What a number of ingenious reasons have been latterly given for the
decline of the Drama, and the decrease of interest now felt for the
stage. Some aver that people are nowadays too cultivated, too highly
educated, to take pleasure in a play; others opine that the novel has
supplanted the drama; others again declare that it is the prevalence
of a religious sentiment on the subject that has damaged theatrical
representation. For my own part, I take a totally different view of the
subject. My notion is this: the world will never pay a high price for
an inferior article, if it can obtain a first-rate one for nothing; in
other words, people are come to the conclusion that the best actors are
not to be found on the boards of the Haymarket or the Adelphi, but
in the world at large--at the Exchange, in the parks, on railroads or
river-steamers, at the soirées of learned societies, in Parliament, at
Civic dinners or Episcopal visitations.
Why has the masquerade ceased to interest and amuse? Simply because no
travestie of costume, no change of condition, is so strikingly ludicrous
as what we see on every side of us. The illiterate man with the revenue
of a prince; the millionaire who cannot write his name, and whom
yesterday we saw as a navvy; the Emperor who, a few years back, lodged
over the bootmaker’s; the out-at-elbow followers of imperial fortune,
now raised to the highest splendour, and dispensing hospitalities more
than regal in magnificence;--these are the spectacles which make the
masquerade a tiresome mockery; and it is exactly because we get the
veritable article for nothing that we neither seek playhouse nor
ballroom, but go out into the streets and highways for our drama,
and take our Kembles and Macreadys as we find them at taverns, at
railway-stations, on the grassy slopes of Malvern, or the breezy cliffs
of Brighton. Once admit that the wild-flower plucked at random has more
true delicacy of tint and elegance of form, and there is no going back
to the tasteless mockery of artificial wax and wire. The broad boards of
real life are the true stage; and he who cannot find matter of interest
or amusement in the piece performed, may rely upon it that the cause is
in himself, and not in the drama. Some will say, The world is just what
it always was. People are no more fictitious now than at any other time.
There was always, and there will be always, a certain amount of false
pretension in life which you may, if you like, call acting. And to this
I demur _in toto_, and assert that as every age has its peculiar
stamp of military glory, or money-seeking, or religious fervour, or
dissipation, or scientific discovery, or unprofitable trifling, so the
mark of our own time will be found to be its thorough unreality. Every
one is in travestie. Selfishness is got up to play philanthropy, apathy
to perform zeal, intense self-seeking goes in for love of country; and,
to crown all, one of the most ordinary and vulgar minds of all Europe
now directs and disposes of the fate and fortunes of all Christendom.
Daily habit familiarises us with the acting of the barrister. His
generous trustfulness, his love of all that is good, his scorn for Vice,
his noble pity, and the withering sarcasm with which he scathes the
ill-doer, we know, can be had, in common cases, for ten pounds ten
shillings; and five times as much will enlist in our service the same
qualities in a less diluted form; while, by quadrupling the latter sum,
we arrive at a self-devotion before which brotherly love pales, and old
friendships seem a cold and selfish indifferentism. We had contracted
for this man’s acuteness, his subtlety, his quick perception, and his
ready-wittedness; but he gives, besides these, his hearty trustfulness,
his faith in our honour, his conviction in our integrity: he knows our
motives; he has been inside our bosom, and comes out to declare that all
is pure and spotless there; and he does this with a trembling lip and a
swelling throat, the sweat on his brow and the tear in his eye, it being
all the while a matter of mere accident that he had not been engaged on
the opposite side, and all the love he bears us been “briefed” for the
defendant.
Look at the physician, too. Who is it, then, enters the sick-room with
the footfall of a cat, and draws our curtain as gently as a zephyr might
stir a rose-leaf, whose tender accents fall softly on our ear, and who
asks with the fondest anxiety how we have passed the night? Who is
it that cheers, consoles, encourages, and supports us? Who associates
himself with our sufferings, and winces under our pain, and as suddenly
rallies as we grow better, and joins in our little sickbed drolleries?
Who does all these?--a consummate actor, who takes from thirty to forty
daily “benefits,” and whose performances are paid at a guinea a scene!
The candidate on the hustings, the Government commissioner on his tour
of inspection, the vicar-general of my lord bishop, the admiral on his
station, the minister at the grand-ducal Court, are all good specimens
of common acting--parts which can be filled with very ordinary
capacities, and not above the powers of everyday artists. They conjugate
but one verb, and on its moods and tenses they trade to the end of the
chapter. These men never soar into the heroic regions of the drama;
they infuse no imagination into their parts. They are as unpoetical as a
lord-in-waiting. There are but two stops on their organ. They are bland,
or they are overbearing; they are either beautifully gentle, or they are
terrible in their wrath.
It is a strange feature of our age that the highest walk of the
real-life drama should be given up to the men of money, and that Finance
should be the most suggestive of all that is creative, fanciful, and
imaginative. What a commentary on our era! It is no paradox I pronounce
here. The greatest actor I ever saw, the most consummate artist, was a
railroad contractor; that is, he had more persuasiveness, more of that
magnetic captivation which subordinates reason to mere hope, than
any one I ever listened to. He scorned the pictorial, he despised all
landscape effects, he summoned to his aid no assistance from gorge or
mountain, no deep-bosomed wood or bright eddying river; he was a man of
culverts and cuttings, of quartz and limestone and flint; with a glance
he could estimate traffic, and with the speed of the lightning-flash
tell you what dividend could come of the shares.
It was, however, in results that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme
of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct--it
was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It
was the golden age--prosperity, happiness, and peace on every side;
the song of the husbandman at his plough mingling with the hum of the
village school; the thousand forms of civilisation, from cheap sugar to
penny serials, that would permeate the land; the peasant studying
social science over his tea, and the railway-guard supping his “cheap
Gladstone” as he speculated on the Antiquity of Man. Never was such an
Eden on earth, and all to be accomplished at the cost of a mere million
or two, with a “limited liability.”
With what a grand contempt this great man talked of the people who
busied themselves in the visionary pursuits of politics or literature,
or who devoted themselves to the Arts or Field-sports! With him
earthworks were the grandest achievements of humanity, and there was
no such civiliser as a parliamentary train. Had he been simply an
enthusiast, that fatal false logic that _will_ track enthusiasm--however
it be guided--would have betrayed him: but the man was not an
enthusiast--he was a great actor; and while to capitalists and
speculators he appealed by all the seductive inducements of profits,
premiums, and preference shares, to the outer and unmoneyed world he
made his approaches by a beautiful and touching philanthropy.
Did he believe in all this? Heaven knows. He talked and acted as if he
did; and though, when I last saw him, he had smashed his banker,
ruined his company, and beggared the shareholders, he was high-hearted,
hopeful, and buoyant as ever. It was a general who had lost a battle,
but he meant to recruit another army. It was some accidental rumour of
a war--some stupid disturbance on the Danube or the Black Sea--that
had frightened capital and made “money tight.” The scheme itself was
a glorious project--an unrivalled investment. Never was there such a
paying line--innumerable towns, filled with a most migratory population,
ever on the move, and only needing to learn the use of certain luxuries
to be constantly in demand of them.
With a good harvest, however, and money easy, if Lord Russell could only
be commonly civil to the Continental Cabinets, all would go well yet.
The bounties of Providence would be diffused over the earth--food would
be cheap, taxation reduced, labour plenty, and “then, sir, these worthy
people shall have their line, if I die for it.”
I find it very hard to believe in Borneo’s love or Othello’s jealousy.
I cannot, let me do all that I will, accept them as real, even in their
most impassioned moments, and yet this other man holds me captive. If
I had a hundred pounds in the world, I’d put it into his scheme, and I
really feel that, in not borrowing the money to make a venture, I am
a poor-spirited creature that has not the courage to win his way to
fortune.
And yet these fellows have no aid from dress or make-up. They are not
surrounded with all the appliances that aid a deception. They come to us
in their everyday apparel, and, mayhap, at inopportune moments, when
we are weary, or busy, or out of sorts, to talk of what we are not
interested in, and have no relish for. With their marvellous tact they
conquer apathy and overcome repugnance; they gain a hearing, and they
obtain at least time for more. There is much in what they say that
we feel no interest in; but now and then they _do_ touch a chord that
vibrates within us; and when they do so, it is like magic the instinct
with which they know it. It was that Roman camp, that lead-mine, that
trout-stream, or that paper-mill, did the thing; and the rogue saw it as
plainly as if he had a peep into our brain, and could read our thoughts
like a printed book. These then, I say, are the truly great actors, who
walk the boards of life with unwritten parts, who are the masters of our
emotions, even to the extent of taking away our money, and who demand
our trustfulness as a right not to be denied them.
Now, what a poor piece of mockery, of false tinsel and fringe and folly
and pretence, is your stage-player beside one of these fellows! Who is
going to sit three weary hours at the Haymarket, bored by the assumed
plausibility of the actor, when the real, the actual, the positive
thing that he so poorly simulates is to be met on the railroad, at the
station, in the club, on the chain-pier, or the penny steamer? Is there
any one, I ask, who will pay to see the plaster-cast when he can
behold the marble original for nothing? You say, “Are you going to the
masquerade?” and I answer, “I am at it.” _Circumspice!_ Look at the
mock royalties hunting (Louis XIV. fashion) in the deep woods of
Fontainebleau. Look at haughty lords and ladies--the haughtiest the
earth has ever seen--vying in public testimonies of homage--as we saw
a few days ago--to the very qualities that, if they mean anything,
mean the subversion of their order. Look at the wasteful abundance of
a prison dietary, and the laudable economy which half-starves the
workhouse. Look at the famished curate, with little beyond Greek roots
to support him, and see the millionaire, who can but write his name,
with a princely fortune; and do you want Webster or Buckstone to give
these “characters” more point?
Will you take a box for the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ when you can walk
into the Chancery Court for nothing? Will you pay for ‘Much Ado about
Nothing,’ when a friendly order can admit you to the House? And as for
a ‘New Way to Pay Old Debts,’ commend me to Commissioner Goulburn in
Bankruptcy; while ‘Love’s Last Shift’ is daily performed at the Court of
Probate, under the distinguished patronage of Judge Wills. Is there any
need to puzzle one’s head over the decline of the drama, then? You
might as well ask if a moderate smoker will pay exorbitantly for dried
cabbage-leaves, when he can have prime Cubans for the trouble of taking
them!