One fine day—it was in 1860—this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to create a genre of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the success which greeted Peep o’ Day, and he wound up with the memorable failure of The Oonagh.[7] Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in the Colleen Bawn.
The Colleen Bawn is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant girl to become worthy of the man she loves,—her discouragement, which yet cannot exhaust her devotion,—all this is depicted by touches so suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half seductive—smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.
Until Boucicault’s time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland, never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard, England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe. Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and although he added many touches in the Shaugraun, in Arrah-na-pogue, in The Octoroon, in Michael O’Dowd, and in other works, it may be said to be already complete in The Colleen Bawn. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells us, “I was full of sudden death that minute,” and when Eily speaks of the little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of the Irish priest of old, and indeed of our own day too—at once the man of the people and the man of God.
Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but striking piece—this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins. Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.
CHAPTER III
The Vogue of Burlesque—Burnand’s Ixion—H. J. Byron—The Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage—Marie Wilton’s début—A Letter from Dickens—Founding of the “Prince of Wales’s”—Tom Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author—His Journalistic Career—London Bohemia in 1865—Sothern.
The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however, nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic genre became quickly acclimatised by success.
I shall take Burnand’s Ixion as a type, for by reason of its never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind. It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion’s palace. Jupiter appears in answer to his invocation. “Are you insured?” he inquires. “Yes,” replies Ixion, “with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it.” Jupiter invites him to come to Olympus. “We lunch at half-past one. Don’t forget.” Mercury, charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aërial omnibus. “Come on for Olympus! Room for one outside!” We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to tell “the Master” that “coffee is served.” Neptune talks nautical lingo like the hero of Black-eyed Susan, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends. The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate, whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for “La France” by performing the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life—he never shows himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.