Some months ago I saw her in a revival of Money, in which she plays the rôle of a woman of the world, and in one scene of which—a scene which owed much more to her than to Bulwer—she shows the steps of a dance. At this moment I seemed to see the legs of Pippo moving under the skirts of Lady Franklin,—those legs which five and thirty years before had made so lively an impression on the brain of Charles Dickens.
Whether he was conscious of it or not, Robertson made her play Pippo all her life. These fantastic rôles, sketched on to the margin of domestic dramas, were to have a remarkable and twofold success; they were largely responsible for the good fortune of Robertson’s comedies, and in the reading of these they constitute, as it were, appetising hors d’œuvres. If I say to the admirers of Caste that Polly Eccles is an excrescence spoiling the artistic merit of the piece, they reply at once that, on the contrary, she is its life and soul; and from the point of view of stage effect, they are quite right.
The Bancrofts—they married shortly after the opening of the theatre—were the complements of each other. She was all fun and fancy, harum-scarum, irresponsible, indescribable. He was chiefly notable for thought, taste, careful observation, and truthful representation of real life. One of his first acts, as soon as there was some money in the exchequer of the “Prince of Wales’s,” was to introduce a certain amount of intelligent realism into the scenery. He felt the need of doors with locks instead of the wretched folding-sashes, which shook before the draughts from the wings. In Caste he gave ceilings to the rooms. The last Act of Ours takes place in Crimean barracks during the winter of 1855; every time the door was opened a gust of snow came into the room with a whirl and whistle, which produced so strong an illusion that the audience shivered. In the gardens, real flowers were introduced, and living birds. Charles Mathews was thought very enterprising because he had ventured to have some chairs placed in a drawing-room upon the stage. Bancroft went so far as to assign a different character to different suites of furniture. Thus in a revival of the School for Scandal, Joseph Surface’s furniture was different from that of Sir Peter Teazle; his furniture, hypocritical as himself, seemed to make a pretence of being plain and simple, lied for him and bore out his lies. As for the actresses, instead of being made guys of by the theatrical costumiers, they had real dresses made for them by real dressmakers.
Robertson approved of these innovations, but he was never more than half a realist, and this from several causes. Like all Englishmen, he delighted in the warfare of words; he shared with them all, big and little, ancient and modern, that liking for brilliancy which is perhaps evolved from the liking of savages for brilliants. Once he began concocting repartees he forgot all else and gave his pen its head. He made his characters play a game of verbal battledore and shuttlecock. He dragged in by the nape of the neck, as it were, tirades whose proper place had been in a leading article. When he went too far, however, in these directions, he was often the first to make fun of the result. “What has that got to do with what we are talking about?” asks a character in Ours. “It has nothing to do with it, that’s why I said it.” And in the same piece another character remarks of something that has happened, “If an author put that into a play, everyone would say that it was impossible and untrue to life.”
Thus it was he would forestall gaily, with a sort of impudent frankness, the objections of the critics. The public enjoys this kind of thing. What it enjoys most of all, in England at anyrate, is the grain de folie, the lurking, unlooked-for quaintness, which characterises some of their humorists, Dickens, for instance, and Ben Jonson. It is this quality which is responsible for their creation of strange types whose ideas and conversations are all topsy-turvy.
It was in School that Robertson poured it out most plentifully. It was the most frivolous of his plays, and in this perhaps may be found the explanation of its success. The heroines are boarding-school girls; they are just at the age and in the situation in which no absurdity would seem too great or out of place. By a convention which the spectator agrees to willingly, they are girls in Act I. and women three weeks later in Act III. In these three weeks they have learned the meaning of life.
“What is love?” asks one of the youngest in the first scene. “Why, everyone knows what love is,” Naomi tells her. “Well, what is it then?” asks another, and the first speaker insists that no one seems to know.
Then comes the time for them to pass from vague theory to real experience. It is the evening, in the orchard. There are two flirtation scenes, one following the other, full of childishness, but full of naïveté, freshness, and charm. There is question of the distance from the earth to the moon, of the play of light and shade, of a little milk-jug which it takes two to carry, of the Crimean War, and of Othello. Of love there is no word, but it underlies their every feeling, hides behind every word, peeps out through every glance, mingles with the very air they breathe.
Naomi: ... “I like to hear you talk.”
Jack (bows): “The fibs or the truth?”