CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

It was melancholy—but Atheist Friswell alone was to blame for it—that we should sit out through that lovely evening and talk about tawdry theatricals, and that same tawdriness more than a little musty through time. If Friswell had not begun with his nonsense about having seen my Temple somewhere down Oxford Street we should never have wandered from the subject of gardens until we lost ourselves among the wings of the Lyceum and its “profiles” of its pines in Iolanthe, and its “built” yews and pomegranates in Romeo and Juliet. But among the perfume of the roses surrounding us, with an occasional whiff of the lavender mound and a gracious breath like that of

“The sweet South

That breathes upon a bank of violets

Giving and taking odours,”

we continued talking of theatres until the summer night was reeking with the smell of sawdust and oranges, to say nothing of the fragrance of the poudre de ninon of the stalls, wafted over opera wraps and diamond-studded shirt-fronts—diamond studs, when just over the glimmering marble of my temple the Evening Star was glowing!

But what had always been a mystery to Friswell as the extraordinary lack of judgment on Irving's part in choosing his plays. Had he ever made a success since he produced that adaptation of Faust?

Beautifully staged and with some splendid moments due to the genius of the man himself and the never-failing charm of the actress with whom he was associated in all, yet no play worth remembering was produced at the Lyceum during that management. Faust made money, as it always has since the days of Marlowe; but all those noisy scenes and meaningless moments on the misty mountains—only alliteration's artful aid can deal adequately with such digressions from the story of Faust and Gretchen which was all that theatregoers, even of the better class, who go to tire pit, wanted—seemed dragged into the piece without reason or profit. To be sure, pages and pages of Goethe's Faust are devoted to his attempt to give concreteness to abstractions. (That was Friswell's phrase; and I repeat it for what it is worth). But in the original all these have a meaning at the back of them; but Irving only brought them on to abandon them after a line or two. The hope to gain the atmosphere of the weird by means of a panorama of clouds and mountain peaks may have been realised so far as some sections of the audience were concerned; but such a manager as Henry Irving should have been above trying for such cheap effects.

Faust made money, however, and helped materially to promote the formation of the Company through which country clergymen and daily governesses in the provinces hoped to advance the British Drama and earn 20 per cent, dividends.

I was at the first night of every play produced at the Lyceum for over twenty years, and I knew that Irving never fell short of the highest and the truest possible conception of any part that he attempted. At his best he was unapproachable. It was not the actor who failed, when there was failure; it was the play that failed. Only one marvellously inartistic feature was in the adaptation of The Courier of Lyons. He assumed that the sole way by which identification of a man is possible is by his appearance—that the intonation of his voice counts for nothing whatsoever. He acted in the dual rôle of Dubose and Lesurges—the one a gentle creature with a gentle voice, the other a truculent ruffian who jerked out his words hoarsely—the very antithesis to the mild gentleman in voice, in gait, and in general demeanour, though closely resembling him in features and appearance. The impression given by this representation was that any one who, having heard Dubose speak, would mistake Lesurges for him must be either stone-deaf or an idiot. But each of the parts was finely played; and the real old stage-coach arriving with its team smoking like Sheffield, helped to make a commonplace melodrama interesting.

Personally I do not think that he was justified in trying to realise at the close of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice, the tableau of Christ standing mute and patient among the mockers. It was an attempt to obtain by suggestion some pity and sympathy for an infamous and inhuman scoundrel. In that pictorial moment Shylock the Jew was made to pose as Christ the Jew.

Mrs. Friswell had not seen Irving's Shylock, but she expressed her belief that Shylock was on the whole very badly treated; and Dorothy was ready to, affirm that Antonio was lacking in those elements that go to the composition of a sportsman. He should not have wriggled out of his bargain by the chicanery of the law.

“They were a bad lot, and that's a fact,” I ventured to say.

“They were,” acquiesced Friswell. “And if you look into the history of the Jews, they were also a bad lot; but among them were the most splendid men recorded as belonging to any race ever known on this earth; and I'm not sure that Irving wasn't justified in trying to get his audiences to realise in that last moment something of the dignity of the Hebrew people.”

“He would have made a more distinct advance in that direction if he had cut out the 'business' of stropping his knife a few minutes earlier, 'To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there,'” I remarked.

“If he had done that Shakespeare would not have had the chance of his pun—the cheapest pun in literature—and it would not be like the author to have neglected that,” said Mrs. Friswell.

They all seemed to know more of the play than I gave them credit for knowing.

It was Heywood who inquired if I remembered another of Irving's plays at the close of which a second greatly misjudged character had appealed for sympathy by adopting the same pose.

Of course I did—I remembered it very distinctly. It was in Peter the Great, that the actor, waiting with sublime resignation to hear the heart-rending death-shriek of his son whom he had condemned to drink a cup of cold poison, is told by a hurrying messenger that his illegitimate child has just died—then came the hideous shriek, and the actor, with his far-away look of patient anguish, spoke his words,—

“Then I am childless!”

And the curtain fell.

He appealed for sympathy on precisely the same grounds as were suggested by the prisoner at the bar who had killed his father with a hatchet, and on being convicted by the jury and asked by the judge if he could advance any plea whereby the sentence of death should not be pronounced upon him, said he hoped that his lordship would not forget that he was an orphan.

In this drama the first act was played with as much jingling of sleigh-bells as took place in another and rather better known piece in the repertoire of the same actor.

But whatever were its shortcomings, Peter the Great showed that poor Lawrence Irving could write, and write well, and that he might one day give to the English theatre a great drama.

Irving was accused of neglecting English authors; but the accusation was quite unjust. He gave several of them a chance. There was, of course, W. G. Wills, who was a true dramatist, and showed it in those plays to which I have referred. But it must not be forgotten that he produced a play by Mr. H. D. Traill and Mr. Robert Hitchens, and another by Herman Merrivale; Mr. J. Comyns Carr took in hand the finishing of King Arthur, begun by Wills, and made it ridiculous, and helped in translating and adapting Madame Sans Gêne. Might not Lord Tennyson also be called an English author? and were not his three plays, Queen Mary, The Cup, and Bechet brought out at the Lyceum? Irving showed me how he had made the last-named playable, and I confess that I was astonished. There was not a single page of the book remaining untouched when he had done with it. Speech after speech was transferred from one act to another, and the sequence of the scenes was altered, before the drama was made possible. But when he had finished with it Bechet was not only possible and playable, it was the noblest and the best constructed drama in verse that the stage had seen for years.

I asked him what Lord Tennyson had said about this chopping and changing; but he did not give me a verbatim account of the poet's greeting of his offspring in its stage dress—he only smiled as one smiles under the influence of a reminiscence of something that is better over.

When he went to Victorien Sardou for a new play and got Robespierre, Irving got the worst thing that he had produced up to that date; but when he went a second time and got Dante, he got something worse still. Sir Arthur Pinero's letter acknowledging the debt incurred by the dramatists of England to M. Sardou for showing them how a play should be written was a masterpiece of irony.

The truth is that Irving was the greatest of English actors, and he was at his best only when he was interpreting the best. When he was acting Shakespeare he was supreme. In scenes of passion he differed from most actors. They could show a passion in the hands of a man, he showed the man in the hands of a passion. And what actor could have represented Corporal Brewster in Waterloo as Irving did?

About the changes that we veterans have seen in the stage during the forty years of our playgoing, we agree that one of the most remarkable is the introduction of parsons and pyjamas, and of persons with a past. All these glories of the modern theatre were shut out from the theatres of forty years ago. When an adaptation of Dora by the author of Fedora and Theodora was made for the English stage under the name of Diplomacy, the claim that the Countess with a past had upon the Diplomatist who is going to marry—really marry—another woman, was turned into a claim that she had “nursed him through a long illness.” The censor of those days thought that that was quite as far as any one should go in that direction. It was assumed that La Dame aux Camélias could never be adapted without being offensive to a pure-minded English audience. I think that A Clerical Error was the first play in which a clergyman of the Church of England was given the entrée to a theatre in London. To be sure, there were priests of the Church of Rome in Dion Roufcicault's Irish plays, but they were not supposed to count. I heard that Mr. Pigott, the Censor, only passed the parson in A Clerical Error on the plea of the young nurse for something equally forbidden, in Midshipman Easy, that “it was a very little one.” But from that day until now we have had parsons by the score, ladies wearing camellias and little else, by the hundred. As for the pyjama drama, I don't suppose that any manager would so much as read a play that had not this duplex garment in one scene. I will confess that I once wrote a story for Punch with a pyjama chorus in it. If it was from this indiscretion that a manager conceived the idea of a ballet founded on the same costume I have something to answer for.

But in journalism and literature a corresponding change has come about, only more recently. It is not more than ten or twelve years since certain words have enjoyed the liberty of the press. In a police-court case the word that the ruffian in the dock hurled at a policeman was represented thus—“d——n,” telling him to go to “h——” no respectable newspaper would ever put in the final letter.

But now we have had the highest examples of amalgamated newspapers printing the name of the place that was to be found in neither gazette nor gazetteer, in bold type at the head of a column, and that too in connection with the utterance of a Prime Minister. As for the d——n of ten years ago, no one could have believed that Bob Acres' thoughtless assertion that “damns have had their day,” should be so luridly disproved. Why, they have only now come into their inheritance. This is the day of the damn. It occupies the Place aux Dames of Victorian times; and now one need not hope to be able to pick up a paper or a book that has not most of its pages sprinkled with damns and hells as plentifully as a devil is sprinkled with cayenne. I am sure that in the cookery books of our parents the treatment of a devilled bone would not be found, or if the more conscientious admitted it, we should find it put, “how to cook a d————bone,” or, “another way,” as the cookery book would put it more explicitly, “a d————d bone.”

“It is satisfactory to learn that the Church which so long enjoyed the soul right to the property in these words, has relinquished its claim and handed over the title deeds of the freehold, with all the patronage that was supposed to go with it,” said Friswell. “I read in the papers the other day that the Archbishop had received the report of the Committee he appointed to inquire into the rights of both words, and this recommended the abolition of both words in the interpretation accepted for them for centuries in religious communities; and in future damnation is to be taken to mean only something that does not commend itself to all temperaments, and hell is no more than a picturesque but insanitary dwelling.”

“I read something like that the other day,” said Dorothy. “But surely they have not gone so far as you say.”

“They have gone to a much more voluminous distance, I assure you,” said he. “It is to enable us all to say the Athanasian Creed without our tongue in our cheek. Quicunque vult may repeat 'Qui-cunque Vult' with a full assurance that nothing worth talking about will happen.”

“All the Bishops' Committees in the world cannot rob us Englishmen of our heritage in those words,” I cried, feeling righteously angry at the man's flippancy. “If they were to take that from us, what can they give us in its place—tell me that?”

“Oh, there is still one word in the same connection that they have been afraid to touch,” said he cheerfully. “Thank Heaven we have still got that to counteract any tendency of our language to become anæmic.”