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and yet

Suffered to sit here waiting his approach While you were slaying him? Oh, doubtlessly

You let him speak his poor confused boy's-speech

-Do his poor utmost to disarm your wrath

And respite me!-you let him try to give
The story of our love and ignorance,
And the brief madness and the long de-
spair-

You let him plead all this, because your code

Of honor bids you hear before you strike: But at the end, as he looked up for life Into your eyes-you struck him down! Tres. No! No!

Had I but heard him-had I let him speak

Half the truth-less-had I looked long on him

I had desisted! Why, as he lay there, The moon on his flushed cheek, I gathered all

The story ere he told it: I saw through The troubled surface of his crime and yours

A depth of purity immovable.

Had I but glanced, where all seemed turbidest

Had gleamed some inlet to the calm be

neath;

I would not glance: my punishment's at hand.

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Guen.

Oh, better far than that!

She's dead!

She threw them thus

Let me unlock her arms!

Tres.

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OSCAR WILDE

LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), like so many writers of comedy during the last two centuries, was born in Ireland, the son of wellknown and brilliant, but somewhat ill-balanced, parents. During the years 1874-8 he made his mark in scholarship and literary work at Oxford; and in the latter year began a career of artistic pose, social conspicuousness, and literary success in London. Besides his plays he wrote poems, novels, essays, and lectures; his first light comedy, the present one, came out with great success in 1892. He died in obscurity.

Wilde was a chief exponent of the socalled esthetic movement among certain clever young men in the eighties and nineties. It began under the influence of such men as Ruskin, William Morris, and Pater; but while their love of beauty broadened and deepened into something more manful and humane, high artistic creation and work toward social betterment, Wilde's was too shallow and unstable a nature to drive him to any more solid achievement than polished literary form and superficial brilliance. His plays are his best work, and are interesting for two reasons. They are admirable so far as they go, and indicate and helped on an important change in dramatic style.

Lady Windermere's Fan is a comedy of manners, brilliantly constructed and written, with much clever satire on social vapidity, some insight into human nature, and some appearance of depth, sympathy, and earnestness. When it first appeared, the influence on it of such earlier dramatists as Congreve and Sheridan was remarked at once, and also (less obvious to the general reader) that of nineteenth-century French comedy. The sparkling dialogue is what especially recalls Sheridan and Congreve. Airy unexpectedness and paradox are even more essential in Wilde, especially that which consists in contradicting or inverting a proverbial saying or a social commonplace" the youth of the present have absolutely no respect for dyed hair," "he has one of these weak natures that are not susceptible to influence (An Ideal Husband), I can resist anything except temptation." Some of his agile twists passed from Wilde's plays into the common talk. Further, no one can fail to be reminded of the screen-scene in The School for Scandal by the third act in Lady Windermere's Fan, where Mrs. Erlynne and Lady

Windermere are concealed in Lord Darlington's rooms. It cannot be said that in dramatic effectiveness Wilde has fallen behind his master. The situation is as probable, the final sensation as well led up to, the complication is greater yet as clear, the emotional state of things is more intricate and more serious the conventionally good woman shows her real flimsy character, and the bad woman rises to the sort of self-sacrifice which meant most heroism for her. The scene is masterly. It is admirably planned, from the extraordinary meeting of the two women, and Dumby's unconscious dramatic irony ("The lively part of the evening is only just beginning"), to the device by which Lady Windermere escapes. The fine feeling which the scene shows is rare in Wilde, whose moral tone is not greatly different from Congreve's, and embodies that of the class of social life which he constantly satirizes, but really respected and chose to identify himself with. One feels dissatisfaction with the ending that Lady Windermere's folly should be huddled up from her husband, so that, instead of facing it down, she may forget it, precisely as any worldly and superficial woman in the audience would have done. The decent and satisfying ending Wilde probably rejected as too "obvious." This last scene has the emotional complexity mentioned earlier, husband and wife each knowing something essential to the situation unknown to the other, and all the threads centering in Mrs. Erlynne's hand. Again she stands on a dramatic pedestal. She is the sort of person in portraying whom Wilde shows most insight and depth; the people in whom he is most fond of showing possibilities of goodness and sacrifice are women "with a past and languid dandies. He makes a specialty of the heroism that may lurk behind the rouged or expressionless face, and in this he has been followed by many a later playwright for nothing makes less demand from the moral feelings of the superficial, or excites more the genial mood of charity which is one of the pleasantest products of a dramatic performance.

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In dramatic history, Wilde and his first comedy mark the rise of a realistic prose drama of genuine literary worth. It was a reaction against the literary mediocrity, the sentimentality, the somewhat narrow conventionalism, the moral primness, which are

sometimes associated with the middle part of the reign of Queen Victoria. In Wilde, and more or less in his like, we find in contrast a fine literary finish, more or less reality, cynicism or an affectation of it, and an inclination to treat the relations of the sexes as freely as modern decorum will allow Dramatic writing refused longer to be bound, it claimed more truth and more art. Much of this is true of the entire prose drama which was the form characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century. Without implying that they were chiefly influenced by Wilde, and without ignoring new influences, like that of Ibsen, we find much the same literary finish, the same or more freedom, the same interest in the relations of the sexes and in the woman with a past," with much more insight and moral earnestness in their treatment, in the "problem plays" of such men as Sir Arthur W. Pinero and Mr. H. A. Jones.

66

Since the present collection stops at the verge of the contemporary drama, it can do no more than barely mention such new tendencies as those toward plays on living social problems and issues, and toward a vitalized poetic drama. The former style has been most able and revolutionary, though not most agreeable, with Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Poetic drama in America has been most worthy and significant in the hands of Mr. Percy MacKaye and Mrs. Josephine Peabody Marks; in the British Isles (besides the rather weak plays of the late Stephen Phillips) with a school of Irish dramatists; a most original form of imaginative drama (not always in verse) has developed in 1reland, in the plays of Mr. W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the late J. M. Synge, as a part of the wonderful renascence of Irish national spirit which was one of the most remarkable spectacles in the first decade of the twentieth century.

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Lady W. How do you do, Lord Darlington? No, I can't shake hands with you. My hands are all wet with these roses. Are n't they lovely? They came up from Selby this morning.

Lord D. They are quite perfect. (Sees a fan lying on the table.) And what a wonderful fan! May I look at it? Lady W. Do. Pretty, is n't it!

It's got my name on it, and everything. I have only just seen it myself. It's my husband's birthday present to me. You know to-day is my birthday? Lord D. No? Is it really? Lady W. Yes; I'm of age to-day. Quite an important day in my life, is n't it? That is why I am giving this party tonight. Do sit down.

(Still arranging flowers.) Lord D. (Sitting down.) I wish I had known it was your birthday, Lady Windermere. I would have covered the whole street in front of your house with flowers for you to walk on. They are made for you.

(A short pause.)

Lady W. Lord Darlington, you annoyed me last night at the Foreign Office. I am afraid you are going to annoy me again.

Lord D. I, Lady Windermere?

(Enter Parker and Footman c. with tray and tea-things.)

Lady W. Put it there, Parker. That will do. (Wipes her hands with her pockethandkerchief, goes to tea-table 1. and sits down.) Won't you come over, Lord Darlington?

(Exit Parker c.) Lord D. (Takes chair and goes across 1. c.) I am quite miserable, Lady Windermere. You must tell me what I did.

(Sits down at table l.)

Lady W. Well, you kept paying me elaborate compliments the whole evening. Lord D. (Smiling.) Ah, now-a-days we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They 're the only thing we can pay. Lady W. (Shaking her head.) No, I am talking very seriously. You must n't laugh, I am quite serious. I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he does n't mean. Lord D. Ah, but I did mean them.

woman

(Takes tea which she offers him.)

Lady W. (Gravely.) I hope not. I should be sorry to have to quarrel with you, Lord Darlington. I like you very much, you know that. But I shouldn't like you at all if I thought you were what most other men are. Believe me, you are better than most other men, and I sometimes think you pretend to be

worse.

Lord D. We all have our little vanities, Lady Windermere.

Lady W. Why do you make that your special one?

(Still seated at table l.)

Lord D. (Still seated 1. c.) Oh, nowa-days so many conceited people go about Society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad. Besides, there is this to be said. If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it does n't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

Lady W. Don't you want the world to take you seriously then, Lord Darlington?

Lord D. No, not the world. Who are the people the world takes seriously? All the dull people one can think of, from the Bishops down to the bores. I should like you to take me very seriously, Lady Windermere, you more than any one else in life.

Lady W. Why-why me?
Lord D. (After a slight hesitation.) Be-
cause I think we might be great friends.
Let us be great friends. You may want

a friend some day.
Lady W.
Lord D.

times.

Why do you say that?
Oh!-we all want friends at

Lady W. I think we're very good friends already, Lord Darlington. We can always remain so as long as you don'tLord D. Don't what? Lady W. Don't spoil it by saying extravagant, silly things to me. You think I am a Puritan, I suppose? Well, I have something of the Puritan in me. I was brought up like that. I am glad of it. My mother died when I was a mere child. I lived always with Lady Julia, my father's eldest sister, you know. She was stern to me, but she taught me, what the world is forgetting, the difference that there is between what is right and what is wrong. She allowed of no compromise. I allow of none.

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