The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

“Have you ever seen me in this before?” inquired the great actor of his humble colleague.

“No, sir.”

“Well, we must rehearse it then, otherwise you would be too much startled this evening.”

They went through it, and yet Wilton tells us that when the evening came, Kean terrified him so by the indescribable violence of his performance that he was within an ace of losing his head and fleeing from the stage as one might flee from the cage of a wild beast.

It may be supposed from all this that Kean was in the habit of abandoning himself entirely to the inspiration of the moment. Now, inspiration upon the stage is almost a meaningless expression. In the very moments when the terrifying actor was crossing the stage like a madman, he was counting his steps. As for Macready, immediately before the great scene of Shylock he would work himself up into excitement, emitting every imaginable oath, and brandishing a heavy ladder until he panted actually for breath. Then he would rush down the stage, pallid, breathless, the sweat coursing down his face, the very picture of a man bursting with rage. The audience would have laughed rather than have shuddered had they seen the ladder!

Macready’s voice was so rich and so beautiful that it delighted even those who could not follow the meaning of the words which it gave forth. But he was too intelligent an actor to make use of it as a mere instrument of music. Until his time verses were chanted on the stage. He himself was content to declaim them. English dramatic verse consists of a succession of five iambics, which, by the alternation of short feet and long, results in a regular and cadenced rhythm. From time to time an imperfection, the deliberate introduction for instance of a trochee, or perhaps a redundant syllable added at the end of the verse, has the effect of breaking this monotony, but it recommences at once, and the mind relapses under its sway, just as a child is sent to sleep again by a lullaby. My foreign ear was long in taking to it, but at last I began to derive from its melody the same delight that the music of Greek and Latin verse had given me long before. This verse, so interesting and curious in its structure, seems to bear a certain secret affinity with the genius of the English race; the rhythm would seem to have been suggested by the clattering of a horse’s hoofs, or by the murmuring of waves.

It is, then, no easy matter to deal with it. Macready approached it reverentially, as was but fitting in a scholar and a devotee of Shakespeare. He wished to leave to it all its melody, its poetic beauty, but he wished at the same time to emphasise the most important words and to bring out the full force of their meaning. He wished to blend the pure classicism of John Kemble with the passion of Kean, and to add that tendency to realism which marked his own temperament, and which sometimes carried him too far; when as Macbeth he came back from Duncan’s room, he looked, according to Lewes, like an Old Bailey ruffian.

It is enough for me to have shown that Macready, like many others in different parts of Europe in 1825, was prepared for a drama that should be in closer touch with life. In France, Romanticism came to turn aside and check the movement. In England, there came absolutely nothing.

But the bankruptcy of the new school was still far off, and the literary atmosphere was charged with warlike sounds at the time when Macready made his appearance in France, with an English company, in the course of the year 1827. He was received as a missionary. He had come to preach Shakespeare to a tribe of poor “ignoramuses,” whom their fathers had taught to worship the idols of Lemierre and Luce de Lancival, but who were now anxious to be converted. The young “leading lady” was a Miss Smithson, whose Irish accent clashed somewhat with the verse of Shakespeare. The Parisians thought she had talent, and lost their hearts to “la belle Smidson.”1 In London she was a joke. It is certain, however, that these performances revealed to him who was to be the only true dramatist of the romantic school – to Alexandre Dumas – the secret of a new art; that they made an epoch, therefore, in our literary history, and that they affixed the seal to the reputation of the English tragedian.

Over and above the privileged theatres, there were a number of others, such as the Haymarket and the Adelphi, at which farces and melodramas were chiefly given. In the provinces there prevailed a curious system, without any analogue, so far as I know, in France, that of going on circuit, – a term borrowed, like the system itself, from the language and customs of the law. Just as the English judges make the round at certain dates of all the important towns within a certain district, holding assizes at each, and accompanied by an army of barristers, solicitors, and legal officials of all kinds, so the travelling companies of actors would cater for a whole county, or group of counties, giving a series of performances in the theatre of every town at certain fixed dates, in addition to fête-days and market-days. Communication was slow and costly in those days, and trips to London infinitely rarer than they are now. The country folk had to look to their travelling company to keep them in touch with the successes of the moment.

On arriving in a new town, the manager’s wife would go about soliciting respectfully the patronage of the ladies of the place. The manager busied himself over everything, played minor rôles, presided over the box-office, undertook the scene painting, and would even take off his coat and turn up his sleeves and lend a hand to the machinist. His life, and the life of all his company, was half bourgeois, half Bohemian; always en route, but always on the same beat, always coming upon familiar and friendly faces, – a beat on which his father and grandfather before him had followed the same career. He had friends living in every city, dead friends in every churchyard. Children were born to him on his travels, and when four or five years old made their appearance upon the stage. These comings and goings, the journeyings over green fields, the stoppages and ample breakfastings at little hillside inns, while the horses browsed at large along the hedges, – the freshness and peaceful rusticity of all these things, alternating with the tinsel of the theatre and the applause of the audiences, with the artificiality and feverishness of theatrical life, – must have been a constant entertainment to the little actors and actresses of eight or nine. For the adults, however, the life was a hard one, and only too often their roman comique was a roman tragique in reality.

The public of these small towns wanted, on their part, to know something of what went on behind the scenes. Sides were taken on the subject of the actor’s life, and hot discussions were called forth. Idle pens took to writing pamphlets for or against individual actors, and these had to defend themselves as best they might against their malignant inquisitors, using their booths as pulpits for the purpose. Here, for instance, is an incident that occurred one evening in a Northern town after the curtain had been raised for Antony and Cleopatra. The jeune premier comes forward to the footlights, and takes the hand of one of the leading actresses with the stiff, staid courtliness of former days, and the following dialogue is exchanged between them: —

“Have I ever been guilty of any injustice of any kind to you since you have been in the theatre?”

“No, sir” (she replies).

“Have I ever behaved to you in an ungentlemanlike manner?”

“No, sir.”

“Have I ever kicked you?”

“Oh, no! sir!”

The audience applauds. Antony and Cleopatra assume their correct attitudes and (this prologue to Shakespeare successfully performed) proceed with their rôles.2

From time to time a great artist came forth, after three or four generations of mediocrities, from one of these theatrical nurseries. The others remained tied to their stake, revolving ceaselessly within the orbit of their chain. For them there was no question of glory or fortune. They lived simply and happily, if only they came to the end of the year without having gone to prison, and if only at the end of their life they saw their children growing up and getting educated. Their courage they derived in part from the bottle, in part from religion. A correspondence which has come to light through an unforeseen chance (a grandson who had become famous) revivifies for us the actor-manager on circuit. He is a good fellow, but a trifle sententious. He quotes from the works of his authors, tragic and comic (he has them at his finger-ends) axioms upon all the incidents and experiences of life. He quotes them just as Nehemiah Wallington or Colonel Hutchinson used to quote the Bible. He is as easily excited and as easily calmed as a child. A storm troubles him as a bad omen. A rainbow smiles on him as a promise. Providence may be trusted, he believes, to look after the takings of poor players. He is the Vicar of Wakefield become père noble.

Neither in this monotonous and easy-going phase of life, nor in the theatrical world of London, had anyone any idea of modifying the forms or the tendencies of the stage. Those whose duty it should have been to give the necessary impulse did not seem even to suspect that there was any such work for them to perform. The critics of the time, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, have achieved a permanent place in literature. And yet when one reads them one is disappointed. Except for a few pages of Lamb, one may look to them in vain for the expression of anything like a general idea. They are taken up almost altogether in discussing and comparing the different actors. It does not occur to them to attempt an appreciation or a classification of the plays, for these plays had already been definitively classified and pronounced upon. There was no drama, they seemed to think, except that of Shakespeare and his satellites; and as for comedy, it had said its last word when Goldsmith and Sheridan died. And they were quite content that this should be so. They saw no reason why they, their successors, and the general public, should not continue until the end of time to carp over an entry of Macbeth or an exit of Othello! – or why they should not sit out revivals without end of The School for Scandal or She Stoops to Conquer. There are eras which will have novelties at all cost, and eras which cling to antiquity.

Macready, with the instinct of a “realistic” and “modern” actor, kept on the lookout for authors. A former Irish schoolmaster, who also had been an actor, and whose name was Sheridan Knowles, brought him a tragedy entitled Virginius which he had written in three months. He made a good deal of this point, never having read, probably, the scene of the sonnet of Oronte. The piece was put into rehearsal and played at Covent Garden in the spring of 1820. Reynolds introduced the unknown author to the public in a carefully-written prologue. In it he ridiculed the drama of the period, which he described as “stories” —

“… piled with dark and cumbrous fate,And words that stagger under their own weight.”

He promised to return to Truth and Nature, the invariable programme of all attempts at reforming the drama. And as a matter of fact, Virginius might be accepted in a certain sense as a return to Truth and Nature. It belonged to what we were going to call in France, twenty-five years later, the School of Common Sense. Or if one prefers to look back instead of forward, one might say that in it the rules of Diderot and Sedaine’s Drame Bourgeois seem to have been transferred to Roman tragedy. The piece, like the plays of Shakespeare, was partly in verse and partly in prose, but the verse was little more, really, than metrical prose. The plot developed clearly and logically with a scrupulous observance of the probable and natural. The heroine (one smiles at having to describe her by so grand a name) is for all the world a little pensionnaire who might have got her ideas on rectitude from Miss Edgeworth. She occupies herself with her needle in working together her initials and those of the young man of her choice, who is no other than the tribune Icilius. It is this piece of embroidery which reveals her secret. “My father is incensed with you,” she says to Icilius, and, her lover becoming impassioned, she covers her face with her hands, saying (as is correct at such a juncture), “Leave me, leave me!” He does not obey, and the author, not knowing how else to prolong the scene, has recourse to high-sounding language… “Thou dost but beggar me, Icilius,” exclaims Virginia, “when thou makest thyself a bankrupt.” And Icilius replies, … “My sweet Virginia, we do but lose and lose, and win and win, playing for nothing but to lose and win. Then let us drop the game – and thus I stop it,” and he stops it by seizing her in his arms.

In the scene in which the client of Appius attempts to possess himself of her, Virginia remains absolutely mute. She is mute also in the great scene of the judgment, and she seems, moreover, to have understood nothing of what has been happening, for she asks her father if he is going to take her home. From the angels and furies of Shakespeare and Corneille we have come down to a virtuous idiot, and are told that this is a return to Nature.

Virginius is an excellent father, a liberal-minded member of the middle class, interesting himself in politics. He knows his rights and does not stand in awe of the ministers. He reminds one of the city man who returns home to his comfortable residence in Chiswick or Hampstead after his day’s work in his Leadenhall Street office. He is a widower, but his house is looked after by a very respectable elderly person, in whose excellent sentiments and weak intelligence we recognise a housekeeper of the superior type. The whole household is tranquil, well behaved, Christian, – I might even say, Puritan.

Doubtless the Romans of the republic were men like ourselves, but a true picture of their humanity should reveal characteristics different from ours. The author should either have sought out these characteristics, or else have restricted himself to that sphere of great passions and heroic madnesses in which all the centuries meet on common ground. One is obliged, however unwillingly, to admit the impossibility of retrospective realism.

When Virginius returns from the camp to defend his child, he gazes on her long, and tells her he had never seen her look so like her mother —

“… It was her soul, … her soul that played just thenAbout the features of her child, and lit themInto the likeness of her own. When firstShe placed thee in my arms – I recollect itAs a thing of yesterday! – she wished, she said,That it had been a man. I answered her,It was the mother of a race of men;And paid her for thee with a kiss.”…

There is something at once virile and moving in this passage, but how many such cases are to be found in this tragedy? The paternal emotion of Virginius prepares us but ill for the heroic crime which he is to commit. There is the same contrast between the antiquity of the events and the modernness of the characters.

But the ruin of the piece was the fifth act. Virginia dead, it remains only to punish Appius according to the good old laws of tragic justice. For that, a single moment and a single gesture had been enough. Sheridan Knowles was in the position of being obliged to write his fifth act and having nothing to put into it. He had recourse to a mad scene. Merimée has written that “il faut laisser aux débutants les foux et les chiens.” This doctrine has Homer and Shakespeare against it. On the other hand, the example of Sheridan Knowles proves that the recourse to madness will not always get the beginner out of his difficulty.

Virginius has succeeded in making his way into Appius’s prison —

“How if I thrust my hand into your breast,And tore your heart out, and confronted itWith your tongue. I’d like it. Shall we try it?”

When the old centurion plunged his hands into the robes of the decemvir, as though he expected to find Virginia in his pocket, and when Appius, horrified at finding himself “caged with a madman,” appealed for help with all the strength of his lungs whilst calling out to his assailant, “Keep down your hands! Help! Help!” – I cannot imagine how the spectators of 1820 can have refrained from laughter. The two men quitted the scene fighting, and turned up again in another room, – for the prison was a veritable suite of rooms. Having killed Appius, the old man grew calm, and Icilius had but to call him by his name to bring back to him his reason. He slipped a small urn into his hands. “What is this?” asks Virginius. “That is Virginia.” And the curtain fell.

Contemporary critics admitted that the last act was somewhat weak. It was curtailed, but delete it as one would, it was still too long. Had it been reduced to ten lines, these ten lines had been ten lines too much.

In spite of everything, however, Virginius, by Macready’s help, remained a masterpiece for twenty-five years! Knowles made haste to produce some more. He tells in one of his naïve prefaces, how he went to stop with his friend, Mr. Robert Dick, near an Irish lough known for its scenery and its fish, how he would spend the morning at his composition and the afternoon angling, and how his host would snatch his fishing line from his hands whenever he caught him using it before midday… If only Mr. Dick had let him fish in peace! The trout he might have hooked had been at least as valuable as his verse and prose.

If there was any sort of foreshadowing of a national drama in the years 1830 to 1840, it must be sought for in the works of Douglas Jerrold. France knows little of Jerrold, who knew France so well. His was a valiant little soul; his life was one long battle – a battle against obscurity, against ill luck, against the enemies of his country, against the oppressors of the poor, last but not least, against all those whom he disliked. He belonged to that theatrical world at which I have glanced. He was the son of a provincial manager who had met with failure. In his early youth, while yet a child, one may say, he served as midshipman in the wars against Napoleon. He became a journalist later, and threw himself into the midst of politics. Whatever may be said of his caustic and aggressive temperament, he belonged, every inch of him, to that noble generation which aspired so fervently after better things, which strove so strenuously for what was right, which believed it could help humanity forward on the way to a progress without bounds. For forty years he vibrated with generous passions, and grew calm only in the presence of death, which he met like a stoic but with a simplicity not all the stoics knew. I have been brought into intimate relations with his son, who has repeated to me his last words – “This is as it should be.” To fight for justice and to accept the inevitable without fear, – this was the life of a man.

The Rent Day was played on January 25, 1832, that is to say, at the commencement of the memorable year which was to see the passing of the Reform Bill. It is the day upon which the rents have become due. The tenants have brought their money. There is drinking and laughing and singing, the while the heaps of crowns are exchanged for receipts, – for nothing was accomplished in England in those days without drinking, and on rent day it had been almost a disgrace not to be at least “well on.” The middleman is presiding over the function. This morning he has received a letter from the young squire, thus expressed – “Master Crumbs, use all despatch, and send me, on receipt of this, five hundred pounds. Cards have tricked me and the devil cogged the dice. Get the money at all costs, and quickly. – Robert Grantley.” The middleman therefore must have no pity. There is one farmer who cannot pay; his brother the schoolmaster comes to plead for him. He himself is too poor to lend —

Toby (the schoolmaster): “My goods and chattels are a volume of Robinson Crusoe, ditto Pilgrim’s Progress, with Plutarch’s Morals, much like the morals of many other people – a good deal dog’s eared.”…

Crumbs: “Has your brother no one to speak for him?”

Toby: “Now, I think on’t, yes. There are two.”

Crumbs: “Where shall I find them?”

Toby: “In the churchyard. Go to the graves of the old men, and there are the words the dead will say to you: – ‘We lived sixty years in Holly Farm; in all that time we never begged an hour of the squire; we paid rent, tax, and tithe; we earned our bread with our own hands, and owed no man a penny when laid down here. Well, then, will you be hard on young Heywood; will ye press upon our child, our poor Martin, when murrain has come upon his cattle and blight fallen upon his corn?’ This is what they will say.”

The middleman is not one to be moved by the supplications of the schoolmaster. He replies monotonously, inexorably – “My accounts; I must settle my accounts!” Grouped round him, farther back, are the instruments of his lowly tyrant, the beadle (for whom a young writer now hidden from the public eye in the gallery of the House of Commons, Charles Dickens, has in store so terrible a cudgelling) and the appraiser. In those days it was the beadle’s function to execute evictions for the benefit of young squires who had lost at cards. The first act of The Rent Day concludes with a spectacle of this kind. We witness the seizing of the peasant’s bed and of all his furniture, down to a bird-cage and the children’s toys. The scene follows its course; entreaties, curses, threats, then silence and desolation. It was thus that the social question was submitted. Had we been there, and in our twentieth year, – you and I who have to contest against the grandsons of the victims, become in their turn slave-drivers, – we should have joined with the rest of the pit in cheering Jerrold.

The first act gives promise of a vigorous comedy of manners, but we sink gradually into a dense melodrama crowded with absurd incidents and extravagant surprises. Was this Jerrold’s fault, or that of a public which insisted upon monster jokes and monster crimes? I am inclined to adopt the latter explanation, for supply is regulated by demand; a mercantile axiom which resolves itself in a great natural and highly scientific law.

Jerrold could achieve a light and realistic touch at need, and he has given proof of it in A Prisoner of War. The scene is laid in France shortly after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Quite impartially, and with consummate wit, Jerrold holds up to ridicule the chauvinisme of the two nations. He does not confound bombast with valour. “Soldiers,” says one character, “should die and civilians lie for their country.” We are shown – and this has some historical value – the English prisoners living comfortably in a French town, frequenting the Café Imperial, regaling themselves on the bulletins of the “Grande Armée,” with no other obligation than that of answering the roll-call morning and evening. They have money, for the lodging-house keepers compete for their favour; and they pay little French boys to sing “Rule Britannia.” As it seems to me, if Garneray’s Memoirs are to be believed, our compatriots were hardly so well off on the English hulks.

But what strikes me most in A Prisoner of War is one really ingenious and moving scene. It is the evening. An old officer, a prisoner, has remained late over a game of cards with a comrade. Meantime his daughter Clary has a man in her bedroom. Don’t be alarmed – the man is her husband. A secret marriage is always introduced in English plays wherever a seduction is to be found in ours. Suddenly Clary is called out to, loudly, by her father. She imagines herself found out, and arrives quite pallid. What had she been doing? her father asks. How was it she had a light still in her window? So she had been reading, eh? Still reading – always reading. And what had she been reading? Novels! As though there weren’t enough real tears in the world – real, scalding, bitter tears from breaking hearts – but we must have a parcel of lying books to make people cry double! And what was this silly novel of hers? Clary doesn’t know what to answer, and begins telling her own story – the youth of no family and fortune, the moment of recklessness, the giving of her heart to him and then her hand. “Well, and how did it end?” asks the old officer. Clary had “not come to the end”! Ah, then (he resumes), she had turned down the page when he had interrupted her? But he could tell her how it ended. The young couple went upon their knees, and the father swore a little, then took out his pocket handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and forgave them.