So it was that Michael Morton made a ‘Colonel Newcome’ piece for Beerbohm Tree in 1906 and that Langdon Mitchell made a ‘Major Pendennis’ piece for John Drew in 1916. So it was that Francis Burnand made a ‘Jeames’ piece for Edward Terry in 1878 out of the ‘Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche.’ Altho Edward Terry was an amusing Jeames and altho Nelly Farren was an amusing Mary Ann Hoggins, the “New and Original Comedy” (as its adapter styled it) did not strike me as amusing in itself; it was three-quarters Burnand and barely one quarter Thackeray—and the blending was not to my taste. As I sat through the performance patiently I came to understand the provocation which had led a gallery boy to shout down to Burnand as he took the author’s curtain call on the first night,—“I say, Frank, it’s a good thing Thackeray is dead, isn’t it?”
As the author had provided the ‘History of Henry Esmond’ with a unifying figure, the dramatizers have only too abundant material for a chronicle-play showing him at different periods in his long and honorable career. To make a compact play, a true drama, out of the protracted story, would be plainly impossible, yet it might not be so difficult to select salient episodes which would serve as a succinct summary of the story. But altho the attempt has been made several times—once for Henry Irving—no one of the versions has ever been put up for a run in any of the principal playhouses of either New York or London. In any dramatization one scene would impose itself, the scene in which Esmond breaks his sword before the prince whom he has loyally served, the scene in which Thackeray is most truly dramatic in the noblest sense of the word. If this had been put on the stage it would have been only a rendering unto the theater of a thing that belonged to the theater, since perhaps Thackeray had it suggested to him by the corresponding scene in the opera of ‘The Favorite’—altho the suggestion may also have come from the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne’ or from the later play which Dumas made out of his own story.
There remains to be mentioned only one other dramatization, that of the ‘Rose and the Ring,’ made by H. Savile Clark in 1890. From all accounts the performance of this little play, with its music by Walter Slaughter, provided a charming spectacle for children, one to which we may be sure that Thackeray would have had no objection and which indeed might have delighted his heart.
IV
It is testimony to Thackeray’s own liking for the theater that he is continually telling us that this or that character went to the play. He also informs us that Henry Esmond was the author of the ‘Faithful Fool,’ a comedy performed by Her Majesty’s Servants and published anonymously, attaining a sale of nine copies, whereupon Esmond had the whole impression destroyed. And the first of the George Warringtons wrote two plays, ‘Carpezan’ and Pocahontas,’ both of them tragedies, the first of which caught the public taste, whereas the second failed to prove attractive. We are all aware that Becky Sharp took part in the private theatricals at Gaunt House, making a most impressive Clytemnestra; but we are less likely to recall the hesitating suggestion that she may have been the Madame Rebecque who failed to please when she appeared in the ‘Dame Blanche’ at Strasburg in 1830. It was natural enough that Becky should go on the stage, since her mother had been a ballet-dancer.
Altho neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever attempted to write a novel of theatrical life, each of them gave us an inside view of a provincial stock-company in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. In ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ we are introduced to the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Crummles; and in ‘Pendennis’ we have a less elaborate study of the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Bingley. The group that Dickens portrays is more boldly drawn and more richly colored than the group that Thackeray sketches in with a few illuminating strokes. “What a light of benevolence it is that plays round Crummles and the Phenomenon and all those poor theatrical people in that charming book,” said Thackeray in his lecture on ‘Charity and Humor.’ “What a humor! And what a good humor!”
Altho in these episodes neither Dickens nor Thackeray aimed at the penetrating inquisition into the histrionic temperament that we find in Henry James’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and in Howells’s ‘Story of a Play,’ there is both validity and originality in Thackeray’s portrait of Miss Fotheringay. In all the dozens and scores of theatrical novels that I have read, I do not recall any other attempt to show the actress who is only an instrument in the hands of a superior intelligence, a woman who has the divine gift and who can display it only when she is taught, perhaps by one himself deficient in the mimetic faculty but possessed of interpretative imagination. Possibly Thackeray bestows overmuch stupidity on the Fotheringay; but she was not too stupid to profit by the instruction of the devoted Bows. She had beauty, voice, manner, the command of emotion, without which the tragic actor is naught; and all she lacked was the intelligence which would enable her to make the most of her native endowment.
Except when she was on the stage Mrs. Siddons was an eminently uninspired woman; and not a little of her inspiration in the theater has been credited to the superior intellect of her brother, John Philip Kemble. Rachel was intelligent, so intelligent that she was always eager to be aided by the intelligence of others. Legouvé recorded that if he gave her a suggestion, she seized on it and transmuted his copper into silver. She used to confess the immensity of her debt to Samson, a little dried up actor of “old men”; and she said once that she did not play a part half as well as she could play it, unless she had had the counsel of Samson. Even if she was a genius, she was rather a marvellous executant than a great composer; and there has been many another actress, even in our own time, who has owed a large part of her talent to the unsuspected guidance given by some one unknown to the public which pressed to applaud her.
Miss Fotheringay was not intelligent like Rachel and she was far duller than Mrs. Siddons, but she had in her the essential quality. She was teachable and Little Bows taught her.
He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from him by rote. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers.... With what indomitable patience and dulness she followed him. She knew that he made her; and she let herself be made.... She was not grateful, or ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humored.