Who in ideal art moved as at home!
Because you bowed at a now empty shrine
Was your faith false? Lo, the believing come!
The sentiment is not easily to be reconciled with the generally hopeful view of the theatre expounded by Punch, or his comparison of Irving with Macready a few months later. In this personal context it is interesting to find that Punch's misgivings were at least partially removed by the emergence of a new star of the first magnitude. He had already welcomed Ellen Terry as Puck in the revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Queen's Theatre; he now paid an unreserved tribute to her performance in The Wandering Heir at the same theatre in March, 1874:—
Considering the present position of our Theatre, such qualities as spontaneity, grace, the finest truth of accent and emphasis, tenderness in grave passages, mirthfulness in gay ones, and all these fused in an atmosphere of buoyancy and brightness which exhilarates like champagne, and irradiates like light, are something to be indeed thankful for, when found combined in one Actress on an English Stage. They are to be seen combined at this moment in Miss Ellen Terry's impersonation of Philippa, in Mr. Charles Reade's drama of The Wandering Heir, at the Queen's Theatre. Let those who may doubt if such praise nowadays can have a solid foundation, go and admire for themselves. A new power of graceful comedy and womanly sentiment comes to us with the return to the boards of this young and charming Actress, whose eclipse for the last few years has been hard indeed upon a Stage that had no light to spare.
Stage Realism
In the earlier years of this period Punch was much concerned with the craze for sensation, and the stage-realism which leaves nothing to the imagination, but exalts the practical carpenter at the expense of the dramatic genius. This stock complaint reaches a climax at the close of 1865 in connexion with the announcement in a fashionable paper that in a play to be shortly produced in Paris there would be "a grand park with a real waterfall" and "a real river flowing through the stage." Punch's comments, if not very subtle, are at least a sane contribution to the everlasting conflict over stage illusion waged between "enterprise" and idealism.
Well, Syusan, 'ow did yer like Aroorer Floyd last night?"
"Oh! so lovely, Jeames—I cried so! that wicked Conyers!... Oh, Jeames, you won't desert me for our young missus, will you, dear?"