The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

CHAPTER VIII

The Three Publics – The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of Pantomime – Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama – Improvement in Acting – The Influence of our French Actors – The “Old” Critics and the “New” – James Mortimer and his Two “Almavivas” – Mr. William Archer’s Ideas and Rôle – The Vicissitudes of Adaptation.

Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud Becket?

Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fashion, the fact remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a passionate interest in this struggle between Mind and Power – between the National Throne and the Roman Priesthood – resuscitated by a poet. Many other symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.

I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the bête humaine been so completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so unblushingly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The bête humaine is outside the door.

I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to Mrs. Bancroft, whose former rôles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree. If you mention her name before an elderly “man about town,” who was young and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.

The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even extended their clientèle. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South, – districts of London whose geography was hardly known, – at the Surrey, the Victoria, the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess’s. In that immense conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing, popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate. It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the masses which people of culture often lack.

When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed, whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even – to descend a degree lower – of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to Shakespeare, for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare’s; and were it not for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.

Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be taught that a criminal’s punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.

As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket, the Garrick, the St. James’s, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add, perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The personnel of these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due? To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager’s first question of a girl coming to him for an engagement would be – “Can you sing? Can you dance? Have you got good legs?” To-day his first requirement would be that she should have intelligence.

English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially, and now Réjane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comédie Française are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his Thirty Years at the Play, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening Favart and Delaunay played On ne badine pas avec l’Amour before the keenest and most impressionable of “pits,” composed exclusively of actors and authors. When, at the dénouement, there was heard the sound of a fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair, crying out, “Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!” – so exquisite was the sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent. I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of more than one English actor.

Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel, out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his toadies to call him the “Napoleon of the Theatrical World,” would fain have had Clement Scott, of the Weekly Despatch, dismissed from his post, and presumed to deny him the entrée to his theatres, and even to refuse his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably in the actor’s favour; – for the truer the adverse criticism, the more injury it did to its object.

Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder of the London Figaro. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon III., and it was in the palace of St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily, became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his career as publisher. It is not the less one’s duty to accord him, under the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven from the theatre.

The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was yesterday, and this must content us – this is as much as we have any right to expect.

The London Figaro was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the pseudonym of “Almaviva.” The reader is already acquainted with the real names of “Almaviva I.” and “Almaviva II.”; he has encountered them several times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of to-morrow.

Mr. Archer’s passion for the theatre – he has told us in a charming preface addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him – dates from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put them on the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room, and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclopædia, a library of references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at once a penetrating critic and a first-rate petit journaliste. Humour, of which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid, lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste or a touch of pedantry. I don’t believe that in all his life he has perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a bore, if he would.

The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M. Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaître, and in what respects he differs from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it, now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more blasé than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate principles which, with us, are taken for granted, – to accomplish, in fact, a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the Dramaturgie of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.

His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a meeting-place, a rendez-vous, of all the arts. Its province, he holds, is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds, provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be folly to judge it by æsthetic laws. One does not take the height of a sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end? Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that they are sincere and independent.

Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment, and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a dilemma. “Either you show me on the stage,” he says, “what I see and go through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it – what do I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of truth and reality?” To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges us to observe – that is to say, to see and feel more intensely – what we see and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth, the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to the side of Rarahu or of Chrysanthème, an infallible instinct tells the reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be endowed with the same critical instinct?

Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama, Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth – it was neither realistic nor idealistic, but just “fantastic.” Mr. Archer took up Matthew Arnold’s idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral; the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got’s declaration, that our drama was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all. Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.

He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards better things, towards a life superior to our common life, – the life, perhaps, of to-morrow.

He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.

His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What is one to think of Diderot’s paradox about the actors’ art, and what do actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer, or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic? What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager, and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own opinions are at variance with his.

This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer’s rôle has consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted by Ibsen and Björnson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent, as it were, a character of scientific precision.

The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house, doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.

From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating sometimes a second and a third time the same inept vaudeville. A melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became the Ticket of Leave Man, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the indifference of the English pit, without anybody’s attempting to draw a moral from the event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the idea of international literary property had been started, and was making way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it, an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.

These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English drama.

It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the flair of the actor-manager.

From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in the domain of our Haute Comédie.

The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would be to spoil them —sint ut sunt aut non sint. It is different with the pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of work having a certain fascination for the playwright.

To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the performance of Dora on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself bought them from M. Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British amour propre. All the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, “But by jingo if we do.” The idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. “By the time we got out at Amiens to drink our bouillon,” one of them tells us, “the play was fully planned out.” And, under the title of Diplomacy, Dora enjoyed an even more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.

This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a new dénouement resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the two races, the two arts, and the two codes of morality.

This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.