The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

Our actors had at this time a permanent home in London, kept for them by Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, at the St. James’s Theatre. Thence they made incursions upon all the others. Some years previously Madame Arnould Plessy, having taken into her head to act in the tongue of Shakespeare, Théophile Gautier had complimented her on the grace with which she had succeeded in “extracting English from her mouth.” Others now attempted to emulate her accomplishment and to turn it to account. Fechter resolved not merely to play Hamlet, but to play as it had never been played before, and he did so to rounds of applause for seventy nights. An ingénue, escaped from the Comédie Française, made a similar effort in the rôle of Juliet, and despite her bad accent, and intolerable pretension, she was able to keep it up, thanks to powerful supporters, in the teeth of the quite excusable hostility of the pit. Things did not always pass off so harmlessly, and in more than one instance the brutal anger of the public, as under Charles I., drove intruders from the stage, which it wished to see occupied by native actors alone.

As a matter of fact, there were some notable English actors and actresses at this time. Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin) preserved the pure diction of John and Charles Kemble. Charles Kean, despite his inadequate physique, won for himself gradually an honourable place on the stage over which his father had held sway. Ryder had a presence, and a sonorous voice, deep and hollow and tragic, like that of Beauvallet or of Maubant. Keeley was a massive man, who could act with subtlety; his wife, incisive, keen, amère, had a leaning towards the serious drama – towards the realistic even. Robson, a queer and wonderful little figure, made a mark in le drame noir and in outrageous caricature. Farren had made his début in old men’s parts at eighteen, and played them for fifty years without advancing in his art a step, without introducing a shade of emotion or a touch of humanity into his effects. Charles Mathews impersonated impudent youth, just as Farren impersonated unpleasant and ridiculous old age. Elegant, lissome, light, mobile, Mathews skipped and fluttered and chirruped like a bird. In his old age he reminded me of Ravel, his contemporary, whose method and rôles offered some analogy with his.5 Buckstone made the Haymarket prosper for twenty years, where I saw him, secure in the favour of the public, with his colleague, Compton, whose speciality was a certain dryness of humour. Buckstone at this time had lost both his hearing and his memory. But what a sly look there was in his eye! How his mouth would twist and turn! What irony lurked in the expressive ugliness of that wrinkled old mask of his!

These good actors injured rather than served their art. They revelled in, and limited themselves to, their own speciality, exaggerated their idiosyncrasies day by day, and left them as a legacy to their imitators. The authors were too insignificant, did they see the danger, to oppose their will to that of Charles Mathews and Farren. They took their measures to order and tried to satisfy their patrons. Thus became gradually narrowed at once the field for invention and for observation. As substitutes for the infinity of living human types and characters, seven or eight emplois, as one may say, came into existence —emplois often further specified and characterised by the name of an actor. There was the low comedian and the light comedian, the villain and the heavy man. All diversities of womenkind were grouped into one of these four ticketed sections: the ingénue, the flirt, the chaperon, and the wicked woman. The valet of Comedy had become a rascally steward whose rogueries took on a certain aspect of Drama. There were two or three types of old men. There was the surly old curmudgeon in whom the author vents his spleen, and who draws up eccentric wills. There is the old beau, cowardly and cynical, who in the last act marries his fiancée to his own son and swears to reform. And there is the old peasant who is descended in a straight line from the father of Pamela, always talking of his white hairs and his contempt for gold, and always greeting the traveller, who has been overtaken by a storm and has lost his way, with “Be welcome to my humble roof.” The peasant, one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was the captain, the “man about town,” addicted to drink, with a diamond pin resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. Did he know Society at his finger-ends, the man would never think of painting it. He never paints from nature. He copies for the thousandth time from the old models, Sheridan and Goldsmith, or his new masters, Scribe and d’Ennery.

It was for the critics, one is inclined to say, to instruct the public, the actors, and the author. I am almost ashamed to tell of the pass to which dramatic criticism had come. A paragraph in an obscure corner, a quarter of a column on the more important works, – that was about all the space the great newspapers accorded to the theatre. Dramatic criticism was a nocturnal calling that enjoyed a not too good repute, and was frowned on by respectable people and fathers of families. It was entrusted to tyros, who hoped by their good conduct to earn their advancement presently to the reporting staff in the police courts. The one writer undertook both drama and opera. Dramatic criticism and musical criticism, owing to the natural gifts which they require, are two absolutely different callings. What mattered it, however, to the writer, who was expected only to praise the pieces and the performers, without being too much of a bore?

John Oxenford, the critic of the Times, was sent for one morning to the office of the editor. In analysing a new piece he had criticised freely the performance of a certain actor, and the latter had addressed a letter of remonstrance to Mr. Delane. “These things,” said the editor majestically to the writer, – “these things don’t interest the general public, and I don’t want the Times to become an arena for the discussion of the merits of Mr. This and Mr. That. So look here, my dear fellow, understand this well, and write me accounts of plays henceforth that won’t bring me any more such letters. Do you see?” “I see,” said Oxenford. And thus it was, continues the teller of the story, that English literature lost pages which might have recalled the subtlety of Hazlitt in conjunction with the winning humour of Charles Lamb. Henceforth Oxenford, a scholar who had translated the “Hellas” of Jacobi and the “Conversations” of Goethe with Eckermann, passed for a blighted and discouraged genius; though of this he gave no stronger proofs than an English version of the operetta, Bon soir, Monsieur Pantalon, a farce which I saw fall quite flat, and some articles on Molière. But you should have heard him in a bar-parlour with his pipe between his teeth, a bottle of port on the table, and facing him some interlocutor who was not Mr. Delane!

While the press critic neglected his duty, or was prevented from fulfilling it, the official censorship added one more to the troubles and obstacles which already hampered the progress of the stage. I may perhaps make some reference in this place to the origin of the Censorship, and to its scope and powers.

Some writers will have it that this institution, as it now exists, is but a survival of the office of Master of the Revels, which flourished under the Tudors and the first Stuarts. As a matter of fact, the censorship owes its existence to a law passed in the reign of George II.6 It was instituted nominally for the protection of good behaviour, decency, and public order; in reality, to protect Walpole from the stings of Aristophanic comedy and to silence Fielding. A century and a half have elapsed since the fall of Walpole, and the censorship still exists, like that sentinel who was stationed in an alley of Trarskoé Sélo to guard a rose, and who was still being relieved every two hours twenty-five years later. The law of 1843, which was by way of according liberty to the theatre, did not free it from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, whose powers were delimited, so to say, geographically, in the most curious manner, for it is impossible to understand why certain quarters of the Metropolis were placed outside the reach of his authority and submitted to the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace.

To all intents and purposes the powers of the Chamberlain are exercised by a gentleman who is styled the Examiner of Plays. Plays have to be submitted to him seven days before their production, and when he returns them with his signature he receives from the submitters of them fees of from £1 to £2, according to the number of acts. The author may not enter his presence. The manager alone has the privilege of contemplating his features, and of giving, or getting from him, verbal explanations. And even those communications are under the seal of secrecy. Above the examiner stands a kind of head of department, and above him the Chamberlain himself. When you have exhausted these three jurisdictions you can go no higher. Above the Lord Chamberlain, as above the Czar of All the Russias, there remains only Divine Justice, and to Divine Justice authors of vaudevilles and musical comedies cannot very well appeal. The censorship indeed is an absurd anomaly, the sole irresponsible and secret authority which remains in English legislation.

If you seek to discover how it has acted during this century, you will find that according as the censor was indolent or zealous his office has been a nullity or a nuisance. In theatrical circles that censor will not soon be forgotten who suppressed the word “thigh” as dangerous to public morals, and who exorcised from a play by Douglas Jerrold, as disrespectful to religion, the following phrase: – “He plays the violin like an angel!” The same censor found these words in a tragedy: – “I do homage to pride, debauchery, avarice!.. Never!” He hastened to delete this, admitting thus by implication that English society, which it was his mission to protect, was compact of these three heinous characteristics.

It was forbidden to make fun of Holloway’s ointment, for Mr. Holloway was “an estimable manufacturer who employs thousands of workmen.” It was forbidden to put a comic bishop on the stage – unless it were a colonial bishop, in which case the censor would give his sanction. A play founded on Oliver Twist was forbidden because it was calculated to incite to crime, but it was allowed for a benefit performance; whence it would appear that it is allowable to incite the audience to crime on such special occasions. This poor censorship, which has to read everything, which has to supervise everything, – from the rages of Othello to the grimaces of the clown and the tights of the ballet girls, – which has to uphold at once the constitution and propriety, to defend at once the Divinity and Mr. Holloway, loses its head over it all at last, and reminds one of the bourgeois broken loose who is being launched at carnival time into some dizzying Saraband.

Its most absorbing task is that of barring the way against French immorality. Its vigilance is eluded, however, by a kind of conventional terminology. Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word “cocotte” in black and white, they replace it by the word “actress.” Where we have unblushingly written “adultery,” they have inserted “flirtation.” The censor gives his sanction and pockets his fees, and on the performance of the piece the by-play of the actor and actresses completes the translation, re-establishing if not reinforcing the original sense.

In the midst of all these difficulties the growth of the theatre-going public had made necessary long series of performances, long runs as we call them now, unknown up till then and inaugurated by the new theatres. There were a dozen in 1847, twenty in 1860. The calling of dramatic author began to grow lucrative and to tempt many writers. It was an easy calling, too, as the public was young and ignorant, ready to accept anything, and as, in addition, the French drama offered an almost inexhaustible amount of raw material. They had recourse to it unceasingly, just as Robinson Crusoe after his shipwreck used to return to his ship in order to look for some tool! I shall not give a long list of names because, unless accompanied by a short personal sketch and a few words of criticism, these names, obscure or even unknown, would mean nothing to French readers, and would be almost as wearisome as the long lists of warriors in the epics of olden times. Amongst the more notable, I may mention Tom Taylor and Dion Boucicault. Tom Taylor belonged to both the world of law and the world of letters. Briefs gave him his dinner, the drama gave him his supper; his supper got to be the more substantial of the two. From 1850 to 1875 he seems to have achieved ubiquity. His name was on every poster. He was facile, had a certain method in his work, a certain skill in putting his plays together, a certain discretion which passed for taste – in fine, all the qualities that go to form a painstaking and prolific mediocrity. He would probably have wished to be judged on the merits of the historical dramas which absorbed his whole activity during the concluding years of his life, and in which he thought he was achieving “literature.” But are they really historical dramas? They contain at once too much history and too little. The historical document is all-pervasive, enters into every scene, interrupts the action; but anything like historical psychology, any attempt to get at the real character of the personages presented, is wholly unattempted. It was characteristic of him that, when desiring to depict Queen Elizabeth, he relied upon some romantic stories by a German lady instead of going to the work of Froude (far more dramatic than his own drama), where he could have learned all he required to know.

Dion Boucicault, the other writer whom I have singled out as representative of the lot, had more character and was more interesting. He was an actor, and an actor of some talent. He knew no other world than that of the theatre – the world which from eight o’clock till midnight laughs and cries, curses and makes love, dies and murders, under the gaslight, behind three sets of painted canvas. Without any real culture, and without having the least critical faculty, Boucicault had read everything about the theatre – read everything and remembered everything, good, bad, and indifferent, from Phormio to the Auberge des Adrets. He knew by heart all the croix de ma mère of modern melodrama, and from his mass of reminiscences he concocted his crazy-quilt-like plays, imitating involuntarily, unconsciously. He was plagiarism incarnate. In his first great success, London Assurance, you may find not only Goldsmith and Sheridan, but Terence and Plautus, who had reached him by way of Molière. You will meet in it a father who speaks to his son without recognising him, or who at least is persuaded not to recognise him; a young lady who boxes her husband’s ears and calls him her doll; a master who makes a confidant of his valet, a valet as untruthful as Dave or Scapin; a lawyer who is anxious to get himself thrashed like L’Intimé; a young drunkard and debauchee who falls in love with a country lass; and a young girl brought up in the wilds, who replies to the first compliment she has paid her – “It strikes me, sir, that you are a stray bee from the hive of fashion. If so, reserve your honey for its proper cell. A truce to compliments.” The piece goes from vulgarity to vulgarity, from absurdity to absurdity. Within a few minutes there is a ridiculous abduction, a comic duel and a hardly less comic marriage, all brought about by a will which is surely the most absurd of all the absurd wills known to the drama. The piece had its central figure in a clever humbug whom no one knows. “Will you allow me to ask you,” says Charles Courtly in the last scene, “an impertinent question?”

“With the greatest pleasure.”

“Who the devil are you?”

“On my faith, I don’t know. But I must be a gentleman.” Upon which another character concludes the play with a pedantic definition of the word “gentleman,” and morality is satisfied.

One fine day – it was in 1860 – this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to create a genre of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the success which greeted Peep o’ Day, and he wound up with the memorable failure of The Oonagh.7 Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in the Colleen Bawn.

The Colleen Bawn is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant girl to become worthy of the man she loves, – her discouragement, which yet cannot exhaust her devotion, – all this is depicted by touches so suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half seductive – smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.

Until Boucicault’s time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland, never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard, England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe. Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and although he added many touches in the Shaugraun, in Arrah-na-pogue, in The Octoroon, in Michael O’Dowd, and in other works, it may be said to be already complete in The Colleen Bawn. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells us, “I was full of sudden death that minute,” and when Eily speaks of the little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of the Irish priest of old, and indeed of our own day too – at once the man of the people and the man of God.

Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but striking piece – this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins. Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.

CHAPTER III

The Vogue of Burlesque – Burnand’s Ixion– H. J. Byron – The Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage – Marie Wilton’s début– A Letter from Dickens – Founding of the “Prince of Wales’s” – Tom Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author – His Journalistic Career – London Bohemia in 1865 – Sothern.

The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however, nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic genre became quickly acclimatised by success.

I shall take Burnand’s Ixion as a type, for by reason of its never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind. It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion’s palace. Jupiter appears in answer to his invocation. “Are you insured?” he inquires. “Yes,” replies Ixion, “with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it.” Jupiter invites him to come to Olympus. “We lunch at half-past one. Don’t forget.” Mercury, charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aërial omnibus. “Come on for Olympus! Room for one outside!” We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to tell “the Master” that “coffee is served.” Neptune talks nautical lingo like the hero of Black-eyed Susan, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends. The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate, whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for “La France” by performing the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life – he never shows himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.

Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day – to the victory of the horse “Gladiator,” to Lady Audley’s Secret (then all the rage), to vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in Trafalgar Square, to Mudie’s Circulating Library, – and a thousand other things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be intelligible.

To read Ixion, as I read it thirty-five years after its first production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making one’s way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had become enigmas, and through all the débris of these used-up fireworks, was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of things in general, the pervading odour of the poudre de riz, the flonflons of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A débutante destined to a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon. Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman) the Goddess of Wisdom.