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.
Macready played once more in Paris in 1846, but the times were changed,
and he achieved only a _succes d'estime_. He then visited America, where
his presence evoked professional jealousies and bad blood, resulting in
serious riots in which lives were lost. On February 26, 1851, the great
actor gave his farewell performance. A brilliant page of Lewes has kept
alive until our own day the emotion of this memorable occasion, which
marks an era in the history of English art. Macready was in deep mourning;
he had just lost a daughter of twenty years of age. He did not declaim his
speech, but gave it forth with dignified sadness. In it he laid claim only
to two merits--that of having brought back the text of Shakespeare in its
purity, and that of having made of the theatre a place in which decent
folks need not hesitate to be seen. He foresaw that if his glory as an
artist should fade with the gradual disappearance of those who had
witnessed it, his work as a literary restorer and a moral reformer would
survive. And he was right.
The farewell performance was followed by a banquet, at which the
inevitable Bulwer took the chair. John Forster read aloud at it some
verses by Tennyson. The Laureate had graven on the tomb of the tragedian's
career the three words, "Moral, Grave, Sublime."
Then all was over. The voice that had thrilled so many souls was to be
heard only at charitable entertainments and provincial gatherings. And
when he died in 1873 England had forgotten him.
There is a story of his last days which I cannot refrain from repeating,
though it has no bearing really upon the subject of this book. When the
old man, confined by paralysis to his armchair, was cut off from the world
by the loss of several of his senses, he would be seen acting to himself
(barely so much as moving his lips the while) the masterpieces he had
loved. There was nothing to reveal the progress of the play save the light
that would illumine his ever-mobile countenance, to which new lines had
been given by conscious use and solitary thought.
How fine they must have been, these impersonations--Lear, Hamlet,
Macbeth--in the mysterious half-shades of his life's evening and in the
silent theatre of his mind, where there was nothing to shackle the artist
in his struggle after perfection, where every aspiration was an
achievement!
If I have spoken at some length of Macready, it is because I cannot bring
myself to regard him as the representative of a dead art, the last High
Priest of a shattered idol. On the stage and off the stage, Macready was a
pioneer. He was the first to see the coming of Realism, and he was the
first actor of good breeding. But a long time was to ensue ere his example
would be followed and understood. The stage, when he left it, was in a
state of confusion and of squalor difficult to describe.
Strive as Macready would to cleanse the theatre, the prejudice which kept
certain classes apart from it seemed to grow and spread. The accession of
the young Queen heralded one of those moods of puritanism which are
chronic with English society. Young Men's and Young Women's Christian
Associations multiplied, and, in providing innocent and free amusements
for the artizan, they competed with the theatre at the same time as with
the public-house. With the higher classes it was music that was injuring
the drama by its rivalry. For a long time--as Lady Gay Spanker put it in a
comedy of the time--the English had known no music but the barking of the
hounds; now it was that Society began to scramble for boxes at extravagant
prices to hear Grisi sing. A quarrel between the singer and her manager
having led to a severance, the now "star"-less company, by a marvellous
stroke of luck, was enabled to shine afresh with Jenny Lind. This rivalry
continued, and together with the burning of Her Majesty's Theatre it led
to the invasion of the two great London theatres by foreign musicians. The
opera held sway from the end of March to the end of July. The Pantomime,
at first humble and modest, but growing stronger every year, began now at
Christmas and lasted throughout a considerable portion of the winter. A
short autumn season was all that remained for the drama, or rather
melodrama, and for what was worse than the others, the "Hippodrama." Thus
was entitled a new kind of production in which horses had the principal
roles. More than one popular author was glad to invent plots for these
singular protagonists. Shakespeare, who had had to go turns hitherto with
the lions of the tamer Van Ambrugh,--he and they roaring on alternate
evenings,--had to give in completely before the Hippodrama. He took refuge
in a suburban theatre, Sadler's Wells, with the actor Phelps, and there he
was able eventually to boast, like that survivor of the Reign of
Terror--_J'ai vecu_. To arouse any interest in him amongst the English
public, it was necessary that he should be stumbled through by foreigners
or lisped by babes.
According to an old brochure of the time which groans over the depth of
the humiliation of the theatre, people stood still to look a second time
at the madman who could attempt to run Covent Garden or Drury Lane. To the
reckless amateur succeeded the shameless adventurer, the shy contractor
with empty pockets that called for filling. About 1850 one of these great
theatres was managed by an ex-policeman who had started a restaurant;
later it passed into the hands of a theatre attendant. One manager was
arrested for theft in the wings of his own theatre. It is easy to imagine
how dramatic art would develop in the hands of such men. They dispensed
with scenery and stage properties, and made shift with an empty stage;
they squandered their substance and lavished their genius upon the art of
advertising; their puffs and prospectuses were the only masterpieces of
the times. There were some who sought to excite English chauvinism,
pre-jingoism as one may call it, by such performances as that of the
national acrobat who turned head over heels ninety-one times while his
American rival was achieving but eighty-one, thus conquering the New World
by ten somersaults.
These things succeeded in attracting the public, but _what_ public?
Theatre-goers were but a small section really of the public--a group apart
on whom lay a certain suspicion of immorality connected with an evil
reputation of being un-English. There was some ground for this last
reproach. Foreigners were gaining ground. It would seem that there was no
getting along without us French between 1850 and 1865. We were translated
and adapted in every form. Our melodramas were transplanted bodily; our
comedies were coarsened and exaggerated into farces; sometimes even, that
nothing might be lost, our operas were ground down into plays. Second-rate
pieces were honoured with two or three successive adaptations; and dramas
which had lived a brief hour at the Boulevard du Crime, in England became
classics. There is a tradition that the director of The Princess's had a
tame translator under lock and key who turned French into English without
respite, his chain never loosened nor his hunger satisfied until his task,
for the time being, should be complete.
Our actors had at this time a permanent home in London, kept for them by
Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, at the St. James's Theatre. Thence
they made incursions upon all the others. Some years previously Madame
Arnould Plessy, having taken into her head to act in the tongue of
Shakespeare, Theophile Gautier had complimented her on the grace with
which she had succeeded in "extracting English from her mouth." Others now
attempted to emulate her accomplishment and to turn it to account. Fechter
resolved not merely to play Hamlet, but to play as it had never been
played before, and he did so to rounds of applause for seventy nights. An
_ingenue_, escaped from the Comedie Francaise, made a similar effort in
the role of Juliet, and despite her bad accent, and intolerable
pretension, she was able to keep it up, thanks to powerful supporters, in
the teeth of the quite excusable hostility of the pit. Things did not
always pass off so harmlessly, and in more than one instance the brutal
anger of the public, as under Charles I., drove intruders from the stage,
which it wished to see occupied by native actors alone.
As a matter of fact, there were some notable English actors and actresses
at this time. Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin) preserved the pure diction of
John and Charles Kemble. Charles Kean, despite his inadequate physique,
won for himself gradually an honourable place on the stage over which his
father had held sway. Ryder had a presence, and a sonorous voice, deep and
hollow and tragic, like that of Beauvallet or of Maubant. Keeley was a
massive man, who could act with subtlety; his wife, incisive, keen,
_amere_, had a leaning towards the serious drama--towards the realistic
even. Robson, a queer and wonderful little figure, made a mark in _le
drame noir_ and in outrageous caricature. Farren had made his _debut_ in
old men's parts at eighteen, and played them for fifty years without
advancing in his art a step, without introducing a shade of emotion or a
touch of humanity into his effects. Charles Mathews impersonated impudent
youth, just as Farren impersonated unpleasant and ridiculous old age.
Elegant, lissome, light, mobile, Mathews skipped and fluttered and
chirruped like a bird. In his old age he reminded me of Ravel, his
contemporary, whose method and roles offered some analogy with his.[5]
Buckstone made the Haymarket prosper for twenty years, where I saw him,
secure in the favour of the public, with his colleague, Compton, whose
speciality was a certain dryness of humour. Buckstone at this time had
lost both his hearing and his memory. But what a sly look there was in his
eye! How his mouth would twist and turn! What irony lurked in the
expressive ugliness of that wrinkled old mask of his!
These good actors injured rather than served their art. They revelled in,
and limited themselves to, their own speciality, exaggerated their
idiosyncrasies day by day, and left them as a legacy to their imitators.
The authors were too insignificant, did they see the danger, to oppose
their will to that of Charles Mathews and Farren. They took their measures
to order and tried to satisfy their patrons. Thus became gradually
narrowed at once the field for invention and for observation. As
substitutes for the infinity of living human types and characters, seven
or eight _emplois_, as one may say, came into existence--_emplois_ often
further specified and characterised by the name of an actor. There was the
low comedian and the light comedian, the villain and the heavy man. All
diversities of womenkind were grouped into one of these four ticketed
sections: the _ingenue_, the flirt, the chaperon, and the wicked woman.
The valet of Comedy had become a rascally steward whose rogueries took on
a certain aspect of Drama. There were two or three types of old men. There
was the surly old curmudgeon in whom the author vents his spleen, and who
draws up eccentric wills. There is the old beau, cowardly and cynical, who
in the last act marries his fiancee to his own son and swears to reform.
And there is the old peasant who is descended in a straight line from the
father of Pamela, always talking of his white hairs and his contempt for
gold, and always greeting the traveller, who has been overtaken by a storm
and has lost his way, with "Be welcome to my humble roof." The peasant,
one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than
a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was
the captain, the "man about town," addicted to drink, with a diamond pin
resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots
that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents
the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as
imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. Did he know
Society at his finger-ends, the man would never think of painting it. He
never paints from nature. He copies for the thousandth time from the old
models, Sheridan and Goldsmith, or his new masters, Scribe and d'Ennery.
It was for the critics, one is inclined to say, to instruct the public,
the actors, and the author. I am almost ashamed to tell of the pass to
which dramatic criticism had come. A paragraph in an obscure corner, a
quarter of a column on the more important works,--that was about all the
space the great newspapers accorded to the theatre. Dramatic criticism was
a nocturnal calling that enjoyed a not too good repute, and was frowned on
by respectable people and fathers of families. It was entrusted to tyros,
who hoped by their good conduct to earn their advancement presently to the
reporting staff in the police courts. The one writer undertook both drama
and opera. Dramatic criticism and musical criticism, owing to the natural
gifts which they require, are two absolutely different callings. What
mattered it, however, to the writer, who was expected only to praise the
pieces and the performers, without being too much of a bore?
John Oxenford, the critic of the _Times_, was sent for one morning to the
office of the editor. In analysing a new piece he had criticised freely
the performance of a certain actor, and the latter had addressed a letter
of remonstrance to Mr. Delane. "These things," said the editor
majestically to the writer,--"these things don't interest the general
public, and I don't want the _Times_ to become an arena for the discussion
of the merits of Mr. This and Mr. That. So look here, my dear fellow,
understand this well, and write me accounts of plays henceforth that won't
bring me any more such letters. Do you see?" "I see," said Oxenford. And
thus it was, continues the teller of the story, that English literature
lost pages which might have recalled the subtlety of Hazlitt in
conjunction with the winning humour of Charles Lamb. Henceforth Oxenford,
a scholar who had translated the "Hellas" of Jacobi and the
"Conversations" of Goethe with Eckermann, passed for a blighted and
discouraged genius; though of this he gave no stronger proofs than an
English version of the operetta, _Bon soir, Monsieur Pantalon_, a farce
which I saw fall quite flat, and some articles on Moliere. But you should
have heard him in a bar-parlour with his pipe between his teeth, a bottle
of port on the table, and facing him some interlocutor who was not Mr.
Delane!
While the press critic neglected his duty, or was prevented from
fulfilling it, the official censorship added one more to the troubles and
obstacles which already hampered the progress of the stage. I may perhaps
make some reference in this place to the origin of the Censorship, and to
its scope and powers.
Some writers will have it that this institution, as it now exists, is but
a survival of the office of Master of the Revels, which flourished under
the Tudors and the first Stuarts. As a matter of fact, the censorship owes
its existence to a law passed in the reign of George II.[6] It was
instituted nominally for the protection of good behaviour, decency, and
public order; in reality, to protect Walpole from the stings of
Aristophanic comedy and to silence Fielding. A century and a half have
elapsed since the fall of Walpole, and the censorship still exists, like
that sentinel who was stationed in an alley of Trarskoe Selo to guard a
rose, and who was still being relieved every two hours twenty-five years
later. The law of 1843, which was by way of according liberty to the
theatre, did not free it from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,
whose powers were delimited, so to say, geographically, in the most
curious manner, for it is impossible to understand why certain quarters of
the Metropolis were placed outside the reach of his authority and
submitted to the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace.
To all intents and purposes the powers of the Chamberlain are exercised by
a gentleman who is styled the Examiner of Plays. Plays have to be
submitted to him seven days before their production, and when he returns
them with his signature he receives from the submitters of them fees of
from L1 to L2, according to the number of acts. The author may not enter
his presence. The manager alone has the privilege of contemplating his
features, and of giving, or getting from him, verbal explanations. And
even those communications are under the seal of secrecy. Above the
examiner stands a kind of head of department, and above him the
Chamberlain himself. When you have exhausted these three jurisdictions you
can go no higher. Above the Lord Chamberlain, as above the Czar of All the
Russias, there remains only Divine Justice, and to Divine Justice authors
of vaudevilles and musical comedies cannot very well appeal. The
censorship indeed is an absurd anomaly, the sole irresponsible and secret
authority which remains in English legislation.
If you seek to discover how it has acted during this century, you will
find that according as the censor was indolent or zealous his office has
been a nullity or a nuisance. In theatrical circles that censor will not
soon be forgotten who suppressed the word "thigh" as dangerous to public
morals, and who exorcised from a play by Douglas Jerrold, as disrespectful
to religion, the following phrase:--"He plays the violin like an angel!"
The same censor found these words in a tragedy:--"_I_ do homage to pride,
debauchery, avarice!... Never!" He hastened to delete this, admitting thus
by implication that English society, which it was his mission to protect,
was compact of these three heinous characteristics.
It was forbidden to make fun of Holloway's ointment, for Mr. Holloway was
"an estimable manufacturer who employs thousands of workmen." It was
forbidden to put a comic bishop on the stage--unless it were a colonial
bishop, in which case the censor would give his sanction. A play founded
on Oliver Twist was forbidden because it was calculated to incite to
crime, but it was allowed for a benefit performance; whence it would
appear that it is allowable to incite the audience to crime on such
special occasions. This poor censorship, which has to read everything,
which has to supervise everything,--from the rages of Othello to the
grimaces of the clown and the tights of the ballet girls,--which has to
uphold at once the constitution and propriety, to defend at once the
Divinity and Mr. Holloway, loses its head over it all at last, and reminds
one of the _bourgeois_ broken loose who is being launched at carnival time
into some dizzying Saraband.
Its most absorbing task is that of barring the way against French
immorality. Its vigilance is eluded, however, by a kind of conventional
terminology. Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word
"cocotte" in black and white, they replace it by the word "actress." Where
we have unblushingly written "adultery," they have inserted "flirtation."
The censor gives his sanction and pockets his fees, and on the performance
of the piece the by-play of the actor and actresses completes the
translation, re-establishing if not reinforcing the original sense.
In the midst of all these difficulties the growth of the theatre-going
public had made necessary long series of performances, long runs as we
call them now, unknown up till then and inaugurated by the new theatres.
There were a dozen in 1847, twenty in 1860. The calling of dramatic author
began to grow lucrative and to tempt many writers. It was an easy calling,
too, as the public was young and ignorant, ready to accept anything, and
as, in addition, the French drama offered an almost inexhaustible amount
of raw material. They had recourse to it unceasingly, just as Robinson
Crusoe after his shipwreck used to return to his ship in order to look for
some tool! I shall not give a long list of names because, unless
accompanied by a short personal sketch and a few words of criticism, these
names, obscure or even unknown, would mean nothing to French readers, and
would be almost as wearisome as the long lists of warriors in the epics of
olden times. Amongst the more notable, I may mention Tom Taylor and Dion
Boucicault. Tom Taylor belonged to both the world of law and the world of
letters. Briefs gave him his dinner, the drama gave him his supper; his
supper got to be the more substantial of the two. From 1850 to 1875 he
seems to have achieved ubiquity. His name was on every poster. He was
facile, had a certain method in his work, a certain skill in putting his
plays together, a certain discretion which passed for taste--in fine, all
the qualities that go to form a painstaking and prolific mediocrity. He
would probably have wished to be judged on the merits of the historical
dramas which absorbed his whole activity during the concluding years of
his life, and in which he thought he was achieving "literature." But are
they really historical dramas? They contain at once too much history and
too little. The historical document is all-pervasive, enters into every
scene, interrupts the action; but anything like historical psychology, any
attempt to get at the real character of the personages presented, is
wholly unattempted. It was characteristic of him that, when desiring to
depict Queen Elizabeth, he relied upon some romantic stories by a German
lady instead of going to the work of Froude (far more dramatic than his
own drama), where he could have learned all he required to know.
Dion Boucicault, the other writer whom I have singled out as
representative of the lot, had more character and was more interesting. He
was an actor, and an actor of some talent. He knew no other world than
that of the theatre--the world which from eight o'clock till midnight
laughs and cries, curses and makes love, dies and murders, under the
gaslight, behind three sets of painted canvas. Without any real culture,
and without having the least critical faculty, Boucicault had read
everything about the theatre--read everything and remembered everything,
good, bad, and indifferent, from _Phormio_ to the _Auberge des Adrets_. He
knew by heart all the _croix de ma mere_ of modern melodrama, and from his
mass of reminiscences he concocted his crazy-quilt-like plays, imitating
involuntarily, unconsciously. He was plagiarism incarnate. In his first
great success, _London Assurance_, you may find not only Goldsmith and
Sheridan, but Terence and Plautus, who had reached him by way of Moliere.
You will meet in it a father who speaks to his son without recognising
him, or who at least is persuaded not to recognise him; a young lady who
boxes her husband's ears and calls him her doll; a master who makes a
confidant of his valet, a valet as untruthful as Dave or Scapin; a lawyer
who is anxious to get himself thrashed like _L'Intime_; a young drunkard
and debauchee who falls in love with a country lass; and a young girl
brought up in the wilds, who replies to the first compliment she has paid
her--"It strikes me, sir, that you are a stray bee from the hive of
fashion. If so, reserve your honey for its proper cell. A truce to
compliments." The piece goes from vulgarity to vulgarity, from absurdity
to absurdity. Within a few minutes there is a ridiculous abduction, a
comic duel and a hardly less comic marriage, all brought about by a will
which is surely the most absurd of all the absurd wills known to the
drama. The piece had its central figure in a clever humbug whom no one
knows. "Will you allow me to ask you," says Charles Courtly in the last
scene, "an impertinent question?"
"With the greatest pleasure."
"Who the devil are you?"
"On my faith, I don't know. But I must be a gentleman." Upon which another
character concludes the play with a pedantic definition of the word
"gentleman," and morality is satisfied.
One fine day--it was in 1860--this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and
who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to
create a _genre_ of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A
compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an
author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the
success which greeted _Peep o' Day_, and he wound up with the memorable
failure of _The Oonagh_.[7] Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to
exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in
the _Colleen Bawn_.
The _Colleen Bawn_ is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What
is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take
an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained
drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes
root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant
girl to become worthy of the man she loves,--her discouragement, which yet
cannot exhaust her devotion,--all this is depicted by touches so
suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But
there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play
round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five
years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red
cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half
seductive--smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.
Until Boucicault's time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland,
never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his
country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling
of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of
the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard,
England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness
of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe.
Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his
English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in
preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the
commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the
sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety
which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and
although he added many touches in the _Shaugraun_, in _Arrah-na-pogue_, in
_The Octoroon_, in _Michael O'Dowd_, and in other works, it may be said to
be already complete in _The Colleen Bawn_. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells
us, "I was full of sudden death that minute," and when Eily speaks of the
little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as
exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes
his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at
will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of
the Irish priest of old, and indeed of our own day too--at once the man
of the people and the man of God.
Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but
striking piece--this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of
rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins.
Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after
winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for
History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her
character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.