DRAMA
At no period, probably, in the history of English literature, from the
sixteenth century until that with which we are now dealing, would it
have been possible to compress the history of the drama during a hundred
years into the space which it is here proposed to give it. If we were
dealing with the works of living men the historian might be justly
charged with arrogant incompetence in not taking more notice of them.
But, fortunately, that is not the case; and the brevity of the treatment
is equally compatible with a belief that the plays of the present day
are masterpieces, and with a suspicion that they are not. As to the past
we have, with the exception of a few protesters, general consent that
the English drama of the nineteenth century has displayed one curious
and disastrous characteristic. The plays, as a rule, which have been
good literature have either never been acted or have seldom succeeded as
plays; the plays that have been acted and have been successful have
seldom been good literature.
The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 1810 may
perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look through--it would
require a monomania, a desert island, or at least a succession of wet
days in a country inn to enable any one to _read_ through--the ten
volumes of Mrs. Inchbald's _Modern British Theatre_, printed in 1811
"from the prompt-books of the Theatres Royal." This publication,
supplementing the larger _British Theatre_ of the same editor, contains
more than two volumes of the works of Frederick Reynolds, a prolific
playwright who was responsible for the English version of _Werther_ in
drama; another of Mrs. Inchbald's own writing and adaptation; one of
Holcroft's later works; one of Cumberland's; and the other five made up
of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and others, serious
plays in blank verse such as Hannah More's _Percy_, and the Honourable
John St. John's _Mary Queen of Scots_, etc. More than one of these was a
person of talent, more than one a person even of very great talent;
while Holcroft and Colman, if not others, had displayed special ability
for drama. Yet there is, perhaps, in the fifty plays of the ten volumes
only one that can be called a good play, only one which is readable, and
that is the _Trip to Scarborough_, which Sheridan simply adapted, which
he did little more than edit, from Vanbrugh's _Relapse_. Outside these
volumes the acting drama of the period may be best studied in the other
and better work of the pair just mentioned, and in O'Keefe.
John O'Keefe, or O'Keeffe (for the name is spelt both ways), was a very
long-lived man, who was born at Dublin in 1748 and died at Southampton
in 1833. But in the later years of his life he suffered from blindness;
and the period of his greatest dramatic activity almost exactly
coincided with that of our first chapter. He is said to have written
some fifty pieces, of various kinds, between 1781 and 1798; and in the
latter year he published a collection of about thirty, referring in the
preface to others which "an inconsiderate disposal of the copyright"
prevented him from including. O'Keefe was to a certain extent a follower
of Foote; but his pieces--though he was a practised actor--depended less
upon his own powers of exposition than Foote's. They range from rather
farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed with
songs for music; and their strictly literary merit is not often great,
while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license of the
boards to excuse them. There is, however, something much more taking in
them than in most of the dramatic work of the time. For instance, the
"wild farce" (referred to but not named by Lamb in his paper on Munden)
of _The Merry Mourners_, though as "improbable" as Mrs. Barbauld thought
_The Ancient Mariner_ to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of
sustained interest, and not a few shrewd strokes such as the following,
which perhaps does not only apply to the end of the _eighteenth_
century. "Your London ladies are so mannified with their switch rattans
and coats, and watch-chain nibbities, and their tip-top hats and their
cauliflower cravats, that, ecod! there's no mark of their being women
except the petticoat." _The Castle of Andalusia_ (1782) is an early and
capital example of the bandit drama, and _The Poor Soldier_ of the Irish
comic opera. _Wild Oats_ supplied favourite parts to the actors of the
time in Rover and Ephraim Smooth; and, with a little good will, one may
read even slight things like _A Beggar on Horseback_ and _The Doldrum_
with some amusement. But O'Keefe has few gifts beyond knowledge of the
stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and an honest, straightforward
simplicity; and that one turns to him from other dramatists of the
period with some relief, is even more to their discredit than to his
credit.
A curious and early fruit of this gradual divorce between drama and
literature was Joanna Baillie, a lady whose virtues, amiability, and in
a way talents, caused her to be spoken of by her own contemporaries with
an admiration which posterity has found it hard to echo as concerns her
strictly literary position in drama--some of her shorter poems were
good. She was born in 1762 at Bothwell, of a good Scotch family, and her
mother was a sister of the great surgeon Hunter. This gift descended to
her elder brother Matthew, who was very famous in his own day as an
anatomist and physician. Partly to be near him, Joanna and her sister
Agnes established themselves at Hampstead, where she often entertained
Scott and other great people, and where she lived till 23rd February
1851. In 1798 she published the first of a series of _Plays on the
Passions_, in which the eighteenth century theory of the ruling passion
was carried out to the uncompromising and even whimsical extent of
supplying a brace of dramas, a tragedy and a comedy, on each of the
stronger passions, Hatred, Fear, Love, etc. The first volume, which
opened with the rather striking closet drama of _Basil_, sometimes
spoken of as _Count Basil_, was prefaced by an introductory discourse of
considerable ability. The book, coming at a dead season of literature,
was well received. It reached its third edition in the second year from
its appearance, and one of its plays, _De Montfort_, was acted, with
Kemble in the title part, not without success. A second volume followed
in 1802, and a third in 1812. In 1804 one of _Miscellaneous Plays_ had
been issued, while others and some poems were added later. Joanna's
plays in general, it was admitted, would not act (though the Ettrick
Shepherd in the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ denies this), and it requires some
effort to read them. The blank verse of the tragedies, though
respectable, is uninspired; the local and historical colour, whether of
Byzantine, Saxon, or Renaissance times, is of that fatal "property"
character which has been noticed in the novel before Scott; and the
passion-scheme is obviously inartistic. The comedies are sometimes
genuinely funny; but they do not display either the direct and fresh
observation of manners, or the genial creation of character, which alone
can make comedy last. In short Miss Baillie was fortunate in the moment
of her appearance, but she cannot be called either a great dramatist or
a good one.
The school of Artificial Tragedy--the phrase, though not a consecrated
one, is as legitimate as that of artificial comedy--which sprung up soon
after the beginning of this century, and which continued during its
first half or thereabouts, if not later, is a curious phenomenon in
English history, and has hardly yet received the attention it deserves.
The tragedy of the eighteenth century is almost beneath contempt, being
for the most part pale French echo or else transpontine melodrama, with
a few plaster-cast attempts to reproduce an entirely misunderstood
Shakespeare. It was impossible that the Romantic movement in itself, and
the study of the Elizabethan drama which it induced, should not lead to
the practise of tragedy, while the existence of the Kembles as players
and managers, might be thought to promise well for the tragic stage.
Yet there has always been something out of joint with English nineteenth
century tragedy. Of Lamb's _John Woodvil_ and Godwin's _Antonio_ mention
has been made. Byron's tragedies are indeed by no means the worst part
of his work; but they also shared the defects of that work as poetry,
and they were not eminently distinguished for acting qualities. Scott
had no dramatic faculty; Shelley's _Cenci_, despite its splendid poetry,
is not actable; indeed the only one of the great English nineteenth
century _Pleiade_ who was successful on the stage was Coleridge; and
_Remorse_ and _Zapolya_ are not masterpieces.
Yet the fascination of the theatre, or at least of the drama, seemed to
continue unaltered, and the attempts on or in it varied from the wild
fantasy pieces of Beddoes (which no stage but the Elizabethan--if even
that--could ever have welcomed) to the curious academic drama of which
types extend not merely from Milman's _Fazio_ in 1815 to Talfourd's
_Ion_ twenty years later, but further still. Of Milman notice has been
taken in his far truer vocation as historian. Talfourd was a good
lawyer, a worthy man, and as noted above, the friend and editor of Lamb.
But his tragedies are very cold, and it is difficult to believe that
_Ion_ can have had any other attraction besides the popularity and skill
of Macready, who indeed was greatly responsible for the appearance both
of this and of better plays. In particular he stood usher to divers
productions of Browning's which have been mentioned, such as the rather
involved and impossible _Strafford_, and the intensely pathetic but not
wholly straightforward _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_. This last is the one
play of the century which--with a certain unsubstantiality of matter, a
defect almost total in character, and a constant provocation to the
fatal question, "Why are all these people behaving in this way?"--has
the actual tragic _vis_ in its central point.
The character, however, and the condemnation of the English drama of the
first half of this century from the literary point of view, are summed
up in the single statement that its most prominent and successful
dramatist was James Sheridan Knowles. Born in 1784, and son of the great
Sheridan's cousin at Cork, Knowles was introduced to London literary
society pretty early. He tried soldiering (at least the militia) and
medicine; but his bent towards the stage was too strong, and he became
an actor, though never a very successful one, and a teacher of acting,
though never a manager. He was about thirty when he turned dramatist,
and though his plays justify the theatrical maxim that no one who has
not practical knowledge of the stage can write a good acting play, they
also justify the maxim of the study that in his day literary excellence
had in some mysterious way obtained or suffered a divorce from dramatic
merit. Not that these plays are exactly contemptible as literature, but
that as literature they are not in the least remarkable. The most famous
of his tragedies is _Virginius_, which dates, as performed in London at
least, from 1820. It was preceded and followed by others, of which the
best are perhaps _Caius Gracchus_ (1815), and _William Tell_ (1834). His
comedies have worn better, and _The Hunchback_ (1832), and the _Love
Chase_ (1836), are still interesting examples of last-century artificial
comedy slightly refreshed. Independently of his technical knowledge,
Knowles really had that knowledge of human nature without which drama is
impossible, and he could write very respectable English. But the fatal
thing about him is that he is content to dwell in decencies for ever.
There is no inspiration in him; his style, his verse, his theme, his
character, his treatment are all emphatically mediocre, and his
technique as a dramatist deserves only a little, though a little, warmer
praise.
Better as literature, and at least as good as drama, are the best plays
of the first Lord Lytton, another of the eminent hands of Macready, who
undoubtedly counted for something in the success of _The Lady of Lyons_,
_Richelieu_, and _Money_, the two first produced in 1838, and the last
in 1840. _Richelieu_ is the nearest to Knowles in competence without
excellence, the other two perhaps excel if not positively yet
relatively. Many spectators quite recently, while unable to check
laughter at the grandiloquent sentimentality and the stock situations of
_The Lady of Lyons_, have been unable to avoid being touched by its real
though ordinary pathos, and moved by its astonishing cleverness; while
_Money_ is probably the very best comic example of the hybrid kind above
referred to, the modernised artificial comedy. But Bulwer's other plays,
though the unsuccessful _Duchesse de la Valliere_ is not bad reading,
were less fortunate, and one of them is the subject of perhaps the most
successful of Thackeray's early reviews in the grotesque style,
preserved in the _Yellowplush Papers_.
It will be observed that, with the single and not very notable exception
of Sheridan Knowles, almost all the names already mentioned are those of
persons to whom drama was a mere by-work. Another exception may be found
in James R. Planche (1796-1880), a man of no very exalted birth or
elaborate education, but an archaeologist of some merit, and from 1854
onwards an official representative of the honourable though discredited
science of Heraldry as Rouge Croix Pursuivant and Somerset Herald. From
1818 onward Planche was the author, adapter, translator, and what not,
of innumerable--they certainly run to hundreds--dramatic pieces of every
possible sort from regular plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest
perhaps in the lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never
vulgar style of jocularity, a fair lyrical gift, and the indefinable
knowledge of what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of
literature proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including
him here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic
literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend
this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to appear, and
who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of story, introduced in
order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of the absence of guests
entitled to be present.
The greater and more strictly literary names of those who have tried the
stage in the intervals of happier studies, from Miss Mitford and R. H.
Horne to Tennyson, have been mentioned elsewhere; and there is no need
to return to them. Dr. James Westland Marston (1820-90) was once much
praised, and was an author of Macready's. Miss Isabella Harwood,
daughter of the second editor of the _Saturday Review_, produced under
the pseudonym of "Ross Neil" a series of closet-dramas of excellent
composition and really poetical fancy, but wanting the one thing
needful. Perhaps a few other writers might with pains be added; and of
course every reviewer knows that the flow of five-act tragedies, though
less abundant than of old, has continued. But, on the whole, the
sentence already put in more than one form remains true and firm--that
in this period the dramatic work of those who have been really men and
women of letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and
that, with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have
not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all.