The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

Irving took up Richelieu next, and in it strove victoriously against memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at him – men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean’s successor. As though to complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side when he played Richard III. was that which Kean had carried in the same rôle, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick’s. A colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the other was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it were, the insignia of royalty.

He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian rôles, like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.

Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare. Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days (and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is required for masterpieces. The mise en scène, he tells us, should not give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its rôle is a negative one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this programme strictly adhered to.

The restoration of Shakespeare’s text, however, was a still more important achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us from Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III. He continued the good work with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for an “acting edition” of the Shakespearian masterpieces, – an actable Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows: – Omissions, often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.

I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is better as Richard III. than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions jerky and irregular. A critic has compared his gait in Hamlet to that of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being perfect, – a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the outset of his career would have freed him completely.

A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of his rôles, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to be the character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out “Burbadge” instead of “Richard,” we also, in Irving’s case, forget the rôle, and see only the actor; and the play assumes for us the character of an admirable lesson in the art of recitation.

Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all members of his profession, even beginners.

It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes. First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to understand the author’s meaning. When this has been mastered, you may trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at will.

Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot’s paradox about the actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love with the actress who has to enact a love scene with him? or thirst for blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often contrary emotions – supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable of them – would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions, but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture, though – what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician, psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for his calling.

Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly, – a life in which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson in the art of living. “Get the working-man to go to the theatre,” he declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house. The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live, and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.

This is the substance of the great actor’s teaching, as set forth by him on many occasions, – I shall not say in defence of his profession: the theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended – but rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine’s as his starting-point, he dealt with that great writer’s opinions on the same plane of thought, in a style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity, a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art, and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree, therefore, which entitled him “Sir Henry” in May 1895, could not have come at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only “my lady’s” dressmaker and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving’s case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised above them.

Irving seems to me – may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can boast? – to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in nothing, – he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch to his portrait: – “The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to fail as an art.” And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare because in Irving’s hand he is also a mine of gold?

CHAPTER VII

Is it well to imitate Shakespeare? – The Death of the Classical Drama – Herman Merivale and the White Pilgrim– Wills and his Plays: Charles the First, Claudian– Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too soon and too late – Tennyson and the Critics —The Falcon, The Promise of May, The Cup, Becket, Queen Mary, Harold.

Irving’s personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare’s heroines, but who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and sweet elocution set the poet’s dream to music. From America have come Mary Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It was possible for a critic to declare, – speaking of the vogue towards which everything seems to have worked, – that of all the dramatists of the day, Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been brought into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought the theatre into fashion.

But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good? Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident, and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted? One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and coups de théâtre; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and coups de théâtre that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is quite another matter. Shakespeare’s spirit is not to be assimilated; this is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment does not suit us, – it is either too long or too short, or both together. One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man about as much as a lawyer’s clerk, masquerading en mousquetaire, resembles d’Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his café in Stamboul. This tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off. It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half centuries before.

These are a priori considerations, but they are confirmed by the experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention besides Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled The White Pilgrim, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says Mr. Archer, “so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly.” His Bohemian life, his impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, Charles the First and Claudian. The first called up on the stage – for the last time doubtless – that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which, instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. “In order that the world may be Claudian’s purgatory, it must first be the hell of an entire generation.” Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.

Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers, tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant it after Ellen Terry.

One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama, – the name of Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published Queen Mary, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of Our Boys and the Pink Dominoes, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments of the imagination.

The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate; it was the critics – and I am borne out in this by the most eminent of their number, – it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson’s plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed – it was for this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career, and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism, tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.

But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to the living drama.

I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter days of the poet not only preserved some of his early graces, but brought out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all his pieces is The Falcon. The action takes place in some vague region in an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure. Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and, ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the sacrifice to which hospitality and her love impelled him, and Monna Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his arms.

When The Falcon was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James’s Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it a mise en scène that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge Robertson’s performance think of it as one thinks of some painter’s masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.

They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in The Falcon, it is apparently Federigo’s sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order, that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird. Even more deceptive than the déjeuner offered to Monna Giovanna, the menu presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of delicate hors d’œeuvres, and there was not enough in them for healthy appetites.

The Promise of May had a worse fate than The Falcon. It failed outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in patience and in intelligence. Harold’s theories are answered in the play. When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded. Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. “And yet I had once a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever.”

In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer’s daughter looks upon it sadly. “Next year,” she says, “it will bear no fruit,” – a moving piece of symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.