The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

CHAPTER III

The Vogue of Burlesque – Burnand’s Ixion– H. J. Byron – The Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage – Marie Wilton’s début– A Letter from Dickens – Founding of the “Prince of Wales’s” – Tom Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author – His Journalistic Career – London Bohemia in 1865 – Sothern.

The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however, nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic genre became quickly acclimatised by success.

I shall take Burnand’s Ixion as a type, for by reason of its never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind. It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion’s palace. Jupiter appears in answer to his invocation. “Are you insured?” he inquires. “Yes,” replies Ixion, “with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it.” Jupiter invites him to come to Olympus. “We lunch at half-past one. Don’t forget.” Mercury, charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aërial omnibus. “Come on for Olympus! Room for one outside!” We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to tell “the Master” that “coffee is served.” Neptune talks nautical lingo like the hero of Black-eyed Susan, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends. The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate, whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for “La France” by performing the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life – he never shows himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.

Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day – to the victory of the horse “Gladiator,” to Lady Audley’s Secret (then all the rage), to vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in Trafalgar Square, to Mudie’s Circulating Library, – and a thousand other things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be intelligible.

To read Ixion, as I read it thirty-five years after its first production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making one’s way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had become enigmas, and through all the débris of these used-up fireworks, was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of things in general, the pervading odour of the poudre de riz, the flonflons of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A débutante destined to a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon. Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman) the Goddess of Wisdom.

But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion. For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one could wish, and even more, – so much so that the list of his works, were I to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and work it up, – you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should be stocked. He collected them together in notebooks which in time must have come to rival the volume of Larousse’s Dictionary. In the street he would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk, or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which never left him an instant’s peace. Having failed as a manager in the provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring down the curtain on a witticism?

Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And, as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in the slang of the green-room, we call grues.

In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former were much nearer to being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen. Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his Model Men and Women, paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the biographies of the Prix Montyon. She goes late to bed, rises early, learns her rôles while washing her children’s linen, rehearses in the afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to her toilette, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. “School mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks, housemaids, – what are your fatigues to those of an actress?” So spoke a writer⁸ who was well acquainted with theatrical life.

These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera, were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did not perform, and who were called upon to fill not rôles but tights. The respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she won – and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.

Poor Byron was not without the ambition of an artist: he aspired to raising himself above the level of the genre to which he owed his first success, – to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband, she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know, however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she herself made her début when she was five years old. At Manchester she had the honour of playing some small rôle with Macready, who was then making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and questioned her.

“I suppose,” he said, “that you want to become a great actress?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what rôle are you most anxious to play?”

“Juliet.”

Macready burst out laughing. “Then,” said he, “you’ll have to change those eyes of yours!”

Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of rôle. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the rôle of any of Shakespeare’s heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons.

It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing Belphegor, a monstrous emotional drama,⁹ the hero of which was an acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the rôle of a little boy, had to give him the cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first, then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at the Lyceum. Here she made her real début towards the end of 1858. Belphegor was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a rôle. On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have to deal at last with the contemporary stage.

But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies of the English Comedy still to be born.

From the Lyceum she passed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; naïvely selfish, it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.

For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her only in two subsidiary rôles, and for an estimate of her talents I must rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the rôle of eccentric ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the time of her début is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve, – a figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from Charles Dickens to John Forster: —

“I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the Maid and the Magpie burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn’t be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels – wonderfully clever – which in the audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you can not imagine a woman’s doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl’s talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original.”

But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids. She begged of all the managers to let her play the rôle of a heroine in long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, “I shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little scamp.”

Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her —

“As the managers won’t have you, take a theatre yourself.”

“But I have no money.”

“I’ll lend you money,” said her brother-in-law.

A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. He brought his reputation and his puns. She the £1000 which was not hers.

A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid, miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy oftenest of all. Frédéric Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French, and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood for the “Grande Armée” and who cried “Viv’ l’Emprou!” The house bore the high-sounding name of the “Queen’s Theatre,” but the people of the neighbourhood called it the “Dust-Hole,” and in doing so proved their acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange peel.

It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than of money. The “Dust-Hole” was transformed into a blue and white bonbonnière. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the evening of the first night, whilst the queue was already forming outside the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality, had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?

The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke, transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs – an actress of delicate and agreeable talent, the excellent duègne Larkin, and two other sisters Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.

He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six rôles. In one engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl, had come to him and taken him by the hand.

Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in 1865 when the little “Prince of Wales’s” opened its door as wide as it could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new repertory. Marie Wilton’s friends supported her in their hundreds, but their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his verve during the removal. Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson was thought of.

Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years of his life in a touring company in the midst of those bourgeois vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of foreigners – a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect. In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.

At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement, Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a good-natured consul, and took up his actor’s life again with its three rôles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a livelihood. He has written one piece, A Night’s Adventure, which by a lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer; and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre. Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays, writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his “copy” for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For, after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.

He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The speaker is a composer of music. “In England, yesterday is always considered so much better than to-day – last week so superior to this – and this week so superior to the week after next – and thirty years ago so much more brilliant an era than the present… I shall explain myself better if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, ‘You look so young,’ in the same tone that he would say, You look like an impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition, thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, ‘My dear sir, very likely your compositions may have merit – I don’t dispute it – but, you see, Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr. T’other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that time exert yourself to get older – you will succeed if you try hard; turn grey, be bald – it’s not a bad substitute – lose your teeth, your health, your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius, – in one short word, your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don’t die in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.’”

As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had assumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at journalism. He tried to “place” work of every kind wherever he could, from riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got connected with a score of London and provincial papers – the Porcupine, of Liverpool; the Comic News; the Wag, which his friend Byron had started; Fun, just started by Tom Hood, and the Illustrated Times, on which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns, under the title of “The Theatrical Lounger,” he sketched the features of the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown in, not unlike the style of our old weekly Figaro; at the same time, it is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a vent of spleen.

Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia – that vaguely-defined district in which “men of the world” whom the “world” bored, among them officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of Fun, used to give Friday supper-parties – frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the world.

Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.

Were they all such very “good fellows”? – I have my doubts. This Bohemia was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working, and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense. I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one man who could claim success.

These lines¹⁰ of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life —

 
“I’m twenty-nine! I’m twenty-nine!
I’ve drank too much of beer and wine;
I’ve had too much of toil and strife,
I’ve given a kiss to Johnson’s wife,
And sent a lying note to mine, —
I’m twenty-nine! I’m twenty-nine!”
 

After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays, Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy of society. He wrote and published the “Songs of the Governing Classes,” the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten lead. The “Song of the Gentleman” in particular might well be given a place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.

Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these nocturnal repasts of Hood’s, at which Robertson was one of the most brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional routine, – everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.

Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson had acted at the Strand in 1861 a little play called The Cantab, which achieved a sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor entitled, Our American Cousin, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was anxious to appear before the public in the rôle of David Garrick. He was anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation from the French with Garrick substituted for the original French hero. Strange beginning for one who aimed at a “Return to Truth,” this sticking of a historic head upon the shoulders of “a gentleman unknown”!

It was after this that he wrote his comedy Society. He took it to Buckstone, who refused it flatly. “My dear fellow,” he said, “your piece wouldn’t reach a fourth performance.” The author went off, fingers twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where one of his friends met him. “Look here,” said Robertson to him, “here is a capital play and these asses won’t have it.” A provincial manager took it up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only the success of the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, but a new era for English Comedy – the era of Robertson.