At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement, Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a good-natured consul, and took up his actor’s life again with its three rôles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a livelihood. He has written one piece, A Night’s Adventure, which by a lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer; and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre. Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays, writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his “copy” for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For, after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.
He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The speaker is a composer of music. “In England, yesterday is always considered so much better than to-day—last week so superior to this—and this week so superior to the week after next—and thirty years ago so much more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, ‘You look so young,’ in the same tone that he would say, You look like an impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition, thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, ‘My dear sir, very likely your compositions may have merit—I don’t dispute it—but, you see, Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr. T’other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that time exert yourself to get older—you will succeed if you try hard; turn grey, be bald—it’s not a bad substitute—lose your teeth, your health, your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,—in one short word, your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don’t die in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.’”
As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had assumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at journalism. He tried to “place” work of every kind wherever he could, from riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got connected with a score of London and provincial papers—the Porcupine, of Liverpool; the Comic News; the Wag, which his friend Byron had started; Fun, just started by Tom Hood, and the Illustrated Times, on which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns, under the title of “The Theatrical Lounger,” he sketched the features of the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown in, not unlike the style of our old weekly Figaro; at the same time, it is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a vent of spleen.
Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia—that vaguely-defined district in which “men of the world” whom the “world” bored, among them officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of Fun, used to give Friday supper-parties—frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the world.
Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.
Were they all such very “good fellows”?—I have my doubts. This Bohemia was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working, and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense. I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one man who could claim success.
These lines[10] of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life—
“I’m twenty-nine! I’m twenty-nine!
I’ve drank too much of beer and wine;
I’ve had too much of toil and strife,
I’ve given a kiss to Johnson’s wife,
And sent a lying note to mine,—
I’m twenty-nine! I’m twenty-nine!”
After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays, Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy of society. He wrote and published the “Songs of the Governing Classes,” the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten lead. The “Song of the Gentleman” in particular might well be given a place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.
Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these nocturnal repasts of Hood’s, at which Robertson was one of the most brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional routine,—everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.