I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the bête humaine been so completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so unblushingly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The bête humaine is outside the door.
I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to Mrs. Bancroft, whose former rôles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree. If you mention her name before an elderly “man about town,” who was young and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.
The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even extended their clientèle. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,—districts of London whose geography was hardly known,—at the Surrey, the Victoria, the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess’s. In that immense conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing, popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate. It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the masses which people of culture often lack.
When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed, whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even—to descend a degree lower—of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to Shakespeare, for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare’s; and were it not for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.
Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be taught that a criminal’s punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.
As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket, the Garrick, the St. James’s, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add, perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The personnel of these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due? To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager’s first question of a girl coming to him for an engagement would be—“Can you sing? Can you dance? Have you got good legs?” To-day his first requirement would be that she should have intelligence.
English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially, and now Réjane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comédie Française are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his Thirty Years at the Play, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening Favart and Delaunay played On ne badine pas avec l’Amour before the keenest and most impressionable of “pits,” composed exclusively of actors and authors. When, at the dénouement, there was heard the sound of a fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair, crying out, “Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!”—so exquisite was the sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent. I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of more than one English actor.
Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel, out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his toadies to call him the “Napoleon of the Theatrical World,” would fain have had Clement Scott, of the Weekly Despatch, dismissed from his post, and presumed to deny him the entrée to his theatres, and even to refuse his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably in the actor’s favour;—for the truer the adverse criticism, the more injury it did to its object.
Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder of the London Figaro. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon III., and it was in the palace of St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily, became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his career as publisher. It is not the less one’s duty to accord him, under the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven from the theatre.
The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was yesterday, and this must content us—this is as much as we have any right to expect.