Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 484, February, 1856

by Various

THE DRAMA.

Sir Andrew Agnew may have been a very good man, but he never said more than one good thing—if even that is original. In one of his letters he characterises the wit of the three kingdoms as follows: The Scotch play upon the feelings, the Irish play upon ideas, the English play upon words. The distribution is clever and very plausible, if not altogether true. It is correct enough, we believe, as far as regards the Scotch. There is little wit, but a great deal of humour in their fun; and wherever there is wit, almost always it manifests itself in union with strong feeling of some kind—is at one time sarcastic, at another time profane. A Scotchman seldom indulges in pure wit—takes no especial interest in a purely intellectual, or a purely auricular surprise. His logical habits unfit him for that confusion of ideas which Sir Andrew attributes to the Irish, and disincline him for that confusion of words which he attributes to the English jesters. It is with reference to these last that his division is most at fault, and it is also at fault with regard to the Irish. An immense number of Hibernian witticisms, it is true, are to be classed with those Yankee and negro sayings, of which the point depends on a singular confusion of ideas, and of which the following may be taken as typical examples: “Pompey and Cæsar very much like, ’specially Pompey;”—“Uncle was so tall that he had to mount a ladder every day to put on his hat.” A practical instance of the same kind is the story of the Irishman who cut a great hole in his door for the sow to pass through, and a little one beside it for the sucking-pigs. But this very confusion of ideas is so apt to express itself in a contradiction of terms, that the wit for which Paddy is celebrated all over the world is known as an Irish bull; and an Irish bull is as much a verbal play as an English pun. The difference between them may be stated thus loosely: In a bull, the double meanings are incompatible and contradictory; in a pun, they blend together, and do not interfere with each other, except in the way of curious comparison or odd contrast. Now, although perhaps no people have such an inveterate habit of punning and quibbling as the English, it is not true that this is the great characteristic of their wit. With all the reputation which they have on the Continent for melancholy, with all that tone of sadness which pervades their poetry, no people have ever displayed such a hearty enjoyment of fun as the English, and no other comedy has such a wide range as theirs. It contains every variety of humour and every variety of wit. And however much we may despise puns, they have often been used as the expression of profoundest feeling by men of the largest grasp. Shakespeare is an example; his range of comicality is greater than that of any other writer in the language, and he puts puns into the mouths of his heroes and heroines, even in the moment of maddest passion. Thomas Fuller is another instance of a man of deep sympathies and earnest views, who gave expression to these sentiments in what we are accustomed to regard as the most trivial and equivocal of forms.

But while Sir Andrew Agnew’s definition of English wit is extremely partial, it has certainly at this season of the year the appearance of conveying the whole truth. The puns are as thick in a Christmas pantomime as plums in a Christmas pudding. They come out at this time of the year as naturally as berries on the holly; and whoever means to enjoy the season must accept it all, quips and quibbles, puns and buns, the light fantastic toe at night, and the headache next morning. Of what avail is it to shake one’s head over the mince-pies, to tell that young savage, Mr Tommy, that he has eaten too many raisins, to look dismal over another glass of champagne? It is all right; digestion will come in its own good time; and what is the use of Christmas if one cannot once in a year dismiss all thoughts of the doctor and his senna? What is the use of Christmas, too, if theatrical managers cannot for once in a year snap their fingers at the critic and his nauseous doses? On boxing-night comes the pantomime, all paint and spangles, scenery and machinery, fooling and pulling about; it is the reign of good-humour; clown grins from ear to ear; pantaloon takes all the buffets he gets with the greatest pleasure; while the manager is as obstreperous as the one, and the critics are as delighted with his hard hits as the other. The fact is, and there is no denying it, that the pantomime, and all that it includes of burlesque and extravaganza, is at present the great glory of the British drama. The drama has all gone to pot (the paint-pot), and out of it has arisen rollicking pantomime, even as out of the caldron of Medea, what went in an old ram came out a young lamb. That this young lamb is the pride of the British stage at the present time, will be evident to any one who enters a theatre. No chance of getting a seat, even in the larger houses, if you happen to be half-an-hour late. And not only are the houses crammed, the audience is different from the usual audiences. There is a prim old lady, with a pursed-up mouth, in the boxes, whose presence is accounted for by the fact that there are two fairies at her side, who are as much in love with Clown as ever Titania was with Bottom. Everybody who looks at the stalls knows that the bald-headed old gentleman with the capacious waistcoat is “the father of a family,” even were there no long lines of children on either side of him. And will it be believed that through the curtain of the private box there is peering, with his ivory opera-glass to his eyes, that long-faced Grimshaw, who never enters a theatre—never—and who never perpetrated a joke but once, when he quite seriously compared the pit to the pit of Acheron, and wondered that when people saw written up, “The way to the pit,” they did not take fright, and vow never again to enter a playhouse? Everybody goes to the pantomime. It is the only successful effort of the British drama. Tragedy has become so very tragic that she has cut her own throat; comedy has been so very comical that she has choked herself with laughing; and burlesque comes up like a demon through the trap to supply the place of the one, pantomime comes tumbling in head-over-heels to supply the place of the other. Every one has his day: Shakespeare has gone out; Planché has come in. Let no one accuse us of treason to “the divine William,” as Dumas calls him, when we say that Planché is a kind of Shakespeare. He is precisely such a Shakespeare as entered into Dr Johnson’s imagination when he said, “A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.”

It must be confessed that although most of Mr Planché’s extravaganzas are published, there is not one of them that is readable. They are meant to be acted, not read. Effervescing from the mouth of the performers, and eked out with look and gesture, scenic effect and musical rubadub, the galleries make a vociferous noise, and the boxes make a magnificent show of teeth. Now it is some pun which has been lying in wait from the beginning of the scene, now some extraordinary rhyme which seemed as difficult to match as Cinderella’s glass slipper, now an allusion to the events of the day, now the sudden falling into slang in the midst of some high-flown language.

“But Cupid is a downy cove

Wot it takes a deal to hinder;

For if you shuts him out o’ the door,

Vy, he’ll valk in at the vinder.”

Nobody cares to read such verse, but, sung by Robson, it brings down the House. As a specimen of the wit, it is difficult to make a selection worthy of Planché from his latest pieces at the Olympic; but take the following from the Prince of Happy Land, which he has repeated in a weaker form in the Yellow Dwarf. The princess is to choose a husband out of ten suitors.

“Duchess. ——You’d not refuse

Ten sovereigns in succession?

Princess. Yes, indeed,

If they’re bad sovereigns, madam.

Duchess. Bad ones!—Read,

Grand duke, the list of their illustrious names,

Sent in with all their portraits—

Duke. In such frames!—

It is impossible to find ten finer!

First, here’s the Emperor of Chelsea China.

Princess. A China husband!

Floretta. Off with him, I’d break.

Duke. The King of Chess.

Princess. A king one cannot take.

Duke. The Doge of Tennis.

Floretta. A sly doge, no doubt.

Princess. And much too prone to racket, sir, about.

Duke. The Dey of All-jeers.

Princess. Hey-day! that’s all joke.

Duke. The Sultan Meer-schaum.

Princess. Meer-shams end in smoke.

Duke. The Rajah Ram Jam Juggle Jib a hoy.

Princess. The name’s enough—

Floretta. I wish his lady joy.

Duke. Ali Kampain, the Shah of—

Princess. Pshaw! pooh! pooh!

Duke. The Khan of Creamo Tartar.

Princess. Cannot do.

Duke. The Prince of Orange Marmalade.

Princess. Too sweet.

Duke. The Duke of Mangel Wurzel.

Princess. Must be Beet.”

What a riot of words! what an amount of subtlety is here expended to no purpose in stultifying the dictionary, and giving to words every possible meaning but the right one. In this noble art, however, Mr Planché is excelled by some of his disciples, and in the parody of Shylock—the Jerusalem Harty-Joke—written by Mr Talfourd for Robson, the system of punning has been carried to the limit of endurance. Let any one read the following address of Gratiano to Nerissa, and attempt if he can to make any meaning out of the puns, or see the fun of continually violating the rules of the language merely to help a failing rhyme.

“The pangs of Cupid I the first time knows-em;

His bows and arrows pierced my harrowed bo-sum.

Let’s off to-night—there’s no chance of diskivery.

With me, dear, put up, and don’t stand at livery.

Blush not that I’m a flunky, I implores;

Let not my plushes be the cause of yours.

You to the eyes—but, though more difficulter,

I to the knees plush as the knee plush ultra.”

Take another specimen, and then, as Mr Talfourd says, we shall bid “a-Jew” to Shylock. Remember, too, that we are quoting the best bits.

“Shylock. Jessica! my own flesh and blood revolted?

I locked her in.

Tubal. And she herself has bolted!

Shylock. I always wondered why she eyed the men so!

What’s the dog’s Christian name?

Tubal. I think Lorenzo.

She’s got the start of us, and bolted right off.

Shylock. Heavy the day that first the sun the light off!

Offer rewards! Use every means to save her.

Let be but catch—I’ll lather the young shaver.

My only heiress folks will say in mock,

Fled like the timid hair from a Shy lock.

Take with you, though, unthinking girl, my curse.

Tubal. She’s taken something more.

Shylock. What’s that?

Tubal. Your purse.

Shylock. You cannot mean she’s robbed her poor old father?

Tubal. I hate strong language, but I fancy—rather.

Shylock. Unfeeling child! who’s left her sire to sigh

Without or tie or prop, or property.”

This is what the fast young men of London call brilliant writing. All this meaningless clatter of words, to produce which requires little more skill than to clash the cymbals in the orchestra, there are crowds of young fellows about the theatres who would give a great deal if they had the brains to emulate. It is out of such slender materials that Robson works up his effects, making the glitter pass for gold, the trash for truth, the bad grammar for good sense, and the abortive pun for pointed wit. Give us good puns by all means, if there is nothing better to be had, and we shall laugh at them; but save us from word-torture as incomprehensible, dull, and valueless as the anagrams which used to puzzle and amuse our ancestors.

Cease your funning;

Force of punning

Ne’er shall Maga’s laugh trepan;

at least such punning as we have quoted. If we are asked to define legitimate punning, take an example from Punch, who sums up his metaphysics in the following queries and answers:—“What is matter? Never mind.—What is mind? No matter.”

If any one wishes a defence of punning, we must refer him to the Germans, and especially to Herman Ulrici, who thus discourses on the quibbles of our great English dramatist: “If, then, we go back to the origin of this verbal play, and further reflect that Shakespeare never kept up this game of rejoinder and antithesis emptily and unmeaningly, but that with him it has always some meaning, and not unfrequently a most profound significance, we shall see good reason for the whole representation being pervaded by it. For in this discrepancy between the indicated matter and its indication, and the appropriateness of the same or similar words to express wholly different objects, we have the revelation of the deep fundamental and original disagreement between human life and its true idea; as well as the inadequacy of human cognition and knowledge of which language is the expression, for the wide range of objective truth and reality, and consequently of the weakness entailed upon man’s noblest intellectual power by the Fall and the first lie.” So that puns are the result of the Fall, and the fruit of the forbidden tree. Horrible thought for Mr ‘A Beckett—puns impossible in paradise! Without, however, going to the profundities of Ulrici, we have to point out the propriety of this style of wit in the peculiar species of drama which it adorns. A pun is on a small scale what parody is on a large. Accept the burlesque drama wholesale, and there is no reason why one should object to the quibbling in detail. It is consistent throughout.

The Olympic is the theatre in which Planché appears to the greatest advantage—the intensity of which Robson is capable, giving a force to the representation with which all the brilliance and gaiety of the old Lyceum spectacle are not to be compared. It is one of the two best theatres in London, in which one is always sure of good and finished acting—the wayward humours of Robson being in fine contrast with the sustained art of Wigan. Than the latter there is not a more accomplished actor on the stage; he really acts; and it is a high intellectual treat, which one does not often nowadays enjoy, to see how with successive touches he works out a character, or graduates a passion with a delicacy of detail that is not more marvellous than the consistency of tone throughout. As Wigan satisfies the lover of intellectual enjoyment, Robson satisfies the craving for excitement; the one is perfect art, the other perfect nature. Perfect nature in burlesque—impossible! It is possible, however, with Robson. Usually burlesque acting is the most unnatural thing in the world; no single passion or state is represented truly; every word, every tone, every look is false. With Robson, however, every tone is true, every look is nature; it is in the jumble and juxtaposition of details that his burlesque consists, in suddenly passing from the extreme of anger or fear to the extreme of humorous ease, in suddenly relapsing into vulgar slang in mid-volley of the most passionate speech, and all with the most marvellous flexibility of voice and feature. Presto! faster than we can follow him, he has changed from grave to gay, from lively to severe. The Yellow Dwarf of last year was probably his greatest effort, although Prince Richcraft of the present season is not far behind. It has a mad scene which is equal to anything he has ever personated. The story it is needless to recapitulate—it is taken from the collection of Mother Goose. They are all nearly alike. There is sure to be a prince or princess in disguise; a good fairy and a bad one; an army extravagantly armed, murders by the score, magical fruit or something else, a strange discovery, and the prince and princess married at last, in spite of the villain, all his wiles and all his passion. A strange life it is, that pictured in the fairy tales which are worked up into these extravaganzas,—a life in which trap-doors and invisible springs are as essential as patent-leather boots and gibus hats are to us, in which there is always a gutta-percha eagle that comes flying with a necessary key in its claw, and fish are poking their gills out of still lakes with lost rings in their mouths, a purse of gold lies on the ground just when it is wanted, beautiful witches in red-heeled shoes come hobbling down to the footlights; and in the last tableau of all, there are all the fairies in their fairy palace standing pyramidally one above the other. As in the Arabian Nights the characters are always asking each other to tell tales—lives are saved by stories well told—and one gathers that the thread of Arabian existence is one long yarn; so, in the extravaganzas, songs are all the rage,—the enchanter sings his victim to sleep, the princess wins her lover by the charm of her voice,—the lover serenades his mistress; the king must be amused, and his only amusement is “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter.” Music is not only the food of love, but the blue-pill also; and it is the food and the blue-pill of every other feeling as well. There is another characteristic feature of the Arabian Nights which is prominently exhibited in the extravaganzas—the disregard of life. Murder is a mild word for the destructiveness of the kings—they literally massacre all around: it is the dance of death. But let no one confound all this murder and massacre with the similar tendencies in the low gallows-literature of the present time. All the murdering of the fairy tales is counterbalanced by the effect of the slaughter. The victims are scarcely ever killed outright—they are instantly transformed, they start up and fly away in some new shape. The idea of death as annihilation never enters into the fairy tales; all is immortal: murder is but the plucking of a flower that will grow again; the massacre of a village is only a series of dissolving views.

The Olympic is the only theatre without a harlequinade attached to its fairy tale. For tricks of clown and pantaloon one naturally travels to Covent Garden and the adjacent theatres. Who shall describe all the nonsense and merriment that passes current in these temples of the Muse? Puns, puns, nothing but puns—and such rough practical joking as the youth of England delights in! What an immense deal of laughter they manage to get out of that part of the body in which angels are said to be deficient. It is kicked, pins are stuck into it as into a convenient pin-cushion; Clown puts a live lobster into his comprehensive pockets, and jumps up with fearful grimaces. Then what pulling of noses; how they are flattened, how they are lengthened, how they are blackened with soot, how they are filled with snuff till the poor member sneezes and bleeds! And how the little fellows in the boxes laugh and crow over the practical jokes! It is such rare fun to see Clown stumble over a baby, and crush its head like a pancake, and double it up into the cradle. O glorious to see a shopkeeper’s window smashed, and his coat torn off his back; to see Clown burning the potatoes and licking the roast, and throwing carrots and turnips about the stage; to see Pantaloon pitched into the pot, and turning out a plum-pudding; to see Clown’s head cut off, and the body running headless about the stage, the head crying out for the body,—glued on to the shoulder, and so happily united that Clown takes a leap through a window, and tumbles back as well as ever through the grating below; to see the sucking-pig running about, and given to the nurse instead of her lost child; to see Clown for all his iniquities put into a great gun, with lots of powder, and shot to perdition, next hanging like a caitiff from the top of the theatre, and suddenly flopping down on the devoted heads of first and second fiddle in the orchestra. Hip, hip! away, you little wicked-eyed younkers, and when you go home put the poker in the fire, Master Jacky, turn in your small toes, and with your redhot plaything burn holes in the tails of papa’s coat, while Sarah Jane dances about in all the ecstasy of Columbine.

There is not much interest in going minutely over the theatres, and recording all the peculiarities of treatment. At Covent Garden the preliminary burlesque is the best subject that can be imagined— Y^e Belle Alliance, but it is very poorly treated. The most remarkable thing about the pantomime is the curtain. What is that, most gentle reader? An immense advertisement sheet, in which Mechi, and Moses, and Madame Tussaud, and all the notorious puffers, dazzle the eye of the spectators, with magic strops and wonders of cheapness, until the curtain rises on the usual trickery of the evening. “Shilling razors”—“Whiskers in five minutes”—“Baking powder”—“Who’s your glover?”—“Look to your legs”—“Gentlemen’s hair dyed in half-an-hour, ladies’ in an hour”—“Caspiato, or the folding bonnet; to fold in a box two inches deep”—“The Teflis silk umbrella,” and all the chicanery of Sheffield and Brummagem wares;—these are the objects of contemplation that, as a kind of mercantile prelude, in which the auctioneer’s hammer and the chinking of coin are the principal instruments, are intended to prepare the mind for the more honest arts of harlequin and pantaloon. Let us go to Drury Lane, the lessee of which is a man who seems anxious to be regarded as the English Barnum, and who probably, like his American prototype, would accept it as the greatest of compliments were we to describe him as the most perfect humbug in London. Jenny Lind, the Feejee mermaid, and the woolly horse, were all the same to Barnum. The African twins, Vauxhall Gardens, the cage of lions, Charles Mathews, or Miss Glyn—it is all the same to E. T. Smith. His great guns for the present are Charles Mathews and Tom Matthews. The Great Gun-Trick, of which the former is the life and soul, appearing as Professor Mathews, the wizard of the S.S.W. by S., is a really clever little piece, happy in idea, brilliant in execution, and worthy of all its success. The pantomime, Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, is all fiddlededee. Tom Matthews, the clown, plays the deuce with the tea and the pale ale, and when Jim and Jerry go to the public-house hard by, with the name of Tom Matthews above it, and his picture as merry-andrew above that, don’t they expect to see a red-and-white face peeping from the back shop, and wonder what sort of a man Mr Clown is at home, and what sort of fourpenny he can recommend? Pass down the Strand to the Adelphi. There is an audience on the most friendly terms with the performers, an unsophisticated audience, that roars and screams, and thoroughly enjoys. When Wright takes off his hat, how they laugh; when he puts it on a chair, how they scream; when he sits on it, what convulsions! The peculiarity of the pantomime here is, that Madame Celeste appears as harlequin. She goes through the performance with marvellous agility, but, on the whole, one could wish that in this case the cap of harlequin had really the power of rendering the wearer invisible. At the Haymarket, Mr Buckstone has turned his attention to entomology, and given us The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. He has succeeded in overcoming our antipathy to insects, in teaching us to endure wasps, negotiate with fleas, hobanob with spiders, and flirt with flies. If the Haymarket is entomological, Sadler’s Wells is decidedly feline, and the Princess’s partly feline, partly canine, partly ornithological. The latter is without doubt the best pantomime of the year—the best in idea, the best put upon the stage. It is impossible to give an idea of it without going more into detail than we can afford. The introduction is supposed to take place partly in the land of birds and partly in the isle of beasts; the canaries and humming-birds are afraid of the cats, and the story of the Maid and the Magpie is interweaved with the hopes and fears of the bright-plumed birds and the gigantic grimalkins, that play and roll over each other like veritable kittens on the hearth-rug. Then, in the harlequinade, we have the pas des parachutes by the young ladies, who come upon the stage—how? dropping from the clouds; the gymnastic feats of Mr Tanner’s wonderful dogs, who poise themselves on barrels and dance on their heads as nimbly as clown in the sawdust of the circus; and best of all, the representation of the banquet in Henry VIII. by a troop of children, the little bluff King Hal making love to a diminutive Anne Bulleyn, a miniature Queen Kate scratching the face and tearing the eyes of her maid of honour in a way that would have shocked Shakespeare not less than Dr Watts, who declares that little hands were never made for such a purpose.

The Princess’s Theatre ought to produce the best pantomime, for it is the theatre of all others which pays most attention to stage effect; and it would be strange, if, eclipsing all others in the illustration of the Shakespearean drama, it should be behindhand in the representation of its pantomime. It is no vulgar brilliance of scenery, no clap-trap effects of green, red, and gold without meaning, that Mr Charles Kean introduces to his audience. There is always something striking, something to remember, something wholly original and highly suggestive, sometimes even poetical, in his scenic effect. Take the angel tableau in Faust and Marguerite, which is substantially the same as in the dying vision of Queen Katherine, what a fine solemn effect it had in feeling, how pure and beautiful it looked as a picture, and, last of all, how cleverly managed as a mere mechanical contrivance—the angels sliding down without any visible support. Or take the banquet scene in Henry VIII.; there was a marvellous originality in the point of view from which the banquet-hall was seen. It was represented slanting up the stage, so that the spectators were supposed to stand, not at the end, but at the corner of it. There is a picture in the window of every printshop, in which the Duke of Wellington is represented feasting his Waterloo comrades, and which is drawn from a similar point of view. Make the slant greater, cut the table off in the middle by the side-scenes or the picture-frame, and we have the suggestion of a room of illimitable extent. Compare this imaginative mode of suggesting a great space, with the vulgar method adopted in Drury Lane, where, in the absurd procession of idols that ended Fitzball’s Egyptian monster of a play, the stage was thrown open to the back wall, and one looked at a stream of cats, rats, and crocodiles, coming down a small street. The scenery and upholstery of Mr Charles Kean, it is true, are very much decried by certain writers, and are continually brought forward as evidences of the low estate of the drama. These writers, however, seem to speak with a personal feeling against the manager of the Princess’s, and with very little knowledge of the history of the drama. And on these two points, the present low estate of the theatre and Mr Kean’s share in that degradation, we have a few remarks to make. Praise it or blame it—the tendency to scenic illustration is the characteristic of the British theatre in its latest development, and rightly to understand its intention, is rightly to comprehend the position of our modern drama.

With regard to the present decline of the drama, we must point out that in its entire history there never has been a time when it has not been exposed to the severest condemnation which our language is capable of expressing. It has always been giving up the ghost, always dead, or worthy of death. Shakespeare began to write for the stage in 1589. Exactly ten years before was published the earliest diatribe against the stage, at least the earliest of importance:—“The School of Abuse: containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and suchlike Caterpillars of a Commonwealth: setting up the flag of defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their bulwarks, by profane writers, natural reason, and common experience: a discourse as pleasant for gentlemen that favour learning, as profitable for all that will follow virtue. By Stephen Gosson.” After Gosson came Philip Stubbes, then Rankins, then Rainolds; then Histriomastin, the play: and many years afterwards, the still more celebrated Histriomastin of William Prynne, which took the author seven years to compose, and four years more to pass through the press. These attacks were levelled against the licentiousness of the stage; had in view the suppression, rather than the reformation, of the theatres; and were so far successful that for a period of years, in which the drama suffered greater comparative injury than has ever since or was ever before inflicted on it, the acting of plays was entirely prohibited. So great was the injury inflicted that from this time forward—from the reopening of the playhouses under Charles II. to the present hour—the cry has never ceased to be heard that the British drama is either dead or dying. All manner of changes have been rung upon it. At one time, amid the unparalleled licentiousness of Wycherley and Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, when a hard heart was the best flint for wit to sparkle from, and a hardened conscience the best steel to make it sparkle, the conclusion was drawn quite logically that artistic degradation is the inevitable accompaniment of such moral debasement, the sensual inhuman spirit tending to destroy that power of sympathy which is the fountainhead of dramatic inspiration. Then when the Italian opera came into vogue, and the fashionables of London turned a ready ear to the poetry of an unknown language, it was declared (by Sir Richard Steele, if we remember rightly, or at all events in the epilogue to one of his plays) that the English, who had eschewed Popery in religion, were hankering after Popery in wit; and loud and many were the warnings raised against the growing apostasy. Again, when the vein of native talent seemed to have been exhausted, and almost every piece that could boast of the slightest success had a plot borrowed from the Spanish, and sentiment borrowed from the French, refugee characters and the refuse of foreign wit, how bitterly was it lamented that so wealthy an heiress, and so beautiful, as the muse of the British drama, having squandered her dowry and prostituted her gifts to ignoble ends, should thus at length be driven forth in penury to live on alien charity, and perhaps, like another Jane Shore, to end a wretched existence begging on the highways and byways of literature? At a later period, the ignominious demise of the British muse was expected with still greater certainty, when the play-wrights seemed to have forgotten even the art of forging clever imitations, seemed to have lost even the Spartan talent of clever plagiarism, and their highest achievements were avowedly translated from Kotzebue and other Germans. And afterwards, when some of the poets who adorned the early part of the present century—Coleridge, Maturin, Milman—surrounding as it were the deathbed of the old lady, did their best to keep her in life, critical doctors shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders as if the labour were useless, and but a prolonging of the last inevitable agonies of a toothless, palsied, miserable old beldame, that had better die than live. She has not yet given up the ghost, however, nor is likely to do so in a hurry. Nevertheless the symptoms of dissatisfaction, so far from being silenced, are more frequent and doleful than ever, and are now directed not only against the dramatists, but also against the actors, there being no doubt that, to whatever cause it may be owing (probably it is very much due to that commonly assigned, the abolition of theatrical monopoly, which has distributed amongst a number of companies the histrionic talent formerly concentrated in two), it is extremely difficult to secure for a comedy, and almost impossible to secure for the highest tragedy, a strong and thoroughly good cast, so that from the protagonist down to the meanest performer every part is well fitted, and the result on the stage, with all the accompaniments of costume, scenery, and music, is a perfect whole, a true work of art. When, partly on this account—namely, the inefficiency of the actors—but partly also through a tendency which is inherent in all art, Mr Macready and other managers after him paid extraordinary attention to the dressing of the stage, so that cases have occurred, on the representation of a new piece, of the audience calling before the curtain, not the author who planned the whole of it, not the manager who brought it effectually to light, not the actors who stood forward as the chief interpreters of the play, but the scenic artist who, with his paint-pots and his Dutch foil, his muslin waterfalls and his paper moons, wrought in the gorgeous background,—dire were the denunciations hurled against those who seemed bent on transforming the theatre into a prodigious panoramic peep-show, to which the dialogue of the players has about the same merely accessory relation as the music of the orchestra. And these last are the most frequent cries, now that Mr Charles Kean has so far outstript his predecessors as almost to create an epoch in the history of the stage, by the production of spectacles which, for splendour and truth of representation, could, some years ago, have hardly been deemed possible. On the production of Sardanapalus, it was said that he had turned his theatre into a Gallery of Illustration, and that, properly read, his playbills invited the public to witness, not the Drama of Sardanapalus, but the Diorama of Nineveh.

Now, suppose that this, and worse than all this, is true—granting that the stage is in the worst state possible, let us compare the denunciations now directed against it with the description that Gifford gives of a period which we are accustomed to look back upon us a kind of golden age. It may be instructive to quote the passage, as a warning to those who may be disposed to howl too lugubriously over the fancied ruin of the drama. In the preface to the Mæviad, published in 1795, he writes as follows: “I know not if the stage has been so low, since the days of Gammer Gurton, as at this hour. It seems as if all the blockheads in the kingdom had started up, and exclaimed with one voice, ‘Come, let us write for the theatres.’ In this there is nothing, perhaps, altogether new; the striking and peculiar novelty of the times seems to be, that ALL they write is received. Of the three parties concerned in this business, the writers and the managers seem the least culpable. If the town will feed on husks, extraordinary pains need not be taken to find them anything more palatable. But what shall we say of the people? The lower orders are so brutified by the lamentable follies of O’Keefe, and Cobbe, and Pilon, and I know not who—Sardi venales, each worse than the other—that they have lost all relish for simplicity and genuine humour; nay, ignorance itself, unless it be gross and glaring, cannot hope for ‘their most sweet voices.’ And the higher ranks are so mawkishly mild that they take with a placid simper whatever comes before them; or, if they now and then experience a slight fit of disgust, have not resolution enough to express it, but sit yawning and gaping in each other’s faces for a little encouragement in their culpable forbearance.” Then, in a note to the Baviad, he speaks of a deep even lower than the bathos of O’Keefe. On referring to Morton, Reynolds, and Holcroft—to “Morton’s catchword,” to Reynolds’ “flippant trash,” and to “Holcroft’s Shug-lane cant”—he asks, “Will future ages believe that this facetious triumvirate should think nothing more to be necessary to the construction of a play than an eternal repetition of some contemptible vulgarity, such as ‘That’s your sort!’ ‘Hey, damme!’ ‘What’s to pay!’ ‘Keep moving!’ &c. They will: for they will have blockheads of their own, who will found their claims to celebrity on similar follies. What, however, they will never credit is, that these drivellings of idiotism, these catchwords, should actually preserve their respective authors from being hooted off the stage. No, they will not believe that an English audience could be so besotted, so brutified, as to receive such senseless exclamations with bursts of laughter, with peals of applause. I cannot believe it myself, though I have witnessed it. Haud credo—if I may reverse the good father’s position—haud credo, quia possibile est.” And not to quote further, let us but cite his description of the tragedy of the time:

“From first to last

Your joy is fustian, and your grief bombast;

Rhetoric has banished reason; kings and queens

Vent in hyperboles their royal spleens;

Guardsmen in metaphors express their hopes;

And ‘maidens, in white linen,’ howl in tropes.”

Terribly severe is all this—terrible for its truth. Gifford was not the man to write mincingly. Nor ought we, at the present day, to write mincingly of the iniquities and stupidities of the stage. But the fact is, that whatever be the shortcomings of the British stage at the present moment, and however much it may deserve the denunciations of criticism, it is incumbent on us to dwell on those indications of promise which are too much overlooked, rather than on the enormous deficiencies which are patent to every observer. Let us see whether the illustrative tendency of the time may not have its bright side as well as a dark, and may not have a higher purpose than spectacular effect.

It would indeed be a great mistake to imagine, that in the production of King Henry VIII., and the other dramas that went before it, the principal object of Mr Charles Kean was simply to place upon the stage a dazzling spectacle, and that his success as a manager has been due to a correct appreciation of the public taste in this matter. Were this the case, there would be nothing special in his managerial career. Brilliant spectacle is nothing new in the history of the theatre—and the history of the English theatre. In the days of James I., some of the stage properties were so very splendid, that we have read of certain lieges who were afraid lest the double-gilt magnificence of the tragedy-kings should cast the majesty of the real sovereign into shade, and so endanger the crown. However absurd and chimerical, what could be more gorgeous than the masques and pageants which were so common in those days? Our extravaganzas (counterparts, to a certain extent, of the ancient masque), although they are more appropriate in costume, and altogether more matter of fact, are not nearly so garish. Where, nowadays, shall we find a queen willing to act like Queen Anne of Denmark—she and the ladies of her court acting the negresses in Ben Jonson’s masque of Blackness? Such magnificence Mr Charles Kean assuredly cannot rival, and his claim to originality is not founded on the gorgeousness of the spectacle which he has placed before the footlights: he claims the praise of historical accuracy. It will be remembered how, in the playbill of his Macbeth—a curiosity in its way—he cited the authority of Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Strabo, Xiphilin, Snorre, Ducange, and the Eyrbiggia Saga—(not bad for a playbill, the Eyrbiggia Saga!)—and in the not less remarkable programme of Sardanapalus, he lays so great a stress on the virtues of antiquarian research and historical fidelity, as not only to speak of his having learnt that scenic illustration, if it have the weight of authority, may adorn and add dignity to the noble works of genius; and to assert that in decoration of every kind, whether scenic or otherwise, he has, in the first instance, aimed at truth, with the grand object of conveying to the stage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of a bygone age; but also to point it out as a note-worthy fact that, until the present moment, it has been impossible to render Lord Byron’s tragedy of Sardanapalus upon the stage with proper dramatic effect, because until now we have known nothing of Assyrian architecture and costume; so that, according to this view, it is not enough to have for such plays an architecture and costume artistically correct—they must also be historically genuine. This magnifying of historical truth, this drifting from the open and trackless sea of fiction to the terra firma and unalterable landmarks of fact—a strong tendency to REALISM, is the chief characteristic of Mr Kean’s management. And it is observable not merely in his mode of placing a drama upon the stage, but in his own style of acting. Look at Louis XI.—look at Cardinal Wolsey, remarkable for the specification of little traits and details that serve to realise the character as much as possible in that style which has been called pre-Raphaelite.

Nor is this tendency peculiar to the management of the Princess’s Theatre. It is manifested in various ways on nearly every stage throughout the country, sometimes absurdly enough. A provincial theatre announces a grand chivalric spectacle, “with seven hundred pounds’ worth of real armour!” A New York theatre announces that the School for Scandal will be produced with magnificent carpets, mirrors, and genuine silver plate! Whittington and his Cat is produced with a real rat amongst the crowds of sham ones, only the sense of reality is destroyed by the terrier that plays the cat, forgetting his catskin and beginning to yelp. One of the City theatres, in announcing the Hertfordshire Tragedy, set forth that the very gig in which Thurtell drove his victim to be murdered, and the very table on which the pork-chops were afterwards devoured, would form part of the stage properties—being expressly engaged for this theatre. In contrast with such inane realism, one had considerable satisfaction in gazing on the dog which Launcelot Gobbo, in Mr Talfourd’s travesty of Shylock, so triumphantly led about—a toy-spaniel on wheels. It is perhaps unfair to quote in such a connection the latest vagary of this realistic tendency—a curious bit of pre-Raphaelitism—on the part of Messrs Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, who, intending in the King’s Rival to produce as complete a picture as possible of the times of Charles II.—with its wit and wantonness, courtesies, familiarities, periwigs, Mr Pepys, and Spring Gardens—actually brought Major Wildman on the stage, in shirt and breeches, wet and torn, and abominably plague-stricken, all the people flying from the unsightly wretch as from an Afrit of the horrible Kaf, or a Goul of the bottomless pit. And so, for the sake of presenting a picture of perfect accuracy, these authors chose to turn the theatre into a Chamber of Horrors. And since this pre-Raphaelitism, or an antiquarianism worse than pre-Raphaelitism, is the order of the day, we are sometimes surprised that none of the managers has seized upon that one of Shakespeare’s plays in which, of all others, there is room for the display of historical ingenuity, and all the originality of research. We allude to the Tempest, and hope they will make use of the idea, when we point out that as, according to Mr Kean, it was impossible to represent the Sardanapalus of Lord Byron upon the stage until Mr Layard made his discoveries at Nineveh; so, until about fifty years ago, when Mr Malone’s Essay on the Tempest was published, it was impossible to produce that play adequately in any theatre. The Rev. Joseph Hunter has attempted to identify the abode of Prospero with Lampedusa, an island half-way between Malta and the African coast, grounding his opinion upon this amongst other facts, that Lampedusa furnishes the Maltese with firewood, and Prospero sends Caliban forth to collect firewood! This, however, is but child’s-play to the labour of Malone, who not only succeeds in identifying the island with the Bermudas, but actually discovers the identical tempest that gives its name to the play—“the dreadful hurricane that dispersed the fleet of Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, in July 1609, on their passage with a large supply of provisions and men for the infant colony in Virginia, by which the Admiral ship, as it was called, having those commanders on board [‘some noble creatures’], was separated from the rest of the fleet, and wrecked on the Island of Bermuda.” Then come the incidental phrases descriptive of the storm that identify it with the Tempest—“Admiral ship parted from the rest of the fleet”—“they resolved to shut up the hatches”—“take leave of each other”—“ship struck upon a rock”—“most luckily thrown up between two, as upright as if she had been on the stocks”—“arrived in safety without the loss of a man”—“Bermodes”—“Isle of Devils”—“enchanted place”—“sea-monster in shape like a man”—“richest, pleasantest, most healthful place ever seen.” What a splendid hit Mr Kean or Mr Phelps would make if only some possible Mr Layard could be found who should go and excavate the cell of Prospero! Why not? Is there not perfect truth in what Mr Charles Mathews says:—“In France the dramatic authors have free permission to distort history ingeniously, on condition of being gay and witty. In England, provided we are true to history, we have free permission to be dull and tiresome.”

Now, if some of the phrases which we have been using, have been used correctly; if we have been right in speaking of the pre-Raphaelitism and realism of the theatre, it will be evident that the question as to the present state of the drama, in particular, resolves itself into a much wider question as to the present state of art generally. And the fact is, that the more narrowly we examine the sister arts, the more nearly do we find that they assimilate. In the pictorial art we find the same symptoms of disintegration and decay as in the dramatic; in both, we find the same elements of promise. Look at the walls of our exhibition-rooms, and behold the inanities that figure there, contemporary with the inanities of the theatre. This picture either displays as little action as a modern tragedy, or its action is as spasmodic as an Adelphi melodrama. In how many of these pictures do we find the artists compensating for bad drawing with gaudy colour, hiding vacancy of expression in a blaze of light, feebleness of passion in a tornado of shadows, and blundering perspective, aerial and linear, in a mist as convenient as the clouds by which the gods of Homer saved their heroes from the lances of the enemy? The very faults we find in the theatre! Eternal mannerism, staginess, mimicry, trickery, grimacing, catchwords, red lights and blue lights, and the name of the perruquier mentioned in the playbills in large letters! In how many pictures of naked legs in the last Exhibition, did you not recognise the calves of the gallant grenadier who is now fighting the battles of his country? That beard, that turban; we think we have seen the face of that Turkish Jew in at least fifty-seven pictures; and he so haunts us throughout the Exhibition-rooms in a thousand intolerable disguises—his long nose here, and his cold brown eye there, as if, after using him whole as long as possible, the artists at length cut him into little pieces, and made a division of his remains, that really it would be a pleasure to know that such had been his actual fate. It is the very vice of the stage, where we find Mr A—— (who plays the villains), or Mr B—— (who plays the enamoured young gentleman), or Mr C—— (who does the comic), eternally playing themselves, and through every possible transformation presenting us with the same legs and arms, and expressive nose and cracked voice. Whether on the boards or on the canvass, incapacity and commonplace issue in virtually the same results. And it so happens that if one were asked what are the most striking, the most note-worthy, or the most notorious peculiarities, at this moment, of our picture-galleries on the one hand, or of the theatres on the other, one must inevitably fix upon the pre-Raphaelitism of the one, and the Revivalism of the other, and recognise them as twins. Only it must be remembered that the pre-Raphaelitism of the picture-galleries is but one of the forms, although the most peculiar form, in which the tendency to realism is manifested. It is manifested not less determinately in the prominence given to portraiture—portraits of “men, women, and Herveys,” portraits of dogs, portraits of horses, portraits of prize oxen and pigs, and dead game, and black-faced ewes. The colouring which Gibson gives to his statues is a move in the same direction. And the tendency is symbolised and strengthened by the photographic art which has sprung up within the last few years, and promises, whether for good or for evil, to exercise so much influence on every easel throughout the country.

To come to the point then: What is the meaning of all this realism? If, with all the multiform absurdities in which it is manifested, it must nevertheless be admitted that all or most of the symptoms of vitality in the imitative arts are at the present moment expressed in this manner, what is the value of it?

The fact is, that whenever this tendency to realism is manifested with more than ordinary force (we were going to say, virulence), it is a most critical symptom. It is distinctive of what the old physicians would have called two separate climacterics in the history of art. It marks the infancy and the old age of art—the rise and the fall. It is just as in the individual man—at first in childhood, and at last in second childhood, he worships the real, and refuses to accept what he cannot believe in as absolutely and historically true. “But is it true?” inquires the child; “is it a fact?” says the old man. The precise difference between the realism of infancy and that of age is another matter to which we shall afterwards have to refer: at present we have only to do with their generic identity. And as the individual man is in almost every respect a miniature of the race, so we find this generic realism characteristic of at once the beginning and the end of art. In the middle space it culminates towards the pure azure of the ideal.

We are not sure, however, that this doctrine as to the periods of realism, evident as it would seem to be, will obtain the immediate acceptance of every reader: we are not sure, because the counter-view has more than once already been put forward—and by some of the critics in the present century has been maintained with great vigour, that art displays most imagination in its infancy, and that—as at once a proof and illustration of the fact—we find its most ancient works to be the best. While the doctrine, as commonly advanced, seems to make this wide and sweeping generalisation, it is of course more cautiously worded, so as to apply chiefly to poetry—epical and lyrical: as applied to the dramatic or imitative arts, there is such a mass of evidence against it, that it could safely be advanced only by implication. But it is not true even with reference to the narrative poet—call him what men will—bard, aoidos, minstrel, maker, minnesinger, scald. For observe, that the point in dispute is not whether the most ancient poets are the best; grant for a moment that they are: but wherein lies their distinguishing excellence? are they more imaginative than later ones? Nothing of the kind: the imaginative poets belong to what a geologist would call the pleiocene formation—a much later epoch. The elder bards are remarkable above all things for their truthfulness, their minute observation, their naturalness, their reality. Life, the present life in the present world, was to them an overwhelming reality, and they had no inclination, little need, to imagine a new world, and go and live in it. A most wonderful imagination they certainly displayed, but they were quite unconscious of the gift: they did not imagine, like Edmund Spenser or John Keats, for the sake of imagining; they did not dream for the mere pleasure of dreaming. Their pleasure in dreaming was a sub-conscious pleasure. Truth was the grand and ostensible object; and if the facts which they proposed to discover and describe were often mere fancies, still they were not recognised as fancies. A mere imagination they would have regarded as a mere lie. The so-called facts for which, in modern phrase, they were indebted to imagination, they professed to have received from reason, from memory, from inspiration, from veritable supernatural vision, always from a credible source. And here, indeed, lies the strength of the argument which refers the origin of verse to the requirements of memory, so that versification was in its first intention but a system of mnemonics. Right or wrong, that theory has been endorsed by illustrious names; and it must be admitted even by an opponent, that the whole tone of the elder poetry speaks in its favour. There is a tone of sincerity in the elder poets, as if they could not play with their subject, and as if upon them all had been bestowed the gift which a fairy is said to have bestowed upon Thomas of Ercildoune—the tongue that could not lie, the tongue that could not feign. They never seem to be telling tales; they are relating histories. They do not attempt to tickle the imagination; they are committing important and interesting facts to memory. And this also is the reason why the rhyming chroniclers—say Robert de Brunne, or Robert of Gloucester, who were nothing but rhymers—were nevertheless regarded as true poets. They narrated history in numerous verse: what more did those who were truly called poets profess to do? These latter made their narratives more interesting, but it was not recognised that the narratives were of a different kind. Psychological analysis had not yet penetrated so far as to discern imagination in the true poet, and none in the rhyming chronicler. It had not yet discovered that the office of the poet is more than this—viz., to tell what he knows faithfully, pleasingly, and in verse. Credibility was deemed the first virtue of the poet, the primrose of the poetical flora. What if their world be all or half unreal?—still they believed it to be real. As it is long before the poor mortals who have been snatched away to Elfland discover that all the splendour which surrounds them is but a dream, that the gold is dross, and the diamonds glass, and the brocades worsted, and the velvets cotton, and all unreality; even so the poets of a country (children kidnapped from a better world) do not all at once discover that the world they live in is wholly unreal, wholly ideal. They are, at first, the most extreme of realists.

It thus appears that even in poetry the early period is remarkable for its realism. The poets do not begin with sublimated fancies in the highest heaven of invention. The ascent of Mont Blanc is quite a modern feat. All that old Provençal minstrelsy—sirvente and chanson—murmurs at the foot of the Alps. And if this be true of poetry, it is much more true of the imitative arts—the drama, painting, and sculpture. If sculpture perished in the realism of Roman portraiture, it began with the realism of Egyptian mummy—inglorious attempt to preserve the real thing. The same law holds in painting. In his work on the North American Indians, Mr Catlin describes a little incident which furnishes a very good illustration of how a savage regards painting, and how the art in its infancy would infallibly be treated. In taking the likeness of one of these Indians, Mr Catlin proceeded to paint the shadow of the nose, to the no small bewilderment of the onlookers, who immediately found fault with the dark patch. He pointed out the shadow of the nose which it was intended to represent; but no—they were unable to understand; it was an injury to the countenance of their medicine-man; there must be no shadow, and without shadow the picture was painted. They insisted on his painting reality, not appearance. We find the counterpart of this in the old medieval pictures—all so shadowless. The feeling for shadow stole very gradually over the artistic mind. And in many other details one might note how the painter, in the early dawn of the art, seeks to represent the object before him, not as it appears to his eye at one particular moment, but as it is, or as he knows it to be, in reality. He knows, for example, that a hand is the flattened extremity of the arm, ending in five points; in his pictures, accordingly, the hand is invariably spread out with the unmistakable digits—one, two, three, four, five—always five. And we do not know that there is anything in the history of art more remarkable than the contrast between our present mode of regarding a picture, and that which we find current in the olden times. We regard a picture as a picture—a representation—a memory—an imagination. Three hundred years ago, it was the established formula of praise to say that it was a reality—the thing itself. One might still go farther back and recall the anecdotes told of the old Greek painters—of the horse neighing to the picture of a horse by Apelles, and the curious test which Zeuxis applied to one of his pictures, the birds coming to eat the grapes, which were thus shown to be well painted, but unterrified by the figure of the man who carried the grapes, which was thus shown to be badly painted.[^[13]] And we might quote whole pages from Vasari to show how an artist and a critic of the cinque cento looked upon a work of art. We will quote but one or two sentences: “Every touch of the pencil,” says Vasari of one of Raphael’s Madonnas—“every touch of the pencil in the heads, hands, and feet of this work, has produced such effect that the parts seem rather to be of the living flesh than the mere colours of the painter.” Again, with reference to musical instruments in a picture of St Cecilia, he says, that they “lie scattered around her; and these do not seem to be merely painted, but might be taken for the real objects represented.” Yet again he says, “It may indeed with truth be declared that the paintings of other masters are properly to be called paintings, but those of Raphael may well be designated the life itself, for the flesh trembles, the breathing is made obvious to sight, the pulses in his figures are beating, and life is in its utmost animation through all his works.” Here we find still in force the old feeling after realism which is characteristic of the earliest period of art, and we find it coincident with a style of painting that more and more daily tended towards conventional treatment and idealisations—until at length, in course of time, ideality, having reached its highest point, passed into allegory, and in these allegories too often took the one venturesome step from the sublime to the ridiculous, so that we can scarcely regard Goldsmith as indulging in caricature when he described the painting of the Wakefield family, with Mrs Primrose as Venus, and the worthy doctor in a gown and bands presenting her with his books on the Whistonian controversy; Olivia, an amazon, dressed in a green Joseph; Sophia, a shepherdess, with plenty of sheep; and poor Moses with a hat and white feather. Let any one who doubts this turn to Rubens’ allegories descriptive of the life and reign of Marie de Medici, where naked young gentlemen appear at court beside ladies overladen with dress, where the caduceus fraternises with the crosier, and the queen grasps indifferently a thyrsus or a sceptre; where Mercury stands unabashed by the legate of the pope, his winged hat in delightful contrast with the red hat of the cardinal; and where one can hardly tell which is more terrible, the lion raging on earth, or the lion gloriously rampant amongst the signs of the Zodiac. And if now, against such bewildering allegory and algebraic generalisations, the caricature of ideality, we find the present generation of artists protesting with perhaps too much vehemence, and all more or less in one way or another—sometimes soberly, sometimes extravagantly—returning again to realism, what are we to say? Is it the art of painting sinking into dotage, or the art of painting renewing its youth? Certainly, whatever faults have been attributed to the realists of our time, we are not aware that they have ever been charged with the sin of paralytic senility.

The charge of senility might be brought with far more appropriateness against the drama in its present state, although, even as applied to the drama, one cannot choose but indulge the belief that it is too severe. If we detect at one and the same time a tendency to excessive realism in the drama, and in the pictorial and plastic arts, it is difficult to believe that what, with all its extravagance, is symptomatic of youth and progress in the one, should be symptomatic only of decrepitude and ruin in the other. These arts are so nearly allied that one might almost say they rise and fall together. At all events, their history is the same, and runs the same cycles. We have spoken of the realism out of which painting and sculpture spring. Like painting and sculpture, the drama springs out of realism the most extreme: it springs out of lyricism. The lyric, strictly speaking, and in its fundamental idea, is an expression of the real feelings of the singer himself: he is not a lyrist, but a dramatist, who gives expression to the supposed feelings of other people. The true lyrist sings because he cannot help singing—a dirge because he is sad, an elegy because he mourns the loss of a friend, pœans because he is joyful, sapphics because he is in love, anacreontics because he has tasted the pleasures of wine. And so with every lyrical art; it is the irrepressible ebullition of a genuine feeling. Take dancing, for example. The ballet, as every one understands, is not natural dancing; the ballet-dancers are not true children of Terpsichore (she is their step-mother, if you like). Every one understands that in its central idea dancing is the expression of a real, not an assumed feeling on the part of the dancer: he dances for joy—he dances because the music excites him to motion. Music is, in fact, the redeeming principle of dancing on the stage and for show: without music it would be meaningless. The orchestra furnishes to the apprehension of every spectator a sufficient reason for the evolutions of the dancer, so that the dancing is but the visible incarnation of the melody. And music in this way preserves, to a certain extent, the lyrical character of the ballet, all the gyrations and saltations of which appear to be the natural consequences of a genuine feeling, which has been created by the music, and which the spectators have in common with the corps de ballet, and therefore know to be real. Thus, even when it mounts the stage, the lyrical art must authenticate itself; even in assuming a dramatic form, the lyric must attempt to establish its own veracity in the highest and strictest sense—its own reality.

Now it is out of such realism that the drama by every natural process arises. And we are not theorising when we say this. It is a well-known fact, that the Greek drama—the tragedy not less than the comedy—sprung out of the Dionysiac festivals, and the drunken dithyrambic revelry of its songs and dances; and there is no theory in the world that can half so well illustrate the relation of the lyric proper to the drama proper, as the history of the rise of the histrionic art in Greece. There the ancient worshippers sang their choral odes to the great Dionysus—Dionysus, not merely the god of wine, but the very vital principle of nature. They hymned his praises with extraordinary fervour—with such enthusiasm, in fact, that they passed beyond the merely lyrical expression of admiration and devotion into the dramatic imitation of his traditional exploits. As the god of Nature, he was the god of endless transformations, and these enthusiastic revellers not only sang the glories and the eclipses of the changing year, but in the height of the inflamed zeal which carried them away, enacted in their own persons, and according to certain typical traditions of Satyrs and Fauns, Dryads and Hamadryads, the stupendous mysteries of physical mutation. They assumed the goatlike appearance of Satyrs; they dashed about like woodland nymphs; Pan became innumerable; Silenus appeared in a thousand reflections. It is utterly prosaic to speak of these hirsute appendages, multitudinous horns, leaves covering the face, the manifold strange disguises assumed by the populace, as if they were the mere masks and dominoes of a modern revel. They were much more than masks and dominoes. They were the poetical costume of the characters with which, in all the heat and flush of wine, the worshippers identified themselves. It was an extravagant fanaticism by which, in celebrating the joys and the sorrows of Dionysus, they passed out of themselves, ceased to sing of the god as far away, and of his history as belonging to the olden time, and suddenly became there and then that which they celebrated;—an extravagance to which a parallel may be found even in some of the phases of the Christian religion, as amongst not a few of the extremer Protestant fanatics, and notably in Catholic countries amongst the mystics—the Estatica, rising beyond the lyrical mood of adoration and enraptured gazing, suddenly stretching forth her arms and limbs until they become cruciform, and so standing entranced and dramatised, until actually, by a peculiarly subtle sympathy, which the physiologists regard as not inexplicable, the stigmata may be traced on the hands and feet. And so it ever happens that the dramatic is evolved out of the lyrical—the assumed out of the real—the representative impersonation out of the genuine sentiment. It is an historic fact that the drama, with its myriad personalities, is generated from the lyric, as the colours of the prism form a ray of pure light; and that, as for example in the Greek Æschylus, and the English Marlowe, it is in its earliest development imbued with lyricism. In other words, it is at first essentially Realistic.

But here arises a question to which we have already referred. If the imitative arts begin with realisation, and end in realisation, what is the difference between the beginning and the end? What is the difference between the child looking up in your face, and saying, “But is it true?” and the old man asking, “Is it a fact?” We must beg pardon if we attempt to answer that question by help of a little psychology.

The Scottish philosophers talk a great deal about the fundamental beliefs of the human mind, one of the most important of these being our belief in the uniformity of nature. Granted—that we have a general belief in the constancy of nature, and in this faith expect that the future shall be as the past. But with the usual meagreness of the elder Scottish psychologists, and with an absence of scientific precision that is also too frequent, they stated the law very loosely: they stated the law, not as we find it aboriginal in the human mind, but as we find it corrected by experience. In its aboriginal form, the belief may be stated thus: whatever is, must be, and could not have been otherwise—whatever happens, happens of necessity. A child accepts every event in this simple faith, and it is often exceedingly difficult to convince the little soul that what has happened once, may not and will not happen again. Experience comes with years, and corrects the stringency of the law; the idea of accident enters, and while a general belief in the constancy of nature still remains, it no longer usurps the throne of absolute law. Perhaps the process goes even further, until at length, in the mind’s dotage, certainty is banished from our expectations, the muse of history becomes the most incredible of Cassandras, and the whole world lies dead before us and around us, with men and women rattling over it like dice from a dice-box. And here we detect precisely the difference between the realism of childhood and poetry, and the realism of dotage and prose. The child in everything perceives the element of necessity; the old man perceives only the element of contingency. In particulars, the child perceives the universal; the old man perceives in particulars only the particular. This makes all the difference between prose and poetry. In the intermediate space between infancy and dotage, dissatisfied with the real, we create an ideal world, where all is necessary and universal. There is nothing true in history, says Horace Walpole, save the names and the dates; and so we pass into fiction, where the names and the dates are the only things that are not true. But at the two poles the ideal is forgotten. At the one—namely, in the youth of men or of nations—the real supplies its place, being viewed in that generality, necessity, eternity—call it what you will—which is the condition of the ideal. At the other—namely, in the decline of individuals or of nations—the real is all in all; and it is nothing but the real, just as in the case of Peter Bell,—

“A primrose by the river’s brim,

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.”

It will be observed that, in contrasting the two poles of realism, we have not made any allusion to the absence or the presence of imagination; and this because the word is so liable to misconception. But if we are correct in distinguishing the realism of youth from the realism of senility, by saying that in the one case every circumstance is recognised as a necessity, every detail is viewed as eternally and universally true, while in the other all is more or less regarded as chance-work, which might or might not have been—what is this but saying, that in the one case facts appeal to the imagination, in the other merely to sense? It is the imagination that magnifies insular facts into continental truths, and immortalises momentary feelings by raising them into eternal laws. The Imagination is, par excellence, the faculty of generalisation—a fact which the psychologists commonly overlook. It indeed always regards the concrete, always regards the individual; and that is the great fact which the psychologists are accustomed to dwell upon, while at the same time they overlook the principal characteristic of imagination, which is this, that it never regards the individual merely as an individual, nor the concrete merely as a concrete; it regards the individual as representative of a species, and the concrete as a type of something more general. The imagination is to our other faculties what Cuvier or Owen is to other men. Give to Professor Owen a single bone—even the single bone of an extinct animal, and he will determine the size and position of every other bone, and the entire structure of the bird or beast. Give to the imagination a single fact, and it has the same marvellous significance, and myriads of other facts link on to it by the most inevitable obligation. And it is because in this temper the youthful mind seizes upon facts, that even when it clings to them far more tenaciously, and dwells upon them far more minutely than superannuated minds do, its realism has a worth and a hopefulness to which any other kind of realism can make no pretensions. The realism of dotage is gossip—merest gossip. The lace in a Dutch portrait—every thread and loop painted, what is it but old wives’ gossip? Compare this uninteresting imitation of point lace, velvets, and silks and satins, with the young Titian painting in the eye of one of his figures the reflection of a window. This is the realism of a boy, that is the realism of old women.

The drift of our argument will now be apparent. We have shown that the distinguishing feature of the modern drama is its tendency to Realism, and that it exhibits this tendency at present in common with the other imitative arts. We have also shown that the tendency to realism is characteristic of art in two periods of its history—namely, its rise and its decline; and we have endeavoured to explain the difference between the realism that characterises the rise of art, and the realism that marks its decadence. Then here arises the question of questions: To which period does the realism that signalises at present the imitative arts in general, and the dramatic art in particular, belong? Is it the realism of progress, or the realism of decay? It is the most difficult question of all; at least, it is the question to which it is most difficult in our present circumstances to give a very decided answer. Having stated the law and summed up the evidence, we should certainly be glad to shift to a jury the responsibility of pronouncing an absolute verdict as to the question of fact. The difficulty of pronouncing such a verdict is easily accounted for. In a period which is one of revival and not of imitation, it is most natural that we should find the two kinds of realism more or less blending together—the literalness of an exhausted epoch, and the faithfulness of a regenerated life. And amid all the pre-Raphaelitism of the stage and of the picture-galleries, it is nothing wonderful that we should find much to condemn, much of that literalness which is unworthy and imbecile. When, to quote an extreme instance—when Thurtell’s gig, with “some of the real water from the pond,” is exhibited on the boards of the Surrey Theatre, it is such another exhibition as we find in the degradation of the Roman drama—a degradation, by the way, which old Thomas Heywood describes as amongst the highest honours of the drama. There is so much naïveté in his description that we shall quote it:—

“Julius Cæsar himself, for his pleasure, became an actor, being in shape, state, voice, judgment, and all other occurrents, exterior and interior, excellent. Amongst many other parts acted by him in person, it is recorded of him that, with general applause in his own theatre, he played Hercules Furens; and, amongst many other arguments of his completeness, excellence, and extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him: Being in the depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had from Dejanira brought him the poisoned shirt, dipt in the blood of the centaur Nessus, he, in the middest of his torture and fury, finding this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appointed him to creep into of purpose), although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Cæsar so carried away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of the madness of Hercules to which he had fashioned all his active spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, and after swung him, terque quaterque (as the poet says) about his head. It was the manner of their emperors in those days, in their public tragedies, to choose out the fittest amongst such as for capital offences were condemned to die, and employ them in such parts as were to be killed in the tragedy, who of themselves would make suit rather to die with resolution, and by the hands of such princely actors, than otherwise to suffer a shameful and most detestable end.”

And this, which honest old Heywood is willing to commend because done by an emperor, is in fact, parvis componere magna, the exact parallel to the incident already mentioned—the rat-killing in the pantomime of Whittington and his Cat. It is parallel also, in a certain degree, to one of Mr Phelps’s early extravagances, who, in his determination to adhere to the text of Shakespeare, actually ended Macbeth by the exhibition of the traitor’s head—“Reenter Macduff, with Macbeth’s head on a pole.” One is inclined to believe that had he not been himself the Macbeth of the evening, he would have made arrangements to exhibit the veritable head of the actor who performed the part.

But while it is impossible to deny the existence of such a baneful realism, is this all? and does there not predominate at the same time a far more healthy tendency? Are not Mr Charles Kean’s revivals of King John and Macbeth—are not Mr Phelps’s revivals, notwithstanding his early vagary—of this kind? Is not, for example, the historic fidelity with which Macbeth is represented in the Princess’s Theatre, something entirely different in kind from that species of realism which in the soliloquy,

“Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle towards my hand?”

actually exhibited a dagger hanging in the air? There can be very little doubt of it; and it may be said generally that the realism displayed is most frequently of the earnest and healthy sort. If any misgiving should arise with regard to this in the case of the drama, one has a right to refer to the realism manifested at the very same time in the kindred art of painting, and if not entirely to interpret the one by the other, still to regard the analogy as of great importance. There are many of us who cannot admire pre-Raphaelitism, with all its extravagance and presumption, but at all events we do not regard its faults as the results of mental paralysis. They are the faults of youth, not of age—of the pleasant springtime which the pre-Raphaelites love to paint, when the leaves come forth in all their delicacy, almost diaphonous against the light, so that we trace the tender veins and fibres in all their minute windings—not of the yellowing autumn, when again all nature comes before us with excessive minuteness of detail, but the detail of faded leaves and the curious reticulation of their skeletons.

Right or wrong, it is at least more pleasant to look thus hopefully on the future of the drama than to fold one’s hands, shrug one’s shoulders, and give up all as lost. The drama! they say—fiddlesticks! the drama has all gone to the opera. Very well: and why should not the drama go to the opera? the music will do it no harm—on the contrary, a great deal of good. It is quite true that the opera, or, to speak more generally, the musical tendencies of the present time, act to the hurt of the existing theatres; but pity the man who ventures to dream that the fortunes of the British drama are to be identified with the fortunes of the present theatres, as at present conducted. On the contrary, it would probably be no great misfortune to the British drama, if, with one or two exceptions, they were all burnt to the ground; and however adverse to the drama the present musical taste may appear to be, it is not so really, but full of promise, if the dramatists would only see and use the opportunity. What is the use of running down illustration, dioramas, and concerts? Would it not be better for the dramatists to write up to them? The British drama has at the present moment two special haunts—the theatre and the concert-hall. It is needless for the dramatic authors to complain that their pieces are damned. Who cares for their pieces? All they have to say has no relation to our present habitudes and thoughts. If they will write for the theatres, let them write something worthy of illustration, and be as realistic in their writing as Mr Kean is in his acting, and in his stage appointments. And let them invade the concert-halls, where a new drama is springing up for the amusement of those who cannot away with the theatre.

Their position in the theatre at present is not good, is not creditable to them as a body, although we are far from looking on it with despair, and are far from saying that Othello’s occupation is gone. It may be worth our while to recognise clearly the position which the drama has always occupied in this country.

“Shikspur? Shikspur? who wrote it?” says Kitty, in High Life below Stairs, when the worshipful Lady Bab asks her if she had never read Shikspur. There are perhaps not many Mrs Kitties of the present day who would give a similar answer. But although the name of the great dramatist has become a household word amongst us, and his works are perhaps better known than those of any other writer in the language, he is known rather as an author to be read than as a dramatist whose plays are to be witnessed. It is not to be denied that upon the great majority of the British people, and especially of the middle classes, the theatre has had little or no influence. It is utterly ignored by them. From the days of Elizabeth and James, when the mayor and aldermen of London did what they could to discountenance the drama, and to oust Shakespeare and Burbage from the Blackfriars’ Theatre, up to this present hour, the playhouses, frequented by the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of education, and the players honoured as “His Majesty’s Servants,” or, “The Lord Chamberlain’s Company,” have been regarded with suspicion by the sober citizens of the middle class. When the theatres rose into importance, the Puritans rose into importance, and the former have never recovered from the denunciations of the latter. These denunciations, it is true, were often most intemperate, and based on the most ridiculous grounds (as when Gosson denounced the acting of women’s parts by boys as the sin which brought the fiery judgment of heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah), yet when in so many of the plays of the period, and still more of the profligate reign of the second Charles, we find profanity, obscenity, and hardness of heart presented as the most brilliant of qualities, it is nothing wonderful that the commonalty should have been estranged. From the memory of those impurities the theatre has never entirely recovered, and there are multitudes among us nowadays who regard it as little better than a lazaretto. It has indeed been very much altered, so that in every respectable theatre he must be nearly as squeamish as those Americans who are said by Sam Slick to have put trousers on the legs of their pianofortes, who is offended with what he sees or hears: and yet still the old repugnance remains; as if, like the man who had the devil cast out of him, the people regard it as a house swept and garnished only to receive seven other devils worse than before. The fact is, that it is not enough to introduce a negative morality into the theatres: it is not enough that the old devil should have been smoked out, and the house swept and garnished, if we find no positive substitute. It is a genuine and noble substitute that is wanted, not electroplate, nor nickel silver. The most offensive part of stage morality at present is its hypocrisy. We should infinitely prefer seeing the downright licentiousness of Etherege and Sedley to the sham sentiment and the canting virtues that sometimes take the place of it on the modern stage—we mean especially in the afterpieces. The former is an open enemy, the other a disguised one. And until we have true poetry in the sentiment, and true chivalry in the action, and that reverence which is implied in poetry and chivalry, it is not likely that the English people, as a whole, will ever look to the theatres. At present, the greater number of dramatic writers seem to expend their energies in the most ephemeral manner. The burlesques and pantomimes, we have said, are about the best things produced on the British stage. They are often very amusing, and display a strange prodigality of power—but power all run to seed. The wit consists of punning; the humour consists of practical jokes, horrible grimace, and elaborate buffoonery; the dialogue is in the vernacular of the London taverns and caves of harmony;[^[14]] the plot is not simply improbable, it is impossible and incomprehensible; the characters are little better than marionettes, and their sentiments the sentiments of puppets. Of course there are exceptions, and brilliant ones they are. Bulwer Lytton, Sheridan Knowles, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, and a few others, have shown what they can do in a more serious vein. But, as a whole, the dramatic literature of the day is, as it has ever been since the Restoration, more remarkable for quantity than quality. Few persons out of London, and not many even in London, are well acquainted with that literature, the extent of its surface, the multiplicity of its currents, its utter shallowness, and the incredible mud that lies at the bottom of it; and were we to attempt a very slight analysis of its contents, run up a few statistics, give one or two extracts, and, in a word, describe it in its proper colours, a tale would probably be unfolded which would not only somewhat astonish those who, living in the provinces, seldom or never enter a theatre, and are thus blessedly ignorant of the carrion fare on which metropolitan playgoers fatten at half-price, but would also make some of those who frequent the dramatic temple not a little ashamed that afterpieces which are unreadable for their insipidity,[^[15]] disgusting for their bad taste, and still worse, contemptible, although not so much for their licentiousness as for the cant and tremendous humbug of their hypocritical moralities, should have power, in the hands of a clever actor, to charm the purer sensibilities of their nature to sleep, so that, as if glamour had been cast in their eyes, trickery and tinsel pass for reality, falsehood appears to be true, evil good, and ugliness beautiful. In such a state of things it is not likely that the theatre should achieve a popularity which it has never enjoyed; and certainly its entire spirit must be revolutionised ere it can find a large welcome in the heart of the nation. Read the modern novelists and read the modern dramatists, and observe the difference of tone. There is in the common run of modern dramas—whether tragedy, comedy, or farce—such an utter absence of noble purpose, that not a whole army of claqueurs could ever succeed in establishing their popularity.

The fact is, the Muse of the British drama seems at this moment inclined to vacate the theatres, and to take up her abode in the halls and concert-rooms. Like the old fairies of the story-books, who, disgusted with the treatment they receive in one family, go and bestow their favours on the household next door, the dramatic Muse—a very old fairy indeed—is tired of the position assigned to her in the theatres. What is that? On the ceiling, gracefully gyrating round the gaselier, are the four lightly-draped muses of the theatre, with dagger, and mask, and harp, and castanets in hand, while certain naked amorini carry festoons of flowers before them, and from every jutty, frieze, and coign of vantage on the cornice, horned satyrs and ivy-crowned bacchantes leer out with astonishment. The Muse of the British drama is tired of dancing over the gaselier, dancing over our heads, and wishes to come down to our hearts, and so she enters the music-halls and concert-rooms, where she patronises two distinct classes of entertainments, the one more strictly lyrical, the other more strictly dramatic.

With regard to the more musical kind of entertainment, it must have been observed, that while songs and ballads, and instrumentation have a large sphere assigned to them, the operatic airs are day by day assuming more and more importance. It is quite true that a cavatina sung in a concert-room is very different from the same cavatina sung on the stage. The singing in a concert-room is like the singing of statues—so expressionless. We would rather not look at a concert-singer—one who is merely a concert-singer. Goethe makes the same remark with respect to singers generally. They remind one of the ludicrous story which the monks report of St Benedict,—that he was heard singing psalms two or three weeks before he was born, and saw the light of day. You hear these singers singing long before their faces are born, long before they attain the life of expression. Exceptions of course there are occasionally, and chiefly when a duet, a trio, or a quartette is to be sung. And it requires only an operatic singer, whose reputation as prima donna or primo tenore will excuse such a liberty, to throw a truly dramatic expression into the solos, for the practice to become general. Why should not some attempt be made by those who can, to escape from the starched formality of the concert-room—to forget that they are in dress boots and white gloves—and to impart somewhat of the animation of the theatre into the pieces of music which they hold so affectionately in their hands, because it saves their hands from even the inclination to gesticulate? And with glee and madrigal unions in every town, why do not the dramatists see their opportunity, and infuse somewhat more of the dramatic element into those part songs, out of which in time a little drama might arise? Everything has its insignificant beginnings, and, discreetly managed, the incoherence of our concerts might gradually be developed into the organic unity of the drama. It is coming to this, in fact. The music-halls are becoming theatres under a new and unobjectionable name.

With regard to the more dramatic entertainments that are so popular in those public halls, the new life is still more apparent. We do not simply refer to dramatic readings, although these too have a vast influence—an influence as superior to that of the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, to which we once heard the plays of Shakespeare irreverently compared, as the spell of the Ladye of Branksome, who could raise the spirits to her bidding, was to the power of William of Deloraine, who lifted the massy tombstone, and fetched the mystic book from the coffin of the departed wizard; an influence, too, as superior to that of the rhapsodists who travelled through the cities of Greece reciting the lays of Homer (for they recited these lays in detached fragments), as the palace of Aladdin, built in a night, is superior to the single brick that Scholasticos carried about with him as a specimen of the house which he wanted to sell. It is needless to dwell, however, upon this influence, important and ennobling though it be, because its tendency is to keep alive the memory of the past; and we wish rather to indicate the new life that is stirring. Albert Smith’s Ascent of Mont Blanc is the best specimen of a class of entertainments that are now very popular—perhaps the most popular of all, and which, when further and duly developed, promise to rival the present theatres. Mr Albert Smith goes to Mont Blanc, returns, gets Mr Beverley to paint the scenes through which he travelled, and enlivens those scenes by the description and impersonation of what he saw and heard. We have no doubt that Mr Smith’s entertainment is far more amusing, far more intellectual, and ten thousand times more artistic, than anything of the kind which England could furnish in the thirteenth or fourteenth century; and he will not resent the comparison if we say that he reminds us of the holy palmers and pilgrims who, in those crusading centuries, returned from Palestine, and with the aid of rude pictures—“the city of Jerusalem, with towers and pinnacles,—Old Tobye’s House,—A Fyrmament with a fyry cloud, and a double cloud,”—attempted in miracle plays and mysteries to convey an idea of the scenes they themselves had witnessed in the Holy Land, or of the events which in the olden time had been enacted there, and so laid the foundations of a theatre that ultimately grew into the fair proportions of the Elizabethan drama, as the rude earthwork which Romulus in the Palilia founded on the Palatine, grew in greatness and in pride, until it embraced the seven hills, a city of palaces and the marble mistress of the world. We might have run the comparison still more closely, if we had not forgotten for the moment Mr Smith’s Eastern Travels and Overland Route. No matter. In these entertainments we find a certain resemblance to the miracle plays out of which the modern drama was developed; and do we not also find a certain nineteenth century likeness of the ancient moralities, in these life-dramas, death-dramas, and devil-dramas, in which our young poets delight to sow their wild oats; giving us all manner of caprices for imagination, hysterics for passion, revolting descriptions for the sublime, soliloquy for dialogue, and dialogue for action? Yea, verily, and out of all these elements we are not without hope that a drama may yet arise more worthy of fame than that which at present exists. But again, we repeat, no more Shakespearean imitations, and legitimate suicide; let the dramatists be wise in their generation, accept the tendencies of the time, and think the thoughts and wear the dress of this year 1856.