OUR LONDON COMMISSIONER.
NO. II.
In the northern outskirt of London, there is a dingy-looking, ill-shaped building, on the bank of a narrow canal, where at one time, not very long ago, real water fell in sparkling cascades, Trafalgars were fought in veritable vessels, and, triumphant over all, radiant in humour and motley, with wit at his fingers’ ends, and ineffable character in his feet, laughed, hobbled, jeered, flouted, and pirouetted the clown, Joseph Grimaldi. The audiences, in those days, were partial to beer. Tobacco was a pleasant accompaniment to the wonders of the scene. Great effect was produced by farces of a very unsentimental kind; and the principal effort of the author was to introduce as much bustle and as many kicks into his piece as he could. A bloody nose secured three rounds of applause; a smack on the cheek was a successful repartee; a coarse oath was only emphatic—nobody blushed, everybody swore. There were fights in the pit, and the police-office was near at hand. It was the one place of entertainment for a poor and squalid district. Poverty and dirt went there to forget themselves, and came away unimproved. It was better, perhaps, than the beer-shop, certainly better than the prize-fight, but not so good as the tea-garden and hop. This building is now the Theatre Royal, Sadler’s Wells, presided over by one of the best actors on the English stage, and ringing, night after night, to the language of Shakspeare and Massinger. How does the audience behave? Better than young gentlemen of the Guards at a concert of sacred music; better than young ladies of fashion at a scientific lecture. They don’t yawn, they don’t giggle, they don’t whisper to each other at the finest passages; but there is intense interest—eyes, heart, mind, all fixed on the wondrous evolvement of the story. They stay, hour by hour, silent, absorbed, attentive, answering the touch of the magician’s wand, warming into enthusiasm, or melting into tears, with as fine an appreciation of the working of the play as if they had studied the Greek drama, and been critics all their days. Are they the same people, or the same class of people, who roared and rioted in the pit in the days of the real water? Exactly the same. The boxes are three shillings, the pit a shilling, the gallery a sixpence. There are many fustian jackets in the pit, and in the gallery a sprinkling of shirt sleeves. Masters of trades, and respectable shopkeepers, and professional men, and their families are in the boxes; and Mr Phelps is as great a benefactor to that neighbourhood as if he had established a public park, or opened a lyceum for education. There is a perceptible difference, we are told, in the manners of the district. You can’t raise a man in any one department without lifting him up in all. Improve his mind, you refine his character; teach him even mathematics, he will learn politeness; give him good society, he will cease to be coarse; introduce him to Shakspeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, and Webster, he will be a gentleman. A man with friends like these will not go to the tap of the Black Dog. Better spend his sixpence at Sadler’s Wells, and learn what was going on in Rome in the time of Coriolanus, or learn the thanklessness of sycophantic friends in the Athenian Timon. With the bluff and brutal Henry VIII. they are quite familiar, and form a very tolerable idea of a certain pinchbeck cardinal’s pride, from the insolence of the overweening Wolsey. That energy and honour overcome all impediments, they have long discovered from the story of the Lady of Lyons, and the grandeur of self-devotion in the noble aspirations of Ion. A world like this opening to their eyes, reflects a pleasant light on the common earth they inhabit. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” The same sentiment brings a big sob into their rough throats, and swells the gentle bosom of the delicate young lady in the front row of the dress circle. If the Queen were there, there would be a quivering of the royal lip. Jack Wiggins, the tinman, cries as if he were flogged. Let us off to see Sadler’s Wells, where a new play is to be acted, with our old friend James VI. for its hero. A pretty hero for a play!—The pedantic, selfish, ambitious, and cowardly son of Mary Stuart, who kissed the hand reeking with his mother’s blood, and held out the Scottish crown to be an awmous-dish, into which Elizabeth disdainfully threw her niggard charity, like an old maid depositing a farthing in the plate at the Magdalen Hospital door. This play is improperly called a tragedy, because a few people happen to be killed in the course of it. The foundation is decidedly comic—horribly, grotesquely comic. There the laughter tries in vain to banish the shudder, and between them a compound is created which we believe to be new to the stage. The conventional tyrant of tragedy is entirely done away with. There are no knittings of brows and crossings of elbows, starts and struttings, such as we generally see made the accompaniments of revenge and hatred. There is a low, selfish, cruel nature, disguised in ludicrous repartee and jocular conversation—a buffoon animated by the soul of Richard III., a harlequin’s lath tipt with deadly poison—our ordinary ideas turned topsy-turvy, and Polonius running his sword through Hamlet behind the arras. Whether this historical view of James be correct or not, does not matter to the play. It is the view chosen by the author on a preponderating weight of evidence; and the point of his career chosen for the development of these blacker portions of his disposition is the Gowrie plot, where even the king’s adulators were unable to hide the murmurs of the people, who certainly believed his conduct to have been cruel and unjust.
Such a piece of acting as Mr Phelps’s presentment of James is rarely seen on the stage. His command of the Scotch dialect is wonderful in an Englishman; his walk, his look, his attitude, are as palpable indications of character as the language he employs. There is not a turn of his mouth, or a leer of his eye, that is not in harmony with the general design. His pride, terror, abasement, doubt, triumph, and final despair, are all given with a marvellous versatility, which yet never trenches on the identity of the actor’s creation. But touches are here and there added, some to soften, some to darken, till the whole is like a Dutch picture—laboriously minute in all its details, and perfect as a finished whole.
The English envoy, Sir John Ayliffe, has been sent by Elizabeth with an answer to a demand made by James, that she should proclaim him her successor on the English throne. He has diverged from his road to Holyrood to the castle of the Laird of Restalrig—the secret, but principal agent in a plot for seizing the king; and is greatly alarmed on hearing that Spanish and Roman agents are at the Scottish court, promising the king great pecuniary assistance if he will march across the Border, and, with the help of the discontented Catholic nobility, assert his claim by force. He therefore agrees to aid Restalrig in his attempt to secure the king, and proceeds on his way to Edinburgh. Lord Gowrie, with his brother, is on a visit to the Laird, Gowrie being, of course, in love with his daughter, and is easily worked on to aid the plot by hearing of certain indignities which had been offered to his mother in his absence by the minions of the king. He also goes to Edinburgh, and here we are introduced to his mother, the widowed countess, who urges him to revenge her wrongs, and vindicate his honour by confronting the oppressor. Restalrig has also come to the capital, encounters his friend Gomez, the Spanish agent, and is by him requested to take care of certain sums of gold which have been sent over for the purpose of purchasing the assistance of the nobles to the views of Spain. We now come into the court of Holyrood. James gabbles, and storms, and fleeches, and goes through the most strange, yet natural evolutions—hears a negative reply from England delivered by Sir John Ayliffe—is startled by the apparition of Gowrie drest in his father’s arms—and dismisses the court with a threat of vengeance against all his opponents, especially the heirs of his old enemy, Lord Ruthven.
The interest of the plot hangs on the intellectual combat between the wily and sagacious laird, and the truculent and relentless king. With some of the gold obtained from the Spaniard, Restalrig induces James to move the court to Falkland, in order to be more easily seized when in the vicinity of Gowrie’s house; but James carries his design farther, and goes into the mansion of the Gowries, having arranged with his train to follow him, and make themselves masters of his hosts. When Restalrig’s triumph in the success of his plan and the imprisonment of the king is at its height, a chivalrous sense of honour in the young earl has disconcerted the whole design, by restoring James to liberty, and admitting his followers. Slaughter then takes place; but while James is rejoicing in his gratified revenge, and the destruction of his enemies, it is announced to him that Restalrig, at the head of the men of Perth, is at the gate; they are clamorous for vengeance—the alarm-bells are ringing—strange yells of an outraged populace are heard—James, in an agony of cowardly remorse, blames the instruments of his cruelty—and the curtain falls, leaving him in immediate expectation of being torn to pieces in punishment of his useless crime. The performers have little to do in this play, except to bring out the peculiarities of the king. Restalrig is played with a rough humour, and appreciation of the part, by Mr Bennet; but the effect of the young earl, upon whom a great deal depends in the scene of the release, is entirely destroyed by the unfortunate voice and feebleness of the actor. As an exhibition, however, of how one great performer can vivify a whole play in spite of all drawbacks, we pronounce the acting of Mr Phelps in some respects without a parallel on the modern stage.
In the good old comedy of the “Man of the World,” he is no less remarkable in his delineation of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant. His power over the Scotch dialect is the same; and it is only a less powerful performance, from the character itself being less diversified, and the tragic element being entirely omitted. Disagreeable characters both, from their hardness and selfishness; and we should like to see the same art applied to some softer and more captivating specimens of the Scottish species.
We have been forced already to confess that single-character pieces are the only style of drama to which full justice can be done in any theatre in London. Many people, deluded by this circumstance, and preferring the perfection of one to the mediocrity of many, will gravely tell you that the drama itself ought to be formed, in this respect, on the model of the stage; that the interest ought to be concentred in the hero, and the others kept entirely subordinate, or at least only endowed with vitality enough to enable them to survive the kicks and buffets with which the chief personage of the plot asserts his superiority. That one central interest must exist in a properly-constructed drama, there is no doubt; but it is a terrible narrowing of the author’s walk if you debar him from affixing this interest to a group, and limit it entirely to one. You force him to descend to mere peculiarities, and the evolvement of character in its most contracted sense—thereby, and to this extent, trenching upon the province of farce, which consists in a development of the humours of some selected individual. The drama, on the other hand, paints humanity in the abstract, modified in its particular action by the position and character of the personages of the story; and in so far as, for the sake of one chief actor, the movement of the play is made to depend on him, the poet sinks from being the Titian or Michael Angelo of his art, into the Watson Gordon, Phillips, or Pickersgill;—high names certainly; but portrait-painting, even at its best, is not history. Let any man read Julius Cæsar, and think of the Kembles, Young, Macready, and Elliston all in the same play, and talk no more of a one-charactered drama as the fittest for representation, and the highest of its class. A one-charactered drama is only the best when there is but one good actor in a theatre; if there were three good actors, a three-charactered play would speedily arise; where all were good, Shakspeare would reappear—that is to say, crowds would go to see Shakspeare, instead of going, as now, to see this or that performer in Hamlet or Macbeth.
The nearest approach to this diffusion of excellence is to be found on the French stage. A unity of purpose is visible in the whole company. The flunky who announces the countess’s carriage enters into the spirit of the scene, and is as completely the flunky, and nothing more, as Regnier is the marquis, and nothing less. But one man we possess on the English boards, who is very superior to Regnier and all his clan. Charles Matthews has more graceful ease, more untiring vivacity, more genial comprehension, than the very finest of the Parisians. For ninety-five nights he has held a hushed theatre in the most complete subjection to his magic art, and was as fresh and forcible on the last night of the course as at its beginning. Yet never once does he raise his voice above drawing-room pitch; no reliance has he on silver shoe-buckles or slashed doublets; he wears the same coat and other habiliments in which he breakfasts at home or dines with a friend. Never once does he point an epigram with a grimace, or even emphasise a sentiment with a shrug of his shoulders. The marvel is how the effect is created; for there is no outward sign of effort or intention. That the effect is there, is manifest from pit to gallery; and yet, there stands a quiet, placid, calm-eyed, pleasant-mannered, meek-voiced, bald-headed, gentlemanly stockbroker, with respectable brass-buttoned blue coat and grey trousers, such as is to be seen on any day of the week pursuing his way from St John’s Wood or Brompton; and, at first sight, as unfit for theatrical representation as the contents of his ledger for the material of an epic poem. But he is placed in queer and unaccountable situations?—made intensely interesting by some strange instance of mistaken identity?—or endangered in life and fame by some curiously ingenious piece of circumstantial evidence? Nothing of the kind. The man is before you all the time. You know his whole circumstances as well as he himself does. He has a wife and daughter; he lives in a well-furnished capacious house—we should say in the upper part of Baker Street; and probably a brass plate reveals to the inquiring passenger that it is the residence of Mr Affable Hawk. That is his name: a merchant or stockbroker, at one time very honest and very rich; but his partner, a Mr Sparrow, has eloped with the co-partnery funds, leaving Mr Hawk’s affairs in inextricable confusion, and throwing him into the disagreeable necessity of living on his wits. He has a great and available capital, and lays it out to the best advantage. Never did wits so stand in the stead of money before. With them he pays off debts, with them he embarks in speculations, and on their security raises loans throwing seed in the stoniest places, and receiving a hundredfold. Nor is his triumph over a set of trustful spinsters, or persons unaccustomed to business. He does not live upon pigeons, but, like the lovers in Boccaccio, makes an excellent dinner on a sharp-beaked falcon. Mr Hardcore will stand no more nonsense. He rushes into the house—hat on head, stick in hand. He will have his money, or issue a writ at once. With a gentlemanly motion towards his head, Mr Affable convicts him silently of ill-breeding and impertinence, and the hat is instantly removed. With the utmost suavity, he requests the irate creditor to write to his clerk to stop farther proceedings, and to add, in a postscript, a cheque for £200. The man is staggered by the immensity of the impertinence. But the calm superiority of his debtor makes itself felt in spite of his utmost efforts. Certain shares in a brilliant speculation have been secured by Mr Hawk for his friend at a very low premium. The letter to the clerk is written. But the cheque for £200? Sir Harry Lester, a rich baronet, is about to marry Mr Hawk’s daughter; all debts are to be paid by the enraptured son-in-law; a fitting breakfast must be given; a few trinkets, a few dresses. You wouldn’t have such a glorious prospect spoiled by the want of such a trifle? Hardcore writes the cheque, and rushes off to secure the depreciated shares. Another comes in who throws himself on the charity of his debtor, pleads poverty, distress, even starvation. How can the polished and humane Mr Hawk resist so touching an appeal? He can’t. He doesn’t. He goes for three pounds, as an instalment of which it appears he has already paid nine, making a remarkably good return on the loan of our penurious friend, Mr Earthworm. That gentleman rejoices in the success of his “dodge,” and appears triumphant in his conquest over the feelings of Mr Hawk. But the benevolent debtor now returns, pays the three sovereigns, and hurries his visitor off to make way for Mr Grossmark, who is about to purchase shares in a speculation of Mr Hawk’s, which is to yield three hundred per cent. “How much is required?” says the miserable Earthworm—“three hundred pounds?” He thinks he can raise the sum—a friend who is very rich will help him: he will advance the money. “But the four hundred pounds are required at once.” “Is it four hundred?” A bow from Mr Hawk. “Well, my friend will not stick at that.” “And the five hundred pounds will set the matter afloat,” said Mr Hawk; “but go—there’s a good fellow—for I hear Grossmark’s step, and the shares are promised to him.” Earthworm’s disguise is seen through, and falls off like the traveller’s cloak before the heat of the sun. “Here! here’s the money,” he cries—puts a pile of notes into Mr Hawk’s reluctant hand, and the bargain is closed. Prosperity once more seems an inhabitant of Baker Street. He has received seven hundred pounds, and can now provide a trousseau, and furnish forth a wedding breakfast. Twenty thousand pounds he has settled on his daughter; but they are any twenty thousand he may be able to extract from the uncountable riches of his son-in-law. This noble specimen of Hibernian honour rejoices in a double name; one being Sir Harry Lester, with which to tickle the ears of the millionaires of Baker Street, and the other his workday appellation under which he enacts the distinguished part of a stag in railways, and a defaulter in other speculations. His interview with Mr Hawk would be diamond cut diamond if the strength and brilliancy weren’t all on one side. Preliminaries are settled—the amount of marriage portion agreed upon—a description of the Lester estates, including a salt marsh taken on trust, and all things verging towards a satisfactory fulfilment. The salt marsh instantly suggests to the ingenious Hawk a perfect California of speculation; divided into shares, market rigged, property realised, and no other inquiries are made. But the course of true love never did run smooth. In the most dramatic scene of the play, the mutual discovery is made that Mr Hawk is an insolvent, and Sir Harry a swindler—the Lester estates are in an Irish bog, the salt marsh is the sea. Pleasant is it to see the mild self-composure, and sublime self-reliance of Mr Hawk. For some years he has softened his creditors’ hearts, and amused their hopes with reports of the return of his runaway partner Mr Sparrow, with all the funds of the firm, and a vast increase of capital by successful trade in the East. That expedient has been tried so often that it begins to lose its effect. The creditors laugh when he mentions Sparrow’s name. What can be better than to make Sir Harry bronze his countenance, shave off his beard, put on a wig, buy a carriage in Long Acre, and post up to Baker Street at the very moment, decisive of his fate, when his creditors, now aware of the failure of his chance of marrying his daughter to a fortune, are to assemble with their united claims and remorselessly convey him to the Fleet? Sir Harry agrees. Hawk retires to mature his plans; but Mrs Hawk, radiant with some unexpected good news, hurries in—stops Sir Harry from the execution of his infamous plot, and waits in happy expectation the dénouement of the piece. The creditors come in—they bawl, they grin, they scold, they bully. Sparrow is appealed to in vain. They have heard too much of that Levanter’s return to believe in it any more. Hark! a carriage rattles up to the door. They look out of the window: carriage covered with mud;—old fellow hobbles out—pigtail wig exactly as ordered. Capital, Sir Harry, cries Hawk! Now, then, gentlemen, will you be persuaded? Won’t you wait for ten days till I have arranged our partnership accounts, and then we will pay you in full? The creditors pause. At last one of them goes out to see. He comes back with a cheque for the amount of his debt! Hawk stands aghast. Another goes out, and comes in holding up a bank post bill for ten thousand pounds! More and more confounded. Hawk has uncomfortable thoughts of forgery, and thinks Sir Harry carries the joke too far. At last the wife of his bosom rushes in, and at the other door Sir Harry makes his appearance. This is magic, witchcraft, sorcery; for still the creditors go out, and still come back with all their claims discharged. The real Sparrow has indeed returned; and, having thus made the amende, is in a position to solicit an interview with his injured partner; and that sagacious and now thoroughly honourable gentleman concludes the series of his “dodges” with a solemn declaration in favour of probity and fair-dealing, which would have been more edifying if he could have appealed to his own conduct in illustration of what he said. There was no occasion for any piece of hypocrisy like this at the end. His life was a sermon. We have heard an objection made to the moral of this play, that it invests swindling with dignity, and so unites dishonesty with wit, ease, grace, and fascinating manner, as to make dishonesty itself far from a repulsive object. Have you ever reflected, oh critic, that the creditors here are the helots of the scene, to be a disgust and warning to others; and, in the midst of their apparent respectabilities, are shown to be the dishonest workers of their own losses?—that Mr Hawk is far less the tempter of those City gentlemen, than the creation of the style of speculation in which they are all engaged. Without Earthworms and Hardcores there would be no possible existence for our easy, pleasant, buoyant friend Hawk. The whole play may be called “Rochefoucauld’s Maxims Dramatised;” for a better satire on the selfishness, meanness, and gullibility of the animal man is not to be found in the whole range of literature or philosophy. What little is to be done by Mr Roxby, as Sir Harry, is done “excellent well.” There is a very praiseworthy obtuseness to the rascality of his conduct, and calm consideration of his claims, which is very edifying as contrasted with the thorough appreciation of him instantaneously arrived at by his intended father-in-law. The principal creditors also are very adequately represented, especially the miserable begging impostor, by Mr Frank Matthews. A more life-like combination of mendicity, and its unvarying accompaniment mendacity, was never observed by Mr Horsford; and we confess to a feeling approaching displeasure, when we learn that the beneficent Sparrow has restored his money to that smooth-tongued, supple-backed, blackhearted vagabond. Now, what is the conclusion derived from all this?—That a dramatic feast of this quality has not been seen in our time. Not that the language is comparable to Sheridan’s—in fact, the composition is rather poor; not even that there is any novelty in the plot;—but the strength of this play is first of all in the prevailing truthfulness of Charles Matthews’ acting; and, secondly, that it never on any one occasion oversteps the modesty of nature. With the sole exception of the opportune return of the defaulting partner, we believe that the entire story of this drama was enacted every day in the neighbourhood of Capel Court all the time of the railway mania, and is now performing every day not far from the Stock Exchange. And the proof that this lecture, as it may be called, on the art of commercial gambling, is carried on in accordance with inevitable natural laws, is that in spite of the English names, the Irish baronet, the Baker Street furniture, and the thoroughly London atmosphere that surrounds all the personages introduced, the play is originally French. The scene is Paris—the creditors are Parisian—the swindling, speculating, caballing, kite-flying, and mystification, are all originally the offspring of the Bourse; and all the merit of the English play-wright is, that he has very ingeniously hidden the birthplace of his characters, without altering, or in the slightest degree damaging, their features; and, in fact, has given them letters of naturalisation under which they could rise to be Lord Mayors of London, and eat turtle and drink port as if to the manner born. The author is poor Balzac, lately dead, who left Mercadet a legacy to the stage of more value by far than all his contributions to it during his lifetime. His minute dissection of character had given a charm to his novels, but gave no promise of a success upon the boards; for his ends were worked out by a thousand little traits, as in our own Miss Austin, without ever having recourse to the broad effects that seem adapted to the theatre;—and we believe his dramatic triumph came as a surprise upon the Parisian public, which, at the same time, highly appreciated his Eugenie Grandet, and his other revelations of provincial life.
While dwelling on the performances of the Lyceum, it would be unpardonable to omit, from the notice of Maga and her readers, the genius of Mr Beverley, the scene-painter. It almost requires an apology for applying that old appellation to a man who lavishes upon the landscapes required in a play a richness of imagination and power of touch which would bring envy to the hearts of the Poussins or Claude. It is not by gorgeous colours, or startling light and shade, that Beverley produces his effects. With a severe adherence to his original design, he works out a scene, so perfect in its parts, and so combined as a whole, that it is difficult to realise to the mind the gigantic scale, or the coarse touches, with which it is painted: you gaze on it as on a finished picture by some great artist, who has devoted months to its elaboration in the solitude of his studio; and wonder not less at the taste, and fancy, and sentiment of those extraordinary works, than at the rapidity with which they are produced, and the inexhaustible resources of the mind that gives them birth. It rests with Mr Beverley himself, whether to follow his illustrious predecessors, Roberts and Stanfield, to the highest honours of the Academy, or to continue an exhibition of his own, where the applause of shouting theatres testifies nightly to his artistic powers; and ample room and verge enough is given for his highest conceptions, which would, perhaps, object to find themselves cramped within the limits of an ordinary frame, and subjected to the tender mercies of a hostile hanging committee. Whichever way he decides, the arts will infallibly be the gainers. If he descends to ordinary canvass, and places “infinite riches in a little room,” he will take rank in after ages with the masters who have ennobled the English school; if he continues where he is, not less useful will his efforts be in diffusing a love of beauty and a knowledge of effect. The Lyceum, like its Athenian prototype, will become a lecture-hall; and from his lessons and examples, new Wilsons and Turners, new Calcotts and Constables, may arise to maintain the supremacy of British landscape against all competitors.