Part 13

In the face of such various rivalries it is not strange that comedy, instead of adhering to the narrow path which Steele and others had marked out for her, should have permitted herself some vagaries of her own. Gay's example pointed the way to a fatally facile form of the comic art; and burlesque began to contribute its influence to the decline of comedy. In an age when party-government was severely straining the capabilities of its system, dramatic satire had not far to look for a source of effective seasonings. The audacity of H. Fielding, whose regular comedies (original or adapted) have secured no enduring remembrance, but whose love of parody was afterwards to suggest to him the theme of the first of the novels which have made his name immortal, accordingly ventured in two extravaganzas[246] (so we should call them in these days) upon a larger admixture of political with literary and other satire. A third attempt[247] (which never reached the stage) furnished the offended minister, Sir Robert Walpole, with the desired occasion for placing a curb upon the licence of the theatre, such as had already been advocated by a representative of its old civic adversaries. The famous act of 1737 asserted no new principle, but converted into legal power the customary authority hither exercised by the lord chamberlain (to whom it had descended from the master of the revels). The regular censorship which this act established has not appreciably affected the literary progress of the English drama, and the objections which have been raised against it seem to have addressed themselves to practice rather than to principle. The liberty of the stage is a question differing in its conditions from that of the liberty of speech in general, or even from that of the liberty of the press; and occasional lapses of official judgment weigh lightly in the balance against the obvious advantages of a system which in a free country needs only the vigilance of public opinion to prevent its abuse. The policy of the restraint which the act of 1737 put upon the number of playhouses is a different, but has long become an obsolete, question.[248]

Comedy in the latter half of the 18th century.

Brought back into its accustomed grooves, English comedy seemed inclined to leave to farce the domain of healthy ridicule, and to coalesce with domestic tragedy in the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of homespun didactic morality. Farce had now become a genuine English species, and has as such retained its vitality through all the subsequent fortunes of the stage; it was actively cultivated by Garrick as both actor and author; and he undoubtedly had more than a hand in the very best farce of this age, which is ascribed to clerical authorship.[249] S. Foote, whose comedies[250] and farces are distinguished both by wit and by variety of characters (though it was an absurd misapplication of a great name to call him the English Aristophanes), introduced into comic acting the abuse of personal mimicry, for the exhibition of which he ingeniously invented a series of entertainments, the parents of a long progeny of imitations. Meanwhile, the domestic drama of the sentimental kind achieved, though not immediately, a success only inferior to that of _The London Merchant_, in _The Gamester_ of E. Moore, to which Garrick seems to have directly contributed;[251] and sentimental comedy courted sympathetic applause in the works of A. Murphy, the single comedy of W. Whitehead,[252] and the earliest of H. Kelly.[153] It cannot be said that this species was extinguished, as it is sometimes assumed to have been, by O. Goldsmith; but he certainly published a direct protest against it between the production of his admirable character-comedy of _The Good-Natured Man_, and his delightfully brisk and fresh _She Stoops to Conquer_, which, after startling critical propriety from its self-conceit, taught comedy no longer to fear being true to herself. The most successful efforts of the elder G. Colman[254] had in them something of the spirit of genuine comedy, besides a finish which, however playwrights may shut their eyes to the fact, is one of the qualities which ensure a long life to a play. And in the masterpieces of R. B. Sheridan some of the happiest features of the comedy of Congreve were revived, together with its too uniform brilliancy of dialogue, but without its indecency of tone. The varnish of the age is indeed upon the style, and the hollowness of its morality in much of the sentiment (even where that sentiment is meant for the audience) of _The Rivals_ and _The School for Scandal_; but in tact of construction, in distinctness of characters, and in pungency of social satire, they are to be ranked among the glories of English comedy. Something in Sheridan's style, but quite without his brilliancy, is the most successful play[255] of the unfortunate General Burgoyne. R. Cumberland, who too consciously endeavoured to excel both in sentimental morality and in comic characterization, in which he was devoid of depth, closes the list of authors of higher pretensions who wrote for the theatre.[256] Like him, Mrs Cowley[257] ("Anna Matilda"), T. Holcroft,[258] and G. Colman the younger,[259] all writers of popular comedies, as well as the prolific J. O'Keefe (1746-1833), who contributed to nearly every species of the comic drama, survived into the 19th century. To an earlier date belong the favourite burlesques of O'Keefe's countryman K. O'Hara[260] (d. 1782), good examples of a species the further history of which may be left aside. In the hands of at least one later writer, J. R. Planché, it proved capable of satisfying a more refined taste than his successors have habitually consulted.

The English drama of the 19th century.

The decline of dramatic composition of the higher class, perceptible in the history of the English theatre about the beginning of the 19th century, was justly attributed by Sir Walter Scott to the wearing out of the French model that had been so long wrought upon; but when he asserted that the new impulse which was sought in the dramatic literature of Germany was derived from some of its worst, instead of from its noblest, productions--from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing, Schiller and Goethe--he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape, with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into "the new, the romantic land." New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful _Manfred_, partly suggested by Goethe's _Faust_, and his powerful _Cain_, have but the form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of Alfieri; his _Sardanapalus_, autobiographically interesting, fails to meet the demands of the stage; his _Werner_ (of which the authorship has been ascribed to the duchess of Devonshire) is a hastily dramatized sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772-1834), who gave to English literature a splendidly loose translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, the same poet's _Robbers_ (to which Wordsworth's only dramatic attempt, the _Borderers_, is likewise indebted) had probably suggested the subject of his tragedy of _Osorio_, afterwards acted under the title of _Remorse_. Far superior to this is his later drama of _Zapolya_, a genuine homage to Shakespeare, out of the themes of two of whose plays it is gracefully woven. Scott, who in his earlier days had translated Goethe's _Götz von Berlichingen_, gained no reputation by his own dramatic compositions. W. S. Landor, apart from those _Imaginary Conversations_ upon which he best loved to expend powers of observation and characterization such as have been given to few playwrights, cast in a formally dramatic mould studies of character of which the value is far from being confined to their wealth in beauties of detail. Of these the magnificent, but in construction altogether undramatic, _Count Julian_, is the most noteworthy. Shelley's _The Cenci_, on the other hand, is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power, abnormally revolting indeed in theme, but singularly pure and delicate in treatment. A humbler niche in the temple of dramatic literature belongs to some of the plays of C. R. Maturin,[261] Sir T. N. Talfourd,[262] and Dean Milman.[263]

Divorced, except for passing moments, from the stage, English dramatic literature could during much the greater part of the 19th century hardly be regarded as a connected national growth; though, already in the last decades of the Victorian age, the revival of public interest in the theatre co-operated with a gradual change in poetic taste to awaken the hope of a future living reunion. Among English poets who lived in this period, Sir Henry Taylor probably approached nearest to the objective treatment and the amplitude of style characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.[264] R. H. Horne, long an almost solitary survivor of the romantic school, was able in at least one memorable dramatic attempt to revive something of the early Elizabethan spirit.[265] Of the chief poets of the age, Tennyson only in his later years addressed himself to a form of composition little suited to his genius, though the very fact of the homage paid by him to the national forms of the historic drama and of romantic comedy could not fail to ennoble the contemporary stage.[266] Matthew Arnold's stately revival of the traditions of classical tragedy proper, on the other hand, deliberately excluded itself from any such contact;[267] while Longfellow's refined literary culture and graceful facility of form made ready use of a quasi-dramatic medieval vesture.[268] William Morris's single "morality," too, cannot be regarded as a contribution to dramatic literature proper.[269] Of very different importance are the excursions into dramatic composition of Robert Browning, whose place in the living inheritance of the English drama has in one instance at least been not unsuccessfully vindicated by a later age, and some of whose greatest gifts are beyond a doubt displayed in his dramatic work;[270] and the sustained endeavours of A. C. Swinburne, after adding a flower of exquisite beauty to the wreath which the lovers of the Attic muse have laid at her feet, to enrich the national historic drama by a trilogy instinct with the ardent eloquence of passion.[271] Until a date too near the times in which we live to admit of its being fixed with precision, most of the English writers who sought to preserve a connexion between their dramatic productions and the demands of the stage addressed themselves to the theatrical rather than the literary public--for the distinction, in those times at all events, was by no means without a difference. The modestly simple and judiciously concentrated efforts of Joanna Baillie deserve a respectful remembrance in the records of literature as well as of the stage, though the day has passed when the theory which suggested her _Plays on the Passions_ could find acceptance among critics, or her exemplifications of it satisfy the demands of playgoers. Sheridan Knowles, on the other hand, composed his conventional semblances of genuine tragedy and comedy with a thorough knowledge of stage effect, and some of them can hardly yet be said to have vanished from the stage.[272] The first Lord Lytton, though his plays were for the most part of a lighter texture, showed even more artificiality of sentiment in their conception and execution; but the romantic touch which he imparted to at least one of them accounts for its long-lived popularity. Among later Victorian playwrights T. W. Robertson brought back a breath of naturalness into the acted comic drama; Tom Taylor, rivalling Lope in fertility, made little pretence to original invention, but adapted with an instinct that rarely failed him, and materially helped to keep the theatrical diversions of his age sound and pure; an endeavour in which he had the co-operation of Charles Reade and that of most of those who competed with them for the favour of generations of playgoers more easily contented than their successors. The one deplorable aspect of this age of the English drama was to be found neither in the sphere of tragedy nor in that of comedy--nor even in that of farce. It was presented in the low depths of contemporary burlesque, which had degenerated from the graceful extravaganza of J. R. Planché into witless and tasteless emptiness.

Curiously enough, it was at this point that something like real originality--discovering a new sub-species of its own--first began, with the aid of a sister-art, to renovate the English popular comic stage. At the beginning of the 19th century the greatest tragic actress of the English theatre, Mrs Siddons, had passed her prime; and before its second decade had closed, not only she (1812) but her brother John Kemble (1817), the representative of a grand style of acting which later generations might conceivably find overpowering, had withdrawn from the boards. Mrs Siddons was soon followed into retirement by her successor Miss O'Neill (1819); while Kemble's brilliant later rival, Edmund Kean, an actor the intuitions of whose genius seem to have supplied, so far as intuition ever can supply, the absence of a consecutive self-culture, remained on the stage till his death in 1833. Young, Macready, and others handed down some of the traditions of the older school of acting to the very few artists who remained to suggest its semblance to a later generation. Even these--among them S. Phelps, whose special merit it was to present to a later age, accustomed to elaborate theatrical environments, dramatic masterpieces as dependent upon themselves and adequate interpretation; and the foremost English actress of the earlier Victorian age, Helen Faucit (Lady Martin)--were unable to leave a school of acting behind them. Still less was this possible to Charles Kean the younger, with whom the decorative production of Shakespearian plays really had its beginning; or even to Sir Henry Irving, an actor of genius, but also an irrepressible and almost eccentric theatrical personality, whose great service to the English drama was his faith in its masterpieces. The comic stage was fortunate in an ampler aftergrowth, from generation to generation, of the successors of the old actors who live for us all in the reminiscences of Charles Lamb; nor were the links suddenly snapped which bound the humours of the present to those of the past. In the first decade of the 20th century a generation still survived which could recall, with many other similar joys, the brilliant levity of Charles Mathews the younger; the not less irresistible stolidity of J. B. Buckstone; the solemn fooling of H. Compton (1805-1877); the subtle humours of J. L. Toole, and the frolic charm of Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), the most original comic actress of her time. (A. W. W.)

_Recent English Drama._--In England the whole mechanism of theatrical life had undergone a radical change in the middle decades of the 19th century. At the root of this change lay the immense growth of population and the enormously increased facilities of communication between London and the provinces. Similar causes came into operation, of course, in France, Germany and Austria, but were much less distinctly felt, because the numerous and important subventioned theatres of these countries remained more or less unaffected by economic influences. Free trade in theatricals (subject only to certain licensing regulations and to a court censorship of new plays) was established in England by an act of 1843, which abolished the long moribund monopoly of the "legitimate drama" claimed by the "Patent Theatres" of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The drama was thus formally subjected to the operation of the law of supply and demand, like any other article of commerce, and managers were left, unaided and unhampered by any subvention or privilege, to cater to the tastes of a huge and growing community. Theatres very soon multiplied, competition grew ever keener, and the long run, with its accompaniments of ostentatious decoration and lavish advertisement, became the one object of managerial effort. This process of evolution may be said to have begun in the second quarter of the 19th century and completed itself in the 3rd. The system which obtains to-day, almost unforeseen in 1825, was in full operation in 1875. The repertory theatre, with its constant changes of programme, maintained on the continent partly by subventions, partly by the mere force of artistic tradition, had become in England a faint and far-off memory. There was not a single theatre in London at which plays, old and new, were not selected and mounted solely with a view to their continuous performance for as many nights as possible, anything short of fifty nights constituting an ignominious and probably ruinous failure. It was found, too, that those theatres were most successful which were devoted exclusively to exploiting the talent of an individual actor. Thus when the fourth quarter of the century opened, the long "run" and the actor-manager were in firm possession of the field.

The outlook was in many ways far from encouraging. It was not quite so black, indeed, as it had been in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties, when the "legitimate" enterprises of Phelps at Sadler's Wells and Charles Kean at the Princess's had failed to hold their ground, and when modern comedy and drama were represented almost exclusively by adaptations from the French. There had been a slight stirring of originality in the series of comedies produced by T. W. Robertson at the Prince of Wales's theatre, where, under the management of Bancroft (q.v.) a new school of mounting and acting, minutely faithful (in theory at any rate) to everyday reality, had come into existence. But the hopes of a revival of English comedy seemed to have died with Robertson's death. One of his followers, James Albery, possessed both imagination and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his talent, and sank into a mere adapter. In the plays of another disciple, H. J. Byron, the Robertsonian or "cup-and-saucer" school declined upon sheer inanity. Of the numerous plays signed by Tom Taylor some were original in substance, but all were cast in the machine-made French mould. Wilkie Collins, in dramatizing some of his novels, produced somewhat crude anticipations of the modern "problem play." The literary talent of W. S. Gilbert displayed itself in a group of comedies both in verse and prose; but Gilbert saw life from too peculiar an angle to represent it otherwise than fantastically. The Robertsonian impulse seemed to have died utterly away, leaving behind it only five or six very insubstantial comedies and a subdued, unrhetorical method in

## acting. This method the Bancrofts proceeded to apply, during the

'seventies, to revivals of stage classics, such as _The School for Scandal_, _Money_ and _Masks and Faces_, and to adaptations from the French of Sardou.

While the modern drama appeared to have relapsed into a comatose condition, poetic and romantic drama was giving some signs of life. At the Lyceum in 1871 Henry Irving had leapt into fame by means of his performance of Mathias in _The Bells_, an adaptation from the French of Erckmann-Chatrian. He followed this up by an admirably picturesque performance of the title-part in _Charles I._ by W. G. Wills. In the autumn of 1874 the great success of Irving's Hamlet was hailed as the prelude to a revival of tragic acting. As a matter of fact, it was the prelude to a long series of remarkable achievements in romantic drama and melodrama. Irving's lack of physical and vocal resources prevented him from scaling the heights of tragedy, and his Othello, Macbeth, and Lear could not be ranked among his successes; but he was admirable in such parts as Richard III., Shylock, Iago and Wolsey, while in melodramatic parts, such as Louis XI. and the hero and villain of _The Lyons Mail_, he was unsurpassed. Mephistopheles in a version of _Faust_ (1885), perhaps the greatest popular success of his career, added nothing to his reputation for artistic intelligence; but on the other hand his Becket in Tennyson's play of that name (1893) was one of his most masterly efforts. His management of the Lyceum (1878-1899) did so much to raise the status of the actor and to restore the prestige of poetic drama, that the knighthood conferred upon him in 1895 was felt to be no more than an appropriate recognition of his services. But his managerial career had scarcely any significance for the living English drama. He seldom experimented with a new play, and, of the few which he did produce, only _The Cup_ and _Becket_ by Lord Tennyson have the remotest chance of being remembered.