Dramatic Opinions and Essays: With an Apology
by Bernard Shaw (9781143274503)

Dramatic Opinions and Essays: With an Apology (Book)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: acts by that sort of comic part which is almost as much a nuisance as a relief; but she played a little scene with Mr. Hare in the last act very cleverly, and was, it seemed to me, the only lady in the cast whose artistic sensitiveness had survived the case-hardening of professional routine. The stage-mounting and coloring were solidly and expensively Philistine, the dresses in the last act, and the style of domestic decoration in the first, epitomizing the whole history of plutocracy in England during the expiring century. TWO NEW PLAYS Guy Domville: a play in three acts. By Henry James. St. James's Theatre, 5 January, 1895. An Ideal Husband: a new and original play of modern life. By Oscar Wilde. Haymarket Theatre, 3 January, 1895. The truth about Mr. James's play is no worse than that it is out of fashion. Any dramatically disposed young gentleman who, cultivating sentiment on a little alcohol, and gaining an insight to the mysteries of the eternal feminine by a couple of squalid intrigues, meanwhile keeps well aloof from art and philosophy, and thus preserves his innocence of the higher life of the senses and of the intellect, can patch up a play to-morrow which will pass as real drama with the gentlemen who deny that distinction to the work of Mr. Henry James. No doubt, if the literary world were as completely dominated by the admirers of Mr. Rider Haggard as thedramatic world is by their first cousins, we should be told that Mr. James cannot write a novel. That is not criticism; it is a mere begging of the question. There is no reason why life as we find it in Mr. James's novels? life, that is, in which passion is subordinate to intellect and to fastidious artistic taste?should not be represented on the stage. If it is real to Mr. James, it must be real to others; ...

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