A MODERN ELIZABETHAN.*

As Glasgow 1877, Edinburgh 1878, Glasgow 1884, Crieff 1886, and Crieff 1888, are the dates and places which vouch for the very curious dramas before us, we presume the author to be a Scotchman rather than one belonging to either of his pub- lishers' homes. He is a very singular dramatist indeed, and, as a poet, so full of curious and varied power, that we have conceived the greatest interest as to his personality and his plans. His plays, let us say at once, do not appear to be written for stage purposes,—except, perhaps, Bruce, the only one of the set which conforms to the ordinary rules, and is but another example, not of any very high mark, of the old five-act blank-verse play. The others are what their designations imply, mixtures,—and mixtures so quaint as to make analysis very difficult. But they are eminently readable ; while, from the first glance, we were fairly deluded into the belief that we were dealing with some, to us, forgotten * Plays by John Pavideon. Being ; An Unhistorical Pastoral; A Romantic Pasco ; Bruce, a Chronicle PLay ; Smith, a Tragic Faro; and Scarasnouch in Naxos, a Pantomime. London : Elkin Mathews and John Iron; Chicago : Stone and Simbs11. l894,

name of the Marlowe period. But when we found Scaramouch talking of buying the Crystal Palace, and met with Mary Jane

and Annie Smith among the characters of the Romantic Farce, we discovered the period with which we are dealing in this fantastic guise. This is the love-song which Ringan Deane indites for Annie Smith, frankly announced to us as "a girl" t

"Where have you been to-day, Annie Smith ?

Where have you been to-day ?

By the shore where the river becomes a frith ?

Or up on the hills, away, By purple heather and saffron broom, Like clouds at the sunset hour, And all the well-kent flowers that bloom In each breezy hillside bower ?

Were you there, Annie Smith, that your face is so gay, And your eyes so laughing and blue ?

Was it there that you spent the whole of the day ? Or, tell me, darling, were you In the leafy wood where the grass grows thick With the fairies at their play ?

Did you flirt with Oberon, dance with Puck,

That your face, Annie Smith, is so gay ?

Where have you been to-day, Annie Smith, That you smile so gaily on me ?

By the shore where the river becomes a frith? Or were you upon the sea ?

Did you sail in a pearly shell, Annie Smith, With your hair flying free ? Do your laughing blue eyes tell, Annie Smith, Such a happy tale of the sea ?

Or were you down in the caves, Annie Smith,

With the mermaids under the sea ?

Did the mermen beneath the waves, Annie Smith, Try to catch and keep you from me ?

Or did you fly through the air all the day ?

Did you frolic with the wind ?

Did you dine with the man in the moon, I pray, That your face and your eyes are so laughing and gay? Come, Annie, Annie, be quick and say

Where you have been the whole of the day, In your body or your mind ?

Where have you been, Annie Smith, to-day,

That your face and your eyes are so calm ?

Did you hear in the church the minister pray ?

Did you join in the holy psalm ?

Did he tell of the solemn joys of the blest—

That your face is so calm and serene, That you seem to have ended each earthly quest ?— In the church, Annie Smith, have you been ?

Or did you stand on the shore, Annie Smith, And gaze away to the west ?

Did you stand where the river becomes a frith, With your hands folded over your breast, And gaze at the golden skyey gate As the sun passed through sublime ? Did you get this shadowy light of fate On your face at the sunset time ?

Or are you an angel, Annie Smith, For a time from your blessedness riven, To guide me over the cold, wan frith Of death, to your happy heaven ? "

If these lines be a pleasant specimen of Mr. Davidson from his modern side, we may set against it the following extracts from the Pastoral, a great part of which is written in the ten-syllable rhyme after Elizabethan precedent :— " Is there, far distant from the sea's highway, Unwatched by any eye save that of day,— Or if perfection lights unreasoning eyes, By gentle beasts and birds of Paradise— A coral isle, old Nature's best-loved child, And latest offspring, nursed by waters wild— Tamed in that nurture—to rare loveliness, Whose witchery creates a sweet distress; An islet Venus might have made her home, Even as, love-mad, she blossomed from the foam ; Where lovers may beneath a bread-fruit tree Repose on bedded flowers, by harmony Of birds and waters lulled to slumber deep ; And by like sounds be roused to waking sleep, To feed upon their conch's canopy,

And watch what may appear with dreamy eye, Stirring no limb, save for their gentler ease, For ministry of love, or what they please ? Methinks you told me once of such a gem, Descried unsought ? or is it my own dream?

. . . . . . .

Retire home for a little; lightly sup ; Lightly to bed; at midnight, lightly up, To welcome May, to banish worldly jars, And wanton it like twinkling earthly stars Outpeering those who thus will deftly tread The joyous, maiden mirth, and all the night About the pure moon, from whose dark blue bed Her bower-maids singing sweetly low aloud To wake their queen will, with soft, quaint affright, Charily cast her coverlet of cloud : Stars must we all be when shall be displayed Our May-moon, Eulalie, Earth's loveliest maid."

Words of all sorts of quaintness—" detractions " of her copied grace—feet retiring " trepidly " to hide themselves in the " circumlocutory shoe," the last certainly a stretch of phrasing—and expressions of unrestrained originality follow each other everywhere ; and we do not doubt that it would be very easy to criticise our poet from the destructive point of view. But the fact remains that the rhythm and the fancies carry the reader away and along in an uninquiring and con- tented spirit :-

" Her hair ! The brightest imagery fails To be a proxy for its rippling streams."

For the reader will have discovered that these little dramas have for the most part the old-world story for their theme.

Oberon and Titania and Puck themselves are mixed up in the Unhistorical Pastoral, and the sovereign of fairy-land expresses herself in the true fairy tongue :- "Mortals, farewell for ever and a day !

To-night we fairies wend the wide world round ; And this our visitation each new May To summer sweetness mellows air and ground. The winds kiss from our lips a perfumed spoil, And store the pillaged wealth in woods and bowers : Each fairy footstep swift impregns the soil, And in our wake we leave a foam of fluwers.

In orchard blossoms from our odoured hair

We shake rich drops that flavour all the fruit,—

Nor lacks the grain our much-availing care ! Each thing is blessed where comes a fairy foot;

We bless all bridals true, all love that's chaste,—

Now, fairies, to the sea with utmost haste !"

'So gracefully and so tastefully does the poet carry Rupert and Enlalie, and Cinthio and Faustine, to the fitting and

happy end of the love-romance, which begins, quite after Shakespearian precedent, on the sea-coast of Belmarie, where Alardo reigns as King. For the pretty name of Belmarie, be it said, Mr. Davidson finds his authority in Chaucer. We would wish he had given his play a name, as " an Unhistorical Pastoral" is only a description, and difficult of citation and reference ; but it is very pleasant and fanciful and poetic reading, after a fashion very mach its own. Nor should it be forgotten that the comic characters vary the blank-verse and the rhyme with appropriate prose-talk of their own, 'written in good tune and harmony with the rest.

In his Romantic Farce—again a distinct error in naming, or rather in the absence of it, which will, we fear, militate -considerably against Mr. Davidson's success, for how are his admirers to speak of it P—(the" Divina Commedia " is a prece- dent too high for the situation)—Mr. Davidson takes us away from Belmarie to a country town in Scotland, and opens with an Amazon and a Clown unmasking to each other during a masked ball which is going on in the next room, other dominoes follow- ing them and joining in the scene. Whether he has views on the stage or not, it is certain that he has the knack or the gift of opening effectively and dramatically, and plunging his

auditors at once into talk which interests them in the story at the outset. Nobody ever did that like Shakespeare, with his "Do you bite your thumb at me, Sir," the very keynote at starting, of the feuds of the Capulets. The French drama- tists, as a rule, curiously neglect the precept, loving to indulge in a good deal of preliminary verbiage before they come to action. The maskers in Mr. Davidson's play agree to attack the tyranny of fashion by wearing their fancy dresses all the next day, and mixing with the world in them, taking, mean- while, fancy names in their performances :-

" What name for me, Hermini P What word, however harsh, would by your lips Be sweetened to a note of syren strength, That, whispered, should have force to summon me From Ieeland to Ceylon. Tell me, Hermini.— I think Antolycus should be your name.

Courtier (to Summer). And you, sweet Summer? Flora?

Bummer. I'd be called,

And for no other reason than I would,

Not Flora, no, nor Maud. But Mary Jane."

How the maiden, who fancies that she has broken her lover's heart and that he is dead, takes the name of May Mont- , gomery and makes her courtier call himself after her dead lover's name, Earl Edmund, to find in the end that he is the true Earl Edmund, changed, but the same, and how the

maskers arrange to meet at noon, dressed as they are, in the Alley of Sighs, where they fall in with a genuine pair of lovers

in Ringan Deane—a good, well-sounding name—and Annie Smith, forms the argument of this curious fantasy, which

would recall to us something of the fashion of Love's Labour's Lost, but for the happy end which comes to all the pairers-off, instead of the unsatisfactory finish of poor Biron and the rest. Demetrius-like, Ringan Deane loses his heart for a moment to the tempting travestie of the Amazon Bellona (who turns out to be rightly Mary Jones), but returns to his Annie in due season.

The story of Smith, a Tragic Farce, as, in his love of this kind of contradiction, Mr. Davidson calls it, is thoroughly tragic in its nature and form, though confined to three

short acts, and with characters bearing the names of Smith, Jones, Brown and Robinson, appellations which he evidently favours much. The play, unlike the others, appears to be conceived and intended in something of the Ibsen vein, and tells how Smith, a kind of mystic adventurer, wins the love of Magdalen Graham from the citizen Brown, and when tracked with her by her father to the top of Mount Merlin (London and Garth are made the scene of the story), flings him- self down with her, where his friend, Hallowes, the poet, has

already met with an untimely death. Very tragical mirth, as the chamberlain calls Pyramus and Thisbe, in the Midsummer Night, but curiously worth reading. The uncultured " Smith, who lacks the college stamp, but— "Spoils the barmaids with his high-flown talk, And talks philosophy—religion—books,"

and argues suicide from the first, from the philosopher's point of view, is evidently a mouthpiece for the poet's satire upon the age we live in :-

"Intolerance in religion never dreamt Such fell machinery of Acts and Codes As now we use for nipping thought in bud, And turning children out like ninepins, each As doleful and as wooden."

After this, his expedition to the North with Hallowes, the un- successful poet who has just been dismissed from his teacher's place, forms the subject of the play,—not in itself so attractive to ourselves as the more purely fancifUl pieces, of which

Scaramouch in Naxos—a pantomime—makes the last. How bold and odd is the mixture, introduced by Scarawouch in an amusing and old-fUshioned prologue, may be gathered from

the fact that the Harlequin and Columbine in the employ- ment of this wandering Pagliacci foregather in the play with Bacchus and Ariadne, Naxos's time-honoured inhabitants, and with Silenus and a Glaucus and an Ione to boot :—

"A thousand daily pitfalls mesh the path

Of those who here are native : faults in friends, Denials, tarryings, storm, and heat and cold,

Things loathsome, incomplete ; falsehood and wrath,—

Oh, I am ill at saying what I mean!

Think, if these pitiful disquietings Have power to kill the joy in us who come Of blood that never beat in other veins Than those of men and women, still abused

By buffetings of chance on every side,

What misery, what terror will there be In you, whose life has known no bolts, no bars, No stumbling-blocks, no weariness, no care!

And chief of all, when you begin to find How weak, how foolish, and how fond I am!"

So says Ione to her Sarmion, and very fresh and graceful is the end to which it leads them. To the play of Bruce we have already referred as cast more in the ordinary mould than the others, and therefore do not quote from it. But we shall be very much surprised if the world, and possibly the stage, do not hear more of Mr. Davidson.