The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irving took up Richelieu next, and in it strove victoriously against memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at him—men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean’s successor. As though to complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side when he played Richard III. was that which Kean had carried in the same rôle, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick’s. A colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the other was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it were, the insignia of royalty.

He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian rôles, like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.

Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare. Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days (and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is required for masterpieces. The mise en scène, he tells us, should not give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its rôle is a negative one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this programme strictly adhered to.

The restoration of Shakespeare’s text, however, was a still more important achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us from Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III. He continued the good work with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for an “acting edition” of the Shakespearian masterpieces,—an actable Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows:—Omissions, often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.

I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is better as Richard III. than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions jerky and irregular. A critic has compared his gait in Hamlet to that of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being perfect,—a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the outset of his career would have freed him completely.

A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of his rôles, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to be the character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out “Burbadge” instead of “Richard,” we also, in Irving’s case, forget the rôle, and see only the actor; and the play assumes for us the character of an admirable lesson in the art of recitation.

Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all members of his profession, even beginners.

It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes. First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to understand the author’s meaning. When this has been mastered, you may trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at will.

Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot’s paradox about the actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love with the actress who has to enact a love scene with him? or thirst for blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often contrary emotions—supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable of them—would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions, but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture, though—what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician, psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for his calling.

Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly,—a life in which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson in the art of living. “Get the working-man to go to the theatre,” he declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house. The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live, and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.

This is the substance of the great actor’s teaching, as set forth by him on many occasions,—I shall not say in defence of his profession: the theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended—but rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine’s as his starting-point, he dealt with that great writer’s opinions on the same plane of thought, in a style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity, a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art, and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree, therefore, which entitled him “Sir Henry” in May 1895, could not have come at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only “my lady’s” dressmaker and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving’s case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised above them.

Irving seems to me—may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can boast?—to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in nothing,—he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch to his portrait:—“The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to fail as an art.” And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare because in Irving’s hand he is also a mine of gold?

CHAPTER VII

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.