The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-05 00:00:00

THEATRE ROYAL PRINCESS'S.

"Never Too Late to lend."
A remarkable scene was last evening witnessed
by a crowded and at times a very excited
audience, at the Princess's Theatre. Mr. Charles

Reade's dramatised version of his own well-known

story, entitled " Never Too Late to Mend," was
the attraction of the night. It turned out to be—
in the Second Act at least—a very repulsive demon-
stration against Penal Servitude and its accompani-

ments, as they happen to be regarded from the
novelist's own particular point of view. According
to Mr. Reade's way of putting forward his
argument against the system and its working, he
would actually seem to insist upon it—that all the
Felons in our Convict prisons are Saints, and that
the gentlemen who are acting thero as Governors,
together with the warders under them, who are
their tools, are so many Monsters of Iniquity.

Now we for our own part believe—quite calmly and
deliberately—that exactly the converse of all this
is the case. We believe that the felons crowding
our great convict establishments—massed together
in formidable gangs at Pentonville, and -Milbank,

and Portland, and Dartmoor, and elsewhere, are
the very pick and cream, or rather the very scum
and dregs of the greatest ruffians and blackguards on
the face of the earth. We believe that the officers

of our great convict establishments, from the Go-
vernors down to the very humblest of the
officials, down to the very doorkeepers and
messengers, are there energetically carrying out
their duties to the utmost of their several powers,

and with the most conscientious solicitude. We
would go further than that, even, and say that
it is our firm and unhesitating conviction that Con-

victs really repentant and patient and chastened in
character, that Governors malignantly harsh and
cruel and unjust are the rare and hardly produci,,-
able exceptions. A Governor of a Convict Prison,
such as the one represented last evening at the
Princess's, we assert to be a wholly impossible and
apochryphal personage. We regard the repre-
sentation as nothingless than a libellous and c alum-
nious portraiture, or, to put it in other words, as
a wholly unjustifiable caricature of as honourable,
and intelligent, and highly educated, and, we doubt
not, also, as concientious a class of gentlemen as
could be found anywhere else upon our Govern-

ment establishments. It is a matter of as tonish-
ment to us that a man of Mr. Charles Reade's
ability should allow himself to indulge so
frequently in such flagrant outbursts of

a perversely wrongheaded onesidedness. It was
only the other day that he gave full swing to an
equally extravagant craze of his about our Lunatic
Asylums—writing of them in his powerful story en-
titled " Hard Cash" as though his pen were a sti-

Letto, and the ink in which he dipped it the deadliest

poison. We no more believe that the officials of
our convict prisons are the blackhearted rascals that
Mr. Charles Reade would have us believe them to
be, than we could ever credit, upon the same autho-
rity (according to the inferences which were alone
deducible from some of the most astounding chapters
of " Hard Cash") that our Commissioners de lunatico
inquirendo are little better than so many drivelling
idiots, and the Masters in Lunacy either purblind
dolts or connivers at, or compounders of, felony ! One
of those same Masters being to this day one of the
shrewdest among contemporary novelists, one of those
same Commissioners having been for many years,
until very recently, one of the most amiable, vene-
rable, and accomplished among contemporary poets
—the Master being the author of " Ten Thousand
a Year "—the Commissioner, Mr. Bryan Procter,
better known as " Barry Cornwall." Abuses there
may be—there doubtless—are still admitting of
being weeded out, here in our Convict Establish-
ments, here in our Lunatic Asylums. But they
are certainly not to be got rid of, we may rest
assured of that, by means of any such monstrous
and wholesale misrepresentation as that applied to
the world of Mad-houses in "Hard Cash," and to the
almost equally grimly world of Convict Prisons in

" Never too Late to Mend." Not thus—not after
this fashion—has Mr. Charles Dickens applied his
genial, cordial, powerful pen to the sweeping
away of abuses in a hundred different directions.
The refined sarcasm applied to the weaknesses
of the powers that be, by that greatest of all
humpurists—as he is, also, none the less distinctly
to our thinking, about the most practical
among all living Social Reformers and
Philanthropists—the exquisitely refined sarcasm ap-
plied by him to the Powers that Be when dubbing
their haunts by the generic name of the Circumlo-
cution Office, and their hereditary occupants by
the cognomen of the Tite-Barnacles—touched into
1 inimitable ridiculousness by such fantastic little
touches as that of the wild search after the eyeglass
by the infatuated stickler for tonnage, the polishing
of the gun-barrel with a silk handkerchief, and the
spreading of marmalade with a paper-knife in the
august regions sacred to the inner mysteries of Red
Tape—all this, one might infer, must be so much
mere idle babble and preposterous small-talk to
one whose irony rages into vituperation, and whose
rhetoric raves into bullyragging. According to
Mr. Reade, there is habitually installed in power
at the Home Office, under the polite desig-
nation of Old Circumbendibus, a Demon of State
Darkness, who has, sometimes, but only, upon very
rare and fitful occasions, freaks of compunction in-
ducing him to come down upon some arch-delin-
quent, such as Hawkes like a very Dens, or rather

Diabolus ex-Machin i. The representation of the
system upon which, according to Mr. Charles
Reade, penal servitude is, or was (we cannot rightly
catch which he really means), carried out, or in-
flicted, or endured (however we may like to put it),
in our Convict Establishments is—so far as we can
comprehend the purport of the dark and dismal
picture presented to view by Act the Second of
" Never too Late to Mend," —to all intents
and purposes very much like the ill-directed
blow of an insensate axe levelled at the very roots
of Social Order! It is, according to our belief and
apprehension, an elaborate, and distorting, and
libellous misrepresentation of one of not the least
important departments or divisions of our common
Government. If there be any power of histrionic
Censorship left remaining at the command of the
administrators in the Lord Chamberlain's office, it
is incomprehensible to us why it cannot be applied
to the sweeping out of view of such a manifestation
as that marking the ghastly Second Act of " Never
Too Late to Mend." And in saying this we
attach but small blame, if any, to the manager
of the Princess's —the responsibility, as it ap-
pears to us, appertaining to the author—that is, to
the author's astonishing want of judgment, to
the author's astounding violation of good taste. As
far as the management of the Princess's iu regard
to this play is concerned, the piece from first to
last has been put upon the stage magnificently. And
this is, if possible, more conspicuous in the Second
Act than in any other portion of the drama—a
Second Act that we feel convinced, nevertheless,
ought at once to be swept from public view alto-
gether. As a piece of stage illusion the building-up
of the two scenes of the prison interior, the Tread -
mill, that is, and the Corridors, are simply marvel-
But--in those scenes, the spectacle presented
to observation, is, to put it just as simply, to our
thinking at any rate, absolutely sickening and re-
volting. Maledictions the most hideous, brutal curses
and brutal blows, the fiendish tormenting of angelic
prisoners by a Demoniac Governor, an attempt at
murder, and a. still more desperate and imminent at-
tempt at suicide (all but accomplished !) are among
the choicest morgeaux of this unparalleled laying
bare of the secrets of the prison house. And—through
it all—between the Demon Governor and his Myr-
midons on the one hand and those etherialised and
almost beatific Felons on the other--there moves
serenely the form of a Prison Chaplain, so incon-
ceivably and preternaturally perfect of his kind,
so intensely, not to say nauseatingly " goody"
in every hair of his whiskers, and in every flagiolet-
like cadence of his dulcifluous voice that, with all
possible respect for him, it would really be a relief