The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

by Augustin Filon

The London Figaro was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the pseudonym of “Almaviva.” The reader is already acquainted with the real names of “Almaviva I.” and “Almaviva II.”; he has encountered them several times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of to-morrow.

Mr. Archer’s passion for the theatre—he has told us in a charming preface addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him—dates from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put them on the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room, and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclopædia, a library of references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at once a penetrating critic and a first-rate petit journaliste. Humour, of which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid, lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste or a touch of pedantry. I don’t believe that in all his life he has perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a bore, if he would.

The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M. Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaître, and in what respects he differs from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it, now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more blasé than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate principles which, with us, are taken for granted,—to accomplish, in fact, a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the Dramaturgie of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.

His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a meeting-place, a rendez-vous, of all the arts. Its province, he holds, is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds, provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be folly to judge it by æsthetic laws. One does not take the height of a sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end? Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that they are sincere and independent.

Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment, and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a dilemma. “Either you show me on the stage,” he says, “what I see and go through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it—what do I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of truth and reality?” To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges us to observe—that is to say, to see and feel more intensely—what we see and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth, the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to the side of Rarahu or of Chrysanthème, an infallible instinct tells the reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be endowed with the same critical instinct?

Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama, Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth—it was neither realistic nor idealistic, but just “fantastic.” Mr. Archer took up Matthew Arnold’s idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral; the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got’s declaration, that our drama was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all. Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.

He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards better things, towards a life superior to our common life,—the life, perhaps, of to-morrow.

He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.

His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What is one to think of Diderot’s paradox about the actors’ art, and what do actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer, or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic? What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager, and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own opinions are at variance with his.

This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer’s rôle has consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted by Ibsen and Björnson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent, as it were, a character of scientific precision.