Chapter XVI: 'the Play's the Thing'

Summary of the agencies and incidents preparing the way for the
revival of the theatre as a popular institution, Macready and his
purifying influences inside the theatre. Charles Kean at the
Princess's. Usefulness of Rugby and Eton associations to each of these
respectively. Miss Faucit (Lady Martin); her last appearance at Drury
Lane; her enduring influence on the profession. Mrs Boucicault, Miss
Kate Terry, Mrs P. H. Lee, Miss Ellen Terry and others. Henry Irving;
his first London hit at the St James's, afterwards at the Lyceum under
Bateman. His success characterized. T. W. Robertson's plays. Other
circumstances of the time favourable to the new popularity of the
play.

At the different seaside resorts fringing the greater part of southern England from Beachy Head to Penzance, by the new sort of life organized at Eastbourne, Hastings, and innumerable other places, one is reminded very practically that only twenty miles of intervening sea separate the French from the English coast. The British climate may be less favourable than that on the other side of the Straits for the open air existence of the French littoral. The more praiseworthy, therefore, and not the less persistent are the efforts of visitors and residents on the unsunny side of the Channel to acclimatize themselves to the _al fresco_ habits of Boulogne, Dieppe, Trouville, or Biarritz.

Brighton has not yet very visibly changed its regime since the days when George IV. lived at the Pavilion. Its newer rival, Eastbourne, has taken advantage of a local conformation, and especially of a paved sea front to present the stranger with various little reproductions of what is most characteristic in the social exterior of French holiday life during the bathing season. It is not only one or two families, mutually intimate, which meet and pass together the greater portion of the day on the esplanade that lies in the shadow of Beachy Head. The whole place practically turns out, settles itself down for a day's occupation, if the weather be fine enough, on the causeway above the pebbled shore. The ladies produce knitting instruments or appliances for domestic needlework. The men have their newspapers or books. The circle exactly after the French fashion is formed, big enough in compass to admit all the polite population of the place. When the luncheon hour approaches, there is a move not from off the sea front, but to some of the covered shelters that stud at intervals the esplanade. Improvised tables are covered with white cloths. The company, that the French stranger at a glance recognizes as belonging to the order of _bourgeoisie_, proves itself long to have outgrown the dislike to public meals common to most English men and women at the period of the Queen's accession. At night the boarding houses, hotels, or private dwellings that in a long line rise just above the sea terrace seem practically to amalgamate themselves into a single dancing hall.

Other instances, more picturesque, or at least more suggestive, of the naturalization of continental examples, at English holiday resorts may be given. Eastbourne is indebted for the full development of its natural attractions and for the addition of its beauties of art to the Duke of Devonshire. Amongst other buildings with which the place has been enriched is a town hall of graceful proportions and artistic aspect. This building is crowned by a clock tower so exquisitely shaped and standing out in such classic profile against the dark South Downs in the background as to justify the local vaunt that had it been in Florence sightseers from all parts of the world would have flocked to see it; and guide books would long since have commemorated the glories of, a new Campanile added to the historic list of fair structures. While the Eastbourne clock tower is awaiting the architectural canonization it deserves, the town itself has still more closely approached to southern exemplars by starting a carnival of its own.[45] The slovenly and bedraggled mummeries into which the Italian saturnalia have degenerated have not prevented the enterprising authorities of the Sussex watering place from mimicking the battles of flowers and confetti that are still supposed to relieve the approach of Lent in the City of the Popes, but which as a fact have during late years only formed another feature in Roman vulgarity. One advantage over its more Southern original the Sussex shore imitation possesses. Real confetti are not employed. Pellets of tissue paper are missiles at once less costly and less dangerous than sugar plums. In other respects the continental type has been reproduced rather too faithfully. Whether on the Corso, the King's Road, Brighton, the Esplanade or Terminus Road, Eastbourne, the whole pageant, as to the costume, the humours, and the hand artillery of the mummers, resembles equally the scenes on the return from the Derby by road to be witnessed between Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.

It was, perhaps, the foreign imitations in the social scheme of English life increasingly visible during his later years to Matthew Arnold which inspired that close observer with the advice to his countrymen to organize the theatre. To some extent, indeed, the counsel had long been anticipated. The organization of the stage into a wholesome agency of popular amusement and teaching began with Macready, the earliest of that line of considerable actors who have served their generation during the Victorian epoch. But the prejudice against the play prevailing among other than the austerer classes long survived the work of this great reformer of the English stage. The company which fills a theatre to-day in respect of ethics and behaviour is not inferior to the fashionable occupants of an opera box on a subscription night.

It was not always so. When between 1827, the year of his first, and 1851 the year of his last, appearance at Drury Lane, Macready was the head of the theatrical world, he found some difficulty in eliminating certain objectionable elements from the auditorium of Drury Lane. He persisted with his work. At last the moral atmosphere of a London playhouse was admittedly as unexceptionable as that of Exeter Hall. Macready himself who was born in 1793, and lived till 1873, had been educated at Rugby, as Charles Kean who followed him, had reached the Sixth Form at Eton. Macready, too, was in his day almost as much a favourite with the clergy of the Established Church as, since his _The Sign of the Cross_, Mr Wilson Barrett has become in ours. If the Etonian Keate inspired respect by the consciousness of his having birched future generations of statesmen, the Etonian Macready reflected the prestige of respectability upon his profession from the fact that during his retirement at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, most of the Anglican clergy noticeable for their elocution had received lessons from him in the art of reading.

Charles Kean's acting life covered the period between 1820 and 1868. Like Macready, he was a favourite in the provinces before he made his mark on the London boards. With him there began, or was fairly established, the improvement of stage, scenery, costume, and in all incidental accessories that has been brought to so high a point of perfection by the genius, industry, and well-judged lavishness of Henry Irving. Byron's enthusiasm still glows in the words of his famous eulogy on the acting of Charles Kean's father, Edmund Kean, who seems to have been perhaps the most powerful and moving artist that the English stage has known. The energy, passion and fire of the Keans marked a reaction from, and were to some extent a protest against the stately and frigid classicism of the school of Kemble. They thus appropriately coincided in point of time with that romantic movement in English poetry which in his satire Byron ridiculed, but which in his practice he did so much to promote. The epoch, during which these attributes were displayed by Kean and his followers, roughly may be said to have synchronized with the season of the influence on the thought and diction of English poetry exercised through the publication of the _Reliques_ of Thomas Percy, who, towards the end of the last, and early in the present, century, was successively Dean of Carlisle and Bishop of Dromore. This book probably did more than any other single volume ever issued from the press, to quicken and complete the revolt of English taste against the formal models of the age of Pope. From the personal life, character and wide social acceptance both of Macready first and of Charles Kean afterwards, the English drama directly, as well as indirectly, was a gainer. In those days the social fusion was not nearly so complete as it has since become; but Macready and the younger Kean had both been popular in their school days. In after life Rugby and Eton respectively rallied round them. The amalgamating agency of the Garrick Club, practically so familiar at rather a later day, was not then an operative force. But of the Athenaeum and similar institutions Macready and in his turn Kean must have been free; their private acquaintances and visiting lists were as large and as representative as those of their successors during the present decade of the Queen's reign.

It is not, however, under a dynasty of high tragedians that the full development, as a social and intellectual force, of the Victorian drama was to be attained. Long after the theatre became respectable, it remained dull. The audience seldom dwindled to the point of invisibility which a little time before was in some theatres habitual, and not infrequent in all. Before the period now spoken of, Lord Lytton, of whose place in letters more will be said elsewhere, had gone some way towards repeating the dual successes in Parliament and at the playhouse achieved by Sheridan in an earlier day. _Money_ was produced in 1840. Exactly a quarter of a century afterwards a dramatic hit not less palpable and destined to have results more considerable was made by an author till then little known on the London stage. The year in which _Society_ was played at the Prince of Wales's, till then the Queen's Theatre, in a street off the Tottenham Court Road, will be remembered by the theatre-goer as that in which Henry J. Byron's last burlesque was produced on the same boards and in which one of the actors in that extravaganza, _Don Giovanni_, Mr John Hare, took, for the first and only time in his life, a woman's part on the stage, wearing the petticoats of Zerlina, the simple peasant girl. The real significance of this occasion lay in its marking a new era in the fortunes of the nineteenth century drama. The germ of Anthony Trollope's novels of domestic life, may be seen in Bulwer-Lytton's fictions of _The Caxtons_ school. The part performed by the author of _Society_ and its dramatic sequels for the English play resembled the performances of Anthony Trollope with regard to the English novel. Like Bulwer, Robertson fashioned his dialogue on the model of Sheridan. The writer of _Money_ laboured to reproduce the antithetic polish of his original. The author of _Society_ and the series that followed it was attracted rather by the caustic repartee in which the author of _The School for Scandal_ excelled. The change thus introduced at a theatre of which till then few had ever heard, was the substitution of the realities of contemporary life in drawing room, club, shooting field or camp for the threadbare traditions, stilted sentiment, and fustian talk of conventional melodrama. Whether the original were, or were not, too trivial for reproduction, it is at least human nature to which the mirror was now for the first time during recent years held up. The contrast between Robertson and most of his immediate predecessors who were nearly his contemporaries was not less marked than that between those masterpieces of the Laura Matilda school, which delighted Mrs Wititterly, and the works of Miss Edgeworth, or that between the _Great Cyrus_ and the author of _Waverley_. The _dramatis personae_ of Robertson were the men and women, the youths and maidens, the old bucks and young officers, the pretty servant girls, their ogling followers, the dapper apprentices, the seasoned topers whom the English public had long known from Leech's drawings in the 'London Charivari,' but who had not often been met with recently on the London stage. Now, for the first time within the experience of many, the theatre became the fashion; the stalls at the Prince of Wales's first, and at other houses soon afterwards, were peopled by occupants as modish as the Italian Opera when Piccolomini sang in _Traviata_. Even then, however, the first night of a new drama, though at the most popular playhouse fell very short of reproducing the personal distinctions of a premiere at the Comedie Francaise or the Palais Royal. That was to follow in due time. Early in the sixties an impressario, with judgment sharpened by American experience, became the lessee of the same theatre, the Lyceum, which twenty years earlier had been managed by Charles Mathews and Madame Vestris. The first great feature in Mr Bateman's management was the powerful and picturesque acting of his accomplished daughter in _Leah_ first and in some Shakespearian parts afterwards. About the same time an actor with whose name in coming years the Lyceum was to be more widely associated had given the public specimens of an art surprisingly vigorous and picturesque. Henry Irving first played before a London audience in 1859. In 1866 he had the good fortune to be cast with Miss Herbert (Mrs Crabbe) in one of those character parts in which he has had few equals, the worthless, persecuting husband in _Hunted Down_. This was in the theatre that witnessed the first triumphs of the great singer Braham, that more recently had been filled from pit to gallery by the laughter loving admirers of Mr and Mrs Frank Mathews,[46] or by the appreciative few who realized the charm of the more subtle impersonations of Alfred Wigan. The place, therefore, was of good omen for the rising star. The most accomplished dramatic critic whom in England the century has produced, George Henry Lewes, and the lady who bore his name, but is best known to the public as George Eliot, author of _Adam Bede_, both witnessed the debut. 'Ten or fifteen years hence,' said the gentleman, 'that young man will be where Kean once was, at the head of the English stage.' 'In my opinion,' faintly murmured the lady, 'he is there already.'

Meanwhile, the popular taste of English playgoers had been educated by the impersonations of Miss Faucit as well as by her own literary expositions of Shakespeare's characters, and by the written discourses of her future husband, Sir Theodore Martin on cognate subjects. The daughter of an actress, Lady Martin received her first education for the stage from an actor, one of a race of actors, Percival Farren, of the Haymarket Theatre. This is the family which at the end of the eighteenth century gave a Countess, acknowledged on Mrs Abington's retirement to be the first actress of her day, to the Derby peerage. Its living representative, the gifted and exemplary William Farren, more than recalls to the present generation the genius of his predecessors. Soon after her arrival in London, Miss Faucit joined Macready's company, and her 'Juliet' became a classical performance. Probably the last occasion that this lady was seen on the London stage is her performance of 'Rosalind' in _As You Like It_ at Drury Lane during the sixties. As a proof that Lady Martin has exercised an abiding influence on her profession for good it is enough to mention the names of Mrs P. H. Lee, as 'Juliet,' of Mrs Boucicault, the graceful and accomplished wife of a popular husband, Miss Kate Terry (Mrs Arthur Lewis), peerless in romantic melodrama, under the lesseeship of Benjamin Webster at the Adelphi. Some bright particular star from the days of Sir Walter Scott downwards has never failed any generation of the Terry family; Henry Irving's inexhaustible co-adjutress has only illustrated anew the ancestral tradition. Artists whether of the pen or pencil, practically experienced in all the publics of Europe, have been unanimous in testifying that there is none with whom conscientious toil and excellence are so sure ultimately to yield the reward of fame and profit as the public of England.

The theatre with us was firmly established as an honourable and lucrative institution directly men of intellectual power and of competent education began to throw their energies into it as they might have done into the law, the legislature or any other of the liberal professions. Samuel Phelps was born some ten years later than Macready; he was trained in Macready's company; under him Sadler's Wells became once more the prosperous school of classical drama. Some years junior to Phelps, Walter Montgomery laboured in the same line. Both of those men unconsciously were preparing the way for Henry Irving; they were each endowed with high gifts of mind as well as with shrewd common sense. Their detractors of course were not wanting. Neither Montgomery nor Phelps, on the score of public appreciation, had more reason to complain than Henry Irving himself. If, therefore, the reason is asked for the revived popularity of the play in all grades of English life, the answer must be not so much the exceptional brilliance of individual successes as the qualifications of industry not less than aptitude which a succession of actors has brought to the vocation. Sir Henry Irving, as a stage artist may have his mannerisms or defects. Whatever career he might have embraced, he would have made his mark in it, because, besides being a great actor, he is a remarkably clever and far-seeing man. He is therefore in this way historically true to the best associations of his art.

Public speakers at theatrical fund dinners are apt to cite as novel instances of the drama's popularity the proportion of young actors who have been educated at Eton or taken a degree at Oxford. So far from this being a novelty, it is rather, as the illustrations mentioned above show, the reversion to an older order. Henry Irving's knighthood only implied the just recognition of qualities that in another walk of life would have earlier elicited for their possessor a like distinction from the State.

In accounting for the approximation as to popularity of a London to a Paris premiere which to-day so much impresses the foreign visitor, other circumstances must be remembered. During the last decade or two, especially since the collapse of the second French Empire, the English capital has been, to an entirely new extent, the pleasure ground of the world, and at all seasons of the year contains a large floating population of strangers, Anglo-American or European, as well as of British subjects visiting for a few days from other parts of the Kingdom, the capital on the Thames. These birds of passage seldom possess a large social acquaintance in the capital; the men among them do not always belong to clubs; the ladies are too busy shopping to invite, or to make, calls; the theatre is thus for a constantly increasing proportion of those who sleep within the bills of mortality the easiest and the most attractive form of pleasure. Hence as might be expected, the far more amusing repertory of the Victorian theatre at the end of this century than at any previous epoch. With a Pinero, or a Grundy, to mention only two typical names; with pieces so diverting as _Charley's Aunt_, or _Bootles' Baby_, to mention only one or two representative plays, the Englishman whose chief pastime the play has become finds laughter moving relaxation as effectually, more economically, and to himself a great deal more intelligibly within the roar of his own Strand, than by travelling to a Paris boulevard. The integral part now occupied by the play in the life of the most respectable portion of the middle class is shown by the spacious theatres that have lately risen in such decorous suburbs of the metropolis as Brixton.

Its utility as an agency of mental improvement and moral teaching is suggested by the surprising success of the new religious drama that beginning perhaps with the _Judah_ of H. A. Jones, has reached its climax of well deserved success in _The Sign of the Cross_ of Wilson Barrett. The suburban theatres have not as yet provided a great field for original talent in the playwright; as might be expected, their patrons seem to prefer pieces that have already received the stamp of public approval. While musical comedies indicate an increasingly popular compromise between Drury Lane and the _Alhambra_, the romantic drama has once more proved to be not less attractive than when three decades since _The Corsican Brothers_ first filled the Princess's with enthusiastic audiences. This perhaps at the present moment is the latest of all the successful revivals on the English stage. The plays respectively founded on novels, _The Prisoner of Zenda_, and _Under the Red Robe_, are not only above the average as to merit, but show that the popularity of the cup-and-saucer drama of Albery and Robertson is consistent with a vigorous affection for the melodrama which in Bulwer's _Lady of Lyons_, and in Boucicault's _Colleen Bawn_ once absorbed the enthusiasm of the pit.