“Juliet.”
Macready burst out laughing. “Then,” said he, “you’ll have to change those eyes of yours!”
Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of rôle. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the rôle of any of Shakespeare’s heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons.
It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing Belphegor, a monstrous emotional drama,[9] the hero of which was an acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the rôle of a little boy, had to give him the cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first, then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at the Lyceum. Here she made her real début towards the end of 1858. Belphegor was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a rôle. On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have to deal at last with the contemporary stage.
But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies of the English Comedy still to be born.
From the Lyceum she passed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; naïvely selfish, it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.
For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her only in two subsidiary rôles, and for an estimate of her talents I must rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the rôle of eccentric ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the time of her début is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,—a figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from Charles Dickens to John Forster:—
“I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the Maid and the Magpie burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn’t be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels—wonderfully clever—which in the audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you can not imagine a woman’s doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl’s talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original.”
But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids. She begged of all the managers to let her play the rôle of a heroine in long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, “I shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little scamp.”
Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her—