CHAPTER XVI
‘THE PLAY’S THE THING’
Summary of the agencies and incidents preparing the way for the revival of the theatre as a popular institution, Macready and his purifying influences inside the theatre. Charles Kean at the Princess’s. Usefulness of Rugby and Eton associations to each of these respectively. Miss Faucit (Lady Martin); her last appearance at Drury Lane; her enduring influence on the profession. Mrs Boucicault, Miss Kate Terry, Mrs P. H. Lee, Miss Ellen Terry and others. Henry Irving; his first London hit at the St James’s, afterwards at the Lyceum under Bateman. His success characterized. T. W. Robertson’s plays. Other circumstances of the time favourable to the new popularity of the play.
At the different seaside resorts fringing the greater part of southern England from Beachy Head to Penzance, by the new sort of life organized at Eastbourne, Hastings, and innumerable other places, one is reminded very practically that only twenty miles of intervening sea separate the French from the English coast. The British climate may be less favourable than that on the other side of the Straits for the open air existence of the French littoral. The more praiseworthy, therefore, and not the less persistent are the efforts of visitors and residents on the unsunny side of the Channel to acclimatize themselves to the al fresco habits of Boulogne, Dieppe, Trouville, or Biarritz.
Brighton has not yet very visibly changed its régime since the days when George IV. lived at the Pavilion. Its newer rival, Eastbourne, has taken advantage of a local conformation, and especially of a paved sea front to present the stranger with various little reproductions of what is most characteristic in the social exterior of French holiday life during the bathing season. It is not only one or two families, mutually intimate, which meet and pass together the greater portion of the day on the esplanade that lies in the shadow of Beachy Head. The whole place practically turns out, settles itself down for a day’s occupation, if the weather be fine enough, on the causeway above the pebbled shore. The ladies produce knitting instruments or appliances for domestic needlework. The men have their newspapers or books. The circle exactly after the French fashion is formed, big enough in compass to admit all the polite population of the place. When the luncheon hour approaches, there is a move not from off the sea front, but to some of the covered shelters that stud at intervals the esplanade. Improvised tables are covered with white cloths. The company, that the French stranger at a glance recognizes as belonging to the order of bourgeoisie, proves itself long to have outgrown the dislike to public meals common to most English men and women at the period of the Queen’s accession. At night the boarding houses, hotels, or private dwellings that in a long line rise just above the sea terrace seem practically to amalgamate themselves into a single dancing hall.
Other instances, more picturesque, or at least more suggestive, of the naturalization of continental examples, at English holiday resorts may be given. Eastbourne is indebted for the full development of its natural attractions and for the addition of its beauties of art to the Duke of Devonshire. Amongst other buildings with which the place has been enriched is a town hall of graceful proportions and artistic aspect. This building is crowned by a clock tower so exquisitely shaped and standing out in such classic profile against the dark South Downs in the background as to justify the local vaunt that had it been in Florence sightseers from all parts of the world would have flocked to see it; and guide books would long since have commemorated the glories of, a new Campanile added to the historic list of fair structures. While the Eastbourne clock tower is awaiting the architectural canonization it deserves, the town itself has still more closely approached to southern exemplars by starting a carnival of its own.[45] The slovenly and bedraggled mummeries into which the Italian saturnalia have degenerated have not prevented the enterprising authorities of the Sussex watering place from mimicking the battles of flowers and confetti that are still supposed to relieve the approach of Lent in the City of the Popes, but which as a fact have during late years only formed another feature in Roman vulgarity. One advantage over its more Southern original the Sussex shore imitation possesses. Real confetti are not employed. Pellets of tissue paper are missiles at once less costly and less dangerous than sugar plums. In other respects the continental type has been reproduced rather too faithfully. Whether on the Corso, the King’s Road, Brighton, the Esplanade or Terminus Road, Eastbourne, the whole pageant, as to the costume, the humours, and the hand artillery of the mummers, resembles equally the scenes on the return from the Derby by road to be witnessed between Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.
It was, perhaps, the foreign imitations in the social scheme of English life increasingly visible during his later years to Matthew Arnold which inspired that close observer with the advice to his countrymen to organize the theatre. To some extent, indeed, the counsel had long been anticipated. The organization of the stage into a wholesome agency of popular amusement and teaching began with Macready, the earliest of that line of considerable actors who have served their generation during the Victorian epoch. But the prejudice against the play prevailing among other than the austerer classes long survived the work of this great reformer of the English stage. The company which fills a theatre to-day in respect of ethics and behaviour is not inferior to the fashionable occupants of an opera box on a subscription night.
It was not always so. When between 1827, the year of his first, and 1851 the year of his last, appearance at Drury Lane, Macready was the head of the theatrical world, he found some difficulty in eliminating certain objectionable elements from the auditorium of Drury Lane. He persisted with his work. At last the moral atmosphere of a London playhouse was admittedly as unexceptionable as that of Exeter Hall. Macready himself who was born in 1793, and lived till 1873, had been educated at Rugby, as Charles Kean who followed him, had reached the Sixth Form at Eton. Macready, too, was in his day almost as much a favourite with the clergy of the Established Church as, since his The Sign of the Cross, Mr Wilson Barrett has become in ours. If the Etonian Keate inspired respect by the consciousness of his having birched future generations of statesmen, the Etonian Macready reflected the prestige of respectability upon his profession from the fact that during his retirement at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, most of the Anglican clergy noticeable for their elocution had received lessons from him in the art of reading.
Charles Kean’s acting life covered the period between 1820 and 1868. Like Macready, he was a favourite in the provinces before he made his mark on the London boards. With him there began, or was fairly established, the improvement of stage, scenery, costume, and in all incidental accessories that has been brought to so high a point of perfection by the genius, industry, and well-judged lavishness of Henry Irving. Byron’s enthusiasm still glows in the words of his famous eulogy on the acting of Charles Kean’s father, Edmund Kean, who seems to have been perhaps the most powerful and moving artist that the English stage has known. The energy, passion and fire of the Keans marked a reaction from, and were to some extent a protest against the stately and frigid classicism of the school of Kemble. They thus appropriately coincided in point of time with that romantic movement in English poetry which in his satire Byron ridiculed, but which in his practice he did so much to promote. The epoch, during which these attributes were displayed by Kean and his followers, roughly may be said to have synchronized with the season of the influence on the thought and diction of English poetry exercised through the publication of the Reliques of Thomas Percy, who, towards the end of the last, and early in the present, century, was successively Dean of Carlisle and Bishop of Dromore. This book probably did more than any other single volume ever issued from the press, to quicken and complete the revolt of English taste against the formal models of the age of Pope. From the personal life, character and wide social acceptance both of Macready first and of Charles Kean afterwards, the English drama directly, as well as indirectly, was a gainer. In those days the social fusion was not nearly so complete as it has since become; but Macready and the younger Kean had both been popular in their school days. In after life Rugby and Eton respectively rallied round them. The amalgamating agency of the Garrick Club, practically so familiar at rather a later day, was not then an operative force. But of the Athenæum and similar institutions Macready and in his turn Kean must have been free; their private acquaintances and visiting lists were as large and as representative as those of their successors during the present decade of the Queen’s reign.