The above was not quite as dignified as Milton’s ‘Arcades,’ played by the children of the Dowager Countess of Derby, at her house, Harefield Place; or as ‘Comus,’ acted by the young Egertons before the Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle. Perhaps it was more amusing.
One of our own best amateur actresses was the Princess Mary of Cambridge (now Duchess of Teck). This excellent lady had once to commence the piece (a musical piece, written for the occasion by an amateur) on a private stage in one of the noblest of our country mansions. An illustrious audience was waiting for the curtain to go up; but the kindly-hearted princess was thinking of some less illustrious folks, who were not among that audience and whom she desired to see there, namely, the servants of the household—as many as could be spared. They had had much trouble, and she hoped they would be allowed to share in the amusement. There was some difficulty; but it was only when she was informed that the servants were really ‘in front,’ that the ‘Queen of Hearts’ (her part in the piece) answered that she was ready to begin the play. She never acted better than on this occasion.
As we look at the two volumes of Mr. Planché’s autobiography we experience a sensation of delight. They remind us of a story told of Maria Tree, long after she had become Mrs. Bradshaw, and was accustomed to luxuries unknown in her early and humble life. She was one night crossing the stage behind the curtain, on a short way to a private box, when she stopped for a moment, and, as she caught the well-known incense of the foot-lights, joyously exclaimed, ‘The smell of the lamps! How I love it!’ Therewith she spoke of the old times, when she worked hard—that is, ‘played,’ for the support of others as well as for her own support; and what a happy time it was, and how she wished it could all come over again! The noble peer who had the honour of escorting her, looked profoundly edified, smiled good-humouredly, and then completed his duty as escort. Here we open Mr. Planché’s book, and catch from it a ‘smell of the lamps.’ Yes, there must have been—must be—something delicious in it to those who have achieved success. To old play-goers there is a similar delight in books of stage reminiscences which include memories of great actors whom those play-goers have seen in their youth. A few of these still survive to talk of the old glories and to prove by comparison of ‘cast’ that for the costly metal of other days we have nothing now but pinchbeck. We have heard one of the old gentlemen of the ancien régime talk, with unfeigned emotion, of the way in which ‘The Gamester’ used to be acted by Mrs. Siddons, John Kemble, Charles Kemble, and George Frederick Cooke. How ladies sobbed and found it hard to suppress a shriek; how gentlemen veiled their eyes to hide the impertinent tears, and tried to look as if nothing were the matter; and, how people who had seen the dreadful tragedy more than once, and dreaded to witness it again, were so fascinated that they would stand in the box-passages gazing through the glass panels of the box doors, beholding the action of the drama, but sparing themselves the heartbreaking utterances of the chief personages. Within a few weeks we have heard a veteran play-goer give imitations of John Kemble in ‘Coriolanus,’ which he last played more than half a century ago! It had the perfect enunciation which was the chief merit of the Kemble school; it was dignified; it gave an idea of a grand actor, and it was a pleasure conferred on the hearers such as Charles Mathews the elder used to confer on his audiences ‘At Home,’ when he presented them with Tate Wilkinson, and they were delighted to make acquaintance with the famous man who had so long before got, as the old Irishwoman said at Billy Fullam’s funeral, his ‘pit order at last.’
While we wait for a paper-cutter to open the closed pages of Mr. Planché’s book, we will just remark that those were days when audiences were differently arranged to what they are now. In the little summer-house in the Haymarket, when stalls were not yet invented, the two-shilling gallery was the rendezvous of some of the richest tradesmen in Pall Mall and the neighbourhood around. At that period, London tradesmen lived and slept at their places of business. They did not pass their nights at a country house. London audiences were made up almost entirely of London people. In the present day, they are largely made up of visitors from the country. In proportion as travelling companies of actors of merit increase and continue to represent plays sometimes better than they are represented in London, country visitors will cease to go to ‘the play,’ as it is called, in the metropolis, and will find some other resort where they can shuffle off the mortal coil of tediousness which holds them bound during their absence from home.
In good old times the pit was the place, not only for the critics, but for the most eminent men of the day. Indeed, not only eminent men, but ladies also, whose granddaughters, as they sweep into the stalls, would think meanly of their grandmothers and grandfathers, and would shudder at the thought of themselves, being in that vulgar part of the house. It is an excellent vulgarity that sits there. Nineteen out of twenty, perhaps ninety out of a hundred, of persons in the pit are the truest patrons of the drama; they pay for the places; and, generally speaking, the places are made as uncomfortable as if the occupiers were intruders of whom the managers would be glad to get rid.
The best proof of the quality of the old pittites is to be found in the diary of the Right Hon. William Windham (1784-1810). One of the entries in the first-named year records a breakfast with Sir Joshua Reynolds, a visit to Miss Kemble, and ‘went in the evening to the pit with Mrs. Lukin.’ The play was ‘The Gamester.’ A day or two afterwards the great statesman went with Steevens and Miss Kemble to see ‘Measure for Measure.’ ‘After the play,’ writes Windham, ‘went with Miss Kemble to Mrs. Siddons’s dressing-room; met Sheridan there.’ What interest Windham took in that actress is illustrated in another entry: ‘Feb. 1, 1785. Drove to Mrs. Siddons in order to communicate a hint on a passage in Lady Macbeth, which she was to act the next night. Not finding her at home, went to her at the play-house.’ Well might Mrs. Siddons write, on inviting Windham to tea: ‘I am sure you would like it; and you can’t be to learn that I am truly sensible of the honour of your society.’
The pits in the London theatres have undergone as great a change, though a different one, as the pit at the opera, which now only nominally exists, if it exist at all. It is now an area of stalls; the old price for admission is doubled, and the entertainment is not worth an eighth of what charged for it compared with that of the olden time, when for an eight-and-sixpenny pit ticket you had Grisi, Mario, Lablache, and Tamburini, with minor vocalists, thorough artists, in the same opera. What a spectacle was the grand old house! The old aristocracy had their boxes for the season, as they had their town and country houses. You got intimate with them by sight; it was a pleasure to note how the beautiful young daughters of each family grew in gracefulness. You took respectful part in the marriages. At each opening season you marked whether the roses bloomed or paled upon the young cheeks, and you sympathised accordingly. You spoke of Lord Marlshire’s look with a hearty neighbourly feeling, and you were glad that Lady Marlshire really seemed only the eldest sister of a group of beauties who were her daughters. As for the sons of those great families, they were in full dress, sauntering or gossiping in that Elysium ill-naturedly called ‘Fops’ Alley’; they were exchanging recognitions with friends and kinsmen in all parts of the house. If you heard a distant laugh—loud enough where the laughers were moved to it—you might be sure it was caused by Lord Alvanley, who was telling some absurdly jocose story to a group of noble Young Englanders in the pit passage under the boxes. We have seen the quiet entry of a quiet man into a private box make quite a stir. Every stranger felt that the quiet man was a man of mark; he came to snatch a momentary joy, and then away to affairs of state again; he was the prime minister. Dozens of opera-goers have recorded their souvenirs of the old glorious days when the opera, as they say, was an institution, opened only twice a week: whereas each house is merely an ordinary theatre, with audiences that are never, two nights running, chiefly made up of the same habitués. They have told what friendly interest used to be aroused when the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, the Princess Victoria, took their seats every opera night. We seem again to hear a ringing laugh, and we know it comes from the sparkling English lady with an Italian title, the Countess St. Antonio. We seem again to see that marvellously audacious-looking pair, Lady Blessington and Count D’Orsay, gauging the house and appearing to differ as to conclusions. The red face of the Duchess of St. Albans and the almost as ruddy vessel from which her tea was poured have been described over and over again; and, in the records of other chroniclers we fancy that once more there come upon us the voices of two gentlemen who talked so above the singers that a remonstrant ‘Hush!’ went round the building. The offenders were the Duke of Gloucester and Sir Robert Wilson. The soldier would draw out of sight, and the prince would make a sort of apologetic remark in a voice a little higher than that which had given offence. These are reminiscences chronicled in the memoirs, diaries, and fugitive articles of old opera-goers.
Mr. Planché must have been among those ancient lovers of music and of song, and that he should record his experiences is a thing to be grateful for, especially as he writes of the battle and joys of life while he is still in harness and the wreathed bowl is in his hand. In 1818, he began with burlesque—‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’ written for amateurs, and taken by Harley, unknown to the author, to Drury Lane. In 1872, after fifty-four years of work, Mr. Planché executed the better portion of ‘Babil and Bijou,’ which, compared with ‘Amoroso,’ is as the Great Eastern steamer to a walnut-shell. We heartily welcome all chroniclers of an art that lives only in the artist, and never survives him in tradition. Our own collection begins with Downes, and Mr. Planché’s emerald-green volumes will find room there. Scores of biographies are ‘squeezing’ room for him. Fred Reynolds’s portrait seems to say, ‘Let Planché come next to me.’ As we look at those dramatic historians we are struck with their usefulness as well as their power of entertaining. For example, a paragraph in one of the most ancient of dramatic chronicles—the ‘Roscius Anglicanus,’ by old Downes, the prompter—is of infinite use to the reputation of Shakespeare. Dryden, who produced his version of ‘The Tempest’ to show how Shakespeare ought to have written it, maintained that after the Restoration our national poet was not much cared for by the people, and that for a long time two plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted for one of Shakespeare. In Downes’s record the prompter registers the revival of ‘Hamlet;’ and, without any reference to Dryden, or knowledge, indeed, of his depreciation of Shakespeare, he states that the tragedy in question brought more money to the house and more reputation to the players than any piece by any other author during a great number of years.
To some nameless chronicler we owe a knowledge of the fact that Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ was played on board ship, in Shakespeare’s time, by sailors. Why was this left unnoticed when the royal captain of the Galatea took the chair at the last Theatrical Fund dinner? But for the chroniclers we should be ignorant that, just six hundred years ago, the Chester mysteries and passion-plays were at their highest point of attraction. Indeed, they could never have been unattractive; for all those who undertook to witness the performance during about a month’s season were promised to be relieved from hundreds of years of the fire of purgatory. What a delicious feeling to the earnest play-goer, that the more regularly he went to the play on these occasions, the more pleasantly he would work out his salvation! The different dramatic scenes were represented by the best actors in the Chester trading companies. One would like to know on what principle the distribution of parts was made by the manager. Why should the Tanners have been chosen to play the ‘Fall of Lucifer’? What virtue was there in the Blacksmiths, that they should be especially appointed to enact ‘The Purification’? or, in the Butchers, that they should represent ‘The Temptation’? or, in the Bakers, that they should be deemed the fittest persons to illustrate ‘The Last Supper’? One can understand the Cooks being selected for ‘The Descent into Hell,’ because they were accustomed to stand fire; but what of angelical or evangelical could be found exclusively in the Tailors, that they should be cast for ‘The Ascension’? Were the Skinners, whose mission it was to play ‘The Resurrection,’ not deemed worthy of going higher? Or, were the Tailors lighter men, and more likely to rise with alacrity?
We are inclined to think that the idea of plays being naughty things and players more than naughty persons in the early days is a vulgar error. Plays must have been highly esteemed by the authorities, or Manningtree in Essex (and probably many another place) would not have enjoyed its privilege of holding a fair by tenure of exhibiting a certain number of stage plays annually.
There was undoubtedly something Aristophanic in many of the early plays. There was sharp satire, and sensitive ribs which shrank from the point of it. When the Cambridge University preachers satirised the Cambridge town morals the burgesses took the matter quietly; but when the Cambridge University players (students) caricatured the town manners in 1601, exaggerating their defects on the University stage, there was much indignation.
The presence of Queen Elizabeth at plays in London, and the acting of them in the mansions which she honoured by a visit, are proofs of the dignity of the profession. We have her, in the year last named, at one of the most popular of London theatres, with a bevy of fair listening maids of honour about her. This was in her old age. ‘I have just come,’ writes Chamberlain to Charlton, ‘from the Blackfriars, where I saw her at the play with all her candida auditrices.’ At Christmas time, Carlile writes to Chamberlain, ‘There has been such a small court this Christmas, that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays and pastimes.’
And if the name of Elizabeth should have a sweet savour to actors generally, not less delicious to dramatic memories should be the mayor of Abingdon, in that queen’s time, who invited so many companies of players to give a taste of their quality in that town for fee and reward. If any actor to whom the history of the stage be of interest should turn up at Abingdon, let him get the name of this play-loving mayor, and hang it over the fire-place of the best room of the Garrick, or rather of the club that will be—the social, cosey, comfortable, professional, not palatial nor swellish, but homelike house, that the Garrick was in its humbler and happier days.
Now the companies the Mayor had down to Abingdon included the Queen’s players, the Earl of Leicester’s players, the players of the Earl of Worcester, of Lord Sussex, of the Earl of Bath, of Lord Berkely, of Lord Shrewsbury, of Lord Derby, and of Lord Oxford. Is there no one who can get at the names of these actors, and of the pieces they played—played for rewards varying from twenty pence to twenty shillings? Will that thoroughly English actor, one of the few accomplished comedians of the well-trained times now left to us, be the more successfully urged to the task, if we remind him that, in 1573, his professional namesake, Mr. Compton, took his players to Abingdon, and earned four shillings by the exercise of their talents?
The Elizabethan time was a very lively one. It had its theatrical cheats and its popular riots. We learn from State records that on the anniversary of the Queen’s accession, November, 1602, ‘One Verner, of Lincoln’s Inn, gave out bills of a play on Bankside, to be acted by persons of account; price of entry, 2s. 6d. or 1s. 6d. Having got most of the money he fled, but was taken and brought before the Lord Chief Justice, who made a jest of it, and bound him over in 5l. to appear at the sessions. The people, seeing themselves deluded, revenged themselves on the hangings, chairs, walls, &c., and made a great spoil. There was much good company, and many noblemen.’
The Queen died in March, 1603. There were the usual ‘blacks,’ but the court and stage were brilliant again by Christmas. Early in January of the following year people were talking of the gay doings, the brilliant dresses, the noble dramas, the grand bear-baitings, the levity, dancing, and the golden play, which had solemnised the Christmas just ended. Thirteen years later Shakespeare died, and in little more than half a century small spirits whispered that he was not such a great spirit himself after all.
In Mr. Planché’s professional autobiography, which makes us as discursive as the biographer himself, there is a seeming inclination to overpraise some actors of the present time at the expense of those whom we must consider their superiors in bygone days. As far as this may tend to show that there is no actor so good but that his equal may in time be discovered, we have no difference with the author of these ‘Recollections.’ It is wonderful how speedily audiences recover the loss of their greatest favourites. Betterton, who restored the stage soon after Monk had restored the monarchy, was called ‘the glory and the grief’ of that stage. The glory while he acted and lived in the memories of those who had seen him act. To the latter his loss was an abiding grief. For years after Betterton’s decease it was rank heresy to suppose that he might be equalled. Pope, in expressive, yet not the happiest of his verses, has alluded to this prejudice. The prejudice, nevertheless, was unfounded. Betterton remains indeed with the prestige of being an actor who has not been equalled in many parts, who has been excelled in none. Old playgoers, who could compare him in his decline with young Garrick in his vigour, were of different opinions as to the respective merits of these two great masters of their art. We may fairly conclude that Garrick’s Hamlet was as ‘great’ as Betterton’s; that the latter’s Sir John Brute was hardly equal to Garrick’s Abel Drugger; and that the Beverley of the later actor was as perfect an original creation as the Jaffier of Betterton.
When Wilks made the ‘Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee,’ a success by the spirit and ease with which he played the part of Sir Harry Wildair, Farquhar, the author of the comedy, said ‘That he made the part will appear from hence: whenever the stage has the misfortune to lose him Sir Harry Wildair may go to the Jubilee.’ Nevertheless, Margaret Woffington achieved a new success for that play by the fire and joyousness of her acting. When Wilks died, poets sang in rapturous grief of his politeness, grace, gentility, and ease; and they protested that a supernatural voice had been heard moaning through the air—
Notwithstanding this, British comedy did not die; Garrick’s Ranger was good compensation for Wilks’s Sir Harry.
When Garrick heard of Mrs. Cibber’s death, in 1766, he exclaimed, ‘Mrs. Cibber dead! Then tragedy has died with her!’ At that very time a little girl of twelve years of age was strolling from country theatre to country theatre, and she was destined to be an actress of higher quality and renown than even Mrs. Cibber, namely, Sarah Siddons. Mrs. Pritchard could play Lady Macbeth as grandly as Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs. Crawford (Spranger Barry’s widow), who laughed at the ‘paw and pause’ of the Kemble school, was a Lady Randolph of such force and pathos that Sarah feared and hated her. Not many years after Garrick had pronounced Tragedy and Cibber to have expired together, his own death was described as having eclipsed the harmless gaiety of nations, and Melpomene wept with Thalia for their common adopted son, and neither would be comforted. But as Siddons was compensation for Mrs. Cibber, so the Kembles, to use an old simile, formed the very fair small change for Garrick. When Kemble himself departed, his most ardent admirers or worshippers could not assert that his legitimate successor could not be found. Edmund Kean had already supplanted him. The romantic had thrust out the classic; the natural had taken place of the artificial; and Shakespeare, by flashes of the Kean lightning, proved more attractive than the stately eloquence of ‘Cato,’ or the measured cadences of ‘Coriolanus.’
Edmund Kean, however, has never had a successor in certain parts. Mrs. F. Kemble has justly said of him: ‘Kean is gone, and with him are gone Shylock, Richard, and Othello.’ Mrs. Siddons, at her first coming, did not dethrone the old popular favourites. After she had withdrawn from the stage, Miss O’Neill cast her somewhat under the shadow of oblivion; but when old Lady Lucy Meyrick saw Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth in her early triumph, she acknowledged the fine conception of the character, but the old lady, full of ancient dramatic memories, declared that, compared with Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Siddons’s grief was the grief of a cheesemonger’s wife. Miss Hawkins is the authority for this anecdote, the weak point in which is that in Lady Macbeth the player is not called upon to exhibit any illustration of grief.
We have said that Kean never had a superior in certain parts. Elliston considered himself to be superior in one point; and by referring to some particular shortcoming in other actors Elliston contrived to establish himself as facile princeps of dramatic geniuses—in his own opinion. This we gather from Moncrieff, whom Elliston urged to become his biographer. He would not interfere with Moncrieff’s treatment of the subject. ‘I will simply call your attention, my dear fellow,’ said Elliston, ‘to three points, which you may find worthy of notice, when you draw your parallels of great actors. Garrick could not sing; I can. Lewis could not act tragedy; I can. Mossop could not play comedy; I can. Edmund Kean never wrote a drama; I have.’ In the last comparison Elliston was altogether out. In the cheap edition of ‘Their Majesties’ Servants’ I have inserted a copy of a bill put up by Kean, in 1811, at York, in the ball-room of the Minster Yard of which city Edmund Kean and his young wife announced a two nights’ performance of scenes from plays, imitations, and songs, the whole enacted by the poor strolling couple. In that bill Mr. Kean is described as ‘late of the Theatres Royal, Haymarket and Edinburgh, and author of “The Cottage Foundling, or Robbers of Ancona,” now preparing for immediate representation at the theatre Lyceum.’ We never heard of this representation having taken place. Hundreds of French dramas once came into the cheap book market from the Lyceum, where they had been examined for the purpose of seeing whether any of them could be made useful in English dresses. Some of them undoubtedly were. Kean’s manuscript drama may still be lying among the Arnold miscellanies; if found, we can only hope that the owner will make over ‘The Cottage Foundling and the Robbers of Ancona’ to the Dramatic College. The manuscript would be treasured there as long as the College itself lasts. How long that will be we cannot say; probably as long as the College serves its present profitable purpose. We could wish that the emeriti players had a more lively lookout. A view from its doorway over the heath is as cheerful as that of an empty house to the actor who looks through the curtain at it on his benefit night!
Edmund Kean’s loss has not been supplied as Mrs. Siddons’s was, to a certain extent, and to that actress’s great distaste, by Miss O’Neill; but Drury Lane has flourished with and by its Christmas pantomimes. Audiences cannot be what they were in Mr. Planché’s younger days. They examine no coin that is offered to them. They take what glitters as real currency, and are content. When we were told the other day of a player at the Gaiety representing Job Thornberry in a moustache, we asked if the pit did not shave him clean out of the comedy? Job Thornberry in a moustache! ‘Well,’ was the rejoinder, ‘he only follows suit. He imitates the example of Mr. Sothern, who played Garrick in a moustache.’ We were silent, and thought of the days when actors dressed their characters from portraits, as William Farren did his Frederick and his Charles XII.
If Mr. Planché’s book had not been as suggestive as it is purely historical we should not have been so long coming to it. But he records a fact or makes a reflection, and straightway a reader, who has long memories of books or men, goes far back into older records in search of contrasts or of parallels. We come to him now definitely, and do not again mean to let him go, as far as his dramatic experiences are concerned. Mr. Planché makes even his birth theatrical; he says, ‘I believe I made my first appearance in Old Burlington Street on the 27th of February, 1796, about the time the farce begins’ (used to begin?) ‘at the Haymarket, that is, shortly after one o’clock in the morning.’ The Haymarket season, however, ran at that time only from June to September. In spite of ourselves, Mr. Planché’s record of his birth leads us to a subject that is, however, in connection with the record. We find that Mr. Planché was not only of the Kemble and Kean periods, since which time the stage has been ‘nothing’ especial, but that he was born under both. On the night of his birth John Kemble played Manly in ‘The Plain Dealer,’ with a cast further including Jack Bannister, the two Palmers, Dodd, Suett, and Mrs. Jordan! Think of the dolls and puppets and groups of sticks whom people are now asked to recognise as artists, and who gain more in a night than the greatest of the above-named players earned in a week. A few nights later Edmund Kean, if he himself is to be credited rather than theatrical biographers, made his first appearance on any stage as the ‘Robber’s Boy’ on the first night the ‘Iron Chest’ was acted—a play in which the boy was destined to surpass, in Sir Edward Mortimer, the original representative, John Kemble. At the other house little Knight, the father of the present secretary of the Royal Academy, made his début in London; and the father of Mr. Macready was playing utility with a finish that, if he were alive to do it now, would entitle him to a name on ‘posters’ three feet high, and to the sarcasm of managers, who readily pay comedians who ‘draw’ and laugh at them and at the public who are drawn by them. But here is Mr. Planché waiting.
Well! he seems to have been backward in speaking; though he says, as a proof to the contrary, that he spoke Rolla’s speech to his soldiers shortly after he had found his own. ‘Pizarro,’ we will observe, was not produced till 1799, and was not printed then. But, on the other hand, Mr. Planché, like Pope, seems to have lisped in numbers, for at ten he wrote odes, sonnets, and particularly an address to the Spanish patriots, which he describes as ‘really terrible to listen to.’ When he passed into his teens, the serious question of life turned up. He could not be made to be a watchmaker, the calling of his good father, a French refugee. Barrister, artist, geometrician, cricketer, were vocations which were considered and set aside. His tutor in geometry died before the pupil could discover the quadrature of the circle; and the other callings not seeming to give him a chance, Mr. Planché bethought himself that, as he was fond of writing, he was especially qualified to become a bookseller. It was while he was learning this métier that his dramatic propensities were further developed. They had begun early; he had been ‘bribed to take some nasty stuff when an urchin, on one occasion, by the present of a complete harlequin’s suit, mask, wand, and all, and on another by that of a miniature theatre and strong company of pasteboard actors,’ in whose control he enjoyed what Charles Dickens longed to possess—a theatre given up to him, with absolute despotic sway, to do what he liked with, house, actors and pieces, monarch of all he surveyed. Mr. Kent has published this ‘longing’ in his ‘Charles Dickens as a Reader,’ and added one shadow on Dickens’s character to the many which Mr. Forster has made public, and which thoughtful biographers ought to have suppressed. We allude particularly to where Dickens describes his mother as advertising to receive young ladies as pupils in a boarding school, without having the means to make preparations for their reception; also his showing-up of his own father as Micawber; and above all, his recording that he never had forgiven and never would forgive his mother for wishing him to go back to his humble work at the blacking-maker’s instead of to school. The light which thoughtless worshippers place before their favourite saint often blackens him at least as much as it does him honour.
While under articles with the bookseller Mr. Planché amused himself as amateur actor at the then well-known private theatres in Berwick Street, Catherine Street, Wilton Street, and Pancras Street. The autobiographer says he there ‘murdered many principal personages of the acting drama in company with several accomplices who have since risen to deserved distinction upon the public boards.’ He adds, the probability, had he continued his line of art, of his becoming by this time ‘a very bad actor, had not “the sisters three and such odd branches of learning” occasioned me by the merest accident to become an indifferent dramatist.’ He says jocosely that finding nothing in Shakespeare or Sheridan worthy of him, he wrote for amateurs the burlesque entitled ‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’ which one of the company showed to Harley, who at once put it on the stage of Drury Lane in April 1818. There, night after night, Queen Coquetinda stabbed Mollidusta, King Amoroso stabbed the Queen, Roastando stabbed Amoroso, who however stabbed his stabber, the too amorous cook—all to excellent music and capitally acted, whether in the love-making, the killing, or the recovery. Drury Lane Theatre is described by Mr. Planché as being at the time ‘in a state of absolute starvation.’ Yet it was a season in which Kean led in tragedy and Elliston in comedy, and David Fisher played Richard and Hamlet as rival to the former, and little Clara Fisher acted part of Richard the Third in ‘Lilliput.’ Drury Lane had not had so good a company for years; and besides revived pieces of sterling merit it brought out ‘Rob Roy the Gregarach,’ and the ‘Falls of Clyde;’ and Kean played Othello and Richard, Hamlet and Reuben Glenroy, Octavian and Sir Giles, Shylock and Luke, Sir Edward Mortimer and King John, Oroonoko, Richard Plantagenet (‘Richard Duke of York’), and Selim (‘Bride of Abydos’); Barabbas (‘Jew of Malta’), Young Norval, Bertram, and, for his benefit, Alexander the Great, Sylvester Daggerwood, and Paul in ‘Paul and Virginia.’ Nevertheless the success of ‘Amoroso’ was the popular feature of that Drury Lane season. It made Mr. Planché become a dramatist in earnest. ‘At this present date,’ he says, ‘I have put upon the stage, of one description and another, seventy-six pieces.’
The English stage has not been wanting in an illustrious line of right royal queens of tragedy. Mrs. Barry is the noble founder, and perhaps the noblest queen of that brilliant line. Then came Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Spranger Barry (Mrs. Crawford), Mrs. Siddons (who hated Mrs. Crawford for not abdicating), and Miss O’Neill, whom Mrs. Siddons equally disliked for coming after her.
With all these the lovers of dramatic literature are well acquainted. Of the contemporary line of French tragedy queens very little is known in this country; nevertheless the dynasty is one of great brilliancy, and the details are not without much dramatic interest.
In the year 1644, in the city of Rouen, there lived a family named Desmares, which family was increased in that year by the birth of a little girl who was christened Marie. Corneille, born in the same city, was then eight-and-thirty years of age. Rouen is now proud of both of them—poet and actress. The actress is only known to fame by her married name. The clever Marie Desmares became the wife of the player, Champmeslé. Monsieur was to Madame very much what poor Mr. Siddons was to his illustrious consort. Madame, or Mademoiselle, or La Champmeslé, as she was called indifferently, associated with Corneille by their common birth-place, was more intimately connected with Racine, who was her senior by five years. La Champmeslé was in her twenty-fifth year when she made her début in Paris as Hermione, in Racine’s masterpiece, ‘Andromaque.’ For a long time Paris could talk of nothing but the new tragedy and the new actress. The part from which the piece takes its name was acted by Mdlle. Duparc, whom Racine had carried off from Molière’s company. The author was very much interested in this lady, the wife of a M. Duparc. Madame was, when a widow, the mother of a very posthumous child indeed. The mother died. She was followed to the grave by a troop of the weeping adorers of her former charms, ‘and,’ says Racine, alluding to himself, ‘the most interested of them was half dead as he wept.’
The poet was aroused from his grief by a summons from the king, who, in presence of the sensitive Racine’s bitterest enemy, Louvois, accused him of having robbed and poisoned his late mistress. The accusation was founded on information given by the infamous woman, Voisin, who was a poisoner by passion and profession, and was executed for her devilish practices. The information was found to be utterly false, and Racine, absolved, soon found consolation and compensation.
He became the master of La Champmeslé, and taught her how to play the heroines of the dramas which he wrote expressly for her. She, in her turn, became the mistress of her tutor. Of his teaching indeed she stood in little need, except to learn from him his ideas and object, as author of the play. She was not only sublime, but La Champmeslé was the first sublime actress that had hitherto appeared on the French stage. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter:—
La Champmeslé is something so extraordinary that you have never seen anything like it in all your life. One goes to hear the actress, and not the play. I went to see ‘Ariadne’ for her sake alone. The piece is inspired: the players execrable. But as soon as La Champmeslé comes upon the stage a murmur of gladness runs throughout the house, and the tears of the audience flow at her despair.
The magic of the actress lured Madame de Sévigné’s son, the young Marquis, from the side of Ninon de l’Enclos. ‘He is nothing but a pumpkin fricasseed in snow,’ said the perennial beauty. After the young nobleman thought proper to inform his mother of the interest he took in La Champmeslé, Madame de Sévigné was so proud that she wrote and spoke of her son’s mistress as her daughter-in-law! To her own daughter she wrote as follows of the representation of Racine’s ‘Bajazet,’ in which La Champmeslé acted Roxane:
The piece appeared to me fine. My daughter-in-law seemed to me the most miraculously good actress I had ever seen; a hundred thousand times better than Des Œillets; and I, who am allowed to be a very fair player, am not worthy of lighting the candles for her to act by. Seen near, she is plain, and I am not astonished that my son was ‘choked’ at his first interview with her; but when she breaks into verse she is adorable. I wish you could have come with us after dinner; you would not have been bored. You would probably have shed one little tear, since I let fall a score. You would have admired your sister-in-law.
Two months later the mother sent to her daughter a copy of the piece, and wrote: ‘If I could send you La Champmeslé with it you would admire it, but without her it loses half its value.’
Racine, as Madame de Sévigné said, wrote pieces for his mistress, and not for posterity. ‘If ever,’ she remarked, ‘he should become less young, or cease to be in love, it will be no longer the same thing.’ The interpreter of the poet produced her wonderful effects dressed in exaggerated court costume, and delivering her tirades in a cadenced, sing-song, rise-and-fall style, marking the rhymes rather than keeping to the punctuation. It was the glory of the well-educated arlequin and columbine, ‘dans leur Hostel de Bourgogne,’ to act whole scenes of mock tragedy in the manner of La Champmeslé and her companions. It was such high-toned burlesque as the gifted Robson’s Medea was to the Medea of Ristori.
Lovers consumed fortunes to win the smiles they sought from the plain but attractive actress. Dukes, courtiers, simple gentlemen, flung themselves and all they had at her feet. La Fontaine wrote verses in worship of her, when he was not helping her complaisant husband to write comedies. Boileau, in the most stinging of epigrams, has made the conjugal immorality immortal, and de Sévigné has made the nobly-endowed actress live for ever in her letters.
After Racine shut his eyes, as complaisantly as the husband, to the splendid infidelities of La Champmeslé—when temptation was powerless, and religion took the place of passionate love—he moralised on the sins of his former mistress. ‘The poor wretch,’ he wrote contemptuously to his son, ‘in her last moments, refused to renounce the stage.’ Without such renunciation the Church barred her way to heaven! Racine, however, was misinformed. La Champmeslé died (1698) like so many of her gayest fellows, ‘dans les plus grands sentiments de piété.’ Her widowed husband, when the rascal quality died out of him, kept to drink, and he turned now and then to devotion. One morning, in the year 1708, he went to the church of the Cordeliers, and ordered two masses for the repose of the souls of his mother and of his wife; and he put thirty sous into the hand of the sacristain to pay for them. The man offered him ten sous as change. But M. Champmeslé put the money back: ‘Keep it,’ he said, ‘for a third mass for myself. I will come and hear it.’ Meanwhile he went and sat at the door of a tavern (L’Alliance) waiting for church time. He chatted gaily with his comrades, promised to join them at dinner, and as he rose to his feet he put his hand to his head, uttered a faint shriek, and fell dead to the ground.
As Racine formed La Champmeslé, so did the latter form her niece as her successor on the stage—Mdlle. Duclos, who reigned supreme; but she was a less potential queen of the drama than her mistress. Her vehemence of movement once caused her to make an ignoble fall as she was playing Camille in ‘Les Horaces.’ Her equally vehement spirit once carried her out of her part altogether. At the first representation of La Motte’s ‘Inés de Castro’ the sudden appearance of the children caused the pit to laugh and to utter some feeble jokes. Mdlle. Duclos, who was acting Inés, was indignant. ‘Brainless pit!’ she exclaimed, ‘you laugh at the finest incident in the piece!’ French audiences are not tolerant of impertinence on the stage; but they took this in good part, and listened with interest to the remainder of the play.
Mdlle. Duclos, like her aunt, chanted or recitatived her parts. The French had got accustomed to the sing-song cadences of their rhymed plays, when suddenly a new charm fell upon their delighted ears. The new charmer was Adrienne Lecouvreur—a hat-maker’s daughter, an amateur actress, then a strolling player. In 1717 she burst upon Paris, and in one month she enchanted the city by her acting in Monimia, Electra, and Bérénice, and had been named one of the king’s company for the first parts in tragedy and comedy. Adrienne’s magic lay in her natural simplicity. She spoke as the character she represented might be expected to speak. This natural style had been suggested by Molière, and had been attempted by Baron, but unsuccessfully. It was given to the silver-tongued Adrienne to subdue her audience by this exquisite simplicity of nature. The play-going world was enthusiastic. Whence did the new charmer come? She came from long training in the provinces, and was the glory of many a provincial city before, in 1717, she put her foot on the stage of the capital, and at the age of twenty-seven began her brilliant but brief artistic career of thirteen years. Tracing her early life back, people found her a baby, true child of Paris. In her little-girlhood she saw ‘Polyeucte’ at the playhouse close by her father’s house. She immediately got up the tragedy, with other little actors and actresses. Madame la Présidente La Jay, hearing of the ability of the troupe and of the excellence of Adrienne as Pauline at the rehearsals in a grocer’s warehouse, lent the court-yard of her hotel in the Rue Garancière, where a stage was erected, and the tragedy acted, in presence of an audience which included members of the noblest families in France. All Paris was talking of the marvellous skill of the young company, but especially of Adrienne, when the association called the ‘Comédie Française,’ which had the exclusive right of acting the legitimate drama, arose in its spite, screamed ‘Privilege!’ and got the company suppressed.
The little Adrienne, however, devoted herself to the stage; and when she came to Paris, after long and earnest experience in the provinces, her new subjects hailed their new queen—queen of tragedy, that is to say; for when she took comedy by the hand the muse bore with, rather than smiled upon her; and, wanting sympathy, Adrienne felt none. Outside the stage her heart and soul were surrendered to the great soldier and utterly worthless fellow, Maurice de Saxe. He was the only man to whom she ever gave her heart; and he had given his to so many there was little left for her worth the having. What little there was was coveted by the Princesse de Bouillon. Adrienne died while this aristocratic rival was flinging herself at the feet of the handsome Maréchal; and the wrathful popular voice, lamenting the loss of the dramatic queen, accused the princess of having poisoned the actress.
Adrienne Lecouvreur (whose story has been twice told in French dramas, and once marvellously illustrated by the genius of Rachel), before she made her exit from the world, thought of the poor of her district, and she left them several thousands of francs. The curé of St.-Sulpice was told of the death and of the legacy. The good man took the money and refused to allow the body to be buried in consecrated ground. Princes of the church went to her petits soupers, but they would neither say ‘rest her soul’ nor sanction decent rest to her body; and yet charity had beautified the one, as talent and dignity had marked the other. The corpse of this exquisite actress (she was only forty when she died) was carried in a fiacre, accompanied by a faithful few, to a timber yard in the Faubourg St.-Germain; a hired porter dug the shallow grave of the tragedy queen; and I remember, in my youthful days, a stone post at the corner of the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue de Grenelle which was said to stand over the spot where Monimia had been so ingloriously buried. It was then a solitary place, significantly named La Grenouillière.
And when this drama had closed, a valet of Baron, the great tragedian, looked at an old woman who attended in a box lobby of the Comédie Française, and they mutually thought of their daughter as the successor to poor Adrienne Lecouvreur. Their name was Gaussem; but when, a year after Adrienne’s death, they succeeded in getting the young girl—eighteen, a flower of youth, beauty, and of simplicity, most exquisite, even if affected—they changed their name to Gaussin. As long as she was young, Voltaire intoxicated her with the incense of his flattery. He admired her Junie, Andromaque, Iphigénie, Bérénice; but he worshipped her for her perfect acting in parts he had written—Zaïre (in which there is a ‘bit of business’ with a veil, which Voltaire stole from the ‘handkerchief’ in ‘Othello,’ the author of which he pretended to despise)—Zaïre, Alzire; and in other characters Voltaire swore that she was a miracle of acting. But La Gaussin never equalled Adrienne. She surpassed Duclos in ‘Inés de Castro:’ she was herself to be surpassed by younger rivals. At about forty Voltaire spoke of his once youthful idol as that old girl!
La Gaussin had that excellent thing in woman—a sympathetic voice. Her pathos melted all hearts to the melodious sorrow of her own. In Bérénice, her pathetic charm had such an effect on one of the sentinels, who, in those days, were posted at the wings, that he unconsciously let his musket fall from his arm. Her eyes were as eloquent as her voice was persuasive. In other respects, Clairon (an actress) has said of her that La Gaussin had instinct rather than intelligence, with beauty, dignity, gracefulness, and an invariably winning manner which nothing could resist. Her great fault, according to the same authority, was sameness. Clairon added that she played Zaïre in the same manner as she did Rodogune. It is as if an English actress were to make no difference between Desdemona and Lady Macbeth.
When La Gaussin had reached the age of forty-seven the French pit did what the French nation invariably does—smote down the idol which it had once worshipped. The uncrowned queen married an Italian ballet dancer, one Tevolaigo, who rendered her miserable, but died two years before her, in 1767. It is, however, said that Mdlle. La Gaussin was led to withdraw from the stage out of sincerely religious scruples. A score of French actresses have done the same thing, and long before they had reached the quarantaine.
There is a good illustration of how unwilling the French audiences were to lose a word of La Gaussin’s utterances in Cibber’s ‘Apology.’ ‘At the tragedy of “Zaïre,”’ he says, ‘while the celebrated Mdlle. Gossin (sic) was delivering a soliloquy, a gentleman was seized with a sudden fit of coughing, which gave the actress some surprise and interruption, and, his fit increasing, she was forced to stand silent so long that it drew the eyes of the uneasy audience upon him; when a French gentleman, leaning forward to him, asked him if this actress had given him any particular offence, that he took so public an occasion to resent it? The English gentleman, in the utmost surprise, assured him that, so far from it, he was a particular admirer of her performance; that his malady was his real misfortune, and that if he apprehended any return of it he would rather quit his seat than disoblige either the actor or the audience.’ Colley calls this the ‘publick decency’ of the French theatre.
The Mdlle. Clairon, named above, took up the inheritance which her predecessor had resigned. Claire Joseph Hippolyte Legris de Latude were her names; but, out of the first, she made the name by which she became illustrious. Her life was a long one—1723-1803. She acted from childhood to middle age; first as sprightly maiden, then in opera, till Rouen discovered in her a grand tragédienne, and sent her up to Paris, which city ratified the warrant given by the Rouennais. She made her first appearance as Phèdre, and the Parisians at once worshipped the new and exquisite idol.
The power that Mdlle. Clairon held over her admirers, the sympathy that existed between them, is matter of notoriety. She was once acting Ariane in Thomas Corneille’s tragedy, at Marseilles, to an impassioned southern audience. In the last scene of the third act, where she is eager to discover who her rival can be in the heart of Theseus, the audience took almost as eager a part; and when she had uttered the lines in which she mentions the names of various beauties, but does not name, because she does not suspect, her own sister, a young fellow who was near her murmured, with the tears in his eyes, ‘It is Phædra! it is Phædra!’—the name of the sister in question. Clairon was one of those artists who conceal their art by being terribly in earnest. In her days the pit stood, there were no seats; parterre meant exactly what it says, ‘on the ground.’ The audience there gathered as near the stage as they could. Clairon, in some of her most tragic parts, put such intensity into her acting that as she descended the stage, clothed in terror or insane with rage, as if she saw no pit before her and would sweep through it, the audience there actually recoiled, and only as the great actress drew back did they slowly return to their old positions.
The autobiographical memoirs of Mdlle. Clairon give her rank as author as well as actress. Her style was declamatory, rather heavy, and marked by dramatic catchings of the breath which were among the faults that weaker players imitated. It was the conventional style, not to be rashly broken through in Paris; she accordingly first tried to do so at Bordeaux in 1752. ‘I acted,’ she tells us, ‘the part of Agrippina, and from first to last I played according to my own ideas. This simple, natural, unconventional style excited much surprise in the beginning; but, in the very middle of my first scene, I distinctly heard the words from a person in the pit, “That is really fine!”’ It was an attempt to change the sing-song style, just as Mdlle. Clairon attempted to change the monotonous absurdity of the costume worn by actresses; but she was preceded by earlier reformers, Adrienne Lecouvreur, for instance. Her inclination for natural acting was doubtless confirmed on simply hearing Garrick recite passages from English plays in a crowded French drawing-room. She did not understand a word of English, but she understood Garrick’s expression, and, in her enthusiasm, Mdlle. Clairon kissed Roscius, and then gracefully asked pardon of Roscius’s wife for the liberty she had taken.
It is said that Clairon was one of those actresses who kept themselves throughout the day in the humour of the character they were to act at night. It is obvious that this might be embarrassing to her servants and unpleasant to her friends, family, and visitors. A Lady Macbeth vein all day long in a house would be too much of a good thing; but Mdlle. Clairon defended the practice, as others did: ‘How,’ she would say, ‘could I be exalted, refined, imperial at night, if through the day I had been subdued to grovelling matters, every-day commonness, and polite servility?’ There was something in it; and in truth the superb Clairon, in ordinary life, was just as if she had to act every night the most sublimely imperious characters. With authors she was especially arbitrary, and to fling a manuscript part in the face of the writer, or to box his ears with it, was thought nothing of. Even worse than that was ‘only pretty Fanny’s way.’
The cause of Mdlle. Clairon’s retirement from the stage was a singular one. An actor named Dubois had been expelled from membership with the company of the Théâtre Français, on the ground that his conduct had brought dishonour on the profession. An order from the King commanded the restoration of Dubois, till the question could be decided. For April 15, 1765, the ‘Siege of Calais’ was accordingly announced, with Dubois in his original character. On that evening, Lekain, Molé, and Brizard, advertised to play, did not come down to the theatre at all. Mdlle. Clairon arrived, but immediately went home. There was an awful tumult in the house, and a general demand that the deserters should be clapped into prison. The theatre was closed: Lekain, Molé, and Brizard suffered twenty-four days’ imprisonment, and Mdlle. Clairon was shut up in Fort L’Évêque. At the re-opening of the theatre Bellecourt offered a very humble apology in the names of all the company; but Mdlle. Clairon refused to be included, and she withdrew altogether from the profession.
On a subsequent evening, when she was receiving friends at her own house, the question of the propriety of her withdrawal was rather vivaciously discussed, as it was by the public generally. Some officers were particularly urgent that she should return, and play in the especially popular piece the ‘Siege of Calais.’ ‘I fancy, gentlemen,’ she replied, ‘that if an attempt was made to compel you to serve with a fellow-officer who had disgraced the profession by an act of the utmost baseness, you would rather withdraw than do so?’ ‘No doubt we should,’ replied one of the officers, ‘but we should not withdraw on a day of siege.’ Clairon laughed, but she did not yield. She retired in 1765, at the age of forty-two.
Clairon, being great, had many enemies. They shot lies at her as venomous as poisoned arrows. They identified her as the original of the shameless heroine in the ‘Histoire de Frétillon.’ With her, however, love was not sporadic. It was a settled sentiment, and she loved but one at a time; among others, Marmontel (see his Memoirs), the Margrave of Anspach, and the comedian Larive. After all, Clairon had a divided sway. The rival queen was Marie Françoise Dumesnil. The latter was much longer before the public. The life of Mademoiselle Dumesnil was also longer, namely, from 1711 to 1803. Her professional career in Paris reached from 1737, when she appeared as Clytemnestra, to 1776, when she retired. For eleven years after Clairon’s withdrawal Dumesnil reigned alone. She was of gentle blood, but poor; she was plain, but her face had the beauty of intelligence and expression. When Garrick was asked what he thought of the two great tragédiennes, Clairon and Dumesnil, he replied, ‘Mdlle. Clairon is the most perfect actress I have seen in France.’ ‘And Mdlle. Dumesnil?’ ‘Oh!’ rejoined Garrick, ‘when I see Mdlle. Dumesnil I see no actress at all. I behold only Semiramis and Athalie!’—in which characters, however, she for many years wore the paniers that were in vogue. She is remembered as the first tragic actress who actually ran on the stage. It was in ‘Mérope,’ when she rushed to save Ægisthe, exclaiming, ‘Hold! he is my son!’ She reserved herself for the ‘points,’ whether of pathos or passion. The effect she produced was the result of nature; there was no art, no study. She exercised great power over her audiences. One night having delivered her famous fine in Clytemnestra,
Je maudirais les dieux, s’ils me rendaient le jour,
an old captain standing near her clapped her on the back, with the rather rough compliment of ‘Va-t-en chienne, à tous les diables!’ Rough as it was, Dumesnil was delighted with it. On another occasion, Joseph Chénier, the dramatist, expressed a desire, at her own house, to hear her recite. It is said that she struck a fearful awe into him, as she replied, ‘Asséyez-vous, Néron, et prenez votre place!’—for, as she spoke, she seemed to adopt the popular accusation that Joseph had been accessory to the guillotining of his brother, the young poet, André Chénier. Her enemies asserted that Dumesnil was never ‘up to the mark’ unless she had taken wine, and a great deal of it. Marmontel insists that she caused his ‘Héraclides’ to fail through her having indulged in excess of wine; but Fleury states that she kept up her strength during a tragedy by taking chicken broth with a little wine poured into it.
Mademoiselle Dumesnil retired, as we have said, in 1776. The stage was next not unworthily occupied by Mdlle. Raucourt. But meanwhile there sprang up two young creatures destined to renew the rivalry which had existed between Clairon and Dumesnil. While these were growing up the French Revolution, which crushed all it touched, touched the Comédie Française, which fell to pieces. It pulled itself together, after a manner, but it was neither flourishing nor easy under the republic. The French stage paid its tribute to prison and to scaffold.
When the storm of the Revolution had swept by, that stage became once more full of talent and beauty. Talma reappeared, and soon after three actresses set the town mad. There was Mdlle. Georges, a dazzling beauty of sixteen, a mere child, who had come up from Normandy, and who knew nothing more of the stage than that richly dressed actors there represented the sorrows, passion, and heroism of ancient times. Of those ancient times she knew no more than what she had learned in Corneille and Racine. But she had no sooner trod the stage, as Agrippina, than she was at once accepted as a great mistress of her art. Her beauty, her voice, her smile, her genius and her talent, caused her to be hailed queen; but not quite unanimously. There was already a recognised queen of tragedy on the same stage, Mdlle. Duchesnois. This older queen (originally a dressmaker, next, like Mrs. Siddons, a lady’s-maid), was as noble an actress as Mdlle. Georges, but her noble style was not supported by personal beauty. She was, perhaps, the ugliest woman that had ever held an audience in thrall by force of her genius and ability alone. While song-writers celebrated the charms of Mdlle. Georges, portrait-painters, too cruelly faithful, placed the sublime ugliness of Mdlle. Duchesnois in the shop windows. There she was to be seen in character, with one of the lines she had to utter in it, as the epigraph:
Le roi parut touché de mes faibles attraits.
Even Talleyrand stooped to point a joke at her expense. A certain lady had no teeth. Mdlle. Duchesnois had, but they were not pleasant to see. ‘If,’ said Talleyrand, alluding to the certain lady, ‘If Madame —— had teeth, she would be as ugly as Mdlle. Duchesnois.’
Between these two queens of tragedy the company of the Théâtre Français were as divided in their allegiance as the public themselves. The Emperor Napoleon and Queen Hortense were admirers of Mdlle. Georges; he covered her with diamonds, and he is said to have lent her those of his wife Josephine, who was the friend of Mdlle. Duchesnois. Bourbonites and Republicans also adopted Mdlle. Duchesnois, who was adopted by Mdlle. Dumesnil. Talma paid allegiance to the same lady, while Lafon swore only by Mdlle. Georges, in whose behalf Mdlle. Raucourt once nearly strangled Duchesnois. In society, every member of that awful institution was compelled to choose a side and a night. One queen played on a Monday, the other on a Wednesday; Mdlle. Georges on a Friday, and Duchesnois again on Sunday; and on the intervening nights the brilliant muse of comedy, Mdlle. Mars (as the daughter of Monvel, the actor, always called herself), came and made Paris ecstatic with her Elmire, her Célimène, and other characters. Of these three supreme actresses, Mdlle. Mars alone never grew old on the stage, in voice, figure, movement, action, feature, or expression. I recollect her well at sixty, creating the part of Mdlle. de Belleisle, a young girl of sixteen; and Mdlle. Mars that night was sixteen, and no more. It was only by putting the binocle to the eyes that you might fancy you saw something older; but the voice! It was the pure, sweet, gentle, penetrating, delicious voice of her youth—ever youthful. Jules Janin describes the nights on which the brilliant and graceful Mdlle. Mars acted as intervals of inexpressible charm, moments of luxurious rest. Factions were silenced. The two queens of tragedy were forgotten for a night, and all the homage was for the queen of comedy.
The beauty, youth, and talent of Mdlle. Georges would probably have secured her seat on an undisputed throne, only for the caprices that accompany those three inestimable possessions. The youthful muse suddenly disappeared. She rose again in Russia, whither she had been tempted by the imperial liberality of Alexander the Czar. She was queening it there in more queenly fashion than ever; her name glittered on the walls of Moscow, when the Grand Army of France scattered all such glories and wrecked its own. A quarter of a million of men perished in that bloody drama, but the tragedy queen contrived to get safe and sound over the frontier.
Thenceforth she gleamed like a meteor from nation to nation. Mdlle. Duchesnois and Mdlle. Mars held the sceptres of tragedy and comedy between them. They reigned with glory, and when their evening of life came on they departed with dignity—Duchesnois in 1835. The more impetuous Mdlle. Georges flashed now here now there, and blinded spectators by her beauty, as she dazzled them by her talent. The joy of acting, the ecstasy of being applauded, soon became all she cared for. One time she was entrancing audiences in the most magnificent theatres; at another, she was playing with strollers on the most primitive of stages; but always with the same care. Now, the Parisians hailed the return of their queen; in a month she was acting Iphigenia to the Tartars of the Crimea!
When the other once youthful queens of tragedy and comedy were approaching the sunset glories of their reigns, Mdlle. Georges, in her mature and majestic beauty too, seized a new sceptre, mounted a new throne, and reigned supreme in a new kingdom. She became the queen of drama—not melodrama—of that prose tragedy, which is full of action, emotion, passion, and strong contrasts. Racine and Corneille were no longer the fountains at which she quaffed long draughts of inspiration. New writers hailed her as their muse and interpreter. She was the original Christine at Fontainebleau, in Dumas’s piece so named; and Victor Hugo wrote for her his terrible ‘Mary Tudor’ and his ‘Lucretia Borgia.’ It was a delicious terror, a fearful delight, a painful pleasure, to see this wonderful woman transform herself into those other women, and seem the awful reality which she was only—but earnestly, valiantly, artistically—acting. She could be everything by turns: proud and cruel as Lady Macbeth; tender and gentle as Desdemona. Mdlle. Georges, however, found a rival queen in drama, as she had done in tragedy—Madame Allan Dorval, who made weeping a luxury worth the paying for. Competitors, perhaps, rather than rivals. There was concurrency, rather than opposition. One of the prettiest incidents in stage annals occurred on the occasion of these artists being twice ‘called,’ after a representation of ‘Mary Tudor,’ in which Mdlle. Georges was the Queen and Madame Dorval Lady Jane Grey. After the two actresses had gracefully acknowledged the ovation of which they were the objects, Madame Dorval, with exquisite refinement and noble feeling, kissed the hand of Mdlle. Georges, as if she recognised in her the still supremely reigning queen. It was a pleasure to see this; it is a pleasure to remember it; and it is equally a pleasure to make record of it here.
When all this brilliant talent began to be on the wane, and play-goers began to fear that all the thrones would be vacant, a curious scene used to occur nightly in summer time in the Champs Élysées. Before the seated public, beneath the trees, an oldish woman used to appear, with a slip of carpet on her arm, a fiddle beneath it, and a tin cup hanging on her finger. She was closely followed by a slim, pale, dark, but fiery-eyed girl, whose thoughts seemed to be with some world far away. When the woman had spread the carpet, had placed the cup at one corner, and had scraped a few hideous notes on the fiddle, the pale dark-eyed girl advanced on the carpet and recited passages from Racine and Corneille. With her beautiful head raised, with slight, rare, but most graceful action, with voice and emphasis in exact accord with her words, that pale-faced, inspired girl, enraptured her out-of-door audience. After a time she was seen no more, and it was concluded that her own inward fire had utterly consumed her, and she was forgotten. By-and-by there descended on the deserted temple of tragedy a new queen—nay, a goddess, bearing the name of Rachel. As the subdued and charmed public gazed and listened and sent up their incense of praise and their shout of adulation, memories of the pale-faced girl who used to recite beneath the stars in the Champs Élysées came upon them. Some, however, could see no resemblance. Others denied the possibility of identity between the abject servant of the muse in the open air, and the glorious, though pale-faced, fiery-eyed queen of tragedy, occupying a throne which none could dispute with her. When half her brief, splendid, extravagant, and not blameless reign was over, Mdlle. Rachel gave a ‘house-warming’ on the occasion of opening her new and gorgeously-furnished mansion in the Rue Troncin. During the evening the hostess disappeared, and the maître d’hôtel requested the crowded company in the great saloon so to arrange themselves as to leave space enough for Mdlle. Rachel to appear at the upper end of the room, as she was about to favour the company with the recital of some passages from Racine and Corneille. Thereupon entered an old woman with strip of carpet, fiddle, and tin pot, followed by the queen of tragedy, in the shabbiest of frocks, pale, thoughtful, inspired, and with a sad smile that was not altogether out of tune with her pale meditations; and then, the carpet being spread, the fiddle scraped, and the cup deposited, Rachel trod the carpet as if it were the stage, and recited two or three passages from the masterpieces of the French masters in dramatic poetry, and moved her audience according to her will, in sympathy and delight. When the hurricane of applause had passed, and while a murmuring of enjoyment seemed as its softer echo, Rachel stooped, picked up the old tin cup, and, going round with it to collect gratuities from the company, said, ‘Anciennement, c’était pour maman; à présent, c’est pour les pauvres.’
The Rachel career was of unsurpassable splendour. Before it declined in darkness and set in premature painful death, the now old queen of tragedy, Mdlle. Georges, met the sole heiress of the great inheritance, Mdlle. Rachel, on the field of the glory of both. Rachel was then at the best of her powers, at the highest tide of her triumphs. They appeared in the same piece, Racine’s ‘Iphigénie.’ Mdlle. Georges was Clytemnestre; Rachel played Ériphile. They stood in presence, like the old and the young wrestlers, gazing on each other. They each struggled for the crown from the spectators, till, whether out of compliment, which is doubtful, or that she was really subdued by the weight, power, and majestic grandeur of Mdlle. Georges, Ériphile forgot to act, and seemed to be lost in admiration at the acting of the then very stout, but still beautiful, mother of the French stage.
The younger rival, however, was the first to leave the arena. She acted in both hemispheres, led what is called a stormy life, was as eccentric as she was full of good impulses, and to the last she knew no more of the personages she acted than what she learned of them from the pieces in which they were represented. Rachel died utterly exhausted. The wear and tear of her professional life was aggravated by the want of repose, the restlessness, and the riot of the tragedy queen at home. She was royally buried. In the foyer of the Théâtre Français Rachel and Mars, in marble, represent the Melpomene and Thalia of France. They are both dead and forgotten by the French public.
For years after Mdlle. Duchesnois had vanished from the scene, Mdlle. Georges may be said to have languished out her life. One day of snow and fog, in January 1867, a funeral procession set out from Passy, traversed the living city of Paris, and entered through the mist the city of the dead, Père la Chaise. Alexandre Dumas was chief mourner. ‘In that coffin,’ said Jules Janin, ‘lay more sorrows, passions, poetry, and hopes than in a thousand proud tombs in the cemetery of Père la Chaise.’ She who had represented and felt and expressed all these sentiments, emotions, and ideas, was the last survivor of the line of dramatic queens in France.
That line had its Lady Jane Grey, its queen for an hour; one who was loved and admired during that time, and whose hard fate was deplored for full as long a period. About the year 1819-20 there appeared at the Odéon a Mdlle. Charton. She made her début in a new piece, ‘Lancastre,’ in which she acted Queen Elizabeth. Her youth and beauty, combined with extraordinary talent, took the public mind prisoner. Here was a young goddess who would shower delight when the maturer divinities had gone back to Olympus. The lithographed portrait of Mdlle. Charton was in all the shops and was eagerly bought. Suddenly she ceased to act. A jealous lover had flung into that beautiful and happy face a cup of vitriol, and destroyed beauty, happiness, and partially the eyesight, for ever. The young actress refused to prosecute the ruffian, and sat at home suffering and helpless, till she became ‘absorbed in the population’—that is to say, starved, or very nearly so. She had one poor female friend who helped just to keep her alive. In this way the once proud young beauty literally went down life into old age and increase of anguish. She dragged through the horrible time of the horrible Commune, and then she died. Her body was carried to the common pauper grave at Montmartre, and one poor actor who had occasionally given her what help he could, a M. Dupuis, followed her to that bourn.
Queens as they were, their advent to such royalty was impeded by every obstacle that could be thrown in their way. The ‘Society’ of French actors has been long noted for its cruel illiberality and its mean jealousy, especially the ‘Society’ that has been established since the Revolution—or, to speak correctly, during the Revolution which began in 1789, and which is now in the eighty-fourth year of its progress. The poor and modest Duchesnois had immense difficulty in being allowed to appear at all. The other actors would not even speak to her. When she was ‘called’ by an enthusiastic audience no actor had the gallantry to offer a hand to lead her forward. A poor player, named Florence, at length did so, but on later occasions he was compelled to leave her to ‘go on’ alone. When Mdlle. Rachel, ill-clad and haggard, besought a well-known sociétaire to aid her in obtaining permission to make her début on the stage of the Théâtre Français, he told her to get a basket and go and sell flowers. On the night of her triumph, when she did appear, and heaps of bouquets were flung at her feet, on her coming forward after the fall of the curtain, she flung them all into a basket, slung it from her shoulders, went to the actor who had advised her to go and vend flowers, and kneeling to him, asked him, half in smiles and half in tears, if he would not buy a nosegay! It is said that Mdlle. Mars was jealous of the promise of her sister, Georgina. Young débutantes are apt to think that the aged queens should abandon the parts of young princesses, and when the young débutantes have become old they are amazed at the impertinence of new comers who expect them to surrender the juvenile characters. The latest successful débutante, Mdlle. Rousseil and M. Mounae Sully, are where they now are in spite of their fellows who were there before them.