The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen’s methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America. Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the public. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is an exception. It is a compromise between the dramatic system of Francillon and that of Hedda Gabler– the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen’s realism. They draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness’s nine dolls produced some tittering in the stalls.14 In Little Eyolf, if Alfred Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were, at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare. Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world in which we live without ever seeing it, – of what is in it, and beside it, and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing. It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange): In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.

If Ibsen’s art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine, Ibsen’s message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to this race more than to any other.

With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious episode in The Dolls’ House, and which pervades Ghosts, and Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea; does it not find a fit and well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Rörland and Pastor Manders these things find expression, – in the former violent, impetuous, fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is well aware that she has both her Rörlands and her Manders. When, too, she is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments, but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial bavard, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote, this Pangloss who would go to the martyr’s stake, but prefers to stop on the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines them and criticises them. “Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a decent stone in the lot!” He has returned from a public meeting with his trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure: “When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be careful not to wear your best pair of breeches.” If these traits are not English, I don’t know what the English character is.

Were I to pass Ibsen’s types in review one by one, I should find it easy to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand, the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Lövborg, that noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest endeavour; – these would require no modification or commentary upon the London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of The Dolls’ House, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah’s cry is indefinitely prolonged.

It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: “In democracy will be found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be devoted.” I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.

Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in Ibsen’s dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That joie de vivre, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which in Regina (in Ghosts) takes the form of a cold and marble-like indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the naïvely animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in Little Eyolf), who puts her husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which had gone from his heart – to secure the marital attentions which are her due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of the Sound.

I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed, whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of The Master Builder. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration, his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen’s ideas; but he must have reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which conceived Hedda Gabler is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.

As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both the artist and thinker in Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which he made of A Dolls’ House, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play. For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold, – symbols of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in it, – the authors of Breaking a Butterfly substituted a general reconciliation. They justified the optimistic dénouement by making the husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic, the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not turn out well, at least everything is true in this most disunited of ménages.

Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian’s heroines. It may be said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has passed through all his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author of Hedda Gabler and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch; despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen’s, in which for the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.

It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Björnson its Spring. This Björnson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under, and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself. The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm than good. This connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long before Ibsen’s name had been even mentioned in London, his Arne and Synnové Solbakken had been read there, two sketches of peasant life which will bear comparison with La Mare au Diable and La Petite Fadette; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his illustrious rival.

When Ibsen attacks that class of puritans and hypocrites who turn away their faces when they pass the entrance to a theatre, there is no hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to follow him, for it feels that a portion of its clientèle, and that the best, – that which has always been constant in its support, – will be startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege and tradition, against change and progress. It is on the side of those who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think; when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted, and gets even to like it. It is one of the amusements of the decadent. Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen’s adversaries, fascinated by his genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife’s in Little Eyolf, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his flute.15

CHAPTER XIII

G. R. Sims – R. C. Carton – Haddon Chambers – The Independent Theatre and Matinée Performances – The Drama of To-morrow – A “Report of Progress” – The Public and the Actors – Actor-Managers – The Forces that have given Birth to the Contemporary English Drama – Disappearance of the Obstacles to its becoming Modern and National – Conclusion.

I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held back; have analysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon, and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of to-morrow.

There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the art? There are many of their kind whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away with, and whom we shall never get back.

I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte says in Molière’s Misanthrope– “Belle Philis, on désespère alors qu’on espère toujours.” The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour, together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a Cockney, and nothing that belongs to Cockneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period in which you can really smell the East End, as the maître of Medan would say, is The Lights o’ London, and that perhaps is why all the London managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, “with thanks.” The Lights o’ London got produced in the end, however, and had an immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.

Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will write the Judahs, The Second Mrs. Tanquerays of to-morrow? Will it be Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it be Mr. Carton, author of Liberty Hall (one of the successes of 1893) and of The Squire of Dames, an adaptation, or rather an abridged translation, of L’Ami des femmes, which has been attracting the public to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.

Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of his works, The Fatal Card, having crossed the channel? Since then he has written a piece entitled John-a-Dreams, played at the Haymarket in 1894, in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn. Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold’s father, a country clergyman.

“You do not know me, sir,” she says to him (I quote from memory), “but I know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of – . I was with Mrs. Withers then.”

“Oh, indeed, – an excellent person,” he replies; “but it is strange that I did not make your acquaintance.”

“No, it is not strange, really, – do you remember the kind of work she was engaged upon?”

“The redemption of unfortunates, was it not.”

“Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless – you helped her?”

“No,” Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. “No, it was she who helped me.” She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. “They came to my help,” she goes on, “but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later on.”

Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she had made herself an honest woman.

“Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?”

“Certainly, my child,” the old man answers.

“You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your own rank, … were a friend of yours, … were your son?”

Harold’s father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself, seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future; she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr. Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds, too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage, those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love the impossible.

After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain for them only those matinées in the regular theatres which lend their stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the strangest of publics. The house is full of friends – if it be not empty altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they have come across little up to the present except the gaucherie which feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting wonder.

Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages, are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of education; it has “settled,” so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually been formed by a process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.

In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr. Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to the best of our sociétaires of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of Liberty Hall; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his whimsical originality upon all his rôles; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is, on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from being complete.