Consequently the editor of the ‘Athenæum’ for once invited his chief literary contributor to fill the post which the dramatic editor of the paper, Mr. Joseph Knight, generously yielded to him for the occasion, and the following article appeared:—
“Paris, November 23, 1882.
“I felt that the revival, at the Theatre Français, of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ on the fiftieth anniversary of its original production, must be one of the most interesting literary events of our time, and so I found it to be. Victor Hugo was there, sitting with his arms folded across his breast, calm but happy, in a stage box. He expressed himself satisfied and even delighted with the acting. The poet’s appearance was fuller of vitality and more Olympian than ever. Between the acts he left the theatre and walked about in the square, leaning on the arm of his illustrious poet friend and family connection, Auguste Vacquerie, to whose kindness I was indebted for a seat in the fauteuils d’orchestre, which otherwise I should have found to be quite unattainable, so unprecedented was the demand for places. It is said that a thousand francs were given for a seat. Never before was seen, even in a French theatre, an audience so brilliant and so illustrious. I did not, however, see any English face I knew save that of Mr. Swinburne, who at the end of the third act might have been seen talking to Hugo in his box. Among the most appreciative and enthusiastic of those who assisted at the representation was the French poet, who perhaps in the nineteenth century stands next to Hugo for intellectual massiveness, M. Leconte de Lisle. And I should say that every French poet and indeed every man of eminence was there.
Considering the extraordinary nature of the piece, the cast was perhaps as satisfactory as could have been hoped for. Fond as is M. Hugo of spectacular effects, and even of coups de théâtre, no other dramatist gives so little attention as he to the idiosyncrasies of actors. It is easy to imagine that Shakespeare in writing his lines was not always unmindful of an actor like Burbage. But in depicting Triboulet, Hugo must have thought as little about the specialities of Ligier, who took the part on the first night in 1832, as of the future Got, who was to take it on the second night in 1882. And the same may be said of Blanche in relation to the two actresses who successively took that part. This is, I think, exactly the way in which a dramatist should work. The contrary method is not more ruinous to drama as a literary form than to the actor’s art. To write up to an actor’s style destroys all true character-drawing; also it ends by writing up to the actor’s mere manner, who from that moment is, as an artist, doomed. On the whole, the performance wanted more glow and animal spirits. The François I of M. Mounet-Sully was full of verve, but this actor’s voice is so exceedingly rich and emotional that the king seemed more poetic, and hence more sympathetic to the audience, than was consistent with a character who in a sense is held up as the villain of the piece. The true villain, here, however, as in ‘Torquemada,’ ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ ‘Les Misérables,’ and, indeed, in all Hugo’s characteristic works, is not an individual at all, but Circumstance. Circumstance placed Francis, a young and pleasure-loving king, over a licentious court. Circumstance gave him a court jester with a temper which, to say the least of it, was peculiar for such times as those. Circumstance, acting through the agency of certain dissolute courtiers, thrust into the king’s very bedroom the girl whom he loved and who belonged to a class from whom he had been taught to expect subservience of every kind. The tragic mischief of the rape follows almost as a necessary consequence. Add to this the fact that Circumstance contrives that the girl Maguelonne, instead of aiding her more conscientious brother in killing the disguised king at the bidding of ‘the client who pays,’ falls unexpectedly in love with him; while Circumstance also contrives that Blanche shall be there ready at the very spot at the very moment where and when she is imperatively wanted as a substituted victim;—and you get the entire motif of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’—man enmeshed in a web of circumstance, the motif of ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ the motif of ‘Torquemada,’ and, in a certain deep sense, perhaps the proper motif in romantic drama. For when the vis matrix of classic drama, the supernatural interference of conscious Destiny, was no longer available to the artist, something akin to it—something nobler and more powerful than the stage villain—was found to be necessary to save tragedy from sinking into melodrama. And this explains so many of the complexities of Shakespeare.
In the dramas of Victor Hugo, however, the romantic temper has advanced quite as far as it ought to advance not only in the use of Circumstance as the final cause of the tragic mischief, but in the use of the grotesque in alliance with the terrible. The greatest masters of the terrible-grotesque till we get to the German romanticists were the English dramatists of the sixteenth and the early portion of the seventeenth century, and of course by far the greatest among these was Shakespeare. For the production of the effect in question there is nothing comparable to the scenes in ‘Lear’ between the king and the fool—scenes which seem very early in his life to have struck Hugo more than anything else in literature. Outside the Elizabethan dramatists, however, there can be no doubt that (leaving out of the discussion the great German masters in this line) Hugo is the greatest worker in the terrible-grotesque that has appeared since Burns. I need only point to Quasimodo and Triboulet and compare them not merely with such attempts in this line as those of writers like Beddoes, but even with the magnificent work of Mr. Browning, who though far more subtle than Hugo is without his sublimity and amazing power over chiaroscuro. Now, the most remarkable feature of the revival of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ and that which made me above all other reasons desirous to see it, was that the character of Triboulet was to be rendered by an actor of rare and splendid genius, but who, educated in the genteel comedy of modern France and also in the social subtleties of Molière, seemed the last man in Paris to give that peculiar expression of the romantic temper which I have called the terrible-grotesque.
That M. Got’s success in a part so absolutely unsuited to him should have been as great as it was is, in my judgment, the crowning success of his life. It is as though Thackeray, after completing ‘Philip,’ had set himself to write a romance in the style of ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ and succeeded in the attempt. Yet the success of M. Got was relative only, I think. The Triboulet was not the Triboulet of the reader’s own imaginings, but an admirable Triboulet of the Comédie Française. Perhaps, however, the truth is that there is not an actor in Europe who could adequately render such a character as Triboulet.
This is what I mean: all great actors are divisible into two groups, which are by temperament and endowment the exact opposites of each other. There are those who, like Garrick, producing their effects by means of a self-dominance and a conservation of energy akin to that of Goethe in poetry, are able to render a character, coldly indeed, but with matchless verisimilitude in its every nuance. And there are those who, like Edmund Kean and Robson, ‘live’ in the character so entirely that self-dominance and conservation of energy are not possible, and who, whensoever the situation becomes very intense, work miracles of representation by sheer imaginative abandon, but do so at the expense of that delicacy of light and shade in the entire conception which is the great quest of the actor as an artist. And if it should be found that in order to render Triboulet there is requisite for the more intense crises of the piece the abandon of Kean and Robson, and at the same time, for the carrying on of the play, the calm, self-conscious staying power of Garrick, the conclusion will be obvious that Triboulet is essentially an unactable character. I will illustrate this by an instance. The reader will remember that in the third act of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ Triboulet’s daughter Blanche, after having been violated by the king at the Louvre, rushes into the antechamber, where stands her father surrounded by the group of sneering courtiers who, unknown both to the king and to Triboulet, have abducted her during the night and set her in the king’s way. When the girl tells her father of the terrible wrong that has been done to her, he passes at once from the mood of sardonic defiance which was natural to him into a state of passion so terrible that a sudden and magical effect is produced: the conventional walls between him, the poor despised court jester, and the courtiers, are suddenly overthrown by the unexpected operation of one of those great human instincts which make the whole world kin:—
Triboulet (faisant trois pas, et balayant du geste tous les seigneurs inter dits).
Allez-vous-en d’ici!
Et, si le roi François par malheur se hasarde
A passer près d’ici, (à Monsieur de Vermandois) vous êtes de sa garde,
Dites-lui de ne pas entrer,—que je suis là.M. de Pienne. On n’a jamais rien vu de fou comme cela.
M. de Gordes (lui faisant signe de se retirer). Aux fous comme aux enfants on cède quelque chose.
Veillons pourtant, de peur d’accident.
[Ils sortent.
Triboulet (s’asseyant sur le fauteuil du roi et relevant sa fille.) Allons, cause.
Dis-moi tout. (Il se retourne, et, apercevant Monsieur de Cossé, qui est resté, il se lève à demi en lui montrant la porte). M’avez-vous en tendu, monseigneur?M. De Cossé (tout en se retirant comme subjugué par l’ascendant du bouffon). Ces fous, cela se croit tout permis, en honneur!
[Il sort.
Now in reading ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ startling as is the situation, it does not seem exaggerated, for Victor Hugo’s lines are adequate in simple passion to effect the dramatic work, and the reader feels that Triboulet was wrought up to the state of exaltation to which the lines give expression, that nothing could resist him, and that the proud courtiers must in truth have cowered before him in the manner here indicated by the dramatist. In literature the artist does not actualize; he suggests, and leaves the reader’s imagination free. But an actor has to actualize this state of exaltation—he has to bring the physical condition answering to the emotional condition before the eyes of the spectator; and if he fails to display as much of the ‘fine frenzy’ of passion as is requisite to cow and overawe a group of cynical worldlings, the situation becomes forced and unnatural, inasmuch as they are overawed without a sufficient cause. That an actor like Robson could and would have risen to such an occasion no one will doubt who ever saw him (for he was the very incarnation of the romantic temper), but then the exhaustion would have been so great that it would have been impossible for him to go on bearing the entire weight of this long play as M. Got does. The actor requires, as I say, the abandon characteristic of one kind of histrionic art together with the staying power characteristic of another. Now, admirable as is M. Got in this and in all scenes of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ he does not pass into such a condition of exalted passion as makes the retirement of the courtiers seem probable. For artistic perfection there was nothing in the entire representation that surpassed the scenes between Saltabadil and Maguelonne in the hovel on the banks of the Seine. It would be difficult, indeed, to decide which was the more admirable, the Saltabadil of M. Febvre or the Maguelonne of Jeanne Samary.
AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS
November 22, 1882Poet of pity and scourge of sceptred crime—
Titan of light, with scarce the gods for peers—
What thoughts come to thee through the mist of years,
There sitting calm, master of Fate and Time?
Homage from every tongue, from every clime,
In place of gibes, fills now thy satiate ears.
Mine own heart swells, mine eyelids prick with tears
In very pride of thee, old man sublime!And thou, the mother who bore him, beauteous France,
Round whose fair limbs what web of sorrow is spun!—
I see thee lift thy tear-stained countenance—
Victress by many a victory he hath won;
I hear thy voice o’er winds of Fate and Chance
Say to the conquered world: ‘Behold my son!’
I may mention here that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always shown the greatest admiration of the actor’s art and the greatest interest in actors and actresses. He has affirmed that ‘the one great art in which women are as essential as men—the one great art in which their place can never be supplied by men—is in the acted drama, which the Greeks held in such high esteem that Æschylus and Sophocles acted as stage managers and show-masters, although the stage mask dispensed with much of the necessity of calling in the aid of women.’
‘Great as is the importance of female poets,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘men are so rich in endowment, that literature would be a worthy expression of the human mind if there had been no Sappho and no Emily Brontë—no Mrs. Browning—no Christina Rossetti. Great as is the importance of female novelists, men again are so rich in endowment that literature would be a worthy expression of the human mind if there had been no Georges Sand, no Jane Austen, no Charlotte Brontë, no George Eliot, no Mrs. Gaskell, no Mrs. Craigie. As to painting and music, up to now women have not been notable workers in either of these departments, notwithstanding Rosa Bonheur and one or two others. But, to say nothing of France, what in England would have been the acted drama, whether in prose or verse, without Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Hermann Vezin, Adelaide Neilson, Miss Glyn, in tragedy; without Mrs. Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Julia Neilson, Ellen Terry, Irene Vanbrugh and Ada Rehan in comedy?’
People who run down actresses should say at once that the acted drama is not one of the fine arts at all. Mr. Watts-Dunton has often expressed the opinion that there is in England a great waste of histrionic endowment among women, owing to the ignorant prejudice against the stage which even now is prevalent in England. ‘An enormous waste of force,’ says he, ‘there is, of course, in other departments of intellectual activity, but nothing like the waste of latent histrionic powers among Englishwomen.’ And he supplies many examples of this which have come under his own observation, among which I can mention only one.
‘Some years ago,’ he said to me, ‘I was invited to go to see the performance of a French play given by the pupils of a fashionable school in the West End of London. Apart from the admirable French accent of the girls I was struck by the acting of two or three performers who showed some latent dramatic talent. I have always taken an interest in amateur dramatic performances, for a reason that Lady Archibald Campbell in one of her writings has well discussed, namely, that what the amateur actor or actress may lack in knowledge of stage traditions he or she will sometimes more than make up for by the sweet flexibility and abandon of nature. The amateur will often achieve that rarest of all artistic excellencies, whether in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, or histrionics—naïveté: a quality which in poetry is seen in its perfection in the finest of the writings of Coleridge; in acting, it is perhaps seen in its perfection in Duse. Now, on the occasion to which I refer, one of these schoolgirl actresses achieved, as I thought, and as others thought with me, this rare and perfect flower of histrionics; and when I came to know her I found that she joined wide culture and an immense knowledge of Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Molière with an innate gift for rendering them. In any other society than that of England she would have gone on the stage as a matter of course, but the fatal prejudice about social position prevented her from following the vocation that Nature intended for her. Since then I have seen two or three such cases, not so striking as this one, but striking enough to make me angry with Philistinism.’
With this sympathy for histrionic art, it is not at all surprising that Mr. Watts-Dunton took the greatest interest in the open-air plays organized by Lady Archibald Campbell at Coombe. I have seen a brilliant description of these plays by him which ought to have been presented to the public years ago. It forms, I believe, a long chapter of an unpublished novel. Turning over the pages of Davenport Adams’s ‘Dictionary of the Drama,’ which every lover of the theatre must regret he did not live to complete, I come accidentally upon these words: “One of the most recently printed epilogues is that which Theodore Watts-Dunton wrote for an amateur performance of Banville’s ‘Le Baiser’ at Coombe, Surrey, in August, 1889.” And this reminds me that I ought to quote this famous epilogue here; for Professor Strong in his review of ‘The Coming of Love’ in ‘Literature’ speaks of the amazing command over metre and colour and story displayed in the poem. It is, I believe, the only poem in the English language in which an elaborate story is fully told by poetic suggestion instead of direct statement.
A REMINISCENCE OF THE OPEN-AIR PLAYS.
Epilogue for the open-air performance of Banville’s ‘Le Baiser, in which Lady Archibald Campbell took the part of ‘Pierrot’ and Miss Annie Schletter the part of the ‘Fairy.’—Coombe, August 9, 1889.
To Pierrot in Love
The Clown whose kisses turned a Crone to a Fairy-queen
What dost thou here in Love’s enchanted wood,
Pierrot, who once wert safe as clown and thief—
Held safe by love of fun and wine and food—
From her who follows love of Woman, Grief—
Her who of old stalked over Eden-grass
Behind Love’s baby-feet—whose shadow threw
On every brook, as on a magic glass,
Prophetic shapes of what should come to pass
When tears got mixt with Paradisal dew?Kisses are loved but for the lips that kiss:
Thine have restored a princess to her throne,
Breaking the spell which barred from fairy bliss
A fay, and shrank her to a wrinkled crone;
But, if thou dream’st that thou from Pantomime
Shalt clasp an angel of the mystic moon,
Clasp her on banks of Love’s own rose and thyme,
While woodland warblers ring the nuptial-chime—
Bottom to thee were but a week buffoon.When yonder fairy, long ago, was told
The spell which caught her in malign eclipse,
Turning her radiant body foul and old,
Would yield to some knight-errant’s virgin lips,
And when, through many a weary day and night,
She, wondering who the paladin would be
Whose kiss should charm her from her grievous plight,
Pictured a-many princely heroes bright,
Dost thou suppose she ever pictured thee?’Tis true the mischief of the foeman’s charm
Yielded to thee—to that first kiss of thine.
We saw her tremble—lift a rose-wreath arm,
Which late, all veined and shrivelled, made her pine;
We saw her fingers rise and touch her cheek,
As if the morning breeze across the wood,
Which lately seemed to strike so chill and bleak
Through all the wasted body, bent and weak,
Were light and music now within her blood.’Tis true thy kiss made all her form expand—
Made all the skin grow smooth and pure as pearl,
Till there she stood, tender, yet tall and grand,
A queen of Faery, yet a lovesome girl,
Within whose eyes—whose wide, new-litten eyes—
New-litten by thy kiss’s re-creation—
Expectant joy that yet was wild surprise
Made all her flesh like light of summer skies
When dawn lies dreaming of the morn’s carnation.But when thou saw’st the breaking of the spell
Within whose grip of might her soul had pined,
Like some sweet butterfly that breaks the cell
In which its purple pinions slept confined,
And when thou heard’st the strains of elfin song
Her sisters sang from rainbow cars above her—
Didst thou suppose that she, though prisoned long,
And freed at last by thee from all the wrong,
Must for that kiss take Harlequin for lover?Hearken, sweet fool! Though Banville carried thee
To lawns where love and song still share the sward
Beyond the golden river few can see,
And fewer still, in these grey days, can ford;
And though he bade the wings of Passion fan
Thy face, till every line grows bright and human,
Feathered thy spirit’s wing for wider span,
And fired thee with the fire that comes to man
When first he plucks the rose of Nature, Woman;And though our actress gives thee that sweet gaze
Where spirit and matter mingle in liquid blue—
That face, where pity through the frolic plays—
That form, whose lines of light Love’s pencil drew—
That voice whose music seems a new caress
Whenever passion makes a new transition
From key to key of joy or quaint distress—
That sigh, when, now, thy fairy’s loveliness
Leaves thee alone to mourn Love’s vanished vision:Still art thou Pierrot—naught but Pierrot ever;
For is not this the very word of Fate:
‘No mortal, clown or king, shall e’er dissever
His present glory from his past estate’?
Yet be thou wise and dry those foolish tears;
The clown’s first kiss was needed, not the clown,
By her, who, fired by hopes and chilled by fears,
Sought but a kiss like thine for years on years:
Be wise, I say, and wander back to town.
Recurring to the Marston gatherings, I reproduce here, from the same unpublished story to which I have already alluded, the following interesting account of them and of other social reunions of the like kind.
“Many of those who have reached life’s meridian, or passed it, will remember the sudden rise, a quarter of a century ago, of Rossetti, Swinburne, and William Morris—poets who seemed for a time to threaten the ascendency of Tennyson himself. Between this galaxy and the latest generation of poets there rose, culminated, and apparently set, another—the group which it was the foolish fashion to call ‘the pre-Raphaelite poets,’ some of whom yielded, or professed to yield, to the influence of Rossetti, some to that of William Morris, and some to that of Swinburne. Round them all, however, there was the aura of Baudelaire or else of Gautier. These—though, as in all such cases, nature had really made them very unlike each other—formed themselves into a set, or rather a sect, and tried apparently to become as much like each other as possible, by studying French models, selecting subjects more or less in harmony with the French temper, getting up their books after the fashion that was as much approved then as contemporary fashions in books are approved now, and by various other means. They had certain places of meeting, where they held high converse with themselves. One of these was the hospitable house, in Fitzroy Square, of the beloved and venerable painter, Mr. Madox Brown, whose face, as he sat smiling upon his Eisteddfod, radiating benevolence and encouragement to the unfledged bards he loved, was a picture which must be cherished in many a grateful memory now. Another was the equally hospitable house, in the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, where reigned the dramatist, Westland Marston, and where his blind poet-boy Philip lived. Here O’Shaughnessy would come with a glow of triumph on his face, which indicated clearly enough what he was carrying in his pocket—something connecting him with the divine Théophile—a letter from the Gallic Olympus perhaps, or a presentation copy sent from the very top of the Gallic Parnassus. It was on one of these occasions that Rossetti satirically advised one of the cenacle to quit so poor a language as that of Shakespeare and write entirely in French, which language Morris immediately defined as ‘nosey Latin.’ It is a pity that some literary veteran does not give his reminiscences of those Marston nights, or rather Marston mornings, for the symposium began at about twelve and went on till nearly six—those famous gatherings of poets, actors, and painters, enlinking the days of Macready, Phelps, Miss Glyn, Robert Browning, Dante Rossetti, and R. H. Horne, with the days of poets, actors, and painters like Mr. Swinburne, Morris, and Mr. Irving. Yet these pre-Raphaelite bards had another joy surpassing even that of the Chalk Farm symposium, that of assisting at those literary and artistic feasts which Rossetti used occasionally to give at Cheyne Walk. Generosity and geniality incarnate was the mysterious poet-painter to those he loved; and if the budding bard yearned for sympathy, as he mostly does, he could get quite as much as he deserved, and more, at 16 Cheyne Walk. To say that any artist could take a deeper interest in the work of a friend than in his own seems bold, yet it could be said of Rossetti. The mean rivalries of the literary character that so often make men experienced in the world shrink away from it, found no place in that great heart. To hear him recite in his musical voice the sonnet or lyric of some unknown bard or bardling—recite it in such a way as to lend the lines the light and music of his own marvellous genius, while the bard or bardling listened with head bowed low, so that the flush on his cheek and the moisture in his eye should not be seen—this was an experience that did indeed make the bardic life ‘worth living.’”