"Our Boys"
As an instance of his good judgment, on the first night of Byron's comedy, Our Boys, which had a phenomenal run, I was in the billiard room of the Garrick Club; a group of men came in who said they had been to see a new comedy at the Vaudeville Theatre. Various opinions were expressed, several present thinking the comedy would only have a moderate run, when Mathews, who was playing pool, said, quietly: "I don't agree with you fellows. I was there, and haven't laughed so heartily for a long while. Byron this time—he doesn't always—has taken his goods to exactly the right shop. That play is sure to run."
Charles Mathews was originally an architect of considerable skill and promise. Although he did not go upon the stage until he was thirty, he became one of the most beloved of the public's favourites. Mathews was distinctly an actor of manners: it was beyond his range to portray emotion. Later on, Charles Wyndham, at one time in his career, had some of his attributes, and so, very strongly, had Kendal. Nowadays, the actor who at times recalls him to me in the delicacy and refinement of his comedy is Gerald du Maurier.
Pictorially, Charles Mathews lives again in the interesting series of stage portraits on the walls of the Garrick Club with which I was first familiar on the staircases when he lived in Pelham Crescent and Belgrave Road.
In a defence of himself and the view he took of his art, he once said: "It has been urged against me that I always play the same characters in the same way, and that ten years hence I should play the parts exactly as I play them now; this I take as a great compliment. It is a precision which has been aimed at by the models of my profession, which I am proud to follow, and shows, at least, that my acting, such as it is, is the result of art, and study, and not of mere accident."
Charles Fechter
I can also take the reader back to another link with the past and tell him briefly something of Charles Fechter, also of Victorian fame, whose name opens up a mine of memories. In our early married days we lived in St. John's Wood; Fechter was our neighbour and once our guest. I regard him as the finest actor of the romantic drama I have ever seen. The eye, the voice, the grace—all so needed—were at his command. He was the original of the lover in La Dame aux Camélias. I was present at his début in London, so long ago as 1860, when, as Ruy Blas, he forsook the French for the English stage, and I saw his first performance of The Corsican Brothers, in which play he also acted originally in Paris. This was at the old Princess's Theatre in Oxford Street, which, a decade earlier, had been the scene of the Charles Kean Shakespearean revivals, most of which I saw in my 'teens. They were a great advance scenically on all that had been done by Macready, while their splendours and pageantry were in turn eclipsed first by Irving and afterwards by Tree; but genius has no part in plastering treacle on jam.
So vivid is my remembrance of Fechter's acting in Hamlet, which took the town by storm, that I can describe and illustrate much of it after a lapse of more than fifty years. He made the Prince a fair-haired, almost flaxen, Dane. Dickens said: "No innovation was ever accepted with so much favour by so many intellectuals as Fechter's Hamlet."
Quite recently I came across the impressions of Clement Scott, for many years one of the most prominent of our dramatic critics. He wrote: "Let me candidly own that I never quite understood Hamlet until I saw Fechter play the Prince of Denmark. Phelps and Charles Kean impressed me with the play, but with Fechter, I loved the play, and was charmed as well as fascinated by the player." He afterwards failed as Othello, while his performance of Iago was a triumph. It is a coincidence that Fechter should have received valuable help during his reign at the Lyceum from Kate Terry, whose younger sister, Ellen, in a similar position, did so much for Irving in the same theatre later on.