Cast of Characters

Madame Sand

I am so grateful to Mr. Moeller for his cleverness, his good taste, and his knowledge of literature, that I am chary of criticising his play, for fear it should be thought that I did not like it. But criticise one must—criticise, like the father when he spanks his son, for the play's own good. So here goes.

The principal, the only serious, defect of "Madame Sand," is that it is too long by fully an hour. there were longueurs, there were repetitions; the situations were stretched to breaking point. this congenital weakness the actors increased, especially in the first act, by taking the piece with a funereal slowness. But a first night is always experimental, and it is to be hoped that in the future the pace will be quickened and the play itself ruthlessly cut. Scraped of its hampering barnacles, and of its top-heaviness, "Madame Sand" should be able to affront a long voyage a light and elegant little ship. Left as it is, it will as likely as not turn turtle and sink at once.

"Madame Sand" is a satire in dramatic form a satire on the great George herself, and a satire on romanticism in general. It is not difficult to satirise George Sand; indeed, she is probably the most easily satirisable figure in history. The thing has been done to absolute perfection in Charles Maurras's brilliant study of the George-Alfred episode, "Les Amants de Venise," a book from which, we imagine, Mr. Moeller must have derived the principal inspiration of his play. George, with that unappeasable maternal instinct of hers, that infinite capacity for indiscriminate passion, that sensibility mingled with coarseness, that fantastically grotesque romanticism, George is her own caricature. The satirist does not have to brighten the colours; he actually finds himself toning them down. The conversation of George and Aflred, in the first act, may seem a little high-flown, but it is nothing to the language of their published letters. George's explanations of her infidelities as Higher Duties, directly inspired from above, were even more amazing in real life than they are in the play.

Mr. Moeller has chosen as his theme the unlucky story of George and Alfred de Musset. We are shown in the first act George's rooms in the Quartier Latin. She is giving a farewell supper—farewell to whom is still a little uncertain; it may be farewell (eternally) to Alfred, or it may be farewell to Paris, while she goes off with him to Italy. By the end of the act it is the latter. George has persuaded Mme. de Musset to let her son go with her (this is a scene which deserved more length, at the expense of the rest of the act, than it got); Buloz of the Revue and Heine are bidden farewell, and the happy pair are off to an Italy, where it is always moonlight and the nightingales perpetually sing.

Act Two shows us George and Alfred's apartment in Venice. Alfred is ill in bed—delirium tremens complicated by sunstroke, a touch of malaria, and the fatigue of frequent debauches. George has heroically nursed him for nearly twenty sleepless nights; the fact that he is alive at all is entirely due to her maternal devotion. But her devotion to Alfred has not prevented her from noticing the appearance of the young, handsome, and ox-like Venetian doctor, Giuseppe Pagello. ... Honest Pagello had no chance. Farewell Alfred! And Alfred, who had watched the whole scene between the curtains of his bed, becomes a little bitter and cynical. (In real life his bitterness and cynicism did not begin till much later. For months after the Pagello incident he wrote her passionate love letters, and for a little while, in Paris, they met as lovers once more. His chronic hysteria again made a joint existence impossible, and the candle of passion finally guttered out with a great deal of evil-smelling smoke. Mr. Moeller has chosen, for his own dramatic purposes, to make the rupture between George and Alfred complete as soon as Pagello appears on the scenes.)

In the last act Pagello is got rid of. He has been brought to Paris, where his naturally bovine qualities are thrown into strong relief by the intelligence of George's friends. George, unable to bear him any longer, sends for his old mistress from Castel Franco to come and carry him away. Which she does, leaving George free to look elsewhere. "The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat form God, and He giveth it them in due season." It is at this moment that Chopin enters providentially upon the scene. The curtain falls on their elopement to an island in the Mediterranean. "How long this time?" Buloz asks Heine. And a romantic young lady who picks up George's farewell not e exclaims in rapture, "How beautiful!"

Mrs. Patrick Campbell made an enchanting George, a George of whom one could feel that she was, in spite of everything, a great woman. Mr. Basil Rathbone's Alfred de Musset and Mr. Ivan Samson's Chopin were both sound performances. Mr. Edgar Kent and Mr. Frank Cellier, as Buloz and Heine respectively, were chiefly responsible for the slowness of the first act. A slight acceleration would improve the acting of both. Scenery and costumes were excellent.

A. L. Huxley

—The Westminster Gazette, June 4, 1920

"Don't destroy my illusions!" is a golden saying which I would frame in everybody's mental chamber, for illusions are half the charm of life. I thought of this when I saw the "Madame sand" play at the Duke of York's Theatre. It is not an unskillful play in its way, nor should it be approached with a high brow; it is simply bold journalism in the best American sense. ... I had the feeling that Mr. Moeller knew very little of the souls of his characters, and a great deal of their clothes and their mannerisms, as handed on by newspaper gossip of the time, or by memories—which mostly turn molehills of events and sayings into mountains of vital importance.

But let all that pass: it is a great task to transplant to the stage those who are almost contemporaries. ... With all its faults, this Sand play is far more interesting than a dozen others now running in London. It stimulates imagination. You have but to scan the characters: Musset, Chopin, Liszt, and Buloz! ...

But where Mr. Moeller fails is in despoiling us of our illusions. George Sand was not a regular courtesan, in breeches and smoking big cigars, with the instinct of an interviewer who says at every good thing he hears: "Capital copy!" and marks it down. She was an amoureuse of high culture, a charmer of men more by the word even than by her graces, a thinker, a plodder, a worker; one who worshipped form and style, and would polish her work in wakeful nights until it glitters like flawless brilliants. In the play she is merely farcical—Quartier Latin reminiscent of Murger's Mimi. As for De Musset, though he was enacted as beautifully by Mr. Basil Rathbone as George Sand by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, was he merely wormwood and wishywashyness? Was there nothing of the poet in him in his intervals of control? The main vision of the play is the spectacle of a man, evidently recovering from a night of cups, emerging from a four-poster [bed] while his mistress is making love to his doctor. To think of it, and then to go to the bookshelf and pick a volume of the "Nuits"! Again, to think of Heinrich Heine (another cameo of acting), distinguished of tongue, yet with a penchant towards gluttony, and the table manners entirely foreign to one so refined in taste, so critical others, so wholly Parisianised that he transformed his own language to unapproachable grace! to think of Liszt, the dreamer, the charmer, the ethereal, the exquisite courtier, re-moulded by the dramatist into a comic busybody, and thus played by Hector Abbas with real humour! There is but one whom we meet without feeling the pain of destroyed illusions. That was the Chopin, a picture in Mr. Samson's delicate emotion. Here, at length, we felt what might have been if Mr. Moeller had applied imagination instead of craft. ... Yet we came away in a strange spirit of disappointment, in spite of having been entertained. The play had rent our illusions.

J.T. Grein

—The Illustrated London News, 19 June 1920

Do not hitch your wagon to a star if that vehicle has only three wheels. Mr. Philip Moeller has certainly a facility for dialogue. He can make a joke, which is not a common faculty, but in Madame Sand he has been completely overwhelmed by the effulgence of his characters—Liszt, Chopin, Heine, Alfred de Musset, and George Sand. When the play was acted the audience was left with the impression that the author had been so completely bouleversé by his high company that he had merely brought his characters on to the stage and hoped that once there they would do themselves justice. Pious aspirations do not make a play, and yet, though it is not quite a play, though it is not a little dull, it was not unpleasing as produced by Mr. Fagan. The costume, for one thing, was attractive, and in the book we perceive a quantity of moderately good epigrams. The idea of the play is to display George Sand as an amiable impulsive Tank, able to override the remonstrances of a mother and the reluctance of three lovers—one lover per act. She simultaneously loves, sups, packs, and writes novels. Thus: tender pressure of the hand and melting glance; bite of omelette (with left hand); sentence describing unhappy past, inscribed in current novel with quill pen (right hand); excursion to pack shawl; repeat.

Though crushed under the weight of his characters, Mr. Philip Moeller remains a potential dramatist, but when next he writes a play, let him invent his characters for himself, a feat of which he is obviously perfectly capable. The actors at the Duke of York's suffered from the dullness produced by the flattening out of the dramatist. They made heroic efforts, but they seemed to move and speak with something of the frantic energy, the ill-success, the muffled tone of those who struggle under the folds of a collapsed tent. Even Mrs. Patrick Campbell's vigour did not quite suffice. However, the acting, like the play, though ineffectual, was not altogether unpleasing; at least, the play will send those who have read or witnessed it in search of La Petite Fadette [a novel written by George Sand] at the London Library. It did not deserve a longer run.

Tarn.

—Spectator, July 3, 1920

Duke of York's Theatre.

To draw the literary portrait of a genius and not make that "genius" half idiot, half ass; to act the part of a genius and not accentuate these lunatic qualities—that is a most difficult achievement, both for author and for actor. Nor has Mr. Philip Moeller succeeded where so many others have failed, in spite of the really brilliant performance of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the title role. His new play, Madame Sand, produced the other evening by Mr. J. B, Fagan, is but the caricature of a real personage. He has merely seized upon the weaknesses of George Sand, elaborated them, exaggerated them, until they are the most overwhelming feature of her character. His heroine is inordinately vain, unscrupulous, hypocritical, absurd—anything but the genius which the woman she is supposed to be, undoubtedly was. In fact, the stage is filled by famous men—most of whom are the veriest puppets masquerading under historical names. Thus we have a neurotic "ninny" calling himself Alfred de Musset; a kind of fussy second-rate bandmaster pretending to be Franz Liszt; an utterly heavy and commonplace Heine; a kind of "butler" in disguise, by name "Buloz," and a rapturously sentimental feminine absurdity pretending she is George Sand. Indeed, the only one who shows even a flicker of "genius" is Frederic Chopin; perhaps because he is very well acted by Mr. Ivan Samson. But Chopin only appears at the very end, though in the most moving scene of the whole play. For the rest, it is all sheer farce pretending to be historical fact. And if you can forget that the names of the men and women who make us laugh—not with them, but at them—are names great in the world' artistic history, you will doubtless be amused. But most who laugh will thank heaven for that obscurity in which they live, an obscurity which will eventually save them from biographers, and from dramatist wishing to exaggerate a few of their minor failings until they appear veritable "figures of fun" to posterity. Death is bad enough, but to be burlesqued after death—that surely is adding a pint of vinegar to a pound of salt.

George Sand and Her Lovers.

From our obscurity, however, we can well afford to laugh at Philip Moeller's picture of George Sand and her lovers. It is all quite good fun. It is all the better fun when you know that half the woman's absurdity at which you laugh isn't true—or only merely a suspicion of the truth. What historical data has the dramatist to go upon, for example, when he makes George Sand break off suddenly in the midst of each one of her passionate moments to write down on paper what she has just uttered for insertion in her forthcoming book? From where, too, did he obtain the knowledge that, when George Sand tire of the good, commonplace Italian doctor, Pagello, she sent for his late mistress and provided the funds by which the doctor and the girl were packed off back to Venice? Of course it's all very amusing, and dovetails admirably with the incident of the 1,000-franc note which Pagello and George got out of Alfred de Musset when he provided the funds for them to leave Venice in the first instance. But we are supposed to be dealing with historical accuracy—otherwise, why drag in George Sand? Any silly woman would have done equally as well, and her absurdity would not have tainted the memory of a writer who, in spite of all her supreme egotism, was at any rate a writer of genius. Indeed, if the real George Sand ever appeared in Mr. Moeller's play at all, it was in the last scene, between herself and Chopin, wherein the woman who was always searching for the ideal lover and ideal friend realised at last that they were all part of the self-deception by which the human heart lives and hopes; that all men and women must pass through this world, always looking for their ideal mate, yet always ... always lonely, and never so lonely as at the end of life. Chopin, too, is tired—tired of the applause and the crowd which lies in wait for him to do him empty homage. So these two meet, and for a short time they believe that they have found Paradise in each other's arms. But, of course, it will only be "for a time"—that's what makes the audience laugh so much. Love is one of the practical jokes which Fate plays on the human heart. And everybody can see the fun of a practical joke when they themselves are not the victim. even the victim can laugh at it later on, years afterwards, when the shock and absurdity are forgotten, and they only see, as it were, an incident in which someone calling themselves by their own name figured so disastrously.

The Acting.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell's George Sand was the dramatist conception to the life. Her own delicious sense of humour found a free play in this character of a hundred absurd affectations, a hundred fond illusions. In the last scene with Chopin, however, she played with a sadness, a tenderness, with that touch of spiritual weariness which comes so often with middle-age, after a life of searching and never finding, which was beautiful in the extreme. This is the most moving scene in the whole play It was the most perfectly acted, too, by both Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Ivan Samson. It is a beautiful end to a play which is quite amusing when you can forget that the author is filling his stage with famous people, and making them speak together in a language closely approaching the modern American idiom. Mr. Basil Rathbone as Alfred de Musset tried his best to give colour to a part which was essentially colourless. The rest were as the author had draw the characters—and this gave them but little scope. But Miss Florence Saunders was vividly tempestuous as Pagello's discarded mistress—though even she was more like an East End 'Arriet in a furious temper than a heartbroken Italian cocotte. The scenery and the dresses were quite charming in their old-world Fashion. Madame Sand will never be satisfactory as an historical play, but it is very amusing as a quiet farce.

—The Tatler, June 23, 1920