The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

by Augustin Filon

“You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your own rank, ... were a friend of yours, ... were your son?”

Harold’s father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself, seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future; she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr. Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds, too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage, those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love the impossible.

After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain for them only those matinées in the regular theatres which lend their stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the strangest of publics. The house is full of friends—if it be not empty altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they have come across little up to the present except the gaucherie which feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting wonder.

Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages, are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of education; it has “settled,” so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually been formed by a process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.

In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr. Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to the best of our sociétaires of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of Liberty Hall; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his whimsical originality upon all his rôles; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is, on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from being complete.

There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly lacking before the Bancrofts’ time was unison. To-day the ensembles are far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for that perpetual va-et-vient in the theatrical world which is so injurious to the homogeneity of the various companies.

The art of mise-en-scène did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving’s formula, with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum. No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless night, threw open his window, and we saw the fields lying under their covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as andante to the loftiest feelings.

It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter of mise-en-scène as they might wish. But may this not be that for one reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, amateur de théâtre and to an even greater degree amateur de femmes: you will find that each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as the actor-manager’s.

Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann, the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction The First Step: this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don’t return at night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.

But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases; and thus it will drag out its existence yet a little while. When, finally, the time will come to give it its coup-de-grâce, it will be found to have already ceased to breathe.