they one and all, both from policy and from
conviction, adopted a hostile attitude towards Ibsen, expressing at most
a theoretical respect overborne by practical dislike. Yet his influence
permeated the atmosphere. He had revealed possibilities of technical
stagecraft and psychological delineation that, once realized, were not
to be banished from the mind of the thoughtful playwright. They haunted
him in spite of himself. Still subtler was the influence exerted over
the critics and the more intelligent public. Deeply and genuinely as
many of them disliked Ibsen's works, they found, when they returned to
the old-fashioned play, the adapted frivolity or the homegrown
sentimentalism, that they disliked this still more. On every side, then,
there was an instinctive or deliberate reaching forward towards
something new; and once again it was Pinero who ventured the decisive
step.

On the 27th of May 1893 _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ was produced at the
St James's theatre. With _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ the English acted
drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the
literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was
obviously comparable with the plays of Dumas, of Sudermann, of Bjurnson,
of Echegaray. It might be better than some of these plays, worse than
others; but it stood on the same artistic level. The fact that such a
play could not only be produced, but could brilliantly succeed, on the
London stage gave a potent stimulus to progress. It encouraged ambition
in authors, enterprise in managers. What _Hernani_ was to the romantic
movement of the 'thirties, and _La Dame aux camelias_ to the realistic
movement of the 'fifties, _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ was to the movement
of the 'nineties towards the serious stage-portraiture of English social
life. All the forces which we have been tracing--Robertsonian realism of
externals, the leisure for thought and experiment involved in vastly
improved financial conditions, the substitution in France of a simpler,
subtler technique for the outworn artifices of the Scribe school, and
the electric thrill communicated to the whole theatrical life of Europe
by contact with the genius of Ibsen--all these slowly converging forces
coalesced to produce, in _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, an epoch-marking
play.

Pinero followed up _Mrs Tanqueray_ with a remarkable series of
plays--_The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_, _The Benefit of the Doubt_, _The
Princess and