Bulwer was not the man to save the erring Drama. Stronger men than he might have tried in vain to do so. It was not to the men of letters, the scholars, that it was to owe its salvation. The democracy had to come to the use of reason and to educate itself. Instead of the artificial drama which was offered to them, they held out for a drama sprung from its own loins, born of its own passions, made after its own image, palpitating with its own life; literary it might become later, if it could. And to this end, in the words of Olivier Saint-Jean, “It was necessary that things should go worse still before they could go better.”
CHAPTER II
Macready’s Withdrawal from the Stage—The Enemies of the Drama in 1850: Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the “Hippodrama”—French Plays and French Players in England—Actors of the Period—The Censorship—The Critics—The Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion Boucicault.
Macready played once more in Paris in 1846, but the times were changed, and he achieved only a succès d’estime. He then visited America, where his presence evoked professional jealousies and bad blood, resulting in serious riots in which lives were lost. On February 26, 1851, the great actor gave his farewell performance. A brilliant page of Lewes has kept alive until our own day the emotion of this memorable occasion, which marks an era in the history of English art. Macready was in deep mourning; he had just lost a daughter of twenty years of age. He did not declaim his speech, but gave it forth with dignified sadness. In it he laid claim only to two merits—that of having brought back the text of Shakespeare in its purity, and that of having made of the theatre a place in which decent folks need not hesitate to be seen. He foresaw that if his glory as an artist should fade with the gradual disappearance of those who had witnessed it, his work as a literary restorer and a moral reformer would survive. And he was right.
The farewell performance was followed by a banquet, at which the inevitable Bulwer took the chair. John Forster read aloud at it some verses by Tennyson. The Laureate had graven on the tomb of the tragedian’s career the three words, “Moral, Grave, Sublime.”
Then all was over. The voice that had thrilled so many souls was to be heard only at charitable entertainments and provincial gatherings. And when he died in 1873 England had forgotten him.
There is a story of his last days which I cannot refrain from repeating, though it has no bearing really upon the subject of this book. When the old man, confined by paralysis to his armchair, was cut off from the world by the loss of several of his senses, he would be seen acting to himself (barely so much as moving his lips the while) the masterpieces he had loved. There was nothing to reveal the progress of the play save the light that would illumine his ever-mobile countenance, to which new lines had been given by conscious use and solitary thought.
How fine they must have been, these impersonations—Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth—in the mysterious half-shades of his life’s evening and in the silent theatre of his mind, where there was nothing to shackle the artist in his struggle after perfection, where every aspiration was an achievement!