No More Learning

For the most part, educated
classes and the higher ranks of society ceased to attend the
theatre. It needed the attraction of some famous actor-Kemble,
the two Keans, or Macready-to draw them back to what had
been their special province; and, until some years later than the
middle of the century, the creation of any drama of high quality
was dependent upon the fame of some great actor who could draw
refined and educated people to witness it.


## p. 256 (#272) ############################################

256
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
Even so, it was presented under theatrical conditions that gave
it small chance of a fair hearing. The theatre was still under the
control of the court; and the only theatres which the court, as
represented by the lord chamberlain, recognised were the two
patent' houses, Drury lane and Covent garden, and the theatre
in the Haymarket. But the increasing number of theatre-goers
rendered these three insufficient for the public need. The patent
houses, and especially Drury lane, were enlarged until they reached
a size in which no drama of any delicacy or subtlety, none, indeed,
which was not spectacular and, in some manner, violent, could
be thoroughly effective. A quarter of the audience could neither
see nor hear; many of the rest could neither see nor hear well.
A theatre of enormous size had been no bar in Athens to the
existence of a noble drama ; but, in nineteenth-century London,
the conditions were different. Plays were not, as will be seen,
a vehicle for religion : religion chose to regard the theatre as an
enemy, and the theatre took what was, on the whole, a very mild
revenge. Moreover, since James I had turned the Globe and
Blackfriars company into an appanage of his court, the whole
tendency had been to divorce the drama from the national life.
The great size, therefore, of Drury lane and of Covent garden
meant that these were no fit places for the representation of the
plays enjoyed by educated classes ; and, considering the growth
in importance, volume and interest of the novel, it is not sur-
prising that educated classes stayed away from the theatre, except
when it was occupied by the fashionable Italian and French
opera and ballet, and left the drama almost entirely to the new
class of theatre-goers, drawn from the people. Meanwhile, the
demand for theatrical entertainment on the part of the populace,
and of the man of average refinement and intelligence, could
not be satisfied by three theatres only. In defiance of the law,
other theatres sprang into existence. By many undignified shifts,
these theatres succeeded in avoiding sudden extinction at the
hand of the lord chamberlain, and in increasing their number and
importance. But dramatists who wrote for them were, necessarily,
ill-paid, and the drama which they produced was, necessarily,
ephemeral. For not only was every such theatre liable to be
closed at a moment's notice ; each work of dramatic art had to
masquerade as something other than a play-to be interspersed
with music or dancing or exhibitions of performing animals-in
order that its producers might persuade themselves, or the lord
chamberlain, that they were not breaking the law. Not till the


## p. 257 (#273) ############################################

VIII]
The Decline of Tragedy
257
year 1843 did the Theatre Regulation act legalise the position
of illegitimate' houses. To these disabilities must be added
the deterrent effect of the lord chamberlain's power to forbid the
performance of plays on the grounds of seditious, blasphemous or
immoral matter in them. The effect of this power was to prevent
the drama from concerning itself with any of the subjects about
which intelligent people think and feel; and this restriction
militated against the production of good plays long after the
act of 1843 had given the public the right to have practically
as many theatres as it liked in which to develop the kinds of
dramatic production which it required.
Under these conditions, the plays of the first half of the century
were not likely to be endowed with much merit; and, in this
period, we reach the low-water mark of the English drama in
quality, together with a great increase in quantity. The death of
tragedy; the swift decline of the romantic or poetical drama and
the coarsening of comedy into farce are scarcely outweighed by
the rapid growth of an honest and fairly spontaneous, but crude,
domestic play suitable to the taste of the new theatrical public.
Theatrical conditions, rather than social, prevented the amalga-
mation of the popular drama with the existing drama into a
national drama that should, like that of Shakespeare, satisfy the
tastes of refined and homely alike. On the one hand, the ‘legiti-
mate' play declined into 'lugubrious comedy and impossible
tragedy, and the poetic play found itself wholly dependent
upon the popularity of some great actor to restore it to brief
semblance of life ; on the other hand, there came into existence
a vigorous school of little artistic merit, lacking the finer
qualities which the great Elizabetbans had contrived to combine
with the homelier.
6
” as
'Sophocles and Shakespeare,' wrote G. H. Lewes, are as "sensational”
Fitzball or Dumas; but the situations, which in the latter are the aim and
object of the piece, to which all the rest is subordinated, in the former are the
mere starting-points, the nodes of dramatic action’i.
In The London Magazine for April 1820, Hazlitt ‘proved,
very satisfactorily, and without fear of contradiction-neither
Mr Maturin, Mr Sheil, nor Mr Milman being present—that no
modern author could write a tragedy. The age was 'critical,
didactic, paradoxical, romantic,' but not dramatic. The French
revolution had made of the English a nation of politicians and
1 G. H, Lewes, On Actors and Acting (1875), p. 15.
E. L. XIII,
CH, VIII.
17


## p. 258 (#274) ############################################

258
Nineteenth-Century Drama [ch.
6
9
newsmongers ; and tragedy, being 'essentially individual and
concrete, both in form and power' was irreconcilable with this
'bias to abstraction' in the general. There had hardly been a
good tragedy written, he declared, since Home's Douglas. Never-
theless, tragedy was written in considerable quantities. It was
a favourite exercise with men of letters, whether or no they
possessed any power of dramatic invention. Wordsworth tried
his hand at tragedy ; Coleridge, Godwin, lord Byron, Mary
Russell Mitford, Disraeli and many others, whose writings are
dealt with elsewhere in this work, composed tragedies, some of
which were produced upon the stage, while others remained polite
exercises in a literary form. The present chapter will touch upon
the minor tragedians, of whom the three mentioned in the quo-
tation from Hazlitt given above are the first to call for notice.
Richard Lalor Sheil, who is more famous, perhaps, as politician
than as dramatist, first came before the public with Adelaide ; or,
The Emigrants, a tragedy of the French revolution, which was
produced in Dublin in 1814 and at Covent garden, where it occupied
the stage for one night only, in 1816. The savagery of Hazlitt's
attack upon this tragedy in The Examiner may be due, in great
measure, to his resentment of the author's endeavour to drench
an English audience with French loyalty' to the house of Bourbon.
In spite of this, Hazlitt's condemnation is scarcely excessive, though
there are passages of modest merit in the verse. Sheil's second
tragedy, The Apostate, produced at Covent garden in 1817, met
with more success. A tragedy of the Moors in Spain, this piece
pleased Hazlitt a little better, because it contained a passage on
the horrors of the inquisition; but he is just in his strictures,
that the tragic situations are too violent, frequent and improbable,
and that the play is full of a succession of self-inflicted horrors.
It is effective stage-work, if far from being fine tragedy; and the
versification has an appearance of vigour which, possibly, might
conceal from the hearer, though it cannot from the reader, its
essentially commonplace character. There are lines in it which
amused even its first hearers-notably the heroine's exclamation :
"This is too much for any mortal creature ! Sheil's next tragedy,
Bellamira; or, The Fall of Tunis (produced at Covent garden in
1818), is the best of his original plays. The language is purer and
less extravagant, though by no means free from sound and fury;
but Leigh Hunt, in The Examiner for 26 April 1818, was right in
censuring
the tendency to mistake vehemence for strength, the impatience of lowness


## p. 259 (#275) ############################################

VII]
Sheil and Maturin
259
for the attainment of height, and excessive tragic effect physically over-
powering for real effect at once carrying away and sustaining.
In other words, Bellamira is, again, a telling piece of stage-work,
and an inferior piece of dramatic art. Sheil was more successful
as dramatic artist in his next play, Evadne ; or, The Statue,
produced in 1819 ; but, here, he had the advantage of a foundation
taken from Shirley's play, The Traytor. It may seem strange that
a play of 1631 connected with the Italian renascence should be able
to steady a dramatic author of the early part of the nineteenth
century; but so it was. Sheil altered the plot, dispensing, among
other things, with the slaughter at the close of The Traytor; and,
in adapting the play a little more closely to the tragic ideals of his
own day, indulged less freely than was his wont in extravagance of
incident or language. Hazlitt took Evadne for the text of the last
of his lectures on the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth ;
and Leigh Hunt found the 'truly feminine and noble character of
Evadne 'a delightful relief from the selfish and extravagantly
virtuous wives who have been palmed upon us of late for women. '
The Huguenot, written in 1819, but not produced till two or three
years later, shows a return to the aim at violence of effect, and an
appeal through strangeness of scene and incident to emotions which
the nature and sufferings of the characters could not arouse by
themselves. And that its failure on the stage was ascribed by the
author and others to the absence of Eliza O'Neill from the cast shows
how dependent the drama had become upon the popularity of this
or that player. After the failure of The Huguenot, Sheil gave up
play-writing ; but previous to its production he had written Montoni
(produced in 1820), a poetical drama founded on the French, and
remarkable for some of Sheil's wildest extravagance in incident
and for some of his best verse ; had adapted Massinger and Field's
The Fatall Dowry; and had revised Damon and Pythias, a tragedy
by John Banim, which turned out a better piece of work than any
play written by Sheil alone.
Hazlitt's last lecture on the dramatic literature of the
age
Elizabeth is largely concerned with German influence on the tragedy
and romantic drama of his day. That influence can be clearly
discerned in the plays of Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman,
whose three tragedies—Bertram ; or, The Castle of St Aldobrond ;
Manuel; and Fredolfo—were produced in London in the years 1816
and 1817. Bertram was a famous and successful play in its time.
It was brought to the notice of Edmund Kean by Walter Scott and
Byron; it was the object of an attack by Coleridge in The Courier,
of
17-2


## p. 260 (#276) ############################################

260
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
which, in its turn, roused a notorious attack by Hazlitt on Coleridge.
The ridicule of The Anti-Jacobin had not opened the eyes of the
public to the shortcomings of the drama of Kotzebue ; and
Coleridge's translation of Wallenstein appears to have had no
corrective influence on taste. Maturin's Bertram, with its gloomy
'Byronic' hero-villain, its strained sentiment, its setting in castle
and monastery and its attempt at the portrayal of frantic passions,
has all the vices of a vicious order of tragedy. Nothing, to the
modern reader, seems real, nothing inevitable. In Hazlitt's words :
“There is no action : there is neither cause nor effect. . . . The passion
described does not arise naturally out of the previous circumstances,
nor lead necessarily to the consequences that follow. This is true,
also, of Manuel; and Fredolfo, “a piece of romanticism run mad,'
shocked the first and last audience that ever saw it with a display
of villainy which even that age could not stomach. Maturin, in
later years, admitted that his acquaintance with life was so limited
as to make him dependent on his imagination alone (and he might
have added the imagination of other dramatists) for his characters,
situations and language. He was, however, a better poet than
Sheil. For all his excess in physical horror, his verse shows
sensibility and has some beauty.
The plays of Henry Hart Milman, afterwards dean of St Paul's,
reveal a taste somewhat surer; although, in Fazio, a tragedy
published in 1815 and produced in London in 1818, there is plenty
of false fire. Milman took inspiration rather from Fletcher or
Massinger than from Kotzebue or ‘Monk’ Lewis ; and Fazio, at
least, is a very lively drama, if not a good tragedy. It is a tale,
placed in Italy, of robbery and supposed murder, of splendid har-
lotry and devoted conjugal affection ; and its acting qualities kept
it on the stage nearly all through the nineteenth century. It has
another title to remembrance : from it, Hazlitt drew a speech which
he hurled at the head of Coleridge in the attack referred to above.
Milman's other plays show less of false taste and less of theatrical
merit, being, for the most part, dramatic poems rather than stage-
plays. The Fall of Jerusalem (1820) and The Martyr of Antioch
(1822) are both founded upon a legitimately conceived struggle
between two passions or ideas. Belshazzar (1822) contains some
good lyrics. Anne Boleyn (1826), Milman's last dramatic com-
position, was, also, his poorest. He cannot, perbaps, be accused
of misrepresenting facts and characters so grossly as some later
historical dramatists ; but his anxiety to state a good case for
protestantism against Roman catholicism mars the dramatic quality


## p. 261 (#277) ############################################

VIII]
Sheridan Knowles
261
of the play. In this connection, the plays of Henry Montague
Grover are worth mention. Grover, in 1826, published a play on
the same subject, Anne Boleyn, in the preface to which he hints
that Milman had made unacknowledged use of his manuscript.
Such a complaint is not uncommon among dramatic authors.
Meanwhile, there had arisen a tragedian who endeavoured to
purge tragedy of the extravagance with which the influence of
German romanticism had affected it. James Sheridan Knowles,
said Hazlitt,
has hardly read a poem or a play or seen anything of the world, but he hears
the anxious beatings of his own heart, and makes others feel them by the
force of sympathy.
Save that Sheridan Knowles had read Shakespeare to such good
purpose that contemporary critics accused him of borrowing every-
thing from Shakespeare, Hazlitt's remark is just. Knowles `kept
his eye on the object,' and abstained from seeking effect from wild
and whirling words that had little or no connection with the subject
and the characters. His situations arise out of the characters and
the circumstances. A sympathetic imagination and an instinctive,
rather than acquired, reverence for the principles of dramatic
composition make his work, in the main, just, sensible and moving ;
and he delineates natural feeling with much simple understanding.
To this simplicity, he owes the few things in his work which come
near to genius-speeches, like Virginius's remark to his daughter :
I never saw you look so like your mother
In all my life ! 1
which might well seem almost 'low' to an audience accustomed to
Sheil and to Maturin, but which impress the reader with their truth.
Such moments are rare; for, though Knowles's language brings
relief from the towering nonsense of his immediate predecessors,
it varies between triviality and excessive, sometimes ridiculous,
decoration ; and his verse is pedestrian. When the plot was given
him by history, he could handle it clearly and effectively. In his
comedies, of which an account will be given later, he proved himself
unable to spin a comprehensible tale ; but his chief tragedies and
plays-Virginius (1820); Caius Gracchus (produced in 1823,
though written before Virginius); William Tell (1825); and The
Wife (1833)—are clearly constructed and full of situations at once
effective and inevitable. Supported by the acting of Macready and
Helen Faucit, Sheridan Knowles succeeded, for a time, in restoring
tragedy at once to its proper dignity and to a good measure of
i Virginius, iv, 1.


## p. 262 (#278) ############################################

262 Nineteenth-Century Drama [ch.
a
popularity in the theatre ; but the taste for it, poisoned by the
excesses of the romantics, was all but dead. The fine plays of
Richard Henry (or Hengist) Horne were never produced on the
stage. Cosmo de Medici, a tragedy in five acts, published in 1837,
is a well-built, well-written piece of poetical drama, in which two
brothers fall with perfect naturalness into a fatal quarrel ; the
murderer's attempt to conceal the half-involuntary deed is acutely
imagined, and the only questionable episode is the somewhat
theatrical death of the father after he has executed the offender
with his own hand. The Death of Marlowe, a short play published
in the same year, has a curious and beautiful intensity in the
execution of the theme; and Horne's other plays, Gregory VII
(1840) and Judas Iscariot (1848), are works of power and some
grandeur, born out of due time.
The age, becoming more and more critical, scientific and
unemotional, fell, more and more, out of touch with tragedy. It
was almost certainly the desire to bring tragedy back to the
business and bosoms of men that induced John Westland Marston
to attempt a verse-tragedy of contemporary life. The Patrician's
Daughter (1842) tells the story of an able politician of humble
birth, who is 'taken up' by an aristocratic family for political
ends, and then treated with contumely when asking for the hand of
the daughter of the house. He takes his revenge by rejecting the
lady (something in the manner of Claudio in Much Ado about
Nothing) when her family has found it necessary to offer him her
hand in exchange for his support; and the insult kills the girl,
who had loved him all the time. The plot, in one place, runs
thin; the humiliation of the hero is accomplished by means of a
commonplace of stage-craft, one of those misunderstandings or
misrepresentations which a moment's calm enquiry would have
cleared up. But Marston was a poet and a scholar; his mind was
richer, his social knowledge greater and his poetical faculty more
highly trained than those of the other tragedians mentioned in this
chapter. He wrote sense, and he understood character. And he
showed considerable courage in writing what was so near to a political
play as The Patrician's Daughter. “The play,' as he said later,
‘ represents a period when the fierce class animosities excited by
the first Reform bill had by no means subsided. It is a manifesto
for neither aristocracy nor democracy: indeed, it exposes the
particular danger on each side, on the side of the patricians,
pride; on the side of the plebeian, the tendency to “indulge
a passion in the belief that he was vindicating a principle. '
a


## p. 263 (#279) ############################################

VIII)
John Westland Marston
263
But, considering the strictness of the censorship and the heated
state of public feeling, Marston went as near as anyone dared to
writing a poetical play about the actual life of his time; and the
favour with which the play was received ought, it would be
imagined, to have inspired others to follow his example and win
for tragedy a new vigour. Nothing came of it; and this opposition
between the haughty, heartless world of high life and the meri-
torious poor became a favourite subject of other kinds of drama
than tragedy. Marston's other tragedies in verse, Strathmore (1849)
and Marie de Méranie (1850), were the last of their kind that
deserve consideration from the student of literature. The drama
was soon to develop along lines more suited to the
age.
With
the retirement of Macready and Helen Faucit, the succession
of great actors who had inspired dramatists with the desire to
write poetical drama came to an end, and was not to be renewed.
Thus, Marston's exciting and romantic Life for Life (1869), his
equally romantic and slightly Byronic A Life's Ransom (1857)
and others, had no successors worthy of comparison with them in
the ordinary traffic of the stage.
The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of very
brisk dramatic activity. The pressure of the public demand for
theatrical entertainment caused prolific production. The com-
paratively low state of public taste and the insecurity of tenure
of unlicensed theatres caused that production to be of little
value. The kinds of drama were many—comedy, farce, extrava-
ganza, burlesque, opera and melodrama; and authors, many of
whom were attached to certain theatres and paid fixed salaries to
produce whatever kind of play might be wanted, wrote in haste
dramatic pieces of all sorts. Under these conditions, originality in
plot could scarcely be expected. Stories were snatched from all
sources? ; especially from French and German drama and from
French and English novels. The works of Scott, of Dumas and
of Dickens were especially favourite hunting-grounds for plots ;
and the law of copyright then offered no protection to the
novelist against the playwright. The period exhibits a confusing
jumble of trivial aims and poor accomplishment; from which may
be extricated two principal characteristics—the degradation of
comedy into farce, and the growth of what is now known as
melodrama. The name, melodrama, was taken from the French
mélodrame, which, as in English, meant a play of sensational
1 John Oxenford, more distinguished as dramatic critic than as playwright, made
a play out of Pope's The Rape of the Lock.


## p. 264 (#280) ############################################

264 Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
a
incident and broad humour, interspersed with songs and dances.
In England, the musical adjuncts were introduced not only to please
public taste but, largely, in order to evade the law by presenting
a stage-play in the guise of a musical entertainment. In character
and content, melodrama was very various. It included the operas
of Isaac Pocock and Henry Bishop; the adaptations of Fitzball;
the wild imaginings of Shirley Brooks; the nautical drama made
popular by T. P. Cooke, the actor; the equestrian drama of
Astley's; the domestic drama of Tom Taylor; and the Irish drama
of Dion Boucicault. In Taylor and Boucicault, it had practitioners
of skill and sense; at the opposite extreme were authors of
blood-curdling pieces performed at the outlying theatres. To
the composition of this heterogeneous mixture, many strains con-
tributed. So far as it had any descent from English tradition, it
may be traced back to the fairy plays and spectacles of John Rich.
These were melodramas, inasmuch as they were opera without
operatic singers ; but the musical element was destined to give
way to the dramatic. By the time of The Miller and his Men
(1813), the author, or, rather, the adapter, Pocock, is as important
as the composer, Bishop; and, before long, the music disappeared
altogether, as it had disappeared from the French mélodrame,
leaving the sensational incidents and the broad humour unrelieved.
The romantic movement, which had produced The Mysteries of
Udolpho and the works of ‘Monk’Lewis, contributed not a little of
the sensational element; and the new theatrical public brought
with it the taste for horrors which continued to be stimulated and
fed by ballads and broadsheets. The French drama of incident
and sensation, which had come into being after the revolution-
the drama of Pixérécourt, of Caigniez and of Cuvelier de Trye
-lent something; shows and spectacles, performing animals
and acrobatic exhibitions, with which licensed houses recouped
themselves for their losses over 'legitimate' drama, flowed, at the
Surrey theatre, at Sadler’s wells, or at Astley's, into the stream;
and, by the middle of the century, melodrama had taken a form
which has scarcely been altered since. Melodrama divides human
nature into the entirely good and the entirely bad, the two being
bridged by an uncertain structure based on the possibility of
reform (in minor personages only) by sudden conversion at a critical
moment of the action. That is to say, incident and situation, not
character, are its aims. It allies itself boldly with the democrat
against the aristocrat. To be rich and well-born is, almost inevit-
ably, to be wicked; to be poor and humble is all but a guarantee


## p. 265 (#281) ############################################

VIN]
Melodrama
265
of virtue. These characteristics did not become crystallised all at
once; they grew by degrees through works of a large number of
playwrights, some among whom may be particularised.
Isaac Pocock, the author of The Miller and his Men, took the
subject of his melodramas, which, in his own day, were called
librettos, but are practically plays, almost entirely from French
or German drama and English novels. His earliest melodrama
was Twenty Years Ago, produced in 1810. The Magpie or the
Maid? (1816) was taken from the French, The Robber's Wife from
the German. Defoe contributed the source of Robinson Crusoe
(1817); and from Scott he took the subjects of Rob Roy
Macgregor ; or, Auld Lang Syne (1818) and Montrose ; or, The
Children of the Mist (1822), besides dramatising, it is recorded,
Woodstock, Peveril of the Peak, The Antiquary and Old Mortality.
Edward Ball, afterwards Fitzball, one of the most prolific among
the prolific authors of his day, compiled a great number of dramas
and librettos for operas, nearly all of which were founded upon
borrowed plots. William Thomas Moncrieff, at one time, was
manager of Astley's circus, to which he furnished at least one very
successful equestrian drama, The Dandy Family; and he won fame
by supplying Drury lane with a romantic melodrama called The
Cataract of the Ganges; or, The Rajah's Daughter, which gave
the national theatre an opportunity of displaying upon its stage
not only real horses but, apparently for the first time, a real
waterfall. Moncrieff is best known by his Tom and Jerry, an
adaptation for the stage of Pierce Egan's! Life in London; but
he drew, also, upon the novels of Dickens for the plots of several
plays. With the dramas of Douglas William Jerrold we come
to work far more reasonable and not wholly unreadable. His
comedies will be considered later; among his dramas, the most
famous is the still enjoyable Blackey'd Susan; or, ‘All in the
Downs,' founded upon Gay's ballad. Helped by the acting of
T. P. Cooke, this admirable piece of popular drama was received
with great favour at the Surrey theatre, and has been the subject
of several adaptations, burlesques and pantomimes. The dramas
of John Baldwin Buckstone, most of them written for the Adelphi
theatre, are the origin of the familiar term, 'Adelphi melodrama. '
They are extravagantly sentimental, and they are written in the
turgid ‘literary' language with which the taste of the day demanded
that the memories and tongues of the players should wrestle. But
they are well constructed, frequently with borrowed plots; and are
1 See, post, vol. xiv.
>


## p. 266 (#282) ############################################

266 Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
not so violent in incident as to be ridiculous. The Bear-hunters; or,
The Fatal Ravine (1829) has a quite exciting story; and both The
Green Bushes; or, A Hundred Years Ago (1845) and The Flower
of the Forest (1849) kept the stage till the end of the century. In
the American-born William Bayle Bernard, a mind of very different
calibre turned to the trade of dramatic composition. Bernard
was a scholar and a sound critic, although those of his 114 plays
which survive in print would scarcely lead the reader to believe it.
But he relied largely upon his own invention, and had a purer
standard of prose than his contemporaries, a neat wit and some
notion of characterisation. His domestic drama, Marie Ducange
(1837) and his ‘fireside story,' The Round of Wrong (1846), are
among the best of his pieces. He composed also a romantic
drama, The Doge of Venice (1867), and made an adaptation of
the story of Rip van Winkle (1832). The Passing Cloud (1850), a
drama in verse and in something that is neither verse nor prose,
at least shows some independence of aim. Joseph Stirling Coyne,
an industrious adapter from the French (of which he was reputed
to know less than he knew about the tastes of the London audiences)
and Charles William Shirley Brooks, who, in date, belongs to the
last half of the century, but, in spirit to the first half, also deserve
mention among the authors of popular dramas.
The writer who gave to melodrama its distinctive formula, and
set it upon a path of development which, in time, was to draw it
far apart from drama of serious interest, was Dionysius Lardner
Bourcicault, better known as Dion Boucicault. This prolific
author of plays was a master of dramatic construction. His plots
were seldom of his own invention; the incidents never. He
borrowed from near and far, and his special skill lay in weaving
multifarious incidents together into a swiftly-moving and exciting
plot, and in writing dialogue that is nearly always fresh and racy.
His characters are never human beings, but always representatives
of some one quality. That, however, does not prevent him from
filling his dramas with sentiment, not grossly exaggerated, which
may appeal to a mixed audience as recognisably human. Before him,
there had been no dramatic author so cunning in the discernment
of what elements are desired in a popular play, and in the mixing
of the ingredients. Before the works of Sardou were introduced to
English audiences, the influence of Boucicault's very different compo-
sitions had become almost as tyrannous as the dramatic construction
of Sardou was to prove itself; and, to Boucicault's influence, largely,
must be attributed a conception of the necessities of dramatic form


## p. 267 (#283) ############################################

viii]
Dion Boucicault
267
which was destined to hamper the efforts of later dramatists and to
cause, for a while, a split between two schools of drama and dramatic
criticism. At the same time, there is more nature' in Boucicault's
drama than in that of his predecessors. This is due, in great measure,
to the humour and suggestiveness of his dialogue, which often
bears a close resemblance to natural speech; and this especially
in his famous Irish dramas, such as The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-
Pogue and The Shaughraun.
Boucicault thus occupies a position
at the turning-point between the purely theatrical drama of the
first half of the century and the more naturalistic drama which
was to put forth a bud while he was at the height of his career as
dramatist. In some of his adaptations, such as The Corsican
Brothers and Louis XI, he belongs entirely to the footlights;
through much of his work gleams the false dawn of a coming
day. It cannot be said that there was any improvement, later in
the century, on the melodrama of Boucicault. The type remained
fixed, and subsequent examples showed merely variation in detail,
though Pettitt and other authors contrived to treat the familiar
material with vigour. The new impulse was to reach the drama
through another channel. Meanwhile, a small amount of superior
work was being produced outside the region of comedy, though in
sporadic fashion. Both Sheridan Knowles and Westland Marston
wrote dramatic pieces of merit besides their tragedies and comedies.
The next playwright to show something of their calibre was
Tom Taylor. Like his contemporaries, Taylor seldom trusted to
his own invention for his plots. He collaborated with Charles
Reade and others, and he took his stories from French drama,
from the works of Dickens and from other English novelists; but,
in Plot and Passion (1853), Still Waters Run Deep (1855), The
Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) and other plays, he proved himself
both a capable playwright, from the theatrical point of view, and
a fairly keen observer of human passions. His construction is
solid and careful; and he wrote, for the most part, without
affectation or extravagance; so, though much of his dialogue
seems stilted to the modern reader, it is not without some
resemblance to nature; while his Arkwright's Wife (1873) is a
domestic drama almost naturalistic' in language, achievement and
spirit, though sensational in incident. Taylor's best work lies in
his series of historical dramas: The Fool's Revenge (1869), which
was founded upon Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse; 'Twist Axe and
Crown (1870), founded upon a German play; Jeanne Darc
(1871); Lady Clancarty (1874); and Anne Boleyn (1875). His
!


## p. 268 (#284) ############################################

268
[ch.
Nineteenth-Century Drama
treatment of history is fairly respectful; his language, whether
in prose or verse, is more direct and forcible than that of some
of his successors in this field; and Taylor fills in his historical
outlines with warmth and movement. With Taylor, rather than
with Boucicault, still less with Webster, should be classed Watts
Phillips—and that in spite of such plays as Lost in London or
The Woman in Mauve. The best examples of his work, such as
Camilla's Husband (1862), though leaning to the sensational side
and ingeniously constructed according to the ideals of the contem-
porary theatre, have some flavour in them of human nature, which,
added to the comparative simplicity of their dialogue, entitle
Phillips to consideration. The Dead Heart (1859), which, possibly,
owed something to A Tale of Two Cities, is Phillips's most famous
play, because of its spectacular qualities; but, as dramatic art, it
is not fairly representative of his ability. In the field of historical
drama, Taylor's eminence was shared by William Gorman Wills.
For Wills, historical truth had no charms. His caricature of
Oliver Cromwell in Charles I (1872) must strike anyone who has
seen or read that play not only as ridiculous, but as a sacrifice of
dramatic for theatrical effect; and, to judge from contemporary
criticism, his treatment of John Knox in the unpublished Marie
Stuart (1874) was no better. As a deviser of theatrical scenes and
situations, Wills had power. His taste was thoroughly common-
place, his language trivial or extravagant.
But he could fit
eminent actors with telling parts, and was useful as librettist to
the scene-painter and stage-manager.
Thus, drama grew up to take the place of tragedy. For the
most part, it was melodrama : at first, violent and coarse; later,
somewhat refined, and crystallised into a definite form. The
stage grew more insistent in its demands, and less suitable either
to poetical or to naturalistic drama. Character was sacrificed
to situation, and art to artifice. With the exception of certain
respectable historical plays, and a moderate amount of domestic
drama contributed by Taylor (with or without Charles Reade),
Marston and Phillips, little survives in print that is likely to tempt
anyone to read it except for the purposes of historical study.
The comedy of the period, for the most part, is as remote from
dramatic art and from nature as is the drama. During the first
half of the century, comedy, as distinct from farce, is represented
only by Sheridan Knowles, Douglas Jerrold, Marston, Tom Taylor
and Boucicault. Practically, the only attempt to carry on the
tradition of English high comedy was a work of Boucicault's


## p. 269 (#285) ############################################

VIII]
Douglas Jerrold
269
youth, London Assurance (1841). On the modern stage, this play is
classed among old comedies’; and it has some affinity, as a whole,
with the work of the elder Colman, while portions are obviously
due to Goldsmith and Sheridan. But the coarsening of the types
and forcing of the situations show how far from his models Bouci-
cault's work fell. The comedy of Sheridan Knowles is more
original in type ; but his plots are more confusing than even
Congreve's. Indeed, the plot of The Hunchback (1832), a pom-
pous and heavy play, has never yet been satisfactorily explained.
The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal Green (1828) looks back to
Elizabethan domestic comedy, with which Knowles was probably
not acquainted. Its story is simpler than those of his other
comedies, and it is written with freshness and skill in dramatic
expression. Douglas Jerrold relies much upon extravagance of
'humour. ' The characters in his comedies are less human beings
than personifications of this or that peculiarity-family pride,
valetudinarianism, or what not; and the misunderstandings and
complications which go to make up his plots are nearly always
flimsy. But he handles his materials with ease, and, now and
then, makes his 'humours' very amusing-Dr Petgoose, for
instance, the domineering doctor in The Catspaw (1850); Miss
Tucker, the spitefully humble companion to the heroine in Time
Works Wonders (1845); best of all, perhaps, the true-blue Briton,
Mr Pallmall, in a clever and amusing comedy, The Prisoner
of War (1842) Pallmall
quarrelled with some French dragoons, because he would insist, that the best
cocoa-nuts grew on Primrose-hill, and that birds of Paradise flew about
St James's.
In defence, he pleads that his motive was patriotism :
They abused the British climate, and I championed my native air. As
a sailor isn't it your duty to die for your country? . . . As a civilian, it is mine
to lie for her. Courage isn't confined to fighting. No, no—whenever a
Frenchman throws me down a lie-for the honour of England, I always
trump it.
Marston was not at his best in comedy. His most successful
attempt was The Favourite of Fortune (1866), which, doubtless,
was amusing when acted, but is pale in the reading. The character
of Mrs Lorrington, the rich and vulgar widow, demands expression
by a comic actress. It is little more than an outline, waiting to
be filled in. A match-making mamma, a young man of fortune,
who hides a Byronic heart and a noble nature under a disguise
of phlegm, are more clearly imagined and expressed; but the


## p. 270 (#286) ############################################

270
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
play, as a whole, is lifeless. The comedy of the time was,
in fact, dependent upon the stage and the actor. In order to
compete with more popular forms of drama, it was obliged to
coarsen its lines, and to avoid all subtlety of character and
development. The political and social history of the period was
not such as to produce the atmosphere in which fine comedy
grows freely. The rich and leisured classes became the butts,
rather than the models, of a swiftly developing democracy; in the
drama of the time, serious and humorous alike, they are nearly
always exhibited in opposition to honest poverty. And the
predominance of the actor helped to make broad and simple
characterisation and theatrical effect more valued than truth
to life or fineness of understanding and expression.
Meanwhile, there was very great activity in another branch
of comic drama, the farce. The lavish playbills of the time always
concluded with a dash of fun, the original object being to relieve
the horror inspired by the violent drama; and the fun chiefly
enjoyed by the new public of theatre-goers was farcical fun. The
demand brought into being an innumerable number of short comic
pieces of broad and bustling humour. Adelphi “screamers' became,
under J. B. Buckstone, as famous as Adelphi dramas. In
In many of
these plays, the imagination of the reader can still supply the
personal drollery of some comic actor and the ceaseless physical
movement which were necessary to their effect. One of the earliest
and best of the farce-writers was John Poole, most famous as
author of Paul Pry (1825). Several actors have found in Paul
Pry a fine field for their talent or their peculiar personality.
From the reader, the play cannot draw a smile, unless his imagina-
tion endow the figure of Paul with the voice and face and
personality of some comic actor whom he has seen. Granted this
effort, the fun of the thing is still fresh ; and so is that of 'Twist
the Cup and Lip (1827) and of Lodgings for Single Gentlemen
(1829). Among the most eminent of other writers of farce were
Pocock and Moncrieff, who both wrote farces for music, Stirling
Coyne, who betrays in farce a genuine sense of fun, and James
Robinson Planché; and no one produced more successful or more
amusing farces than John Maddison Morton, a son of the dramatist
Thomas Morton, and an industrious adapter of plays from the French.
His most famous work, Box and Cox (1847), was founded upon two
French vaudevilles; but it still reads like an original and single
creation. These farces all depend upon some marked and simple
oddity in the chief character, upon complicated misunderstandings


## p. 271 (#287) ############################################

VIII]
T. W. Robertson
271
or broadly ridiculous situations. There is very little comedy in
them ; but their hearty fun is clean and seldom absolutely silly.
Early in the second half of the century, the popularity of farce
waned, to some extent, under the increasing taste for burlesque.
The example had been set chiefly by Planché, a dramatic author
with a wide knowledge of drama, ancient and modern, a lively
sense of humour and a wit that was by no means merely verbal.
Those were days in which the gods and goddesses of Greece
and Rome were more familiar to the public than they are now;
and Planché liked to make them characters in his various and
spirited dramatic work. Mythology and fairy lore were generally
in favour ; Shirley Brooks wrote a burlesque, The Exposition
(1851), in which the Scandinavian gods pay a visit to the great
exhibition. Planché's principal successor in this field was Henry
James Byron, a prolific author of dramatic pieces of many kinds.
To judge from contemporary estimates, Byron's wit consisted
chiefly of puns; and of puns there are plenty in his published
comedies and plays.
During Byron's career, the drama became affected by an in-
fluence which proved to be more important than the positive
achievement of the writer who exercised it, Thomas William
Robertson. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the drama had
become all but wholly stagey. Broad farce, theatrical comedy and
machine-made melodrama, written in doggerel verse or cumbrous
and showy prose, were produced in enormous quantities; but play-
wrights had not yet learned how to make use of the freedom and
the comparative security conferred upon them by the act of 1843.
Most dramatists were still, practically, in the position of writers
retained by this or that theatre, to compose whatever the manager
might demand of them; and the tyranny of the actor was still
paramount. Twenty years separated the passing of the act
.
from the first distinguishable effect of its provisions, which is
to be found in the plays of Robertson Robertson began his
work as dramatic author much as did all the men of his time.
He adapted plays and knocked off trifles of many kinds. A play
called David Garrick, which he made out of a novel of his own
composition, founded upon Mélesville's three-act comedy, Sullivan,
brought him into notice in 1864; but David Garrick belongs wholly
to the drama of the first half of the century. Robertson's proper
achievement begins with Society (1865), which, after being re-
jected by many managers, at last found a home at the Prince of
Wales's theatre. In Society, he made a distinct attempt to introduce


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272 Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
a
naturalism into the drama. To a modern reader, the tone of the
play does not seem very natural, unless it be contrasted with
the purely theatrical plays that preceded it; but it bears evidence
that the author observed life about him, and endeavoured to
reproduce it. The result is a commonplace of nineteenth-century
drama—a picture of tender and sentimental youth in a setting
of worldliness and cynicism. The plot is bald and crude; and
these qualities, though they have no merit in themselves, at least
distinguish the play from others, which depended entirely upon
the spinning of intrigue. But the dialogue is natural-or, if
unduly smart, as in Robertson's favourite device of antiphonal, or
echoing, speeches, it is not tainted with the display familiar in
the contemporary drama. The characters behave, on the surface,
like people of their day; the atmosphere which the author
endeavours to create is the atmosphere of the life going on out-
side the walls of the theatre. Though, to modern readers, the
psychology of Society and other plays by Robertson may seem
childish, his presentation of manners and his reliance upon nature
rather than upon plot or violence were signs of the emancipation
of the drama from a long tyranny. Thanks, largely, to the manner
in which the play was presented by young actors fully in sympathy
with the author's naturalistic aims, Society achieved a success
which encouraged Robertson to go further along the same path.
Ours was produced in 1866; Caste in 1867; Play in 1868; School
in 1869; and M. P. in 1870. Both Ours and Caste show an advance
on Society in Robertson's peculiar province of manners, though his
plots remain crude and his characterisation elementary. School,
which was partly founded upon the Aschenbrödel of Benedix, is a
very pretty idyll, lacking the quality of ease which is to be found
in Robertson's best work. Play is a feeble piece of work, and
M. P. was written when the author was practically dying.
Robertson's direct influence was not so strong as it might have
been, because, soon after his death, another and an opposed influ-
ence cut clean across it in the taste for the plays of Sardou. The
French literature which Robertson enjoyed was that of Alfred de
Musset and George Sand: the drama of Sardou had reduced
romanticism, for others, to a mechanical trick, and the English public
fell once more a victim to the wholly unnatural 'well-made play. '
This was a return to the drama of the first half of the century;
with the only difference that Sardou was an accomplished crafts-
man, whose work was all but proof against bungling adaptation,
whereas preceding adaptations from French or German and the


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VIII]
W. S. Gilbert
273
few original English plays were almost all the work of bunglers.
It needed a stronger influence than that of Robertson's delicate
and naïve little pieces to arouse in England the demand for
dramatic truth and good sense. Meanwhile, however, the work
of Robertson had its effect upon certain playwrights of his time,
upon Byron, for instance, and upon James Albery, a successful
dramatist, none of whose pieces have been printed. In comedy
and domestic drama alike, Byron showed himself lacking in
originality, in taste and in dignity. His humour, though not coarse,
is mean; his plots are at once complicated and puerile; and his
characterisation is purely theatrical. Nevertheless, he deserves
mention among dramatists of the latter half of the century
because of an undeniable cleverness, and a shrewd ingenuity
in the management of familiar materials, which distinguish such
pieces as Cyril's Success (1868), Our Boys (1876) and Uncle Dick's
Darling (1869); and because, also, of certain flashes of homely
verisimilitude which are due to the influence of Robertson. That
influence having failed to produce any marked effect, there was no
other yet at work. The 'artistic revival of the eighteen-seventies
found expression rather in the mounting of plays and in stage-
decoration than in the quality of the drama produced; and it was
not until the influence of Ibsen, however reviled by its opponents
and misunderstood by its very champions, had percolated into the
theatre that the English drama made any noticeable effort to
burst the chains of outworn tradition and a constricted view of
the province of dramatic art.
One other dramatist demands notice, perhaps the most brilliant
of his century, but almost wholly unrelated, in his mature work, to
the drama of his age. The earlier pieces of William Schwenck
Gilbert were burlesques and other such trifles. In 1870, he began
a second period with The Palace of Truth, a poetical fantasy,
adapted from a story by Madame de Genlis and undoubtedly
influenced by the fairy-work of Planché. This period included
other plays in verse: The Wicked World (1873); Pygmalion and
Galatea (1871); and Broken Hearts (1875). These plays and
others of their kind are all founded upon a single idea, that of
self-revelation by characters who are unaware of it, under the
influence of some magic or some supernatural interference. The
satire is shrewd, but not profound; the young author is apt to
sneer, and he has by no means learned to make the best use of
his curiously logical fancy. That he occasionally degrades high
and beautiful themes is not surprising. To do so had been the
18
E, L. XIII.
CH, VIII.


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274
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH. VIII
regular proceeding in burlesque, and the age almost expected it;
but Gilbert's is not the then usual hearty cockney vulgarity. In
Pygmalion and Galatea, and, still more, in Gretchen (1879), a
perversion of part of the story of Faust, the vulgarity is cynical
and bitter. And, in Gilbert's prose plays, the same spirit may be
found in greater degree. He could be pleasantly sentimental, as
in Sweethearts (1874), without sacrificing his cynicism altogether;
but Engaged (1877), a farcical comedy, compels the reader to
laugh in spite of an exceedingly low conception of human nature.
Gilbert was not at his ease in prose. He writes it pompously and
with an inartistic display, which was inherited, to some extent,
from his predecessors in dramatic writing. His true province was
verse, and especially light verse; and, in the third period of his
activity, he found the perfect medium for his genius in comic opera
of an original kind. In The Bab Ballads, he had already shown
his skill in metre; and, when all is said, an extraordinary skill in
the writing of songs is the most remarkable feature of the comic
operas which began with Trial by Jury in 1875 and ended with
The Grand Duke in 1896. Gilbert was a metrical humourist
of the first water. His lyrical facility and his mastery of metre
raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had
never reached before and has not reached since. Moreover, the
skill was used in the expression of truly humorous ideas. The
base of Gilbert's humour is a logical and wholly unpoetical use of
fantasy. It carries out absurd ideas, with exact logic, from premiss
to conclusion; or it takes what passes in daily life for a matter of
fact or of right and shows what would happen if this were pushed
to an extreme without regard to contrary influences and con-
siderations. The difference between the shrewd, neat satire and
.
fine workmanship of Gilbert's operas and the vulgar inanities of
the comic opera of his early days was, unfortunately, too wide for
any contact to be established. Gilbert remains alone, a brilliant
and original genius, whom it is obviously hopeless to imitate, and
on whose example no school could be founded.


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CHAPTER IX
THACKERAY
OF all English novelists whose fiction has been founded on
a perception of the comedy of life with its alternations of the
ridiculous and the pathetic, none has met with more adverse
criticism than Thackeray. The versatility of his work as novelist,
.
essayist, writer of humorous trifles, rimester and draughtsman
causes some difficulty in forming a coherent judgment upon his
total achievement. At once satirist and sentimentalist, he com-
bined two points of view the relation between which is invisible to
many eyes; and, in both capacities, he worked with a refinement
which does not make for general popularity. In the wide field of
action which his novels cover, in the generous proportions of their
construction and in the great variety of their personages, he bears
a superficial resemblance to his contemporary Dickens; and the
two novelists have become the object of a traditional contrast in
which Dickens's colossal power of fantastic creation and more direct
appeal to popular sentiment, as opposed to Thackeray's minute
observation of everyday peculiarities and more elusive humour, has,
perhaps, gained the vote of the majority. No such competition,
however, is really possible between two writers whose view of life
and artistic methods were, fundamentally, different. The true
criterion of Thackeray's, and of his great contemporary's, work,
upon their own merits is the exactness with which they reproduced
the contradictions and variations of the comedy of which they
were the amused and sympathetic spectators.
The family of Thackeray was of Yorkshire origin, and one of
its branches was settled at Hampsthwaite on the Nidd, seven
miles above Knaresborough, until within a few years of the
novelist's birth. His father, Richmond Thackeray, was grandson
of Thomas Thackeray, headmaster of Harrow and archdeacon of
Surrey, whose youngest son, William Makepeace, had entered the
service of the East India company, and had married Amelia,
18-2


## p. 276 (#292) ############################################

276
[CH.
Thackeray
daughter of colonel Richmond Webb. Richmond, the second son
of this marriage, entered the same service. He married Anne
Becher, and William Makepeace Thackeray, their only child, was
born at Alipur near Calcutta on 18 July 1811. Richmond
Thackeray, who, at this time, held the office of collector of the
twenty-four Parganas, died in 1815: his widow not long after-
wards married major Carmichael-Smyth, and outlived her famous
son, dying in 1864.
Thackeray, a child of six, was sent to England in 1817.
Among his earliest impressions were a distant sight, at St Helena,
where his boat touched, of Napoleon walking in the garden of
Longwood, and the spectacle of the national mourning for prin-
cess Charlotte on his arrival in England in November. His home
was with relations, chiefly at Hadley, near Barnet, where Peter
Moore, member of parliament for Coventry, husband of one of
his great-aunts, was lord of the manor. He was sent to school
first at Southampton, where he was near Fareham, the home of
another great-aunt, Miss Becher; then, at Walpole house, Chiswick
mall; and, from 1822 to 1828, at Charterhouse. His school-
days were not altogether happy. He loved Walpole house no
better than Becky Sharp loved the seminary of which it became
the prototype ; while his memories of Charterhouse, as it appears
in his writings, were certainly softened and transfigured by the
passage of years. He amused his schoolfellows with his ready
gifts of caricature and parody; but the temperament which
criticises its surroundings with an exceptionally acute sense of
their relative values is not often congenial to the atmosphere
of a public school, and Thackeray had the self-consciousness
and desultory tendency which are its dangerous entail. He left
Charterhouse without distinction, and, before entering Trinity
college, Cambridge, read, for a few months, with his step-father at
Larkbeare in Devon. The neighbouring town of Ottery St Mary,
the native place of Coleridge, the church bells of which ring
melodiously in some lines of Lamb's John Woodvil, became the
Clavering of Pendennis, and Exeter provided the original for the
cathedral city Chatteris, where Arthur Pendennis lost his heart to
Miss Fotheringay.
In February 1829, Thackeray went to Cambridge, and remained
at Trinity college for a year and a half. Pendennis contains
chapters founded upon this part of his life with a characteristic
mixture of fact and fiction. Its story of extravagance and failure
is, of course, overdrawn; but he seems to have done little work and


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IX]
Early Life
277
spent money freely, and he went down in June 1830 without waiting
to take a degree. His talent for riming and parody was exercised
in two ephemeral university papers, The Snob and The Gownsman.
The Snob of 30 April 1829 contained his burlesque upon the subject
set for the chancellor's medal for English verse, Timbuctoo.
Critics who foresaw the genius of Tennyson in the poem which
won the medal could hardly have prophesied eminence for the
author of these facile couplets, which begin happily and are
brought to an end neatly, but, otherwise, are not noticeably above
the ordinary level of clever parody. Although Thackeray's career
at Cambridge was not academically successful, the friendships
which he made among his contemporaries there had a lasting
influence upon him. His special affection
His special affection was reserved for William
Henry Brookfield and Edward FitzGerald; but Tennyson and other
members of one of the goodliest brotherhoods of which the world
holds record remained his life-long friends, and the ideals of life
and conduct to which Tennyson dedicated his verse, fostered
among that ‘band of youthful friends,' came to a maturity hardly
less noble in Esmond and The Newcomes.
After leaving Cambridge, Thackeray spent a year abroad,
living at Weimar from September 1830 to the following summer.
Here, he laid in a stock of impressions of the life of a small
German court upon which he afterwards drew freely. Schiller's
poetry filled him with enthusiasm, and he met Goethe, of whom
he drew two sketches. Pleasant, however, as he found his resi-
dence in Weimar, Paris, where he had joined FitzGerald for a
stolen holiday at Easter 1830, was his first and most enduring
love. In the autumn of 1831, he began to read law in the Middle
Temple ; but, on coming into £500 a year on his twenty-first
birthday, he left London for Paris. His small fortune soon dis-
appeared, partly in a bank failure. He appears to have been
relieved of the rest by a gentlemanlike card-sharper, from whose
society he gained some compensating advantage in material for the
portraits of Deuceace and other members of the same profession.
These misfortunes compelled him to live by his wits. He was
divided, for a time, between his talent for easy and fluent writing
and his love for drawing. In May 1833, he became proprietor of
a weekly paper, The National Standard, and wrote or drew
regularly for it for a few months. The venture, however, was
a failure : after a fitful existence, the paper came to an end in
February 1834. Thackeray had already returned to Paris in the
previous October, with the intention of studying art. His fondness


## p.