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.
Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled
through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a
reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud _Becket_?
Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fashion, the fact
remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a passionate
interest in this struggle between Mind and Power--between the National
Throne and the Roman Priesthood--resuscitated by a poet. Many other
symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.
I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of
London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the _bete humaine_ been so
completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of
George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so
unblushingly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special
resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out
before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly
veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for
morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is
looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not
be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The _bete humaine_ is
outside the door.
I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the
Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more
luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to
Mrs. Bancroft, whose former roles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree.
If you mention her name before an elderly "man about town," who was young
and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day
you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.
The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the
children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even
extended their clientele. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three
acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to
inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,--districts
of London whose geography was hardly known,--at the Surrey, the Victoria,
the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds
sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess's. In that immense
conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third
public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but
respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of
the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary
drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing,
popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These
forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate.
It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people
laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who
despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very
acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the
masses which people of culture often lack.
When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed,
whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget
life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows
that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in
that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together
with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight
in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even--to descend a degree
lower--of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to Shakespeare,
for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare's; and were it not
for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people
to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.
Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in
that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks
under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters
him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be
taught that a criminal's punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his
own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least
their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same
places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured
spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.
As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here
following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket,
the Garrick, the St. James's, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add,
perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent
actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The _personnel_ of
these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and
actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the
advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material
well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet
more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due?
To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which
individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept
going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager's first question of a
girl coming to him for an engagement would be--"Can you sing? Can you
dance? Have you got good legs?" To-day his first requirement would be that
she should have intelligence.
English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially,
and now Rejane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made
the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comedie Francaise
are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his _Thirty Years at
the Play_, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised
performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the
banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening
Favart and Delaunay played _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ before the
keenest and most impressionable of "pits," composed exclusively of actors
and authors. When, at the _denouement_, there was heard the sound of a
fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid
to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair,
crying out, "_Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!_"--so exquisite was the
sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a
second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of
some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent.
I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of
more than one English actor.
Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious
stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this
study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to
enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a
large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth
century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like
Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made
their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led
the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel,
out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his
soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical
attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his
toadies to call him the "Napoleon of the Theatrical World," would fain
have had Clement Scott, of the _Weekly Despatch_, dismissed from his post,
and presumed to deny him the _entree_ to his theatres, and even to refuse
his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised
appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and
looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably
in the actor's favour;--for the truer the adverse criticism, the more
injury it did to its object.
Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to
whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder
of the _London Figaro_. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many
years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon III., and it was in the palace of
St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge
of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by
reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily,
became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of
freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and
William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of
complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat
on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he
entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its
life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his
career as publisher. It is not the less one's duty to accord him, under
the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him
by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now
carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven
from the theatre.
The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their
judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have
pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have
abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on
the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was
yesterday, and this must content us--this is as much as we have any right
to expect.
_The London Figaro_ was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple
Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers
in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the
pseudonym of "Almaviva." The reader is already acquainted with the real
names of "Almaviva I." and "Almaviva II."; he has encountered them several
times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a
difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their
profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely
opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the
critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of
to-morrow.
Mr. Archer's passion for the theatre--he has told us in a charming preface
addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him--dates
from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying
element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put them on
the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room,
and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely
to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has
studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic
literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclopaedia, a library of
references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact
information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive
idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at
once a penetrating critic and a first-rate _petit journaliste_. Humour, of
which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid,
lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste
or a touch of pedantry. I don't believe that in all his life he has
perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a
bore, if he would.
The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare
him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which
preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M.
Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaitre, and in what respects he differs
from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and
circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent
writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters
of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it,
now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their
personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more
_blase_ than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be
taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to
hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had
always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate
principles which, with us, are taken for granted,--to accomplish, in fact,
a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the
_Dramaturgie_ of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of
articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions
which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently
complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the
arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.
His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a
meeting-place, a _rendez-vous_, of all the arts. Its province, he holds,
is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds,
provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul
of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for
farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively
farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be
folly to judge it by aesthetic laws. One does not take the height of a
sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist
outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten
or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to
raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it
with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end?
Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may
all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that
they are sincere and independent.
Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment,
and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the
stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a
dilemma. "Either you show me on the stage," he says, "what I see and go
through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it--what do
I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of
life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of
truth and reality?" To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges
us to observe--that is to say, to see and feel more intensely--what we see
and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without
reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and
of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth,
the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or
refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the
financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to
the side of Rarahu or of Chrysantheme, an infallible instinct tells the
reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be
endowed with the same critical instinct?
Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic
character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon
lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until
there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose
staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness
of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama,
Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth--it was
neither realistic nor idealistic, but just "fantastic." Mr. Archer took up
Matthew Arnold's idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the
portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a
succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce
judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to
put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral;
the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was
inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got's declaration, that our drama
was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French
drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all.
Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the
villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in
the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is
moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to
which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no
drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless
sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the
antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.
He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards
better things, towards a life superior to our common life,--the life,
perhaps, of to-morrow.
He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to
speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition
retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that
of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.
His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind
of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every
direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable
question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be
imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it
is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which
should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And
would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What
is one to think of Diderot's paradox about the actors' art, and what do
actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in
former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected
because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer,
or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic?
What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system
which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought
the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager,
and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and
answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an
unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own
opinions are at variance with his.
This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer's role has
consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of
foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians
and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works
of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be
turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted
by Ibsen and Bjoernson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall
speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works
have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which
Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very
attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent,
as it were, a character of scientific precision.
The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago
resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house,
doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in
consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking
jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing
with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge
to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming
bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.
From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating
sometimes a second and a third time the same inept _vaudeville_. A
melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became
the _Ticket of Leave Man_, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on
the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in
our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the
indifference of the English pit, without anybody's attempting to draw a
moral from the event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the
idea of international literary property had been started, and was making
way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an
Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for
five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being
covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to
invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation
into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of
the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it,
an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary
property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the
natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.
These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom
we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the
importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that
they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think
twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of
paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn
from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so
efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English
drama.
It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the _flair_ of
the actor-manager.
From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in
the domain of our _Haute Comedie_.
The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires
almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as
finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would
be to spoil them--_sint ut sunt aut non sint_. It is different with the
pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and
detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author
has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked
out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely
new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the
excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of
taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of
work having a certain fascination for the playwright.
To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been
in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one
spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft,
Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the
performance of _Dora_ on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the
English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself bought them from M.
Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested
the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the
sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British _amour propre_. All
the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, "But by jingo if we do." The
idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by
making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. "By the time we got out at Amiens
to drink our _bouillon_," one of them tells us, "the play was fully
planned out." And, under the title of _Diplomacy, Dora_ enjoyed an even
more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.
This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The
new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double
advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken
from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral
problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst
of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in
complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a
new _denouement_ resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French
play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the
adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to
a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the two races, the two arts,
and the two codes of morality.
This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more
interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era
of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.