Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern
make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject
was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and
theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;
what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little
peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the
peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of
shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its
whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and
love, who makes war angelically.
Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than
Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was
in Flower." Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage.
Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production,
which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York,
one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's
fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
practitioners in the same art of sinking.
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