May 24, 1879
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, ca. 1813.
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, IN HIS VOLUME OF “MIXED Essays,” lately published, in speaking somewhere of some of the less creditable features of English civilization, alludes to the British theatre as “probably the most contemptible in Europe.” The judgment is a harsh one, but he would be a bold man who, looking round him at the condition of the London stage at the present moment, should attempt to gainsay it. I have lately made a point of gathering such impressions on the subject as were easily obtainable, and a brief record of them may not be without interest. The first impression one receives in England on turning one’s attention at all in this direction, is that a very large number of people are doing the same. The theatre just now is the fashion, just as “art” is the fashion and just as literature is not. The English stage has probably never been so bad as it is at present, and at the same time there probably has never been so much care about it. It sometimes seems to an observer of English customs that this interest in histrionic matters almost reaches the proportions of a mania. It pervades society—it breaks down barriers. If you go to an evening party, nothing is more probable than that all of a sudden a young lady or a young gentleman will jump up and strike an attitude and begin to recite a poem or a speech. Every pretext for this sort of exhibition is ardently cultivated, and the London world is apparently filled with stage-struck young persons whose relatives are holding them back from a dramatic career by the skirts of their garments. Plays and actors are perpetually talked about, private theatricals are incessant, and members of the dramatic profession are “received” without restriction. They appear in society, and the people of society appear on the stage; it is as if the great gate which formerly divided the theatre from the world had been lifted off its hinges. There is, at any rate, such a passing to and fro as has never before been known; the stage has become amateurish and society has become professional. There are various explanations of this state of things, of which I am far from expressing disapproval; I mention it only because, superficially, it might seem that the theatre would have drawn strength from this large development of public favor. It is part of a great general change which has come over English manners—of the confusion of many things which forty years ago were kept very distinct. The world is being steadily democratized and vulgarized, and literature and art give their testimony to the fact. The fact is better for the world perhaps, but I question greatly whether it is better for art and literature; and therefore it is that I was careful to say just now that it is only superficially that one might expect to see the stage elevated by becoming what is called the fashion. They are in the truth of the matter very much more in France. In France, too, the democratizing, vulgarizing movement, the confusion of kinds, is sufficiently perceptible; but the stage has still, and will probably long have, the good fortune of not becoming the fashion. It is something at once more and less than the fashion, and something more respectable and permanent, and a part of the national life. It is a need, a constant habit, enjoying no fluctuations of credit. The French esteem the theatre too much to take rash liberties with it, and they have a wholesome dread, very natural in an artistic people, of abusing the source of their highest pleasure. Recitations, readings, private theatricals, public experiments by amateurs who have fallen in love with the footlights, are very much less common in France than in England, and of course still less common in the United States. Another fact that helps these diversions to flourish in England is the immense size of society, the prevalence of country life, the existence of an enormous class of people who have nothing in the world to do. The famous “leisure class,” which is the envy and admiration of so many good Americans, has certainly invented a great many expedients for getting through the time; but there still remains for this interesting section of the human race a considerable danger of being bored, and it is to escape this danger that many of the victims of leisure take refuge in playing at histrionics.
In France (as I spoke just now of France) the actor’s art, like the ancient arts and trades, is still something of a “mystery”—a thing of technical secrets, of special knowledge. This kind of feeling about it is inevitably much infringed when it becomes the fashion, in the sense that I have alluded to, and certainly the evidences of training—of a school, a discipline, a body of science—are on the English stage conspicuous by their absence. Of how little the public taste misses these things or perceives the need of them, the great and continued success of Mr. Henry Irving is a striking example. I shall not here pretend to judge Mr. Irving; but I may at least say that even his most ardent admirers would probably admit that he is an altogether irregular performer, and that an artistic education has had little to do with the results that he presents to the public. I do not mean by this, of course, that he has not had plenty of practice; I mean simply that he is an actor who, in default of any help rendered him, any control offered him by the public taste, by an ideal in the public mind, has had to get himself together and keep himself together as he could. He is at present the principal “actuality” of the London stage, and his prosperity has taken a fresh start with his having at the beginning of the winter established a theatre of his own and obtained the graceful assistance of Miss Ellen Terry. I say I shall not pretend to judge Mr. Irving, because I am aware that I must in the nature of the case probably do him injustice. His starting-point is so perfectly opposed to any that I find conceivable that it would be idle to attempt to appreciate him. In the opinion of many people the basis, the prime condition, of acting is the art of finished and beautiful utterance—the art of speaking, of saying, of diction, as the French call it; and such persons find it impossible to initiate themselves into any theory of the business which leaves this out of account. Mr. Irving’s theory eliminates it altogether, and there is perhaps a great deal to be said for his point of view. I must, however, leave the task of elucidating it to other hands. He began the present season with a revival of “Hamlet”—a part, one would say, offering peculiar obstacles to treatment on this system of the unimportance of giving value to the text; and now, for some weeks past, he has been playing the “Lady of Lyons” with great success. To this success Miss Ellen Terry has very considerably contributed. She is greatly the fashion at present, and she belongs properly to a period which takes a strong interest in aesthetic furniture, archaeological attire, and blue china. Miss Ellen Terry is “aesthetic”; not only her garments but her features themselves bear the stamp of the new enthusiasm. She has a charm, a great deal of a certain amateurish, angular grace, a total want of what the French call chic, and a countenance very happily adapted to the expression of pathetic emotion. To this last effect her voice also contributes; it has a sort of monotonous husky thickness which is extremely touching, though it gravely interferes with the modulation of many of her speeches. Miss Terry, however, to my sense, is far from having the large manner, the style and finish, of a comédienne. She is the most pleasing and picturesque figure upon the English stage, but the other night, as I sat watching the “Lady of Lyons,” I said to myself that her charming aspect hardly availed to redeem the strange, dingy grotesqueness of that decidedly infelicitous drama.
The two best theatres in London are the Court and the Prince of Wales’s, and the intelligent playgoer is supposed chiefly to concern himself with what takes place at these houses. It is certainly true that at either house you see the London stage at its best; they possess respectively the two most finished English actors with whom I am acquainted. Mr. Arthur Cecil, at the Prince of Wales’s, has a ripeness and perfection of method which reminds me of the high finish of the best French acting. He is an artist in very much the same sense that Got and Coquelin are artists. The same may be said of Mr. Hare at the Court, whose touch is wonderfully light and unerring. Indeed, for a certain sort of minute, almost painter-like elaboration of a part that really suits him, Mr. Hare is very remarkable. But the merits of these two actors, and those of some of their comrades at either theatre, only serve to throw into relief the essential weakness of the whole institution—the absolute poverty of its repertory. When Matthew Arnold speaks of the “contemptible” character of the contemporary English theatre, he points of course not merely at the bad acting which is so largely found there; he alludes also to its perfect literary nudity. Why it is that in the English language of our day there is not so much even as an unsuccessful attempt at a dramatic literature—such as is so largely visible in Germany and Italy, where “original” plays, even though they be bad ones, are produced by the hundred—this is quite a question by itself, and one that it would take some space to glance at. But it is sufficiently obvious that the poverty of the modern English theatre is complete, and it is equally obvious that the theatre is all one—that the drama and the stage hold together. There can be no serious school of acting unless there is a dramatic literature to feed it; the two things act and react upon each other—they are a reciprocal inspiration and encouragement. Anything less inspiring than the borrowed wares, vulgarized and distorted in the borrowing, upon which the English stage of to-day subsists, cannot well be imagined. Coarse adaptations of French comedies, with their literary savor completely evaporated, and their form and proportions quite sacrificed to the queer obeisances they are obliged to make to that incongruous phantom of a morality which has not wit enough to provide itself with an entertainment conceived in its own image—this is the material on which the actor’s spirit is obliged to exert itself. The result is natural enough, and the plays and the acting are equally crude.
There can be no better proof of the poverty of the repertory than the expedients to which the Court and the Prince of Wales’s have been reduced during the present winter. The Court has been playing a couple of threadbare French pieces of twenty and thirty years ago—a stiff translation of Scribe’s “Bataille de Dames,” and a commonplace version of a commonplace drama entitled “Le Fils de Famille.” Scribe’s piece is a clever light comedy—it is still sometimes played at the Théâtre Français; but it belongs at this time of day quite to the dramatic scrap-bag. There is something pitiful in seeing it dragged into the breach and made to figure for weeks as the stock entertainment at one of the two best English theatres. At the Prince of Wales’s they have been playing all winter and are still playing Robertson’s “Caste”—a piece of which, in common with the other productions of the same hand, it is only possible to say that it belongs quite to the primitive stage of dramatic literature. It is the infancy of art; it might have been written by a clever under-teacher for representation at a boarding-school. At the Criterion there is a comedy entitled “Truth,” by an American author, Mr. Bronson Howard. Even the desire to speak well of American productions is insufficient to enable me to say that Mr. Bronson Howard offers a partial contradiction to Matthew Arnold’s dictum. “Truth” may be an “original” drama; I know nothing of its history; but it produces the effect of the faint ghost of any old conventional French vaudeville—the first comer—completely divested of intellectual garniture, reduced to its simplest expression, and diluted in British propriety.