Читать книгу The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama - Filon Augustin - Страница 3

A Glance back – From 1820 to 1830 – Kean and Macready – The Strolling Player – The Critics – Sheridan Knowles and Virginius– Douglas Jerrold – His Comedies —The Rent Day—The Prisoner of War—Black-eyed Susan– Collapse of the Privileged Theatres – Men of Letters come to the Rescue of the Drama – Bulwer Lytton —The Lady of Lyons—Richelieu—Money.

From 1820 to 1830 the Theatre, or, to be precise, the theatres, prospered to all appearances exceedingly. We shall see just now the real significance of this prosperity; it may be compared to the great ball given by Mercadet on the eve of his bankruptcy. But no one foresaw the collapse that was impending. It was the reign of the Adonis of sixty, who had spent his life inventing pomades and breaking oaths. It would have been droll, indeed, had the man who washed his dirty linen in the House of Lords pretended to be scandalised by the licence of the stage. And his heir, also a worn-out man of pleasure, had lived for a time with an actress, Mrs. Jordan, who, before his accession to the throne, died of grief, and forsaken, at St. Cloud. The small girl named Victoria, who roamed at this time amongst the lonely avenues of the old park at Broadstairs, and who was destined presently to bring marital love and the domestic virtues back into fashion, was still engrossed in the minding of her dolls.

The “privileged” theatres were frequented, or patronised, – to use the recognised English expression, with its savour of old-time condescension, – by Society. By the term “privileged,” subventioned must not be understood. To Drury Lane and Covent Garden alone belonged the right of producing the legitimate drama, the plays of Shakespeare, that is to say, and of his successors. This was their “privilege,” a privilege which might soon have become but a doubtful benefit had not great actors arisen to keep alive the classical drama by their command on the suffrages of the masses. The generation of actors who had studied in the school of Garrick, and had maintained its traditions, was taking its farewell of the stage in the person of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons – Siddons, “whose voice,” one of her contemporaries tells us, “was more delicious than the most delicious music.” Edmund Kean had already come forward, and after him, Macready.

I try to picture to myself these two men as they appeared upon the stage, to produce for myself from all the accounts of them that I have read the illusion of their living presence. The first thing that comes home to one is Kean’s Bohemianism, Macready’s respectability and good-breeding. Macready was the friend of the leading men of letters of his time, and had the advantage of their advice and support. Kean’s only intimate was the brandy-bottle that killed him. Writing to Frederick Yates, the manager of the Adelphi, to ask him for a box, he says, “I don’t want to herd with the mob. I like the money of the public, but the public itself I scorn.” He in his turn might be looked upon with scorn, were it not for the sufferings of his childhood and youth. If ever man had the right to hate life, it was he.

At Madame Tussaud’s the two rivals may now be seen standing side by side, Kean wearing the kilt of Macbeth and Macready the chlamys of Coriolanus. Save for his small size, the former seems the better endowed by nature; his countenance is sombre and bears the stamp of the tragedian. The angular and wrinkled face of Macready, on the other hand, – his slitlike mouth, his close-compressed lips and projecting jaws, – might have made the fortune of a clown. He had only to emphasise or modify its effects, indeed, for his tragic qualities to become comic. It was thus that he rendered so admirably the officiousness and fussiness of Oakley, the sly sensuality of Joseph Surface, the English Tartufe. Alas! he evoked a smile sometimes as Othello; when the Moorish condottiere, this personification of a passionate, noble, and high-strung race, was lost in an insensate negro or, if Théophile Gautier were to be believed, something lower still, “an anthropoid ape.”

Contemporaries seem agreed in attributing to Kean more genius, more talent to Macready. But there are many occasions when talent serves better than genius. To see Kean, said Coleridge, was to read Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. It is a method which has its merits, but by it one misses a good deal. Kean had some wonderful moments, then relapsed into dulness and insignificance. He would stumble, like a schoolboy reciting a lesson which had no meaning for him, through the whole of the speech of the Moor of Venice before the Senate, “letting himself go” only in the last verse, in which his emotion on seeing Desdemona brought down the house. He concentrated a whole passion into these final words. It was always thus with him.

I may say of them, following Mr. Archer: of the two, Kean was the greater actor and Macready the greater artist. Everything that pertained to instinct was stronger in the one, and everything that pertained to intellect was stronger in the other. Macready bore himself best in moods of calm, rendered with most effect the more virtuous emotions, —moral passions one may call them. All that was greatest in Shakespeare, the very soul of his poetry, was revealed through Kean. On one point only had Macready the advantage: he had a way of gazing into space when his lined and haggard countenance seemed to tell of the seeing of things invisible. There was no one like Macready for the suggestion of the supernatural. In all the other provinces of terror Kean was the real master.

Mr. Wilton, the father of an actress of whom I shall have much to say in these pages, used to tell how in his youth, when he was still a young and unknown actor, he had had the honour of playing with Edmund Kean. They were rehearsing the scene in which Shylock, baulked of his coveted gain, rushes frantically upon the stage crying out for his prey.

“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” —

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 —

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 —

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.

At this Clary’s face lights up with hope. So that would be the ending, according to him! He could assure her of it? Yes, he replies, he could assure her of it. She is on the point of falling upon her knees. Behind the half-open door, behind which there glimmers the light of a candle, her lover waits, ready to rush forward upon a word from her. “Of course, in real life it would be quite another thing,” goes on her father. “If it were I, what would you do?” “I’d kill him like a dog. And as for you – But there, it’s too horrible to think of! Let’s talk of something else.” And he tells her he has found a husband for her. Naturally she protests. The old man goes off again into a fury. “These cursed novels are turning your head. I shall go and burn them this instant.” And he steps towards the door, behind which Clary’s lover stands trembling.

All this is old-fashioned enough; it dates from the time when the drama was made out of the materials of a vaudeville. And yet I think that even nowadays this scene would tell.

But once again Jerrold had to follow the public taste which led him so terribly astray. His greatest success was his worst production, Black-eyed Susan, the popularity of which does not appear to have been even yet exhausted. The hero is a sailor, who translates the simplest ideas into nautical phraseology; the heroine a woman of humble birth, who expresses the loftiest sentiments in the finest language. The prolonged success of such a piece shows the delight which the lower sections of the public derive from the extravagant and the absurd, – the gross idealism, as one may call it, of the masses.

It is more difficult to understand how Jerrold, who had some regard for realism, and who had himself served on the sea, could have brought himself to write a drama which had in it not a semblance of truth, not a touch of nature. In spite of all, however, even in Black-eyed Susan, one may find that unrestrained violence, that diable au corps, which our fathers accepted willingly as passion.

It was not the public taste alone that was at fault; from the year 1830 the commercial decadence of the English theatre became more and more marked. As often happens, contemporaries failed to appreciate the real meaning of this, and attributed it to accidental causes; amongst others, to the rivalry between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a rivalry which was carried to absurd extremes under some of the managers, who bid against each other, both for plays and players, to an extent that ruined them. Then came the notion of ending this dangerous competition by uniting the two houses under the same management, but the enterprise proved too big for one man and for a single company. The separate existence had to come into force again. A certain Captain Polhill, who aspired to the rôle of a Mæcenas, lost fifty thousand pounds in two years over the management of Drury Lane. Then Macready in his turn had a try, and managed the two theatres successively from 1838 to 1843.

The privileged theatres were no longer living on their privilege; they were dying of it. Theatres were springing up all round them, which succeeded sometimes in drawing the public by strange means. Edmund Yates, whose father was then manager of the Adelphi, has given us in his memoirs some idea of the attractions then in vogue: a Chinese giant, Indian dancers, a legless acrobat who got himself up with spreading wings as a monstrous fly, and who sprang about, tied on to a thread, from floor to ceiling. The privileged theatres had no other course than to emulate the unprivileged ones. They produced Shakespeare in the form of curtain-raisers, or to wind up the evening before half-empty benches. They sliced him, carved him limb from limb, and served him up in bits, or floating in a dish of music, with a garnishment of loud and vulgar mise en scène, of which the contemporaries of Elizabeth would have been ashamed. And, in spite of all, in spite even of Macready’s talent (Kean had died in 1833), they could not get the public to accept him. The new public which filled the theatres was gluttonous rather than gourmet, and wanted not quality but quantity – at least six acts every evening, and sometimes even seven or eight. Masterful, clamorous, ill-bred, uncouth in its expression both of enjoyment and of dissatisfaction, its attitude astounded Price Puckler-Muskau, a very careful observer who visited England about the time. Macready acknowledges that there were some corners in Drury Lane where a respectable woman might not venture. The barbarians had begun to arrive; it was the first wave of democracy before which the habitué, the playgoer of the old school, was forced to flee.

In 1832 a Commission was instituted by Parliament for the purpose of going into the question of liberty for the theatre. The members could not agree upon the subject, and the question was not settled until after eleven years of discussion. Before this ultimate surrender of Privilege and Tradition to the new spirit, one last effort had been made by men of letters to save the theatre. This was when the great tragedian undertook the management of Covent Garden. There was only one feeling in the world of literature: “We must back up Macready!” Everyone helped. John Forster applied himself to the stage management. Leigh Hunt left aside his criticisms to undertake a tragedy (based on a legend in which Shelley had already found inspiration), and those who could not do so much penned prologues and epilogues and brought them to Covent Garden, just as in former days, at moments of national peril, the patriotic rich brought their valuables to the Mint.3

From this abortive renaissance there remain one reputation and three plays. The three plays are The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money; the reputation is that of Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton. Bulwer passed himself off as a grand seigneur and a genius; he was really but a clever man and a dandy, who exploited literature for his social advancement. He affected a lofty originality, but his talents were mostly imitative. His chief gift, almost entirely wanting in his books, but very notable in his life, was what we call finesse. He took from the Byronian Satanism as much as England would put up with in 1840. He copied Victor Hugo secretly and discreetly. A sort of Gothic democrat, he managed at the same time to charm romantic youths and flatter the proletariat by pretending to hurl down that society in whose front rank he aspired to take his place. His novels were terribly long-winded, but there are generations which find such a quality to their taste. When at last it was discovered that his sublimity was a spurious sublimity, that his history was false history, his “middle-ages” bric-a-brac, his poetry mere rhetoric, his democracy a farce, his human heart a heart that had never beat in a man’s breast, his books mere windy bladders, – why, it was too late! The game had been played successfully and was over – the squireen of Knebworth, the self-styled descendant of the Vikings, had founded a family and hooked a peerage.

He had an eye for all the popular causes which were to be served – and were likely to be of service. When there was talk of reforming the drama, he at once came to the front and took the lead. He was the heart and soul of the Commission of 1832. He was one of those who came to the support of Macready in 1838. It was to this end he wrote The Lady of Lyons (without putting his name to it at first).

This is a literary melodrama; a detestable combination, for melodrama, considered either as a variation from drama proper or as a separate type, is not to be raised to the dignity of literature by the veneering of it with a thin layer of poetry. This operation does but produce wild and violent incongruities. In the first act of The Lady of Lyons, Madame Deschappelles is a Palais Royal Maman. Only a Palais Royal Maman, and only one of the most pronounced of them at that, could imagine she would become a dowager princess by marrying her daughter to a prince. Pauline belongs to the same repertory. What are one’s feelings, then, on hearing tragic verses from her lips in the third act and seeing her compete with Imogene and Griselda in the sublimity (and absurdity) of her self-sacrifice! In the fourth act she has resumed something of her natural temperament – the temperament of a prim and tedious governess.

But I suppose I must put up with Pauline Deschappelles willy-nilly! It is one of the accepted doctrines of the old dramatic psychology that a character can pass from good to evil at critical moments, and pass out again even when all egress is barred. It is an absurd notion, but if Bulwer conforms to it, at least he is in the same boat with many others. Where he is himself at fault – that which indicates the obliquity of his moral outlook – is his having presented to us in Claude Melnotte a hero who is a double-dyed cheat. A mere peasant by birth, he passes himself off as a prince and marries under his false name the daughter of a rich bourgeois; a soldier by profession, he becomes a general within two years, and in these two years amasses a fortune. How? By what methods of brigandage we are not told, but we are left to accept it as a matter of course. As regards the first point, love may perhaps be held to excuse the crime; as regards the second, no one seems ever to have raised any objection, and it has been left for me to state my difficulty. In a sufficiently disingenuous preface, Bulwer accounts for the incoherences and extravagances of his hero by the state of extraordinary excitement into which men’s minds had been thrown by the French Revolution. This explanation has sufficed for the author’s fellow-countrymen, and the Revolution has a broad back. But I am afraid that Bulwer was not clear in his mind as to the kind of madness to which Frenchmen were impelled by it, – and still more, that he has confounded our generals with our contractors. Our Desaix and our Ouvrards are not made of the same clay nor moulded in the same form; a fact as to which, unfortunately, he remained unenlightened.

After having made his anonymity serve the purpose of an advertisement, the author consented to reveal his identity whilst announcing at the same time that The Lady of Lyons would be a sole experiment. The very next year he appeared before the public with the tragedy of Richelieu, in which Macready played the principal rôle. This piece may be compared with the Cromwell of Victor Hugo. It was marked by the same mixture of tragedy and melodrama; the same display of historical documents and the same ignorance of what is essential in history; the same use of the lowest and the most eccentric expedients to raise a laugh or cause a shudder; the same superficial and crude psychology which in each character, male or female, great or small, reveals the personality of the author. Even when this author is a Victor Hugo it is bad enough! But when it is a Bulwer – !

When he blended into one plot the journée des Dupes and the conspiracy of the Duc de Bouillon, together with some features borrowed from the adventure of Cinq-Mars and De Thou, the author mingled together two periods which could not and should not be thus confounded, the beginning and the end of Richelieu’s career.4 He managed, too, to falsify English history as well, incidentally, by making Richelieu refer in Council to Cromwell, at that time a still obscure member of the House of Commons. Richelieu speaks of the antagonism between Charles and Oliver at a period when the latter is not even a captain of cavalry. But what is an anachronism of this kind compared to that which involves the principal character in one continued topsy-turveydom? It is the drawback both of the historical play and the historical novel, that they put the great figures of history before us in a form and in an attitude that their contemporaries could have never witnessed; confessing, describing, revealing themselves just to illustrate their character by their conversation, always dilating on their deeds instead of doing them. But of all the braggarts in theatrical history, Bulwer’s Richelieu is the most vainglorious and the most intolerable. It is all very well for the author to say in his preface that the cardinal was the father of French civilisation and the architect of the monarchy; he may say what he likes: but we cannot stand Richelieu when he talks of himself in the same strain and in the third person, just as Michelet and Carlyle might in a fit of raving; nor when he counterfeits death in order to play the ghost, nor when he weeps theatrically, and addresses declamatory love messages to “La France.” – “France, I love thee, – Richelieu and France are one!” Nor can we believe in him when he sees modern France come to life again from out the cinders of feudalism. After such nonsensical dicta, indeed, one would be hardly surprised to hear him exclaim, “I am the precursor of 1789; what I cannot consummate, Bonaparte shall achieve in the Sessions of the Conseil d’Etat!”

The secondary characters are one idea’d. Beringhen can say nothing but “Let’s discuss the pâté!” and the Duc d’Orleans is limited to “Marion dotes on me.” To the tragi-comedy there is tacked on a melodrama made after the approved methods of the Boulevard – a succession of events and surprises which cancel out. You feel you are expected to shout, Bravo Richelieu! bravo Baradas! Just as at the Porte Saint Martin or at the Ambigu you cry out, Bravo d’Artagnan! bravo Mordaunt! It is the system of Dumas without his art.

Lord Lytton lacked both imagination and ingenuity. His effects are poor, and he overdoes them. The first resuscitation of Richelieu comes near to impressing one, the second is simply silly. The kernel of the play consists of a document which passes through every pocket but never reaches its address. At the moment, the owner of this treasure is a prisoner at the Bastille. Instead of searching him, the Government sends a courtier to seize him by the throat and rob him of it. The scene is witnessed through a key-hole and described to us by a little page of Richelieu’s – the rôle being played by a woman. The page throws himself on the courtier the moment he comes out in order to snatch from him the fateful paper, and the conclusion of the drama results from these two encounters. One might sum up Richelieu as a mixture of bad Hugo with worse Dumas!

Money is by way of depicting English Society as it was in 1840. It recognised itself, or rather its enemies recognised it, in this caricature! Are we to believe that the gambling scene in the third act takes place in an aristocratic club? It is more in keeping with the back parlour of a public-house. A very well-known critic, who represents the ideas of a whole class and of a whole school, in alluding to the success which the piece met with in the first instance, and which it meets with still on every revival, declares that the spectators wished to show their appreciation of the “humour of a scholar.” I must confess that I can recognise neither the scholar nor the humour. On the contrary, what I see in it is a spurious sensibility and that moral obliquity to which I have referred. Alfred Evelyn, who has been enriched by the will of an eccentric cousin, and who now sees the world at his feet after having experienced its disdain, decides to share his fortune with an unknown girl who has sent £10 to his old nurse at a time when he himself was too poor to come to her aid. It is in this silly intention that he is throwing away his happiness, and that the plot finds its motive. He is engaged to a young girl whom he doesn’t love, and in order to get rid of her, this mirror of refinement, this Alcestes with all his fine scorn of average humanity, pretends to ruin himself at play in the presence of his destined father-in-law. The girl whom he loves has refused (in Act I.) to marry him, not because he is poor, but because, poor herself, she was afraid of being a drag on him in his career. But someone had entered during her explanation and she had not been able to finish her sentence. She finishes it in the last act, and it transpiring also that it was she who had really sent the £10, the two lovers fall into each other’s arms. That is really all there is in Money over and above the social satire, which to my thinking is terribly far-fetched, and that wonderful “humour” which I have been unable personally to discover.

Bulwer was not the man to save the erring Drama. Stronger men than he might have tried in vain to do so. It was not to the men of letters, the scholars, that it was to owe its salvation. The democracy had to come to the use of reason and to educate itself. Instead of the artificial drama which was offered to them, they held out for a drama sprung from its own loins, born of its own passions, made after its own image, palpitating with its own life; literary it might become later, if it could. And to this end, in the words of Olivier Saint-Jean, “It was necessary that things should go worse still before they could go better.”