Whenever a foolish joke was made on the stage, when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell, the orange girl, stuttered with laughter or romped heavily across the stage, the pit thrilled and quivered with delight.  At every piece of clowning there was the same responsive gurgle of delight.  Tricks of acting so badly done that I should have thought a child would have seen through them, and resented them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect good faith, and gloated over.  I was turning over the matter in my mind afterwards, when I remembered something that was said to me the other day by a young Swedish poet who is now in London.  He told me that he had been to most of the theatres, and he had been surprised to find that the greater part of the pieces which were played at the principal London theatres were such pieces as would be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower class theatres, and that nobody here seemed to mind.  The English audience, he said, reminded him of a lot of children; they took what was set before them with ingenuous good temper, they laughed when they were expected to laugh, cried when they were expected to cry.  But of criticism, preference, selection, not a trace.  He was amazed, for he had been told that London was the centre of civilisation.  Well, in future I shall try to remember, when I hear an audience clapping its hands wildly over some bad play, badly acted:  it is all right, it is only the children.

THE TEST OF THE ACTOR

The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the capability of the actor.  To what extent, however, can an actor really carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such a play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in “The Princess’s Nose”?  Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a complimentary preface, has said:  “The claim of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’s more ambitious plays to rank as literature may have been in some cases grudgingly allowed, but has not been seriously contested.”  Mr. Jones himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to give some representation of it in his plays.  That is apparently what he means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the Nineteenth Century:  “O human life! so varied, so vast, so complex, so rich and subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim of silver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell of insight, who of us can govern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages to any utterance of harmony, or pluck out the heart of thy eternal mystery?” Does Mr. Jones, I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any “soft proclaim of silver flutes,” or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates, in “The Princess’s Nose”?  Does anyone “seriously contest” its right not to “rank as Literature”?  The audience, for once, was unanimous.  Mr. Jones was not encouraged to appear.  And yet there had been applause, prolonged applause, at many points throughout this bewildering evening.  The applause was meant for the actors.