As for Home, the first act is a prologue, the second is the play, the third is the epilogue. The three chief characters are more or less unprincipled, one of them (played by Mr. Sothern) justifying the end by the means; and the sympathy of the audience is, at the conclusion, entirely with the designing woman whose schemes have been foiled by the aforesaid unprincipled son. Much has been said in praise of the business of the love-making at the piano. There is nothing new under the sun or behind the foot-lights, and the details of this, the diffidence, the short sentences, the shyness, the nervousness, are as old as stage-courtship itself. Mr. Sothern gets some laughs out of misplacing words, by a sort of Dundreary habit, and obtains one roar by upsetting a music-stand when he is talking to the young lady at the piano. He makes false love, with affected earnestness, as he did in A Lesson for Life, and his stage business is all good and careful. By the way, there is a too brilliant screen in the corner, which distracts the attention of the audience. It is never used during the play, nothing is done with it, and, unless it be used to conceal some one who plays the piano, (something of the sort was done in Golden Daggers, at the Princess’s) while Miss Hill is pretending to perform a brilliant waltz, the screen is useless—is worse, being an eye-sore.
In fine, we shall be glad to see another piece of Mr. Robertson’s, but he owes it to his friends and the public, to inform us of its originality: and we heartily advise him to work his own ground, and to leave the French, German, and Italian fields to those who have no fertile soil of their own.
From “Bohemian Days in Fleet Street”
By William Mackay.
When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the Times, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the Times letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my “diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called Once a Week lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,” as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.
Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but not to Once a Week, because the paper in question was then under the editorial control of a member of the staff of the Times. So that—a circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer. A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And, incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom” Robertson.
Once a Week, 27 March 1869
School.
By William Mackay.
When in these days a dramatic author achieves undoubted success, without having recourse to sensational incident, to intricacies of plot, and to impossible situations, something has occurred to arrest the attention of those who are eternally bemoaning the degraded position of the modern stage. There is a play being performed in London at present which has ensnared the public into admiration; which fills a theatre night after night with pleased audiences; and in which, strange to say, there is introduced no railway train, no hansom cab, no real pump. The title of the play is School. The object of this article is to discover, if possible, the secret of the author’s success.
We take it for granted that the cloud of accusation which, erewhile, hung over Mr. Robertson’s head has been dissipated. Lord Macaulay informs us in his essay on Byron, that the British public is subject to periodical fits of morality. When School was produced at the Prince of Wales’ Theatre, the town was suffering from one of these attacks. Almost every event became a text. But it so happened that anent public exhibitions the Briton was especially asserting himself. The State was interfering in the matter of stage petticoats, and various journals were waxing eloquent over the degrading and demoralising spectacle of the Siamese Twins. It was impossible that School should escape. True there are no legs displayed in Tottenham Street,—nothing there to offend a correct taste. In a happy moment, however, it was discovered that Mr. Robertson had translated his comedy from the German. Here, indeed, was a charge of immorality compared with which an accusation of legs would be less than trivial. What Goldsmith once called “the busy disposition of some correspondents,” went to work with a will. Printing House Square helped it to utterance, and in a day or two the town rang with the echoes of it. Those who have read the German play about which the correspondents wrote, have been able to convince themselves, and those who have not, will have by this time been convinced by the Times article on the question that School is not a translation. Mr. Robertson has indeed borrowed the idea of a play, in which a boarding-school should afford some of the characters, and the legend of Cinderella a background. Further than this, the author of School is not indebted to his continental contemporary. If there be criminality in so borrowing we should at once commence to measure modern authors with a standard higher than that which we apply to the great masters of the dramatic art.
But, after all, the most convincing refutation of the charge of translation is afforded by the comedy itself. With one exception (that of Krux the tutor) can anything be more thoroughly, more peculiarly English than the delineation of the dramatis personæ of School—than the dialogue, the channels in which it runs, and the allusions with which it is studded?
Mr. Robertson’s comedy, then, is not a translation. And in crossing the channel to search for the author’s model, critics have put themselves to unnecessary trouble. A great deal of the press praise lavished on our author has been excessive. And probably no one feels this more than the author himself. Mr. Robertson does not write for immortality. His plays will never be read; after a few years, probably, will cease to be acted even. He is not a Sheridan, any more than Sheridan was a Shakspeare. But he is a dramatic author, capable of portraying a character with ability and finish, and of writing dialogue which is sometimes sparkling, often charming, and always clever. And much of his success in these respects is attributable, as we think, to his having studied earnestly the writings of Thackeray. This idea has not suddenly and only now occurred to us. When we first saw it, we thought that Society was not altogether uninfluenced by Vanity Fair. And although in Caste and Ours the genius of the master was not so observable, it reasserted itself in Play, and in the author’s latest production it is more than ever felt. In endeavouring to show the extent of Thackeray’s influence on Mr. Robertson’s work, we purpose confining ourselves to that latest production.