Part 4 (1/2)
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.