills was author or part-author of a great many plays, but only Charles the First and Olivia gained any very conspicuous measure of success; and all the partiality of a brother cannot make us quite forget Goldsmith's not unim- portant share in the latter work. Indeed, we could never avoid a sense of annoyance at finding a version of " Goldie's " famous story made so conspicuous by a distinct lack of that humour which was the earlier Irishman's greatest characteristic. It is a pity that those were days before the idea of dramatising his own work occurred to the dramatist. What an incom- parable comedy the author of She Stoops to Conquer would have made out of the Vicar of Wakefield ! Wills himself never was troubled with such considerations. Like Shake- speare, he took the subjects given him, and made playa out of them without ado. That was his business, and he accepted it as it came. He disliked the theatre ; and once wanted to give a shilling to a doorkeeper for refusing him admittance on the free-list when a friend wanted to make him go. He rewrote Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield for him. He introduced the last act of the eminently nautical clap-trap of Black-Eyed Susan by two senti- mental acts of his own, which fitted about as well as the horse's neck on the human head. He provided a new and popular version of the much-abused Faust, on the lines of the old opera and melodrama turned into blank verse, without any deference at all to Goethe's Spirit of Negation. Again, he would write as many scenes as his manager wanted, and rewrite them as often and cut them out as serenely as opportunity required. It has been fabled, indeed, that one of his many secretaries used to tack together sheets of discarded blank-verse lying broadcast over the studio, and construct poetical dramas out of them.

That historical studio was the true centre of Wills's singular life,—a life so absolutely illustrative of the very wildest side of that Bohemia which has faded so completely into the past, crushed out of existence by the Court Circulars and the Fashion Books, as to make the book about the most original and entertaining reading that we have met with for this many a day. As a pure piece of biography, apart altogether from its criticisms and comments, it adds a new item to the list of biography's lovers, so entirely unlike all the others as to demand quite a new niche for itself. The stage was Wills's field of success; oil-painting the field of his ambition. "Madam," he said to a lady who complimented him on one of his successes, " I am only a poor painter who writes plays for bread." And to the last he retained his oil-painter's ambition, though it was only in pastels that he achieved any success on the canvas. And for his plays he cared as little as, in the present writer's belief, Shakespeare did (the Shakespeare whose head his own so curiously resembles), wanting only to get his cheque and to depart, and, above all, not to be called upon to interfere at the rehearsals. He wrote them anywhere and anyhow, on any scraps of paper that turned up, mainly in bed, because of the mess his studio was always kept in; sometimes in a hot-bath a few doors off, because he was not likely to be disturbed there. And if he was disturbed it did not matter, as it was currently believed that he could paint a picture and dictate two plays at the same time. Dr. Johnson himself could not have made a more general home for the needy than Wills did, except that Dr. Johnson wanted his inmates to be worthy subjects, and that Wills did not care whether they were or not. The stories told in the book of the amazing persons who preyed upon him, and the scenes of inconceivable comedy of which the studio was the scene, follow each other with bewildering rapidity,

Absence of mind he carried to an extent which was his own, inherited and improved upon. If his father was found with an egg in his hand, standing before a saucepan and boiling his watch, Wills arrived from a Continental tour with the one hand-bag which was all he ever took, buying and leaving shirts as he went, with the pockets of his long ulster, worn in all weathers, fall of the keys of the various rooms he had occupied,—it having been his habit to put them there for security, and forget them. Lavish of money when he had it, he hated parting with it in any formal way ; and when a friend to whom he owed £5 took advantage of his having j net got a round cheque for a play, to ask for pay- ment, he declined on account of " the claims " upon him. But the friend knew him, came back again a few hours later, and asked him for £5 to help him out of a difficulty. "Cer- tainly, my boy," said Wills, entirely forgetting what had gone before. "Take what you want." And he offered him a handful of sovereigns. After that we may forgive his biographer for fathering upon Wills the very old story of his accepting a friend's oral invitation to dinner, on being re- minded that he had just broken his last promise to dine with him, and then asking a companion what the man's name was. We remember that story told of Sheridan Knowles, dramatist and Irishman likewise; and we doubt not of other Celts before that. But there is no reason why the occurrence should not have repeated itself. We will not detain the reader any longer from the feast of good fun that he may make for himself out of these chapters ; but cannot resist mentioning the deliciously characteristic adventure which is really the climax of the book. The Queen wanted Willa to execute some pastel drawings of the Royal children, and sent for him to Osborne. So far from appreciating the honour, Wills only felt his utter incompetence for dealing properly with the situation, and simply answered that he was engaged. In fearful trepidation, a courtier-friend came to look for him, but he had gone out for a walk. On his return he was met by another telegram of command, and only complied when he found that he really must. He carried out the duty in the same simple spirit, and shocked a lady-in-waiting by addressing a Royal baby on all fours with " Look up, little one,"—instead of "Your Royal Highness." But it is pleasant to learn that the Queen and the Princess Louise, who was his especial ally, were courtesy and kindness itself with the embarrassed painter. For some of the Court officials was reserved the rudeness which only such exalted creatures know. As a painter Wills made no great mark; and his position as a dramatist time must show. But his brother's affectionate interest and solicitude, if they lead him perhaps into too much discussion of work like Olivia and Faust—avowed affairs of stage-craft to the author's own mind—lend an additional attraction to this attractive and original biography.