Yet Thackeray’s enjoyment of the theater was not less than Dickens’. His biographer, Lewis Melville, has recorded that Thackeray once asked a friend if he loved the play, and when he received the qualified answer, “Ye-es, I like a good play,” he retorted, “Oh, get out! You don’t even understand what I mean!” Almost his first published effort as a draftsman was a series of sketches of a ballet, ‘Flore et Zephyr’; and toward the end of his life, in 1858, he presided at the annual dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund.
In his days of arduous hack-work he wrote half-a-dozen papers on the French stage. One of these essays was entitled ‘Dickens in France’; and in this he described with abundant gusto the gross absurdities of a Parisian perversion of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ produced at the Ambigu. Another is called ‘English History and Character on the French Stage’; and in this he has an easy task to show up the wilful disregard of veracity which taints the ingenious ‘Verre d’Eau’ of Scribe. A third paper is devoted to ‘French Dramas and Melodramas’; and in this he begins by an unfortunate prediction, that French tragedy, the classic plays of Corneille and Racine, “in which half-a-dozen characters appear and spout sonorous alexandrines” was dead or dying, and that Rachel was trying in vain to revive tragedy and
to untomb Racine; but do not be alarmed, Racine will never come to life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore. Madam Rachel can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it. Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged, lies in its grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised.
Here Thackeray revealed his insularity, his inability to “penetrate French literature by an interior line.” Red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged as French tragedy may be, and as it undoubtedly is in some of its aspects, it is not dead even now, more than three-quarters of a century since Thackeray preached this funeral sermon, nor is it dying. After the fiery fervor of the Romanticist revolt it may have needed the genius of Rachel to bring it back to favor; but to-day it is kept alive by the more modest talent of her successors.
II
Before he was of age Dickens had thought seriously of becoming an actor; and he even went so far as to apply to a manager for an engagement. Not long after he wrote a farce or two; and he was responsible for the book of a little ballad-opera. Late in his career he collaborated with Wilkie Collins in writing ‘No Thoroughfare,’ an effective melodrama, compounded specifically for Charles Fechter, who acted it successfully, first in London in English and then in Paris in French (under the title of ‘L’Abîme’). In Dickens’ letters we are told of the trouble he took in getting all the details of stage-management arranged to his satisfaction. It is evident that he found these labors congenial and that he did not doubt his possession of the intuitive qualities of the play-producer, so distinct from those of the artist in pure narrative.
Thackeray also made one or two juvenile attempts at the dramatic form. Perhaps it is safer to say that these early efforts were dramatic only in form, in their being wholly in dialog; and there is little reason to suppose that he endeavored to have them acted. In 1840, the year in which the ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ was published, there was produced in Paris a melodrama, called the ‘Abbaye de Penmarque’ and founded upon Southey’s ‘Mary, the Maid of the Inn.’ Its authors were announced as MM. Tournemine and Thackeray; and an American translator fearlessly ascribed it to the author of the ‘Paris Sketch Book,’ finding possible justification in the catalog of the British Museum and in the early edition of Shepard’s bibliography. The ascription was erroneous; and the “nautical melodrama” (as the translator termed it) seems to have been written by a distant kinsman of the novelist otherwise unknown to fame. The explanation recalls that given by an Irish critic, who solved his doubts as to another case of disputed authorship by the opinion that “Shakspere’s plays were not written by Shakspere himself, but by another man of the same name.”
Once and once only did Thackeray make a serious effort to appear before the public as a playwright. In 1854 after he had established his fame by ‘Vanity Fair’ and consolidated it by ‘Pendennis’ and the ‘Newcomes,’ he composed a comedy in two acts, the ‘Wolves and the Lamb.’ He proffered the play to two managers in turn, first to Buckstone of the Haymarket Theater, and then to Alfred Wigan of the Olympic. They declined it, one after the other; and apparently Thackeray made no further effort to have it produced. In 1860 he utilized the plot of his play in a story, ‘Lovel the Widower,’ which was never one of his attractive novels, perhaps because it was more or less deprived of spontaneity by its enforced reliance upon a plot put together for another purpose.
When he moved into his own home in Kensington in 1862, only a few months before his untimely death, he arranged an amateur performance of the ‘Wolves and the Lamb’ as a special attraction for his house-warming. He did not undertake any part in his own play; but he appeared in the character of Bonnington just before the final fall of the curtain, and spoke a rhymed epilog, by way of salutation to his guests:
Our drama ends;