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After several weeks devoted to the productions of former seasons, the Olympic put forth an entirely new programme on Monday last. Mrs. Inchttald's comedy Wives as they Were and Maids as they Are was re- vived, and was followed by a new farce called Jones the Avenger.
The comedy, now nearly sixty years old, is no bad specimen of the more serious dramatic tendency at the time of its original production. The brilliant deliberate rakes, who had talked so wittily and deported themselves so viciously at the commencement of the eighteenth century, had ceased to rule the stage as objects of admiration; and, though a heartless man of fashion commonly held a place among the dramatis per- some, he served as a butt for the ridicule of well-regulated minds. A re- action against the artificial both in life and in literature was everywhere manifest ; and while the "Emile" of Rousseau was a book in vogue, as setting forth sounder principles of education than those followed at schools and universities, the writers for the stage were anxious to teach their au- dieaces that there was a higher rule of morality than the code of fashion maintained by the aristocracy and their imitators, and that an instinctive knowledge of this rule was frequently found among the least refined spe- cimens of humanity. As a Jeremy Collier attacked the wits of the Con- grove school for general profligacy and impiety, a divine of slaty years since might have assailed his dramatic contemporaries by charging them with a thorough disbelief in the doctrine of original sin. Man was evi- dently good by nature ; and if he tried to become no higher than a very small farmer, he would descend to his grave a perfect being. If he at- tained a large fortune, there was still a chance for him, provided he made up his mind to be a stem censor of the usages of the world around him ; but if he ever became fashionable, he was indeed on the brink of a preci- pice. Fashion was the Ahriman in a system of which Nature was the Ormuzd ; and it was hard to conjecture how a being naturally so perfect as man could have produced such an abominable set of rules for the go- vernment of high life. Decidedly, St. Augustine would have preferred Wycherly to the more moral dramatists of the waning eighteenth cen- tury.
Wives as they Were and Maids as they Are is an essentially genteel comedy; and therefore we do not find in it any of those virtuous rustics whose intrinsic goodness was manifest even in their flowered unfashion- able waistcoats. But we see the staff broken over fashion with the most solemn reprobation, and hear the belief in native goodness most sedu- lously inculcated. Miss Dorillon, the heroine of the tale, looks at the fust glance a mere specimen of heartless frivolity ; but so noble and dis- interested is her nature, that she would rather perish in a prison than allow her father to suffer poverty ; and she adopts this resolution under the most extreme circumstances, for her father she has never seen, to her knowledge, and she is already in a spunging-house. What a perfect creature would Miss Dorillon have been, if she had remained unfashion- able; and what a sublime contempt do we feel for her sparkling friend Lady Mary Raffle, who is fashionable only ! A dramatic picture of Mrs. Inchbald's time would not do without seine high lights ; and therefore, as we are denied the unsophisticated ploughboy, we are presented with a certain Lady Priory, who, although S nobleman's wife, obeys implicitly the laws laid down by her im- perious husband, in direct contravention to every precept of the &- mon fashion. What particular age of the world Mrs. Inehbald had in view when she made passive obedience the characteristic of "Wives as they Were," we cannot precisely say. Lord Priory once, if we mistake not, alludes to the Spartans as models of perfection : but the Spartans, severe in many respects, were lax in their notions of the marriage tie, and their matrimonial laws did not favour matrimonial fidelity so much ts increase of population. Of Athenian matrons we have rather for- tlidable specimens in the wife of Strepsiades as described in the Clouds Of Aristophanes, and the Nausistrata, who has been handed down to us through the medium of Terence. From Juvenal' s report of Roman man- Otis, 'we may gather that he did not believe a virtuous woman uad existed since the days When acorns were the accepted food of the
human race. The imperious dames of the middle ages were surely inclined rather to exact than to pay obedience. When, therefore, was Lady Priory a type of the female position ? At no time whatever ; but she was the result of a belief in a past golden age, that was prevalent at the time when the comedy was written. Man was, of course, older hart fashion, and fashion was the origin of evil ; hence there was P tinle of absolute perfection, of which Lord Priory happily preserved the un- written tradition.
The comedy, as we have already said, is no bad specimen of its class. There is, indeed, the same deficiency of the via comica that we find in the plays of Terence ; and to obtain a little extra "fun," the authoress is obliged now and then to put her wise characters in a ridiculous position : but, on the other hand, she avoids the extravagance of the Reynolds school, in which similar moral doctrues were couched in claptrap lines, and the drollery by which the instruction was relieved overflowed all bounds of possibility. Wives as they Were and Maids as they Are is at any rate a literary work worthy of the authoress of Nature and Art. The doc- trine it inculcates is steadily carried out ; the story is interesting ; and the dialogue is free from trick. Mrs. Stirling and Iffiest Herbert, as the two representatives of fashionable life, and Miss Swanborough as the relic of the virtuous past, make the piece agreeable enough at the Olympic Theatre ; and though some of the other parts are not so well filled as they would have been in theatres "as they were —(our past is not so indefinite as Mrs. Inchbald's)—the manager is to be commended for the revival.
The new farce, which is a translation of a vaudeville by MM. Varin and Marc Michel, entitled le Massacre d'un Innocent, has been severely censured by some contemporary critics. Why ? The notion of a man bound by a vow to slaughter another, and being stricken with remorse when he thinks the deed is perpetrated, is certainly extravagant ; but ex- travagance is no fault in a short farce, provided an attention to the laws of cause and effect keep the story within the limits of possibility. Again, an inchoate murderer is somewhat of a tragic hero to become a focus for " fun " : but then, Mr. Robson's talent is of that peculiar kind, that it is most displayed on that border territory which marks the junction of the tragic and the ridiculous. In no regular farce character (we set aside burlesques) has Mr. Robson been more advantageously exhibited than in Jones the Avenger.
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