The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

In such a manner was it that Robertson, who had wished that the world were a football which he could send into space with one kick, that the same Robertson, who, as he quitted those nocturnal symposia at Tom Hood’s, would bring down his stick upon the pavement with a noise that made the silent streets resound, as he held forth indignantly against society, – grew in time and unconsciously, though in a manner easy to under-stand, to be the interpreter of the feelings and ideas of this very same society. The former assailant now defended the social rank which he had attained against both the enemies above and the enemies below. The new strata which came into being in 1832 were now half-way through their evolution. In 1850 they had been content with melodramas, vulgar farces, and Hippodramas. In 1865 they asked already for wit, sentiment, satire, poetic feeling, all flavoured, it might be, with Cockneyism, but this demand was an indication of progress, and Robertson satisfied it by writing the middle-class comedy.

The change which took place just then in the life of the dramatist convinces me that I am right. He hastened to take leave of his irregular life, and to feel after bourgeois comforts. He worked out for himself a happiness which made him, like the poor vagabond in the fable, weep for very joy. The Eve of this new-opened Paradise was a fair German whom he had met at the house of the editor of the Daily Telegraph, whose niece she was. Robertson did not long enjoy the sweets of this happy land. His mental and physical powers seemed to die away together. Mrs. Bancroft, who accompanied him to the first night of The Nightingale, saw him, livid with rage, shake his fist at the hissing members of the audience, muttering, “I shall never forgive them for this!”

The doctors ordered him to Torquay, where, however, he grew worse. I have read a letter which he wrote thence to his young wife, – a pitiful letter, all in little jerky sentences, set in rhythm by the sick man’s pants for breath. Pitiful, yet gay, for he could not give up being facetious. On his return to London he experienced a literary misfortune of which it was the lot of little Tommy, then thirteen or fourteen years old, to bring the news. Father and son looked upon each other with tearful eyes, and grasped each other’s hands. “If they had seen me thus,” said the writer sadly, “they would have had pity.” Robertson was wrong. The public should know nothing of these things. There are no extenuating circumstances for literary mistakes.

He died some days later. He was only forty-four. A friend who attended the funeral remarked, lying in the death chamber, its limbs dangling and disjointed, a doll whose injured stomach gave out sawdust through a wide opening. It was a doll with which he used to amuse his little girl to the very end. As for the puppets with which he had so long amused the world, they were to have a longer life. His comedies were destined to be continually revived, applauded, and imitated. Out of the six thousand performances given by the Bancrofts in a period of twenty years which formed one long success, three thousand belonged to Robertson. He alone furnished half their repertoire, and that the better half. From the depths of the out-of-the-way district which it had brought into fashion, the Prince of Wales’s company sent colonies into the heart of the metropolis. It was by actors who had been brought out in it, as in a conservatoire, that the Vaudeville, the Globe, and the Court Theatres were founded. The inexhaustible success of The Two Roses– of which there will be question further on – placed the name of James Albery almost as high.

Byron, in his turn, took a leaf out of the book of his old comrade, and succeeded, in Our Boys, in producing a comedy without (or almost without) puns. Our Boys resembles Robertson’s comedies just as a cook resembles her mistress when she is decked out in her mistress’s hat and gown, or as Cathos and Madelon resemble the Marquise de Rambouillet and Julie d’Angennes. Even in this unintentionally caricature-like form the Robertsonian comedy continued to please, and it looked as though Our Boys would never leave the bills.

The exacting, the fastidious, those who had begun to dream of a purer and more penetrating art, dubbed Robertsonian comedy “Cup and Saucer” comedy. The school accepted the nickname, and gloried in it. For the tea-table, fifteen or twenty years ago, was still the centre of the home, the symbol of the family, the core of English life, such as it had been formed by the combination of the spirit of Puritanism with that of middle-class Utilitarianism.

The name of the Bancrofts remained associated with the “Cup and Saucer” comedy as long as the movement lasted. As soon as they became sensible of their favourite author’s decline in the eyes of the public they called Sardou to their assistance. By 1880 the Prince of Wales’s had become too small for them and they emigrated to the Haymarket, which Mr. Bancroft had reconstructed as it is now, after a new plan, without the conventional proscenium, with the orchestra out of sight, the stage encased in a gilt frame like a picture, and no pit.

This last innovation is characteristic. The pit from having composed the whole arena of the hall, had been moved back bit by bit, until at last it was confined to a few back benches behind the dress circle. To suppress it altogether was not so much an act of authority as of emancipation. It has been said that Mr. Bancroft thought too much of his gentility, and that he seemed anxious to reserve his theatre for the élite: Satis est equitem mihi plaudere. But even then? After all, it was only a case of an extremely able man keeping pace with the democratic generation to which he belonged, in his rise towards fortune and its accompanying enjoyments. He raised the price of stalls from six to seven shillings, and then to ten-and-sixpence. The public was evidently able to pay, for the stalls were always full.

It should be added that, under the management of the Bancrofts, the rise in salaries was out of all proportion to the rise in the price of seats. The weekly salary of one actor, continuing to play in the same rôle, went from £18 to £60, and that of another from £9 to £50. Mrs. Stirling had created the rôle of the Marchioness in Caste at the “Prince of Wales’s,” and received seven times as much for appearing in it at the Haymarket. Douglas Jerrold said to Charles Mathews: “I don’t despair of seeing you yet with a good cotton umbrella under your arm, carrying your savings to the bank.” Many years afterwards Mathews, presiding over the Theatrical Fund, recalled this remark, and added, “The first part of Jerrold’s wish has been fulfilled. I have bought an umbrella.” Thanks to the Bancrofts and the managers who came after them, the bank has been in receipt of the savings of many actors who previously would have been content if only they might earn their daily bread.

Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft saw the time approaching when the monopoly they had secured of the works of Robertson would cease to exist; they felt at once that the vein was being exhausted, and that the new generation would have new needs. Able and far-sighted, they determined to retire at the zenith of their success, and if not in their youth, at least in their prime and in the full activity of their intellect. Neither of them was forty-five when in 1885 they gave their farewell performance at the Haymarket.

Amongst the innumerable tokens of esteem which conduced to the triumph of this withdrawal, I shall cite only one. It is a letter from Arthur W. Pinero, who had belonged as an actor to the Bancroft Company, and who has taken since then a foremost place amongst English dramatists. He wrote to his former manager: —

“It is my opinion, expressed here as it is elsewhere, that the present advanced condition of the English stage – throwing as it does a clear, natural light upon the manner and life of the people, where a few years ago there was nothing but moulding and tinsel – is due to the crusade begun by Mrs. Bancroft and yourself in your little Prince of Wales’s Theatre. When the history of the stage and its progress is adequately and faithfully written, Mrs. Bancroft’s name and your own must be recorded with honour and gratitude.”

I took it into my head not long ago to pay a visit to the little theatre in which Frédéric Lemaître appeared, in which Napoleon and Count d’Orsay rubbed shoulders with Dickens and Thackeray, in which there was difficulty once in finding a seat for Gladstone, and in which Beaconsfield received a memorable ovation. The Salvationists have succeeded to the comedians, and, whether or not it be that their trumpets have the virtue of those of Jericho, these historic walls are crumbling to ruin. The place is empty, cold, and desolate. It was on an evening of last winter that I stood pensively under the porch – the porch through which had flowed like a stream all the elegance and talent of a whole generation. The light of a gas jet shone mournfully on the notice, mouldy already, “To be let or sold”; and the rain trickled down on me from a gaping hole whence the electric light used once to glare upon pretty women issuing in all their finery from their carriages. My curiosity was not satisfied. In order to obtain admission inside, I gave myself out as a lecturer in search of a hall, but the ruse failed. I was told that I should have to pay £4500 or £6000, and was asked whether this trifling outlay would interfere with me. I did not pursue the negotiations, and the door remained closed.

CHAPTER V

Gilbert: compared with Robertson – His first Literary Efforts – The Bab Ballads—Sweethearts– A Series of Experiments – Gilbert’s Psychology and Methods of Work —Dan’l Druce, Engaged, The Palace of Truth, The Wicked World—Pygmalion and Galatea– The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.

When Marie Wilton’s company, during their first holiday, went on tour to Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn assizes. The young London barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs, adding pleasantly: “We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time.”

Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson’s, – a reputation which still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is striking. Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public, – one may say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore, unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an accident. He might have “occurred” at any time in the century, or indeed in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal character; – in discussing a living writer, more than this would be improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.

He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think, even he himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.

It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to Fun that first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the title, Bab Ballads, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with More Bab Ballads. Some of them were set to music and are still popular as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of naïve irony, expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously careless, – a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up at all, – which was a surprise too.

Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales’s a pleasant little comedy entitled Sweethearts. A young man is about to start for India, where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets him go. Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now, – a lover, indeed, no longer.

Distance in time, as in space, makes things look small. His “grande passion” seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old boy’s scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever find the thirty years that they have lost?

Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate in it like mist and sunshine on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic, though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject. In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas! there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he has continued to rail at love ever since?

Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which followed. He wrote Broken Hearts, a fantastic drama in verse, and made it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He aimed at freeing Goethe’s Margaret from all that philosophy which surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus disencumbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head – probably after some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic instinct – that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly successful; Dan’l Druce is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public which applauded School and Society sufficiently advanced in its artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however, of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert’s drama turns, would he really have solved it after the fashion of Dan’l Druce? Surely not.

It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the two does the child belong – to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that decides in favour of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which it saw the guiding hand of God. As all things in this world and the next were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications, the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real. Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no problem to solve.

A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a girl amongst its characters. Their conversation – apart from certain pretty archaic touches which continue to delight me – is a sort of subtle intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up. Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. “I don’t know what to say,” Dorothy’s answer to her lover’s proposal, seems to suggest that the author himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young person, naïvely outspoken to the point of silliness. She is not sure of being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience with him whose interest in it is most at stake. “These are my feelings,” she tells him. “Is this love or is it not?” This self-analysing ingénue is the only woman’s character in the whole of Gilbert’s dramatic work.

Before writing Engaged, some such thoughts as these must have passed through his mind. “I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appetites and instincts? – To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a woman want? – To shine in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman? – The greed for money wherewith to buy the rest.

“My dramatis personæ shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be naïvely and absolutely selfish, – their selfishness shown clearly, but in the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments and correct commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. Fiancé and fiancée, father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these evolutions and manœuvres before the audience, and the young girls will change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different women; within the same space of time Simperson will throw his daughter at the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide. Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told that ‘Il faut se hâter d’en rire de peur d’être obligé d’en pleurer.’”

So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his Palace of Truth for the big children who composed the public to accept them with glee.

The Palace of Truth is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of psychology as Engaged, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious. Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they really are, we have seen them playing every rôle in the human comedy. In the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish coxcomb; the ingénue, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all, the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste has changed skins with Philinthe.

In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon animals, depriving this one of viscera, that one of a cerebral lobe, a third of some nerve essential to motion. His Creatures of Impulse do everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the Palace of Truth, their language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The denizens of fairyland in The Wicked World are unacquainted with love; they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from the Pandora’s box. Selenè passes through every stage of the malady. Joy, ecstasy, absolute security, – the celestial period; then vague disquietude, anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels, threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.

But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as in Pygmalion and Galatea. This was one of the great successes of the Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson, the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss Robertson’s grace of person, her pure and noble diction, were aids to success, though it was not to them that success was due. Even had the piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all the other productions of the author.

I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject. Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea; to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an analysis of her emotions as subtle as Joubert’s or Amiel’s; how this absolutely ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness through which she has passed on her way to full existence; how she can distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another’s having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the difference between a man and a woman.