The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly lacking before the Bancrofts’ time was unison. To-day the ensembles are far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for that perpetual va-et-vient in the theatrical world which is so injurious to the homogeneity of the various companies.

The art of mise-en-scène did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving’s formula, with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum. No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless night, threw open his window, and we saw the fields lying under their covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as andante to the loftiest feelings.

It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter of mise-en-scène as they might wish. But may this not be that for one reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, amateur de théâtre and to an even greater degree amateur de femmes: you will find that each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as the actor-manager’s.

Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann, the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction The First Step: this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don’t return at night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.

But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases; and thus it will drag out its existence yet a little while. When, finally, the time will come to give it its coup-de-grâce, it will be found to have already ceased to breathe.

Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of the national mind, one of the reasons of England’s existence? They are the natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. When they leave it free, their end or its end will be near at hand, and England’s end will be in sight.

We live, not because we choose but because we must. It is thus with the English drama as with everything else. The law that put the dramatic work of foreigners upon the same footing in regard to copyright as their own has made translation and adaptation almost impossible, by reason of the double expense involved. Thenceforward it was necessary for the English dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It was thus the English drama came to life.

The vote of Congress, which in 1890 secured copyright in America for English authors, put an end to the old system of keeping plays in manuscript. Once publication was no longer attended by risk, how could they hold aloof from this new form of success? Accordingly they began to print. But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the times. These causes, which I have pointed out and discussed, were: —

1. The timidity resulting from excessive severity of manners.

2. The dramatist’s lack of opportunity for the study of social life.

3. The Shakespeare cult, which paralysed the imagination by offering it a model that was too big for it, and forms that had become antiquated.

These causes have disappeared one after the other. The moral ideal has become enlarged and has given over a wider field to the dramatist. The dramatist himself has learned to know life outside the green-room and the tavern back-parlour. He has studied from nature instead of copying Goldsmith and Sheridan. Shakespeare has never been less imitated, perhaps because he has never been better acted or better understood.

But what prevented the drama from being “English”? It is we French who have prevented it – it is from our drama that the English playwrights have drawn for so long, at first with an indiscriminate eagerness for which there is no parallel, later more modestly and with discernment. At the risk of offending my compatriots, I must here express my absolute conviction that, except in regard to acting, this French influence has been harmful to the English stage. Our dramatists have enriched some London managers; but they have lain for thirty years on top of the English dramatists, and have stifled their originality – and without deriving much profit from this involuntary tyranny. If only they could have taught their pupils the secrets of their trade! But the English were maladroit disciples of Scribe and Sardou, whilst the philosophy of Dumas and Augier remained to them a closed book.

The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to time, – now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally, will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama, freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. It is capable of doing so unaided, but I think Ibsen’s plays will help it. In this reference to Ibsen my readers may think they see a contradiction in my reasoning. “What!” they will cry. “In order to bring back the English drama to itself again, you say it must be freed from foreign influence, and yet you send it to school to Norway!”

But I have answered this objection by anticipation. I have shown that Ibsen is not a foreigner to England. He seems to have written for Englishmen; he has given them the kind of drama, more or less, that Shakespeare, were he living now, would have given them. I write this sentence, confident that if I am in the world, or, not being in the world, am still read, a score of years hence, no one will be inclined to call me to account for it. To the Northern races, at all events, Ibsen means not a fashion but an era.

What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create, – with or without Ibsen’s assistance, – is a new form in which to reproduce that dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. For my part, I have sometimes endeavoured to trace this dualism to the marriage, tempestuous but fruitful, of Saxon and Celt, to the effort, ever vain but never ceasing, of these two refractory elements to fuse and unite. The drama of the sixteenth century came, in a moving and memorable hour, from one of those unions between the young and strong in which there enters something of violence and even of madness. The existing drama is the issue of parents well on in years in a time of gloom and trouble. It is delicate and calls for care. At the same time, it bears resemblances to those who gave it life. A race of heroes who are also buccaneers, a race of poets and shopkeepers, a race fearless of death and devoted to money, calculating but passionate, dreamers yet men of action, capable of the charges of Balaclava and the deal in the Suez shares, cannot possibly find its literary expression either in pure idealism or in realism undiluted. The “bleeding slice of life” awakes in it no appetite; “Art for Art’s sake” leaves it wonderfully indifferent; of moralising, it is tired for the time being: it is passing through a stage of sensuous torpor which is not without charm, and it waits open-eyed and, as it were, hesitatingly before the labour of creating society afresh, of building up a new civilisation. It does not wish, and is not able, to forget those problems – that terrible To-morrow – by which we are everywhere threatened. Hence its sensuousness is tempered, refined, saddened by philosophy. And in this mood, what it asks of the drama is not to be amused, or to be excited, but to be made to think.

1

Berlioz did so literally, and married her.

2

William Archer, Life of Macready.

3

“Write me a drama,” said Macready to young Browning, “and save me having to go off to America.” The drama was written, but attained only a fourth performance, and did not save the actor from his impending expedition.

4

As a matter of fact, Bulwer had not even the merit of inventing this arrangement for himself. His play was founded on the novel by X. – B. Saintine.

5

Charles Mathews played at the Variétés, in French, in L’anglais timide, an adaptation of Cool as a Cucumber, by Blanchard Jerrold.

6

10 George II. cap. 19.

7

In Thirty Years at the Play, Clement Scott gives an account of the first night of The Oonagh, which has come down to us as a tradition. At two o’clock in the morning the play was still in progress. The house was empty save for a few critics slumbering in their stalls. The actors were on the stage all in a line facing the public, as was then the custom, and there was no sign of the ending, when suddenly the machinists pulled back the carpet on which the chief characters were standing. They collapsed simply! – with the piece, which was never brought to its real conclusion.

8

T. W. Robertson in The Illustrated Times.

9

Founded on the famous French play Paillasse.

10

To the fourth line he added a footnote to the effect that the name was not Johnson really.

11

Henry Morley, Journal of a Playgoer.

12

These lines appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, on September 15, 1895. Less than three months later the Kendals produced, for the first time in the provinces, a new drama by Mr. Grundy, The Greatest of These. This play, which was performed later in London, is a work of real value. In it Mr. Grundy has forgotten his French models, and has painted English life and English characters with a freedom, a fidelity, a power, worthy of that Ibsen to whom he will not have it that he owes anything. He has put aside his wit in order to be more moving. There is not a weak spot or a trace of bad taste in the whole piece. The scene which takes up most of the third act is equally beautiful, whether regarded from a psychological, a literary, or a purely dramatic standpoint.

13

His début was in 1874, when he was nineteen. He has given an account of some of his Edinburgh experiences about this time in a pleasant Preface to Mr. William Archer’s Theatrical World in 1895.

14

When this episode was reached on the night of the first performance of The Master Builder, a critic turned to Mr. Archer and said, “Will you explain that symbol to us?” “I am not sure,” Mr. Archer replied quietly, “that it is a symbol.” Upon which, a lady sitting near them interposed: “Excuse my breaking in upon your conversation,” she said, “but you may be interested to know that many women are like Mrs. Solness in this. I myself have all the dolls of my childhood safely preserved at home, and I look after them tenderly.” It is well known, too, that the Queen’s collection of her dolls is preserved at Windsor Castle.

15

I should have wished to determine the influence exerted by the contemporary German drama upon the dramatic movement in England, but I can find no trace of any such influence at all. Only a single work of Sudermann’s has so far been translated, and this came from America. An attempt was made in 1895 to found a permanent Deutsches Theater in London, and works by Freytag, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Otto Hartleber, Max Halbe, and Blumenthal were produced there. I do not know whether the attempt, made under modest, and indeed almost mean, conditions, will be renewed. The critics attended the performance, but the general public paid but little attention to them.