I
In 1881, when William Ernest Henley was hard put to it to make a living,
Sir Sidney Colvin kindly recommended him for the editorship of the
monthly _Magazine of Art_. Among the contributors whom the new editor
called to his aid was Robert Louis Stevenson, and among the
contributions the latter made to the former's magazine was the highly
characteristic and self-revelatory essay, entitled 'A Penny Plain and
Two Pence Colored,' now included in the volume called 'Memories and
Portraits.' In this playful paper Stevenson makes one of his many
returns to his boyhood, whose moods he could always recapture at will
with the assistance of that imaginative memory which was one of his
special gifts, and he was able to replevin from the dim limbo of things
half forgotten his longing delight in the toy theater, the scenes for
which and the necessary properties and the several characters themselves
in their successive dresses were to be procured printed on very thin
cardboard, so that the proud possessor might cut them out at will. If
the youthful capitalist had accumulated twopence, he could acquire these
treasures already resplendent in their glowing hues; and yet Stevenson
held that the lad was happier who parted with only a single penny,
reserving the half of his fortune for the purchase of the paints
wherewith he might himself vivify this scenery and these properties,
and so cause his characters to start to life, emblazoned in the bold
colors which please the puerile mind.
These sheets of thin cardboard, with thin little pamphlets containing
the text of the pieces to be performed in the toy theater, were
originally known as Skelt's Juvenile Drama; and one Skelt seems to have
been its originator, probably in the early part of the nineteenth
century. Apparently he parted with his precious stock in trade to one
Park, who passed it on in due season to one Webb, who transmitted it to
one Redington, until at last it descended to its present owner, one B.
Pollock, of 73 Hoxton Street, London, N. Stevenson affected to think
that Skelt's Juvenile Drama had "become, for the most part, a memory";
yet it survives now in the second decade of the twentieth century as
Pollock's Juvenile Drama, and Mr. Pollock proclaims that he has
republished some score plays, and that he keeps them always in print,
plain and colored. He offers, furthermore, to supply "Drop Scenes, Top
Drops, Orchestras, Foot and Water Pieces, Single Portraits,
Combats--Fours, Sixes, Twelves, Sixteens--Fairies, Horse Soldiers,
Clowns, Rifles, Animals, Birds, Butterflies, Houses, Views, Ships, &c.,
plain and colored, 1/2_d_ sheet plain, 1_d_ sheet colored."
[Illustration: Taken from upper half of Plate No. 1, which is the
title-page of the series, this section of which is also a guide for the
setting of the first scene in the 'Miller and His Men']
It is from the covers of "the book of the words" of the 'Miller and His
Men' that this enticing proclamation is taken--the 'Miller and His Men,'
"adapted only for Pollock's characters and scenes," and accompanied by
"7 Plates characters, 11 Scenes, 3 Wings, Total 21 Plates." The persons
of the drama and the scenes wherein that drama is played out to its
fiery end, are all in the bolder manner of the Old Masters, who sought
the broadest effects, and who willingly neglected petty details. How
bold and how broad the manner and the effects can best be judged by an
honest transcription from the final page of the book of words, wherein
the terse and tense dialog, single speech clashing with single speech,
is accompanied by stage directions for the instruction of the Young
Masters who are about to produce the sublime spectacle:
_Enter Grindorf left hand, plate 4._
_Enter Karl and Friberg, swords drawn, plate 4, followed by the
Troops, right hand, plate 7._
_Grindorf_: Ha! ha! I have escaped you, have I?
_Karl_: But you are caught in your own trap.
_Grindorf_: Spiller!--Golotz! Golotz! I say!
_Count_: Villain! you cannot escape us now! Surrender, or
instantly meet thy fate!
_Grindorf_: Surrender! I have sworn never to descend from this
place alive!
_Enter Lothair, as Spiller, 3rd dress, left hand, plate 7._
_Grindorf_: Spiller, let my bride appear.
_Exit Lothair._
_Enter Kehnar, right hand, plate 1._
_Enter Ravina with torch, plate 7._
_Ravina_: Before it is too late, restore Claudine to her
father's arms!
_Grindorf_: Never!
_Ravina_: Then I know my course!
_Enter Lothair with Claudine, left hand, plate 6._
_Kehnar_: My child! Ah, Grindorf, spare her!
_Grindorf_: Hear me, Count Friberg; if you do not withdraw your
followers, by my hand she dies!
_Count_: Never, till thou art yielded to justice!
_Grindorf_: No more--this to her heart!
_Lothair_: And this to thine!
_Exit Lothair and Claudine, and Grindorf._
_Re-enter Grindorf and Lothair fighting, plate 6, fight and
exit._
_Grindorf to be put on wounded, plate 7._
_Re-enter Lothair with Claudine, plate 6._
_Lothair_: Ravina, fire the train!
_Scene changes to explosion, Scene 11, No. 9._
The words are striking and the actions are startling, and it is no
wonder that plate 7 and scene 11, No. 9, filled with joy the heart of
Robert Louis Stevenson when he was a perfervid Scot of fourteen. In his
manly maturity, when he had risen to an appreciation of portraits by
Raeburn, and when he had sat at the feet of that inspired critic of
painting, his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, he admitted that he had no
desire to insist upon the art of Skelt's purveyors. "Those wonderful
characters that once so thrilled our soul with their bold attitude,
array of deadly engines and incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat
pallidly," he confessed regretfully; "the extreme hard favor of the
heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the villain's scowl no
longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes themselves, those once
incomparable landscapes, seem the efforts of a prentice hand. So much of
fault we can find; but, on the other side, the impartial critic rejoices
to remark the presence of a great unity of gusto; of those direct
claptrap appeals which a man is dead and buriable when he fails to
answer; of the footlight glamor, the ready-made, barefaced, transpontine
picturesque, a thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to
the mind!"
[Illustration: A group of the principal characters from Pollock's
juvenile drama, the 'Miller and His Men,' cut out and assembled as
called for in Scene 10, a part of which is quoted in the text]