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.
The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as
the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however,
nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other
pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English
name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time
to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic
_genre_ became quickly acclimatised by success.
I shall take Burnand's _Ixion_ as a type, for by reason of its
never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind.
It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost
every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no
consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern
sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from
antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion's palace. Jupiter appears in
answer to his invocation. "Are you insured?" he inquires. "Yes," replies
Ixion, "with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes
to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it." Jupiter invites him
to come to Olympus. "We lunch at half-past one. Don't forget." Mercury,
charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aerial omnibus. "Come on for
Olympus! Room for one outside!" We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly
over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to
tell "the Master" that "coffee is served." Neptune talks nautical lingo
like the hero of _Black-eyed Susan_, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a
French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends.
The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate,
whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for "La France" by performing
the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life--he never shows
himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of
the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper
articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.
Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls
scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and
dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to
the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day--to the victory of
the horse "Gladiator," to _Lady Audley's Secret_ (then all the rage), to
vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in
Trafalgar Square, to Mudie's Circulating Library,--and a thousand other
things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be
intelligible.
To read _Ixion_, as I read it thirty-five years after its first
production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making
one's way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had
become enigmas, and through all the _debris_ of these used-up fireworks,
was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the
piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The
Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of
spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of
things in general, the pervading odour of the _poudre de riz_, the
_flonflons_ of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the
dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and
the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits
which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A debutante destined to
a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with
the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later
in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon.
Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman)
the Goddess of Wisdom.
But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management
of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English
grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking
fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used
to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this
genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to
it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of
dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion.
For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy
for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had
him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and
had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten
shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in
the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one
could wish, and even more,--so much so that the list of his works, were I
to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a
subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and
work it up,--you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the
subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should
be stocked. He collected them together in notebooks which in time must
have come to rival the volume of Larousse's Dictionary. In the street he
would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his
sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk,
or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall
door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had
been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his
mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which
never left him an instant's peace. Having failed as a manager in the
provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments
before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring
down the curtain on a witticism?
Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And,
as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a
single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the
theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume
upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in
the slang of the green-room, we call _grues_.
In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under
which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the
actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former
were much nearer to being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen.
Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with
the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional
and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the
inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his _Model Men and Women_,
paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the
biographies of the _Prix Montyon_. She goes late to bed, rises early,
learns her roles while washing her children's linen, rehearses in the
afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to
her _toilette_, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. "School
mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks,
housemaids,--what are your fatigues to those of an actress?" So spoke a
writer[8] who was well acquainted with theatrical life.
These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera,
were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did
not perform, and who were called upon to fill not roles but tights. The
respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own
ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she
won--and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was
the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.
Poor Byron was not without the ambition of an artist: he aspired to
raising himself above the level of the _genre_ to which he owed his first
success,--to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the
stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran
parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was
then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband,
she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know,
however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she
herself made her _debut_ when she was five years old. At Manchester she
had the honour of playing some small role with Macready, who was then
making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great
tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and
questioned her.
"I suppose," he said, "that you want to become a great actress?"
"Yes, sir."
"And what role are you most anxious to play?"
"Juliet."
Macready burst out laughing. "Then," said he, "you'll have to change those
eyes of yours!"
Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was
an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of
role. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the role
of any of Shakespeare's heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude
Melnotte in _The Lady of Lyons_.
It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in
her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing
_Belphegor_, a monstrous emotional drama,[9] the hero of which was an
acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the role of a little boy, had to give him the
cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and
risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first,
then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her
explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon
remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at
the Lyceum. Here she made her real _debut_ towards the end of 1858.
_Belphegor_ was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a role.
On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there
appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low
comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have
to deal at last with the contemporary stage.
But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none
had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies
of the English Comedy still to be born.
From the Lyceum she passed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a
spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid
here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other
Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; naively selfish,
it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture
which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone
which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket
Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the
inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.
For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at
long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a
whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her
only in two subsidiary roles, and for an estimate of her talents I must
rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds
one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle
place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was
writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the role of eccentric
ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who
rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the
time of her _debut_ is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which
forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,--a
figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he
declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter
which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the
barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half
Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from
Charles Dickens to John Forster:--
"I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having
taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you
would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the _Maid and the
Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever
I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is
astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is
so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly
free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as
a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the
dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which in the
audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you _can
not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the
appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like
a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association
with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I
never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl's talent is
unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the
stage in my time, and the most singularly original."
But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids.
She begged of all the managers to let her play the role of a heroine in
long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, "I
shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little
scamp."
Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent
in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her--
"As the managers won't have you, take a theatre yourself."
"But I have no money."
"I'll lend you money," said her brother-in-law.
A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. _He_
brought his reputation and his puns. _She_ the L1000 which was not hers.
A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the
noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid,
miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at
this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of
entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy
oftenest of all. Frederic Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French,
and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood
for the "Grande Armee" and who cried "Viv' l'Emprou!" The house bore the
high-sounding name of the "Queen's Theatre," but the people of the
neighbourhood called it the "Dust-Hole," and in doing so proved their
acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the
Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange
peel.
It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than
of money. The "Dust-Hole" was transformed into a blue and white
_bonbonniere_. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the
evening of the first night, whilst the _queue_ was already forming outside
the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would
have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy
Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality,
had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?
The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke,
transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs--an actress of delicate and
agreeable talent, the excellent _duegne_ Larkin, and two other sisters
Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not
previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to
the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.
He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being
ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four
and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six roles. In one
engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard
life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and
slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to
his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred
nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there
lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in
observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his
colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which
had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl,
had come to him and taken him by the hand.
Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in
1865 when the little "Prince of Wales's" opened its door as wide as it
could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a
burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new
repertory. Marie Wilton's friends supported her in their hundreds, but
their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost
worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his _verve_ during the removal.
Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson
was thought of.
Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next
door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight
against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The
son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years
of his life in a touring company in the midst of those _bourgeois_
vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father
had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and
had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst
still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any
remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of
foreigners--a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect.
In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it
is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.
At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement,
Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master
in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked
afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been
useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a
good-natured consul, and took up his actor's life again with its three
roles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a
livelihood. He has written one piece, _A Night's Adventure_, which by a
lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a
quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer;
and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his
father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre.
Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to
Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never
again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays,
writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot
always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his "copy"
for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say
whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For,
after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the
bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.
He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his
beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The
speaker is a composer of music. "In England, yesterday is always
considered so much better than to-day--last week so superior to this--and
this week so superior to the week after next--and thirty years ago so much
more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better
if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In
this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so
worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell
it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, 'You
look so young,' in the same tone that he would say, You look like an
impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having
been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition,
thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so
young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, 'My dear sir, very
likely your compositions may have merit--I don't dispute it--but, you see,
Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr.
T'other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the
public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to
give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go
away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that
time exert yourself to get older--you will succeed if you try hard; turn
grey, be bald--it's not a bad substitute--lose your teeth, your health,
your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,--in one short word,
your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don't die
in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.'"
As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old
after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had
assumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth
of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have
nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who
imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither
success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at
journalism. He tried to "place" work of every kind wherever he could, from
riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got
connected with a score of London and provincial papers--the _Porcupine_,
of Liverpool; the _Comic News_; the _Wag_, which his friend Byron had
started; _Fun_, just started by Tom Hood, and the _Illustrated Times_, on
which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns,
under the title of "The Theatrical Lounger," he sketched the features of
the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is
all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown
in, not unlike the style of our old weekly _Figaro_; at the same time, it
is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a
vent of spleen.
Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia--that vaguely-defined
district in which "men of the world" whom the "world" bored, among them
officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make
merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They
would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which
last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom
Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of _Fun_, used to give Friday
supper-parties--frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But
those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the
world.
Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed
as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the
market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun
to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.
Were they all such very "good fellows"?--I have my doubts. This Bohemia
was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just
a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working,
and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real
world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense.
I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one
man who could claim success.
These lines[10] of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of
the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his
birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life--
"I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!
I've drank too much of beer and wine;
I've had too much of toil and strife,
I've given a kiss to Johnson's wife,
And sent a lying note to mine,--
I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!"
After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays,
Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he
should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy
of society. He wrote and published the "Songs of the Governing Classes,"
the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten
lead. The "Song of the Gentleman" in particular might well be given a
place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.
Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned
outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these
nocturnal repasts of Hood's, at which Robertson was one of the most
brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so
much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the
theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the
fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional
routine,--everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to
offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature
more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same
pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never
seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.
Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson had acted at
the Strand in 1861 a little play called _The Cantab_, which achieved a
sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she
refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time
attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor entitled, _Our American
Cousin_, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who
was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was
anxious to appear before the public in the role of David Garrick. He was
anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a
really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the
piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation
from the French with Garrick substituted for the original French hero.
Strange beginning for one who aimed at a "Return to Truth," this sticking
of a historic head upon the shoulders of "a gentleman unknown"!
It was after this that he wrote his comedy _Society_. He took it to
Buckstone, who refused it flatly. "My dear fellow," he said, "your piece
wouldn't reach a fourth performance." The author went off, fingers
twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where
one of his friends met him. "Look here," said Robertson to him, "here is a
capital play and these asses won't have it." A provincial manager took it
up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on
November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only
the success of the Prince of Wales's Theatre, but a new era for English
Comedy--the era of Robertson.