Part 9 (1/2)
It is true that _Becket_ achieved a startling success in the summer of 1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he is--hieratical, pontifical. Mediaeval asceticism is one of the forms of life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth one's while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton, when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous const.i.tutions and then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been carried through by dumb show without words at all.
Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow, and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in gusts from the church above--mingled with the cries of the people beating against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great edifice to its foundation--experienced one of the strongest emotions any spectacle ever gave.
And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen Terry's tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king's mistress to care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so much hardihood.
I have not the same objections to make against _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_.
In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road, strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined with thorns, along which she pa.s.sed, in so brief a period, from a protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding, she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust in the eyes of the man she wors.h.i.+pped, the man to whom she had offered human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched out, if he did not quite complete it, in _Queen Mary_.
The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold's young brother, describes to him the slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner, deprived of all that he loves best,--of the sight of the green fields, of the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away by the loathsome vermin of the earth.
When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes, and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in it nothing of the ba.n.a.lity, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to which we are too often treated in the theatre.
Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him, with a n.o.bility and pride of tone that thrill one.
These two dramas--I dare not say two masterpieces--set in a framework of history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.
A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in air and light upon their essential lines; a great actor, to understand and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character of Mary,--and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.
NOTE.--I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of poetry than that of the theatre.
CHAPTER VIII
The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--Improvement in Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The ”Old” Critics and the ”New”--James Mortimer and his Two ”Almavivas”--Mr. William Archer's Ideas and Role--The Vicissitudes of Adaptation.
Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud _Becket_?
Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fas.h.i.+on, the fact remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a pa.s.sionate interest in this struggle between Mind and Power--between the National Throne and the Roman Priesthood--resuscitated by a poet. Many other symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.
I do not wish to a.s.sert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the _bete humaine_ been so completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so unblus.h.i.+ngly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out before the mult.i.tude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The _bete humaine_ is outside the door.
I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to Mrs. Bancroft, whose former roles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree.
If you mention her name before an elderly ”man about town,” who was young and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.
The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even extended their clientele. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,--districts of London whose geography was hardly known,--at the Surrey, the Victoria, the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess's. In that immense conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing, popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate.
It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the ma.s.ses which people of culture often lack.
When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed, whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These mult.i.tudes who delight in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even--to descend a degree lower--of Merritt and Pett.i.tt, often pa.s.s quite naturally to Shakespeare, for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare's; and were it not for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.
Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be taught that a criminal's punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.
As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket, the Garrick, the St. James's, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add, perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The _personnel_ of these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due?
To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which individuals, and cla.s.ses, and communities are set in movement and kept going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager's first question of a girl coming to him for an engagement would be--”Can you sing? Can you dance? Have you got good legs?” To-day his first requirement would be that she should have intelligence.
English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially, and now Rejane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comedie Francaise are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his _Thirty Years at the Play_, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening Favart and Delaunay played _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ before the keenest and most impressionable of ”pits,” composed exclusively of actors and authors. When, at the _denouement_, there was heard the sound of a fall behind the scenes and of a m.u.f.fled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair, crying out, ”_Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!_”--so exquisite was the sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent.
I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of more than one English actor.
Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel, out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his soul for an advertis.e.m.e.nt; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his toadies to call him the ”Napoleon of the Theatrical World,” would fain have had Clement Scott, of the _Weekly Despatch_, dismissed from his post, and presumed to deny him the _entree_ to his theatres, and even to refuse his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably in the actor's favour;--for the truer the adverse criticism, the more injury it did to its object.