Am I guilty of an odious comparison when I
say that in my opinion Mr, A. W. Pinero is the
most original and remarkable of living English
playwrights, with a possible exception in favour
of Mr. Gilbert ? Other writers have done ad-
mirable things which Mr. Pinero has not
attempted, and very likely could not do ; but
neither Mr. Grundy, Mr. Jones, Mr. Sims, nor



V Google



ARE WE ADVAA'CLya.'

Mr. Merivale has the pecuhar gift of inventive
humour and turn for elaborate (if not always
successful) characterization which have led to
Mr. Pinero's successes — and his failures. For ''
even his failures, which have been neither few
nor far between, are to be attributed in great
measure to a strong originality getting the bit
between its teeth and galloping off into perver-
sity. Of " Girls and Boys " (at Toole's), " The
Rector " (at the Court) and " Low Water " (at
the Globe), I shall say little. "The Rector"
was a melancholy, " Low Water" an un-
speakably comic, fiasco ; yet both were better
worth seeing than half the successes of the
day. The precise causes of their failure I can-
not pretend to determine, after merely seeing
them once on the stage. They are plays which
the student would like to read and analyze in
order to learn why such remarkable pieces of
work proved so utterly impracticable in the
theatre. Speaking from memory, I am inclined
to attribute the failure of "The Rector" mainly
to a curious obliquity of moral judgment, which
deprived the hero of all sympathy precisely in
the crucial scenes of the play. In " Low
Water" the faults were chiefly technical — a
jumbling of farce and drama not only in the
same play, but absolutely in the same scenes.
