"MY DEAR B.,
"It is my firm belief that the most ardent and persistent lover of the drama, after a long life of playgoing, and when the footlights illuminating his own private and personal drama are beginning to burn low, can, if he be honest with himself, count his red-letter nights in the theatre, at a liberal estimate, on the fingers of both hands. Such is the case with me at any rate. Many distinguished and moving performances, memorable in their way, have I witnessed; but the real, unmistakeable red-letter nights—heart and brain clutching—how few! Some premieres at the old Lyceum, under the management of the Batemans and, subsequently, of Irving himself, two or three representations at the Théâtre Français—notably Mounet Sully's acting, as it was thirty years ago, in Œdipe Roi—Duse's earliest appearance in England in La Dame aux Camélias; to recall these things gives one a catch in the breath—these and the first time I saw Marie Wilton as 'Polly Eccles.'
A red-letter night
"This particular red-letter night happened at the Standard Theatre in Shoreditch in, I think, August, 1873. (You, in whose honour a University should create the degree of Master of Dates, so curious, so infallible—occasionally, to the ladies, so disconcerting—is your memory, will correct me if I am wrong as to the month or year.) The company of the dainty little Prince of Wales's Theatre had carried their delicate art to that not too salubrious quarter of the town, and were delighting the East-enders in Robertson's Caste. Nowadays it is the critical habit to sniff at Robertson and his simple, humane comedies; but the work of a writer for the stage should be judged in relation to the period which produced it, and, so judged, Robertson was a man of vision and courage. There is no dramatist now writing, 'advanced' or otherwise, who is not in a measure indebted to Robertson. But how lucky he was in the people who interpreted him! Take Caste, for instance. Lydia Foote—her appealing 'Esther Eccles' was approached in later years only by Olga Brandon in a revival of the piece at the Criterion—the highly capable Mrs. Leigh Murray, the unctuous Honey, John Hare, most refined of miniaturists, the fascinating Coghlan—who had succeeded Frederick Younge, whom I never saw, as 'George D'Alroy'—-yourself as 'Hawtree'—a monumental picture of Swelldom, unequalled, in its combination of grotesqueness and good breeding, by any stage Swell of my time—even Sothern's 'Dundreary' couldn't touch your 'Hawtree'—and, above and beyond you all, the glorious actress who used to figure in the playbills as 'Miss Marie Wilton (Mrs. Bancroft),' and was to become Lady Bancroft; what a wonderful—what an unmatchable—troupe!
"Enter Polly"
"That red-letter night in unsavoury Shoreditch! Outside the theatre, the thick air of a warm evening, presently to be fouled by the fumes of the naphtha lamps of the gutter tradesmen; the incessant bawling of those gentry; the garish display of cheap wares in the shop-windows; the jostling and shoving of the loiterers on the pavement; and the sensation of complete happiness, almost choking in its intensity, because one was going to the play! And the fight for a front seat in the pit; the contentment, after a terrific struggle resulting in a torn jacket and the limpest of shirt-collars, at finding oneself in possession of about eight inches of bare board; and the settling down to enjoy the blended odours, peculiar to the popular theatre of that day, of gas and stale orange-peel, than which no more agreeable smell could greet the nostrils of a stage-struck youth! Then the tuning-up by the orchestra—joyful discord—and the unheeded playing of a 'selection'; and then the rising of the curtain, the sudden hush of voices, and lo! there is the poor, shabby room on the ground-floor of the lodging-house in Stangate! George appears, followed by Hawtree; they talk, and I wonder that their talk should be so different from the talk I had heard in other plays; then comes 'Papa Eccles,' who 'can tell a real gentleman with half a sov'; then, when Papa, the half-sovereign in his dirty fist, has shuffled away to meet a friend round the corner, Esther steals in; and then—oh, then!—'Enter Polly, D.R.H.,' as the stage direction says, and in a moment the audience is enraptured by the brightest, freshest, sweetest little woman that ever gladdened ears and eyes in or out of a playhouse!
"Those, my dear B., who can remember Lady Bancroft in the plenitude of her powers, the fulness of her witchery, are—I speak feelingly—rapidly growing fewer and fewer; and it is with the aim, I suppose, of conveying an impression of what she was at the time I mention, and for at least a decade afterwards, to the theatre-lovers of to-day—who saw her, if they saw her at all, when age had begun to weigh upon her—and to the theatre-lovers of the future, that you are inviting two or three men, old enough so to remember her, and who yet linger more or less actively on the scene, to contribute to your forthcoming book. Phew! A pretty difficult task, unless one employs language which in modern slang I understand is called 'mushy.' In the first place, of course, she knew her business to her finger-tips. That a practitioner of any of the arts should have known his or her business is frequently remarked in disparagement. Great artists, however, will take care to include a knowledge of their business—i.e. of the tricks of their trade—among other accomplishments, one of the latter being the faculty for hiding those tricks from the public. Lady Bancroft knew her business—and other people's; that is, though a born comedian, she could, if her physique had allowed of it, have 'gone on,' in theatrical phrase, for Lady Macbeth, or Juliet, or Ophelia, and have triumphed. (In fact, occasionally, she did 'go on' for parts for which she was hardly physically suited, and perhaps it was a pity she didn't do so oftener. She would have been forgiven.) And her experience, commencing in babyhood, and her innate cleverness, had taught her how, while keeping strictly within the picture-frame, to button-hole, as it were, each individual member of the audience. The man on the farthest bench of the topmost gallery, as well as the man in the stalls, was flattered by her skill into believing that she was acting specially for him. I myself have watched her act from the sixpenny gallery of a large theatre—that same Standard in Shoreditch, the pit being beyond my means for a second visit—and felt that she was so near to me that by stretching out my hand I could have grasped hers. As for her laugh, I won't—I daren't—attempt to describe it, because I should have to say that at one moment it was like the trill of a singing-bird, at another that it seemed not to be the music of her throat, but to bubble up from her very soul; and that, though gospel-truth, would be too terribly mushy. Nor her speaking-voice, because, again, I should have to say that it had something of the quality of the note of the purest of silver bells; nor her eyes, because in mirth they twinkled—thrice-hackneyed simile!—like twin stars, and in expressing sorrow resembled the little rain-pools when the sun has come out after a summer shower; and to say anything of the sort, while it would be equally true, would also be mushy to an insupportable degree. But I will say, because it is just a trifle less trite and banal, and because to do her justice it ought to be said, that the secret and source of her genius lay not in her artistry—which was consummate—but in herself. She was a fine, warm-hearted creature, and her acting was a reflection of the glow of her innermost nature.
The secret of genius
"Patches of shadow becloud every career, however brilliant. The tragedy of Lady Bancroft's career was that after Robertson's death no dramatist arose who could, or would, provide her with material worthy of her talent. For years, therefore, she retained her hold upon the public mainly by her 'Polly' in Caste, 'Naomi Tighe' in School, and 'Mary Netley' in Ours. From time to time she acted in new pieces by other authors, which lacked the attraction of Robertson at his best; and then, after giving us a captivating Lady Teazle, and delighting us in revivals of some other old comedies, in order to extend the repertory of the theatre she gallantly subordinated herself, when policy demanded it, to playing parts of minor importance. Towards the end, spurred by a surviving ambition into trying to make bricks without straw—and it must be confessed that she made sounder bricks without straw than did many an actress who was supplied with stacks of that commodity—she took to applying her ready wit to 'writing up' the tiny parts she was condemned to play, until at last her rare appearances became not so much those of an actress engaged in impersonating a character as of a charming lady determined at all costs to be amusing.
"But she had done enough long before then to win a place in stage history with the most illustrious of the comic actresses of the past. Margaret Woffington, Kitty Clive, Frances Abington and Dorothea Jordan had a legitimate successor in Marie Wilton.