We were still being but vaguely "formed," yet it was a vagueness
preferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in any
degree open to us, that of the English school away from home (the London
private school near home they would absolutely none of;) which they saw
as a fearful and wonderful, though seemingly effective, preparation of
the young for English life and an English career, but related to that
situation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it, in
a differing case, an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies.
They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for
boys _was_ so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense
of the matter--which would have been that it all depended on what was
meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative
forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very
definite by _their_ measure and intention; there were "advantages,"
generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other
matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values,
importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was their
belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. In
respect of which I further remind myself of the blest fewness, as yet,
of our years; and I come back to my own sense, benighted though it may
have been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably active life. I recognise
our immediate, our practical ferment even in our decent perambulations,
our discussions, W. J.'s and mine, of whether we had in a given case
best apply for a renewal of our "artists' materials" to Messrs. Rowney
or to Messrs. Windsor and Newton, and in our pious resort, on these
determinations, to Rathbone Place, more beset by our steps, probably,
than any other single corner of the town, and the short but charged
vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old
winter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequent
visits, in the same general connection, to the old Pantheon of Oxford
Street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of
fine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at the
end of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, and
above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R.
Haydon. We must at one time quite have haunted the Pantheon, where we
doubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to
ruminative rest: Haydon's huge canvases covered the walls--I wonder
what has become now of The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the city
gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which,
especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the
all-too-just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkable
interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that we
hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless
artist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent to
our preoccupation, had provided us with; but I blush to risk the further
surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in Haydon,
came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as
"old," who, at the National Gallery, seemed to meet us so little
half-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that
_we_ could do, or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon was just
that he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps
in some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing so
impossible about it. If we adored daubing we preferred it _fresh_, and
the genius of the Pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubens
and Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pantheon yielded, however, to
that of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, then
arrayed at Marlborough House and to which the great plumed and draped
and dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive
adjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that time
royally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and as
owing their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Landseer, to David
Wilkie and Charles Leslie. _They_ were, by some deep-seated English
mystery, the real unattainable, just as they were none the less the
directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never have
enough of Maclise's Play-scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest
composition in the world (though Ophelia did look a little as if cut in
silhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as I gazed, and
gazed again, at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed through
the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments.
Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the May-time
exhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home of
its own, to borrow space from the National Gallery--space partly
occupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of the
Pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Millais's Vale
of Rest, his Autumn Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious
Blind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of
meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but
for one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and I may perhaps
somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception.
Momentous to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where there
were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder,
Holman Hunt's Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so charged
with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company--_it_ in company and
I the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to
face it all alone in a room. By that time moreover--I mean by 1858--we
had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with
W. J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at the
atelier of M. Leon Coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to his
years, had been candidly provided--that M. Leon Coigniet whose Marius
meditating among the Ruins of Carthage impressed us the more, at the
Luxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon had
been,) in consequence of this family connection.
Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our aesthetic evolution
without a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciated
experience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion
favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities
had to drop; going to the play presented itself in London as a serious,
ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs over
vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and
with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and
catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strange
places, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls and
partitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house
was to burst into flame; I recall in especial our being arrayed, to the
number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic
balcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swiss
cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith's
once-famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded,
rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my senses,
though subject to the reflection that his type and presence,
superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such
ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance--a
performance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, the
very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Epernay, with the
ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the
slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal
champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's mere
personal resources and graces. But it is the publicity of our situation
as a happy family that I best remember, and how, to our embarrassment,
we seemed put forward in our illustrative chalet as part of the
boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two other
great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one of
these at the Princess's, then under the management of Charles Kean, the
unprecedented (as he was held) Shakespearean revivalist, the other at
the Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived
Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Stirling were the high
attraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry the
Eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothing
for weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours Queen
Katharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiant
group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous--when
indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the
portentous Cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to
Cromwell with Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address on the way
to the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious--as it was
doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though as
I look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and
fusion I seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent, after the
manner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of the
same period. I was to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed later
on--ten years later, in America--without a rag of scenic reinforcement;
when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature
probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of
endeavour. Were he and his wife really not _coercively_ interesting on
that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a
distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was
I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and
forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find
hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the
castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of
pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to
the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of
them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in
common, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumference
and archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers of
the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth and
Zoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision of
the Mrs. Cibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards--so affecting may often be such
recovered links.
I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of that
antiquity, even though Still Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishing
freshness and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kemble's
mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed Tom
Taylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the subject of it,
passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study." It is perhaps
in particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre,
the squalid slum of Wych Street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as
an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of
Royalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of the
conditions of the mid-Victorian age; the general credit of which, I
should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet
and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's John
Mildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash
mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was an
exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in
the highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkable
height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little
genius of Robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable for
us, we felt that night, in Planche's extravaganza of The Discreet
Princess, a Christmas production preluding to the immemorial
harlequinade. I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong
wriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy-tale,
everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true
and yet none the less _macabre_, the great point of it all its parody of
Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple of
years further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of a
Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eugenie
Grandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of
his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is
the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose
daughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lover
shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; and
the prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor,
his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase
occupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling of
his chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his
alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus
hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so
held the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half way
across the room. I associate a little uncertainly with the same night
the sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and in a comedy
botched from the French, like everything else in those days that was not
either Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an example
above all, this association, of the heaped measure of the old
bills--vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of but
slightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feel
and redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, in
their big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in his
mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked," I was to
see again, ever so long after, in America; an impression reminding me,
as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted
that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at least
in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," which were on a footing,
and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of a
naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's
relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the
character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while the
character gained, or at least while the spectator did--this comes back
to me quite as a part even of my earlier experience and as attesting on
behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no more
charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank
_enough_, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been
deep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at least
gain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from a
mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something.
In spite of which, at the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by the
light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of
Drury Lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact
that personality and artistry, _with_ their intensity, could work their
spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so
charmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what we
regard to-day as most indispensable--since our present fine conception
is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet
and curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, but our
predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks to
which they wear the crown of our now thinking of them--if we do think of
them--as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were to
become is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt.