only two persons _de face_, at whose occupants you may gaze without any
glaring dereliction of the proprieties. See, a lady who screens herself
behind the amber satin drapery, even more completely than her Majesty,
and by her side an elderly gentleman, with a large mouth, a very stiff
white neckcloth, and a very severe aspect, and about whose tendency to
baldness there cannot exist any doubt, inasmuch as his cranium is as
bare and polished as a billiard-ball. It would be a pardonable guess to
presume this individual to be a member of the College of Preceptors,
or a proctor, fresh from Doctors’ Commons; but if you eye him narrowly
through the many-lensed lorgnette, you will perceive that he wears a
little badge of parti-coloured ribands at his button-holes, and on some
evenings you may even discern a brilliant star tacked on the left breast
of his coat. Who is this distinguished bald one? I must not be personal
with less distinguished people than royalty, and so I will content myself
with calling him his Excellency. His Excellency dwells in an enormous
mansion in Belgravia, where he gives grand parties. His own little
cabinet is, I am told, decorated with charming-coloured lithographs,
representing scenes Oriental and operatic; and, indeed, his Excellency
has been throughout his long and ornamental life a consistent and
liberal patron of Terpsichore. He never misses a new ballet night now.
Occasionally, his Excellency has some business to transact with the Baron
Fitzharris, Earl of Malmesbury; but the old fogies of the clubs, and the
chronic alarmists of the newspapers, are haunted by the notion that his
Excellency is perpetually weaving plots, and entangling British statesmen
in the mazes of his dark diplomacy. For my part, I think that very often,
when his Excellency is supposed to be busily occupied in concocting
his Machiavelian plots, the good man is quietly at home snipping away
the outlines of his favourite coloured lithographs, and pasting them
in albums or on screens. You know what the Chancellor Oxenstiern said
to his son anent the small amount of wisdom with which this world is
governed; and I think as much might be said concerning diplomacy. But
his Excellency has a terrible reputation for undermining, plotting, and
counter-plotting, and is supposed to be, intellectually, a compound of
the dark and crooked astuteness of Talleyrand, Metternich, ex-Inspector
Field, and the late Joseph Ady.
I might tire you out, and exhaust a space already growing limited, by
drawing portraits of the denizens of opera-boxes. Our glances at them
must be, perforce, rapid, for I dare not linger. See, there (he comes
late, does not seem to enjoy the music much, and stays but for an hour)
seventy-three years worth of learning, of genius, of wit, of eloquence,
and patriotism—that glorious edifice of humanity, of which the first
stone was laid by a young north-country advocate, who was a friend of
Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, and wrote stinging articles in the “Edinburgh
Review.” No man so famous as that whilom chancellor has her Majesty’s
Theatre reckoned among its audience, since the days when, in spotless
white waistcoat, and creaseless cravat, with a silver buckle behind, the
great duke was wont to make his bow at the court of Euterpe, not because,
honest man, he cared much for operas, Italian or English, but because he
considered it to be a matter of duty towards that aristocracy of which,
though a premier duke, he was the prince, to show himself in their places
of resort. He went everywhere, the brave old boy, to balls and concerts,
to routs and banquets. In the house of feasting, when the goblets were
wreathed with flowers, and the cymbals clashed, there was Duke Arthur,
long after his gums were toothless, his eyes dim, his joints stiffened,
and the drums of his ears muffled. And, next morning, at eight o’clock,
you would still see him on duty, at early service, in St. James’s Church,
reading out the responses to the Psalms as though they were words of
command.
[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK P.M.: THE OPERA.]
There, in her family box, is the still beautiful marchioness, with that
crop of ringlets unequalled in luxuriance. There, in the stalls, is
Captain Fitzblazer, the Duke of Alma’s aide-de-camp, whom we met “behind
the scenes” an hour since. “Jemmy” Fitzblazer—he is always known as
“Jemmy,” though there are not half-a-dozen men of his acquaintance who
would presume thus familiarly to address him to his face—is getting very
middle-aged and gray-headed now. He is not slim enough in the waist.
Adonis is growing fat. Narcissus has the gout. Lesbia’s sparrow is
moulting. A sad reflection, but so runs the world.
I should be wilfully deceiving you, and unworthy the name I have been
always striving to gain—that of a faithful chronicler—if I were to lead
you to imagine that the brilliant theatre is full only of rank, fashion,
wealth, and happiness. Are any of the terms I have used synonymous,
I wonder. There are many aching hearts, doubtless, beneath all this
jewellery and embroidery; many titled folks who are thinking of pawning
their plate on the morrow, many dashing young scions of aristocracy,
who, between the bars of the overture, are racking their brains as to
how on earth they are to meet Mephibosheth’s bill, and whether a passage
through the Insolvent Court would not be, after all, the best way out
of their difficulties. And in the great equality that dress-coats, bare
shoulders, white neckcloths, and opera-cloaks make among men and women,
how much dross and alloy might we not find among the gold and silver! In
the very next box to the mother of the Gracchi, resplendent among her
offspring, in her severe beauty, is poor pretty lost Mrs. Demmymond,
late Miss Vanderplank, of the Theatres Royal. The chaste Volumnia, who
only comes to the opera once in the season, and always goes away before
the commencement of the ballet, is elbowed in the crush-room by Miss
Golightly, who has one of the best boxes that Mr. Sams can let, and
who comes with a head of flaxen hair one night, and with raven black
tresses the next. Captain Spavin, of the 3rd Jibbers, shudders when he
finds his next-stall neighbour to be his long-suffering tailor; and Sir
Hugh Hempenridge, baronet, is covered with confusion when he feels the
hawk-glance of little Casay, the sheriff’s officer (and none so bravely
attired as he) darted full at him from Fops’ Alley.
Fops’ Alley! The word reminds me of bygone operatic days, and I sigh
when, looking round the house, I remember how Time, the destroyer, has
left a mark, too, upon these _cari luoghi_. It is true that many of
those reminiscences may not be worth sighing for; but is there not always
something melancholy in the fading away of old associations? Where is
the Omnibus Box? The longitudinal den answering to the _Loge Infernale_
at Paris, and the _Fosse aux Lions_ at Madrid, yet has its customary
locality over the orchestra, on the Queen’s side of the proscenium;
but where are its brilliant, witty, worthless occupants? But one, the
gay young prince, who, if report says true, kicked, with his own royal
foot, through the panels of the door of communication leading from the
Omnibus Box to the stage, and for that night—the night of the famous
Tamburini and Coletti disturbance—locked by special order of M. Laporte,
has become a Respectable, holds high office, does his work well, and
occupies himself far more with the subjects of soldiers’ kit and barrack
accommodation, than with squabbles between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But
where are the rest? Where the dashing spirits and impetuous madcaps of
twenty years since? One is in a lunatic asylum, and another is paralytic,
and a third is prowling about the gambling-places on the Rhine, and the
last I saw of a fourth, was once, in 1852, descending the stairs of the
Hotel des Bains, at Dieppe, when a companion, drawing me on one side as
a broken, bowed, decrepit, sunken-eyed, gray-headed, prematurely-aged
man passed us tottering on a stick, whispered to me, “See! there goes
D’Orsay;” who died a fortnight afterwards.
A Liberal, I hope—a Democrat, if you will—on some not unimportant
public topics, I cannot help a species of meek wailing Conservatism
upon the decadence of some of our social institutions. This is the age
of abolition—of doing away with and putting down. They have robbed our
grenadiers of their worsted epaulettes. The beefeaters in the Tower have
been deprived of those scarlet and embroidered tunics, that contrasted so
quaintly with the pantaloons and highlows of everyday life, and thrust
into buttoned-up coats and brass buttons. The barristers’ wigs will go
next, I suppose, and the cocked-hat of the parish beadle—his red plush
shorts and buckled shoon are already departed. I have fears for the
opera; I tremble for the days when there will be bonnets in the upper
tiers and paletots in the pit. When I mind the opera first, it was a
subaltern’s, and not a sergeant’s, guard that kept watch and ward under
the portico. The officer on duty had a right of entrance _ex officio_
into the pit, and it was splendid to see him swinging his bearskin and
flashing his epaulettes in Fops’ Alley. The very name of Fops’ Alley is
becoming obsolete now. The next generation will forget its locality.
In those days, on drawing-room nights, the men used to come in their
court suits and uniforms, their stars and badges, the ladies in their
ostrich plumes and diamond necklaces, only taking off their trains. There
were opera-hats in those days—half moon cocked-hats; now the men carry
Gibuses like pancakes. The link boys are disappearing—the leather-lunged,
silver-badged fellows, who shouted so sonorously that Lady Sardanapalias’
carriage stopped the way. And the glories of the operatic stage; are
not those inconstant singing birds fled now? Can all the Arditis in
the world compensate for Costa, with his coat thrown back, and those
immortal, tight-fitting white kid gloves? He was the first man who ever
succeeded in parting his hair down the back; and now, he too is growing
bald, and he has cajoled Grisi the mellifluous, and Mario the heroic,
to pipe their nightingale notes among the coach-builders of Long Acre,
and the fried-fish shopmen of Drury Lane. Of the glorious unequalled,
unapproachable Four—Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache—who once
electrified the world in the “Puritani,” three are dead: the first is
in Covent Garden provoking malevolent criticism. Where are the other
Four, the Terpsichorean quartett, the immortals who danced the _pas de
quatre_! Ah! Mademoiselle Piccolomini, you are very arch and pretty; ah!
Mademoiselle Marie Taglioni, you are a _spirituelle_ and graceful dancer;
but you are not the giants and giantesses of the old Dead Days.
“You little people of the skies,
What are you when the sun shall rise!”
But the sun is set, and there is darkness, and I am afraid that I am
prosing _in re_ her Majesty’s Theatre, as old playgoers will prose about
Jack Bannister, sir, and Dowton, and Munden, and Fawcett.
There is lately come to town, at least within these latter years, an
Italian gentleman by the name of Verdi, to whose brassy screeds, and
tinkling cymbalics, it is expected that all _habitués_ of the opera
must listen, to the utter exclusion and oblivion of the old musical
worthies who delighted the world with their immortal works before Signor
Verdi was born. I have brought you to her Majesty’s Theatre, and this
is unfortunately a Verdi night. You may listen to him, but I won’t.
Thersites Theorbo, the editor of the “Spinet” (with which is incorporated
that famous musical journal the “Jew’s Harp”), may accuse me of being
“perfunctory,” or of being an ass—no one minds Thersites Theorbo,
knowing him to be a good fellow, much bemused in Cavendish tobacco and
counterpoint; but I will shut my eyes, and muse upon the bygone glories
of the opera. The place is a mass of memories. Things and books, and
scenes and men, and stories, come teeming on my brain as I sit in my
stall, heedless of Signor Verdi and his musical machinations. From
that shelf, well known to me, where nestle my dog’s-eared Rabelais, my
Montaigne, my annotated edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue, my Shakspeare, and my beloved Jeremy Taylor, I take down
garrulous old Pepys, and read—“Jan. 12, 1667. With my Lord Brouncker
to his house, there to hear some Italian Musique, and here we met Tom
Killigrew, Sir Robert Murray, and the Italian Signor Baptista, who had
prepared a play for the Opera, which Sir T. Killigrew do intend to have
up; and here he did sing one of the acts. He is himself the poet as
well as the musician, and did sing the whole from the words without any
musique prick’d, and played all along on a harpiscon most admirably, and
the composition most excellent.” And then I mind me of an advertisement
in the “London Gazette,” in 1692, setting forth how “the Italian lady
that is lately come over, that is so famous for singing, will sing at the
concerts at York Buildings during the season.” The season! There was a
“season” in William the Deliverer’s time, then. So I call to mind Dick
Steele’s serio-comic announcement in the fourth number of the “Tattler,”
of how “Letters from the Haymarket inform us that on Saturday night last
the opera of ‘Pyrrhus and Demetrius’ was performed with great applause.”
Then from the beginning of Italian opera in England, a grand trunk line
extending to our days, I shunt off on to innumerable little branches and
loop-lines. I see the Faustina and the Cuzzoni coming to blows—Sir Robert
Walpole backing the first, his lady the second. I am, for the nonce, an
ardent partisan of Mrs. Tofts. Then I have a vision of Mrs. Fox Lane,
in a hoop of preternatural size, bidding General Crewe get out of her
house, because he professed his ignorance as to whom Signora Mingotti
was—the Mingotti who told Dr. Burney that she had “been frequently hissed
by the English for having a toothache, a cold, or a fever, to which the
good people of England will readily allow every human being to be liable
except an actress or a singer.” And then I bow down in awe before the
radiant shadow of Farinelli, great and good, unmoved by misfortune,
unspoilt by fame—Farinelli, whose dulcet notes cured a Spanish king of
madness, who was thought worthy to receive the decorations of the orders
of St. Jago and of Calatrava—Farinelli, of whom honest Will Hogarth could
not help falling a little foul in the “Rake’s Progress,” but who was,
nevertheless, as singularly modest and upright as he was unprecedentedly
gifted in his art. Unprecedentedly! recall the word. I bow before a
greater shadow, though of one who wrote, and sang not, save to his pretty
wife.[9] I see a little boy, in a grave court suit, and his young locks
curling like the tendrils of the vine, sitting before the harpsichord in
the orchestra of the great theatre of Milan. It is the first night of a
new opera, and the opera is his—this almost suckling. Upstairs, in a box
near the chandelier, is the little man’s father, sobbing, and smiling,
and vowing candles to the Virgin, if his dear child’s opera succeeds.
And it does succeed, and all Milan is full of that small maestro’s, that
maestrino’s fame, the next day. I see him again, years afterwards, grown
to be a slight, vivacious little personage, in a scarlet pelisse and a
cocked-hat. He is standing behind the scenes at the wing of the Imperial
Theatre at Vienna, and it is again the first night of the performance
of a new opera—his own. There is a singer in a Spanish costume, and who
must be, I take it, a species of barber. When he sings a song, commencing
“_Non più andrai farfallone amoroso_,” the little man in the scarlet
pelisse and cocked-hat begins to beat his palms together in applause,
and murmurs “_Bravo! Bravo!_ Benucci!” But when the singer winds up in
that magnificent exercitation to Cherubino, “_Alla vittoria! Alla gloria
militar!_” the house comes down with applause. The people shout out; the
fat-headed musicians in the orchestra beat their violin bows violently
against their desks, and (quite in defiance of operatic discipline) cry
“_Bravo! Bravo! Viva! viva! grande maestro!_” I see the same little man
lying sick and pining on his bed at Salzburg. The intrigues of Salieri,
the ingratitude of courts, the quick forgetfulness of the public, are
nothing to him now. Little does it matter if he have been indeed poisoned
with _aqua tofana_, or if he be dying of that common, but denied disease,
a broken heart. _He has written the Requiem_ (recreant Sussmayer will
strive to rob him even of _that_ fame after death), and his last hour is
approaching. The poor Swan dies; and then the sluice-gates of my eyes are
opened, and I remember that this was Johann Wolfgang von Mozart.
Upon my word and honour there is Van Poggi, the chorus-singer, on the
stage. I am recalled at once from dreamland to actualities. There is
an old operatic saying that her Majesty’s Theatre, in the Haymarket,
could not be complete without Van Poggi, and now behold that lyrical
Widdicomb. According to the same tradition—not always trustworthy—Van
Poggi was the identical chorus-singer who assisted Velluti to alight
from his barge the night the last of those male _soprani_ made his first
appearance (in the opera of the “Crociato in Egitto”) before an audience
who had almost forgotten the fame of the Pacchierottis, the Rubinellis,
and the Marchesis. Van Poggi wears wonderfully well. Nobody knows his
exact nationality: whether he is a Dutchman, a Dane, or an Italian. His
residence has never been precisely ascertained. The management have no
occasion to rout him up, for he is always punctual at rehearsal. During
the vacation he retires to Paris, where he tells his friends that he is
to be found between ten and four every day in the Long Gallery of the
Louvre. During the London season you may contemplate Van Poggi between
the same hours in Mr. Zerubbabel’s cigar-shop in the Quadrant, at whose
door he generally stands in a Spanish cloak faced with velvet. He never
sang any better or any worse than he sings now; he was never promoted to
play the smallest separate part, such as is from time to time assigned
to the gentleman who appears in the bills as Signor N. N., or _non
nominato_. It is believed that Van Poggi would faint if he had to deliver
a line of recitative. Yet there is a very general opinion in operatic
circles that her Majesty’s Theatre would come to hopeless grief if Van
Poggi were not among the chorus. At the commencement of the season there
are always anxious inquiries at the box-office as to whether Van Poggi is
secured; and a reply being given in the affirmative, the lovers of the
lyrical drama breathe freely, and the subscription progresses. No one
knows what became of Van Poggi in the dark and dismal interregnum during
which Mr. Lumley was compelled to close his doors. Mysterious offers of
better parts, and better salaries, had, it is reported, been made to Van
Poggi, emanating from a quarter not a hundred miles from Bow Street,
Covent Garden; but the patriotic chorister scornfully refused them. He
was still seen to haunt Mr. Zerubbabel’s cigar-shop at the commencement
of the musical season; then he suddenly disappeared; and whether he went
abroad, or wrapped himself in the Spanish cloak and so lay torpid for two
years like a dormouse, must for ever remain a matter for speculation. But
it is certain that when the Haymarket Phœnix arose from its ashes, and
light once more shone on its amber satin curtains, there was Van Poggi,
at the first chorus rehearsal, as fresh as paint, and looking better
than ever. And it is moreover reported, that when his Excellency, whom a
combination of political difficulties (which began about the time some
English grenadiers were sent out to Gallipoli) had forced to leave this
country, and who did not return for upwards of three years, when his
Excellency Baron —— made his first visit to his beloved opera-house,
the piece of the evening being “Lucia di Lammermoor,” he swept the ranks
of those preposterous sham Highlanders, who are discovered singing a sham
hunting chorus, anxiously with his lorgnette, and at last cried out with
a satisfied accent: “_Bon, voilà_ Van Poggi.” He had recognised that
chorus-singer in his kilt, and was thenceforth persuaded that the opera
season was safe.
There is a new ballet to-night, in which the enchanting little Pocchini,
most modest and most graceful of modern _danseuses_, is to appear; and
Signor Verdi’s opera is very long, and I am aweary of his figments, and
cannot sit them out. Besides, I want your presence, trusty friend and
companion, always in the interest of “Twice Round the Clock.” We have a
little business to transact; and as it is getting towards nine o’clock,
we had better transact it at once. Leave we then the dazzling temple,
let us hie to an obscure retreat, to your servant known, where we can
leave our opera-glasses, divest ourselves of our white cravats, and throw
paletots over our evening dress. There, a few touches, and the similitude
of swells is taken away from us. Now let us plunge into a labyrinth of
narrow streets to attain our unfashionable goal, for, upon my word, our
destination is a pawnbroker’s shop.
[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK P.M.: INTERIOR OF A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP.]
Where the long lane from St. Giles’s to the Strand divides the
many-branching slums; where flares the gas over coarse scraps of meat in
cheap butchers’ shops; where brokers pile up motley heaps of second-hand
wares—from fishing-rods and bird-cages to flat-irons and blankets;
from cornet-à-pistons and “Family Encyclopædias” to corkscrews and
fowling-pieces; where linen-drapers are invaded by poorly-clad women
and girls, demanding penn’orths of needles, ha’porths of buttons, and
farthingworths of thread; where jean stays flap against the door jambs,
and “men’s stout hose” gleam gaunt in the shop-windows; where grimy dames
sit in coal and potato-sheds, and Jew clothesmen wrestle for the custom
of passengers who don’t want to buy anything; where little dens, reeking
with the odours of fried fish, sausages, and baked potatoes, or steaming
with reminders of à-la-mode beef and hot eel soup, offer suppers, cheap
and nasty, to the poor in pocket; where, in low coffee-shops, newspapers
a fortnight old, with coffee-cup rings on them, suggest an intellectual
pabulum, combined with bodily refreshment; where gaping public-houses
receive or disgorge their crowds of tattered topers; where “general
shops” are packed to overflowing with heterogeneous odds and ends—soap,
candles, Bath brick, tobacco, Dutch cheese, red herrings, firewood,
black lead, streaky bacon, brown sugar, birch brooms, lucifer matches,
tops, marbles, hoops, brandy balls, packets of cocoa, steel pens,
cheap periodicals, Everton toffy, and penny canes; where on each side,
peeping down each narrow thoroughfare, you see a repetition only of
these scenes of poverty and misery; where you have to elbow and jostle
your way through a teeming, ragged, ill-favoured, shrieking, fighting
population—by oyster-stalls and costermongers’ barrows—by orange-women
and organ-grinders—by flower-girls and match-sellers—by hulking labourers
and brandy-faced viragos, squabbling at tavern doors—by innumerable
children in every phase of weazened, hungry, semi-nakedness, who
pullulate at every corner, and seem cast up on the pavement like pebbles
on the sea-shore. Here, at last, we find the hostelry of the three
golden balls, where the capitalist, whom men familiarly term “my uncle,”
lends money on the security of plate, jewellery, linen, wearing apparel,
furniture, bedding, books—upon everything, in fact, that is not in itself
of so perishable a nature as to warrant the probability of its rotting
upon my uncle’s shelves.