Part 6 (2/2)
This last innovation is characteristic. The pit from having composed the whole arena of the hall, had been moved back bit by bit, until at last it was confined to a few back benches behind the dress circle. To suppress it altogether was not so much an act of authority as of emanc.i.p.ation. It has been said that Mr. Bancroft thought too much of his gentility, and that he seemed anxious to reserve his theatre for the _elite: Satis est equitem mihi plaudere_. But even then? After all, it was only a case of an extremely able man keeping pace with the democratic generation to which he belonged, in his rise towards fortune and its accompanying enjoyments. He raised the price of stalls from six to seven s.h.i.+llings, and then to ten-and-sixpence. The public was evidently able to pay, for the stalls were always full.
It should be added that, under the management of the Bancrofts, the rise in salaries was out of all proportion to the rise in the price of seats.
The weekly salary of one actor, continuing to play in the same role, went from 18 to 60, and that of another from 9 to 50. Mrs. Stirling had created the role of the Marchioness in Caste at the ”Prince of Wales's,”
and received seven times as much for appearing in it at the Haymarket.
Douglas Jerrold said to Charles Mathews: ”I don't despair of seeing you yet with a good cotton umbrella under your arm, carrying your savings to the bank.” Many years afterwards Mathews, presiding over the Theatrical Fund, recalled this remark, and added, ”The first part of Jerrold's wish has been fulfilled. I have bought an umbrella.” Thanks to the Bancrofts and the managers who came after them, the bank has been in receipt of the savings of many actors who previously would have been content if only they might earn their daily bread.
Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft saw the time approaching when the monopoly they had secured of the works of Robertson would cease to exist; they felt at once that the vein was being exhausted, and that the new generation would have new needs. Able and far-sighted, they determined to retire at the zenith of their success, and if not in their youth, at least in their prime and in the full activity of their intellect. Neither of them was forty-five when in 1885 they gave their farewell performance at the Haymarket.
Amongst the innumerable tokens of esteem which conduced to the triumph of this withdrawal, I shall cite only one. It is a letter from Arthur W.
Pinero, who had belonged as an actor to the Bancroft Company, and who has taken since then a foremost place amongst English dramatists. He wrote to his former manager:--
”It is my opinion, expressed here as it is elsewhere, that the present advanced condition of the English stage--throwing as it does a clear, natural light upon the manner and life of the people, where a few years ago there was nothing but moulding and tinsel--is due to the crusade begun by Mrs. Bancroft and yourself in your little Prince of Wales's Theatre. When the history of the stage and its progress is adequately and faithfully written, Mrs. Bancroft's name and your own must be recorded with honour and grat.i.tude.”
I took it into my head not long ago to pay a visit to the little theatre in which Frederic Lemaitre appeared, in which Napoleon and Count d'Orsay rubbed shoulders with d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, in which there was difficulty once in finding a seat for Gladstone, and in which Beaconsfield received a memorable ovation. The Salvationists have succeeded to the comedians, and, whether or not it be that their trumpets have the virtue of those of Jericho, these historic walls are crumbling to ruin. The place is empty, cold, and desolate. It was on an evening of last winter that I stood pensively under the porch--the porch through which had flowed like a stream all the elegance and talent of a whole generation. The light of a gas jet shone mournfully on the notice, mouldy already, ”To be let or sold”; and the rain trickled down on me from a gaping hole whence the electric light used once to glare upon pretty women issuing in all their finery from their carriages. My curiosity was not satisfied. In order to obtain admission inside, I gave myself out as a lecturer in search of a hall, but the ruse failed. I was told that I should have to pay 4500 or 6000, and was asked whether this trifling outlay would interfere with me.
I did not pursue the negotiations, and the door remained closed.
CHAPTER V
Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His first Literary Efforts--The _Bab Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--Gilbert's Psychology and Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_, _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The Wicked World_--_Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.
When Marie Wilton's company, during their first holiday, went on tour to Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn a.s.sizes. The young London barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs, adding pleasantly: ”We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time.”
Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson's,--a reputation which still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is striking.
Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public,--one may say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore, unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an accident. He might have ”occurred” at any time in the century, or indeed in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal character;--in discussing a living writer, more than this would be improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.
He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think, even he himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.
It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to _Fun_ that first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the t.i.tle, _Bab Ballads_, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with _More Bab Ballads_. Some of them were set to music and are still popular as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of nave irony, expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously careless,--a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up at all,--which was a surprise too.
Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales's a pleasant little comedy ent.i.tled _Sweethearts_. A young man is about to start for India, where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets him go.
Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now,--a lover, indeed, no longer.
Distance in time, as in s.p.a.ce, makes things look small. His ”grande pa.s.sion” seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old boy's scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever find the thirty years that they have lost?
Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate in it like mist and suns.h.i.+ne on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic, though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject.
In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas!
there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he has continued to rail at love ever since?
Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which followed. He wrote _Broken Hearts_, a fantastic drama in verse, and made it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He aimed at freeing Goethe's Margaret from all that philosophy which surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus disenc.u.mbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head--probably after some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic instinct--that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly successful; _Dan'l Druce_ is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public which applauded _School_ and _Society_ sufficiently advanced in its artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however, of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert's drama turns, would he really have solved it after the fas.h.i.+on of _Dan'l Druce_? Surely not.
It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the two does the child belong--to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that decides in favour of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which it saw the guiding hand of G.o.d. As all things in this world and the next were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications, the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real.
Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no problem to solve.
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