The stage is keeping step with the progress of human thought in every direction, and it will continue to advance. Evil influences impressed upon it there certainly are, in liberal abundance—not the least of these being that of the speculative shop-keeper, whose nature it is to seize any means of turning a penny, and who deals in dramatic art precisely as he would deal in groceries: but when we speak of "our stage" we do not mean an aggregation of shows or of the schemes of showmen. The stage is an institution that has grown out of a necessity in human nature. It was as inevitable that man should evolve the theatre as it was that he should evolve the church, the judiciary tribunal, the parliament, or any other essential component of the State. Almost all human beings possess the dramatic perception; a few possess the dramatic faculty. These few are born for the stage, and each and every generation contributes its number to the service of this art. The problem is one of selection and embarkation. Of the true actor it may be said, as Ben Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure, takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution. The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however, impulse soon recognises the curb of common sense, and the aspirant finds his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way the several types of dramatic artist—each type being distinct and each being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry—are maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art, every species of person; in order that all human life—whether of the street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most ideal state—may be so copied that the picture will express all its beauty and sweetness, all its happiness and mirth, all its dignity, and all its moral admonition and significance, for the benefit of the world. Such a dramatic stock-company, for example (and this is but one of the commendable products of the modern stage), has grown up and crystallised into a form of refined power and symmetry, for the purpose to which it is devoted, under the management of Augustin Daly. That purpose is the acting of comedy. Mr. Daly began management in 1869, and he has remained in it, almost continually, from that time to this. Many players, first and last, have served under his direction. His company has known vicissitudes. But the organisation has not lost its comprehensive form, its competent force, and its attractive quality of essential grace. No thoughtful observer of its career can have failed to perceive how prompt the manager has been to profit by every lesson of experience; what keen perception he has shown as to the essential constituents of a theatrical troop; with what fine judgment he has used the forces at his disposal; with what intrepid resolution and expeditious energy he has animated their spirit and guided their art; and how naturally those players have glided into their several stations and assimilated in one artistic family. How well balanced, how finely equipped, how distinctively able that company is, and what resources of poetry, thought, taste, character, humour, and general capacity it contains, may not, perhaps, be fully appreciated in the passing hour. "Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit." Fifty years from now, when perchance some veteran, still bright and cheery "in the chimney-nook of age," shall sit in his armchair and prose about the past, with what complacent exultation will he speak of the beautiful Ada Rehan, so bewitching as Peggy in The Country Girl, so radiant, vehement, and stormily passionate as Katherine; of manly John Drew, with his nonchalant ease, incisive tone, and crisp and graceful method; of noble Charles Fisher, and sprightly and sparkling James Lewis, and genial, piquant, quaint Mrs. Gilbert! I mark the gentle triumph in that aged reminiscent voice, and can respect an old man's kindly and natural sympathy with the glories and delights of his vanished youth. But I think it is not necessary to wait till you are old before you begin to praise anything, and then to praise only the dead. Let us recognise what is good in our own time, and honour and admire it with grateful hearts.
Note.—At the Garrick club, London, June 26, 1885, it was my fortune to meet Mr. Fladgate, "father of the Garrick," who was then aged 86. The veteran displayed astonishing resources of memory and talked most instructively about the actors of the Kemble period. He declared John Philip Kemble to have been the greatest of actors, and said that his best impersonations were Penruddock, Zanga, and Coriolanus. Mrs. Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great genius,—the precursor of Dickens. For Edmund Kean he had no enthusiasm. Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and after that in Shylock. Miss O'Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet: a beautiful, blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who retained her beauty to the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher.
II.
HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST.
It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe's colossal poem—a work which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius—should find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it never has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of its contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; it is not the Fiend. Mephistopheles, indeed, might, for the purpose of philosophical apprehension, be viewed as an embodied projection of the mind of Faust; for the power of the one is dependent absolutely upon the weakness and surrender of the other. The object of the poem was the portrayal of universal humanity in a typical form at its highest point of development and in its representative spiritual experience. Faust, an aged scholar, the epitome of human faculties and virtues, grand, venerable, beneficent, blameless, is passing miserably into the evening of life. He has done no outward and visible wrong, and yet he is wretched. The utter emptiness of his life—its lack of fulfilment, its lack of sensation—wearies, annoys, disgusts, and torments him. He is divided between an apathy, which heavily weighs him down into the dust, and a passionate, spiritual longing, intense, unsatisfied, insatiable, which almost drives him to frenzy. Once, at sunset, standing on a hillside, and looking down upon a peaceful valley, he utters, in a poetic strain of exquisite tenderness and beauty, the final wish of his forlorn and weary soul. It is no longer now the god-like aspiration and imperious desire of his prime, but it is the sufficient alternative. All he asks now is that he may see the world always as in that sunset vision, in the perfection of happy rest; that he may be permitted, soaring on the wings of the spirit, to follow the sun in its setting ("The day before me and the night behind"), and thus to circle forever round and round this globe, the ecstatic spectator of happiness and peace. He has had enough and more than enough of study, of struggle, of unfulfilled aspiration. Lonely dignity, arid renown, satiety, sorrow, knowledge without hope, and age without comfort,—these are his present portion; and a little way onward, waiting for him, is death. Too old to play with passion, too young not to feel desire, he has endured a long struggle between the two souls in his breast—one longing for heaven and the other for the world; but he is beaten at last, and in the abject surrender of despair he determines to die by his own act. A childlike feeling, responsive in his heart to the divine prompting of sacred music, saves him from self-murder; but in a subsequent bitter revulsion he utters a curse upon everything in the state of man, and most of all upon that celestial attribute of patience whereby man is able to endure and to advance in the eternal process of evolution from darkness into light. And now it is, when the soul of the human being, utterly baffled by the mystery of creation, crushed by its own hopeless sorrow, and enraged by the everlasting command to renounce and refrain, has become one delirium of revolt against God and destiny, that the spirit of perpetual denial, incarnated in Mephistopheles, steps forth to proffer guidance and help. It is as if his rejection and defiance had suddenly become embodied, to aid him in his ruin. More in recklessness than in trust, with no fear, almost with scorn and contempt, he yet agrees to accept this assistance. If happiness be really possible, if the true way, after all, should lie in the life of the senses, and not in knowledge and reason; if, under the ministrations of this fiend, one hour of life, even one moment of it, shall ever (which is an idle and futile supposition) be so sweet that his heart shall desire it to linger, then, indeed, he will surrender himself eternally to this at present preposterous Mephistopheles, whom his mood, his magic, and the revulsion of his moral nature have evoked:—
"Then let the death-bell chime the token!
Then art thou from thy service free!
The clock may stop, the hand be broken,
And time be finished unto me."
Such an hour, it is destined, shall arrive, after many long and miserable years, when, aware of the beneficence of living for others and in the imagined prospect of leading, guiding, and guarding a free people upon a free land, Faust shall be willing to say to the moment: "Stay, thou art so fair"; and Mephistopheles shall harshly cry out: "The clock stands still"; and the graybeard shall sink in the dust; and the holy angels shall fly away with his soul, leaving the Fiend baffled and morose, to gibe at himself over the failure of all his infernal arts. But, meanwhile, it remains true of the man that no pleasure satisfies him and no happiness contents, and "death is desired, and life a thing unblest."