The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

CHAPTER VII

Is it well to imitate Shakespeare? – The Death of the Classical Drama – Herman Merivale and the White Pilgrim– Wills and his Plays: Charles the First, Claudian– Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too soon and too late – Tennyson and the Critics —The Falcon, The Promise of May, The Cup, Becket, Queen Mary, Harold.

Irving’s personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare’s heroines, but who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and sweet elocution set the poet’s dream to music. From America have come Mary Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It was possible for a critic to declare, – speaking of the vogue towards which everything seems to have worked, – that of all the dramatists of the day, Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been brought into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought the theatre into fashion.

But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good? Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident, and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted? One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and coups de théâtre; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and coups de théâtre that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is quite another matter. Shakespeare’s spirit is not to be assimilated; this is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment does not suit us, – it is either too long or too short, or both together. One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man about as much as a lawyer’s clerk, masquerading en mousquetaire, resembles d’Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his café in Stamboul. This tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off. It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half centuries before.

These are a priori considerations, but they are confirmed by the experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention besides Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled The White Pilgrim, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says Mr. Archer, “so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly.” His Bohemian life, his impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, Charles the First and Claudian. The first called up on the stage – for the last time doubtless – that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which, instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. “In order that the world may be Claudian’s purgatory, it must first be the hell of an entire generation.” Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.

Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers, tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant it after Ellen Terry.

One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama, – the name of Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published Queen Mary, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of Our Boys and the Pink Dominoes, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments of the imagination.

The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate; it was the critics – and I am borne out in this by the most eminent of their number, – it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson’s plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed – it was for this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career, and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism, tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.

But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to the living drama.

I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter days of the poet not only preserved some of his early graces, but brought out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all his pieces is The Falcon. The action takes place in some vague region in an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure. Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and, ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the sacrifice to which hospitality and her love impelled him, and Monna Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his arms.

When The Falcon was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James’s Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it a mise en scène that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge Robertson’s performance think of it as one thinks of some painter’s masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.

They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in The Falcon, it is apparently Federigo’s sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order, that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird. Even more deceptive than the déjeuner offered to Monna Giovanna, the menu presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of delicate hors d’œeuvres, and there was not enough in them for healthy appetites.

The Promise of May had a worse fate than The Falcon. It failed outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in patience and in intelligence. Harold’s theories are answered in the play. When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded. Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. “And yet I had once a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever.”

In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer’s daughter looks upon it sadly. “Next year,” she says, “it will bear no fruit,” – a moving piece of symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.

The comparative success of The Cup at the Lyceum surprises me less than it does Mr. Archer. I see no need to seek the secret of this success in the grace of Ellen Terry, or in the splendid scenery of Diana’s Temple. The Cup has certain qualities which were calculated to please the general public. The subject is taken from Plutarch’s De Claris Mulieribus, and from a passage which had already suggested a tragedy to a Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. It is possible that, without being quite conscious of it, Tennyson adopted to a certain point the tone of the original author and the manner of his predecessors. He was less English, less Shakespearian, less himself, in this piece than in his other dramatic works. The dialogue is rapid and effective; the characters do not give themselves up to poetical fancies; instead of formulating theories, they express sentiments that are in no way complex or strange. One of them, Synorix, is interesting. Except for the Don Juanism which seems to impart to him too modern a note, this double-faced type, half Roman, half barbarian, whose intelligence has been sharpened but whose passions have not been extinguished by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a sort of monster, who is conscious of his intellectual superiority and his moral decay; he unites these two qualities in a sadness that has about it something that seems great.

The attractiveness of this character was what made a failure of Tennyson’s piece; the English poet avoids the subject which Plutarch puts before him, and which Thomas Corneille and Montanelli had seized upon; the latter, cleverly and with success, despite the inflation of his style. This subject lies in the action of Camma, widow of the Tetrarch of Galatia, whom Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, has killed and supplanted. Synorix loves her, and is anxious to make her his wife. Camma, seeing no escape from this odious marriage, pretends to assent to it. After the sacred rites she has to put her lips to the same cup as Synorix before the altar of Diana. She gives him death to drink from it, and drinks death from it herself. That this dénouement should awaken no objections in our mind, it would be essential that we should have been brought to hate Synorix as Camma hates him. Now, Tennyson seems to have done everything in his power to minimise the repulsiveness of the character. He has woven round him the fascination of a noble sadness, the palliation of a great love; has in some sort constrained him to kill his rival, by importing into the action an element of justifiable self-defence. Not content with this, he depicts Camma’s husband as an unintelligent brute, who ill deserves her regrets and her sacrifice.

It may be added, that of the real drama – the conflict of emotion in Camma’s soul – we know nothing until the last scene. A coup de théâtre does not make a play, and Mr. Archer is doubtless right in placing the work of Montanelli above that of Tennyson; but these defects notwithstanding, I think The Cup would be accorded the same favourable reception from the public again now that it enjoyed in 1881. It bears a distinct resemblance to our French tragedies, in its dignity, its propriety, in the seriousness, the freedom from any comic element, by which it is marked, by the consistency in the characters, its continuity of tone and unity of action, – qualities which undoubtedly give more pleasure, whatever may be said to the contrary, than the most faithful imitation of the contrasts and inconsistencies of life.

Had he written nothing but The Falcon, The Cup, and The Promise of May, Tennyson would hold but a very low place among play-writers. If he is to live as a dramatist, it must be by his three historical plays, Queen Mary, Harold, and Becket.

These dramas, it has been declared, were bound to be inferior, even before they ever saw the light, to the historical dramas of the age of Elizabeth, whose aspect and character they recalled so completely; for whereas the histories of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hewn out of the old Chronicles which, almost equally with reminiscences, preserve the vivacity of personal impressions, and something, as it were, of the warmth of life, Tennyson’s dramas are taken from “History,” properly so called, and “History” is a serious scientific person who studies life by dissecting it, who is addicted to discussion rather than to the telling of tales, and who substitutes modern judgments for ancient passions. The objection is more plausible than real. First of all, this definition of History, though true enough of a Guizot, a Hallam, or a Lecky, is quite inapplicable to a Carlyle, a Michelet, or a Taine.

In reading Freeman and Froude, was Tennyson less in touch with the soul of the past than Shakespeare was in making his way through the cold and often tedious pages of Holinshed? Moreover, even had Froude been as sententious and frigid as he was in reality picturesque and impassioned, Tennyson’s own faculties would have made good these defects.

It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and quite exceptional strength of Tennyson’s sense of history. I must explain clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It was thus that Michelet was present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc; Macaulay at the flight of James II. and at the trial of Warren Hastings; Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger. This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.

This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas, – that is to say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories, illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history; for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in Queen Mary, and in Becket the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map, the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.

A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles, and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose, but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson, to set before us un état d’âme, and plunge us into the depth of the life of olden days?

I am fully aware, of course, that this is not everything, or rather that it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is there a dramatic idea underlying Becket, Queen Mary, and Harold? I shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the first question; Yes, to the second and third.

It is true that Becket achieved a startling success in the summer of 1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he is – hieratical, pontifical. Mediæval asceticism is one of the forms of life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth one’s while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton, when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been carried through by dumb show without words at all.

Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow, and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in gusts from the church above – mingled with the cries of the people beating against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great edifice to its foundation – experienced one of the strongest emotions any spectacle ever gave.

And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen Terry’s tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king’s mistress to care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so much hardihood.

I have not the same objections to make against Queen Mary and Harold. In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road, strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding, she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched out, if he did not quite complete it, in Queen Mary.

The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold’s young brother, describes to him the slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner, deprived of all that he loves best, – of the sight of the green fields, of the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away by the loathsome vermin of the earth.

When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes, and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to which we are too often treated in the theatre.

Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him, with a nobility and pride of tone that thrill one.

These two dramas – I dare not say two masterpieces – set in a framework of history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.

A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in air and light upon their essential lines; a great actor, to understand and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character of Mary, – and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.

Note. – I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of poetry than that of the theatre.