For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at Princess Ida, unless it was at Patience. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of Tennyson, which bears the similar title The Princess, and is a satire upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the aesthetic movement. In Iolanthe I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence (expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining face of Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down before Whitehall.
In The Pirates of Penzance, and in Pinafore, mankind seems to be walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is the plot of the Pirates. Frederic’s nurse was charged by his parents to make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw’s devotion to strict legality—this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish forth three hours’ entertainment? But the author was justified by the result.
Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty for losing good cases and winning bad ones.
CHAPTER VI
Shakespeare again—From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder, Adelaide Neilson—Irving’s Début—His Career in the Provinces, and Visit to Paris—The Rôle of Digby Grant—The Rôle of Matthias—The Production of Hamlet—Successive Triumphs—Irving as Stage Manager—As an Editor of Shakespeare—His Defects as an Actor—Too great for some of his Parts—As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art—Sir Henry Irving, Head of his Profession.
What became of the “legitimate” drama the while Robertson busied himself with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in Richard III. the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a “Shakespeare Made Easy.” An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the day which brought the news of his “Hero”-like end on a ship which was taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850 to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler’s Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the Bouffes du Nord, or, further still, to the Théâtre de Belleville!
Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain rôles which up till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,—that crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters beyond the scope of his intelligence. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.[11] Kean and Macready had “popularised” Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out another and nobler distinctive quality—that of poèmes en action. This does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.
The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche in La Dame aux Camélias, set our mothers weeping, brought back Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess’s and to the Lyceum. In Macbeth, he was only middling; but while they say his Othello was the worst imaginable, his Hamlet, according to the same critics, could not be surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great rôle which had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready, taking from him Hamlet’s velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some emotion, Horatio’s words—“Adieu, dear Prince!” and added, “It seems to me that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness, humanity, and poetry in the character.” Fechter found out traits which had escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil and pleasing parts of the action—a refined intellectual elegance proper to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The advice of Hamlet to the players—the actor’s Ten Commandments—he rendered with much art and spirit.