Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive.)









THE ENGLISH STAGE




_WORKS BY THE AUTHOR._

  PROFILS ANGLAIS.
  MÉRIMÉE ET SES AMIS.
  VIOLETTE MÉRIAN.
  AMOURS ANGLAIS.
  LES CONTES DU CENTENAIRE.
  ETC. ETC.




  THE ENGLISH STAGE

  _Being an Account of the Victorian Drama by Augustin Filon_

  Translated from the French by Frederic Whyte with
  an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones


  JOHN MILNE
  12 NORFOLK STREET, STRAND, LONDON

  NEW YORK
  DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY
  MDCCCXCVII




_All Rights Reserved_




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

  Introduction by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones                               9

  Author's Preface                                                    31


  CHAPTER I

  A Glance back--From 1820 to 1830--Kean and Macready--The
  Strolling Player--The Critics--Sheridan Knowles and
  _Virginius_--Douglas Jerrold--His Comedies--_The Rent
  Day_--_The Prisoner of War_--_Black-Eyed Susan_--Collapse of
  the Privileged Theatres--Men of Letters come to the Rescue of
  the Drama--Bulwer Lytton--_The Lady of Lyons_--_Richelieu_--
  _Money_                                                             39


  CHAPTER II

  Macready's Withdrawal from the Stage--The Enemies of the
  Drama in 1850: Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the
  "Hippodrama"--French Plays and French Players in England--
  Actors of the Period--The Censorship--The Critics--The
  Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion
  Boucicault                                                          73


  CHAPTER III

  The Vogue of Burlesque--Burnand's _Ixion_--H. J. Byron--The
  Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage--Marie
  Wilton's Début--A Letter from Dickens--Founding of the Prince
  of Wales's--Tom Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author--His
  Journalistic Career--London Bohemia in 1865--Sothern                93


  CHAPTER IV

  First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_,
  and _School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of
  his Actors, John Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress
  in the Matter of Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--
  Robertson as a Humorist: a Scene from _School_--As a Realist:
  a Scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the Upper Middle
  Classes--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup
  and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The
  Bancrofts at the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My
  Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street                                     114


  CHAPTER V

  Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His First Literary Efforts--
  The _Bab Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--
  Gilbert's Psychology and Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_,
  _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The Wicked World_,
  _Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas           138


  CHAPTER VI

  Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter,
  Ryder, Adelaide Neilson--Irving's Début--His Career in the
  Provinces, and Visit to Paris--The rôle of Digby Grand--The
  rôle of Matthias--The Production of _Hamlet_--Successive
  Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--as an Editor of
  Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of
  his Parts--As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir
  Henry Irving, Head of his Profession                               156


  CHAPTER VII

  Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
  Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his
  Plays: _Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a
  Dramatist; he comes too soon and too late--Tennyson and the
  Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of May_, _The Cup_,
  _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_                                   174


  CHAPTER VIII

  The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence
  of Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--
  Improvement in Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The
  "Old" Critics and the "New"--James Mortimer and his Two
  "Almavivas"--Mr. William Archer's Ideas and Rôle--The
  Vicissitudes of Adaptation                                         193


  CHAPTER IX

  The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his
  First Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_,
  _A Pair of Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original
  Plays--His Style--His Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old
  Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which has not done growing         212


  CHAPTER X

  Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works--His Melodramas--_Saints
  and Sinners_--The Puritans and the Theatre--The Two Deacons:
  the Character of Fletcher--_Judah_--_The Crusaders_: Character
  of Palsam; the Conclusion of the Piece--_The Case of Rebellious
  Susan_--_The Masqueraders_--Return to Melodrama--Theories
  expounded by Mr. Jones in his Book: _The Renascence of the
  Drama_                                                             234


  CHAPTER XI

  Two Portraits--Mr. Pinero's Career as an Actor--His Early
  Works--_The Squire, Lords and Commons_--The Pieces which
  followed, Half-Comedy, Half-Farce--_The Profligate_; its
  Success and Defects: _Lady Bountiful_--_The Second Mrs.
  Tanqueray_: Character of Paula--Mrs. Patrick Campbell--_The
  Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_                                           254


  CHAPTER XII

  Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse--
  The First Translations--Ibsen acted in London--The Performers
  and the Public--Encounters between the Critics--Mr. Archer
  once more--Affinity between the Norwegian Character and the
  English--Ibsen's Realism suited to English Taste, his
  Characters adaptable to English Life--The Women in his Plays--
  Ibsen and Mr. Jones--Present and Future Influence of Ibsen--
  Objections and Obstacles                                           277


  CHAPTER XIII

  G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent
  Theatre and Matinée Performance--The Drama of To-morrow--A
  "Report of Progress"--The Public and the Actors--
  Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to the
  Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to
  its becoming Modern and National--Conclusion                       300




INTRODUCTION

BY HENRY ARTHUR JONES


I have rarely had a more welcome task than that of saying a few words of
introduction to the following essays, and of heartily commending them to
the English reading public. I am not called upon, nor would it become me,
to recriticise the criticism of the English drama they contain, to reargue
any of the issues raised, or to vent my own opinions of the persons and
plays hereafter dealt with. My business is to thank M. Filon for bringing
us before the notice of the French public, to speak of his work as a whole
rather than to discuss it in detail, and to define his position in
relation to the recent dramatic movement in our country.

But before addressing myself to these main ends, I may perhaps be allowed
to call attention to one or two striking passages and individual
judgments. The picture in the first chapter of the old actor's life on
circuit is capitally done. I do not know where to look for so animated and
succinct a rendering of that phase of past theatrical life. And the
pilgrimage to the deserted Prince of Wales's Theatre also left a vivid
impression on me, perhaps quickened by my own early memories. In all that
relates to the early Victorian drama M. Filon seems to me a sure and
penetrating guide. All lovers of the English drama, as distinguished from
that totally different and in many ways antagonistic institution, the
English theatre, must be pleased to see M. Filon stripping the spangles
from Bulwer Lytton. To this day Lytton remains an idol of English
playgoers and actors, a lasting proof of their inability to distinguish
what is dramatic truth. _The Lady of Lyons_ and _Richelieu_ still rank in
many theatrical circles with _Hamlet_ as masterpieces of the "legitimate,"
and _Money_ is still bracketed with _The School for Scandal_. It is
benevolent of M. Filon to write dramatic criticism about a nation where
such notions have prevailed for half a century.

The criticism on Tennyson as a playwright seems to me equally admirable
with the criticism on Bulwer Lytton, and all the more admirable when the
two are read in conjunction. Doubtless Tennyson will never be so
successful on the boards as Lytton has been. _Becket_ is a loose and
ill-made play in many respects, and succeeded with the public only because
Irving was able to pull it into some kind of unity by buckling it round
his great impersonation of the archbishop. But _Becket_ contains great
things, and is a real addition to our dramatic literature. It would have
been a thousand pities if it had failed. On the other hand, the success of
Lytton's plays has been a real misfortune to our drama. You cannot have
two standards of taste in dramatic poetry. Just as surely as the
circulation of bad money in a country drives out all the good, so surely
does a base and counterfeit currency in art drive out all finer and higher
things that contend with it. In his measurement of those two ancient
enemies, Tennyson and Lytton, M. Filon has shown a rare power of
understanding us and of entering into the spirit of our nineteenth-century
poetic drama.

If I may be allowed a word of partial dissent from M. Filon, I would say
that he assigns too much space and influence to Robertson. Robertson did
one great thing: he drew the great and vital tragi-comic figure of Eccles.
He drew many other pleasing characters and scenes, most of them as
essentially false as the falsities and theatricalities he supposed himself
to be superseding. I shall be reminded that in the volume before us M.
Filon says that all reforms of the drama pretend to be a return to nature
and to truth. I have elsewhere shown that there is no such thing as being
consistently and realistically "true to nature" on the stage. _Hamlet_ in
many respects is farther away from real life than the shallowest and
emptiest farce. It is in the seizure and presentation of the essential and
distinguishing marks of a character, of a scene, of a passion, of a
society, of a phase of life, of a movement of national thought--it is in
the seizure and vivid treatment of some of these, to the exclusion or
falsification of non-essentials, that the dramatist must lay his claim to
sincerity and being "true to nature." And it seems to me that one has
only to compare _Caste_, the typical comedy of an English _mésalliance_,
with _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, the typical comedy of a French
_mésalliance_, to come to the conclusion that in the foundation and
conduct of his story Robertson was false and theatrical--theatrical, that
is, in the employment of a social contrast that was effective on the
stage, but well-nigh, if not quite, impossible in life.

It is of the smallest moment to be "true to nature" in such mint and
cummin of the stage as the shutting of a door with a real lock, in the
observation of niceties of expression and behaviour, in the careful
copying of little fleeting modes and gestures, in the introduction of
certain realistic bits of business--it is, I say, of the smallest moment
to be "true to nature" in these, if the playwright is false to nature in
all the great verities of the heart and spirit of man, if his work as a
whole leaves the final impression that the vast, unimaginable drama of
human life is as petty and meaningless and empty as our own English
theatre. A fair way to measure any dramatist is to ask this question of
his work: "Does he make human life as small as his own theatre, so that
there is nothing more to be said about either; or does he hint that human
life so far transcends any theatre that all attempts to deal with it on
the boards, even the highest, even Hamlet, even OEdipus, even Faust, are
but shadows and guesses and perishable toys of the stage?"

Robertson has nothing to say to us in 1896. He drew one great character
and many pleasing ones in puerile, impossible schemes, without relation to
any larger world than the very narrow English theatrical world of 1865-70.

In his analysis of the influence of Ibsen in England and France, M. Filon
seems to touch the right note. I may perhaps be permitted a word of
personal explanation in this connection. When I came up to London sixteen
years ago, to try for a place among English playwrights, a rough
translation from the German version of _The Dolls' House_ was put into my
hands, and I was told that if it could be turned into a sympathetic play,
a ready opening would be found for it on the London boards. I knew nothing
of Ibsen, but I knew a great deal of Robertson and H. J. Byron. From these
circumstances came the adaptation called _Breaking a Butterfly_. I pray it
may be forgotten from this time, or remembered only with leniency amongst
other transgressions of my dramatic youth and ignorance.

I pass on to speak of M. Filon's work as a whole. For a generation or two
past France has held the lead, and rightly held the lead, in the European
theatre. She has done this by virtue of a peculiar innate dramatic
instinct in her people; by virtue of great traditions and thorough methods
of training; by virtue of national recognition of her dramatists and
actors, and national pride in them; and by virtue of the freedom she has
allowed to her playwrights. So far as they have abused that freedom, so
far as they have become the mere purveyors of sexual eccentricity and
perversity, so far the French drama has declined. So cunningly economic is
Nature, she will slip in her moral by hook or by crook. There cannot be an
intellectual effort in any province of art without a moral implication.

But France, though her great band of playwrights is broken up, still lords
it over the European drama, or rather, over the European theatre. There is
still a feeling among our upper-class English audiences that a play, an
author, an actor and actress, are good _because_ they are French. There
is, or has been, a sound reason for that feeling. And there is still, as
M. Filon says in his Preface, a corresponding feeling in France that
"there is no such thing as an English drama." There has been an equally
sound reason for that feeling. M. Filon has done us the great kindness of
trying to remove it. We still feel very shy in coming before our French
neighbours, like humble, honest, poor relations who are getting on a
little in the world, and would like to have a nod from our aristocratic
kinsfolk. We are uneasy about the reception we shall meet, and nervous and
diffident in making our bow to the French public. A nod from our
aristocratic relations, a recognition from France, might be of so much use
in our parish here at home. For in all matters of the modern drama England
is no better than a parish, with "porochial" judgments, "porochial"
instincts, and "porochial" ways of looking at things. There is not a
breath of national sentiment, a breath of national feeling, of width of
view, in the way English playgoers regard their drama.

M. Filon has sketched in the following pages the history of the recent
dramatic movement in England. If I were asked what was the distinguishing
mark of that movement, I should say that during the years when it was in
progress there was a steadfast and growing attempt to treat the great
realities of our modern life upon our stage, to bring our drama into
relation with our literature, our religion, our art, and our science, and
to make it reflect the main movements of our national thought and
character. That anything great or permanent was accomplished I am the last
to claim; all was crude, confused, tentative, aspiring. But there was
_life_ in it. Again I shall be reminded that dramatic reformers always
pretend that they return to nature and truth, and are generally found out
by the next generation to be stale and theatrical impostors. But if anyone
will take the trouble to examine the leading English plays of the last ten
years, and will compare them with the _serious_ plays of our country
during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find
evidence of the beginnings, the first shoots of an English drama of
greater import and vitality and of wider aim than any school of drama the
English theatre has known since the Elizabethans. The brilliant
Restoration comedy makes no pretence to be a national drama: neither do
the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith. There was no possibility of a
great national English drama between Milton and the French Revolution, any
more than there was the possibility of a great school of English poetry.
And the feelings that were let loose after the convulsions of 1793 did not
in England run in the direction of the drama. It is only within the
present generation that great masses of Englishmen have begun to frequent
the theatre. And as our vast city population began to get into a habit of
playgoing, and our theatres became more crowded, it seemed not too much to
hope that a school of English drama might be developed amongst us, and
that we might induce more and more of our theatre-goers to find their
pleasure in seeing their lives portrayed at the theatre, rather than in
running to the theatre to escape from their lives.

After considerable advances had been made in this direction, the movement
became obscured and burlesqued, and finally the British public fell into
what Macaulay calls one of its periodical panics of morality. In that
panic the English drama disappeared for the time, and at the moment of
writing it does not exist. There are many excellent entertainments at our
different theatres, and most of them are deservedly successful. But in the
very height of this theatrical season there is not a single London theatre
that is giving a play that so much as pretends to picture our modern
English life,--I might almost say that pretends to picture human life at
all. I have not a word to say against these various entertainments. I
have been delighted with some of them, and heartily welcome their success.
But what has become of the English drama that M. Filon has given so many
of the following pages to discuss and dissect? I wish M. Filon would
devote another article in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ to explain to his
countrymen what has taken place in the English theatre since his articles
were written. It needs a Frenchman to explain, and a French audience to
understand, the full comedy of the situation.

For ten years the English theatre-going public had been led to take an
increasing interest in their national drama,--I mean the drama as a
picture of life in opposition to a funny theatrical entertainment,--and
during those ten years that drama had grown in strength of purpose, in
largeness of aim, in vividness of character-painting, in every quality
that promised England a living school of drama. It began to deal with the
great realities of modern English life. It was pressing on to be a real
force in the spiritual and intellectual life of the nation. It began to
attract the attention of Europe. But it became entangled with another
movement, got caught in the skirts of the sexual-pessimistic blizzard
sweeping over North Europe, was confounded with it, and was execrated and
condemned without examination. I say without examination. Let anyone turn
to the _Times_ of November 1894, and read the correspondence which began
the assault on the modern school of English drama. Let him discover, if
he can, in the letters of those who attacked it, what notions they had as
to the relations of morality to the drama. It will interest M. Filon's
countrymen to know that British playwrights were condemned in the
interests of British morality. And when one tried to find out what
particular sort of morality the English public was trying to teach its
dramatists, one discovered at last that it was precisely that system of
morality which is practised amongst wax dolls. Not the broad, genial,
worldly morality of Shakespeare; not the deep, devious, confused, but most
human morality of the Bible; not a high, severe, ascetic morality; not
even a sour, grim, puritanic morality. No! let any candid inquirer search
into this matter and try to get at the truth of it, and ask what has been
the recent demand of the English public in this matter, and he will find
it is for a wax-doll morality.

Now, there is much to be said for the establishment of a system of
wax-doll morality, not only on the English stage, but also in the world at
large. And all of us who have properly-regulated minds must regret that,
through some unaccountable oversight, it did not occur to Providence to
carry on the due progress and succession of the human species by means of
some such system.

I say it must have been an oversight. For can we doubt that, had this
excellent method suggested itself, it would have been instantly adopted?
Can we suppose that Providence would have deliberately rejected so sweetly
pretty and simple an expedient for putting a stop to immorality, not only
on the English stage to-day, but everywhere and always?

I know there is a real dilemma. But surely those of us who are truly
reverent will suspect Providence of a little nodding and negligence in
this matter, rather than of virtual complicity with immorality--for that
is what the alternate hypothesis amounts to.

But seeing that, by reason of this lamentable oversight of Providence,
English life is not sustained and renewed by means of wax-doll morality,
what is a poor playwright to do? I am quite aware that what is going on in
English life has nothing whatever to do with what is going on at the
English theatres in the autumn of 1896. Still, like Caleb Plummer, in a
matter of this kind one would like to get "as near natur' as possible,"
or, at least, not to falsify and improve her beyond all chance of
recognition. I hope I shall not be accused of any feeling of enmity
against wax-doll morality in the abstract. I think it a most excellent,
nay, a perfect theory of morals. The more I consider it, the more eloquent
I could grow in its favour. I do not mean to practise it myself, but I do
most cordially recommend it to all my neighbours.

To return. The correspondence in the _Times_ showed scarcely a suspicion
that morality on the stage meant anything else than shutting one's eyes
alike to facts and to truth, and making one's characters behave like wax
dolls. As to the bent and purpose of the dramatist, there was so little
of the dramatic sense abroad, that an act of a play which was written to
ridicule the detestable, cheap, paradoxical affectations of vice and
immorality current among a certain section of society was censured as
being an attempt to _copy_ the thing it was _satirising_! So impossible is
it to get the average Englishman to distinguish for a moment between the
dramatist and his characters. The one notion that the public got into its
head was that we were a set of gloomy corrupters of youth, and it hooted
accordingly. Now, I do not deny that many undesirable things, many things
to regret, many extreme things, and some few unclean things, fastened upon
the recent dramatic movement. And so far as it had morbid issues, so far
as it tended merely to distress and confuse, so far as it painted vice and
ugliness for their own sakes, so far it was rightly and inevitably
condemned, nay, so far it condemned and destroyed itself. But these, I
maintain, were side-tendencies. They were not the essence of the movement.
They were the extravagances and confusions that always attend a revival,
whether in art or religion. And by the general public, who can never get
but one idea, and never more than one side of that idea, into its head at
a time, these extravagances and side-shoots are taken for the very heart
of the movement.

Take the Oxford movement. Did the great British public get a glimmer of
Newman's lofty idea of the continual indwelling miraculous spiritual
force of the Church? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of
rabid, dishonest bigots were trying to violate the purity of its
Protestant religion, so it hooted and howled, stamped upon the movement,
and went back to hug the sallow corpse of Evangelicalism for another
quarter of a century. The movement was thought to be killed. But it was
only scotched, and it is the one living force in the English Church
to-day.

Take, again, the æsthetic movement. Did the great British public get a
glimmer of William Morris's lofty idea of making every home in England
beautiful? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of idiotic fops
had gone crazy in worship of sunflowers; so it giggled and derided, and
went back to its geometric-patterned Brussels carpets, its flock
wall-papers, and all the damnable trumpery of Tottenham Court Road. The
movement was thought to be killed, but it was only scotched; and whatever
beauty there is in English interiors, whatever advance has been made in
decorating our homes, is due to that movement. Again, to compare small
things with great, in the recent attempt to give England a living national
drama, we have been judged not upon the essence of the matter, but upon
certain extravagances and side-tendencies. The great public got a notion
into its head that a set of gloomy, vicious persons had conspired to
corrupt the youth of our nation by writing immoral plays. And the untimely
accident of a notorious prosecution giving some colour to the opinion, no
further examination was made of the matter. A clean sweep was made of the
whole business, and a rigid system of wax-doll morality established
forthwith, so far, that is, as the modern prose drama is concerned. But
this wax-doll morality is only enforced against the serious drama of
modern life. It is not enforced against farce, or musical comedy. It is
only the serious dramatist who has been gagged and handcuffed. Adultery is
still an excellent joke in a farce, provided it is conveyed by winks and
nods. The whole body of a musical entertainment may reek with cockney
indecency and witlessness, and yet no English mother will sniff offence,
provided it is covered up with dances and songs. I repeat that if a
thorough examination is made of the matter, it will be found that the
recent movement has been judged upon a small side-issue.

We may hope that the English translation of M. Filon's work will do
something to reinstate us in the good opinion of our countrymen. I think,
if his readers will take his cue that during the last few years there has
been an earnest attempt on the part of a few writers to establish a living
English drama, that is, a drama which within necessary limitations and
conventions sets out with a determination to see English life as it really
is and to paint English men and women as they really are--I think if
playgoers will take that cue from M. Filon, they will get a better notion
of the truth of the case than if they still regard us as gloomy and
perverse corrupters of English youth.

A passage from George Meredith may perhaps serve to indicate the position
of the English drama at the present moment, and to point in what direction
its energies should lie when the gags and handcuffs are removed, and the
stiffness gets out of its joints. At the opening of _Diana of the
Crossways_ these memorable words occur:--

"Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist's art (and the dramatist's),
now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its
majority. We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive.
Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the
foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a
shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns,
will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no
longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to
see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty
drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects,
the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a
delight. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride
toward it will be a giant's--a century a day. And imagine the celestial
refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a
soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction (and
the drama) then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick
with our blood. Why, when you behold it you love it,--and you will not
encourage it?--or only when presented by dead hands? Worse than that
alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous
revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you
try to stifle her by drowning she comes up, not the fairest part of her
uppermost! Peruse your Realists--really your castigators, for not having
yet embraced philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended,
nature is unimpeachable, flower-like, yet not too decoratively a flower;
you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat
bedding of roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus
does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner
as well as exhibiting the outer.

"And how may you know that you have reached to philosophy? You touch her
skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
former, merely and badly aping the latter;--fine flower, or pinnacle
flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other?--and
accompanying the former it traverses tracks of desert, here and there
couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite sustained by
sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have these
gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once you are
at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funeral orb of Glaucoma, in the thick
midst of poinarded, slit-throat, rope-dependent figures, placarded across
the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the
sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it;
evanescent dreams are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.

"A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route before
you are one with divine philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will
reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the
senses, REALITY'S INFINITE SWEETNESS; for these things are in philosophy;
and the fiction (and drama) which is the summary of actual Life, the
within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
philosophy's elect handmaiden."

"Dirty drab and rose-pink, with their silly cancelling contest"--does not
that sum up the English drama of the last few years? There was certainly a
shade too much dirty drab outside a while back, but within there was
_life_. What life is there in the drama that has followed? Where does it
paint one living English character? Where does it touch one single
interest of our present life, one single concern of man's body, soul, or
spirit? What have these rose-pink revels of wax dolls to do with the
immense, tragic, incoherent Babel around us, with all its multifold
interests, passions, beliefs, and aspirations? When will philosophy come
to our aid and depose this silly rose-pink wax-doll morality?

"But," says the British mother, "I must have plays that I can take my
daughters to see."

"Quite so, my dear ma'am, and so you shall. But do you let your daughters
read the Bible? The great realities of life are there handled in a far
plainer and more outrageous way than they are ever handled on the English
stage, and yet I cannot bring myself to think that the Bible has had a
corrupt influence on the youth of our nation. Do you let them read
Shakespeare? Again there is the freest handling of all these subjects, and
again I cannot think that Shakespeare is a corrupter of English youth."

The question of verbal indecency or grossness has really very little to do
with the matter. A few centuries ago English gentlewomen habitually used
words and spoke of matters in a way that would be considered disgusting in
a smoking-room to-day. We may be very glad to have outgrown the verbal
coarseness of former generations. But we are not on that account to plume
ourselves on being the more moral. It is a matter of taste and custom, not
of morality.

The real knot of the question is in the method of treating the great
passions of humanity. If the English public sticks to its present decision
that these passions are not to be handled at all, then no drama is
possible. We shall continue our revels of wax dolls, and our theatres will
provide entertainments, not drama. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that
many of the greatest concerns of human life lie, to a great extent,
outside the sexual question; and many great plays have been, and can be,
written without touching upon these matters at all. But the general public
will have none of them. The general public demands a love-story, and
insists that it shall be the main interest of the play. And every English
playwright knows that to offer the public a pure love-story is the surest
way of winning a popular success. He knows that if he treats of unlawful
love he imperils his chances and tends to drive away whole classes--one
may say, the great majority of playgoers.

"Then why be so foolish as to do it?" is the obvious reply.

The dramatist has no choice. He is as helpless as Balaam, and can as
little tune his prophesying to a foregone pleasing issue. A certain story
presents itself to him, forces itself upon him, takes shape and coherence
in his mind, becomes organic. The story comes automatically, grows
naturally and spontaneously from what he has observed and experienced in
the world around him, and he cannot alter its drift or reverse its
significance without murdering his artistic instincts and impulses, and
making his play a dead, mechanical thing. There are many stories which
treat of pure love thwarted and baffled and at last rewarded. I do not say
that these stories may not be quite as worth telling as the others. But
from the nature of the case, the course of a lawful love, though it may
not run altogether smooth, does not offer the same tremendous
opportunities to the dramatist. In affairs of love, as in those of war,
happy are they who have no history! Almost all the great love-stories of
the world have been stories of unlawful love, and almost all the great
plays of the world are built round stories of unlawful love. David and
Bathsheba, "the tale of Troy divine," Agamemnon, OEdipus, Phædra,
Tristram and Iseult, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Abelard and Heloïse,
Paolo and Francesca, Faust and Margaret, Burns and his Scotch lassies,
Nelson and Lady Hamilton--what have they to do with wax-doll morality?
What has wax-doll morality to do with them?

I know the question is a difficult one. Much may be said for the French
custom of keeping young girls altogether away from the theatre. I believe
Dumas _fils_ did not allow his daughter to see any of his plays before she
was married--a fact that reminds one of Mr. Brooke's delightful suggestion
to Casaubon--"Get Dorothea to read you light things--Smollett--_Roderick
Random_, _Humphrey Clinker_. They're a little broad, but _she may read
anything now she's married_, you know."

But whatever liberty may for the future be allowed to the dramatist or to
his hearers, I am sure that no play which came from any English author of
repute during the years included in M. Filon's survey could work in any
girl's mind so much mischief as must be done by the constant trickle of
little cheap cockney indecencies and suggestions which make the staple of
entertainment at some of our theatres. But, as I have said, it is only the
serious dramatist who in the present state of public feeling can be called
to account for immoral teaching.

I have strayed far from my immediate subject. But if I have written
anything that cannot be considered appropriate as a preface to M. Filon's
book, I hope it may be accepted as a supplement. At the time M. Filon
wrote, the English drama was a force in the land, and had the promise of a
long and vigorous future. Now those who were leading it stand, for the
moment, defeated and discredited before their countrymen. But the movement
is not killed. It is only scotched. The English drama will always have
immortal longings and aspirations, though we may not be chosen to satisfy
them.

Meantime, one cannot help casting wishful eyes to France, and thinking in
how different a manner we should have been received by the countrymen of
M. Filon, with their alert dramatic instinct, their cultivated dramatic
intelligence, their responsiveness to the best that the drama has to offer
them. France would not have misunderstood us. France would not have
treated us in the spirit of Bumble. France would not have mistaken the
men who were sweating to put a little life into her national drama, for a
set of gloomy corrupters of youth. France would not have bound and gagged
us and handed us over to the Philistines.

M. Filon has done us a kindness in bringing us for a moment before the
eyes of Europe. He will have done us a far greater kindness if the English
edition of his book helps our own countrymen to form a juster opinion of
those who, in the face of recent discouragement and misrepresentation,
who, with many faults and blunders and deficiencies, have yet struggled to
make the English drama a real living art, an intellectual product worthy
of a great nation.

HENRY ARTHUR JONES.




AUTHOR'S PREFACE


The French public has heard a great deal about modern English poets,
novelists, statesmen, and philosophers. What is the reason that it hears
nothing, or next to nothing, about the English drama? Your first impulse
is, perhaps, to make answer--"Because there is no such thing!" A
conclusive reason, and one dispensing with the need of any other, were it
true. But is it true? As it seems to me, it was true some thirty years
ago, but is true no longer.

And, indeed, were there no English drama at the moment at which I write,
this in itself would be a phenomenon well worth studying, a problem that
it would be interesting to solve. The understanding of the miscarriages of
the mind, of the ineffectual but not wholly vain endeavours, the
frustrated efforts of Life, contains for the critic, just as it does for
the follower of any other science, the most fruitful of lessons, the most
strangely suggestive of all spectacles. Were there no English drama, we
should have to seek for the reasons--psychological, social, æsthetic--why
the Anglo-Saxon race, which produced a Shakespeare at a time when it
counted a bare three millions and covered a mere patch of ground, should
now be able to produce but clowns and dancers, when it is forty times as
numerous, and has spread itself throughout the world.

But, as a matter of fact, these premises would be false. There _is_ an
English drama. The demand for it has been felt, and the supply is
forthcoming. Or, rather, it has come. It is a strenuous youngster,
determined to keep alive, bearing up pluckily, if with trouble, against
all the maladies of childhood, against the dangers of evil influences--the
brutal roughness of some, and the undue tenderness of others. Its growth
is slow and laborious; it recalls in no way that marvellous development of
the early drama, which, towards the end of the sixteenth century, passed
almost in a breath from the hesitating and halting speech of youth into
the rich utterance of full maturity. Here we still see doubt, uncertainty,
confusion. The struggle slackens at times. Improvement is followed by
lamentable relapse. But there the drama is; it is alive, and it is
growing.

Ten or a dozen years ago, it was hard to say whether the drama was in
process of decline or of renascence, whether there was to be an end of it,
or a new beginning. There were many even among the critics who raised
their eyes in sorrow to heaven, and spoke of the drama as one speaks of
the dear departed. And they talked of the past as of a golden age--"the
palmy days, the halcyon days."

To-day, these pessimists are non-existent. Their place has been taken, it
is true, by those intolerable carpers who, in every generation, would
prevent youth from daring, regardless of the fact that youth's chief
business is to dare. But these good people remain unheeded. Everyone is
agreed that to-day is better than yesterday; and almost everyone, that
to-morrow will be better than to-day. Twenty or thirty years ago, the
dozen theatres of London were almost always empty; there are now three
times as many, almost always full. The actors, then, were for the most
part mere clowns; they are artists now. Then, some of the best of them had
little more than a bare sustenance; now, there are some of the second rank
who have their house in town and their house in the country. About 1835, a
well-known author was glad to sell a drama to Frederick Yates, manager of
the Adelphi, for the sum of £70, _plus_ £10 for provincial rights. In
1884, a successful play (that had not yet exhausted its popularity)
brought its author £10,000 within a few months, of which £3000 came from
the provinces, and to which America and Australia had also contributed.
This is a very sordid aspect of the case, but a very important one.
£10,000 to an author must prove as effectual an incentive to the modern
English author, as did a _coup d'oeil de Louis_ to the French dramatist
in the reign of the Grand Monarque. Such profits should serve to encourage
talent, if it be beyond them to generate genius.

It is not difficult to find the real reason why the French public is kept
so little and so ill informed as to the present prospects of the English
drama. To read Lord Salisbury's latest speech, all one has to do is to buy
a paper. One need but go to a bookseller to procure for oneself a volume
of Swinburne's poems, or a novel by Stevenson, or a work by Lecky or
Herbert Spencer. It is different with plays. From motives commercial
rather than literary, it has been the custom not to print these until long
after their production, and I could instance really popular dramas of
twenty or forty years ago which have never yet been published. It is
necessary, therefore, in order to study the drama, to become a regular
frequenter of the theatre; or rather, it is necessary to have followed its
course for a number of years in order to note, season by season, the
changes it has been undergoing, the tendencies which have been developing,
the growth or disappearance of foreign influences, and, finally, the
course of each individual talent and of the taste of the public. This
study, direct from nature--from the life--is not without difficulty, even
to Englishmen; how much less easy must it be to a Frenchman? Ever since it
has become the business of an actor, not merely to recite and declaim, but
to reproduce faithfully life itself, how many small points must escape the
ear of a foreigner?

And if it be hard to say where the drama now stands, to foresee whither it
is going, it is still harder to ascertain whence it has come. You expect
from a critic, and quite properly, not merely a snapshot of a literary
movement at a certain specified moment, but some record also of its
process of formation. Affairs in England, even more than elsewhere,
require to be thus approached by the historical method. There is no
understanding what they are until you have learned what they have been. In
the present instance, before examining the resuscitated drama, it is
necessary to see of what it died, and how long it remained entombed. All
this has to be found out for oneself. The critics of the preceding
generations wasted their energies upon inessential details. Theatrical
"Reminiscences" are crowded with fictitious anecdotes. This department of
history is like a garden that has been neglected and grown wild; the
pathways are lost to sight.

I have believed--fondly, perhaps--that, by my special opportunities, I
should escape some of these difficulties. I have resided long in England.
I know something of its people and its customs. I know how much value to
attach to individual testimonies, aided as I am by the thousand opinions
and feelings which are in the air, so to speak, but which find their way
never into print. I get the impressions of the public from the public
itself. Lastly, I love the theatre, and have been an enthusiastic
playgoer. During the last three or four years more especially I have seen
all the new pieces; and I may perhaps take this opportunity of expressing
my appreciation of the courtesy so kindly extended to me in this
connection by the principal managers. I may mention, among those to whom I
am most indebted, Mr. Tree, Mr. Hare, Mr. Wyndham, Mr. Alexander, and Mr.
Comyns Carr, the talented dramatist who, in his _King Arthur_, provided
Sir Henry Irving with the opportunity of rendering a last homage to the
genius of Tennyson. Indeed, I have met with wide-open doors and
outstretched hands wherever I have sought assistance in theatrical
circles. Many authors have been good enough to place at my disposal copies
of their works which had been printed only for their own use, or for that
of their interpreters upon the stage.

But my greatest debt, of course, is to contemporary critics. After having
first assisted me in my studies, they have done me the further kindness of
encouraging me with their sympathy upon the publication of the successive
instalments of my work in the pages of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Their
mere attention had been a reward; their kindly approval was more than I
had hoped for. I trust they will be able to accord the same indulgent
reception to my book, now that it is complete, and that the spirit and
feelings which have actuated me in my work will be more fully apparent.

I owe a special acknowledgment to Mr. William Archer. You will see in the
course of my book the part which he has played and is still playing, the
excellent seeds which he has sown broadcast, not all of which have yet
borne fruit. Here, I shall say only that, had I not had his books as a
guiding thread, I should have hardly ventured to risk myself in the
labyrinth of theatrical history.

There are, in the England of to-day, two schools of dramatic criticism,
whose divergence of opinion is clearly marked. They are called "New
Critics" and "Old Critics," though accidents of date or age are hardly at
all accountable for their antagonisms; it is possible that during the next
few years the old criticism may become rejuvenated and that the new
criticism may age. For my part, I have sided with neither the one nor the
other, because the rôle of neutral is best suited to a foreigner. I have
supplemented my own personal impressions by quotations, taken impartially
from both camps, of what has struck me in their criticisms as noteworthy,
or happy, or true. I think that the new school is right in wishing to free
the English theatre from foreign influences, and in its efforts to give
the drama a moral value and an ideal. But I think the old school is not
far wrong when it defends, to a certain extent, the more popular forms of
dramatic art, and when it would have the drama follow the indications of
success, and not isolate itself from that public of whose feelings it
should be the living expression.

One word in conclusion. Among the French critics who have done me the
honour of discussing my work during its serial publication, more than one
has come to the conclusion that, after all, these new English dramas were
not such great affairs, and that it was hardly worth while to make so
much fuss about them. They forget, these good people, that I promised them
no marvels; I did not invite them to a display of masterpieces. If there
are to be masterpieces at all, they will be of to-morrow, not to-day. What
I have set out to do is to ascertain at what temperature the drama comes
to flower, to see how a great section of the human race sets about making
to itself a new vehicle of enjoyment, of emotion, of thought, and, I may
even add, of moral education. It is an essay in literary history, but also
in social history. The two things go together,--are, indeed, henceforth
inseparable.

I do not merely follow, step by step, the gradual transformation of the
theatrical world; I have endeavoured to make clear the attitude taken up
by the drama in presence of the crisis through which society has been
passing during the last score or so of years. In this strange conflict
between laws and manners, upon which side will the drama definitively take
up its stand? What part will it play, and what place will it assume, in
the renovation of England by the democracy? Will it help democracy with
earnest homilies? Or check it with satire and ridicule? Or will it turn
aside from such things altogether, and aspire to those serene heights of
art, to which the noises of the plain can never reach? The secret of its
downfall or glory lies perhaps in the answering of these questions. It was
time to submit them, pending the hour of their solution.




CHAPTER I

A Glance back--From 1820 to 1830--Kean and Macready--The Strolling
Player--The Critics--Sheridan Knowles and _Virginius_--Douglas
Jerrold--His Comedies--_The Rent Day_--_The Prisoner of War_--_Black-eyed
Susan_--Collapse of the Privileged Theatres--Men of Letters come to the
Rescue of the Drama--Bulwer Lytton--_The Lady of Lyons_--_Richelieu_--
_Money_.


From 1820 to 1830 the Theatre, or, to be precise, the theatres, prospered
to all appearances exceedingly. We shall see just now the real
significance of this prosperity; it may be compared to the great ball
given by Mercadet on the eve of his bankruptcy. But no one foresaw the
collapse that was impending. It was the reign of the Adonis of sixty, who
had spent his life inventing pomades and breaking oaths. It would have
been droll, indeed, had the man who washed his dirty linen in the House of
Lords pretended to be scandalised by the licence of the stage. And his
heir, also a worn-out man of pleasure, had lived for a time with an
actress, Mrs. Jordan, who, before his accession to the throne, died of
grief, and forsaken, at St. Cloud. The small girl named Victoria, who
roamed at this time amongst the lonely avenues of the old park at
Broadstairs, and who was destined presently to bring marital love and the
domestic virtues back into fashion, was still engrossed in the minding of
her dolls.

The "privileged" theatres were frequented, or patronised,--to use the
recognised English expression, with its savour of old-time
condescension,--by Society. By the term "privileged," subventioned must
not be understood. To Drury Lane and Covent Garden alone belonged the
right of producing the legitimate drama, the plays of Shakespeare, that is
to say, and of his successors. This was their "privilege," a privilege
which might soon have become but a doubtful benefit had not great actors
arisen to keep alive the classical drama by their command on the suffrages
of the masses. The generation of actors who had studied in the school of
Garrick, and had maintained its traditions, was taking its farewell of the
stage in the person of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons--Siddons, "whose
voice," one of her contemporaries tells us, "was more delicious than the
most delicious music." Edmund Kean had already come forward, and after
him, Macready.

I try to picture to myself these two men as they appeared upon the stage,
to produce for myself from all the accounts of them that I have read the
illusion of their living presence. The first thing that comes home to one
is Kean's Bohemianism, Macready's respectability and good-breeding.
Macready was the friend of the leading men of letters of his time, and had
the advantage of their advice and support. Kean's only intimate was the
brandy-bottle that killed him. Writing to Frederick Yates, the manager of
the Adelphi, to ask him for a box, he says, "I don't want to herd with the
mob. I like the money of the public, but the public itself I scorn." He in
his turn might be looked upon with scorn, were it not for the sufferings
of his childhood and youth. If ever man had the right to hate life, it was
he.

At Madame Tussaud's the two rivals may now be seen standing side by side,
Kean wearing the kilt of Macbeth and Macready the chlamys of Coriolanus.
Save for his small size, the former seems the better endowed by nature;
his countenance is sombre and bears the stamp of the tragedian. The
angular and wrinkled face of Macready, on the other hand,--his slitlike
mouth, his close-compressed lips and projecting jaws,--might have made the
fortune of a clown. He had only to emphasise or modify its effects,
indeed, for his tragic qualities to become comic. It was thus that he
rendered so admirably the officiousness and fussiness of Oakley, the sly
sensuality of Joseph Surface, the English Tartufe. Alas! he evoked a smile
sometimes as Othello; when the Moorish _condottiere_, this personification
of a passionate, noble, and high-strung race, was lost in an insensate
negro or, if Théophile Gautier were to be believed, something lower still,
"an anthropoid ape."

Contemporaries seem agreed in attributing to Kean more genius, more
talent to Macready. But there are many occasions when talent serves better
than genius. To see Kean, said Coleridge, was to read Shakespeare by
flashes of lightning. It is a method which has its merits, but by it one
misses a good deal. Kean had some wonderful moments, then relapsed into
dulness and insignificance. He would stumble, like a schoolboy reciting a
lesson which had no meaning for him, through the whole of the speech of
the Moor of Venice before the Senate, "letting himself go" only in the
last verse, in which his emotion on seeing Desdemona brought down the
house. He concentrated a whole passion into these final words. It was
always thus with him.

I may say of them, following Mr. Archer: of the two, Kean was the greater
actor and Macready the greater artist. Everything that pertained to
instinct was stronger in the one, and everything that pertained to
intellect was stronger in the other. Macready bore himself best in moods
of calm, rendered with most effect the more virtuous emotions,--_moral_
passions one may call them. All that was greatest in Shakespeare, the very
soul of his poetry, was revealed through Kean. On one point only had
Macready the advantage: he had a way of gazing into space when his lined
and haggard countenance seemed to tell of the seeing of things invisible.
There was no one like Macready for the suggestion of the supernatural. In
all the other provinces of terror Kean was the real master.

Mr. Wilton, the father of an actress of whom I shall have much to say in
these pages, used to tell how in his youth, when he was still a young and
unknown actor, he had had the honour of playing with Edmund Kean. They
were rehearsing the scene in which Shylock, baulked of his coveted gain,
rushes frantically upon the stage crying out for his prey.

"Have you ever seen me in this before?" inquired the great actor of his
humble colleague.

"No, sir."

"Well, we must rehearse it then, otherwise you would be too much startled
this evening."

They went through it, and yet Wilton tells us that when the evening came,
Kean terrified him so by the indescribable violence of his performance
that he was within an ace of losing his head and fleeing from the stage as
one might flee from the cage of a wild beast.

It may be supposed from all this that Kean was in the habit of abandoning
himself entirely to the inspiration of the moment. Now, inspiration upon
the stage is almost a meaningless expression. In the very moments when the
terrifying actor was crossing the stage like a madman, he was counting his
steps. As for Macready, immediately before the great scene of Shylock he
would work himself up into excitement, emitting every imaginable oath, and
brandishing a heavy ladder until he panted actually for breath. Then he
would rush down the stage, pallid, breathless, the sweat coursing down his
face, the very picture of a man bursting with rage. The audience would
have laughed rather than have shuddered had they seen the ladder!

Macready's voice was so rich and so beautiful that it delighted even those
who could not follow the meaning of the words which it gave forth. But he
was too intelligent an actor to make use of it as a mere instrument of
music. Until his time verses were chanted on the stage. He himself was
content to declaim them. English dramatic verse consists of a succession
of five iambics, which, by the alternation of short feet and long, results
in a regular and cadenced rhythm. From time to time an imperfection, the
deliberate introduction for instance of a trochee, or perhaps a redundant
syllable added at the end of the verse, has the effect of breaking this
monotony, but it recommences at once, and the mind relapses under its
sway, just as a child is sent to sleep again by a lullaby. My foreign ear
was long in taking to it, but at last I began to derive from its melody
the same delight that the music of Greek and Latin verse had given me long
before. This verse, so interesting and curious in its structure, seems to
bear a certain secret affinity with the genius of the English race; the
rhythm would seem to have been suggested by the clattering of a horse's
hoofs, or by the murmuring of waves.

It is, then, no easy matter to deal with it. Macready approached it
reverentially, as was but fitting in a scholar and a devotee of
Shakespeare. He wished to leave to it all its melody, its poetic beauty,
but he wished at the same time to emphasise the most important words and
to bring out the full force of their meaning. He wished to blend the pure
classicism of John Kemble with the passion of Kean, and to add that
tendency to realism which marked his own temperament, and which sometimes
carried him too far; when as Macbeth he came back from Duncan's room, he
looked, according to Lewes, like an Old Bailey ruffian.

It is enough for me to have shown that Macready, like many others in
different parts of Europe in 1825, was prepared for a drama that should be
in closer touch with life. In France, Romanticism came to turn aside and
check the movement. In England, there came absolutely nothing.

But the bankruptcy of the new school was still far off, and the literary
atmosphere was charged with warlike sounds at the time when Macready made
his appearance in France, with an English company, in the course of the
year 1827. He was received as a missionary. He had come to preach
Shakespeare to a tribe of poor "ignoramuses," whom their fathers had
taught to worship the idols of Lemierre and Luce de Lancival, but who were
now anxious to be converted. The young "leading lady" was a Miss Smithson,
whose Irish accent clashed somewhat with the verse of Shakespeare. The
Parisians thought she had talent, and lost their hearts to "la belle
Smidson."[1] In London she was a joke. It is certain, however, that these
performances revealed to him who was to be the only true dramatist of the
romantic school--to Alexandre Dumas--the secret of a new art; that they
made an epoch, therefore, in our literary history, and that they affixed
the seal to the reputation of the English tragedian.

Over and above the privileged theatres, there were a number of others,
such as the Haymarket and the Adelphi, at which farces and melodramas were
chiefly given. In the provinces there prevailed a curious system, without
any analogue, so far as I know, in France, that of going on circuit,--a
term borrowed, like the system itself, from the language and customs of
the law. Just as the English judges make the round at certain dates of all
the important towns within a certain district, holding assizes at each,
and accompanied by an army of barristers, solicitors, and legal officials
of all kinds, so the travelling companies of actors would cater for a
whole county, or group of counties, giving a series of performances in the
theatre of every town at certain fixed dates, in addition to fête-days and
market-days. Communication was slow and costly in those days, and trips to
London infinitely rarer than they are now. The country folk had to look to
their travelling company to keep them in touch with the successes of the
moment.

On arriving in a new town, the manager's wife would go about soliciting
respectfully the patronage of the ladies of the place. The manager busied
himself over everything, played minor rôles, presided over the box-office,
undertook the scene painting, and would even take off his coat and turn up
his sleeves and lend a hand to the machinist. His life, and the life of
all his company, was half _bourgeois_, half Bohemian; always _en route_,
but always on the same beat, always coming upon familiar and friendly
faces,--a beat on which his father and grandfather before him had followed
the same career. He had friends living in every city, dead friends in
every churchyard. Children were born to him on his travels, and when four
or five years old made their appearance upon the stage. These comings and
goings, the journeyings over green fields, the stoppages and ample
breakfastings at little hillside inns, while the horses browsed at large
along the hedges,--the freshness and peaceful rusticity of all these
things, alternating with the tinsel of the theatre and the applause of the
audiences, with the artificiality and feverishness of theatrical
life,--must have been a constant entertainment to the little actors and
actresses of eight or nine. For the adults, however, the life was a hard
one, and only too often their _roman comique_ was a _roman tragique_ in
reality.

The public of these small towns wanted, on their part, to know something
of what went on behind the scenes. Sides were taken on the subject of the
actor's life, and hot discussions were called forth. Idle pens took to
writing pamphlets for or against individual actors, and these had to
defend themselves as best they might against their malignant inquisitors,
using their booths as pulpits for the purpose. Here, for instance, is an
incident that occurred one evening in a Northern town after the curtain
had been raised for _Antony and Cleopatra_. The _jeune premier_ comes
forward to the footlights, and takes the hand of one of the leading
actresses with the stiff, staid courtliness of former days, and the
following dialogue is exchanged between them:--

"Have I ever been guilty of any injustice of any kind to you since you
have been in the theatre?"

"No, sir" (she replies).

"Have I ever behaved to you in an ungentlemanlike manner?"

"No, sir."

"Have I ever kicked you?"

"Oh, no! sir!"

The audience applauds. Antony and Cleopatra assume their correct attitudes
and (this prologue to Shakespeare successfully performed) proceed with
their rôles.[2]

From time to time a great artist came forth, after three or four
generations of mediocrities, from one of these theatrical nurseries. The
others remained tied to their stake, revolving ceaselessly within the
orbit of their chain. For them there was no question of glory or fortune.
They lived simply and happily, if only they came to the end of the year
without having gone to prison, and if only at the end of their life they
saw their children growing up and getting educated. Their courage they
derived in part from the bottle, in part from religion. A correspondence
which has come to light through an unforeseen chance (a grandson who had
become famous) revivifies for us the actor-manager on circuit. He is a
good fellow, but a trifle sententious. He quotes from the works of his
authors, tragic and comic (he has them at his finger-ends) axioms upon all
the incidents and experiences of life. He quotes them just as Nehemiah
Wallington or Colonel Hutchinson used to quote the Bible. He is as easily
excited and as easily calmed as a child. A storm troubles him as a bad
omen. A rainbow smiles on him as a promise. Providence may be trusted, he
believes, to look after the takings of poor players. He is the Vicar of
Wakefield become _père noble_.

Neither in this monotonous and easy-going phase of life, nor in the
theatrical world of London, had anyone any idea of modifying the forms or
the tendencies of the stage. Those whose duty it should have been to give
the necessary impulse did not seem even to suspect that there was any such
work for them to perform. The critics of the time, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt,
Charles Lamb, have achieved a permanent place in literature. And yet when
one reads them one is disappointed. Except for a few pages of Lamb, one
may look to them in vain for the expression of anything like a general
idea. They are taken up almost altogether in discussing and comparing the
different actors. It does not occur to them to attempt an appreciation or
a classification of the plays, for these plays had already been
definitively classified and pronounced upon. There was no drama, they
seemed to think, except that of Shakespeare and his satellites; and as for
comedy, it had said its last word when Goldsmith and Sheridan died. And
they were quite content that this should be so. They saw no reason why
they, their successors, and the general public, should not continue until
the end of time to carp over an entry of Macbeth or an exit of
Othello!--or why they should not sit out revivals without end of _The
School for Scandal_ or _She Stoops to Conquer_. There are eras which will
have novelties at all cost, and eras which cling to antiquity.

Macready, with the instinct of a "realistic" and "modern" actor, kept on
the lookout for authors. A former Irish schoolmaster, who also had been an
actor, and whose name was Sheridan Knowles, brought him a tragedy entitled
_Virginius_ which he had written in three months. He made a good deal of
this point, never having read, probably, the scene of the sonnet of
Oronte. The piece was put into rehearsal and played at Covent Garden in
the spring of 1820. Reynolds introduced the unknown author to the public
in a carefully-written prologue. In it he ridiculed the drama of the
period, which he described as "stories"--

  "... piled with dark and cumbrous fate,
  And words that stagger under their own weight."

He promised to return to Truth and Nature, the invariable programme of all
attempts at reforming the drama. And as a matter of fact, _Virginius_
might be accepted in a certain sense as a return to Truth and Nature. It
belonged to what we were going to call in France, twenty-five years later,
the School of Common Sense. Or if one prefers to look back instead of
forward, one might say that in it the rules of Diderot and Sedaine's
_Drame Bourgeois_ seem to have been transferred to Roman tragedy. The
piece, like the plays of Shakespeare, was partly in verse and partly in
prose, but the verse was little more, really, than metrical prose. The
plot developed clearly and logically with a scrupulous observance of the
probable and natural. The heroine (one smiles at having to describe her by
so grand a name) is for all the world a little _pensionnaire_ who might
have got her ideas on rectitude from Miss Edgeworth. She occupies herself
with her needle in working together her initials and those of the young
man of her choice, who is no other than the tribune Icilius. It is this
piece of embroidery which reveals her secret. "My father is incensed with
you," she says to Icilius, and, her lover becoming impassioned, she covers
her face with her hands, saying (as is correct at such a juncture), "Leave
me, leave me!" He does not obey, and the author, not knowing how else to
prolong the scene, has recourse to high-sounding language.... "Thou dost
but beggar me, Icilius," exclaims Virginia, "when thou makest thyself a
bankrupt." And Icilius replies, ... "My sweet Virginia, we do but lose and
lose, and win and win, playing for nothing but to lose and win. Then let
us drop the game--and thus I stop it," and he stops it by seizing her in
his arms.

In the scene in which the client of Appius attempts to possess himself of
her, Virginia remains absolutely mute. She is mute also in the great scene
of the judgment, and she seems, moreover, to have understood nothing of
what has been happening, for she asks her father if he is going to take
her home. From the angels and furies of Shakespeare and Corneille we have
come down to a virtuous idiot, and are told that this is a return to
Nature.

Virginius is an excellent father, a liberal-minded member of the middle
class, interesting himself in politics. He knows his rights and does not
stand in awe of the ministers. He reminds one of the city man who returns
home to his comfortable residence in Chiswick or Hampstead after his day's
work in his Leadenhall Street office. He is a widower, but his house is
looked after by a very respectable elderly person, in whose excellent
sentiments and weak intelligence we recognise a housekeeper of the
superior type. The whole household is tranquil, well behaved,
Christian,--I might even say, Puritan.

Doubtless the Romans of the republic were men like ourselves, but a true
picture of their humanity should reveal characteristics different from
ours. The author should either have sought out these characteristics, or
else have restricted himself to that sphere of great passions and heroic
madnesses in which all the centuries meet on common ground. One is
obliged, however unwillingly, to admit the impossibility of retrospective
realism.

When Virginius returns from the camp to defend his child, he gazes on her
long, and tells her he had never seen her look so like her mother--

  "... It was her soul, ... her soul that played just then
  About the features of her child, and lit them
  Into the likeness of her own. When first
  She placed thee in my arms--I recollect it
  As a thing of yesterday!--she wished, she said,
  That it had been a man. I answered her,
  It was the mother of a race of men;
  And paid her for thee with a kiss."...

There is something at once virile and moving in this passage, but how many
such cases are to be found in this tragedy? The paternal emotion of
Virginius prepares us but ill for the heroic crime which he is to commit.
There is the same contrast between the antiquity of the events and the
modernness of the characters.

But the ruin of the piece was the fifth act. Virginia dead, it remains
only to punish Appius according to the good old laws of tragic justice.
For that, a single moment and a single gesture had been enough. Sheridan
Knowles was in the position of being obliged to write his fifth act and
having nothing to put into it. He had recourse to a mad scene. Merimée has
written that "_il faut laisser aux débutants les foux et les chiens_."
This doctrine has Homer and Shakespeare against it. On the other hand, the
example of Sheridan Knowles proves that the recourse to madness will not
always get the beginner out of his difficulty.

Virginius has succeeded in making his way into Appius's prison--

  "How if I thrust my hand into your breast,
  And tore your heart out, and confronted it
  With your tongue. I'd like it. Shall we try it?"

When the old centurion plunged his hands into the robes of the _decemvir_,
as though he expected to find Virginia in his pocket, and when Appius,
horrified at finding himself "caged with a madman," appealed for help with
all the strength of his lungs whilst calling out to his assailant, "Keep
down your hands! Help! Help!"--I cannot imagine how the spectators of 1820
can have refrained from laughter. The two men quitted the scene fighting,
and turned up again in another room,--for the prison was a veritable suite
of rooms. Having killed Appius, the old man grew calm, and Icilius had
but to call him by his name to bring back to him his reason. He slipped a
small urn into his hands. "What is this?" asks Virginius. "That is
Virginia." And the curtain fell.

Contemporary critics admitted that the last act was somewhat weak. It was
curtailed, but delete it as one would, it was still too long. Had it been
reduced to ten lines, these ten lines had been ten lines too much.

In spite of everything, however, _Virginius_, by Macready's help, remained
a masterpiece for twenty-five years! Knowles made haste to produce some
more. He tells in one of his naïve prefaces, how he went to stop with his
friend, Mr. Robert Dick, near an Irish lough known for its scenery and its
fish, how he would spend the morning at his composition and the afternoon
angling, and how his host would snatch his fishing line from his hands
whenever he caught him using it before midday.... If only Mr. Dick had let
him fish in peace! The trout he might have hooked had been at least as
valuable as his verse and prose.

If there was any sort of foreshadowing of a national drama in the years
1830 to 1840, it must be sought for in the works of Douglas Jerrold.
France knows little of Jerrold, who knew France so well. His was a valiant
little soul; his life was one long battle--a battle against obscurity,
against ill luck, against the enemies of his country, against the
oppressors of the poor, last but not least, against all those whom he
disliked. He belonged to that theatrical world at which I have glanced. He
was the son of a provincial manager who had met with failure. In his early
youth, while yet a child, one may say, he served as midshipman in the wars
against Napoleon. He became a journalist later, and threw himself into the
midst of politics. Whatever may be said of his caustic and aggressive
temperament, he belonged, every inch of him, to that noble generation
which aspired so fervently after better things, which strove so
strenuously for what was right, which believed it could help humanity
forward on the way to a progress without bounds. For forty years he
vibrated with generous passions, and grew calm only in the presence of
death, which he met like a stoic but with a simplicity not all the stoics
knew. I have been brought into intimate relations with his son, who has
repeated to me his last words--"This is as it should be." To fight for
justice and to accept the inevitable without fear,--this was the life of a
man.

_The Rent Day_ was played on January 25, 1832, that is to say, at the
commencement of the memorable year which was to see the passing of the
Reform Bill. It is the day upon which the rents have become due. The
tenants have brought their money. There is drinking and laughing and
singing, the while the heaps of crowns are exchanged for receipts,--for
nothing was accomplished in England in those days without drinking, and
on rent day it had been almost a disgrace not to be at least "well on."
The middleman is presiding over the function. This morning he has received
a letter from the young squire, thus expressed--"Master Crumbs, use all
despatch, and send me, on receipt of this, five hundred pounds. Cards have
tricked me and the devil cogged the dice. Get the money at all costs, and
quickly.--ROBERT GRANTLEY." The middleman therefore must have no pity.
There is one farmer who cannot pay; his brother the schoolmaster comes to
plead for him. He himself is too poor to lend--

    _Toby_ (the schoolmaster): "My goods and chattels are a volume of
    _Robinson Crusoe_, ditto _Pilgrim's Progress_, with Plutarch's
    _Morals_, much like the morals of many other people--a good deal dog's
    eared."...

    _Crumbs_: "Has your brother no one to speak for him?"

    _Toby_: "Now, I think on't, yes. There are two."

    _Crumbs_: "Where shall I find them?"

    _Toby_: "In the churchyard. Go to the graves of the old men, and there
    are the words the dead will say to you:--'We lived sixty years in
    Holly Farm; in all that time we never begged an hour of the squire; we
    paid rent, tax, and tithe; we earned our bread with our own hands, and
    owed no man a penny when laid down here. Well, then, will you be hard
    on young Heywood; will ye press upon our child, our poor Martin, when
    murrain has come upon his cattle and blight fallen upon his corn?'
    This is what they will say."

The middleman is not one to be moved by the supplications of the
schoolmaster. He replies monotonously, inexorably--"My accounts; I must
settle my accounts!" Grouped round him, farther back, are the instruments
of his lowly tyrant, the beadle (for whom a young writer now hidden from
the public eye in the gallery of the House of Commons, Charles Dickens,
has in store so terrible a cudgelling) and the appraiser. In those days it
was the beadle's function to execute evictions for the benefit of young
squires who had lost at cards. The first act of _The Rent Day_ concludes
with a spectacle of this kind. We witness the seizing of the peasant's bed
and of all his furniture, down to a bird-cage and the children's toys. The
scene follows its course; entreaties, curses, threats, then silence and
desolation. It was thus that the social question was submitted. Had we
been there, and in our twentieth year,--you and I who have to contest
against the grandsons of the victims, become in their turn
slave-drivers,--we should have joined with the rest of the pit in cheering
Jerrold.

The first act gives promise of a vigorous comedy of manners, but we sink
gradually into a dense melodrama crowded with absurd incidents and
extravagant surprises. Was this Jerrold's fault, or that of a public which
insisted upon monster jokes and monster crimes? I am inclined to adopt
the latter explanation, for supply is regulated by demand; a mercantile
axiom which resolves itself in a great natural and highly scientific law.

Jerrold could achieve a light and realistic touch at need, and he has
given proof of it in _A Prisoner of War_. The scene is laid in France
shortly after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Quite impartially, and
with consummate wit, Jerrold holds up to ridicule the _chauvinisme_ of the
two nations. He does not confound bombast with valour. "Soldiers," says
one character, "should die and civilians lie for their country." We are
shown--and this has some historical value--the English prisoners living
comfortably in a French town, frequenting the Café Imperial, regaling
themselves on the bulletins of the "Grande Armée," with no other
obligation than that of answering the roll-call morning and evening. They
have money, for the lodging-house keepers compete for their favour; and
they pay little French boys to sing "Rule Britannia." As it seems to me,
if Garneray's Memoirs are to be believed, our compatriots were hardly so
well off on the English hulks.

But what strikes me most in _A Prisoner of War_ is one really ingenious
and moving scene. It is the evening. An old officer, a prisoner, has
remained late over a game of cards with a comrade. Meantime his daughter
Clary has a man in her bedroom. Don't be alarmed--the man is her husband.
A secret marriage is always introduced in English plays wherever a
seduction is to be found in ours. Suddenly Clary is called out to, loudly,
by her father. She imagines herself found out, and arrives quite pallid.
What had she been doing? her father asks. How was it she had a light still
in her window? So she had been reading, eh? Still reading--always reading.
And what had she been reading? Novels! As though there weren't enough real
tears in the world--real, scalding, bitter tears from breaking hearts--but
we must have a parcel of lying books to make people cry double! And what
was this silly novel of hers? Clary doesn't know what to answer, and
begins telling her own story--the youth of no family and fortune, the
moment of recklessness, the giving of her heart to him and then her hand.
"Well, and how did it end?" asks the old officer. Clary had "not come to
the end"! Ah, then (he resumes), she had turned down the page when he had
interrupted her? But he could tell her how it ended. The young couple went
upon their knees, and the father swore a little, then took out his pocket
handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and forgave them.

At this Clary's face lights up with hope. So that would be the ending,
according to him! He could assure her of it? Yes, he replies, he could
assure her of it. She is on the point of falling upon her knees. Behind
the half-open door, behind which there glimmers the light of a candle, her
lover waits, ready to rush forward upon a word from her. "Of course, in
real life it would be quite another thing," goes on her father. "If it
were I, what would you do?" "I'd kill him like a dog. And as for you--But
there, it's too horrible to think of! Let's talk of something else." And
he tells her he has found a husband for her. Naturally she protests. The
old man goes off again into a fury. "These cursed novels are turning your
head. I shall go and burn them this instant." And he steps towards the
door, behind which Clary's lover stands trembling.

All this is old-fashioned enough; it dates from the time when the drama
was made out of the materials of a vaudeville. And yet I think that even
nowadays this scene would tell.

But once again Jerrold had to follow the public taste which led him so
terribly astray. His greatest success was his worst production,
_Black-eyed Susan_, the popularity of which does not appear to have been
even yet exhausted. The hero is a sailor, who translates the simplest
ideas into nautical phraseology; the heroine a woman of humble birth, who
expresses the loftiest sentiments in the finest language. The prolonged
success of such a piece shows the delight which the lower sections of the
public derive from the extravagant and the absurd,--the gross idealism, as
one may call it, of the masses.

It is more difficult to understand how Jerrold, who had some regard for
realism, and who had himself served on the sea, could have brought himself
to write a drama which had in it not a semblance of truth, not a touch of
nature. In spite of all, however, even in _Black-eyed Susan_, one may find
that unrestrained violence, that _diable au corps_, which our fathers
accepted willingly as passion.

It was not the public taste alone that was at fault; from the year 1830
the commercial decadence of the English theatre became more and more
marked. As often happens, contemporaries failed to appreciate the real
meaning of this, and attributed it to accidental causes; amongst others,
to the rivalry between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a rivalry which was
carried to absurd extremes under some of the managers, who bid against
each other, both for plays and players, to an extent that ruined them.
Then came the notion of ending this dangerous competition by uniting the
two houses under the same management, but the enterprise proved too big
for one man and for a single company. The separate existence had to come
into force again. A certain Captain Polhill, who aspired to the rôle of a
Mæcenas, lost fifty thousand pounds in two years over the management of
Drury Lane. Then Macready in his turn had a try, and managed the two
theatres successively from 1838 to 1843.

The privileged theatres were no longer living on their privilege; they
were dying of it. Theatres were springing up all round them, which
succeeded sometimes in drawing the public by strange means. Edmund Yates,
whose father was then manager of the Adelphi, has given us in his memoirs
some idea of the attractions then in vogue: a Chinese giant, Indian
dancers, a legless acrobat who got himself up with spreading wings as a
monstrous fly, and who sprang about, tied on to a thread, from floor to
ceiling. The privileged theatres had no other course than to emulate the
unprivileged ones. They produced Shakespeare in the form of
curtain-raisers, or to wind up the evening before half-empty benches. They
sliced him, carved him limb from limb, and served him up in bits, or
floating in a dish of music, with a garnishment of loud and vulgar _mise
en scène_, of which the contemporaries of Elizabeth would have been
ashamed. And, in spite of all, in spite even of Macready's talent (Kean
had died in 1833), they could not get the public to accept him. The new
public which filled the theatres was gluttonous rather than _gourmet_, and
wanted not quality but quantity--at least six acts every evening, and
sometimes even seven or eight. Masterful, clamorous, ill-bred, uncouth in
its expression both of enjoyment and of dissatisfaction, its attitude
astounded Price Puckler-Muskau, a very careful observer who visited
England about the time. Macready acknowledges that there were some corners
in Drury Lane where a respectable woman might not venture. The barbarians
had begun to arrive; it was the first wave of democracy before which the
_habitué_, the playgoer of the old school, was forced to flee.

In 1832 a Commission was instituted by Parliament for the purpose of
going into the question of liberty for the theatre. The members could not
agree upon the subject, and the question was not settled until after
eleven years of discussion. Before this ultimate surrender of Privilege
and Tradition to the new spirit, one last effort had been made by men of
letters to save the theatre. This was when the great tragedian undertook
the management of Covent Garden. There was only one feeling in the world
of literature: "We must back up Macready!" Everyone helped. John Forster
applied himself to the stage management. Leigh Hunt left aside his
criticisms to undertake a tragedy (based on a legend in which Shelley had
already found inspiration), and those who could not do so much penned
prologues and epilogues and brought them to Covent Garden, just as in
former days, at moments of national peril, the patriotic rich brought
their valuables to the Mint.[3]

From this abortive renaissance there remain one reputation and three
plays. The three plays are _The Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_;
the reputation is that of Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton. Bulwer passed
himself off as a _grand seigneur_ and a genius; he was really but a clever
man and a dandy, who exploited literature for his social advancement. He
affected a lofty originality, but his talents were mostly imitative. His
chief gift, almost entirely wanting in his books, but very notable in his
life, was what we call _finesse_. He took from the Byronian Satanism as
much as England would put up with in 1840. He copied Victor Hugo secretly
and discreetly. A sort of Gothic democrat, he managed at the same time to
charm romantic youths and flatter the proletariat by pretending to hurl
down that society in whose front rank he aspired to take his place. His
novels were terribly long-winded, but there are generations which find
such a quality to their taste. When at last it was discovered that his
sublimity was a spurious sublimity, that his history was false history,
his "middle-ages" bric-a-brac, his poetry mere rhetoric, his democracy a
farce, his human heart a heart that had never beat in a man's breast, his
books mere windy bladders,--why, it was too late! The game had been played
successfully and was over--the squireen of Knebworth, the self-styled
descendant of the Vikings, had founded a family and hooked a peerage.

He had an eye for all the popular causes which were to be served--and were
likely to be of service. When there was talk of reforming the drama, he at
once came to the front and took the lead. He was the heart and soul of the
Commission of 1832. He was one of those who came to the support of
Macready in 1838. It was to this end he wrote _The Lady of Lyons_ (without
putting his name to it at first).

This is a literary melodrama; a detestable combination, for melodrama,
considered either as a variation from drama proper or as a separate type,
is not to be raised to the dignity of literature by the veneering of it
with a thin layer of poetry. This operation does but produce wild and
violent incongruities. In the first act of _The Lady of Lyons_, Madame
Deschappelles is a Palais Royal _Maman_. Only a Palais Royal _Maman_, and
only one of the most pronounced of them at that, could imagine she would
become a dowager princess by marrying her daughter to a prince. Pauline
belongs to the same repertory. What are one's feelings, then, on hearing
tragic verses from her lips in the third act and seeing her compete with
Imogene and Griselda in the sublimity (and absurdity) of her
self-sacrifice! In the fourth act she has resumed something of her natural
temperament--the temperament of a prim and tedious governess.

But I suppose I must put up with Pauline Deschappelles willy-nilly! It is
one of the accepted doctrines of the old dramatic psychology that a
character can pass from good to evil at critical moments, and pass out
again even when all egress is barred. It is an absurd notion, but if
Bulwer conforms to it, at least he is in the same boat with many others.
Where he is himself at fault--that which indicates the obliquity of his
moral outlook--is his having presented to us in Claude Melnotte a hero who
is a double-dyed cheat. A mere peasant by birth, he passes himself off as
a prince and marries under his false name the daughter of a rich
bourgeois; a soldier by profession, he becomes a general within two years,
and in these two years amasses a fortune. How? By what methods of
brigandage we are not told, but we are left to accept it as a matter of
course. As regards the first point, love may perhaps be held to excuse the
crime; as regards the second, no one seems ever to have raised any
objection, and it has been left for me to state my difficulty. In a
sufficiently disingenuous preface, Bulwer accounts for the incoherences
and extravagances of his hero by the state of extraordinary excitement
into which men's minds had been thrown by the French Revolution. This
explanation has sufficed for the author's fellow-countrymen, and the
Revolution has a broad back. But I am afraid that Bulwer was not clear in
his mind as to the kind of madness to which Frenchmen were impelled by
it,--and still more, that he has confounded our generals with our
contractors. Our Desaix and our Ouvrards are not made of the same clay nor
moulded in the same form; a fact as to which, unfortunately, he remained
unenlightened.

After having made his anonymity serve the purpose of an advertisement, the
author consented to reveal his identity whilst announcing at the same time
that _The Lady of Lyons_ would be a sole experiment. The very next year he
appeared before the public with the tragedy of _Richelieu_, in which
Macready played the principal rôle. This piece may be compared with the
Cromwell of Victor Hugo. It was marked by the same mixture of tragedy and
melodrama; the same display of historical documents and the same ignorance
of what is essential in history; the same use of the lowest and the most
eccentric expedients to raise a laugh or cause a shudder; the same
superficial and crude psychology which in each character, male or female,
great or small, reveals the personality of the author. Even when this
author is a Victor Hugo it is bad enough! But when it is a Bulwer--!

When he blended into one plot the _journée des Dupes_ and the conspiracy
of the Duc de Bouillon, together with some features borrowed from the
adventure of Cinq-Mars and De Thou, the author mingled together two
periods which could not and should not be thus confounded, the beginning
and the end of Richelieu's career.[4] He managed, too, to falsify English
history as well, incidentally, by making Richelieu refer in Council to
Cromwell, at that time a still obscure member of the House of Commons.
Richelieu speaks of the antagonism between Charles and Oliver at a period
when the latter is not even a captain of cavalry. But what is an
anachronism of this kind compared to that which involves the principal
character in one continued topsy-turveydom? It is the drawback both of the
historical play and the historical novel, that they put the great figures
of history before us in a form and in an attitude that their
contemporaries could have never witnessed; confessing, describing,
revealing themselves just to illustrate their character by their
conversation, always dilating on their deeds instead of doing them. But of
all the braggarts in theatrical history, Bulwer's Richelieu is the most
vainglorious and the most intolerable. It is all very well for the author
to say in his preface that the cardinal was the father of French
civilisation and the architect of the monarchy; he may say what he likes:
but we cannot stand Richelieu when he talks of himself in the same strain
and in the third person, just as Michelet and Carlyle might in a fit of
raving; nor when he counterfeits death in order to play the ghost, nor
when he weeps theatrically, and addresses declamatory love messages to "La
France."--"France, I love thee,--Richelieu and France are one!" Nor can we
believe in him when he sees modern France come to life again from out the
cinders of feudalism. After such nonsensical dicta, indeed, one would be
hardly surprised to hear him exclaim, "I am the precursor of 1789; what I
cannot consummate, Bonaparte shall achieve in the Sessions of the Conseil
d'Etat!"

The secondary characters are one idea'd. Beringhen can say nothing but
"Let's discuss the pâté!" and the Duc d'Orleans is limited to "Marion
dotes on me." To the tragi-comedy there is tacked on a melodrama made
after the approved methods of the Boulevard--a succession of events and
surprises which cancel out. You feel you are expected to shout, Bravo
Richelieu! bravo Baradas! Just as at the Porte Saint Martin or at the
Ambigu you cry out, Bravo d'Artagnan! bravo Mordaunt! It is the system of
Dumas without his art.

Lord Lytton lacked both imagination and ingenuity. His effects are poor,
and he overdoes them. The first resuscitation of Richelieu comes near to
impressing one, the second is simply silly. The kernel of the play
consists of a document which passes through every pocket but never reaches
its address. At the moment, the owner of this treasure is a prisoner at
the Bastille. Instead of searching him, the Government sends a courtier to
seize him by the throat and rob him of it. The scene is witnessed through
a key-hole and described to us by a little page of Richelieu's--the rôle
being played by a woman. The page throws himself on the courtier the
moment he comes out in order to snatch from him the fateful paper, and the
conclusion of the drama results from these two encounters. One might sum
up _Richelieu_ as a mixture of bad Hugo with worse Dumas!

_Money_ is by way of depicting English Society as it was in 1840. It
recognised itself, or rather its enemies recognised it, in this
caricature! Are we to believe that the gambling scene in the third act
takes place in an aristocratic club? It is more in keeping with the back
parlour of a public-house. A very well-known critic, who represents the
ideas of a whole class and of a whole school, in alluding to the success
which the piece met with in the first instance, and which it meets with
still on every revival, declares that the spectators wished to show their
appreciation of the "humour of a scholar." I must confess that I can
recognise neither the scholar nor the humour. On the contrary, what I see
in it is a spurious sensibility and that moral obliquity to which I have
referred. Alfred Evelyn, who has been enriched by the will of an eccentric
cousin, and who now sees the world at his feet after having experienced
its disdain, decides to share his fortune with an unknown girl who has
sent £10 to his old nurse at a time when he himself was too poor to come
to her aid. It is in this silly intention that he is throwing away his
happiness, and that the plot finds its motive. He is engaged to a young
girl whom he doesn't love, and in order to get rid of her, this mirror of
refinement, this Alcestes with all his fine scorn of average humanity,
pretends to ruin himself at play in the presence of his destined
father-in-law. The girl whom he loves has refused (in Act I.) to marry
him, not because he is poor, but because, poor herself, she was afraid of
being a drag on him in his career. But someone had entered during her
explanation and she had not been able to finish her sentence. She finishes
it in the last act, and it transpiring also that it was she who had really
sent the £10, the two lovers fall into each other's arms. That is really
all there is in _Money_ over and above the social satire, which to my
thinking is terribly far-fetched, and that wonderful "humour" which I have
been unable personally to discover.

Bulwer was not the man to save the erring Drama. Stronger men than he
might have tried in vain to do so. It was not to the men of letters, the
scholars, that it was to owe its salvation. The democracy had to come to
the use of reason and to educate itself. Instead of the artificial drama
which was offered to them, they held out for a drama sprung from its own
loins, born of its own passions, made after its own image, palpitating
with its own life; literary it might become later, if it could. And to
this end, in the words of Olivier Saint-Jean, "It was necessary that
things should go worse still before they could go better."




CHAPTER II

Macready's Withdrawal from the Stage--The Enemies of the Drama in 1850:
Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the "Hippodrama"--French Plays and
French Players in England--Actors of the Period--The Censorship--The
Critics--The Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion
Boucicault.


Macready played once more in Paris in 1846, but the times were changed,
and he achieved only a _succès d'estime_. He then visited America, where
his presence evoked professional jealousies and bad blood, resulting in
serious riots in which lives were lost. On February 26, 1851, the great
actor gave his farewell performance. A brilliant page of Lewes has kept
alive until our own day the emotion of this memorable occasion, which
marks an era in the history of English art. Macready was in deep mourning;
he had just lost a daughter of twenty years of age. He did not declaim his
speech, but gave it forth with dignified sadness. In it he laid claim only
to two merits--that of having brought back the text of Shakespeare in its
purity, and that of having made of the theatre a place in which decent
folks need not hesitate to be seen. He foresaw that if his glory as an
artist should fade with the gradual disappearance of those who had
witnessed it, his work as a literary restorer and a moral reformer would
survive. And he was right.

The farewell performance was followed by a banquet, at which the
inevitable Bulwer took the chair. John Forster read aloud at it some
verses by Tennyson. The Laureate had graven on the tomb of the tragedian's
career the three words, "Moral, Grave, Sublime."

Then all was over. The voice that had thrilled so many souls was to be
heard only at charitable entertainments and provincial gatherings. And
when he died in 1873 England had forgotten him.

There is a story of his last days which I cannot refrain from repeating,
though it has no bearing really upon the subject of this book. When the
old man, confined by paralysis to his armchair, was cut off from the world
by the loss of several of his senses, he would be seen acting to himself
(barely so much as moving his lips the while) the masterpieces he had
loved. There was nothing to reveal the progress of the play save the light
that would illumine his ever-mobile countenance, to which new lines had
been given by conscious use and solitary thought.

How fine they must have been, these impersonations--Lear, Hamlet,
Macbeth--in the mysterious half-shades of his life's evening and in the
silent theatre of his mind, where there was nothing to shackle the artist
in his struggle after perfection, where every aspiration was an
achievement!

If I have spoken at some length of Macready, it is because I cannot bring
myself to regard him as the representative of a dead art, the last High
Priest of a shattered idol. On the stage and off the stage, Macready was a
pioneer. He was the first to see the coming of Realism, and he was the
first actor of good breeding. But a long time was to ensue ere his example
would be followed and understood. The stage, when he left it, was in a
state of confusion and of squalor difficult to describe.

Strive as Macready would to cleanse the theatre, the prejudice which kept
certain classes apart from it seemed to grow and spread. The accession of
the young Queen heralded one of those moods of puritanism which are
chronic with English society. Young Men's and Young Women's Christian
Associations multiplied, and, in providing innocent and free amusements
for the artizan, they competed with the theatre at the same time as with
the public-house. With the higher classes it was music that was injuring
the drama by its rivalry. For a long time--as Lady Gay Spanker put it in a
comedy of the time--the English had known no music but the barking of the
hounds; now it was that Society began to scramble for boxes at extravagant
prices to hear Grisi sing. A quarrel between the singer and her manager
having led to a severance, the now "star"-less company, by a marvellous
stroke of luck, was enabled to shine afresh with Jenny Lind. This rivalry
continued, and together with the burning of Her Majesty's Theatre it led
to the invasion of the two great London theatres by foreign musicians. The
opera held sway from the end of March to the end of July. The Pantomime,
at first humble and modest, but growing stronger every year, began now at
Christmas and lasted throughout a considerable portion of the winter. A
short autumn season was all that remained for the drama, or rather
melodrama, and for what was worse than the others, the "Hippodrama." Thus
was entitled a new kind of production in which horses had the principal
rôles. More than one popular author was glad to invent plots for these
singular protagonists. Shakespeare, who had had to go turns hitherto with
the lions of the tamer Van Ambrugh,--he and they roaring on alternate
evenings,--had to give in completely before the Hippodrama. He took refuge
in a suburban theatre, Sadler's Wells, with the actor Phelps, and there he
was able eventually to boast, like that survivor of the Reign of
Terror--_J'ai vécu_. To arouse any interest in him amongst the English
public, it was necessary that he should be stumbled through by foreigners
or lisped by babes.

According to an old brochure of the time which groans over the depth of
the humiliation of the theatre, people stood still to look a second time
at the madman who could attempt to run Covent Garden or Drury Lane. To the
reckless amateur succeeded the shameless adventurer, the shy contractor
with empty pockets that called for filling. About 1850 one of these great
theatres was managed by an ex-policeman who had started a restaurant;
later it passed into the hands of a theatre attendant. One manager was
arrested for theft in the wings of his own theatre. It is easy to imagine
how dramatic art would develop in the hands of such men. They dispensed
with scenery and stage properties, and made shift with an empty stage;
they squandered their substance and lavished their genius upon the art of
advertising; their puffs and prospectuses were the only masterpieces of
the times. There were some who sought to excite English chauvinism,
pre-jingoism as one may call it, by such performances as that of the
national acrobat who turned head over heels ninety-one times while his
American rival was achieving but eighty-one, thus conquering the New World
by ten somersaults.

These things succeeded in attracting the public, but _what_ public?
Theatre-goers were but a small section really of the public--a group apart
on whom lay a certain suspicion of immorality connected with an evil
reputation of being un-English. There was some ground for this last
reproach. Foreigners were gaining ground. It would seem that there was no
getting along without us French between 1850 and 1865. We were translated
and adapted in every form. Our melodramas were transplanted bodily; our
comedies were coarsened and exaggerated into farces; sometimes even, that
nothing might be lost, our operas were ground down into plays. Second-rate
pieces were honoured with two or three successive adaptations; and dramas
which had lived a brief hour at the Boulevard du Crime, in England became
classics. There is a tradition that the director of The Princess's had a
tame translator under lock and key who turned French into English without
respite, his chain never loosened nor his hunger satisfied until his task,
for the time being, should be complete.

Our actors had at this time a permanent home in London, kept for them by
Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, at the St. James's Theatre. Thence
they made incursions upon all the others. Some years previously Madame
Arnould Plessy, having taken into her head to act in the tongue of
Shakespeare, Théophile Gautier had complimented her on the grace with
which she had succeeded in "extracting English from her mouth." Others now
attempted to emulate her accomplishment and to turn it to account. Fechter
resolved not merely to play Hamlet, but to play as it had never been
played before, and he did so to rounds of applause for seventy nights. An
_ingénue_, escaped from the Comédie Française, made a similar effort in
the rôle of Juliet, and despite her bad accent, and intolerable
pretension, she was able to keep it up, thanks to powerful supporters, in
the teeth of the quite excusable hostility of the pit. Things did not
always pass off so harmlessly, and in more than one instance the brutal
anger of the public, as under Charles I., drove intruders from the stage,
which it wished to see occupied by native actors alone.

As a matter of fact, there were some notable English actors and actresses
at this time. Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin) preserved the pure diction of
John and Charles Kemble. Charles Kean, despite his inadequate physique,
won for himself gradually an honourable place on the stage over which his
father had held sway. Ryder had a presence, and a sonorous voice, deep and
hollow and tragic, like that of Beauvallet or of Maubant. Keeley was a
massive man, who could act with subtlety; his wife, incisive, keen,
_amère_, had a leaning towards the serious drama--towards the realistic
even. Robson, a queer and wonderful little figure, made a mark in _le
drame noir_ and in outrageous caricature. Farren had made his _début_ in
old men's parts at eighteen, and played them for fifty years without
advancing in his art a step, without introducing a shade of emotion or a
touch of humanity into his effects. Charles Mathews impersonated impudent
youth, just as Farren impersonated unpleasant and ridiculous old age.
Elegant, lissome, light, mobile, Mathews skipped and fluttered and
chirruped like a bird. In his old age he reminded me of Ravel, his
contemporary, whose method and rôles offered some analogy with his.[5]
Buckstone made the Haymarket prosper for twenty years, where I saw him,
secure in the favour of the public, with his colleague, Compton, whose
speciality was a certain dryness of humour. Buckstone at this time had
lost both his hearing and his memory. But what a sly look there was in his
eye! How his mouth would twist and turn! What irony lurked in the
expressive ugliness of that wrinkled old mask of his!

These good actors injured rather than served their art. They revelled in,
and limited themselves to, their own speciality, exaggerated their
idiosyncrasies day by day, and left them as a legacy to their imitators.
The authors were too insignificant, did they see the danger, to oppose
their will to that of Charles Mathews and Farren. They took their measures
to order and tried to satisfy their patrons. Thus became gradually
narrowed at once the field for invention and for observation. As
substitutes for the infinity of living human types and characters, seven
or eight _emplois_, as one may say, came into existence--_emplois_ often
further specified and characterised by the name of an actor. There was the
low comedian and the light comedian, the villain and the heavy man. All
diversities of womenkind were grouped into one of these four ticketed
sections: the _ingénue_, the flirt, the chaperon, and the wicked woman.
The valet of Comedy had become a rascally steward whose rogueries took on
a certain aspect of Drama. There were two or three types of old men. There
was the surly old curmudgeon in whom the author vents his spleen, and who
draws up eccentric wills. There is the old beau, cowardly and cynical, who
in the last act marries his fiancée to his own son and swears to reform.
And there is the old peasant who is descended in a straight line from the
father of Pamela, always talking of his white hairs and his contempt for
gold, and always greeting the traveller, who has been overtaken by a storm
and has lost his way, with "Be welcome to my humble roof." The peasant,
one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than
a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was
the captain, the "man about town," addicted to drink, with a diamond pin
resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots
that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents
the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as
imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. Did he know
Society at his finger-ends, the man would never think of painting it. He
never paints from nature. He copies for the thousandth time from the old
models, Sheridan and Goldsmith, or his new masters, Scribe and d'Ennery.

It was for the critics, one is inclined to say, to instruct the public,
the actors, and the author. I am almost ashamed to tell of the pass to
which dramatic criticism had come. A paragraph in an obscure corner, a
quarter of a column on the more important works,--that was about all the
space the great newspapers accorded to the theatre. Dramatic criticism was
a nocturnal calling that enjoyed a not too good repute, and was frowned on
by respectable people and fathers of families. It was entrusted to tyros,
who hoped by their good conduct to earn their advancement presently to the
reporting staff in the police courts. The one writer undertook both drama
and opera. Dramatic criticism and musical criticism, owing to the natural
gifts which they require, are two absolutely different callings. What
mattered it, however, to the writer, who was expected only to praise the
pieces and the performers, without being too much of a bore?

John Oxenford, the critic of the _Times_, was sent for one morning to the
office of the editor. In analysing a new piece he had criticised freely
the performance of a certain actor, and the latter had addressed a letter
of remonstrance to Mr. Delane. "These things," said the editor
majestically to the writer,--"these things don't interest the general
public, and I don't want the _Times_ to become an arena for the discussion
of the merits of Mr. This and Mr. That. So look here, my dear fellow,
understand this well, and write me accounts of plays henceforth that won't
bring me any more such letters. Do you see?" "I see," said Oxenford. And
thus it was, continues the teller of the story, that English literature
lost pages which might have recalled the subtlety of Hazlitt in
conjunction with the winning humour of Charles Lamb. Henceforth Oxenford,
a scholar who had translated the "Hellas" of Jacobi and the
"Conversations" of Goethe with Eckermann, passed for a blighted and
discouraged genius; though of this he gave no stronger proofs than an
English version of the operetta, _Bon soir, Monsieur Pantalon_, a farce
which I saw fall quite flat, and some articles on Molière. But you should
have heard him in a bar-parlour with his pipe between his teeth, a bottle
of port on the table, and facing him some interlocutor who was not Mr.
Delane!

While the press critic neglected his duty, or was prevented from
fulfilling it, the official censorship added one more to the troubles and
obstacles which already hampered the progress of the stage. I may perhaps
make some reference in this place to the origin of the Censorship, and to
its scope and powers.

Some writers will have it that this institution, as it now exists, is but
a survival of the office of Master of the Revels, which flourished under
the Tudors and the first Stuarts. As a matter of fact, the censorship owes
its existence to a law passed in the reign of George II.[6] It was
instituted nominally for the protection of good behaviour, decency, and
public order; in reality, to protect Walpole from the stings of
Aristophanic comedy and to silence Fielding. A century and a half have
elapsed since the fall of Walpole, and the censorship still exists, like
that sentinel who was stationed in an alley of Trarskoé Sélo to guard a
rose, and who was still being relieved every two hours twenty-five years
later. The law of 1843, which was by way of according liberty to the
theatre, did not free it from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,
whose powers were delimited, so to say, geographically, in the most
curious manner, for it is impossible to understand why certain quarters of
the Metropolis were placed outside the reach of his authority and
submitted to the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace.

To all intents and purposes the powers of the Chamberlain are exercised by
a gentleman who is styled the Examiner of Plays. Plays have to be
submitted to him seven days before their production, and when he returns
them with his signature he receives from the submitters of them fees of
from £1 to £2, according to the number of acts. The author may not enter
his presence. The manager alone has the privilege of contemplating his
features, and of giving, or getting from him, verbal explanations. And
even those communications are under the seal of secrecy. Above the
examiner stands a kind of head of department, and above him the
Chamberlain himself. When you have exhausted these three jurisdictions you
can go no higher. Above the Lord Chamberlain, as above the Czar of All the
Russias, there remains only Divine Justice, and to Divine Justice authors
of vaudevilles and musical comedies cannot very well appeal. The
censorship indeed is an absurd anomaly, the sole irresponsible and secret
authority which remains in English legislation.

If you seek to discover how it has acted during this century, you will
find that according as the censor was indolent or zealous his office has
been a nullity or a nuisance. In theatrical circles that censor will not
soon be forgotten who suppressed the word "thigh" as dangerous to public
morals, and who exorcised from a play by Douglas Jerrold, as disrespectful
to religion, the following phrase:--"He plays the violin like an angel!"
The same censor found these words in a tragedy:--"_I_ do homage to pride,
debauchery, avarice!... Never!" He hastened to delete this, admitting thus
by implication that English society, which it was his mission to protect,
was compact of these three heinous characteristics.

It was forbidden to make fun of Holloway's ointment, for Mr. Holloway was
"an estimable manufacturer who employs thousands of workmen." It was
forbidden to put a comic bishop on the stage--unless it were a colonial
bishop, in which case the censor would give his sanction. A play founded
on Oliver Twist was forbidden because it was calculated to incite to
crime, but it was allowed for a benefit performance; whence it would
appear that it is allowable to incite the audience to crime on such
special occasions. This poor censorship, which has to read everything,
which has to supervise everything,--from the rages of Othello to the
grimaces of the clown and the tights of the ballet girls,--which has to
uphold at once the constitution and propriety, to defend at once the
Divinity and Mr. Holloway, loses its head over it all at last, and reminds
one of the _bourgeois_ broken loose who is being launched at carnival time
into some dizzying Saraband.

Its most absorbing task is that of barring the way against French
immorality. Its vigilance is eluded, however, by a kind of conventional
terminology. Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word
"cocotte" in black and white, they replace it by the word "actress." Where
we have unblushingly written "adultery," they have inserted "flirtation."
The censor gives his sanction and pockets his fees, and on the performance
of the piece the by-play of the actor and actresses completes the
translation, re-establishing if not reinforcing the original sense.

In the midst of all these difficulties the growth of the theatre-going
public had made necessary long series of performances, long runs as we
call them now, unknown up till then and inaugurated by the new theatres.
There were a dozen in 1847, twenty in 1860. The calling of dramatic author
began to grow lucrative and to tempt many writers. It was an easy calling,
too, as the public was young and ignorant, ready to accept anything, and
as, in addition, the French drama offered an almost inexhaustible amount
of raw material. They had recourse to it unceasingly, just as Robinson
Crusoe after his shipwreck used to return to his ship in order to look for
some tool! I shall not give a long list of names because, unless
accompanied by a short personal sketch and a few words of criticism, these
names, obscure or even unknown, would mean nothing to French readers, and
would be almost as wearisome as the long lists of warriors in the epics of
olden times. Amongst the more notable, I may mention Tom Taylor and Dion
Boucicault. Tom Taylor belonged to both the world of law and the world of
letters. Briefs gave him his dinner, the drama gave him his supper; his
supper got to be the more substantial of the two. From 1850 to 1875 he
seems to have achieved ubiquity. His name was on every poster. He was
facile, had a certain method in his work, a certain skill in putting his
plays together, a certain discretion which passed for taste--in fine, all
the qualities that go to form a painstaking and prolific mediocrity. He
would probably have wished to be judged on the merits of the historical
dramas which absorbed his whole activity during the concluding years of
his life, and in which he thought he was achieving "literature." But are
they really historical dramas? They contain at once too much history and
too little. The historical document is all-pervasive, enters into every
scene, interrupts the action; but anything like historical psychology, any
attempt to get at the real character of the personages presented, is
wholly unattempted. It was characteristic of him that, when desiring to
depict Queen Elizabeth, he relied upon some romantic stories by a German
lady instead of going to the work of Froude (far more dramatic than his
own drama), where he could have learned all he required to know.

Dion Boucicault, the other writer whom I have singled out as
representative of the lot, had more character and was more interesting. He
was an actor, and an actor of some talent. He knew no other world than
that of the theatre--the world which from eight o'clock till midnight
laughs and cries, curses and makes love, dies and murders, under the
gaslight, behind three sets of painted canvas. Without any real culture,
and without having the least critical faculty, Boucicault had read
everything about the theatre--read everything and remembered everything,
good, bad, and indifferent, from _Phormio_ to the _Auberge des Adrets_. He
knew by heart all the _croix de ma mère_ of modern melodrama, and from his
mass of reminiscences he concocted his crazy-quilt-like plays, imitating
involuntarily, unconsciously. He was plagiarism incarnate. In his first
great success, _London Assurance_, you may find not only Goldsmith and
Sheridan, but Terence and Plautus, who had reached him by way of Molière.
You will meet in it a father who speaks to his son without recognising
him, or who at least is persuaded not to recognise him; a young lady who
boxes her husband's ears and calls him her doll; a master who makes a
confidant of his valet, a valet as untruthful as Dave or Scapin; a lawyer
who is anxious to get himself thrashed like _L'Intimé_; a young drunkard
and debauchee who falls in love with a country lass; and a young girl
brought up in the wilds, who replies to the first compliment she has paid
her--"It strikes me, sir, that you are a stray bee from the hive of
fashion. If so, reserve your honey for its proper cell. A truce to
compliments." The piece goes from vulgarity to vulgarity, from absurdity
to absurdity. Within a few minutes there is a ridiculous abduction, a
comic duel and a hardly less comic marriage, all brought about by a will
which is surely the most absurd of all the absurd wills known to the
drama. The piece had its central figure in a clever humbug whom no one
knows. "Will you allow me to ask you," says Charles Courtly in the last
scene, "an impertinent question?"

"With the greatest pleasure."

"Who the devil are you?"

"On my faith, I don't know. But I must be a gentleman." Upon which another
character concludes the play with a pedantic definition of the word
"gentleman," and morality is satisfied.

One fine day--it was in 1860--this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and
who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to
create a _genre_ of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A
compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an
author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the
success which greeted _Peep o' Day_, and he wound up with the memorable
failure of _The Oonagh_.[7] Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to
exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in
the _Colleen Bawn_.

The _Colleen Bawn_ is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What
is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take
an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained
drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes
root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant
girl to become worthy of the man she loves,--her discouragement, which yet
cannot exhaust her devotion,--all this is depicted by touches so
suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But
there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play
round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five
years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red
cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half
seductive--smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.

Until Boucicault's time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland,
never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his
country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling
of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of
the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard,
England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness
of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe.
Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his
English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in
preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the
commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the
sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety
which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and
although he added many touches in the _Shaugraun_, in _Arrah-na-pogue_, in
_The Octoroon_, in _Michael O'Dowd_, and in other works, it may be said to
be already complete in _The Colleen Bawn_. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells
us, "I was full of sudden death that minute," and when Eily speaks of the
little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as
exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes
his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at
will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of
the Irish priest of old, and indeed of our own day too--at once the man
of the people and the man of God.

Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but
striking piece--this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of
rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins.
Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after
winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for
History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her
character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.




CHAPTER III

The Vogue of Burlesque--Burnand's _Ixion_--H. J. Byron--The Influence of
Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage--Marie Wilton's _début_--A
Letter from Dickens--Founding of the "Prince of Wales's"--Tom Robertson,
his Life as Actor and Author--His Journalistic Career--London Bohemia in
1865--Sothern.


The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as
the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however,
nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other
pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English
name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time
to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic
_genre_ became quickly acclimatised by success.

I shall take Burnand's _Ixion_ as a type, for by reason of its
never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind.
It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost
every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no
consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern
sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from
antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion's palace. Jupiter appears in
answer to his invocation. "Are you insured?" he inquires. "Yes," replies
Ixion, "with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes
to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it." Jupiter invites him
to come to Olympus. "We lunch at half-past one. Don't forget." Mercury,
charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aërial omnibus. "Come on for
Olympus! Room for one outside!" We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly
over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to
tell "the Master" that "coffee is served." Neptune talks nautical lingo
like the hero of _Black-eyed Susan_, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a
French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends.
The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate,
whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for "La France" by performing
the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life--he never shows
himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of
the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper
articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.

Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls
scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and
dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to
the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day--to the victory of
the horse "Gladiator," to _Lady Audley's Secret_ (then all the rage), to
vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in
Trafalgar Square, to Mudie's Circulating Library,--and a thousand other
things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be
intelligible.

To read _Ixion_, as I read it thirty-five years after its first
production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making
one's way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had
become enigmas, and through all the _débris_ of these used-up fireworks,
was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the
piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The
Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of
spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of
things in general, the pervading odour of the _poudre de riz_, the
_flonflons_ of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the
dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and
the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits
which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A débutante destined to
a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with
the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later
in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon.
Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman)
the Goddess of Wisdom.

But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management
of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English
grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking
fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used
to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this
genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to
it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of
dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion.
For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy
for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had
him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and
had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten
shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in
the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one
could wish, and even more,--so much so that the list of his works, were I
to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a
subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and
work it up,--you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the
subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should
be stocked. He collected them together in notebooks which in time must
have come to rival the volume of Larousse's Dictionary. In the street he
would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his
sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk,
or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall
door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had
been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his
mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which
never left him an instant's peace. Having failed as a manager in the
provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments
before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring
down the curtain on a witticism?

Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And,
as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a
single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the
theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume
upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in
the slang of the green-room, we call _grues_.

In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under
which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the
actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former
were much nearer to being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen.
Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with
the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional
and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the
inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his _Model Men and Women_,
paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the
biographies of the _Prix Montyon_. She goes late to bed, rises early,
learns her rôles while washing her children's linen, rehearses in the
afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to
her _toilette_, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. "School
mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks,
housemaids,--what are your fatigues to those of an actress?" So spoke a
writer[8] who was well acquainted with theatrical life.

These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera,
were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did
not perform, and who were called upon to fill not rôles but tights. The
respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own
ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she
won--and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was
the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.

Poor Byron was not without the ambition of an artist: he aspired to
raising himself above the level of the _genre_ to which he owed his first
success,--to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the
stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran
parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was
then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband,
she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know,
however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she
herself made her _début_ when she was five years old. At Manchester she
had the honour of playing some small rôle with Macready, who was then
making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great
tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and
questioned her.

"I suppose," he said, "that you want to become a great actress?"

"Yes, sir."

"And what rôle are you most anxious to play?"

"Juliet."

Macready burst out laughing. "Then," said he, "you'll have to change those
eyes of yours!"

Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was
an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of
rôle. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the rôle
of any of Shakespeare's heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude
Melnotte in _The Lady of Lyons_.

It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in
her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing
_Belphegor_, a monstrous emotional drama,[9] the hero of which was an
acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the rôle of a little boy, had to give him the
cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and
risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first,
then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her
explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon
remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at
the Lyceum. Here she made her real _début_ towards the end of 1858.
_Belphegor_ was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a rôle.
On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there
appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low
comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have
to deal at last with the contemporary stage.

But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none
had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies
of the English Comedy still to be born.

From the Lyceum she passed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a
spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid
here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other
Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; naïvely selfish,
it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture
which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone
which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket
Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the
inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.

For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at
long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a
whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her
only in two subsidiary rôles, and for an estimate of her talents I must
rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds
one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle
place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was
writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the rôle of eccentric
ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who
rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the
time of her _début_ is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which
forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,--a
figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he
declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter
which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the
barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half
Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from
Charles Dickens to John Forster:--

    "I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having
    taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you
    would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the _Maid and the
    Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever
    I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is
    astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is
    so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly
    free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as
    a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the
    dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which in the
    audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you _can
    not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the
    appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like
    a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association
    with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I
    never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl's talent is
    unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the
    stage in my time, and the most singularly original."

But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids.
She begged of all the managers to let her play the rôle of a heroine in
long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, "I
shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little
scamp."

Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent
in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her--

"As the managers won't have you, take a theatre yourself."

"But I have no money."

"I'll lend you money," said her brother-in-law.

A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. _He_
brought his reputation and his puns. _She_ the £1000 which was not hers.

A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the
noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid,
miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at
this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of
entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy
oftenest of all. Frédéric Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French,
and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood
for the "Grande Armée" and who cried "Viv' l'Emprou!" The house bore the
high-sounding name of the "Queen's Theatre," but the people of the
neighbourhood called it the "Dust-Hole," and in doing so proved their
acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the
Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange
peel.

It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than
of money. The "Dust-Hole" was transformed into a blue and white
_bonbonnière_. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the
evening of the first night, whilst the _queue_ was already forming outside
the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would
have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy
Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality,
had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?

The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke,
transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs--an actress of delicate and
agreeable talent, the excellent _duègne_ Larkin, and two other sisters
Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not
previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to
the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.

He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being
ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four
and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six rôles. In one
engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard
life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and
slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to
his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred
nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there
lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in
observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his
colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which
had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl,
had come to him and taken him by the hand.

Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in
1865 when the little "Prince of Wales's" opened its door as wide as it
could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a
burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new
repertory. Marie Wilton's friends supported her in their hundreds, but
their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost
worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his _verve_ during the removal.
Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson
was thought of.

Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next
door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight
against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The
son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years
of his life in a touring company in the midst of those _bourgeois_
vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father
had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and
had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst
still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any
remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of
foreigners--a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect.
In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it
is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.

At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement,
Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master
in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked
afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been
useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a
good-natured consul, and took up his actor's life again with its three
rôles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a
livelihood. He has written one piece, _A Night's Adventure_, which by a
lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a
quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer;
and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his
father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre.
Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to
Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never
again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays,
writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot
always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his "copy"
for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say
whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For,
after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the
bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.

He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his
beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The
speaker is a composer of music. "In England, yesterday is always
considered so much better than to-day--last week so superior to this--and
this week so superior to the week after next--and thirty years ago so much
more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better
if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In
this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so
worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell
it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, 'You
look so young,' in the same tone that he would say, You look like an
impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having
been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition,
thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so
young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, 'My dear sir, very
likely your compositions may have merit--I don't dispute it--but, you see,
Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr.
T'other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the
public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to
give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go
away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that
time exert yourself to get older--you will succeed if you try hard; turn
grey, be bald--it's not a bad substitute--lose your teeth, your health,
your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,--in one short word,
your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don't die
in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.'"

As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old
after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had
assumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth
of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have
nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who
imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither
success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at
journalism. He tried to "place" work of every kind wherever he could, from
riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got
connected with a score of London and provincial papers--the _Porcupine_,
of Liverpool; the _Comic News_; the _Wag_, which his friend Byron had
started; _Fun_, just started by Tom Hood, and the _Illustrated Times_, on
which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns,
under the title of "The Theatrical Lounger," he sketched the features of
the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is
all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown
in, not unlike the style of our old weekly _Figaro_; at the same time, it
is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a
vent of spleen.

Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia--that vaguely-defined
district in which "men of the world" whom the "world" bored, among them
officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make
merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They
would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which
last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom
Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of _Fun_, used to give Friday
supper-parties--frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But
those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the
world.

Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed
as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the
market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun
to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.

Were they all such very "good fellows"?--I have my doubts. This Bohemia
was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just
a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working,
and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real
world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense.
I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one
man who could claim success.

These lines[10] of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of
the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his
birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life--

  "I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!
  I've drank too much of beer and wine;
  I've had too much of toil and strife,
  I've given a kiss to Johnson's wife,
  And sent a lying note to mine,--
  I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!"

After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays,
Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he
should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy
of society. He wrote and published the "Songs of the Governing Classes,"
the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten
lead. The "Song of the Gentleman" in particular might well be given a
place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.

Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned
outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these
nocturnal repasts of Hood's, at which Robertson was one of the most
brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so
much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the
theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the
fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional
routine,--everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to
offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature
more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same
pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never
seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.

Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson had acted at
the Strand in 1861 a little play called _The Cantab_, which achieved a
sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she
refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time
attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor entitled, _Our American
Cousin_, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who
was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was
anxious to appear before the public in the rôle of David Garrick. He was
anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a
really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the
piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation
from the French with Garrick substituted for the original French hero.
Strange beginning for one who aimed at a "Return to Truth," this sticking
of a historic head upon the shoulders of "a gentleman unknown"!

It was after this that he wrote his comedy _Society_. He took it to
Buckstone, who refused it flatly. "My dear fellow," he said, "your piece
wouldn't reach a fourth performance." The author went off, fingers
twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where
one of his friends met him. "Look here," said Robertson to him, "here is a
capital play and these asses won't have it." A provincial manager took it
up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on
November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only
the success of the Prince of Wales's Theatre, but a new era for English
Comedy--the era of Robertson.




CHAPTER IV

First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_, and
_School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of his Actors, John
Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress in the Matter of
Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--Robertson as a Humorist: a scene
from _School_--As a Realist: a scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the
Upper Middle Classes--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup
and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The Bancrofts at
the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street.


That evening of the 14th of November has been described to us by several
eye-witnesses, so that we are able to realise the feelings that prevailed
both on the stage and amongst the audience. The first act seemed gay and
lively, with a sort of mordant raillery in it with which the audience was
unfamiliar. Then came an idyll, evolving amidst the trees of a London
square. What! love--youthful, tender, tremulous love--in the very heart of
this city of mud, fog, and smoke! Love, so near that you might touch his
wings! This was the kind of impression it evoked--an impression that
pleased and moved the more, that the public, always over-curious
concerning the private life of its favourites, was acquainted with the
tender relations of actor and actress. It was a real "honeymoon"--the
full moon which shone on this love duet from over the shrubbery of
coloured canvas. The hearts of the audience went out to them, and all was
well.

But no one could say what sort of reception was in store for "The Owls'
Roost." This "roost" was a picture from the life of the clubs which I have
already described as the principal resorts of Bohemia. Now, the
"Savages"--the members, that is, of the Savage Club--as well as the
frequenters of the Garrick, the Fielding, and the Arundel, were all there
in force. How would they take this caricature of themselves? The laughter
which broke out in uninterrupted peals soon reassured the anxious ears
behind the scenes.

There is a point at which one of the chief characters is at a loss for
half a crown wherewith to pay for the hansom in which he is going off to a
ball. Having no money in his pocket he asks a friend for the sum. "I
haven't got it," the friend replies, "but I'll see if I can't get it for
you." He asks a third, who makes a similar reply; and so the appeal makes
the whole round of the club, until at last a half-crown is found in the
depths of a pocket, and is passed on from hand to hand, borrowed and lent
a dozen times, to the man who had asked for it in the first instance. The
incident was taken from actual life. Thus reproduced upon the stage, it
seemed indescribably comic, and proved the turning-point in the fortune of
the play--the happy crisis after which everything was greeted with
applause. It was a trivial illustration, but it was thoroughly
characteristic. It was Bohemia in a nutshell--to have nothing and give
everything.

As the "owls" were so much diverted by the faithful portrayal of their
resorts and of their customs, thus presented for the first time upon the
stage, there was no reason to expect that Society would take offence over
the extraordinary and incongruous proceedings at the establishment of Lord
and Lady Ptarmigant. This kind of comic libel was not unknown;--Bulwer,
for instance, had set himself to depict the union of the old aristocracy
with the new, the naïve veneration displayed by Riches for Rank, and on
the other hand, the prostration of Rank before Riches. No one showed
astonishment at seeing Lady Ptarmigant smilingly take the arm of old
Chodd, though his language and his manners were those of a costermonger,
and though his lordship's valet would probably have hesitated about
letting himself be seen with him in a public-house. As for Lord Ptarmigant
himself, he was just what we call a _panne_. The whole character resolved
itself into a mere eccentricity, as monotonous as it was far-fetched and
extravagant,--a habit of dragging about his chair with him wherever he
went, and of falling asleep in it the moment he sat down, with the result
that everyone who came in or went out could not fail to tumble over his
stretched-out old legs. Who would have imagined that such a rôle as this
would be one of the causes of the success of the piece, and would be the
means of revealing to London an admirable actor? His name was John Hare.
He was still quite young, and he had wished for this strange rôle in which
to make his _début_. Profiting by the example of Garrick, Hare had
realised that an actor does not make his name by giving out a witticism or
telling phrase with effect, but by putting before us a live human figure,
if only a silent figure, in all its eccentricity of brain. His facial
expression was wonderful, and his mimicry excellent;--he had in him the
genius of metamorphosis; he has it still, and gives evidence of it in a
hundred different rôles. By a sort of intuition not easy to explain, there
was hardly a spectator who did not divine the future great actor from this
one performance.

The success of _Society_--it lasted for one hundred and fifty nights--was
followed almost at once by the success of _Ours_, which lasted still
longer, and filled the theatrical season 1866-67. Then came _Caste_ in
1867 and 1868. _School_ in 1869 surpassed its predecessors in popularity,
being played nearly four hundred times. In the intervals between these
four great triumphs there were two pieces which, without achieving so long
a run, still maintained in the fortunate little theatre the same joyous
atmosphere of success.

When the "Prince of Wales's," however, had recourse to any other than its
regular caterer, a check in its fortunes was sure to come, and there was
no alternative to falling back on Robertson. And when Robertson tried his
fortune elsewhere, even when supported by a popularity so well established
as that of Sothern, the result was invariably but a _succès d'estime_,
when not a disastrous failure. From these circumstances a certain
superstition grew up. Superstitions are rife in the theatrical world.
Marie Wilton, it was felt, had her lucky star, and Robertson had his, but
the two had to be in conjunction for their benign influence to be exerted.
Perhaps the coincidence may be explained without having recourse to the
stars. Tom Taylor, on the day after a new triumph, wrote to the young
manageress: "The author and the theatre, the actors and the rôles, all
seem made for one another." This was quite true, and it may be added, that
the public and the time were in harmony with the spirit of the pieces and
the talent of the performers. Everything had come about as it should; so
it was called chance!

Robertson was not much of an actor, but he was a wonderful reader. When
you heard Robertson read one of his comedies, Clement Scott tells us, you
understood it in all its details. Under the sway of his moving elocution
the actors laughed and cried. The author knew their weaknesses and their
gifts better than they themselves; he knew, therefore, how to make the
most of the peculiar constitution of this small company which formed a
kind of family, closely united by common interests, ambitions, and
affections. Until then a piece was often nothing more than a star actor
planted well in the front of the stage, taking his time and prolonging his
effects, and behind him a dozen or so nonentities mumbling mere odds and
ends of dialogue and addressing themselves to the back of their more
famous colleague. For the first time there was now at the "Prince of
Wales's," an _ensemble_ moulded by assiduous rehearsals and perfected by
the practice of every night.

In _Ours_, John Hare, who played the rôle of Prince Perofsky, had only to
utter a dozen sentences--hackneyed and affected compliments--yet he made
out of it a really striking portrait of a Slavonic Grand Seigneur, with a
smouldering passion in his heart veiled under the most perfect manners.
Besides his impressiveness there was something enigmatic about him that
set one speculating as to the part he was to play in the plot,--an enigma
to which there was to be no solution.

At length, in _Caste_, Robertson gave him a real rôle, that of Sam
Gerridge. I imagine, indeed, that author and actor contributed equally to
the creation of this character. The same might be said, perhaps, of that
of Captain Hawtree, created by Bancroft in the same play. Seldom, surely,
has the use of this big word "created" (so often applied in the papers to
the most insignificant performances) been warranted so fully as in these
cases.

Before Sothern's time the man of the world used to be represented on the
English stage as an absurd figure treading on tiptoe while in ladies'
society and ogling them _à bout portant_.

The type had been changed as regards costume, but not as regards language,
from that of the Macaroni of 1770. The dandy of 1840 does not seem to have
found his way on to the stage until 1865.

It was a complete change from this type to the character presented by
Bancroft as Captain Hawtree, humorous but not ridiculous; not in the least
essential to the play, yet attracting a large share of interest and
sympathy. An elegantly languid air, which yet spoke of weakness neither of
muscles nor of character; a blind acceptance of the social code, which was
not incompatible with generous feelings and a sense of humour; a mixture
of soldier-like cordiality and worldly cynicism, which amounted to an
_état d'âme_ if not to a philosophy: these were some of the features that
went to make up the character.

When circumstances--quite simple and natural--lead to Hawtree's taking tea
in humble East End lodgings, between a little dancing-girl and an old
plumber, nearly all the fun of the scene comes from his mute expression of
continual astonishment. Hawtree presents a curious combination of
awkwardness and goodwill in the scene in which he brings the plates to
Polly Eccles in the pantry to be washed. At bottom it is the attitude of
the English gentleman towards the social question,--somewhat scornful,
somewhat amused, but ready to turn up his sleeves and put a shoulder to
the wheel at need.

As for Marie Wilton, with what wonderful insight Robertson had made out
the real genius of this little woman, whose talents were so real, if all
her ambitions were not attainable! She looked back with horror at her
successes at the Strand; she wanted never again to play a _gamin's_ part
(as we should call it) or to appear in burlesque. Robertson wrote her a
succession of _gamin's_ parts and burlesque scenes. But the _gamin_ was
petticoated and the burlesque scenes set in a comedy. I am not referring
to _Society_, which was not written for the "Prince of Wales's." But what
is it she has to do in the three other pieces? In _School_ she climbs a
wall. In _Ours_ she takes part in a game of bowls, mimics the affectations
of the swells of '65, plays at being a soldier, bastes a leg of mutton
from a watering pot, and as a climax makes a roley-poley pudding, adapting
military implements to culinary uses for the purpose. In _Caste_ her
operations are still more varied--she sings, dances, boxes people's ears,
plays the piano, pretends to blow a trumpet, puts on a forage cap, and
imitates a squadron of cavalry. If this is not burlesque, what is it?

Some months ago I saw her in a revival of _Money_, in which she plays the
rôle of a woman of the world, and in one scene of which--a scene which
owed much more to her than to Bulwer--she shows the steps of a dance. At
this moment I seemed to see the legs of Pippo moving under the skirts of
Lady Franklin,--those legs which five and thirty years before had made so
lively an impression on the brain of Charles Dickens.

Whether he was conscious of it or not, Robertson made her play Pippo all
her life. These fantastic rôles, sketched on to the margin of domestic
dramas, were to have a remarkable and twofold success; they were largely
responsible for the good fortune of Robertson's comedies, and in the
reading of these they constitute, as it were, appetising _hors
d'oeuvres_. If I say to the admirers of _Caste_ that Polly Eccles is an
excrescence spoiling the artistic merit of the piece, they reply at once
that, on the contrary, she is its life and soul; and from the point of
view of stage effect, they are quite right.

The Bancrofts--they married shortly after the opening of the theatre--were
the complements of each other. She was all fun and fancy, harum-scarum,
irresponsible, indescribable. He was chiefly notable for thought, taste,
careful observation, and truthful representation of real life. One of his
first acts, as soon as there was some money in the exchequer of the
"Prince of Wales's," was to introduce a certain amount of intelligent
realism into the scenery. He felt the need of doors with locks instead of
the wretched folding-sashes, which shook before the draughts from the
wings. In _Caste_ he gave ceilings to the rooms. The last Act of _Ours_
takes place in Crimean barracks during the winter of 1855; every time the
door was opened a gust of snow came into the room with a whirl and
whistle, which produced so strong an illusion that the audience shivered.
In the gardens, real flowers were introduced, and living birds. Charles
Mathews was thought very enterprising because he had ventured to have some
chairs placed in a drawing-room upon the stage. Bancroft went so far as to
assign a different character to different suites of furniture. Thus in a
revival of the _School for Scandal_, Joseph Surface's furniture was
different from that of Sir Peter Teazle; his furniture, hypocritical as
himself, seemed to make a pretence of being plain and simple, lied for him
and bore out his lies. As for the actresses, instead of being made guys of
by the theatrical costumiers, they had real dresses made for them by real
dressmakers.

Robertson approved of these innovations, but he was never more than half a
realist, and this from several causes. Like all Englishmen, he delighted
in the warfare of words; he shared with them all, big and little, ancient
and modern, that liking for brilliancy which is perhaps evolved from the
liking of savages for brilliants. Once he began concocting repartees he
forgot all else and gave his pen its head. He made his characters play a
game of verbal battledore and shuttlecock. He dragged in by the nape of
the neck, as it were, tirades whose proper place had been in a leading
article. When he went too far, however, in these directions, he was often
the first to make fun of the result. "What has that got to do with what we
are talking about?" asks a character in _Ours_. "It has nothing to do
with it, that's why I said it." And in the same piece another character
remarks of something that has happened, "If an author put that into a
play, everyone would say that it was impossible and untrue to life."

Thus it was he would forestall gaily, with a sort of impudent frankness,
the objections of the critics. The public enjoys this kind of thing. What
it enjoys most of all, in England at anyrate, is the _grain de folie_, the
lurking, unlooked-for quaintness, which characterises some of their
humorists, Dickens, for instance, and Ben Jonson. It is this quality which
is responsible for their creation of strange types whose ideas and
conversations are all topsy-turvy.

It was in _School_ that Robertson poured it out most plentifully. It was
the most frivolous of his plays, and in this perhaps may be found the
explanation of its success. The heroines are boarding-school girls; they
are just at the age and in the situation in which no absurdity would seem
too great or out of place. By a convention which the spectator agrees to
willingly, they are girls in Act I. and women three weeks later in Act
III. In these three weeks they have learned the meaning of life.

"What is love?" asks one of the youngest in the first scene. "Why,
everyone knows what love is," Naomi tells her. "Well, what is it then?"
asks another, and the first speaker insists that no one seems to know.

Then comes the time for them to pass from vague theory to real experience.
It is the evening, in the orchard. There are two flirtation scenes, one
following the other, full of childishness, but full of _naïveté_,
freshness, and charm. There is question of the distance from the earth to
the moon, of the play of light and shade, of a little milk-jug which it
takes two to carry, of the Crimean War, and of Othello. Of love there is
no word, but it underlies their every feeling, hides behind every word,
peeps out through every glance, mingles with the very air they breathe.

    _Naomi_: ... "I like to hear you talk."

    _Jack_ (_bows_): "The fibs or the truth?"

    _Naomi_: "Both. Have you ever been married?"

    _Jack_: "Never."

    _Naomi_: "What are you?"

    _Jack_: "Nothing. It's the occupation I am most fitted for."

    _Naomi_: "Oh, you must be something?"

    _Jack_: "No."

    _Naomi_: "What were you before you were what you are now?"

    _Jack_: "A little boy."...

    _Naomi_: "Mr. Farintosh was saying at table that you had been in the
    army. Were you a horse-soldier or a foot-soldier?"

    _Jack_: "A foot-soldier,--a very foot-soldier."

    _Naomi_: "And that you were in the Crimea?"

    _Jack_: "Ya-as, I was there."

    _Naomi_: "At the battle of Inkermann?"

    _Jack_: "Ya-as."

    _Naomi_: "Then why didn't you mention it?"

    _Jack_: "Not worth while, there were so many other fellows there."

    _Naomi_: "Did you fight?"

    _Jack_: "Ya-as, I fought."

    _Naomi_: "Weren't you frightened?"

    _Jack_: "Immensely."

    _Naomi_: "Then why did you stay?"

    _Jack_: "Because I hadn't the pluck to run away."

    _Naomi_: "Did they pay you much for fighting?"

    _Jack_: "No, but then I didn't do much fighting, so that I was even
    with them in that respect!"

           *       *       *       *       *

    _Naomi_: ... "Are you fond of reading?"

    _Jack_: "Ya-as. Middling."

    _Naomi_: "Did you ever read Othello?"

    _Jack_: "Ya-as. But I don't think it nice reading for young ladies."

    _Naomi_: "Othello told Desdemona of the dangers he had passed and the
    battles he had won."

    _Jack_: "Ya-as. Othello was a nigger, and didn't mind bragging."...

It would be but an ill service to Robertson to give an outline of his
plays. A mere outline would give the impression that they were childish
and absurd, and they were neither the one nor the other. He never invented
a striking situation, so far as I am aware. He never settled (or even
raised) a moral or social problem in any of his productions. He gave all
his attention to the characters and the dialogue. A scribbled synopsis
found amongst his papers reveals his method of character-drawing. He stuck
down three words, one after another--a name, a profession, a ruling
passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, pride. With these words he
thought he had summed up the ordinary conventional man, as nature had
formed him, and society had reformed or deformed him: a very elementary
but very sane psychology, which he enriched, embellished, elaborated, with
the flowers of his fancy and the fruits of his observation. I have given
some specimens of the former. I may now give some specimens of the second,
to justify the title of half-realist which I have given him.

He wanted nothing better than to be a realist and to reproduce what he had
actually seen. He knew nothing of great ladies, as one may well
understand. When he had to portray them he was obliged to copy from bad
models. His Lady Ptarmigant is a regular _bourgeoise_; his Marquise de
Saint Maur, who learns bits of Froissart by heart and gives lessons in
history to her son, is either a myth or an anachronism. His Hawtree, on
the other hand, is as real as can be; Robertson had met him probably in
the clubs which he frequented. In _School_ he introduced a foolish yet
ferocious usher, who was, it seems, a reminiscence of his youthful
expedition to Holland. His rancour had not become extinguished in the
twenty years that had intervened, and he could not resist the somewhat
brutal satisfaction of inflicting a physical punishment in the last act
upon his old enemy. He used to ask his small boy, whilst walking with him
in Belsize Park, what he would answer to such and such a question? How
would he set about enraging his master? And the boy would receive sixpence
or a florin according to the nature of his reply.

Soldiers, theatrical folk, artistic and literary Bohemians, are painted as
they live, slightly idealised. In _Caste_ we have two specimens of the
people--bad and good--in the persons of Eccles and Sam Gerridge. "Work, my
boy," says Eccles to his future son-in-law; "there's nothing like
work--when you're young." As for him,--well, it was some years since he
worked (as a matter of fact he had lived on his daughters, and not touched
a tool for twenty years), but he loved to see young folk at work. That did
him good,--did them good too. He declaims against the upper classes; but
when a marchioness passes his threshold, he bows down before her, and
conducts her back to her carriage, only to return to his real self,
insolent and venomous, the moment she has gone. When he makes his way to
the public-house to drink, he gives a "business appointment" as his
pretext--"a friend who is waiting for him round the corner." Always posing
and aiming at effect, he uses big words for the smallest matters, and can
produce a tear in his eye at will. He has a few garbled bits of literature
at his command, and makes use of mangled quotations from _King Lear_.
And, wretched actor though he be, he is able, with the aid of filial
affection, to produce an illusion in the mind of one of his daughters.
"Poor dad," says Polly, "he is so good at heart--and _so_ cute."

No money in the house! He has been left at home by himself to mind the
child of his eldest daughter, married to an officer who was well-born and
rich, but who, it is supposed, has perished in the Indian Mutiny. The old
drunkard rocks the cradle, angrily puffing his tobacco smoke in the baby's
face.

    _Eccles_: ... "Mind the baby, indeed! (_Smokes and puffs angrily short
    cloud._) That fool of a ge'l to go and throw away her chances
    (_rises_) for the sake of being an Honourable-ess. (_Goes up centre._)
    To think of her father not having the price of an early pint, or a
    quartern of cool refreshing gin! Rock the young Honourable! (_Kicks
    the cradle._) Cuss him! Are we slaves, we working-men? (_Sings._)
    'Britons never, never, never'--(_Snatches pipe from his mouth, throws
    it over the fireplace, takes chair front of table._) However, I shan't
    stand this much longer! I've writ the old cat!--the Marquizzy, I mean;
    I told her her daughter-in-law and her grandson were starving! That
    fool Esther is too proud to do it herself. I 'ate pride--it's beastly.
    (_Rises._) There's no beastly pride about me! (_Goes up centre, clacks
    his tongue against the roof of mouth._) I'm as dry as a limekiln! Of
    course, there's nothing in the house fit for a Christian to drink!
    (_Looks into the jug on dresser._) Empty! (_Lifts teapot on mantel._)
    Tea! (_Turns up his nose. Turns to table, looks into jug on it._)
    Milk! (_Contempt._) Milk for this aristocratic young pauper! Everybody
    in the 'ouse is saggrefized for him! To think of me, Member of the
    Committee of Banded Brothers, organised for the Regeneration of Human
    Kind by an Equal Diffusion of Labour and an Equal Division of
    Property!--to think of me, without the price of a pot of beer, while
    this aristocratic pauper wears round his neck--a coral of gold--real
    gold. Oh, Society! Oh, Governments! Oh, Class-degradation! Is _this_
    right? Shall this mindless wretch enjoy in his sleep a jewelled gaud
    while his poor old grandfather is _thirsty_? It shall not be! I will
    resent the outrage on the Rights of Man! In this holy crusade of class
    against class, of (_very meekly_) the weak and lowly against the
    (_loudly, pointing to cradle_) powerful and strong! I will strike one
    blow for freedom. (_Stoops over cradle._) He's asleep! This coral will
    fetch ten "bob" around the corner! If the Marquizzy gives anythink, it
    can be easy got out again! (_Takes coral._) Lie still, darling--lie
    still, darling! It's grandfather a-watching you! (_Sings._) 'Who ran
    to catch me when I fell? who _kicked_ the spot to make it well?--My
    grandfather!' (_Goes R._) Lie still, my darling!--lie still, my
    darling!"

These comedies reveal the date of their composition in every line.
Everybody cries out in them against money, but as against a master. Love
cuts but a poor figure in comparison, though for form's sake it may
triumph for five minutes before the curtain fails. Sam Gerridge, the
virtuous plumber, who acts as counterpoise to the old wretch Eccles, has
concocted a philosophy for himself out of the notices which he has seen on
public conveyances--"First Class," "Second Class," "Third Class," "Holders
of Third-Class Tickets must not enter Second-Class Carriages." As for him,
he proposes to establish himself, and, from being a workman, to become an
employer. John Burns will tell you that this kind of democracy is a
negation of true democracy; in 1868 the formula seemed wide and generous
enough.

In such a manner was it that Robertson, who had wished that the world were
a football which he could send into space with one kick, that the same
Robertson, who, as he quitted those nocturnal symposia at Tom Hood's,
would bring down his stick upon the pavement with a noise that made the
silent streets resound, as he held forth indignantly against
society,--grew in time and unconsciously, though in a manner easy to
under-stand, to be the interpreter of the feelings and ideas of this very
same society. The former assailant now defended the social rank which he
had attained against both the enemies above and the enemies below. The new
strata which came into being in 1832 were now half-way through their
evolution. In 1850 they had been content with melodramas, vulgar farces,
and Hippodramas. In 1865 they asked already for wit, sentiment, satire,
poetic feeling, all flavoured, it might be, with Cockneyism, but this
demand was an indication of progress, and Robertson satisfied it by
writing the middle-class comedy.

The change which took place just then in the life of the dramatist
convinces me that I am right. He hastened to take leave of his irregular
life, and to feel after _bourgeois_ comforts. He worked out for himself a
happiness which made him, like the poor vagabond in the fable, weep for
very joy. The Eve of this new-opened Paradise was a fair German whom he
had met at the house of the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_, whose niece
she was. Robertson did not long enjoy the sweets of this happy land. His
mental and physical powers seemed to die away together. Mrs. Bancroft, who
accompanied him to the first night of _The Nightingale_, saw him, livid
with rage, shake his fist at the hissing members of the audience,
muttering, "I shall never forgive them for this!"

The doctors ordered him to Torquay, where, however, he grew worse. I have
read a letter which he wrote thence to his young wife,--a pitiful letter,
all in little jerky sentences, set in rhythm by the sick man's pants for
breath. Pitiful, yet gay, for he could not give up being facetious. On his
return to London he experienced a literary misfortune of which it was the
lot of little Tommy, then thirteen or fourteen years old, to bring the
news. Father and son looked upon each other with tearful eyes, and
grasped each other's hands. "If they had seen me thus," said the writer
sadly, "they would have had pity." Robertson was wrong. The public should
know nothing of these things. There are no extenuating circumstances for
literary mistakes.

He died some days later. He was only forty-four. A friend who attended the
funeral remarked, lying in the death chamber, its limbs dangling and
disjointed, a doll whose injured stomach gave out sawdust through a wide
opening. It was a doll with which he used to amuse his little girl to the
very end. As for the puppets with which he had so long amused the world,
they were to have a longer life. His comedies were destined to be
continually revived, applauded, and imitated. Out of the six thousand
performances given by the Bancrofts in a period of twenty years which
formed one long success, three thousand belonged to Robertson. He alone
furnished half their repertoire, and that the better half. From the depths
of the out-of-the-way district which it had brought into fashion, the
Prince of Wales's company sent colonies into the heart of the metropolis.
It was by actors who had been brought out in it, as in a _conservatoire_,
that the Vaudeville, the Globe, and the Court Theatres were founded. The
inexhaustible success of _The Two Roses_--of which there will be question
further on--placed the name of James Albery almost as high.

Byron, in his turn, took a leaf out of the book of his old comrade, and
succeeded, in _Our Boys_, in producing a comedy without (or almost
without) puns. _Our Boys_ resembles Robertson's comedies just as a cook
resembles her mistress when she is decked out in her mistress's hat and
gown, or as Cathos and Madelon resemble the Marquise de Rambouillet and
Julie d'Angennes. Even in this unintentionally caricature-like form the
Robertsonian comedy continued to please, and it looked as though _Our
Boys_ would never leave the bills.

The exacting, the fastidious, those who had begun to dream of a purer and
more penetrating art, dubbed Robertsonian comedy "Cup and Saucer" comedy.
The school accepted the nickname, and gloried in it. For the tea-table,
fifteen or twenty years ago, was still the centre of the home, the symbol
of the family, the core of English life, such as it had been formed by the
combination of the spirit of Puritanism with that of middle-class
Utilitarianism.

The name of the Bancrofts remained associated with the "Cup and Saucer"
comedy as long as the movement lasted. As soon as they became sensible of
their favourite author's decline in the eyes of the public they called
Sardou to their assistance. By 1880 the Prince of Wales's had become too
small for them and they emigrated to the Haymarket, which Mr. Bancroft had
reconstructed as it is now, after a new plan, without the conventional
proscenium, with the orchestra out of sight, the stage encased in a gilt
frame like a picture, and no pit.

This last innovation is characteristic. The pit from having composed the
whole arena of the hall, had been moved back bit by bit, until at last it
was confined to a few back benches behind the dress circle. To suppress it
altogether was not so much an act of authority as of emancipation. It has
been said that Mr. Bancroft thought too much of his gentility, and that he
seemed anxious to reserve his theatre for the _élite: Satis est equitem
mihi plaudere_. But even then? After all, it was only a case of an
extremely able man keeping pace with the democratic generation to which he
belonged, in his rise towards fortune and its accompanying enjoyments. He
raised the price of stalls from six to seven shillings, and then to
ten-and-sixpence. The public was evidently able to pay, for the stalls
were always full.

It should be added that, under the management of the Bancrofts, the rise
in salaries was out of all proportion to the rise in the price of seats.
The weekly salary of one actor, continuing to play in the same rôle, went
from £18 to £60, and that of another from £9 to £50. Mrs. Stirling had
created the rôle of the Marchioness in Caste at the "Prince of Wales's,"
and received seven times as much for appearing in it at the Haymarket.
Douglas Jerrold said to Charles Mathews: "I don't despair of seeing you
yet with a good cotton umbrella under your arm, carrying your savings to
the bank." Many years afterwards Mathews, presiding over the Theatrical
Fund, recalled this remark, and added, "The first part of Jerrold's wish
has been fulfilled. I have bought an umbrella." Thanks to the Bancrofts
and the managers who came after them, the bank has been in receipt of the
savings of many actors who previously would have been content if only they
might earn their daily bread.

Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft saw the time approaching when the monopoly they had
secured of the works of Robertson would cease to exist; they felt at once
that the vein was being exhausted, and that the new generation would have
new needs. Able and far-sighted, they determined to retire at the zenith
of their success, and if not in their youth, at least in their prime and
in the full activity of their intellect. Neither of them was forty-five
when in 1885 they gave their farewell performance at the Haymarket.

Amongst the innumerable tokens of esteem which conduced to the triumph of
this withdrawal, I shall cite only one. It is a letter from Arthur W.
Pinero, who had belonged as an actor to the Bancroft Company, and who has
taken since then a foremost place amongst English dramatists. He wrote to
his former manager:--

    "It is my opinion, expressed here as it is elsewhere, that the present
    advanced condition of the English stage--throwing as it does a clear,
    natural light upon the manner and life of the people, where a few
    years ago there was nothing but moulding and tinsel--is due to the
    crusade begun by Mrs. Bancroft and yourself in your little Prince of
    Wales's Theatre. When the history of the stage and its progress is
    adequately and faithfully written, Mrs. Bancroft's name and your own
    must be recorded with honour and gratitude."

I took it into my head not long ago to pay a visit to the little theatre
in which Frédéric Lemaître appeared, in which Napoleon and Count d'Orsay
rubbed shoulders with Dickens and Thackeray, in which there was difficulty
once in finding a seat for Gladstone, and in which Beaconsfield received a
memorable ovation. The Salvationists have succeeded to the comedians, and,
whether or not it be that their trumpets have the virtue of those of
Jericho, these historic walls are crumbling to ruin. The place is empty,
cold, and desolate. It was on an evening of last winter that I stood
pensively under the porch--the porch through which had flowed like a
stream all the elegance and talent of a whole generation. The light of a
gas jet shone mournfully on the notice, mouldy already, "To be let or
sold"; and the rain trickled down on me from a gaping hole whence the
electric light used once to glare upon pretty women issuing in all their
finery from their carriages. My curiosity was not satisfied. In order to
obtain admission inside, I gave myself out as a lecturer in search of a
hall, but the ruse failed. I was told that I should have to pay £4500 or
£6000, and was asked whether this trifling outlay would interfere with me.
I did not pursue the negotiations, and the door remained closed.




CHAPTER V

Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His first Literary Efforts--The _Bab
Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--Gilbert's Psychology and
Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_, _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The
Wicked World_--_Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.


When Marie Wilton's company, during their first holiday, went on tour to
Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn assizes. The young London
barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the
theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which
everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in
which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave
forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs,
adding pleasantly: "We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared
greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time."

Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to
throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he
was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson's,--a reputation which
still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is striking.
Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside
influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public,--one may
say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and
indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore,
unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where
Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an
accident. He might have "occurred" at any time in the century, or indeed
in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his
posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world
without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner
to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal
character;--in discussing a living writer, more than this would be
improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the
first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable
to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.

He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost
limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary
career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt
his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in
the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which
arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think, even he
himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same
time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even
in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.

It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to _Fun_ that
first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the title, _Bab
Ballads_, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with
_More Bab Ballads_. Some of them were set to music and are still popular
as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is
difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of naïve irony,
expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously
careless,--a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some
of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up
at all,--which was a surprise too.

Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales's a pleasant little
comedy entitled _Sweethearts_. A young man is about to start for India,
where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young
girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he
will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What
prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit
of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from
obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets him go.
Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now,--a lover, indeed,
no longer.

Distance in time, as in space, makes things look small. His "grande
passion" seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot
again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree
which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given
her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old
boy's scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever
find the thirty years that they have lost?

Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave
Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate
in it like mist and sunshine on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic,
though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject.
In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping
at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert
speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas!
there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this
first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a
great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict
love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he
has continued to rail at love ever since?

Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which
followed. He wrote _Broken Hearts_, a fantastic drama in verse, and made
it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He
aimed at freeing Goethe's Margaret from all that philosophy which
surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus
disencumbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was
then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head--probably after
some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic
instinct--that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a
puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is
for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a
character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly
successful; _Dan'l Druce_ is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an
ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public
which applauded _School_ and _Society_ sufficiently advanced in its
artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however,
of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John
Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert's drama turns,
would he really have solved it after the fashion of _Dan'l Druce_? Surely
not.

It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the
two does the child belong--to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him
who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that
decides in favour of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days
would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which
it saw the guiding hand of God. As all things in this world and the next
were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of
everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the
heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems
to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon
these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is
turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications,
the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real.
Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no
problem to solve.

A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a
girl amongst its characters. Their conversation--apart from certain pretty
archaic touches which continue to delight me--is a sort of subtle
intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of
the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the
dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up.
Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. "I don't know what to say,"
Dorothy's answer to her lover's proposal, seems to suggest that the author
himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young
person, naïvely outspoken to the point of silliness. She is not sure of
being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience
with him whose interest in it is most at stake. "These are my feelings,"
she tells him. "Is this love or is it not?" This self-analysing _ingénue_
is the only woman's character in the whole of Gilbert's dramatic work.

Before writing _Engaged_, some such thoughts as these must have passed
through his mind. "I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its
lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more
amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all
regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appetites and
instincts?--To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all
those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or
otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a
woman want?--To shine in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to
marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the
meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman?--The greed for money
wherewith to buy the rest.

"My _dramatis personæ_ shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be
naïvely and absolutely selfish,--their selfishness shown clearly, but in
the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it
shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred
people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments and correct
commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall
deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. _Fiancé_ and _fiancée_,
father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment
their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp
hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these
evolutions and manoeuvres before the audience, and the young girls will
change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a
quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different
women; within the same space of time Simperson will throw his daughter at
the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide.
Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in
denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less
desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of
men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are
monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told
that '_Il faut se hâter d'en rire de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer_.'"

So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces
to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three
ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators
laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too
unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the
conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous
where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had
but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his
_Palace of Truth_ for the big children who composed the public to accept
them with glee.

The _Palace of Truth_ is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of
psychology as _Engaged_, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious.
Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they
really are, we have seen them playing every rôle in the human comedy. In
the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side
of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent
lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish coxcomb;
the _ingénue_, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is
beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and
insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all,
the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless
criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste
has changed skins with Philinthe.

In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He
experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon
animals, depriving this one of viscera, that one of a cerebral lobe, a
third of some nerve essential to motion. His _Creatures of Impulse_ do
everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their
instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the _Palace of Truth_, their
language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The
denizens of fairyland in _The Wicked World_ are unacquainted with love;
they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are
made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from
the Pandora's box. Selenè passes through every stage of the malady. Joy,
ecstasy, absolute security,--the celestial period; then vague disquietude,
anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels,
threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all
his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the
colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the
other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.

But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as
in _Pygmalion and Galatea_. This was one of the great successes of the
Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson,
the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second
year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss
Robertson's grace of person, her pure and noble diction, were aids to
success, though it was not to them that success was due. Even had the
piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all
the other productions of the author.

I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject.
Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea;
to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in
his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks
the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an analysis
of her emotions as subtle as Joubert's or Amiel's; how this absolutely
ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is
the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness
through which she has passed on her way to full existence; how she can
distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another's
having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the
difference between a man and a woman.

Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the
meaning of the word explained to her, as a "hired assassin." Her
comprehension of these two words "assassin" and "hired" presuppose some
rudimentary knowledge of the principal social institutions which affect
the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of
the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it obeys. The
soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war,
she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these
reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which
could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!

These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are
vain, because they assume our acceptance of a general thesis more
improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did
come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of
a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn
how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its
first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of
critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it
or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness,
of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.

For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was
something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought:
it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that
favourite picture he had so often sketched out already--the woman whose
heart is a _tabula rasa_, whose mind is an instrument that has never been
used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her
unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and
language at her command. What _we_ learn during the toilsome schooling of
twenty or thirty years _she_ apprehends at a glance, and it would seem
that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it
reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.

Mr. Gilbert's Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits
to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is
jealous, however,--and in this conception the author is more Greek than
the Greeks themselves,--of the gods, in that they alone have the power of
giving life. _He_ is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As
for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not
Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere lust; it is Diana, whose
priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this
cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of
Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion's feeling upon first noting the
aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious
awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the
gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the
life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the
first question of Galatea, "Who am I?"--"A woman." "And you, are you also
a woman?"--"No, I am a man." "What, then, is a man?" Upon this the pit
would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the
author. How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate
Pygmalion's reply--

          "A being strongly framed,
  To wait on woman, and protect her from
  All ills that strength and courage can avert;
  To work and toil for her, that she may rest;
  To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh;
  To fight and die for her, that she may live!"

Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the
thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty
and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it
sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then
she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life?
She asks Myrine, Pygmalion's sister, for an explanation of all these
things. Myrine replies--

  _Myrine_: "Once every day this death occurs to us,
  Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth
  Shall sleep to wake no more!"

  _Galatea_: (_Horrified, takes Myrine's hand_) "To wake no more?"

  _Pygmalion_: "That time must come, may be, not yet awhile,
  Still it must come, and we shall all return
  To the cold earth from which we quarried thee."

  _Galatea_: "See how the promises of newborn life
  Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!
  Love for Pygmalion--a blighting sin,
  _His_ love a shame that he must hide away.
  Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state,
  And life a passing vision born thereof,
  From which we wake to native senselessness!
  How the bright promises fade one by one!"

At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for
old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their
weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old
groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and
finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned,
and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again
the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to
those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but
little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It
remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern
English plays.

Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical
accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural
background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the
outlines of his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The
writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this
was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by
a musician? He did so in _Trial by Jury_, a very amusing one-act piece,
suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a
little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic
operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular
in England as that of Meilhac and Halévy with Offenbach was with us during
the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of gratitude to
their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports
from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well,
but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators.
Already they are out of fashion.

For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at _Princess Ida_, unless it
was at _Patience_. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of
Tennyson, which bears the similar title _The Princess_, and is a satire
upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the
aesthetic movement. In _Iolanthe_ I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been
married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his
colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in
their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence
(expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining face of
Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down
before Whitehall.

In _The Pirates of Penzance_, and in _Pinafore_, mankind seems to be
walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in
making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected
from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is
the plot of the _Pirates_. Frederic's nurse was charged by his parents to
make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood
and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract
of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty
accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen
of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set
himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by
the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall
have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born
on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years
still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw's devotion to strict
legality--this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the
production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of
the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would
you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish
forth three hours' entertainment? But the author was justified by the
result.

Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and
Lincoln's Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer
all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his
dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and
interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against
realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty
for losing good cases and winning bad ones.




CHAPTER VI

Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder,
Adelaide Neilson--Irving's _Début_--His Career in the Provinces, and Visit
to Paris--The Rôle of Digby Grant--The Rôle of Matthias--The Production of
_Hamlet_--Successive Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--As an Editor of
Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of his Parts--As
a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir Henry Irving, Head of his
Profession.


What became of the "legitimate" drama the while Robertson busied himself
with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert
worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have
shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old
privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned
it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it
up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in _Richard III._
the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the
readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish
in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a "Shakespeare
Made Easy." An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it
was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the
day which brought the news of his "Hero"-like end on a ship which was
taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come
upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850
to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler's
Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the _Bouffes du Nord_, or,
further still, to the _Théâtre de Belleville_!

Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good
actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain rôles which up
till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his
personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom
was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,--that
crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters
beyond the scope of his intelligence. In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the
fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw
between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of
the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.[11] Kean and Macready had
"popularised" Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the
best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit
of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out
another and nobler distinctive quality--that of _poèmes en action_. This
does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.

The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche
in _La Dame aux Camélias_, set our mothers weeping, brought back
Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess's and to the Lyceum. In _Macbeth_,
he was only middling; but while they say his _Othello_ was the worst
imaginable, his _Hamlet_, according to the same critics, could not be
surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great rôle which
had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready,
taking from him Hamlet's velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some
emotion, Horatio's words--"Adieu, dear Prince!" and added, "It seems to me
that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness,
humanity, and poetry in the character." Fechter found out traits which had
escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil
and pleasing parts of the action--a refined intellectual elegance proper
to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The
advice of Hamlet to the players--the actor's Ten Commandments--he rendered
with much art and spirit.

After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners
became old stagers and appeared in principal rôles. Between 1870 and 1875
I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a
hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in _Anthony and Cleopatra_,
with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm,
one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too,
the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson,
who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet
kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pré-Catelan,--it was a
glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say
that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman
enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.

He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most
flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already
been long upon the stage,--he was already an actor of repute even; but the
Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It
was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.

There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs
of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr.
Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction
associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had
recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it,
pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in
his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these
criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to
time they gave public performances.

It was at one of these that there appeared one evening--in 1853--a
strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of
fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman's. He wore a
jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven
locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.

He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East
India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way
corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house
in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured--the
Bible, _Don Quixote_, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western
expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its
reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in
London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like
very ant-hills of humanity.

Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the
stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry
Irving's vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some
day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his
vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be
shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly
ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and
inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute
or ill-directed endeavour.

Young Irving frequented Phelps' theatre, Sadler's Wells; an old actor who
belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to
Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank.
Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed
himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the
provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed
pithily at a later period: "The learning how to do a thing is the doing of
it,"--one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in
England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on
September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play
the rôle of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton's _Richelieu_. Thence he
proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred
and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his _début_ in
London at the Princess's, in an adaptation of the _Roman d'un Jeune Homme
Pauvre_. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat
those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to
break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave
two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the _Daily Telegraph_ and the
_Standard_ the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came
seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and
Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a rôle in one of
Boucicault's dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last
set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James's, whence he passed
first to the Queen's, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.

More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor
Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting
vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted
over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps
it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which
visited us, hid Henry Irving.

There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during
which the conquest of one's professional brethren is achieved. Now, one's
professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity,
upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period
during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length
attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand
in James Albery's _Two Roses_. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman
who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,--a singular blend of
pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The
opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been
pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so
brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the
scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from
fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing
but a tumult of words, a confusion of _jeux de scenes_, interrupted here
and there by silly _preciosités_ which are intended to serve as aphorisms.
However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste
of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention
more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first
performance of _The Two Roses_, he recited "The Dream of Eugene Aram," and
his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the
actor's art was immensely widened--what he actually expressed in his
recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole
province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse
beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.

Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they
expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them
subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his
conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.

At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the
very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts--a piece which
should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and
language, of a man's outward aspect and his soul within,--this was _The
Bells_, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian's _Polish
Jew_. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who
tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the
actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his
newspaper, _The Daily Telegraph_, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of
the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject,
and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the _Times_,
John Oxenford analysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the
actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all
that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled
upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a
world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The
horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and
would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the
first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the
indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which seemed, under the bright
morning sunshine, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was
to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province
of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his
psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical
and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.

_The Bells_ was succeeded by _Charles I._, by Wills. From the Alsatian
inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without
apparent effort.

It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its
frame--this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of
sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache,
the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to
see him, now playing with his children on the grass slopes of Hampton
Court, now crushing Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of
his--"Who's this rude gentleman?" still rings in my ears. The picture of
Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in
the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes....
Then, in a village graveyard, that more terrible figure takes its place,
the sombre phantom-form of Aram, long and lank, the assassin reasoning
with his remorse.

In these fruitful years one creation followed another in quick succession,
each excellent, all different. Finally, on October 31, 1874, Irving
appeared as Hamlet.

This was his Marengo; up to the third act, the battle seemed lost. His
anguish must have been terrible. The audience was mute, frigid, and their
frigidity seemed to increase. The third act produced a complete change.
From the scene with the players and the description of the imaginary
portraits the evening was a continual triumph. The public had before them
a Hamlet they had never seen or even dreamt of; all the Hamlets that had
ever appeared upon the stage seemed to have been assimilated by an
original and powerful temperament, and blended harmoniously into one. _The
Bells_ had been played a hundred and fifty-one times, _Charles I._ eighty
times. _Hamlet_ filled the Lyceum for two hundred nights without
interruption.

Irving took up _Richelieu_ next, and in it strove victoriously against
memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at
him--men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest
cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for
half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean's successor. As though to
complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side
when he played Richard III. was that which Kean had carried in the same
rôle, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick's. A
colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the
other was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it
were, the insignia of royalty.

He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian rôles,
like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in
all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and
to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as
Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled
with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the
statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the
storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the
co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most
delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around
them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who
to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.

Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare.
Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the
modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given
them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days
(and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in
a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the
result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is
required for masterpieces. _The mise en scène_, he tells us, should not
give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely
with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an
atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special
kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its rôle is a negative
one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all
that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to
the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this
programme strictly adhered to.

The restoration of Shakespeare's text, however, was a still more important
achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us
from Colley Cibber's version of _Richard III._ He continued the good work
with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for
an "acting edition" of the Shakespearian masterpieces,--an actable
Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has
followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows:--Omissions,
often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.

I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he
is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his
artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is
better as Richard III. than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The
first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions
jerky and irregular. A critic has compared his gait in _Hamlet_ to that
of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that
curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his
head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage
making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being
perfect,--a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to
correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But
these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the
outset of his career would have freed him completely.

A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of
his rôles, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has
told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to _be_ the
character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this
principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick
himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and
thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become
more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller
personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that
magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to
which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out "Burbadge"
instead of "Richard," we also, in Irving's case, forget the rôle, and see
only the actor; and the play assumes for us the character of an admirable
lesson in the art of recitation.

Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving
takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual
to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all
members of his profession, even beginners.

It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes.
First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to
understand the author's meaning. When this has been mastered, you may
trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus
discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of
mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at
will.

Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot's paradox about the
actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not
abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is
wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As
Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions
represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often
worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as
material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving
to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love
with the actress who has to enact a love scene with him? or thirst for
blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often
contrary emotions--supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable
of them--would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of
him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions,
but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture,
though--what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call
into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician,
psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for
his calling.

Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the
contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position
half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one
should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with
emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly,--a life in
which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which
there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson
in the art of living. "Get the working-man to go to the theatre," he
declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house.
The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live,
and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before
them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.

This is the substance of the great actor's teaching, as set forth by him
on many occasions,--I shall not say in defence of his profession: the
theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended--but
rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal
Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of
the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine's as his starting-point, he
dealt with that great writer's opinions on the same plane of thought, in a
style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too
keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value
lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer
born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity,
a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader
the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first
lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set
one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art,
and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving
after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree,
therefore, which entitled him "Sir Henry" in May 1895, could not have come
at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who
has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a
horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only
"my lady's" dressmaker and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving's
case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first
actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is
a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised
above them.

Irving seems to me--may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative
of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can
boast?--to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He
compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the
splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his
gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas
which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the
slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of
independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of
the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see
most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in
nothing,--he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to
this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his
defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch
to his portrait:--"The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to
fail as an art." And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare
because in Irving's hand he is also a mine of gold?




CHAPTER VII

Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his Plays:
_Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too
soon and too late--Tennyson and the Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of
May_, _The Cup_, _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_.


Irving's personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I
have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and
women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus
upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an
incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare's heroines, but
who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and
sweet elocution set the poet's dream to music. From America have come Mary
Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more
recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It
was possible for a critic to declare,--speaking of the vogue towards which
everything seems to have worked,--that of all the dramatists of the day,
Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been
brought into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought
the theatre into fashion.

But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good?
Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident,
and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted?
One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides
for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied
closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate
Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and
turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing
scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and _coups de
théâtre_; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear
the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not
merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry
of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and _coups de
théâtre_ that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is
quite another matter. Shakespeare's spirit is not to be assimilated; this
is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the
cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment
does not suit us,--it is either too long or too short, or both together.
One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man
about as much as a lawyer's clerk, masquerading _en mousquetaire_,
resembles d'Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the
genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his café in Stamboul. This
tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond
the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our
intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off.
It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read
his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English
character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself
in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of
his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and
hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for
in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It
is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to
a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be
astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been
born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half
centuries before.

These are _a priori_ considerations, but they are confirmed by the
experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis
of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who
tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention
besides Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled _The White
Pilgrim_, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be
felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come
towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for
our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was
room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says
Mr. Archer, "so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and
so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly." His Bohemian life, his
impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the
illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a
misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, _Charles the First_ and
_Claudian_. The first called up on the stage--for the last time
doubtless--that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of
Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A
man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which,
instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross
his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings
about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this
horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these
sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a
white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. "In order that the
world may be Claudian's purgatory, it must first be the hell of an entire
generation." Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded
upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification
is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.

Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers,
tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to
characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would
yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant
it after Ellen Terry.

One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most
unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama,--the name of
Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life
as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his
plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for
his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published _Queen
Mary_, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic
output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was
far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they
brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of _Our
Boys_ and the _Pink Dominoes_, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments
of the imagination.

The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate;
it was the critics--and I am borne out in this by the most eminent of
their number,--it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson's
plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened
to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression
of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed--it was for
this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career,
and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to
believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more
usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success
in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism,
tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless
rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary
that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.

But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his
theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to
the living drama.

I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as
if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying
that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain
flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what
to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter
days of the poet not only preserved some of his early graces, but brought
out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch
with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed
himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social
and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his
theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest
order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of
cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments
had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all
his pieces is _The Falcon_. The action takes place in some vague region in
an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is
like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure.
Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without
hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest
possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a
subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for
hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and,
ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself
unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his
favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it
was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with
the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the
sacrifice to which hospitality and her love impelled him, and Monna
Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his
arms.

When _The Falcon_ was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James's
Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an
excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it
a _mise en scène_ that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and
Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge
Robertson's performance think of it as one thinks of some painter's
masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere
outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the
charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of
the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be
expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators
to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of
an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the
house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common
cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.

They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in _The Falcon_, it
is apparently Federigo's sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is
not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order,
that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird.
Even more deceptive than the _déjeuner_ offered to Monna Giovanna, the
_menu_ presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of
delicate _hors d'oeeuvres_, and there was not enough in them for healthy
appetites.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The Promise of May_ had a worse fate than _The Falcon_. It failed
outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the
poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much
bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon
which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in
patience and in intelligence. Harold's theories are answered in the play.
When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon
man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded.
Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of
marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and
feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. "And yet I had once
a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only
differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand
together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave
at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would
seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the
resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever."

In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a
branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer's daughter looks upon it
sadly. "Next year," she says, "it will bear no fruit,"--a moving piece of
symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of
the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the
fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.

The comparative success of _The Cup_ at the Lyceum surprises me less than
it does Mr. Archer. I see no need to seek the secret of this success in
the grace of Ellen Terry, or in the splendid scenery of Diana's Temple.
_The Cup_ has certain qualities which were calculated to please the
general public. The subject is taken from Plutarch's _De Claris
Mulieribus_, and from a passage which had already suggested a tragedy to a
Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. It is possible that, without being
quite conscious of it, Tennyson adopted to a certain point the tone of the
original author and the manner of his predecessors. He was less English,
less Shakespearian, less himself, in this piece than in his other dramatic
works. The dialogue is rapid and effective; the characters do not give
themselves up to poetical fancies; instead of formulating theories, they
express sentiments that are in no way complex or strange. One of them,
Synorix, is interesting. Except for the Don Juanism which seems to impart
to him too modern a note, this double-faced type, half Roman, half
barbarian, whose intelligence has been sharpened but whose passions have
not been extinguished by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a sort
of monster, who is conscious of his intellectual superiority and his moral
decay; he unites these two qualities in a sadness that has about it
something that seems great.

The attractiveness of this character was what made a failure of Tennyson's
piece; the English poet avoids the subject which Plutarch puts before him,
and which Thomas Corneille and Montanelli had seized upon; the latter,
cleverly and with success, despite the inflation of his style. This
subject lies in the action of Camma, widow of the Tetrarch of Galatia,
whom Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, has killed and supplanted.
Synorix loves her, and is anxious to make her his wife. Camma, seeing no
escape from this odious marriage, pretends to assent to it. After the
sacred rites she has to put her lips to the same cup as Synorix before the
altar of Diana. She gives him death to drink from it, and drinks death
from it herself. That this _dénouement_ should awaken no objections in our
mind, it would be essential that we should have been brought to hate
Synorix as Camma hates him. Now, Tennyson seems to have done everything in
his power to minimise the repulsiveness of the character. He has woven
round him the fascination of a noble sadness, the palliation of a great
love; has in some sort constrained him to kill his rival, by importing
into the action an element of justifiable self-defence. Not content with
this, he depicts Camma's husband as an unintelligent brute, who ill
deserves her regrets and her sacrifice.

It may be added, that of the real drama--the conflict of emotion in
Camma's soul--we know nothing until the last scene. A _coup de théâtre_
does not make a play, and Mr. Archer is doubtless right in placing the
work of Montanelli above that of Tennyson; but these defects
notwithstanding, I think _The Cup_ would be accorded the same favourable
reception from the public again now that it enjoyed in 1881. It bears a
distinct resemblance to our French tragedies, in its dignity, its
propriety, in the seriousness, the freedom from any comic element, by
which it is marked, by the consistency in the characters, its continuity
of tone and unity of action,--qualities which undoubtedly give more
pleasure, whatever may be said to the contrary, than the most faithful
imitation of the contrasts and inconsistencies of life.

Had he written nothing but _The Falcon_, _The Cup_, and _The Promise of
May_, Tennyson would hold but a very low place among play-writers. If he
is to live as a dramatist, it must be by his three historical plays,
_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_.

These dramas, it has been declared, were bound to be inferior, even before
they ever saw the light, to the historical dramas of the age of Elizabeth,
whose aspect and character they recalled so completely; for whereas the
histories of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hewn out of the old
Chronicles which, almost equally with reminiscences, preserve the vivacity
of personal impressions, and something, as it were, of the warmth of life,
Tennyson's dramas are taken from "History," properly so called, and
"History" is a serious scientific person who studies life by dissecting
it, who is addicted to discussion rather than to the telling of tales, and
who substitutes modern judgments for ancient passions. The objection is
more plausible than real. First of all, this definition of History, though
true enough of a Guizot, a Hallam, or a Lecky, is quite inapplicable to a
Carlyle, a Michelet, or a Taine.

In reading Freeman and Froude, was Tennyson less in touch with the soul of
the past than Shakespeare was in making his way through the cold and often
tedious pages of Holinshed? Moreover, even had Froude been as sententious
and frigid as he was in reality picturesque and impassioned, Tennyson's
own faculties would have made good these defects.

It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and
quite exceptional strength of Tennyson's sense of history. I must explain
clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical
faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living
over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It
was thus that Michelet was present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc;
Macaulay at the flight of James II. and at the trial of Warren Hastings;
Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at
the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted
upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger.
This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the
actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.

This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine
acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As
evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas,--that is to
say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories,
illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history;
for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of
the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in _Queen Mary_, and in
_Becket_ the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map,
the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.

A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles,
and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose,
but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson,
to set before us _un état d'âme_, and plunge us into the depth of the life
of olden days?

I am fully aware, of course, that this is not everything, or rather that
it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is
there a dramatic idea underlying _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, and _Harold_? I
shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the
first question; Yes, to the second and third.

It is true that _Becket_ achieved a startling success in the summer of
1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have
been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he
is--hieratical, pontifical. Mediæval asceticism is one of the forms of
life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into
most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented
Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth
one's while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present
at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop
and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue
in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and
his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton,
when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and
then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which
follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been
carried through by dumb show without words at all.

Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow,
and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in
gusts from the church above--mingled with the cries of the people beating
against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great
edifice to its foundation--experienced one of the strongest emotions any
spectacle ever gave.

And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation
which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the
king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely
a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the
courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the
poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical
drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen
Terry's tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The
complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman
savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious
details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a
piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I
may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful
function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from
protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging
Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king's mistress to
care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so
much hardihood.

I have not the same objections to make against _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_.
In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged
in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the
character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road,
strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined
with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a
protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to
agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice
bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left
it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a
Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding,
she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not
sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated
stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before
her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust
in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered
human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched
out, if he did not quite complete it, in _Queen Mary_.

The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is
the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the
feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the
great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at
the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect
of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the
episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold's young brother, describes to him the
slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner,
deprived of all that he loves best,--of the sight of the green fields, of
the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of
memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away
by the loathsome vermin of the earth.

When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a
spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated
oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes,
and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in
it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to
which we are too often treated in the theatre.

Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him,
with a nobility and pride of tone that thrill one.

These two dramas--I dare not say two masterpieces--set in a framework of
history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by
the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.

A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in
air and light upon their essential lines; a great actor, to understand
and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character
of Mary,--and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.

    NOTE.--I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of
    Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of
    poetry than that of the theatre.




CHAPTER VIII

The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of
Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--Improvement in
Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The "Old" Critics and the
"New"--James Mortimer and his Two "Almavivas"--Mr. William Archer's Ideas
and Rôle--The Vicissitudes of Adaptation.


Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled
through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a
reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud _Becket_?

Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fashion, the fact
remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a passionate
interest in this struggle between Mind and Power--between the National
Throne and the Roman Priesthood--resuscitated by a poet. Many other
symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.

I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of
London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the _bête humaine_ been so
completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of
George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so
unblushingly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special
resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out
before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly
veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for
morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is
looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not
be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The _bête humaine_ is
outside the door.

I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the
Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more
luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to
Mrs. Bancroft, whose former rôles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree.
If you mention her name before an elderly "man about town," who was young
and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day
you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.

The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the
children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even
extended their clientèle. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three
acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to
inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,--districts
of London whose geography was hardly known,--at the Surrey, the Victoria,
the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds
sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess's. In that immense
conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third
public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but
respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of
the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary
drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing,
popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These
forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate.
It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people
laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who
despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very
acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the
masses which people of culture often lack.

When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed,
whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget
life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows
that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in
that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together
with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight
in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even--to descend a degree
lower--of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to Shakespeare,
for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare's; and were it not
for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people
to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.

Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in
that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks
under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters
him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be
taught that a criminal's punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his
own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least
their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same
places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured
spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.

As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here
following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket,
the Garrick, the St. James's, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add,
perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent
actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The _personnel_ of
these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and
actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the
advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material
well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet
more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due?
To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which
individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept
going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager's first question of a
girl coming to him for an engagement would be--"Can you sing? Can you
dance? Have you got good legs?" To-day his first requirement would be that
she should have intelligence.

English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially,
and now Réjane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made
the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comédie Française
are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his _Thirty Years at
the Play_, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised
performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the
banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening
Favart and Delaunay played _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ before the
keenest and most impressionable of "pits," composed exclusively of actors
and authors. When, at the _dénouement_, there was heard the sound of a
fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid
to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair,
crying out, "_Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!_"--so exquisite was the
sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a
second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of
some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent.
I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of
more than one English actor.

Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious
stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this
study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to
enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a
large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth
century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like
Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made
their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led
the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel,
out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his
soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical
attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his
toadies to call him the "Napoleon of the Theatrical World," would fain
have had Clement Scott, of the _Weekly Despatch_, dismissed from his post,
and presumed to deny him the _entrée_ to his theatres, and even to refuse
his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised
appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and
looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably
in the actor's favour;--for the truer the adverse criticism, the more
injury it did to its object.

Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to
whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder
of the _London Figaro_. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many
years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon III., and it was in the palace of
St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge
of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by
reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily,
became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of
freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and
William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of
complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat
on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he
entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its
life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his
career as publisher. It is not the less one's duty to accord him, under
the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him
by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now
carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven
from the theatre.

The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their
judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have
pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have
abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on
the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was
yesterday, and this must content us--this is as much as we have any right
to expect.

_The London Figaro_ was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple
Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers
in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the
pseudonym of "Almaviva." The reader is already acquainted with the real
names of "Almaviva I." and "Almaviva II."; he has encountered them several
times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a
difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their
profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely
opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the
critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of
to-morrow.

Mr. Archer's passion for the theatre--he has told us in a charming preface
addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him--dates
from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying
element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put them on
the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room,
and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely
to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has
studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic
literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclopædia, a library of
references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact
information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive
idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at
once a penetrating critic and a first-rate _petit journaliste_. Humour, of
which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid,
lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste
or a touch of pedantry. I don't believe that in all his life he has
perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a
bore, if he would.

The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare
him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which
preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M.
Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaître, and in what respects he differs
from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and
circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent
writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters
of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it,
now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their
personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more
_blasé_ than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be
taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to
hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had
always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate
principles which, with us, are taken for granted,--to accomplish, in fact,
a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the
_Dramaturgie_ of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of
articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions
which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently
complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the
arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.

His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a
meeting-place, a _rendez-vous_, of all the arts. Its province, he holds,
is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds,
provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul
of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for
farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively
farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be
folly to judge it by æsthetic laws. One does not take the height of a
sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist
outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten
or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to
raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it
with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end?
Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may
all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that
they are sincere and independent.

Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment,
and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the
stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a
dilemma. "Either you show me on the stage," he says, "what I see and go
through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it--what do
I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of
life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of
truth and reality?" To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges
us to observe--that is to say, to see and feel more intensely--what we see
and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without
reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and
of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth,
the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or
refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the
financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to
the side of Rarahu or of Chrysanthème, an infallible instinct tells the
reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be
endowed with the same critical instinct?

Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic
character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon
lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until
there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose
staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness
of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama,
Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth--it was
neither realistic nor idealistic, but just "fantastic." Mr. Archer took up
Matthew Arnold's idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the
portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a
succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce
judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to
put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral;
the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was
inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got's declaration, that our drama
was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French
drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all.
Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the
villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in
the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is
moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to
which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no
drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless
sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the
antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.

He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards
better things, towards a life superior to our common life,--the life,
perhaps, of to-morrow.

He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to
speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition
retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that
of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.

His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind
of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every
direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable
question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be
imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it
is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which
should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And
would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What
is one to think of Diderot's paradox about the actors' art, and what do
actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in
former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected
because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer,
or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic?
What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system
which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought
the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager,
and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and
answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an
unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own
opinions are at variance with his.

This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer's rôle has
consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of
foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians
and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works
of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be
turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted
by Ibsen and Björnson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall
speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works
have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which
Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very
attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent,
as it were, a character of scientific precision.

The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago
resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house,
doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in
consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking
jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing
with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge
to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming
bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.

From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating
sometimes a second and a third time the same inept _vaudeville_. A
melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became
the _Ticket of Leave Man_, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on
the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in
our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the
indifference of the English pit, without anybody's attempting to draw a
moral from the event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the
idea of international literary property had been started, and was making
way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an
Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for
five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being
covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to
invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation
into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of
the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it,
an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary
property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the
natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.

These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom
we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the
importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that
they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think
twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of
paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn
from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so
efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English
drama.

It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the _flair_ of
the actor-manager.

From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in
the domain of our _Haute Comédie_.

The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires
almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as
finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would
be to spoil them--_sint ut sunt aut non sint_. It is different with the
pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and
detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author
has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked
out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely
new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the
excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of
taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of
work having a certain fascination for the playwright.

To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been
in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one
spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft,
Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the
performance of _Dora_ on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the
English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself bought them from M.
Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested
the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the
sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British _amour propre_. All
the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, "But by jingo if we do." The
idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by
making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. "By the time we got out at Amiens
to drink our _bouillon_," one of them tells us, "the play was fully
planned out." And, under the title of _Diplomacy, Dora_ enjoyed an even
more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.

This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The
new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double
advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken
from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral
problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst
of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in
complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a
new _dénouement_ resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French
play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the
adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to
a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the two races, the two arts,
and the two codes of morality.

This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more
interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era
of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.




CHAPTER IX

The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his First
Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_, _A Pair of
Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original Plays--His Style--His
Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which
has not done growing.


If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular
dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell
most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I
think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips,
with scarcely a moment's pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing
Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be
some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who
will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely
with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its
sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to
whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time
to study the vagaries of individual minds. A _plébiscite_ of West-End
playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have
mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.

They all began work about the same time--a score of years ago, as nearly
as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress
has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts
and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or
that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence
of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest
works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they
were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their
originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something
almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical _autodidactes_,
but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging
along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding
science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are
only half-way along their arduous paths.

So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are
dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one
commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who
adheres still--largely through his antecedents, and partly through his
natural disposition--to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of
the French: with Sydney Grundy.

If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long
intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small
pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial
theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity--an affray
with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three
acts, entitled _The Snowball_. There was question, in the first case, of
an adaptation of _La Petite Marquise_, which he wrote in collaboration
with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain
nothing more frankly moral than _La Petite Marquise_. The story of the
piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a
virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its
moral is a moral of--shall I say?--fastidious abstention; a moral it is
difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when
passion has lost its fire and its poison.

It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no
more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English
censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the
posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had "passed" the _Petite
Marquise_ in French in all her original licence; he refused her his
sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his
fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater,
perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have
wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and
indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people
who were destined to keep it in mind.

_The Snowball_ is an English version of _Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa
femme_. Mr. Sydney Grundy's originality consists in his having introduced
into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this
species--cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a
single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his
finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening
to or reading _The Snowball_, you look out for a single trait of English
manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.

The well-merited success of _The Snowball_ retarded Mr. Grundy's dramatic
career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation--so ungrateful
in those days--for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good
side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter,
obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy
Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead
of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his
business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail
these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none
of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these
adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his
personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of
another.

The first in date, _In Honour Bound_, is at once a condensation and a
critical commentary on Scribe's piece, _Une Chaîne_. The heroine is a
young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought
distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it
is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of
a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders
throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young
man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has
had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty
happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that
is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl's
guardian gives his consent. Now--and it is here that Scribe's hand is
discovered--this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been
threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir
George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is
unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands,
under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George
know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow
every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose
happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that
he never for a moment loses his _sang-froid_, his grace, or his wit. At
bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the
woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of
Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her
guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the
confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.

There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all
the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly,
breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence,
cunningly distilled.

_A Pair of Spectacles_ is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a
translation) of _Les Petits Oiseaux_, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject
is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through,
sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He
passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a
more moderate estimate of average human nature--prepared now and again to
come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow
natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this
easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory
of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow's future daughter-in-law
congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. "You are so good!"
she cries; "but people are so ungrateful!" "What does that matter?" she
makes answer; "I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my
window-sill. They never say 'Thanks.' Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier
than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from
feeding them again next day." At the _dénouement_, he recalls this lesson
read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience.
The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for
the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in
that--the sparrows don't say "Thanks!"

It is a symbol, nothing more nor less,--a symbol in a play by Labiche!
Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written _Solness, the
Master-Builder!--n'est ce pas un comble!_ A second symbol is added to the
first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the
English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is
not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this
moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory,
the misanthrope. At the _dénouement_, his own come back to him from the
optician's. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to
prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from
believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of
these pairs of spectacles. The author's idea is obvious to all. Our mind
is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we
look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is
probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The
pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend
them again.

In France the _Petits Oiseaux_ had a provincial success. In Paris the
piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at
the Comédie Française some years ago, the critics thought it childish.

In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was
given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I
myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority
of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our _amour
propre_. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with
this one. Namely, that _Les Petits Oiseaux_ is a fairy tale, and that
Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands--I speak
figuratively, never having seen the author of _Perrichan_ and _La
Grammaire_--were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of
realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real
writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and this is why I think the
copy is better than the original.

The third adaptation which has struck me is that of _Montjoye_. So far
back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of
_Mammon_, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions
already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of
the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was
the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye's son, and the
introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose
fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his
employer's secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart
all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires
his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master's master.

_Mammon_ is certainly a better made piece than _Montjoye_, but this was
not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the
same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points
of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the
course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator
differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which
Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old
schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his
belief in mankind. "That is all rubbish," Montjoye declares,--"_Tout
cela, c'est du bleu!_" Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be
expressed clearly in black and white, he calls "Bleu." Poetical illusions,
childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities,
sonorous and empty sayings--"_Voila le royaume de bleu!_"

Thus Montjoye, "_ou l'homme fort_," declaimed, in language which now seems
somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed rôles with Saladin. He is
the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous,
he is the _virtuoso_ of sickly sensibility--the Paganini of the sonorous
and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the _Royaume du Bleu_.
His _Tartufferie_ is social rather than religious. He is not content to
issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to
the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve
the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and
finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and
through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that
hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir
Philip Marchant, the hero of _A Bunch of Violets_.

Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree,--like
a college boy who has been out of bounds,--and who sacrifices his
financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an
adventuress, escorted and aggravated by a Palais Royal husband, would
never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would
refuse to stand him.

I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a
man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects
of the _vie mondaine_ and _demi-mondaine_ of 1865 from afar and _de chic_.
Mr. Grundy eliminated this naïve and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In
order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The
expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it
gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.

Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. "What
would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it
to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?" The objection
is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public
to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all
events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His
second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we
escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet
to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir
Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a
hair--a method of settling one's differences with social morality and the
criminal code resorted to, as we know, in every country, when no other
method is available.

On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and
sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets
which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler,
who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his
own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his
daughter's present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five
thousand pounds--a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for
another twenty-four hours and--who knows?--perhaps escape bankruptcy and
suicide. "These violets are not for sale," he thunders, and the audience
is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait
the criminal is redeemed and absolved.

Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of
his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having,
now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it
were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more
serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great
portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding
our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he
is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has
employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to
produce some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe's marionettes
moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters
unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much
like ours. Thus, in _The Glass of Fashion_, we have depicted for us the
havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who
has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying
a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very
wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for
libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners,
thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which
women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger's peas, in
accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to
Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter,
and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic
contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not
essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may
contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to
combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many
still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.

In every play of Mr. Grundy's there is to be found an element which is
very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new
and very personal in the treatment, the working out,--the individual
note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them
with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy
the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it
is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has
entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.

This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in
brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our
writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick
rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such
abundance through Mr. Grundy's theatrical work that it floods even his
serious dramas. _A Fool's Paradise_, that sombre story of poisoning, is so
saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish;
and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself
considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good
humour by the sight of her agonies. In _The Late Mr. Castello_ there is
nothing at all of tragedy--nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose
amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing
general indignation.

The author's wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous
gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken
neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy,
endearing terms used in earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion
artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of
expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer,
nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss--the
tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can
understand, then, why Mr. Grundy's plays are popular with the public,
without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of
his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the
truth of his thesis.

One of Mr. Grundy's peculiarities--and, together with his fancy and his
originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in
him--consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work
between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe
judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful
love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from
one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to
lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness
to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set
about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature
that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which
strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little
rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems
us in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one
which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but
by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.

In _Sowing the Wind_, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate
children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to
acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken
part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not
surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a
suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had
really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in
which the scene is laid.

But I shall cite _An Old Jew_ as the best example of those plays of his
which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better
and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its
faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been
deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving
her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be
suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do
without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into
despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption,
her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is
ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent
children than of his guilty wife? Has he not run too great a risk in
confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The
dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say,
because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one
point,--on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter's
caresses, and the companionship of his son.

He returns therefore, and draws near to his deserted family; he remains in
concealment, but close beside them, ready to guard and help them.

His daughter plays _ingénue_ parts in a London theatre, and although the
morality of the wings is a little better on the other side of the channel
than on ours, the girl is exposed to such proposals as that of a certain
Burnside, who asks her calmly and coolly, without any pretence of love or
any beating about the bush, to come and live with him. It is time for the
father to show himself. But Julius has a method all his own for watching
over his daughter. Every evening he goes to see her act, and, the piece
over, returns to bed. As for the young man, his dream is of literary
glory, and it is now that the second subject is introduced, a satire upon
the ways of contemporary English journalism, which is made to go side by
side with the domestic drama of the Sterns. How do we find Julius
intervening in the interests of his son? First he buys him a rare edition
of "The Dramatists of the Sixteenth Century," which he seems to recommend
to him as a model (a mistaken and ill-timed recommendation, as I think,
for the reasons I have indicated already in a previous chapter). The young
man has written a comedy. Without having read it, and, in consequence,
without knowing whether he is encouraging a real or only an imagined
vocation, Julius buys a theatre in which the piece may be performed, and
he buys also two or three newspapers wherewith to secure its success. Here
he assumes proportions that are almost fantastic. His sadness, his
wandering and mysterious life, his authority of voice and bearing, that
fatal gift of his for turning everything he touches into gold, point to
some symbolical intention in the author's mind, and to a _third_ subject.

It is no longer _A Jew_; it is _The Jew_--the Jew rehabilitated, and
becoming now, in his turn, a dispenser of social justice. But how does he
set about it, this reformer? By loading rascals with gold. Not a good way,
truly, of closing the _marché aux consciences_. And then the whole
structure falls to pieces before a very simple reflection. The newspapers
that give success are not to be bought. Those that are to be bought don't
give success.

I could proceed with these criticisms, but I am almost ashamed really, as
it is, of having gone so far, for they make me look ungrateful. If the
play be theoretically bad, how is it that we listen to it, moved or
amused, without a moment of fatigue? It is a play without love, for one
cannot regard the incident of Burnside's base proposal as a love scene. A
whole act passes in the smoking room of a club, in which we do not catch
sight of even the shadow of a petticoat. But one would not miss a line of
this frank, direct, live dialogue; one is thrilled by certain sentences,
strangely deep or bitterly eloquent, as by lightning flashes; one feels
that there are real souls behind these unreal incidents. And then,--shall
I acknowledge it?--one is keenly interested in the absurd but affecting
spectacle of this father, who thirsts for his daughter's forehead, as a
lover thirsts for the lips of his mistress. Why should not such love as
this have its drama and its romance, as it has its anguishes, its
sacrifices, and its joys?

_The New Woman_, played in the autumn of 1894, gives us the same emotions,
without suggesting to the mind the same doubts and objections. It had a
well-merited success. It is, of course, open to criticism. It is a wholly
modern picture of manners, the _dernier cri_ of social satire, serving as
a background to the working out of a very old dramatic subject. Does the
play bear out the promises of its title? I see in it three episodical
types, of which two, at least, are caricatures; an impudent lady-doctor,
who takes herself very seriously; a sort of _garçon manqué_, who smokes
and wears her hair short; and a sort of half-faded flirt, who is much more
taken up with angling for a husband in troubled waters than with the
reformation of society.

I see also a married woman, who bores herself at home, and who tries to
appropriate another woman's husband, by collaborating, or pretending to
collaborate, with him on a book. But I have no difficulty in recognising
in her the everlasting would-be adulteress, of whom our drama has made
such abuse. Her case is complicated with literature; she is the old
Blue-Stocking darned anew. Thus escapes us once more the New Woman, this
obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen.

The real theme of the play is the folly of a man of the world in marrying
a little farmer's daughter, who has been brought up at home in the
country. I have said that it is an old subject, but it is well to remark
that it is generally approached from another side. The authors of a
certain epoch were fond of describing the origin of one of these passions
which level the differences of rank and education. They led the hero and
heroine up to the point of marriage, but it is the morrow of their
marriage, and the day after that still more, that one would like to hear
of. This is precisely what Mr. Grundy sets out to show us, but is his
representation of it accurate, lifelike, credible?

In reality, were this marriage to come off, it is very likely that the
newly-wedded wife, made giddy by the sudden plunge, would surpass in
frivolity those who belong to the gay world into which she has been
introduced, and who have lived in it. But this idea would be too true and
too simple for the theatre. Or else this little country girl would show
herself inferior to the people amongst whom she has to mix, as much by the
vulgarity of her ideas as that of her manners. It is not the world who
would repulse her, it is she who would be unable to suit herself to the
world; whence it would come, that her husband must either cast her off or
become a pariah with her. This version, also, would fail to please the
pit. Mr. Grundy, therefore, has preferred to devote all his _savoir
faire_, his wit and his emotional power, to the task of making us accept,
as a compromise between realism and idealism, a solution as pleasing as it
is illogical and essentially theatrical. In the second act, Marjery
commits blunder upon blunder. Everybody makes fun of her, and her husband
declares she is "hopeless." In the third act she is the admired of all,
for her eloquence and dignity, her virtue and tact; those who made fun of
her have prostrated themselves at her feet. Is it possible that she has
learnt all this during the entr'acte, whilst the orchestra got through a
waltz? She takes refuge with her father, whose country dialect is just
strong enough to raise a smile. She milks the cows and plucks the apples,
the only occupations permissible on the stage to a pretty farmer's lass.
The youthful husband comes in search of her to this retreat, and obtains
her pardon. She will never be a lady, but she will be a "woman" _par
excellence_. The public seemed to me to be delighted with this conclusion.
An assembly of two thousand snobs will never stint its applause to an
author who chastises snobbery.

To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise
all his gifts at once--to put his whole strength into one important work.
But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous
comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with
living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose?
Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the
favour of the public.[12]




CHAPTER X

Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works--His Melodramas--_Saints and
Sinners_--The Puritans and the Theatre--The Two Deacons; The Character of
Fletcher--_Judah_--_The Crusaders_; Character of Palsam; the Conclusion of
the Piece--_The Case of Rebellious Susan_--_The Masqueraders_--Return to
Melodrama. Theories expounded by Mr. Jones in his book: _The Renascence of
the Drama_.


The start of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones was not less difficult than that of
Mr. Sydney Grundy. He could get only short and light pieces accepted at
first. The earliest play of his within the memory of London play-goers was
performed at the Court Theatre, and was entitled, _A Clerical Error_. The
second was an idyll in two short acts, called _An Old Master_.

The young author found it necessary to seek refuge in provincial theatres.
The world remained unwilling to learn his name--a somewhat undistinguished
name, and easily forgotten. When, in 1882, Mr. Archer included him in his
_Dramatists of To-day_, there were many who asked, "_Who_ is this Mr.
Jones?"

It was then he worked at melodrama. He served seven years with Laban, and
married Leah, upheld by the hope of one day obtaining Rachel. This was
his apprenticeship. As Mr. Grundy had learnt his craft by adapting our
French authors, Mr. Jones learnt his by writing great popular dramas. It
was in this _genre_, one which gives full scope to the imagination, that
he came to know his own individual temperament, and developed those
poetical faculties which were to be put to better uses; it was by this
unlikely pathway that he found the road to Shakespearian emotions. His
qualities and his defects date from this time.

The great success of _The Silver King_ set Mr. Jones at liberty. I have
neither seen nor read the piece, which has not been printed. It is a good
melodrama, I understand. People found in it, together with some new types
and _coups de théâtre_, observation, gaiety, a rare freedom of handling,
some really moving touches, and, here and there, flashes of imagination
and poetry.

Mr. Jones thought he could now take a step further, and please himself,
having succeeded in pleasing the public. He wrote _Saints and Sinners_.
The little Margate Theatre was the scene of the first performance of the
new play in September 1884, this first performance having for object only
the perfecting of the actors in their parts, and the testing of the
public. The piece passed thence to the Vaudeville, where it held the bills
until the middle of the following year, much talked about and applauded.

It marks an important date, not merely in the career of Mr. Jones, but in
the history of the English drama. It denotes the revival of active
hostility, in that ancient conflict between the Puritans and the stage,
which began in 1580, and will last as long as English literature and
English civilisation. This conflict had assumed a sluggish and inactive
character in the nineteenth century. Shattered by the scorn of the
Puritans, the stage had not dared to raise its arm for a blow. Suddenly it
took the offensive, and carried the war into the enemy's camp. _Saints and
Sinners_ is only the first of a series of dramas and comedies, in which
Mr. Jones has fearlessly attacked the hypocrisies of religion, in their
most characteristic form. He has let fly some darts, indeed, which have
sped even further, and which he has not shot at random. Has he not
declared, in his high-spirited and witty preface to _The Case of
Rebellious Susan_, that the theatre was perhaps destined to succeed to the
tottering pulpit, and to teach morality to the professional moralists?

Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to
deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he
declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and
one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England
without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.

He seems to say--and this boldness does not displease in a man of
talent--"We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce
masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed."

What Mr. Jones satirised in _Saints and Sinners_, was the money-making
spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated
by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of
Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small
town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other
merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different
degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his
rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is
convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own
stamp.

Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing
no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative
stores by which his shop is being ruined. "I keep up his chapel. He ought
to keep up my custom." Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic
emotions of the _dénouement_, when he wishes to express to the minister
they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one
fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without
inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday--just one word about the
co-operative stores!

Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason
and act otherwise at bottom, than did the great king when he allied his
throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved
successful--at least, for a time.

"You know, my dear Prabble," Hoggard says to his friend, "it is we who are
the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is." And
what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and
Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy,
which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt
nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is
called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our
_Classe Moyenne_, is regarded with real contempt by superior
intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on
having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the
hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones
took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister
cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own
accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and--I
shall venture to add--like creed.

In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand)
would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from
his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the
harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be robbed by a
poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real
life, but from _The Vicar of Wakefield_,--Goldsmith's irrational,
delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in
_Les Miserables_, and it is not at these times I like him best. I
acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been
aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He
is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he
makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter's sin, and
relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There
is real grandeur in this self-abasement--a dignity full of impressiveness
in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate,
they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of
his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him
from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of
bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes
happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, "Christians,
will you never learn to forgive?"--the words thrill me, and I change my
mind again--I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the
bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the
pitiless.

Mr. Jones's talent achieved a fresh advance in _Judah_, produced on May
21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the
situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of
spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in _Saints and
Sinners_, are used as motives again in _Judah_, with great power, and
form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti
Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the rôle of _clairvoyante_
and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried
perhaps to the point of terrorising,--she has abundant excuses for
adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the
enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an
imposture which she loathes.

We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the
wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung,
nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous
influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when,
by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become
too real, the young girl's heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as
much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish
that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her--we are all for
the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is
going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a
poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her
character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were
passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.

These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to
the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry
explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his
nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the
ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning
eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, "I
believe what I say." This faith, which carries away the uncultured,
inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a
smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the
night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all
believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for
the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in
his words.

This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At
first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious
enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a
superior being--privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with
a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it
chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate
efforts of Vashti's father to get some food to her during her fast. At
once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit
no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a
lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has
never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to
show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon
the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he
would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done
just the opposite. Judah's first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy.
Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to
himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until
later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience,
terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.

To all appearances Judah and Vashti are triumphant: they are to be united;
Lord Asgarby's daughter, the subject of the imposture, is cured because
she believes herself cured; the world pays its homage at once to Vashti's
miraculous powers, and to the virtue and eloquence of the man she is to
marry. What is lacking? Peace of mind, self-respect. In what poignant
terms Judah recounts to Vashti his mental agony! With what imagination of
poet, or of the lost, does he give voice and form to all the terrors of
the Puritan mind,--those terrors which, for some mere trifle, some shadow
of a sin, so tortured Bunyan, and prostrated Cromwell, pallid, gasping,
on the bare boards of his chamber! Yet love has not gone from Judah's
heart. Better Hell with her than Heaven without!

The champion of science, Dr. Jopp, for his part, has instituted an inquiry
into the whole thing; he is inclined to bracket Dethic and his daughter
together. Judah becomes aware of what is in preparation, is free to
separate his lot from that of Vashti; but he does not do so. Then when
Jopp, on the entreaty of his old friend Lord Asgarby, has consented to
spare Vashti, it would be easy for Judah to maintain silence, and to
accept, together with his wife, the favours with which they are being
overwhelmed. But no, he must speak; he must confess himself! The
confession issues with the explosive violence born of long compression, in
a strange frenzy of humiliation and of repentance, impetuous, vibrating,
almost triumphant, like a blare of trumpets. Beyond the awful but not
impassable ordeal, the guilty man and woman see the divine horizon of
paradise regained.

"You won't? Then hear me, hear me, all of you! I lied! I lied! Take back
my false oath; let the truth return to my lips! Let my heart find peace
and my eyelids sleep again! You all know me now for what I am; let all who
honoured me and followed me know me too. Hide nothing! Let it be blazed
about the city. (_Pause. To_ LORD A.) Take back your gift. (_Gives deed
to_ LORD A.) We will take nothing from you! Nothing! Nothing! (_Goes to_
VASHTI.) It's done. (_Takes her hand._) Our path is straight; now we can
walk safely all our lives."

It is the pride of penitence, and this expression of feeling has never
been given a prouder tone. In the previous play, _Saints and Sinners_, old
Fletcher, on learning of his daughter's shame, had cried out, "How shall I
ever hold up my head again?" To hold up his head, that is an Englishman's
first need. And when Letty Fletcher had effaced her transgression by dint
of heroism and devotion, she said, not, "I have expiated my sin," but, "I
have conquered." By such expressions it is that I can see that the
artificial psychology of the drama is yielding place to a truer and more
real psychology. Hitherto, almost everything that has been written in
England, would seem to have had for object, to conceal and not to make
clear the English mind. A new generation of writers has come forth, whose
work it will be to depict this mind as it really is, and to make its
confession with the fierce sincerity of Judah.

_The Crusaders_, produced on November 2, 1891, is a piece of quite another
stamp. It is not the unfolding of a character contending with
circumstances: it is a satirical representation of a _côterie_, a group, a
social movement. This kind of piece has but a first act, in which the
theme is expounded and a brilliant array of characters presented to the
audience. The plot of _The Crusaders_ is a mere imbroglio, fastened on
somewhat artificially to a satirical and ethical homily; it turns upon an
open window and shut door, which endanger the reputation of a young widow.
Unfortunately, we do not take much interest in this young widow, or in the
two men who love her; one of them is a faded copy of Judah, the other is
nothing at all.

But what is a mere accessory in the view of the ordinary playgoer,
constitutes the essential part of the play for the critic, for the
historian of the drama and of life.

When the time comes for depicting the state of English society during the
last years of the nineteenth century, this curious first act of _The
Crusaders_ will certainly be drawn upon for material. There will be found
in it the confusion of elements that stir and mingle, without uniting, in
the vague social movement of this period: enthusiasm lacking a clear end
in view, devotion lacking a definite object, a pilgrimage which leads no
one knows whither, and on which no single pilgrim will reach his
destination. It deals with the reformation of London; a programme so vast
and complex as to be none at all. This association counts amongst its
members a number of pretty women who play at charity; young idlers for
whom the reformation of London is merely an opportunity for flirting, just
like private theatricals, _tableaux vivants_, and garden parties; pushing
women who turn the occasion to their own profit by bringing about
relations with this "dear Duchess of Launceston," and who raise
themselves thus in the world, step by step. One of these good ladies, Mrs.
Campion Blake, invites an old statesman to dinner, to meet a kind of
apostle whom she defines as a "new variety of inspired idiot--something
between an angel, a fool, and a poet! And atrociously in earnest! a sort
of Shelley from Peckham Rye. He's rather good fun, if you take him in
small doses." After dinner, an American lady gymnast will give a
performance in the dining-room. "She's adorable. She gives drawing-room
gymnastics after dinner. It isn't the least indelicate--after the first
shock." Be sure the Minister will accept the invitation. He is quite ready
to reform London, provided only that no one calls upon him to alter his
own mode of life. He acknowledges that he has no ideals. No ideals! his
hearers exclaim horrified. Alas! no; had he not become a member of the
House of Commons in his twenty-second year! Which of the two is Mr. Jones
turning into ridicule? Idealism, or the House of Commons? Both, I fancy.
Why should there not be a double irony for the clever, just as there is a
_galimatias double_ for the dull?

In this movement there are many who are in earnest. First of all we have
the credulous, ingenuous Ingarfield, dragging in his train Una, the
petticoated apostle of the prison and the house of ill-fame, the young
virgin whose joy it is to attempt the conversion of rogues and
prostitutes. But the most real type is that of Palsam. This individual is
wholly repulsive. A voluntary spy, a detective by his own choice, he is
the incarnation of that spirit of sneaking, which rages so cruelly in
certain sections of English society. Basile, in comparison with him, is a
"good sort," an amiable companion. He stoops to expedients to which an
_agent de moeurs_ would blush to have recourse against an _habituée_ of
Saint Lazare; and it is against women of the world, too, that he resorts
to them! He is so insensible to indignity that a box on the ear has no
effect upon him. How do people put up with him? How is it they let him
into their houses? In France we would throw him out without troubling
about his calumnies, which would be welcomed only by the lowest kind of
newspaper; or rather, a complete Palsam, a perfect Palsam could not be
found in France. In England he is a reality and a power. But is he so vile
as he seems, as at first we are inclined to regard him? No; his conduct
seems mean to the utmost degree; but consider, please, two things: first,
that he acts thus, quite disinterestedly; secondly, that he deprives
himself of those incorrect enjoyments of which he is so bent upon
depriving others. Give him the benefit of these two admissions, and,
little by little, the man will begin to wear for you a different aspect.
The ascetic will rehabilitate the spy, you will be forced to find a kind
of heroism in his meanness, and to admire, while you hate, his hideous
virtue, which is perhaps one of the hundred ways of doing good to men in
their own despite.

Perhaps it was not Mr. Jones's intention to suggest so many reflections by
his Palsam, but whether he wishes it or no, his work is thus suggestive,
and it is the special note of this very straightforward, very masculine,
very generous satire, that it never ridicules the enemy without letting us
see the redeeming traits in his character, and the good motives which he
might plead in self-defence, thus putting the real man before us whole and
entire.

Mr. Jones ridicules the would-be reformers of London, and represents their
efforts as resulting in a pitiable fiasco. But he has not contended, of
course, that London is all right as it is, and that the bringing of the
great city into a state of moral health has ceased to be one of the dark
problems which demand, and baffle, the good intentions of honest folk. He
himself has indicated a solution, and the true solution; "To reform
London, it is necessary, first of all, that each of us should reform
himself." Such is the moral of the piece; and this sermon is worth more
than many others.

Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones's popularity has gone
on increasing during the last four years. _The Tempter_, it is true, gave
the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised
splendours of the _mise en scène_, and the admirable resources of his own
talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not
wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in
bringing his audience round to his way of thinking. In the _Triumph of
the Philistines_, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but
after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The
hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the
public would not have known _à quoi se prendre_, had not the piece been
given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential
character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by
Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments
really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English
dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out
anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of
facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he
has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the _état d'âme_, of
another nation, differentiating it from his own.

_The Case of Rebellious Susan_ is a very amusing comedy. I know of none
with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr.
Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should
be one in it, he tells her--indeed, there should be several; they have but
to be looked for.

I don't know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy's researches. I, for
my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have
found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon with certain
differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic
situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by
paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first
of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her
nature much more of pride than of love. Susan's grief is not a tearful
grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little
exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her
vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one
knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor
I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to
her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first.
She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the
repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies;
I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he
helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a
fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she
wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is
to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the
end to lay down the moral of the whole business.

Very different is the heroine of _The Masqueraders_, who, as impersonated
by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season of 1894.
Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on
enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then
love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is
the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all
round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with
a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these
mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength
and oppress her will.

Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write _Judah_; he
returned to it in _The Masqueraders_, not from listlessness or
unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his
wife at a game of écarté--is not this melodrama? But what cares the author
of _The Masqueraders_, whether the incidents be improbable and his
situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the "well-made" piece;
he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count
for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will
he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of
being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay
for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when
they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing.
Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a
store-room of materials. As for logic, it may be left to the professors
who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be
logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements,
amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements
are--Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is
convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of
human life.

And if the critic press too hard upon the author of _The Masqueraders_, he
has recourse for his defence--and quite rightly--to the great name which
is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted,
Shakespeare's plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas,
traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of
thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some
passing glimpses of real life.

To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They
are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any
master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late
by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw _Judah_ and _The
Crusaders_ in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in
his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his
later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be
obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this
cloud, he has already played a great part in the resuscitation of the
drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists;
the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his
generation and of his race.




CHAPTER XI

Two Portraits--Mr. Pinero's Career as an Actor--His Early Works--_The
Squire_, _Lords and Commons_--The Pieces which followed, half Comedy, half
Farce--_The Profligate_; its Success and Defects--_Lady Bountiful_--_The
Second Mrs. Tanqueray_--Character of Paula--Mrs. Patrick Campbell--_The
Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_.


Meanwhile, it was to Mr. Pinero that fell the lot of writing the most
human work yet known to modern English dramatic literature,--the work,
too, approaching most nearly to perfection.

I have never gazed on Mr. Pinero in the flesh, but I have seen two
portraits of him which have struck me. In one I seem to discover the
pensive _bonhomie_ of a philosopher, who looks on at the world from afar;
the other suggests rather the frequenter of drawing-rooms--the look in the
eyes is more alive, the smile more knowing, less calculated to leave one
at one's ease. Which of these portraits tells the truth? Both of them
perhaps. There are aspects of Mr. Pinero's work which respond to these
different moods of a single mind. Then, the two physiognomies, which I try
to reconcile with each other, have this trait in common: they both show us
a man who observes and who reflects.

And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in
order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of
his youth, or even from such pieces as _The Squire_ and _Lord and
Commons_, to a work like _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. His career as an
author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and
accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every
stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.

In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he
knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H.
J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of
others.[13] He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and
then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving's company
and then with the Bancrofts'.

After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of
plays then in vogue,--farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He
adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was
lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a
living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an
articulated skeleton. It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to
give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire
beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed,
and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of
bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities
which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the
language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely,
that was weak in Mr. Pinero's earliest efforts.

_The Squire_ was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an
unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised
representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a
smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a
pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, _Far from the Madding Crowd_.

_Lords and Commons_ carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of
the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a
young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He
discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After
some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her.
She has a double end in view--to win back her husband's love in her new
guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to _that other_, thus torturing
him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his heart torn in
twain, to a _rendez-vous_ with his former victim to obtain her pardon.
When Mr. Pinero was content to write a _dénouement_ of this kind, who
could have divined in him the future creator of _Mrs. Tanqueray_?

But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked
for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid
production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of
manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the
same province of the drama as _Divorçons_, sometimes on a higher plane,
sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and
D'Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. _The
Magistrate_ is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who
finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of
doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own
wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this
fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon
this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in
appearance),--this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even
to English humour. In _Dandy Dick_ and in _The Hobby-Horse_, I find, in
the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy
sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and
those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur,--a
woman jockey,--whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our
_répertoire_. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of
invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in
_The Times_ and _The Cabinet Minister_. I have read these two pieces a
number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration.
But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of
social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which
the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a
generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of
satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes
after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it
describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have
disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the
rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm;
and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of
getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable
modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know
quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the
realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling
before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme
upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm
which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon's part is not to
accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties,
and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic
dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not
from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is
through his carefulness in aspirating his h's, his punctiliousness in the
matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants' livery, of his stud,
and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought
delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would
be--failure. And he is on his guard.

I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero's comedies, although very
pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get
them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they
are looked at side by side with that first act of _The Crusaders_, in
which the satire is so modern and so full of life.

Mr. Pinero had not renounced the serious drama, and all his theatrical
friends, watching his progress in light comedy, yet expected to see him in
this field in which, so far, he had achieved but half-successes. On April
24, 1889, the Garrick opened its doors with a drama of his, entitled _The
Profligate_. Marvels were expected from the new theatre which John Hare
had erected for himself and his company. As had been the case with the
opening of the Prince of Wales's, it was felt that the first night at the
Garrick ought to mark a date in the history of the drama. The critics,
"old" and "new," were enthusiastic. "At last," exclaimed Mr. Archer, "we
have a real play; a play which has faults, with a third act which has
none!" Those triumphant assertions, made in the heat of the moment, must
unfortunately be taken with a considerable discount. _The Profligate_ is a
melodrama, treated with delicacy and distinction, but incontestably a
melodrama in every aspect and in every part, that wonderful third act
included; it is even one of the most fanciful, most romantic melodramas
that have been written in England for fifteen years.

Whom shall I recognise as an English character, or even as a human type?
Hugh Murray, the sentimental lawyer, who loses his heart at first sight to
a schoolgirl, and who buries this beautiful passion in the depths of his
heart, to disinter it just at the wrong moment? Janet?--who has given
herself, without the temptation of love, to a seducer in the forties, and
who, during the remainder of the piece perseveres in the accomplishment of
acts of delicacy, of renunciation and of self-abnegation without number,
veritable _tours de force_--_morale_. Leslie?--the heroine of the play, a
schoolgirl who giddily exclaims, a quarter of an hour before her wedding,
that she wonders whether the world will seem of the same colour when she
is the wife of Duncan Renshaw; and who, after a month spent _tête-à-tête_
with her husband in a villa near Florence, where a fresco of Michael
Angelo is to be seen, seems to know life better than we do ourselves. I
know, of course, the explanation that is forthcoming: only a single moment
was required to alter this character, to bring light to that one. It is
precisely in this explanation that I find the mark of melodrama. In
serious psychology, it is not so easy to believe in these "moments"--in
these sudden revelations, these flash-like crises, which transform an
individuality completely, annulling nature and education.

And what is one to say of the "Profligate" himself? He is just the
traditional libertine of all the innumerable English novels published
during the last fifty years, nor is he unknown to our own old Boulevard du
Crime. We see him coldly and deliberately cynical up to the moment when
love touches him with its magic ring. That is a kind of conception that
has passed its prime. Nowadays we are inclined to regard Don Juan as a
kind of dupe, the plaything of woman from puberty to decrepitude. We
picture him to ourselves more engaging when he first begins to sin, and
less easy to convert when he has become hardened to it. We find it
difficult to believe that thirty days of wedded bliss suffice to awake a
conscience which has lain dormant for forty years. If the sense of
morality were innate, it must have shown itself earlier; to have been
acquired and to have reached such a degree of perfection and
sensitiveness, it would have needed more time than the average duration
of a honeymoon.

The situation which delighted so the English critics may be thus
described. The seducer's wife has, without knowing it, given shelter to
his victim. She wishes to help her to confront the man who has wronged
her, and her heart breaks when she sees upon whom the penalty has to fall.
I admit that the scenes leading up to this discovery, contrived with great
ability, produce a veritable anguish in the spectator's mind, and that the
scene between the husband and the wife, which follows after it, is on the
same plane of emotion. But by what a number of improbable coincidences had
this precious moment to be bought! Chance had to take Janet to Paddington
station at the same moment as Leslie and her brother; Chance had to give
this same Janet as "companion" to Miss Stonehay, Leslie's school friend;
to send the Stonehays travelling towards the environs of Florence and the
villa of the Renshaws; to synchronise Janet's illness and Dunstan's
departure so that the two women may interest themselves in each other. And
it is Chance again that makes Janet see Dunstan in Lord Dangars' company
in order that the confusion may arise regarding the two men, and that this
Lord Dangars, who is Dunstan's friend, may become engaged to Irene
Stonehay, the friend of Leslie. And even after Chance has made all these
thoughtful arrangements, Renshaw's happiness might yet be saved, and this
terrible danger by which it is threatened be avoided (and this great scene
of Mr. Pinero's never come to pass), if only Janet were allowed to go as
she desires, and as good sense and modesty make it right that she should.
What is it that makes her stay? Who is it that advises her to bring about
this scandal? No one but Leslie, and I cannot but think her ideas on the
subject singularly gross for so refined a person. This advice she gives is
grounded on the slenderest and most irrational of arguments; a score of
conclusive replies could be given to the pitiful considerations she puts
forward. But Janet has to be convinced. Otherwise, what would become of
the crisis of this "Faultless Third Act"?

What surprises me most of all is the number of useless excrescences with
which the author has encumbered his piece. What is the point of this
solicitor who bores us, and who gives himself such important airs
throughout the play without having the slightest influence upon the
development of the plot? When, by a final stroke of chance, Leslie has
come to know of the absurd love of which he is the victim, why should she
let him see that she has heard? All she can find to say to him is,
"Good-night." And "Good-night" is all he has to say in reply. This scene
in four words could only be sublime or grotesque: I am inclined towards
the latter view of it.

Had I been present at one of the first performances of _The Profligate_, I
should have imagined myself in the presence of a talent that had lost its
way, turning its back on the goal to which it should direct its steps,
seeking beyond the confines of reality for some imaginative source of
tears. I should have been wrong. Mr. Pinero is of a reflective turn of
mind; he learns from his mistakes, and is not blinded by his successes.
Before the echoes of the applause which greeted _The Profligate_ in London
had yet died out in the provinces and abroad, Mr. Pinero was at work upon
another drama, conceived after a fashion quite different--quite contrary,
in fact--a drama in half tints, with realistic touches; a sort of novel in
dialogue. This was _Lady Bountiful_, produced on March 7, 1891.

In _Lady Bountiful_ there is no question of any great fundamental truth,
no great human interest. It is a very unequal piece of work, in turn very
moving and very irritating, for of the two women in whom its interest
centres, it happens unfortunately that one has the sympathy of the author
and the other that of the public. But it showed, at least, that its author
had found its way into the domain of psychological observation.

It was on May 27, 1893, that _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ was performed for
the first time at the St. James's Theatre. It must be said, to the credit
of the public, that its success was immediate, universal, and continued.
The critic whom I have quoted so often exclaimed in a burst of joy, that
here was a piece "which Dumas might sign without a blush." No one is
entitled to speak in the name of our greatest dramatist; but quite
recently, when I re-read _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, I said to myself
that if the greatest gift of M. Alexandre Dumas was that of embodying deep
psychological and social observation in splendid eloquence or dazzling
wit, this rare faculty is to be found almost in an equal degree in
Pinero's masterpiece.

"The limitations of _Mrs. Tanqueray_," Mr. Archer goes on to say, "are
really the limitations of the dramatic form." I would go further still,
and say that such a piece enlarges the province of the theatre. Minute
details are to be found in it, brought out by intelligent and carefully
thought-out acting, which one would have regarded as too small to attract
attention on the stage, shades that the theatre had left to the novel up
till then. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is, like _Lady Bountiful_, an acted
novel, but a novel excellently constructed. Its four acts are its four
chief chapters, and it should be noticed that the first two of these
chapters are purely analytical; but emotion is introduced imperceptibly
into the play, and we step from psychology into drama without being
conscious of the passage.

It is not the old, old subject of the courtesan in love, but that of the
mistress raised to the dignity of wife. One of Mr. Pinero's clever notions
is that of having in a sense left passion out of the question. It is
clear, of course, that Tanqueray is very sensible of Paula's personal
attractions. Who would not be, in the presence of so charming a woman?
But there is another feeling mingled with this. He is neither a satyr nor
a stoic, he assures his friend Cayley; he has a quite rational affection
for "Mrs. Jarman"; hitherto she has never met a man who has been good to
her; he, Tanqueray, will be good to her, that is all. Is he absolutely
sincere? Is his affection quite so rational as he asserts? Cayley has his
own ideas upon the subject, and so have we. Mr. Pinero has been charged
with not having told us to what extent philanthropy--the craze for
redeeming--entered into Tanqueray's marriage, to what extent the desire to
have a pretty woman all to himself. But after all, was it incumbent on the
author to give us Tanqueray's psychology? Was it not rather an indication
of his æsthetic sense to keep the husband in the background, to leave him
in half-tints so as not to mar the effect of the principal figure? That
excellent actor, Mr. Alexander, seems to have felt this, for he effaced
himself in the presence of Mrs. Campbell, though quite capable of filling
the stage unassisted, as he showed in _The Masqueraders_ and many other
pieces. In regard to Tanqueray's character, this, however, should be
noted, that, being rich and young enough to keep a mistress without
looking ridiculous, he might, if he chose, have become Paula's lover. If
he decided to make her his wife, it was first of all to give her pleasure,
but also to satisfy a sense of devotion and of virtue in himself. This I
believe to be quite true to life. He was born to believe in women--not to
be deceived by them, but to deceive himself in their regard: which is a
different thing, and perhaps more serious. His first wife was like a nun.
He ends with a courtesan. The law of moral oscillation requires that he
should go from the iceberg (it is thus the first Mrs. Tanqueray is
described to us) to a volcano. Like all weak men, he would play the part
of _un homme fort_. With Paula's arm passed through his, he is ready to
look the world in the face; but when on the eve of their wedding she comes
to see him at eleven o'clock at night, his first remark is, "What will
your coachman say?" This remark lights up his whole character, and for my
part I require nothing more.

But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its
aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how
suggestive, is everything she says--even her most trifling remarks; with
what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an
infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to
perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which
imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys
Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. There are women who traverse muddy
ways with so light a step that they do not sink in them, and that one but
guesses where they have passed from little stains upon the tips of their
shoes. One or two traits reveal to us the irregularity of Paula's life;
the mobility of her impressions, the manner at once fanciful and passive
in which she allows chance to regulate her actions. She has forgotten to
order her dinner; her cook, a "beast" who "detests" her, has pretended to
believe that she was not dining at home, and has given himself an evening
out. So she has got herself up in _grande toilette_ and has taken up her
position in her dining-room, her feet on the fender. Here she has fallen
asleep and dreamt. She tells us her dream later, the while she sups off
the dessert of the farewell dinner Tanqueray had given to three old
bachelor friends. To sup instead of dining, does not this in itself
suggest a whole conception of life? Whoever gets into the way of it will
never be able to reconcile himself to the respectable regularity of the
family joint.

Thus it is with her in everything. She has acquired a certain _ton_, now
brusque, now bewitching, an air of Bohemianism, and a whole host of
opinions which could never tally with the rôle of married woman; and these
characteristics have become embedded in her nature. Her irregularity of
word and deed goes with a like incoherence of thought and feeling. Sombre
moods succeed suddenly to extreme gaiety and vanish as suddenly again. The
idea of suicide comes to her; next moment she bursts into laughter at the
sight of the mournful expression she has evoked on Aubrey's countenance.
She has so serious a way of saying the wildest things, and says the most
serious things so frivolously, that you don't know what to believe; her
every word leaves you under her spell, and this effect is intensified more
and more. She is a really "good" woman, Tanqueray will declare just now to
his friend. It is neither an illusion on his part nor even an
exaggeration. Paula is "good" and loyal; she has kept back from Aubrey
nothing of her past. Better still, she has spent this last day writing out
a general confession, with a precision and scrupulousness in which there
is a touch of childishness, a touch of cynicism, and a touch, I think, of
heroism. She weighs the letter with a smile. It is heavy! She wonders if
the post would take all that for a penny! She says to Aubrey, quite
simply, without affectation of any kind, without any airs of tragedy about
her, that she wants him to read this letter and to think over it; and
then, on the morrow, at the last moment, if he changes his mind, let him
send her a line before eleven o'clock, and--"I--I'll take the blow!"
Aubrey puts the letter into the fire and she throws her arms round his
neck; she tells him quite frankly she had counted upon his doing so, an
admission which would quite spoil her "effect," had she sought one.

Has the question ever been better set? Think of the _Mariage d'Olympe_.
The insolent and hypocritical _gueuse_ stood revealed before she had
uttered half a dozen words. We knew she could never become acclimatised to
that family of honest folk, amongst whom fortune had thrown her. Where,
then, was the problem? All Augier's wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed
to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman.
Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the
women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence
of a _grande passion_, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant
fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him
and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not
succeed?

We learn in the second act. First of all, because, once she is married,
Paula gets bored. The world will not visit her, and custom does not permit
of her taking the initiative. She is a kind of prisoner in the beautiful
country-house in Surrey. The monotonous tranquillity of "home" oppresses
her after the feverish, exciting existence she has led; the quiet wearies
her to death. Here is her account of her day's occupations from hour to
hour.

"In the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my
orders to the tradespeople. At lunch, you and Ellean. In the afternoon, a
novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive--_if_ fine! Tea--you and
Ellean. Then two hours of dusk; then dinner--you and Ellean. Then a game
of Bésique, you and I, while Ellean reads a religious book in a dull
corner. Then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from Ellean, three
figures suddenly rise--'Good-night! good-night! good-night!' (_Imitating
a kiss._) 'God bless you!' Ah!"

With Cayley she speaks out more strongly. He asks her how she is.

_Paula_ (_walking away to the window_): "Oh, a dog's life, my dear Cayley,
mine."

_Drummle_: "Eh?"

_Paula_: "Doesn't that define a happy marriage? I'm sleek, well-kept,
well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon.
(_Gazing out of the window._) Oh, dear me!"

_Drummle_: "H'm, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The
view from the terrace is superb."

_Paula_: "Yes, I can see London."

_Drummle_: "London! Not quite so far, surely?"

_Paula_: "I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what
Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (_Impulsively_) Oh, Cayley!
do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman's yacht, when we
lay off"--(_Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her_).

Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has
made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for
her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He
has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever
want to be married? Because the other women of her world were _not_. The
title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying
to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to
her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which
she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people
nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?

But these are Paula's least serious trials. There is another woman in the
house--the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a
convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume
her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double
jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she
feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself
inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by
some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a
shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing--she ought to love
her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot
produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that
he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good.
It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her
into deeds of rashness and folly.

A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the
Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her
step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to
do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible
(it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to
bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula
can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and
in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which
bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character,
embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to
learn about her.

When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over
her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants
her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an
opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this
love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in
which the young girl's heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is
to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first
had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her
sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl
is one of the former lovers of the woman!

This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and
which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her
face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely
enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less
natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious--after the author
has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of
analysis--to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our
sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second
act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and
the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but
render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable,
crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing
has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying
and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of
humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of
death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her
husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant
land:--She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her
beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees
herself _tête-à-tête_ with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the
bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had
suffered and had wrought.... I shall never forget this scene. How her
hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went
to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great
triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate
play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances
and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have
Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of
hers, that _morbidezza_ which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent
no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the
knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that
magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and
with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must
be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell's province as an actress is
more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it
has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense
of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating
delicious fear that I would describe as the _curiosité de souffrir_. You
feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is
too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the
human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious
passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just
in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the
victim and the instrument of destiny.

It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in
January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse _The Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and
that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I
am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious
questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt,
justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject
has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the
point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and
humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible
which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the
fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her
arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The
scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to
bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a _dénouement_,--not
a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman
will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all
her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall
remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop,
provisionally, with this admirable _Mrs. Tanqueray_, which submits and
solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to
its natural close a drama of domestic life.




CHAPTER XII

Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse--The First
Translations--Ibsen acted in London--The Performers and the
Public--Encounters between the Critics--Mr. Archer once more--Affinity
between the Norwegian Character and the English--Ibsen's Realism suited to
English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life--The Women in his
Plays--Ibsen and Mr. Jones--Present and Future Influence of
Ibsen--Objections and Obstacles.


"There is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who
walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all
things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive.
Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish
papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen's is about to appear."

It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence
of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art
and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up
at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the
Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the
article which brought him before the English public, he was a quite young
man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he
occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those
who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to
one's youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more
precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at
which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.

Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen's published works, his historical and
historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his
position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent
partiality towards _The Comedy of Love_, and justified it by ingenious
translations into verse of his own. He condemned _Emperor and Galilean_ as
only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it
did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice
to the sombre grandeur of _Brand_ and the dazzling fancy of _Peer Gynt_.
In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced
the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him
somewhat _grêle_ for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the
realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist,
who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I
think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as "a vast and sinister
genius"--"a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire."

Ibsen entered into correspondence with his young critic, as Goethe before
him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one
of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming
the poet's talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of
social and psychological dramas. "The play upon which I am now at work, he
wrote,"--it was _The Pillars of Society_,--"will give the spectator
exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life
running their course before his eyes." The stage was to be merely a room,
one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look
on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of
_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_ not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his
destiny.

In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an
English version of _Emperor and Galilean_; three years later the British
Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from
his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated _The Dolls' House_ under the
title of _Norah_, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she
represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman's Rights. Women like to form some
concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to
inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, "a
delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,"
small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose
quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly,
and rarely gesticulates, and that his "self-command amounts to coldness,
but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power."
In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of
Ibsen's plays, _The Pillars of Society_, _Ghosts_, and _An Enemy of the
People_, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the
dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong
sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine
literary sense. To this library _Ondine_ was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse
returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877.
Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an
analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as
final in some respects.

It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen's fame and
influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they
attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon
performances, or, as a last resource, as a _fin de saison_, when there was
nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which
was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a
little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre,
which is the _Theâtre Libre_ of London, but which might be called even
more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to
take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said
that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly
Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would
sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious
existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for
the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an
undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he "does not pay." Now
Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving's
which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success
is most real when business is worst.

Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave
themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith,
passion, and courage, ready to "confess" him, and to endure for him, and
with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins,
and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence
at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had
been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of
hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very
respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely
curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open
and unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged
opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.

It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics
lost their temper and their manners, and passed, without realising it,
from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either
with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen's
philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as
those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a "Pocket Ibsen" in the pages of _Punch_;
these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of
respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have
for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End
tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who
lower the rate of their wages.

Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in
which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he
returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more
destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to
the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now
into the world of the theatre.

If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague,
it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well equipped
as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that
were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as
1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in _Brand_,
which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new
play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the
way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism
into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with
an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of
exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort.
But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of
translations, which are now in everybody's hands; not only do they convey
into English the intense realism of Ibsen's dialogues, but young authors
may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a
step or two nearer to life.

Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by
other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it
is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers
of the _Star_ as "Spectator," and to those of the _Speaker_ by his
initials, "A. B. W." To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard
Shaw, whose articles in the _Saturday Review_ have attracted much notice
during the year 1895, and have constituted a veritable campaign in Ibsen's
honour.

The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr.
Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor
possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept--even, at
need, to initiate--reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before
the Playgoers' Club, he had given a very clever analysis of one of the
most striking of M. Maeterlinck's plays. In 1893 he produced a play of
Ibsen's at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was _The Enemy of the
People_. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage,
and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he
did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one
with a piece of Björnson's. Therein he has set a good example to a greater
actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving
to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be,
the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course,
like _Charley's Aunt_! One must not expect too much when one has only
genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a
single one of lucky Mr. Penley's spectators.

Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will
he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By
what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what
prejudices--religious, philosophical, æsthetic--has it been impeded? To
what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist's art, or to the ideas
which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before
bringing my study to an end.

I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography;
I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the
Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague
feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their
cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the
family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to
him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these
traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer,
two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at
the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is
it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of
Carlyle's last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The
Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the _livre de raison_, in which this soul
of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique
serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders,
it is the real Bible of his race.

Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the mediæval world of the
Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will
not allow his descendants to exist in the present, and play their part in
modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to
make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than
pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a
standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of
Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could
not long hold up against the force of the current. These archæologists,
strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood
the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and
they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and
present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt,
of the ancient Vikings,--as brave before the enigmas of thought as _they_
had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.

Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschläger before him and Björnson in his
own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the
Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising
towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and
Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen's historical and semi-legendary dramas
than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the
devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has
undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to
the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the
English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are
almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical
Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could
all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of
the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had
points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political
individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under
a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no
nobility and no class distinctions--Norway has been since 1814 very much
what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of
Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.

In his strange poem, _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian
type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to
a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the principal
features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is
full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a
hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf
and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for
themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of
political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime
commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure.
Peer Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this
second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and
twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice
to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his
death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has
vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the
rest--grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that
of a death agony! Peer Gynt's old mother is about to meet her end, and she
is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he
was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart.
Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off
they go to where God lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter
for admission,--he's _got_ to let Peer Gynt's old mammy into Heaven! The
old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic,
cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French
readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it
from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the
portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a
second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the
English mind--less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier
works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more intelligible than the Scottish
peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.

Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way
which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a
question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is
that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and
who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have
grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen's
methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a
horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America.
Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been
unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but
without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their
three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against
realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third
cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards
the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the
public. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is an exception. It is a compromise
between the dramatic system of _Francillon_ and that of _Hedda
Gabler_--the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English
the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not
that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen's realism. They
draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish
minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness's nine dolls
produced some tittering in the stalls.[14] In _Little Eyolf_, if Alfred
Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the
tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what
he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were,
at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the
dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare.
Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature
sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is
to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then
to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never
seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the
supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards
the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some
enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world
in which we live without ever seeing it,--of what is in it, and beside it,
and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere
pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but
a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be
replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the
joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is
accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and
suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were
but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing.
It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to
suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange):
In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.

If Ibsen's art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because
this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and
secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions
with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the
English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine,
Ibsen's message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to
this race more than to any other.

With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that
theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious
episode in _The Dolls' House_, and which pervades _Ghosts_, and
_Rosmersholm_, and _The Lady from the Sea_; does it not find a fit and
well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert
Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are
the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the
majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all
initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but
sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Rörland and Pastor
Manders these things find expression,--in the former violent, impetuous,
fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the
incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is
well aware that she has both her Rörlands and her Manders. When, too, she
is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments,
but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows
on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own
philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And
just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a
Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial
_bavard_, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote,
this Pangloss who would go to the martyr's stake, but prefers to stop on
the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for
a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines
them and criticises them. "Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a
decent stone in the lot!" He has returned from a public meeting with his
trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure:
"When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be
careful not to wear your best pair of breeches." If these traits are not
English, I don't know what the English character is.

Were I to pass Ibsen's types in review one by one, I should find it easy
to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand,
the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who
makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Lövborg, that
noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in
whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest
endeavour;--these would require no modification or commentary upon the
London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined
best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke
so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of _The Dolls'
House_, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a
plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities
and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own
life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed
daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah's
cry is indefinitely prolonged.

It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: "In democracy will be
found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of
society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of
birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but
the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much
in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to
the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be
devoted." I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It
seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and
intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.

Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in
Ibsen's dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That _joie de
vivre_, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which
in Regina (in _Ghosts_) takes the form of a cold and marble-like
indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and
self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a
man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness
through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather
than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the naïvely
animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in _Little Eyolf_), who puts her
husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which
had gone from his heart--to secure the marital attentions which are her
due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the
fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of
the Sound.

I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English
dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has
brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed,
whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare
quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict
them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney
Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a
certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has
declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of _The
Master Builder_. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration,
his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not
seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen's ideas; but he must have
reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which
conceived _Hedda Gabler_ is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed
its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.

As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both the artist and thinker in
Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which
he made of _A Dolls' House_, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an
Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In
certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the
original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and
of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting
in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of
rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene
which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play.
For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the
midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for
ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold,--symbols
of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in
it,--the authors of _Breaking a Butterfly_ substituted a general
reconciliation. They justified the optimistic _dénouement_ by making the
husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah
declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was
right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that
she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their
individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic,
the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not
turn out well, at least everything is true in this most disunited of
_ménages_.

Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has
translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems
to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian's heroines. It may be
said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has passed through all
his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too
lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to
account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is
in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author
of _Hedda Gabler_ and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The
English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch;
despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they
consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen's, in which for
the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful
solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.

It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Björnson its
Spring. This Björnson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament
have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown
himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under,
and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself.
The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm than good. This
connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has
drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have
failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident
and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long
before Ibsen's name had been even mentioned in London, his _Arne_ and
_Synnové Solbakken_ had been read there, two sketches of peasant life
which will bear comparison with _La Mare au Diable_ and _La Petite
Fadette_; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten
years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first
achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but
little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal
degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his illustrious rival.

When Ibsen attacks that class of puritans and hypocrites who turn away
their faces when they pass the entrance to a theatre, there is no
hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake
the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas
and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to
follow him, for it feels that a portion of its clientèle, and that the
best,--that which has always been constant in its support,--will be
startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to
be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege
and tradition, against change and progress. It is on the side of those
who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for
these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are
indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think;
when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights
and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of
what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air
of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows
no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of
anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees
have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted,
and gets even to like it. It is one of the amusements of the decadent.
Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen's adversaries, fascinated by his
genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife's in
_Little Eyolf_, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his
flute.[15]




CHAPTER XIII

G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent Theatre and
Matinée Performances--The Drama of To-morrow--A "Report of Progress"--The
Public and the Actors--Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to
the Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to its
becoming Modern and National--Conclusion.


I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic
movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from
without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held
back; have analysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those
dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for
me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon,
and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of
to-morrow.

There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and
melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to
earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they
stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the
art? There are many of their kind whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away
with, and whom we shall never get back.

I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte
says in Molière's _Misanthrope_--"_Belle Philis, on désespère alors qu'on
espère toujours_." The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been
no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given
what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is
an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of
observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour,
together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a Cockney, and nothing
that belongs to Cockneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period
in which you can really smell the East End, as the _maître_ of Medan would
say, is _The Lights o' London_, and that perhaps is why all the London
managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, "with thanks."
_The Lights o' London_ got produced in the end, however, and had an
immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards
realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.

Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will
write the _Judahs_, _The Second Mrs. Tanquerays_ of to-morrow? Will it be
Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it
be Mr. Carton, author of _Liberty Hall_ (one of the successes of 1893)
and of _The Squire of Dames_, an adaptation, or rather an abridged
translation, of _L'Ami des femmes_, which has been attracting the public
to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he
possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive
faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.

Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of
his works, _The Fatal Card_, having crossed the channel? Since then he has
written a piece entitled _John-a-Dreams_, played at the Haymarket in 1894,
in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is
not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama
are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the
restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine
phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a
quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn.
Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold's
father, a country clergyman.

"You do not know me, sir," she says to him (I quote from memory), "but I
know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of ----. I was
with Mrs. Withers then."

"Oh, indeed,--an excellent person," he replies; "but it is strange that I
did not make your acquaintance."

"No, it is not strange, really,--do you remember the kind of work she was
engaged upon?"

"The redemption of unfortunates, was it not."

"Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless--you helped her?"

"No," Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. "No, it was she
who helped me." She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or
rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. "They came to
my help," she goes on, "but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed
and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later
on."

Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she
had made herself an honest woman.

"Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full
consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?"

"Certainly, my child," the old man answers.

"You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your
own rank, ... were a friend of yours, ... were your son?"

Harold's father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil
and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself,
seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he
has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his
heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future;
she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice
which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the
point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter
and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being
pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr.
Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me
to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to
dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always
that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional
propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds,
too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the
spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage,
those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to
forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage
appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces
of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The
jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate
odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring
home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it
is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought
of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love
the impossible.

After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others
still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the
managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but
this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and
there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain
for them only those matinées in the regular theatres which lend their
stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in
which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the
strangest of publics. The house is full of friends--if it be not empty
altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these
tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to
discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they
have come across little up to the present except the _gaucherie_ which
feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting
wonder.

Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have
watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages,
are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already
during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the
taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of
education; it has "settled," so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the
bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually been formed by a
process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of
the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of
clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to
which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.

In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose
rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already
mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to
refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of
applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr.
Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to
the best of our _sociétaires_ of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift
of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of _Liberty
Hall_; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his
whimsical originality upon all his rôles; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls
Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is,
on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet
freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as
Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss
Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of
depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from
being complete.

There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly
lacking before the Bancrofts' time was unison. To-day the _ensembles_ are
far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for
that perpetual _va-et-vient_ in the theatrical world which is so injurious
to the homogeneity of the various companies.

The art of _mise-en-scène_ did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it
has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the
scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to
make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous
accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter
of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving's formula,
with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the
piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum.
No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a
glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the
poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must
have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the
Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in
the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the
conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless
night, threw open his window, and we saw the fields lying under their
covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the
room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the
sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as _andante_ to the loftiest
feelings.

It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter
of _mise-en-scène_ as they might wish. But may this not be that for one
reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is
inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the
actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the
complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is
no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some
actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to
measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young
authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a
dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left
in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a
study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal
vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own
special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded
manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly
balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, _amateur de théâtre_
and to an even greater degree _amateur de femmes_: you will find that
each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as
the actor-manager's.

Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in
principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly
unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I
have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann,
the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the
world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the
world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction _The First Step_:
this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in
their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman
has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their
mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don't return at
night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.

But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like
the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some
years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the
hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature
in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of
adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it
will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases;
and thus it will drag out its existence yet a little while. When,
finally, the time will come to give it its _coup-de-grâce_, it will be
found to have already ceased to breathe.

Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the
Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented
not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who
are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will
be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of
the national mind, one of the reasons of England's existence? They are the
natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. When they
leave it free, their end or its end will be near at hand, and England's
end will be in sight.

We live, not because we choose but because we must. It is thus with the
English drama as with everything else. The law that put the dramatic work
of foreigners upon the same footing in regard to copyright as their own
has made translation and adaptation almost impossible, by reason of the
double expense involved. Thenceforward it was necessary for the English
dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It
was thus the English drama came to life.

The vote of Congress, which in 1890 secured copyright in America for
English authors, put an end to the old system of keeping plays in
manuscript. Once publication was no longer attended by risk, how could
they hold aloof from this new form of success? Accordingly they began to
print. But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The
drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a
moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English
drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should
express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it
should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of
the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the
times. These causes, which I have pointed out and discussed, were:--

1. The timidity resulting from excessive severity of manners.

2. The dramatist's lack of opportunity for the study of social life.

3. The Shakespeare cult, which paralysed the imagination by offering it a
model that was too big for it, and forms that had become antiquated.

These causes have disappeared one after the other. The moral ideal has
become enlarged and has given over a wider field to the dramatist. The
dramatist himself has learned to know life outside the green-room and the
tavern back-parlour. He has studied from nature instead of copying
Goldsmith and Sheridan. Shakespeare has never been less imitated, perhaps
because he has never been better acted or better understood.

But what prevented the drama from being "English"? It is we French who
have prevented it--it is from our drama that the English playwrights have
drawn for so long, at first with an indiscriminate eagerness for which
there is no parallel, later more modestly and with discernment. At the
risk of offending my compatriots, I must here express my absolute
conviction that, except in regard to acting, this French influence has
been harmful to the English stage. Our dramatists have enriched some
London managers; but they have lain for thirty years on top of the English
dramatists, and have stifled their originality--and without deriving much
profit from this involuntary tyranny. If only they could have taught their
pupils the secrets of their trade! But the English were maladroit
disciples of Scribe and Sardou, whilst the philosophy of Dumas and Augier
remained to them a closed book.

The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two
theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to
time,--now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side
of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the
two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally,
will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the
Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama,
freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. It is
capable of doing so unaided, but I think Ibsen's plays will help it. In
this reference to Ibsen my readers may think they see a contradiction in
my reasoning. "What!" they will cry. "In order to bring back the English
drama to itself again, you say it must be freed from foreign influence,
and yet you send it to school to Norway!"

But I have answered this objection by anticipation. I have shown that
Ibsen is not a foreigner to England. He seems to have written for
Englishmen; he has given them the kind of drama, more or less, that
Shakespeare, were he living now, would have given them. I write this
sentence, confident that if I am in the world, or, not being in the world,
am still read, a score of years hence, no one will be inclined to call me
to account for it. To the Northern races, at all events, Ibsen means not a
fashion but an era.

What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create,--with
or without Ibsen's assistance,--is a new form in which to reproduce that
dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or
foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. For my part, I have sometimes
endeavoured to trace this dualism to the marriage, tempestuous but
fruitful, of Saxon and Celt, to the effort, ever vain but never ceasing,
of these two refractory elements to fuse and unite. The drama of the
sixteenth century came, in a moving and memorable hour, from one of those
unions between the young and strong in which there enters something of
violence and even of madness. The existing drama is the issue of parents
well on in years in a time of gloom and trouble. It is delicate and calls
for care. At the same time, it bears resemblances to those who gave it
life. A race of heroes who are also buccaneers, a race of poets and
shopkeepers, a race fearless of death and devoted to money, calculating
but passionate, dreamers yet men of action, capable of the charges of
Balaclava and the deal in the Suez shares, cannot possibly find its
literary expression either in pure idealism or in realism undiluted. The
"bleeding slice of life" awakes in it no appetite; "Art for Art's sake"
leaves it wonderfully indifferent; of moralising, it is tired for the time
being: it is passing through a stage of sensuous torpor which is not
without charm, and it waits open-eyed and, as it were, hesitatingly before
the labour of creating society afresh, of building up a new civilisation.
It does not wish, and is not able, to forget those problems--that terrible
To-morrow--by which we are everywhere threatened. Hence its sensuousness
is tempered, refined, saddened by philosophy. And in this mood, what it
asks of the drama is not to be amused, or to be excited, but to be made to
think.




INDEX


  Achurch, Miss, and Ibsen, 281.

  Actor-manager on circuit, 49.

  Adaptations from the French, 77, 207;
    law as to, 208;
    process, 209;
    S. Grundy's, 216.

  Adelphi, The, 41, 46, 63, 195.

  Albany, James, 133;
    his _Two Roses_, 162.

  Alexander, Mr., in _Mrs. Tanqueray_, 266.

  Almaviva I. and II., 200.

  America, Macready in, 73.

  Anderson, Mary, 174.

  Anstey, Mr., and Ibsen, 282.

  Archer, W., on Kean and Macready, 42.

  ---- on Wills, 177;
    on Tennyson, 178.

  ---- on Tennyson and Montanelli, 185, 299-207.

  ---- and H. A. Jones, 234;
    and _The Profligate_, 260;
    and _Mrs. Tanqueray_, 265.

  ---- and Ibsen, 282, 285, 290.

  Arnold, Matthew, in the English Drama, 204;
    and H. A. Jones, 239.

  _Arrah-na-pogue_, 91.

  Art of _mise-en-scène_, 307.

  Arundel Club, The, 109, 115.

  Augier, 209, 257, 269, 312.

  Authors of 1850-65, 80.


  _Bab Ballads_, 140.

  Bancroft, Mr., as Captain Hawtree, 119, 120;
    his realism, 122;
    revival of _School for Scandal_, 50, 123.

  Bancrofts, the, compared, 122;
    and Robertson's plays, 133;
    and the "cup and saucer" comedy, 134;
    retirement, 136.

  Bancroft, Mrs., 101 (see Wilton, Marie).

  Barrett, Wilson, 306.

  Barrie, J. M., 301.

  Batemans, the, 156.

  Beauty in the Drama, 252.

  _Becket_, Tennyson's, 185, 188, 193.

  _Bells, The_, 164, 166.

  _Belphegor_, 100.

  Beringhiem in _Richelieu_, 69.

  Berlioz, 45.

  Berne, Treaty of, 208.

  Bernhardt, Sarah, 197, 275.

  Björnson, 406.

  ---- and Ibsen, 297.

  _Black-eyed Susan_, 61, 94.

  Bohemia, centre of, 109, 115;
    in a nutshell, 116.

  Boucicault, Dion, 87, 88-92, 93.

  ---- Mrs. Dion, 90.

  _Brand_, Ibsen's, 278, 279, 283.

  _Breaking a Butterfly_, 296.

  _Broken Hearts_, Gilbert's, 142.

  Brooke, 156.

  Brough, Lionel, 306.

  ---- Robert, 110.

  Browning and Macready, 64;
    his dramas, 192.

  Buchanan, Robert, 195, 301.

  Buckstone, 79, 80, 103, 112, 152.

  Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 64-72;
    at Macready's banquet, 74;
    portrayal of Riches and Rank, 116 (see Lytton).

  _Bunch of Violets, A_, 221.

  Burdett-Coutts', Baroness, present to Irving, 167.

  Burlesque, 93.

  Burnand's _Ixion_, 93-95.

  Byron, H. J., 96-99, 103, 104;
    and Robertson, 134.

  ---- Lord, 96.

  Byronian Satanism and Bulwer Lytton, 65.


  _Cabinet Minister, The_, 258.

  Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 250, 266, 275, 276.

  ---- in _John o' Dreams_, 302, 306.

  _Cantab, The_, Robertson in, 112.

  Carlyle and the Sagas, 285;
    and Ibsen, 288.

  Carton, 301.

  _Caste_, 117;
    Howe in, 119;
    Marie Wilton in, 121;
    scene from, 129.

  Cavendish, Ada, 95.

  Censor's Successor, the, 310.

  Censorship, official, 83.

  ---- and Sydney Grundy, 214.

  ---- and _The First Step_, 309.

  Chamberlain, Lord, 84.

  Chambers, Haddon, 302, 307.

  Characters, limited types of, 80.

  _Charles I._, Wills's, 165, 166, 177.

  _Charley's Aunt_, 284.

  Chatterton, 198.

  Chedd, 116.

  Chippendale's present to Irving, 166.

  Cibber, Colley, 168.

  Circuit, on, 46-49.

  City elocution class, 159.

  Clarke, John, 104.

  Clary in _The Prisoner of War_, 59.

  Classical drama, death of the, 176.

  _Clerical Error, A_, 234.

  Coleridge on Kean, 42.

  _Colleen Bawn_, 90-92.

  Comédie Française, 197.

  Comedies, Robertson's, cause of their success, 122.

  Comedy, "Cup and Saucer," 134.

  Comedy, the, 196.

  Comic opera, 98.

  Commission, parliamentary, 64;
    and Bulwer Lytton, 65.

  Compton, 80.

  Cook, 198.

  _Cool as a Cucumber_, 79.

  Copyright in dramatic work, 310.

  Coquelin, M., on Mrs. Bancroft, 101.

  Coriolanus, Macready as, 41.

  Court Theatre, The, 133, 196.

  Courtly, Charles, in _London Assurance_, 89.

  Covent Garden, 46, 62, 64, 76.

  Criticism, dramatic, 81.

  Critics, 81.

  ---- old and new, 198;
    and Sydney Grundy, 226;
    and Ibsen, 282.

  Cromwell and Richelieu, 68.

  Crumbs and Toby in _The Rent Day_, 57.

  _Crusaders, The_, 244-248, 259.

  "Cup and Saucer" comedy, 134.

  _Cup_, Tennyson's, 183.

  Cynisca, 150, 152.


  _Dandy Dick_, 257.

  _Dan'l Druce_, 142.

  Darwin and Ibsen, 292.

  Delacour, 217.

  Delane, Mr., and John Oxenford, 82.

  Delaunay, 197.

  Democracy and the drama, 72.

  Deschapelles, Madame, in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.

  Dick, Robert, 55.

  Dickens, Charles, 58;
    letter on Marie Wilton, 102.

  Diderot's rules, 51.

  ---- paradox, 170, 206.

  Dillon, Charles, 100.

  _Diplomacy_, origin of, 210.

  _Dolls' House, The_, 279, 292, 293, 296.

  Drama, legitimate, 40;
    a national, and Douglas Jerrold, 55, 156.

  ---- and democracy, 72.

  ---- the Boucicault, 93.

  ---- the classical, 176.

  ---- English and French, 204;
    elements of the, 252.

  ---- German, in England, 299.

  ---- English, cause of its return to life, 310;
    causes of its decay, 311;
    Ibsen's influence, 313;
    what it is seeking, 314.

  Dramatic verse, English, 44.

  ---- criticism, 81, 198.

  Dramatists of to-day, 212.

  Drury Lane, 40, 62, 76, 195.

  Dumas, Alexander, effect of Macready on, 46, 70, 209, 227, 257, 264, 312.

  Dundreary, Lord, 112.

  "Dust-Hole," The, 104.

  Dutton, 198.


  _Ebbsmith, The Notorious Mrs._, 275.

  Eccles, 128, 129.

  Eccles, Polly, 120, 122, 129.

  Edgeworth, Miss, 51.

  Eily in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.

  Ellis, Havelock, and Ibsen, 280.

  Emery, Winifred, 306.

  _Emperor and Galilean_, Ibsen's, 278, 279.

  _Enemy of the People, An_, 280, 284.

  _Engaged_, Gilbert's, 144.

  English dramatic verse, 44.

  Ennery, d', 81.

  Evelyn, Alfred, 71.

  Examiner of Plays, 84.


  _Falcon, The_, 180.

  Falconer, Edmund, 89.

  Farce, 194.

  Farren, 79, 80, 107.

  Farren, Nellie, 194.

  Father Tom in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.

  _Fatal Card, The_, 302.

  Faucit, Helen, 79.

  Favart, 197.

  Fechter in Hamlet, 78, 158.

  Feuillet, Octave, 222.

  Fielding and the Censorship, 83.

  Fielding Club, The, 109, 115.

  _Figaro, London_, 199, 200.

  _First Step, The_, 309.

  Forster, John, and Macready, 64;
    at Macready's banquet, 74;
    letter from Dickens, 102.

  France, Macready in, 45, 73.

  _Francillon_, _Hedda Gabler_, 289, 295.

  French actors in London, 78.

  ---- adaptations, 77, 207;
    law as to, 208;
    S. Grundy's, 216.

  ---- drama prevented English, 311.

  Froude, 88.

  _Fun_, Gilbert a contributor to, 140.


  Gaiety, The, 194.

  Garneray's Memoirs, 59.

  Garrick, David, the rôle of, 112.

  Garrick and Hare, 117, 157.

  Garrick school, 40.

  Garrick Club, The, 109, 115, 196.

  Garrick, the first night at the, 259.

  Gautier, Théophile, 41, 78.

  Gerridge, Sam, Hare as, 119, 128, 131.

  German drama in England, 299.

  _Ghosts_, 280, 292.

  Gilbert, irony of, 111.

  ---- and Robertson, 138;
    literary career, 139;
    _Bab Ballads_, 140;
    _Sweethearts_, 140;
    _Broken Hearts_, 142;
    his only woman's character, 144;
    _Engaged_, 144;
    _Palace of Truth_, 146;
    his philosophy, 144-146;
    _Wicked World_, 147;
    _Pygmalion and Galatea_, 147-152;
    _Trial by Jury_, combines with Sullivan, _Princess Ida_, _Patience_,
          _Iolanthe_, 153;
    _Pirates of Penzance_, _Pinafore_, 154;
    a lawyer, 155.

  Globe, The, 133.

  Goldsmith, 50, 81, 88.

  Gosse, Edmund, and Ibsen, 277-280, 285.

  _Greatest of These, The_, 233.

  Grecian, The, 194.

  Grisi, 75.

  Grundy, Sydney, 212;
    first appearance, 214.

  ---- _The Snowball_, 214;
    _In Honour Bound_, 216;
    _A Pair of Spectacles_, 217;
    _Mammon_, 220;
    _A Bunch of Violets_, 221;
    influence of the French, 223;
    _The Glass of Fashion_, 224;
    _A Fool's Paradise_, _The Late Mr. Costello_, 225;
    his peculiarities, 226;
    _Sowing the Wind_, _An Old Jew_, 227;
    _The New Woman_, 230;
    _The Greatest of These_, 233.

  ---- and Ibsen, 295.

  _Grues_, 97.


  Hamlet, Irving's, 166.

  Hardy, Thomas, and Pinero, 256.

  Hare, John, 117;
    in _Ours_, 119;
    in _Caste_, 119, 181, 259.

  _Harold_, Tennyson's, 185, 188, 190.

  Harris, Sir Augustus, 301.

  Hawtree, Captain, Bancroft as, 119, 122.

  Haymarket, The, 46, 101.

  ---- and the Bancrofts, 134, 196.

  Hazlitt, 49, 82.

  Heinemann's, Wm., _First Step_, 309.

  Her Majesty's Theatre, 76.

  Herman, Mr., and H. A. Jones, 296.

  Hippodrama, The, 76.

  _Hobby Horse, The_, 257.

  Homer, 54.

  Hood's _Model Men and Women_, 98.

  ---- supper-parties, 110, 111, 131.

  Horton, Priscilla, 102.

  Hoskyns, David, and Irving, 161.

  Hugo, Victor, and Bulwer Lytton, 65, 68, 70.

  _Humour of a Scholar_ and _Money's_ success, 71.

  Hunt, Leigh, 49;
    and Macready, 64.

  Hutchinson, Colonel, 49.

  Huxley and Ibsen, 292.


  Ibsen, 206, 253, 233.

  ---- England hears of him, 277;
    translations by Edmund Gosse and others, 278-280;
    played by The Independent Theatre, 280;
    and the Critics, 281-283;
    and theatrical managers, 284;
    performed at The Haymarket, 284;
    and the Sagas, 286;
    _Peer Gynt_, 287;
    more intelligible than Carlyle, 288;
    his methods, 289;
    realism, 290;
    his message, 291-292;
    his types, 293;
    and democracy, 294;
    and English dramatists, 295;
    H. A. Jones's adaptation of _A Dolls' House_, 296;
    divergence from English admirers, 297;
    and the Puritans, 298;
    influence on the English drama, 313.

  Icilius and Virginia, 51.

  Imagination in the drama, 252.

  Independent Theatre, The, 280, 305.

  _Iolanthe_, 153.

  Irving, Henry, first plays Hamlet, 159;
    early days, 160;
    in the provinces and début in London, 161;
    as Digby Grant in Albery's _Two Roses_, 163;
    secures _The Bells_, 164;
    in _Charles I._, 165;
    as Hamlet, 166;
    in _Richelieu_, 166;
    on staging masterpieces, 167;
    and Shakespeare's text, 168;
    his rôles, 168;
    his method, 170;
    his position as to realism, 171;
    as a writer and lecturer, 172;
    "Sir Henry," 172;
     his success, 173;
    and Tennyson's _Becket_, 188;
    and Ibsen, 284.

  _Ixion_, Burnand's, 93-95.


  Jean, Oliver Saint, 72.

  Jerrold, Blanchard, 79.

  Jerrold, Douglas, 55-62;
    _Rent Day_, 56;
    _Prisoner of War_, 59;
    _Black-eyed Susan_, 61, 94;
    and the Censorship, 85.

  _John-a-Dreams_, 302-304.

  Jones, H. A., 178, 212.

  ---- _A Clerical Error_, _An Old Master_, 234;
    _The Silver King_, _Saints and Sinners_, 235-240;
    _The Case of Rebellious Susan_, 236-250;
    _Judah_, 239-244;
    _The Crusaders_, 244-248, 259;
    _The Tempter_, 248;
    _Triumph of the Philistines_, 249;
    _The Masqueraders_, 250, 252;
    on realism, 251;
    future work, 252.

  ---- and Ibsen, 295-297.

  Jordan, Mrs., 39.

  Josephs, Fanny, 104.

  _Judah_, 239-244, 251.


  Kean, Charles, 79, 157;
    his successor, 166.

  Kean, Edmund, 40-45;
    death of, 63.

  Keeley, 79.

  Keeley, Mrs., 79.

  Kemble, Charles, 79.

  Kemble, John, 40, 45, 79, 157.

  Kendal as Pygmalion, 147;
    in _The Falcon_, 181.

  Kendals in _The Greatest of These_, 233.

  Knebworth, Squireen of, 65.

  Knowles, Sheridan, 50, 54, 55.


  "La Belle Smidson," 45.

  Labiche, 215, 217, 218, 219, 257.

  Lacy, the bookseller, 107.

  _Lady from the Sea, The_, 292.

  _Lady of Lyons_, 64, 65-67.

  Lamb, Charles, 49, 83.

  Lancival, Luce de, 45.

  Larkin, 104.

  _Late Mr. Costello, The_, 225.

  Law as to adaptations and translations, 208.

  ---- as to foreign dramas, 310.

  Legitimate drama, 156.

  Lemaitre, Jules, 201.

  Lemierra, 45.

  Lewes on Macready's Macbeth, 45;
    on Macready's last performance, 73.

  _Liberty Hall_, 301, 306.

  Lind, Jenny, 76.

  _Little Eyolph_, 290, 299.

  _London Assurance_, Boucicault's, 88.

  _London Figaro_, 199, 200.

  _London, Lights o'_, 302.

  Lord, Miss H. F., and Ibsen, 279.

  _Lords and Commons_, 256.

  _Love, The Comedy of_, Ibsen's, 278.

  Lyceum, The, 100.

  ---- _The Cup_ at, 184.

  Lyceum, 196.

  Lytton, Lord, 64-72;
    at Macready's banquet, 74;
    on Riches and Rank, 116.


  Macbeth, Kean as, 41;
    Macready as, 45.

  Mackayers, Joseph, 214.

  Macready, 40-45;
    and Dumas, 46;
    and authors, 50;
    and _Virginius_, 55.

  ---- manager of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, 62, 63, 64, 65;
    in _Richelieu_, 67;
    in Paris, 1846, 73.

  ---- work and farewell performance, 73;
    last days, 74.

  ---- and Marie Wilton, 99, 157;
    and Fechter's Hamlet, 158.

  Maeterlink, M., 284.

  _Magistrate, The_, 257.

  Man of the world type, 120.

  Managers, theatre, 77, 308.

  Manning, Cardinal, and Becket, 188.

  Martin, Lady, 79.

  _Master Builder, The_, 290, 295.

  Mathews, Charles, 79, 80, 123, 135.

  Melnotte, Claude, in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.

  Melodrama, 154, 196.

  Memoirs, Marie Wilton's, 99.

  Merimée, 54.

  Merivale, Herman, 177.

  Merritt, 195.

  _Michael O'Dowd_, 91.

  Millard, Evelyn, 306.

  Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, 78.

  _Model Men and Women_, Hood's, 98.

  Molière, 88, 236.

  _Money_, 64, 70-72;
    Marie Wilton in, 121.

  _Moor of Venice_, Kean in, 42.

  Moore, George, 289.

  Morals of the stage, Byron's effect on, 97.

  Morris and the Sagas, 285.

  Mortimer, James, 199.

  Munich, Ibsen at, 277.

  Music, a rival to the drama, 75.

  Music halls, 194.

  Myles-na-Coppaleen in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.

  Myrine, 151.

  Mystery in the drama, 252.


  Neilson, Adelaide, 159.

  Nesville, Juliette, 249.

  _New Woman, The_, 230-233.

  _Night's Adventure, A_, Robertson's, 107.

  _Norah_, Ibsen's, 279.

  Norway and England, affinities between, 287.

  _Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The_, 276.


  Oakley, Macready as, 41.

  _Octoroon_, 91.

  Official Censorship, 83.

  _Old Jew, An_, 227-230.

  _Old Master, An_, 234.

  Olympic, The, 107.

  _Oonagh, The_, 90.

  Operetta, The, 93, 194.

  Origin of Official Censorship, 83.

  Orleans, Duc d', in _Richelieu_, 69.

  _Our American Cousin_, Sothern in, 112.

  _Our Boys_, 134, 178.

  _Ours_, 117;
    Marie Wilton in, 121.

  "Owls' Roost," 115.

  Oxenford, John, 82;
    on Irving, 164.


  _Pair of Spectacles, A_, 217-220.

  _Palace of Truth, The_, 146.

  Pantomime, the, 76, 98, 194.

  Parker, Louis N., 301.

  Parliamentary Commission, 64;
    and Bulwer Lytton, 65.

  Passion in the drama, 252.

  _Patience_, 153.

  Pauline in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.

  _Peep o' Day_, 90.

  _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen's, 278, 279, 287.

  Penley, Mr., 284.

  Pettitt, 195.

  Phelps, 76, 157.

  _Pilgrim, The White_, 177.

  _Pillars of Society, The_, Ibsen's, 279, 280.

  _Pinafore_, 154.

  Pinero, Arthur W., letter to Mr. Bancroft, 136, 212.

  ---- personal, 254;
    an actor, 255;
    _The Squire_, _Lords and Commons_, 256;
    _The Magistrate_, _Dandy Dick_, _The Hobby Horse_, 257;
    _The Times_, _The Cabinet Minister_, 258;
    _The Profligate_, 259-264;
    _Lady Bountiful_, 264;
    _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, 264-274, 276;
    _The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_, 276;
    and Ibsen, 295.

  _Pink Dominoes_, 178.

  Pippo, Marie Wilton as, 102, 103, 121.

  _Pirates of Penzance_, 154.

  Plautus, 88.

  Playgoers' Club, Mr. Tree at, 284.

  Plays, Examiner of, 84.

  Plessy, Madame Arnould, 78.

  "Pocket Ibsen," A, 282.

  Polhill, Captain, 62.

  Prices under the Bancrofts, 135.

  Prince of Wales's Theatre, 105 (see Queen's), 113.

  ---- Robertson's plays at, 114.

  ---- last visit to, 137.

  _Princess Ida_, 153.

  Princess's, The, 195.

  Princess's translator, The, 78.

  _Prisoner of War_, Jerrold's, 59.

  "Privileged" theatres, 40, 62-64, 156.

  _Profligate, The_, 259-264.

  _Promise of May, The_, 182.

  Provincial touring, 46-49.

  Ptarmigant, Lord and Lady, 116, 127.

  Puckler-Muskau, Price, 63.

  Puritans and the Stage, 236.

  ---- and the Censorship, 310.

  _Pygmalion and Galatea_, 147;
    the critics on, 148-152.


  _Queen Mary_, Tennyson's, 178, 185, 187, 190.

  Queen's Theatre, 104 (see Prince of Wales's).

  _The Promise of May_, 182.


  Raval, 79.

  Ray, Katharine, and Ibsen, 279.

  Realism, H. A. Jones on, 252.

  ---- English horror of, 289;
    Ibsen's, 289.

  _Rebellious Susan, The Case of_, 236, 250.

  Rehan, Ada, 174.

  Réjane, 197.

  _Rent Day, The_, Jerrold's, 56.

  Reynolds, 50.

  Rhythm of English dramatic verse, 44.

  _Richelieu_, 64, 65-70.

  Richelieu and Cromwell, 68.

  _Richelieu_, Lytton's, 69.

  Robertson, Forbes, 306.

  Robertson, Madge, as Galatea, 147;
    in _The Falcon_, 181.

  Robertson, T. W., early life, 106;
    quarrel with Farren, 107;
    at journalism, 109;
    in Bohemia, 109-111;
    writes a play for Sothern, 112;
    _Society_ and Marie Wilton, 112, 113;
    success, 117;
    a wonderful reader, 118;
    his insight into Marie Wilton's genius, 121;
    cause of the success of his comedies, 122;
    only half a realist, 123;
    characteristics exemplified from _School_, 124;
    method of character-drawing, 127;
    his characters, 127-132;
    marriage, 132;
    death, 133;
    and Byron, 134;
    and Gilbert, 138.

  Robins, Miss, and Ibsen, 281.

  Robson, Mr., 79, 306.

  Roche, Madame, 158.

  Romanticism in France, 45.

  _Roses, The Two_, 133.

  _Rosmersholm_, 292.

  Rorke, Kate, 306.

  Royalty, The, 95.

  Ryder, 79, 158.


  Sadler's Wells, 76, 157.

  Sagas, The, 285.

  Saintine, X. B., and _Richelieu_, 68.

  _Saints and Sinners_, 235-240, 244.

  Salaries of actors, 135.

  Sarcey, Francisque, 201.

  Sardou and the Bancrofts, 134, 209, 210, 215, 252, 312.

  Savage Club, The, 109, 115.

  Scandinavian Society, British, and Ibsen, 279.

  School of Common Sense in France, 51.

  _School_, 117;
    Marie Wilton in, 121;
    scene from, 125.

  Scott, Clement, and _The Oonagh_, 90;
    and Tom Hood's parties, 110;
    on Robertson's reading, 118;
    on Irving, 164, 197, 198, 199, 200.

  Scribe, 81, 215, 216, 224, 252, 312.

  Sedaine's _drame bourgeois_, 51.

  Shakespeare, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 63, 73, 76;
    and French actors, 78;
    in Irving's hand, 173;
    resuscitation, 175;
    and melodrama, 196.

  "Shakespeare made Easy," 156.

  _Shaugraun_, 91.

  Shaw, G. B., and Ibsen, 283.

  Shelley, 64.

  Sheridan, 50, 81, 88.

  Shylock, Kean as, 43.

  Siddons, Mrs., 40.

  _Silver King, The_, 235.

  Sims, G. R., 195, 301.

  Smith, Albert, 109.

  Smithson, Miss, 45.

  _Snowball, The_, 214.

  _Society_, Robertson's, 112;
    first performance, 114;
    success, 117.

  "Song of the Gentleman," by Brough, 111.

  "Songs of the Governing Classes," by Brough, 111.

  Sothern and Robertson, 112, 118.

  ---- and Irving, 162.

  _Sowing the Wind_, 227.

  Spanker, Lady Gay, 75.

  Spectators, three classes, 305.

  Spencer, Herbert, and Ibsen, 292.

  _Squire of Dames_, 302.

  _Squire, The_, 256.

  St. James's Theatre, 78, 181, 196.

  Standard, The, 194.

  Strand, The, 96, 99, 101;
    Dickens at, 102, 104, 112, 121.

  Stirling, Mrs., in _Caste_, 135.

  Sullivan and Gilbert, 153.

  Surface, Joseph, Macready as, 41.

  Surrey, The, 194.

  Swanborough, Mrs., 96, 112.

  _Sweethearts_, Gilbert's, 140.

  Swinburne's dramas, 192.


  Talma on the actor's emotions, 170.

  _Tanqueray, The Second Mrs._, 264-274, 276, 289.

  Taylor, Tom, 87.

  ---- _Our American Cousin_, 112.

  Taylor, Tom, on Marie Wilton and Robertson, 118.

  _Tempter, The_, 248.

  Tennyson and Macready, 74;
    and Gilbert's _Princess Ida_, 153.

  ---- as a dramatist, 178;
    and the critics, 178;
    _The Falcon_, 180;
    _The Promise of May_, 182;
    _The Cup_, 183.

  ---- _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_, 185;
    his sense of history, 186.

  Terence, 88.

  Terry, Miss Ellen, 167, 174, 178, 189.

  Theatre-goers of 1850, 77.

  Theatres, number of, 86.

  Theatre, commercial decadence of the, 62.

  Theatres, "Privileged," 40, 62-64, 156.

  Theatre managers, 77.

  Thomas, Henry, 159.

  Thomas, Moy, 198.

  _Ticket of Leave Man_, origin of, 207.

  _Times, The_, Pinero's, 258.

  Toby and Crumbs in _The Rent Day_, 57.

  Toole, John, first appearance, 100.

  Tour, on, 46-49.

  Translations of foreign plays, law as to, 208.

  Travelling companies, 46-49.

  Treaty of Berne, 208.

  Tree, Mr., and _The Tempter_, 248.

  ---- and Ibsen, 284.

  ---- in _John-a-Dreams_, 302;
    his staying, 307.

  _Trial by Jury_, 153.

  _Triumph of the Philistines_, 249.

  Tussaud's, Madame, Kean and Macready at, 41.


  Van Ambrugh, 76.

  Vaudeville, The, 133.

  Victoria, 39.

  Victoria, The, 194.

  Virginia and Icilius, 51.

  _Virginius_, Knowles's, 50-55.

  Virginius's character, 52.


  Walkley, A. B., and Ibsen, 283.

  Wallington, Nehemiah, 49.

  Wallis, Miss, as Cleopatra, 159.

  Walpole and the Censorship, 83.

  Waring, Mr., and Ibsen, 281.

  Watson, Malcolm, 301.

  Wells and the classical drama, 177.

  _Wicked World, The_, 147.

  Willard, Mr., 306.

  Wills's _Charles I._, 165, 177;
    _Claudian_, 177;
    his conceptions, 178.

  Wilton and Kean, 43.

  Wilton, Marie, and Macready, 99;
    at the Lyceum, 100;
    at the Haymarket, 101;
    Coquelin on, 101;
    Dickens on, 102;
    partnership with Byron, 103;
    her first company, 104;
    secures _Society_, 113;
    and Robertson, 118;
    her parts in Robertson's plays, 121;
    early days in Liverpool, 138.

  Wilton, the Sisters, 104.

  Wingfield, Hon. Lewis W., 95.

  Woman, the English, and Ibsen, 293.

  Wyndham, Charles, 196, 306.


  Yates, Edmund, 62.

  Yates, Frederick, 41.




  PRINTED BY
  MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED
  EDINBURGH




FOOTNOTES:

[1] Berlioz did so literally, and married her.

[2] William Archer, _Life of Macready_.

[3] "Write me a drama," said Macready to young Browning, "and save me
having to go off to America." The drama was written, but attained only a
fourth performance, and did not save the actor from his impending
expedition.

[4] As a matter of fact, Bulwer had not even the merit of inventing this
arrangement for himself. His play was founded on the novel by X.-B.
Saintine.

[5] Charles Mathews played at the _Variétés_, in French, in _L'anglais
timide_, an adaptation of _Cool as a Cucumber_, by Blanchard Jerrold.

[6] 10 George II. cap. 19.

[7] In _Thirty Years at the Play_, Clement Scott gives an account of the
first night of _The Oonagh_, which has come down to us as a tradition. At
two o'clock in the morning the play was still in progress. The house was
empty save for a few critics slumbering in their stalls. The actors were
on the stage all in a line facing the public, as was then the custom, and
there was no sign of the ending, when suddenly the machinists pulled back
the carpet on which the chief characters were standing. They collapsed
simply!--with the piece, which was never brought to its real conclusion.

[8] T. W. Robertson in _The Illustrated Times_.

[9] Founded on the famous French play _Paillasse_.

[10] To the fourth line he added a footnote to the effect that the name
was _not_ Johnson really.

[11] Henry Morley, _Journal of a Playgoer_.

[12] These lines appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, on September 15,
1895. Less than three months later the Kendals produced, for the first
time in the provinces, a new drama by Mr. Grundy, _The Greatest of These_.
This play, which was performed later in London, is a work of real value.
In it Mr. Grundy has forgotten his French models, and has painted English
life and English characters with a freedom, a fidelity, a power, worthy of
that Ibsen to whom he will not have it that he owes anything. He has put
aside his wit in order to be more moving. There is not a weak spot or a
trace of bad taste in the whole piece. The scene which takes up most of
the third act is equally beautiful, whether regarded from a psychological,
a literary, or a purely dramatic standpoint.

[13] His début was in 1874, when he was nineteen. He has given an account
of some of his Edinburgh experiences about this time in a pleasant Preface
to Mr. William Archer's _Theatrical World in 1895_.

[14] When this episode was reached on the night of the first performance
of _The Master Builder_, a critic turned to Mr. Archer and said, "Will you
explain _that_ symbol to us?" "I am not sure," Mr. Archer replied quietly,
"that it _is_ a symbol." Upon which, a lady sitting near them interposed:
"Excuse my breaking in upon your conversation," she said, "but you may be
interested to know that many women are like Mrs. Solness in this. I myself
have all the dolls of my childhood safely preserved at home, and I look
after them tenderly." It is well known, too, that the Queen's collection
of her dolls is preserved at Windsor Castle.

[15] I should have wished to determine the influence exerted by the
contemporary German drama upon the dramatic movement in England, but I can
find no trace of any such influence at all. Only a single work of
Sudermann's has so far been translated, and this came from America. An
attempt was made in 1895 to found a permanent _Deutsches Theater_ in
London, and works by Freytag, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Otto Hartleber, Max
Halbe, and Blumenthal were produced there. I do not know whether the
attempt, made under modest, and indeed almost mean, conditions, will be
renewed. The critics attended the performance, but the general public paid
but little attention to them.




Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

Punctuation has been corrected without note.

The following misprints have been corrected:
  "had had" corrected to "had" (page 112)
  "uninterruped" corrected to "uninterrupted" (page 115)
  "made" corrected to "make" (page 117)
  "Pgymalion" corrected to "Pygmalion" (page 151)
  "protraits" corrected to "portraits" (page 166)
  "aquainted" corrected to "acquainted" (page 200)
  "is is" corrected to "is" (page 277)
  "105" corrected to "50" (index)
  "succces" corrected to "success" (index)

Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and
hyphenation have been retained from the original.