MODERN TRAGEDY AT THE OLYMPIC.
IF Henry Dunbar is a success—and crowded houses, visible emotion in the boxes, dud loud applause everywhere, surely constitute a success—Mr. Taylor has done something more than merely "adapt" a novel to the stage. He has written, or at all events compiled, a modern tragedy which has succeeded—a feat which we should have pronounced beforehand nearly impossible. The playgoers of to-day who go to theatres like the Olympic detest tragedy as they detest novels which end badly. They are too conscious of the abiding misery which accompanies life under its best circumstances to wish for that " cruddle of the blood" which our ancestors so dearly loved, and which transpontine audiences still enjoy, and all the new tragedies they have seen are deficient in realism. Either the actors have talked bombast, or the actresses have screamed too much, or there has been too much visible "battle, murder, and sudden death" to admit of refined enjoyment. They are fretted at once by what seems to them an exhibition of pseudo-emotion, and by the sense of disappoint- -ment under which they compelled Mr. Dion Boucicault to re-edit the Octoroon. No tragedy has for years therefore been a success unless either supported by magnificent poetry, in which case the enjoyment is that either of the words or of criticism on their de- livery, or is exceedingly old, in which case people go because they used once on a time to enjoy it. This is a real loss to art, a virtual extinction of one of its most valuable domains, and if Mr. Taylor has recovered it, as we incline to believe he has, he will have performed a most essential service to modern literature.
Henry Dunbar as presented at the Olympic is essentially a tragedy.. True, nobody talks in blank verse, or rants with the author's consent, or stalks about in a black cloak, or shoots any- body with powder, or groans over the hardness of the skies, or does anything violently unlike what human beings are in the usual habit of doing. True, there are no long recitations made to the audience and not to the characters, no people in armour so badly fitted that it jingles—which armour, Mr. Nathan may rely on it, never did do—no turning down of the lights, none of that machinery of terror which people associate with tragedy, except indeed trembling music, which we suppose the gallery will not forego. But the play is in itself a tragedy ; the interest is tragic, the characters represent only fear and remorse, vengeance, horror, and despairing effort ; the denouement is tragic almost to pain. The cause of the play is a murder, the only impressive figures a man remorseful for that murder, and fearful of its dis- covery, and his daughter, first as avenger of the murder and then as protectress of the murderer, and the denouement is a death which only prevents an execution for crime. True, one or two love stories are supposed to be going on, but one of them has no connection with the drama, and serves only to indicate the mur- derer's natural kindliness of disposition, and in the other even a girl of eighteen could take no interest, though Miss Terry is its heroine. Spectators watch the love scenes in the latter case— there are but two—not out of interest in their termination as love scenes, but to see how far Margaret Wilmot (Miss Terry) will succeed in using her lover to hunt her enemy or save her father. Even the 4' Major," a comic scoundrel who practises chantage upon Henry Dunbar, and who is an unrefined Sir Charles Coldstream, and would be admirably represented by Mr. Vincent if he would only put a trace more watchfulness into his eyes, though he delights the gallery, delights them principally as part of the murderer's torment. There is no relief from the tragic element either in him, or in the love scenes, or even in the movements of the detective, though the latter amuses us with his professional view of temptation. The abiding sense of a great crime about to be greatly avenged never quits the audience. It is said that very recently a young lady in the bus; who had never read the novel, as Margaret recognized Wilma started straight up from her seat, crying out so that half the theatre could hear, " 0 God, it is her father!" but not even that young lady could have ventured to expect a pleasant termination to the drama. The audience saw from the first that it could only be tragical. The figures of the unhappy father and almost as unhappy daughter, Henry Dunbar, full of remorse yet compelled to go on with his deceit, laving his daughter and flying from her as if she had been the executioner, coldly able in the bank parlour, but at home existing only by the aid of brandy, a prey at once to conscience and to fear, and of the daughter, at first as her father's avenger, then as the girl who recognizes him in the same moment as alive and as a murderer, monopolize the stage, and keep the breath of the audi- ence suspended as nothing but genuine tragedy ever does. A pause in the action, in the slow advance of the doom which we see to be inevitable, and which is arrested only because the capital sentence of the law is anticipated by the capital sentence of Heaven, is felt as a relief. Henry Dunbar is a modern tragedy, in which people who suffer and who long, who are oppressed with fear or filled with hate, who have in fact violent cause for violent emotion, yet look and move and talk like the beings around us. Mr. Neville as Henry Dunbar sighs, it is true, as bankers never sigh except when they have eaten too much, but he presents us with a life-like portrait of a man overburdened with a conscience which he must nevertheless crush down, and one or two bursts of natural emo- tion, especially the passage in which the false Henry Dunbar finds himself accusing his real daughter and recoils from his own words, was given with most genuine seeming pathos. We missed, too, from Miss Terry's marvellous face in the crucial scene one expres- sion which should have been there. Surely the first feeling on recognizing her father should be the woman's delight that he is not dead, and then the daughter's horror at the crime which she sees can alone account for his appearance. Will she permit us to say, too, that no girl, even if half-mad with horror and the thirst for vengeance, would shout such a denunciation of the absent head of a bank in that bank's parlour to that bank's cashier, that a whisper or suppressed shout would be, if not more effective, at least more natural ? But with these exceptions, and the humorous absurdity of introducing the regular stage soubrette, Henry Dunbar is excellently acted, and is that long-sought desideratum, a modern tragedy. Nevertheless it succeeds, and why should it not succeed ? Half life is tragic to-day, as half of it was tragic in Shakespeare's time. We do not fight duels, but we do hate, and sometimes murder; we do not allow kings to sentence, but judges can draw tears as readily ; we do not much believe in Nemesis, but we do greatly in Detective A. The old passions, bate and jealousy and greed and ambition are as active as ever, envy is much more active, and though they express themselves more seldom in murder, they cub minate in it often enough to remove the faintest idea of impro- bability. If they were used as instruments, and the story worked out as melodramas are worked out, by men talking the dialect of to-day, and women attacking with bitter sarcasm instead of long-winded denunciation, and the accessories of Belgravia instead of the accessories of mediaeval life, the public, well weary as it is of fun repeated till it has ceased to be funny, of stale jokes and staler situations, and adultery as the eternal motive power, might still appreciate. It would be an experiment, we admit, but if Henry Dunbar is a success the result of the experiment is half assured.
We wonder if Mr. Taylor was himself quite conscious that he had prepared a tragedy. We suspect he imagined that the audience would be much more interested in Margaret's engage- ment, in the clearance of obstacles effected by her father's death, than they actually were, that he had hardly imagined the extent to which the gloom enveloping the two principal figures would dominate all lighter shades. Had this not been the case he would, we think, have lightened both those figures. Even murderers can- not sigh always, and some sense of the grand absurdity of his situa- tion, for instance when talking to his partners, must have struck Henry Dunbar. Miss Terry, too, would have had some chance of mingling some of the humour she exhibited in The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing with the stronger emotions, and the slight sense of strain in all the characters, so real, but in actual life usually so invisible, would have been wanting. We know no one with a better claim than Mr. Taylor to risk a daring experiment, •and give the public what it has not had for years—a tragedy in which interest shall depend On tragic emotion and situation, and not on poetry And elocution only. Why not act Paul Ferroll ?
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