Short Plays

old chap: I don’t say a word against your mother; and I’m sorry she’s dead; but really, you know, most women are mothers; and they all die some time or other; yet that doesn’t make them infallible authorities on morals, does it? Gregory I was about to say so myself. Let me add that if you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things. Juno Lunn: I love your wife; and that’s all about it. Gregory Juno: I love yours. What then? Juno Clearly she must never see you again. Mrs. Juno Why not? Juno Why not! My love: I’m surprised at you. Mrs. Juno Am I to speak only to men who dislike me? Juno Yes: I think that is, properly speaking, a married woman’s duty. Mrs. Juno Then I won’t do it: that’s flat. I like to be liked. I like to be loved. I want everyone round me to love me. I don’t want to meet or speak to anyone who doesn’t like me. Juno But, my precious, this is the most horrible immorality. Mrs. Lunn I don’t intend to give up meeting you, Mr. Juno. You amuse me very much. I don’t like being loved: it bores me. But I do like to be amused. Juno I hope we shall meet very often. But I hope also we shall not defend our conduct. Mrs. Juno Rising. This is unendurable. We’ve all been flirting. Need we go on footling about it? Juno Huffily. I don’t know what you call footling⁠— Mrs. Juno Cutting him short. You do. You’re footling. Mr. Lunn is footling. Can’t we admit that we’re human and have done with it? Juno I have admitted it all along. I⁠— Mrs. Juno Almost screaming. Then stop footling. The dinner gong sounds. Mrs. Lunn Rising. Thank heaven! Let’s go in to dinner. Gregory: take in Mrs. Juno. Gregory But surely I ought to take in our guest, and not my own wife. Mrs. Lunn Well, Mrs. Juno is not your wife, is she? Gregory Oh, of course: I beg your pardon. I’m hopelessly confused. He offers his arm to Mrs. Juno, rather apprehensively. Mrs. Juno You seem quite afraid of me. She takes his arm. Gregory I am. I simply adore you. They go out together; and as they pass through the door he turns and says in a ringing voice to the other couple. I have said to Mrs. Juno that I simply adore her. He takes her out defiantly. Mrs. Lunn Calling after him. Yes, dear. She’s a darling. To Juno. Now, Sibthorpe. Juno Giving her his arm gallantly. You have called me Sibthorpe! Thank you. I think Lunn’s conduct fully justifies me in allowing you to do it. Mrs. Lunn Yes: I think you may let yourself go now. Juno Seraphita: I worship you beyond expression. Mrs. Lunn Sibthorpe: you amuse me beyond description. Come. They go in to dinner together.

Great Catherine

“In Catherine’s reign, whom Glory still adores”

Byron

The Author’s Apology for “Great Catherine”

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery on the ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great Catherine, but the Catherine whose gallantries provide some of the lightest pages of modern history. Great Catherine, it is said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy, whose campaigns and conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose correspondence with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a magnificent figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only confess that Catherine’s diplomacy and her conquests do not interest me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom she played this mischievous kind of political chess had any notion of the real history of their own times, or of the real forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which made such short work of Catherine’s Voltairean principles, surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised and scandalized any provincial governess in the French châteaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal Governments was that whereas she talked and wrote quite intelligently about Liberal principles before she was frightened into making such talking and writing a flogging matter, our Liberal ministers take the name of Liberalism in vain without knowing or caring enough about its meaning even to talk and scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and institute their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth, without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any apology from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the condition of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up for the occasion by scenic artists; but in the little world of European court intrigue and dynastic diplomacy which was the only world she knew she was more than a match for him and for all the rest of her contemporaries. In such intrigue and diplomacy, however, there was no romance, no scientific political interest, nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if it can be persuaded to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a woman with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals, still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for nearly half a century, not as a Russian, but as a