The English Stage Part 4

Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And, as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in the slang of the green-room, we call _grues_.

In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former were much nearer to being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen.

Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his _Model Men and Women_, paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the biographies of the _Prix Montyon_. She goes late to bed, rises early, learns her roles while was.h.i.+ng her children's linen, rehea.r.s.es in the afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to her _toilette_, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. "School mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks, housemaids,--what are your fatigues to those of an actress?" So spoke a writer[8] who was well acquainted with theatrical life.

These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera, were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did not perform, and who were called upon to fill not roles but tights. The respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she won--and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.

Poor Byron was not without the ambition of an artist: he aspired to raising himself above the level of the _genre_ to which he owed his first success,--to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband, she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know, however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she herself made her _debut_ when she was five years old. At Manchester she had the honour of playing some small role with Macready, who was then making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and questioned her.

"I suppose," he said, "that you want to become a great actress?"

"Yes, sir."

"And what role are you most anxious to play?"

"Juliet."

Macready burst out laughing. "Then," said he, "you'll have to change those eyes of yours!"

Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of role. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to a.s.sume the role of any of Shakespeare's heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude Melnotte in _The Lady of Lyons_.

It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing _Belphegor_, a monstrous emotional drama,[9] the hero of which was an acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the role of a little boy, had to give him the cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first, then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at the Lyceum. Here she made her real _debut_ towards the end of 1858.

_Belphegor_ was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a role.

On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have to deal at last with the contemporary stage.

But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies of the English Comedy still to be born.

From the Lyceum she pa.s.sed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; navely selfish, it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the inevitable princ.i.p.al boy of the burlesques.

For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her only in two subsidiary roles, and for an estimate of her talents I must rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the role of eccentric ladies of fas.h.i.+on. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the time of her _debut_ is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,--a figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from Charles d.i.c.kens to John Forster:--

"I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the _Maid and the Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonis.h.i.+ngly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which in the audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you _can not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her s.e.x in a.s.sociation with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl's talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original."

But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids.

She begged of all the managers to let her play the role of a heroine in long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, "I shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little scamp."

Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her--

"As the managers won't have you, take a theatre yourself."

"But I have no money."

"I'll lend you money," said her brother-in-law.

A partners.h.i.+p between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. _He_ brought his reputation and his puns. _She_ the 1000 which was not hers.

A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid, miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy oftenest of all. Frederic Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French, and had in this capacity pa.s.sed in review some half-dozen supers who stood for the "Grande Armee" and who cried "Viv' l'Emprou!" The house bore the high-sounding name of the "Queen's Theatre," but the people of the neighbourhood called it the "Dust-Hole," and in doing so proved their acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a s.h.i.+lling, and when the Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange peel.

It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than of money. The "Dust-Hole" was transformed into a blue and white _bonbonniere_. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the evening of the first night, whilst the _queue_ was already forming outside the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would have been said by the devotees of fas.h.i.+on, wandering in the muddy Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality, had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?

The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke, transplanted from the Strand, f.a.n.n.y Josephs--an actress of delicate and agreeable talent, the excellent _duegne_ Larkin, and two other sisters Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.

He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six roles. In one engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl, had come to him and taken him by the hand.

Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in 1865 when the little "Prince of Wales's" opened its door as wide as it could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new repertory. Marie Wilton's friends supported her in their hundreds, but their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his _verve_ during the removal.

Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson was thought of.

Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had pa.s.sed the first years of his life in a touring company in the midst of those _bourgeois_ vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of foreigners--a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect.

In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.

At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nt, Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a good-natured consul, and took up his actor's life again with its three roles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a livelihood. He has written one piece, _A Night's Adventure_, which by a lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer; and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the a.s.sistance of his father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre.

Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Sat.u.r.day and never again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays, writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his "copy"

for a few s.h.i.+llings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For, after all, to the recipient these s.h.i.+llings meant his daily bread, and the bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.

He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The speaker is a composer of music. "In England, yesterday is always considered so much better than to-day--last week so superior to this--and this week so superior to the week after next--and thirty years ago so much more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so wors.h.i.+pped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, 'You look so young,' in the same tone that he would say, You look like an impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition, thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, 'My dear sir, very likely your compositions may have merit--I don't dispute it--but, you see, Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr.

T'other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that time exert yourself to get older--you will succeed if you try hard; turn grey, be bald--it's not a bad subst.i.tute--lose your teeth, your health, your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,--in one short word, your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don't die in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.'"

As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had a.s.sumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at journalism. He tried to "place" work of every kind wherever he could, from riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got connected with a score of London and provincial papers--the _Porcupine_, of Liverpool; the _Comic News_; the _Wag_, which his friend Byron had started; _Fun_, just started by Tom Hood, and the _Ill.u.s.trated Times_, on which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns, under the t.i.tle of "The Theatrical Lounger," he sketched the features of the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown in, not unlike the style of our old weekly _Figaro_; at the same time, it is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of pa.s.sion and a vent of spleen.

Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia--that vaguely-defined district in which "men of the world" whom the "world" bored, among them officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of _Fun_, used to give Friday supper-parties--frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the world.

Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.

Were they all such very "good fellows"?--I have my doubts. This Bohemia was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working, and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense.

I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one man who could claim success.

These lines[10] of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life--

"I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!

I've drank too much of beer and wine; I've had too much of toil and strife, I've given a kiss to Johnson's wife, And sent a lying note to mine,-- I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!"

After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays, Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy of society. He wrote and published the "Songs of the Governing Cla.s.ses,"

the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten lead. The "Song of the Gentleman" in particular might well be given a place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.

Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impa.s.sioned outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these nocturnal repasts of Hood's, at which Robertson was one of the most brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so much of reconst.i.tuting society as of renewing art and reforming the theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional routine,--everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.

Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson had acted at the Strand in 1861 a little play called _The Cantab_, which achieved a sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor ent.i.tled, _Our American Cousin_, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was anxious to appear before the public in the role of David Garrick. He was anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation from the French with Garrick subst.i.tuted for the original French hero.

Strange beginning for one who aimed at a "Return to Truth," this sticking of a historic head upon the shoulders of "a gentleman unknown"!

It was after this that he wrote his comedy _Society_. He took it to Buckstone, who refused it flatly. "My dear fellow," he said, "your piece wouldn't reach a fourth performance." The author went off, fingers twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where one of his friends met him. "Look here," said Robertson to him, "here is a capital play and these a.s.ses won't have it." A provincial manager took it up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only the success of the Prince of Wales's Theatre, but a new era for English Comedy--the era of Robertson.

CHAPTER IV

First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_, and _School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of his Actors, John Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress in the Matter of Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--Robertson as a Humorist: a scene from _School_--As a Realist: a scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the Upper Middle Cla.s.ses--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The Bancrofts at the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street.