IV
It is testimony to Thackeray’s own liking for the theater that he is continually telling us that this or that character went to the play. He also informs us that Henry Esmond was the author of the ‘Faithful Fool,’ a comedy performed by Her Majesty’s Servants and published anonymously, attaining a sale of nine copies, whereupon Esmond had the whole impression destroyed. And the first of the George Warringtons wrote two plays, ‘Carpezan’ and Pocahontas,’ both of them tragedies, the first of which caught the public taste, whereas the second failed to prove attractive. We are all aware that Becky Sharp took part in the private theatricals at Gaunt House, making a most impressive Clytemnestra; but we are less likely to recall the hesitating suggestion that she may have been the Madame Rebecque who failed to please when she appeared in the ‘Dame Blanche’ at Strasburg in 1830. It was natural enough that Becky should go on the stage, since her mother had been a ballet-dancer.
Altho neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever attempted to write a novel of theatrical life, each of them gave us an inside view of a provincial stock-company in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. In ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ we are introduced to the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Crummles; and in ‘Pendennis’ we have a less elaborate study of the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Bingley. The group that Dickens portrays is more boldly drawn and more richly colored than the group that Thackeray sketches in with a few illuminating strokes. “What a light of benevolence it is that plays round Crummles and the Phenomenon and all those poor theatrical people in that charming book,” said Thackeray in his lecture on ‘Charity and Humor.’ “What a humor! And what a good humor!”
Altho in these episodes neither Dickens nor Thackeray aimed at the penetrating inquisition into the histrionic temperament that we find in Henry James’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and in Howells’s ‘Story of a Play,’ there is both validity and originality in Thackeray’s portrait of Miss Fotheringay. In all the dozens and scores of theatrical novels that I have read, I do not recall any other attempt to show the actress who is only an instrument in the hands of a superior intelligence, a woman who has the divine gift and who can display it only when she is taught, perhaps by one himself deficient in the mimetic faculty but possessed of interpretative imagination. Possibly Thackeray bestows overmuch stupidity on the Fotheringay; but she was not too stupid to profit by the instruction of the devoted Bows. She had beauty, voice, manner, the command of emotion, without which the tragic actor is naught; and all she lacked was the intelligence which would enable her to make the most of her native endowment.
Except when she was on the stage Mrs. Siddons was an eminently uninspired woman; and not a little of her inspiration in the theater has been credited to the superior intellect of her brother, John Philip Kemble. Rachel was intelligent, so intelligent that she was always eager to be aided by the intelligence of others. Legouvé recorded that if he gave her a suggestion, she seized on it and transmuted his copper into silver. She used to confess the immensity of her debt to Samson, a little dried up actor of “old men”; and she said once that she did not play a part half as well as she could play it, unless she had had the counsel of Samson. Even if she was a genius, she was rather a marvellous executant than a great composer; and there has been many another actress, even in our own time, who has owed a large part of her talent to the unsuspected guidance given by some one unknown to the public which pressed to applaud her.
Miss Fotheringay was not intelligent like Rachel and she was far duller than Mrs. Siddons, but she had in her the essential quality. She was teachable and Little Bows taught her.
He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from him by rote. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers.... With what indomitable patience and dulness she followed him. She knew that he made her; and she let herself be made.... She was not grateful, or ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humored.
She might not be grateful, but she knew very well who had made her; she said so simply enough, explaining why she had not earlier played the more important parts, “I didn’t take the leading business then; I wasn’t fit for it till Bows taught me.”
So it was that Adrienne Lecouvreur, in the play which Scribe and Legouvé wrote for Rachel, thanked the little old prompter, Michonnet, who had taught her, “I was ungrateful in saying I had never had a teacher. There is a kind-hearted man, a sincere friend, whose counsels have always sustained me.” And Legouvé has told us that at one of the rehearsals Rachel suddenly turned from Regnier, who was the Michonnet, and knelt before Samson, who was the Duc de Bouillon, and addressed this speech directly to him.
It would be interesting to know whether Thackeray ever saw ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ which was produced in Paris in April, 1849, six months before ‘Pendennis’ began to appear in monthly parts.
(1920)
IX
MARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER