Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

But to me personally there was this added penalty, that when I returned from each such woful debauch, like a stricken soldier from the field, I was compelled to endure without defence the reproachful glance of my nurse’s eye, which told me as clearly as though it were written upon the wall that I had but earned the appointed wages of sin. This nurse of mine was in many ways a remarkable character. Linked with a nature surely the most loving and affectionate that a child could desire, were the sternest principles of religion and morality ever implanted in the human breast—principles associated with so slender a store of intellectual endowment that even to my childish mind their vehement announcement was sometimes grotesque.

One of her most deeply rooted convictions was that the principle of life insurance was a direct defiance of the laws of God: a proposition which she sought to establish by a terrible tale of a butcher of Lewes, who, having flouted Providence by affecting an insurance upon his life, within half an hour after the conclusion of this prudent operation fell down dead as he descended the steps of the market-hall.

Her intellectual equipment was perhaps no scantier than that of many other women, but the fervour with which she employed it in the service of her religious principles might have made her a desolating influence upon the life of a child, if her loving and kindly nature had not constantly given the lie to the rigid creed she innocently believed was guiding her conduct through life.

It is undeniable, however, that such influences first exercised in childhood are long remembered, and it was many a day before I could quite free myself from the thought that the study of dramatic art was not in some degree associated with a sinful life. It is difficult to say whether this hovering sense of wrong-doing is not in its nature an added incentive to enjoyment. Certain it is that the pleasures of the play-house became a factor of increasing influence in my life. There was an old laundry attached to our house at Barnes which seemed to us singularly unfitted for its destined purpose, but which might, as we thought, be easily adapted as an arena for the performance of stage plays, and here, urged on by a wicked cousin who has since, as a fitting penalty for his youthful delinquencies, become a clergyman, I began my career as an amateur actor. We had at that time a distrust of all feminine help, and chose for our essays in histrionic art only those plays in Lacy’s list wherein the plot might be expounded by the exclusive support of male performers.

It chanced, while I was at Bruce Castle School, I had for one of my comrades poor Dick Bateman, son of Richard Bateman, who had about that time, or soon after, become Irving’s manager at the Lyceum. Together we became editors of a school magazine, and it was through him afterwards that I won my first introduction to the theatre.

He was remarkable as a schoolboy for a prodigious and extraordinary memory. I have spoken, in the earlier pages of this book, of the memory of Churton Collins, but in Dick Bateman’s case the faculty was differently exercised. It seemed in him to be purely mechanical, and we used to delight, as schoolboys, to set him the task, in which he rarely failed, of reading over a page of any author and then requiring of him that he should repeat it word for word. That special kind of memory which appeared to be detached from any personal interest in the matter recalled, it has not been my chance to see equalled in any other man I have known.

I have spoken of him as “poor” Dick Bateman because he met an early and tragic fate, for after a few years spent in London in occasional employment under his father he was sent upon some business adventure to the East, and was drowned in a shipwreck which occurred off the coast of Japan. But in our schooldays, and in the years immediately succeeding our schooldays, we were close comrades, and it was through him that I won my first knowledge of Irving, who had already appeared in several plays in which I had seen him, but who had then been recently engaged by Mr. Bateman as a leading actor to support his daughter, Isabella Bateman, in whose interests he had undertaken the management of the Lyceum Theatre. I had seen Irving before that time when he had played Bob Gassett in Dearer than Life at the Queen’s Theatre, and I had seen him again in Uncle Dick’s Darling at the Gaiety, when he had appeared in company with Toole.

It was of the latter performance that Toole afterwards told me Charles Dickens had said, when he saw it, that he thought it admirable in the promise it gave of the young actor’s ability; though he had added: “I fancy that both he and the author have cast an eye over my character of Mr. Dombey—eh, Toole?” And to any one who saw the performance there could have been no doubt as to the justice of Dickens’s suggestion. It was at a little later date that Irving achieved his first great success with the public in the character of Digby Grant in Mr. Albery’s play of The Two Roses, and it was after that again that he became permanently engaged to Mr. Bateman.

But Mr. Bateman’s endeavour to force his younger daughter Isabella upon the acceptance of the public as a leading actress was not successful. The play of Fanchette, with which he opened his management, was a failure, and the part of the youthful hero, for which Irving was cast, was entirely unsuited to his special abilities. Other adventures followed, and they only had the effect of somewhat lowering the mark Irving had made in The Two Roses, and there came a time in the steadily waning fortunes of the theatre when it seemed that Mr. Bateman’s management was destined to come to an inglorious end. It was at that time that Irving, who had had for some little while in his possession Leopold Lewis’s dramatised version of Erckmann-Chatrian’s Polish Jew, persuaded Mr. Bateman to allow him to put it on the stage of the Lyceum.

Irving has more than once told me the story himself, of how he and Bateman paced up and down the Adelphi terrace at midnight debating the possibilities of its success. Bateman, as he frankly avowed to the actor, had no faith in the popular appeal of the play, and it was, I suppose, only because he found himself at the end of his tether that he somewhat reluctantly consented to permit Irving to make the experiment. How hardly pressed the enterprising manager must have been at the time was proved by the fact that one evening, when I was walking with him down the Haymarket, he pointed to a corner public-house and said to me, “The owner of that house once held an umbrella over me in the rain when I most needed it, and I shall never forget it.”