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THE ENGLISH STAGE
_WORKS BY THE AUTHOR._
PROFILS ANGLAIS.
MERIMEE ET SES AMIS.
VIOLETTE MERIAN.
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 Debut--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 Debut--His Career in the
Provinces, and Visit to Paris--The role of Digby Grand--The
role 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 Role--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 Matinee 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 _mesalliance_,
with _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, the typical comedy of a French
_mesalliance_, 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 aesthetic 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, Phaedra,
Tristram and Iseult, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Abelard and Heloise,
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, aesthetic--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 L70, _plus_ L10 for provincial rights. In
1884, a successful play (that had not yet exhausted its popularity)
brought its author L10,000 within a few months, of which L3000 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.
L10,000 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 role 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 Theophile 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 fete-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 roles, 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 roles.[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 _pere 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. Merimee has
written that "_il faut laisser aux debutants 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 naive 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 Cafe Imperial, regaling
themselves on the bulletins of the "Grande Armee," 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 role of a
Maecenas, 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 scene_, 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
_habitue_, 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 role. 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 _journee 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 pate!" 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 role
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 L10 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 L10, 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."