The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the meaning of the word explained to her, as a “hired assassin.” Her comprehension of these two words “assassin” and “hired” presuppose some rudimentary knowledge of the principal social institutions which affect the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it obeys. The soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war, she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!

These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are vain, because they assume our acceptance of a general thesis more improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness, of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.

For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought: it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that favourite picture he had so often sketched out already – the woman whose heart is a tabula rasa, whose mind is an instrument that has never been used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and language at her command. What we learn during the toilsome schooling of twenty or thirty years she apprehends at a glance, and it would seem that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.

Mr. Gilbert’s Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is jealous, however, – and in this conception the author is more Greek than the Greeks themselves, – of the gods, in that they alone have the power of giving life. He is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere lust; it is Diana, whose priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion’s feeling upon first noting the aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the first question of Galatea, “Who am I?” – “A woman.” “And you, are you also a woman?” – “No, I am a man.” “What, then, is a man?” Upon this the pit would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the author. How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate Pygmalion’s reply —

“A being strongly framed,To wait on woman, and protect her fromAll ills that strength and courage can avert;To work and toil for her, that she may rest;To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh;To fight and die for her, that she may live!”

Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life? She asks Myrine, Pygmalion’s sister, for an explanation of all these things. Myrine replies —

Myrine: “Once every day this death occurs to us,

Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth

Shall sleep to wake no more!”

Galatea: (Horrified, takes Myrine’s hand) “To wake no more?”

Pygmalion: “That time must come, may be, not yet awhile,

Still it must come, and we shall all return

To the cold earth from which we quarried thee.”

Galatea: “See how the promises of newborn life

Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!

Love for Pygmalion – a blighting sin,

His love a shame that he must hide away.

Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state,

And life a passing vision born thereof,

From which we wake to native senselessness!

How the bright promises fade one by one!”

At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned, and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern English plays.

Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the outlines of his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by a musician? He did so in Trial by Jury, a very amusing one-act piece, suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular in England as that of Meilhac and Halévy with Offenbach was with us during the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of gratitude to their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well, but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators. Already they are out of fashion.

For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at Princess Ida, unless it was at Patience. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of Tennyson, which bears the similar title The Princess, and is a satire upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the aesthetic movement. In Iolanthe I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence (expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining face of Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down before Whitehall.

In The Pirates of Penzance, and in Pinafore, mankind seems to be walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is the plot of the Pirates. Frederic’s nurse was charged by his parents to make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw’s devotion to strict legality – this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish forth three hours’ entertainment? But the author was justified by the result.

Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty for losing good cases and winning bad ones.

CHAPTER VI

Shakespeare again – From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder, Adelaide Neilson – Irving’s Début– His Career in the Provinces, and Visit to Paris – The Rôle of Digby Grant – The Rôle of Matthias – The Production of Hamlet– Successive Triumphs – Irving as Stage Manager – As an Editor of Shakespeare – His Defects as an Actor – Too great for some of his Parts – As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art – Sir Henry Irving, Head of his Profession.

What became of the “legitimate” drama the while Robertson busied himself with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in Richard III. the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a “Shakespeare Made Easy.” An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the day which brought the news of his “Hero”-like end on a ship which was taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850 to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler’s Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the Bouffes du Nord, or, further still, to the Théâtre de Belleville!

Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain rôles which up till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering, – that crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters beyond the scope of his intelligence. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.11 Kean and Macready had “popularised” Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out another and nobler distinctive quality – that of poèmes en action. This does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.

The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche in La Dame aux Camélias, set our mothers weeping, brought back Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess’s and to the Lyceum. In Macbeth, he was only middling; but while they say his Othello was the worst imaginable, his Hamlet, according to the same critics, could not be surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great rôle which had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready, taking from him Hamlet’s velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some emotion, Horatio’s words – “Adieu, dear Prince!” and added, “It seems to me that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness, humanity, and poetry in the character.” Fechter found out traits which had escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil and pleasing parts of the action – a refined intellectual elegance proper to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The advice of Hamlet to the players – the actor’s Ten Commandments – he rendered with much art and spirit.

After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners became old stagers and appeared in principal rôles. Between 1870 and 1875 I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in Anthony and Cleopatra, with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm, one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too, the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson, who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pré-Catelan, – it was a glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.

He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already been long upon the stage, – he was already an actor of repute even; but the Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.

There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr. Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it, pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to time they gave public performances.

It was at one of these that there appeared one evening – in 1853 – a strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman’s. He wore a jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.

He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured – the Bible, Don Quixote, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like very ant-hills of humanity.

Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry Irving’s vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute or ill-directed endeavour.

Young Irving frequented Phelps’ theatre, Sadler’s Wells; an old actor who belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank. Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed pithily at a later period: “The learning how to do a thing is the doing of it,” – one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play the rôle of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton’s Richelieu. Thence he proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his début in London at the Princess’s, in an adaptation of the Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the Daily Telegraph and the Standard the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a rôle in one of Boucicault’s dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James’s, whence he passed first to the Queen’s, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.

More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which visited us, hid Henry Irving.

There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during which the conquest of one’s professional brethren is achieved. Now, one’s professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity, upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand in James Albery’s Two Roses. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours, – a singular blend of pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing but a tumult of words, a confusion of jeux de scenes, interrupted here and there by silly preciosités which are intended to serve as aphorisms. However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first performance of The Two Roses, he recited “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” and his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the actor’s art was immensely widened – what he actually expressed in his recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.

Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.

At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts – a piece which should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and language, of a man’s outward aspect and his soul within, – this was The Bells, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian’s Polish Jew. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject, and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the Times, John Oxenford analysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which seemed, under the bright morning sunshine, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.

The Bells was succeeded by Charles I., by Wills. From the Alsatian inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without apparent effort.

It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its frame – this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache, the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to see him, now playing with his children on the grass slopes of Hampton Court, now crushing Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of his – “Who’s this rude gentleman?” still rings in my ears. The picture of Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes… Then, in a village graveyard, that more terrible figure takes its place, the sombre phantom-form of Aram, long and lank, the assassin reasoning with his remorse.

In these fruitful years one creation followed another in quick succession, each excellent, all different. Finally, on October 31, 1874, Irving appeared as Hamlet.

This was his Marengo; up to the third act, the battle seemed lost. His anguish must have been terrible. The audience was mute, frigid, and their frigidity seemed to increase. The third act produced a complete change. From the scene with the players and the description of the imaginary portraits the evening was a continual triumph. The public had before them a Hamlet they had never seen or even dreamt of; all the Hamlets that had ever appeared upon the stage seemed to have been assimilated by an original and powerful temperament, and blended harmoniously into one. The Bells had been played a hundred and fifty-one times, Charles I. eighty times. Hamlet filled the Lyceum for two hundred nights without interruption.