Harper's Weekly/Love in a Dutch Garden

by Neith Boyce

Love in a Dutch Garden

By NEITH BOYCE

A GARDEN carefully constructed to keep Love out, with a gate that locks, with tall green hedges that shut out sight of the world—the busy, naughty world.

Inside the garden, a prim little house, carefully-kept walks, well-regulated flowers, and a fountain. Love stands over the fountain, with a viol and bow in his hands—but he is a stone statue.

There are three old gardeners to keep down Nature in the garden, to trim the hedges to perfect rectangularity, to keep out the weeds, to make the flowers orderly. There is a boy with clappers, to chase away the birds.

“Oh, you naughty little birds! Now, come into my garden, and I’ll kill you!”

There are three strict, spinster aunts, Prim, Prude and Privacy, to keep Nature down and Love out of a young heart.

And there is Prunella—innocent, inquisitive maiden.

A road runs by the garden-gate, and all the naughty world may travel by that road—and does. A band of wandering Mummers, from the village fair, passes by. The locked gate and shut windows of the house cannot keep them out. A shower of confetti invades the garden—and in through the hedge careless, wanton Pierrot creeps, and finds Prunella.

Pierrot is Lovelace—but to Prunella he is Love, the World, Life—everything that has been forbidden her, everything she is longing for. His mad companions terrify her. But the transparent sham of his quick wooing carries her away. A ladder is put up to her window at night, and she comes down into his arms. And now Love, the statue, wakes and plays upon his viol. He is in league with Nature, the World, the Birds, the Mummers and Pierrot, to seduce Prunella out of the garden. . . .

And yet he is a moral Love, as the sequel shows. . . .

“Prunella” speaks to the eye. The garden, scene of all three acts, is a pretty place. The sky is sometimes lit by the moon, sometimes spangled with stars, sometimes both together. We see and hear a great deal throughout the play of the moon, the stars, of birds, and—naturally—of Love.

Against the tall, clipped, formal hedges the old-style dresses are charming. In the first act the aunts, in sweeping dresses of different lilac shades, with caps, stomachers, lappets and what-not, and Prunella in a straight little gown of green are quite lovely. Pierrot, too, is sweetly dressed—in white in the first act, in black-and-white in the second, all in black in the third. The maid-servants, Queer and Quaint, are nice, too, in the picture; and the Mummers quite cubistically bizarre. The gardeners are perhaps a trifle obvious—but then, good heavens, if we are going to quarrel with “Prunella” for being obvious——!

WE are not. We take the little play for what it is—a oonventionalized decoration on the theme of Love—a light fantasy on the eighteenth-century Lovelace motif, with all the sting left out. We admit frankly that it is sentimental, in the most recognized English style. There is nothing that isn't sweet about it, nothing shocking, not even the kiss that Pierrot gives Prunella—

“And now—she knows!”

This, too, is in accordance with the best English tradition, for a kiss cannot shock—-can it?—except, of course, very pleasantly. Equally proper is the marriage of Pierrot and Prunella, duly taking place after their midnight elopement in the second set. To be sure, Pierrot deserts Prunella afterward, marriage not being one of his habits, but that can he remedied—and is.

Act III shows the garden three years after Prunella's flight—a sad, deserted garden, gone to weed and seed. The gate, half off its hinge, stands open. The three gardeners are gone. and two of the aunts. Only Aunt Privacy, softest-hearted of the three, remains, mourning in a very pretty dress of gray and white and black. A stranger has taken the little house, and she waits to give him the key. He comes—it is Pierrot, all in black, with a settled melancholy on his visage, once so wanton and so gay. . . . In short, Pierrot has repented. Though he won't, at first, admit it, he misses Prunella, and is sorry that he left her—for a year—returning then to find her gone.

Poor Pierrot! He is a mournful spectacle, as, in fact, repentance generally is—like washing the dishes after a feast, necessary but certainly irksome. Pierrot repents at leisure, and to music—there's no doubt about it, he is very much cut up. But we can’t feel as sorry for him as we might, for we know all the time, of course, that Prunella is coming back. If she had not come!—now that would have been something original!

But she comes—a poor, travel-stained waif, wandering back to her old home. Here she is met by her erstwhile companions, the Mummers, who have followed Pierrot and now bore him to distraction.

THEN the final curtain on the two, reunited, with the sun rising—rather a relief, the sun is, after so much of the moon and stars. Love, the statue, presides over this reunion and plays triumphantly upon his viol—thus proving himself, as we have said, in spite of his little escapades, an eminently English and moral Love.

The play in given with music; and with its sweetly pretty setting and dresses, and its light sentiment, it has pleased many people. Jaded theater-goers and critics like it. We have hoard it called “charming,” and even “adorable.” It all depends on whether you like whipped cream or prefer cheese and salad.

It isn't easy to say why “Prunella” recalls to one’s mind Alfred de Musset's play. “On ne badine pas avec l′Amour.″ It must certainly be by force of contrast. Here are two comedies of sentiment, with the requisite touch of pathos. The French play in a beautiful thing. Of course, it's breaking a butterfly on the wheel to try “Prunella” by such a standard. . . . But why is it that English sentiment has such terrific difficulty in being light in form and true in substance? It seems sometimes that only the most intense feeling can fire the English mind: that it is like hard wood, flaming gloriously when once thoroughly kindled, otherwise producing more smoke than light.