*f t'l ** OCCASIONAL PAPERS DRAMATIC AND HISTORICAL OCCASIONAL PAPERS DRAMATIC AND HISTORICAL BV H. B. IRVING, M.A. OXON. AUTHOR OF " LIFE OF JUDGE JEFFREYS," AND " STUDIES OF FRENCH CRIMINALS " LONDON BICKERS AND SON 1906 [All rights rtstrvtd] The Publishers desire to express their thanks to Sir James Knowles, W. L. Courtney, Esq., and Messrs. Smith Elder & Co. for permission to reprint such of these essays as have appeared in The Nineteenth Century, Fortnightly Review, and Cornhill Magazine, CONTENTS PAGE THE ENGLISH STAGE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CEN- TURY 1 THE ART AND STATUS OF THE ACTOR ... 65 COLLEY GIBBER'S APOLOGY " 91 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR 123 THE TRUE STORY OF EUGENE ARAM . . .139 THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF GOODERE . . .161 THE FUALDES CASE 185 THE EARLY LIFE OF CHIEF JUSTICE SCROGGS 227 The English Stage in the Eighteenth Century I HAVE selected as the subject of the two lectures which I am to have the honour of delivering to you the history of our English stage in the eighteenth century. The history of our theatre has been as glorious as it has been brief. For the three centuries of its existence as a part of our national life, our stage can point, with justifiable pride, to a record, splendid in is achievement, in some respects unsurpassed, a history that may well rank in quality and distinction with those of literature and art, and compare worthily with the annals of any of the European theatres. I think, roughly speaking, we may say that of those three centuries the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth the first was the century of great drama, the greatest drama the world has ever known ; the second a century in which the interest shifts from the drama to its exponents, the players ; the third a century which at any rate we may venture to say, even though we are yet so close to it, will be noteworthy for the extraordinary advance made in the presentation of plays on the stage, the realisation of the utmost that the theatre can do in the way of giving to the work of the dramatist a worthy setting ; a century in which painting, music, history, and archaeology have all been pressed into the service of the theatre, in a degree never thought or 1 Two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in February, 1906. Reprinted from The. Fortnightly Review. 3 THE ENGLISH STAGE dreamed of by our forefathers. Of these periods of theatrical history, general reasons point to the eighteenth century as the one which will at present best repay study and con- sideration. For the actual history of the theatre in the seventeenth century, for the lives of the dramatists and actors of those days, our materials are very scanty ; to one seeking to gain a real knowledge of the great men of the Elizabethan and Restoration theatres, investigation can only yield very inadequate and therefore disappointing results. The nineteenth is too near to us to make it in the present instance either profitable or expedient to deal with its achievement. But the eighteenth century is not open to these objections ; in this case the materials are sufficient ; our stage becomes for the first time in some measure living, we can form some idea of the personalities of those who make its history, and we are so far removed in point of time as to be able to view their proceedings with impartiality. And there is one supreme reason why an actor is drawn irresistibly to study, if he does study, the history of the theatre in this eighteenth century. It is, in theatrical history, the century of the actor ; he and not the dramatist is the dominating figure, his the achievement that survives, his art that finds in this century its highest opportunity for distinction. It is the player, not the author, that fixes the attention of posterity in the history of the Georgian theatre. For all those plays that attracted audiences in the eighteenth century are for the most part dead things. We can name on the fingers of one hand those plays that have survived and still hold their place on the stage. Home and Rowe, Murphy and Colman, Hill and D'Urfey, more or less popular authors of the day, they and their works have passed into oblivion ; to read them with patience is beyond human power ; while as for Addison and Steele, Fielding and Dr. Johnson, Gibber and Smollett, their dramatic efforts, successful or unsuccessful, would be buried in as dark oblivion, but for the undying 4 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY fame of their authors in other branches of literature. Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh live to-day as literature and nothing else, while such once-popular plays as Home's Douglas, The Gamester, The Honeymoon, Holcroft's Road to Ruin, and Lille's George Bamwett, that survived at any rate their own immediate popularity, have to-day all but passed out of recollection ; indeed, Goldsmith and Sheridan alone, of all these eighteenth-century dramatists, have given to posterity imperishable works of genius. The tragic writing of the eighteenth century is devoid of inspiration ; it is the true product of that Augustan age of English literature, the age of noble prose, or regular, uniform, correct, but unimpassioned poetry. Tragedy, bound hand and foot by the trammels of poetical orthodoxy, is lifeless and ponderous to the last degree ; Dr. Johnson's Irene is the reductio ad absurdum of such attempts. The comedies are not so insufferable as the tragedies, but they are for the most part purely ephemeral productions, mechanical in construction, laboured in utterance. Gibber and Colman do little more than mark time between the brilliant impro- priety of the age of Wycherley and Congreve and their more decorous and skilful successors, Goldsmith and Sheridan. If, however, posterity can find nothing to kindle its interest in the contemporary plays of the eighteenth century, it is not so with the players. For the first time in our history we begin to know something of our actors, and very interesting and entertaining people they turn out to be ; interesting because of the conditions under which they work, entertaining because of their agreeable or disagreeable personalities. Never as an artist has the actor in this country enjoyed such opportunities for dis- tinction, or occupied so prominent a place in the art of the theatre. Many causes contributed to this state of things. Foremost of all, perhaps, was the absence of long runs the bane, from the actor's point of view, of our modern stage ; the constant change of bill enabled the successful 5 THE ENGLISH STAGE actor in the eighteenth century to cultivate and exhibit his versatility ; whilst the fact that he never played a long or exacting part more than three or four times a week enabled him to husband his strength, maintain his freshness, and escape that monotony of work which it is difficult for an actor not to experience in the conditions of our present-day theatre, when business considerations compel the theatrical manager to give seven or eight performances a week of a successful play. Mrs. Woffington, one of the most indus- trious of eighteenth-century actresses, was considered to have greatly impaired her health and hastened her premature death by frequently playing six times a week. What would her contemporaries have said to the labour of some of our modern actors, who, up to the very end of their career, have played arduous and exacting characters unin- terruptedly season after season ? Garrick, throughout his career, never played more than 138 nights in one year, and that the year of his debut ; during his management of Drury Lane he played on an average about 70 times a year. The run of Addison's Cato in 1713, which lasted twenty nights, of the Beggar's Opera in 1728, lasting sixty-two, were considered phenomenal in their length ; and when in 1750 Garrick and Barry, as rival Roineos, played Shakepeare's tragedy at the two theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, for eight successive perform- ances, the indignation of the public found vent in epigram. This very rivalry of Garrick and Barry in Romeo and Juliet, and the excitement it created, is a very striking instance of the keen emulation of the actors of that day in following one another in classical parts, and of the critical enthusiasm that was stirred in the public, whenever a new Othello, or Hamlet, or Falstaff challenged comparison with illustrious predecessors. And the opportunity given to these eighteenth-century actors of exhibiting their skill was rendered glorious by the proudest feature in the history of the Georgian theatre the return of Shakespeare to the 6 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY stage. If the contemporary drama offered them but poor material for the exercise of their art, they found in the revival of the great poet's fame all they could desire. Coincidently with the appearance of David Garrick in 1741, by the labours of Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson, and others, Shakespeare had begun to take his supreme place in English literature ; withih the previous forty years nine editions of his works had been published, and some ladies of rank had formed a club to encourage and support the performance of his plays. This change found its immediate reflection in the theatre. Whereas during the early part of the century but eight or nine sorely mutilated plays of Shakespeare had held the stage, Garrick, when he went into the management, gave the public seventeen or eighteen of them annually. Apart from his own admiration of Shakespeare, which did not hinder him from perpetrating some outrageous improve- ments in his acting versions of the master's plays, Garrick found that he best consulted his own interests as a manager in giving his patrons frequent Shakespearean performances. There was another and a very strong reason why the actor of the eighteenth century was encouraged, nay, driven, to exert his powers to the utmost ; it lay in the conditions under which he was compelled to exercise his art. In the first place, he was deprived of most of those accessories of scenery and costume which to-day have become part of our theatre. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that any real attempt was made by the actor to dress his characters in the costumes proper to the period of the play in which they figured. When in 1773 Macklin, to the incidental accompaniment of the Coldstream March, appeared as Macbeth, dressed in a kilt, he incurred all the ridicule and opprobrium of a daring innovator. The ordinary costume and wig of the day, richer or poorer in style according to the station of the character represented, was the only theatrical dress of the eighteenth-century 7 THE ENGLISH STAGE actors. If we look at the pictures in the Garrick Club of Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in Macbeth, of Garrick and Mrs. Gibber in Venice Preserved, or Barry and Mrs. Barry in Hamlet, we can get some idea of the illusion that the actor was called on to create, and could only create, by the magic of his art. Barry, as Hamlet, is dressed in a black court suit, with the ribbon of the Danish Order of the " Elephant " across his breast. Garrick as Macbeth wears a blue and red suit, richly trimmed with gold, and short powdered wig ; while the ladies, whether as Queen Gertrude or Lady Macbeth, are gorgeous in hoops and feathers. Occasionally some attempt would be made to dress Turkish or classical tragedies with some approach to realism ; but such attempts were usually rather less convincing than powdered wigs and court suits. It was not only on the stage that the actor of this day had to contend against formidable difficulties. He had all his work cut out to fix and hold the attention of his audience. Until 1762 he played on a stage surrounded by fops and fine gentlemen, " unlick'd cubs of condition," as Gibber terms them. These persons, lolling in the wings, frequently interrupted the actors, and occasionally fought with them. In 1721 a noble but drunken earl, standing in the wings during a performance of Macbeth, crossed the stage to talk to a friend. Rich, the manager, expostulated with the nobleman for his breach of decorum, and he promptly slapped the manager's face. Thereupon Quin and two of the other actors drew their swords and drove the earl and his friends from the stage. But the gentlemen, not to be defeated, rushed into the boxes and, cutting and slashing right and left, proceeded to destroy the furniture ; they were only stopped from doing further damage by the resolute action of Quin, who, calling the watch to his assistance, arrested the rioters and haled them before the magistrates. A less disastrous instance of these curious interruptions was that of a gentleman who was so 8 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY stirred by the beauty of Mrs. Woffington's performance of Cordelia in King Lear that he could not refrain from coming on to the stage and embracing her in the sight of the audience. Gibber, during his management, did some- thing to mitigate the intrusion of these lollers in the wings ; but it was left to Garrick to abolish them. In these days the pit was looked on as containing the critical part of the audience. It occupied the whole of the floor of the theatre, right up to the orchestra. With the exception of the boxes where the ladies and people of quality sat, which cost four shillings, the pit seats at half a crown were the most expensive in the theatre. Macklin, in his old age, has left us a description of these pittites which gives some notion of the awe in which they were held by the actors. " You then saw," he said, speaking of his own day, " no red cloaks, and heard no pattens in the pit, but you saw merchants from the city with big-wigs, lawyers from the Temple with big-wigs, and physicians from the coffee-houses with big-wigs, and the whole exhibited such a formidable grizzle as might well shake the nerves of actors and authors." Here, in the pit, Dr. Johnson would, on occasion, sit in judgment ; it was leaning forward in the front row of the pit that the players would descry, with apprehension, the burly form of the poet Churchill, whose satire in The Rosciad had stung not a few of them to the quick. And these gentlemen of the pit gave their criticisms very freely, and often conveyed them very audibly to the persons on the stage. When four theatres at most served the needs of the town and the number of playgoers was very limited, there grew up quite a happy, if at times inconvenient, family feeling between actor and audience. In the prologue that was always spoken before any new play, or on any unique occasion, the actor speaking it would frequently take the audience into his confidence, ask their indulgence for his wife, who was that night making 9 THE ENGLISH STAGE her first appearance in a new part, or apologise for the absence of some artist who had quarrelled with the management. It was this same intimacy of the player with his public that betrayed Garrick into the bad taste of selecting Benedick as the part in which to make his first appearance at Drury Lane after his honeymoon. But it is only fair to say that the audience thoroughly enjoyed the suggestiveness of the situation. jf an actor, however popular, was considered by the critics of the pit to be ill-suited to some particular part for which he had been cast, or had cast himself, they very soon hissed him out of it. Gibber, a fine comedian, who, however, fancied himself in tragedy, to which his piping voice and insignificant appearance were quite unsuited, elected on one occasion to appear in the dignified character of Scipio in Thomson's Sophonisba. After being roundly hissed for two nights, he wisely desisted, and surrendered the part to another actor, Williams. When, the following night, the audience saw in the distance Scipio advancing to the front of the stage with stately strides, thinking it was still Gibber they immediately broke into violent hisses and cat-calls, and it was only when they recognised Williams that they changed their hisses to loud applause. If players fell out and they did sometimes their quarrels became at once the talk of the town, and the pit was quick to take sides. In 1743 the actors at Drury Lane, headed by Garrick and Macklin, revolted against the reckless and discreditable administration of the manager, Fleetwood, whose dissipation and incompetence were bringing the theatre to ruin. Failing, however, to obtain from the Lord Chamberlain then the Duke of Grafton a licence to appear elsewhere, the players were obliged to return to Fleetwood, who agreed to receive them all back, with the exception of Macklin. Garrick, on behalf of his colleagues, accepted the manager's terms, and Macklin was left out in the cold. The friends of the 10 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY latter chose to consider that he had been betrayed by Garrick, though an examination into the circumstances of the negotiations hardly bears out such a charge. In any case, on Gar-rick's first re-appearance at Drury Lane, the Macklinites, headed by a certain Dr. Barrowby, "a monster of lewdness and prophaneness," according to some authori- ties, but a keen playgoer and critic, assembled in great force to express their indignation at their hero's treatment. On Garrick's appearance they greeted him with loud cries of " Off' ! Off ! " and pelted him so vigorously with peas, rotten eggs, and apples that he was compelled to leave the stage. This treatment continued for two nights, until Fleetwood put a party of prize-fighters into the pit, who so pounded and pummelled the uproarious Macklinites that they fled in confusion, and order was restored. Even the private characters or personal peculiarities of the actors and actresses were not sacred to the witlings of the pit. If an actress of notoriously immodest reputation uttered modest sentiments on the stage she was liable to be greeted with sarcastic jeers ; if another with a plain face undertook a character whose personal beauty was emphasised throughout the play, she would be fortunate to escape without flouts from the gentlemen of the pit. At the same time, these critics were prodigal of applause when moved or delighted by a great actor. Aaron Hill, in endeavouring to persuade Garrick to appear as Caesar in his adaptation of Voltaire's Death of Cccsar, told him that Booth, in the rather similar character of Cato in Addison's tragedy, raised forty-eight to fifty thundering claps for delivering various noble sentiments to the audience ; and that when Quin played the same part the claps dwindled to half a dozen. Davies says that Hill's statements are excessive, and they make one a little doubtful of a style of acting the excellence of which was measured by interrup- tions of this kind. At the same time they prove the eagerness and attention with which the delivery of the 11 THE ENGLISH STAGE lines of some well-known or classical part by succeeding actors was followed by the critical portion of the audience. On the night of November 14th, 1746, the excitement of all good playgoers was stirred in an unwonted degree, and criticism prepared itself for a great effort in judgment and discrimination. The occasion was the appearance of Garrick and Quin at Drury Lane in Howe's tragedy, The Fair Penitent. It was the first time that the two famous actors had played together in the same piece. Garrick was then in the early years of his extraordinary success. He had come as something of a revelation to those accustomed to the solemn methods of ponderous and declamatory tragedians. Quin was the great representative of this older school. " If this young fellow is right, we have all been wrong," he had said of Garrick's Richard III. ; he, the portentous Cato and Brutus, stood in surly opposition to the lively Hamlet and Richard of the younger man, that were drawing all the town. Quin, from afar, lured by the scent of fame, A stage Leviathan, put in his claim," writes Churchill in The Rescind, in enumerating the rivals of Garrick. He pays Quin the compliment of saying : No actor ever greater heights could reach In all the labour'd artifice of speech. But he qualifies his praise : His eyes in gloomy socket taught to roll, Proclaim'd the sullen habit of his soul, Heavy and phlegmatic he trod the stage, Too proud for tenderness, too dull for rage. And as Hector making love to Andromache, or Horatio rebuking the gay Lothario, Churchill declares that Quin was still Quin and nothing else. With the same cast of features he is seen To chide the libertine and court the queen. 12 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY And now as Horatio and Lothario in The Fair Penitent Quin and Garrick were to try conclusions. Such an occasion as this gives us some conception of the position which the actor held as an artist in the theatre of the eighteenth century ; the noble emulation that fired his efforts ; the closeness, the keenness of the criticism that, undistracted by extraneous and adventitious aids, was focussed on every detail of the player's performance. Acting to-day has, to all intents and purposes, ceased to be closely criticised, nor will it be closely criticised again until the conditions of the eighteenth-century theatre can be in some form or other reproduced. When, on this particular occasion, Garrick and Quin met for the first time on the stage, the applause of the audience was so prolonged that the two rivals were unnerved. Quin is said to have changed colour ; Garrick was ill at ease and embarrassed. Quin, as Horatio, played the part of an honest and coura- geous friend ; Garrick, as Lothario, that of a dissolute and heartless libertine. Victory rested with Garrick. To him it was no effort to be easy, graceful, and insolent ; but Quin laboured heavily and ineffectually through the part of Horatio ; every word was gravely and ponderously empha- sised. When Lothario challenges him to meet him in deadly combat, West of the town, a mile among the rocks, Two hours ere noon, to-morrow I expect thee, Thy single hand in mine, Quin, as Horatio, had merely to reply with calm courage : I'll meet thee there. But that was not Quin's way. After Garrick had spoken his challenge, a tremendous pause ensued so long that at last one in the gallery called out to Quin : " Why don't you tell the gentleman whether you'll meet him or not ? " When at length the long-delayed answer was given, it was 13 THE ENGLISH STAGE delivered with such slowness and elaboration as to be ridiculous. Garrick came off* victorious in The, Fair Penitent. And he was equally victorious in Jane Shore ; his Hastings was declared to be a fine performance, whilst Quin, as the Duke of Gloucester, made such impression as might be expected in a character which he himself always spoke of as one of his " whisker " parts. But in the first part of Henry IV. success lay undoubtedly with Quin. It was in the character of Falstaff, and not in tragedy, that Quin had established his position as a first-rate actor, whilst Garrick found himself physically unable to cope with the rough, soldierly passion of Hotspur ; his fine and flexible voice, unable to sustain the loud vehemence of the character, gave out after five nights, and he had to retire from the cast. Critics considered also that he had not dressed the part with propriety ; a laced frock and a Rarnillies wig were held to be too insignificant for the dignity of the character. That the audiences of the eighteenth century should have been freer in their criticisms and in their method of express- ing them than our modern audiences is in no way surprising if we recollect that there was in the eighteenth century no written dramatic criticism in the sense that we understand it now. The newspapers of the day did not follow or criticise theatrical performances with any regularity ; this form of criticism was not instituted until early in the nine- teenth century, when Leigh Hunt became the dramatic critic of a paper called The News. Occasional pamphlets would deal with actors' performances, but as they were generally written to attack one actor at the expense of another, or were the spiteful retort of some disappointed dramatist, they could be. of little value as criticisms. Indeed, a successful actor like Garrick had far more to dread from blackmailing libels on his private character than from strictures on his acting. It was an age when scurrilous personalities were the accustomed weapons of 14 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY literary and artistic quarrels ; and Gibber and Garrick came in for their full share of such things. But of reviews and sane criticism there was little enough. What we learn of the art of the actors of the eighteenth century we learn from books such as Gibber's Apology, GhurchilFs Rosciad. Davies's Life of Garriclc, and his Dramatic Miscellanies, and the various letters and memoirs of the time. Occasion- ally an enthusiastic playgoer would publish an elaborate treatise on the art of the " Actor," as that in which the author propounds and answers such interesting questions as whether an actor can have too much fire ; whether, if he be a comedian, he must possess what the author terms the " interior qualification " of a gay and happy disposition ; or whether he who plays the hero of tragedy should have the " interior qualification " of an elevated soul ; whether players who are naturally amorous are the only ones who should impersonate lovers on the stage ; and the most important and delicate question, whether there should be a real or apparent conformity between the age of the actor and that of the character he is representing. This exhaus- tive treatise, entitled The Actor, WAS published anonymously, but it has been attributed to Aaron Hill, one of the most ardent devotees of theatrical art in the eighteenth century, a warm-hearted and benevolent gentleman, who lost a fortune in various schemes that were to benefit his fellow- men. The theatre was his ruling passion. His love of classical tragedy led him not only to christen his children Julius Caesar, Calliope, Urania, and Minerva, but to trans- late Voltaire's Merope and Mori de Cesar; his keen interest in acting prompted him to bestow advice and instruction so liberally on the players that they came to regard him as something of a nuisance. If he be the author of The Actor their impatience is not to be wondered at, for he is mighty severe in his strictures on some of the players and tiresome in his praises of others. He does not hesitate to attribute the shortcomings of Mrs. Bellamy on the stage to the hurry 15 THE ENGLISH STAGE of her passions and the multitude of her lovers at home ; whilst the improvement he has discerned in Mrs. Woffing- ton's acting is, in his opinion, to be set down to the fact that, for the last two years, her domestic arrangements have been in a more tranquil state. She, too, is sharply rebuked for taking too much pains about her face and too little about her mind ; the author prophesies that, if she is not more careful, when " her face (as in time it will be) is not worth a farthing, her mind will not be worth a fiftieth part of one." Some of his reflections are pertinent enough, as when he speaks of the many who thoughtlessly adopt the calling of the actor, when they can have no more hope of succeed- ing in it " than a fat fellow wheezing with asthma could hope to win the prize in a foot-race," or of that " set of wretches, the perfunctory players, who deliver their parts as if they were easing themselves of a burden which they were hired for carrying, and in pain till they were rid of." " Let a man not think," he writes, " that all an actor needs is to have a memory and the power of speaking, walking, and tossing his arms about." His concluding sentiments are applicable to other centuries as well as his own. He protests against the tendency of the critics of his own day to discourage young players who attempt great characters ; aspiring genius which has " some merit and the necessary requisites from nature " should, he thinks, be stimulated, not depressed ; he deprecates the common folly of admiring the actors of the past much more than they were admired when they were alive, in order to dash the spirits of their successors, five or six of whom he declares to be equal to any of those old actors so greatly commended. This treatise is instructive, because it illustrates the close attention with which the work of actors was scrutinised by a critical playgoer. But it will not bear comparison with the two classics of theatrical literature in the eighteenth century, Colley Gibber's Apology for His Life and 16 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Churchill's poem of The Rosdad. These two works, though comparatively little known to modern readers, are both of them remarkable, the former as a lively autobiography that delighted such opposite critics as Swift and Horace Walpole, the latter as one of the happiest prod actions of that genius for satire which is the dis- tinguishing characteristic of the poetic literature of the century. Colley Gibber, actor, manager, poet, and dramatist, holds an unique position among the players of his time. His versatility is in itself remarkable. As an actor, if he failed in tragedy, in comedy he was the creator of characters now forgotten, but in his own time celebrated and admired ; he was the original Lord Foppington and Sir Novelty Fashion. These two characters belonged to plays of his own making, for Gibber was also a prolific dramatist. He turned out a number of comedies, very popular and successful in their day, some tragedies that were less popular, a few masques and interludes, and adapted for the stage two of Shake- speare's plays, one an outrageous mutilation of King John with the cumbrous title of Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, the other a version of Richard III. which, until about thirty years ago, held the stage in preference to the original. As a poet, Gibber attained to the office of Laureate, and that is all that need be said. It is as a theatrical manager that, with all his faults, he extorts our admiration and respect. His management of Drury Lane Theatre, extending over more than twenty years, from 1711 to 1733, is a memorable epoch in theatrical history. At the opening of the eighteenth century the state of the theatre was anything but palmy. The stage was still staggering under Jeremy Collier's vehement and well-merited denunciation of its impropriety; the older generation of actors, with the exception of Betterton, had passed away, and had as yet left no successors. The actors were divided into two companies : one was at Lincoln's Inn Fields, under 17 c THE ENGLISH STAGE Betterton, where, says Gibber, " the players were most of them too advanced in years to mend " Betterton himself was seventy the other was at Drury Lane, under Rich ; and here the actors, Gibber himself among them, he described as "too young to be excellent." But the younger company was the more successful of the two, and all would have gone well with them but for the impossible character of their manager, Christopher Rich. Originally a lawyer, he was one of those persons who enter into theatrical business with the sole purpose of getting as much money as they can out of it, regardless of the claims of art or the feelings of their artists. To this excusable insensibility Rich added positive dishonesty. His ambition as a manager was to cheat his actors out of as much of their legitimate gains as he could ; and as a lawyer he was able to do this with some skill. At length, however, his mis- conduct led to a revolt, and after considerable negotiation, Drury Lane came for the first time under the management of three actors Gibber, Wilks, and Doggett. Now, for the first time for many years, the theatre was properly and honestly administered. The credit of this is due chiefly to Gibber himself. Wilks, an accomplished actor, cared for nothing so long as he had good parts and plenty of them ; Doggett retired from the partnership early in its history, and was succeeded by Barton Booth, the tragedian and original representative of Addison's Cato, an amiable, indulgent, and easy-going gentleman. Gibber was quite equal to the task imposed on him. His natural gaiety of disposition, his impudent self-confidence, his shrewdness, his sensible appreciation of facts, which his ingenuous vanity never impaired, well fitted him for the task of smoothing down difficult colleagues, facing reverses, over- coming hostility, and making money. With j ustifiable pride he declared that, during his management, bills were paid regularly, that no actor ever required a written agreement, and that the work of the theatre was carried on with order 18 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and propriety. The much-tried actor-manager comes in for a great deal of unsympathetic criticism ; by some he is even represented as the great bane of theatrical art in this country. But history shows us conclusively that, so far, it is to the actor-manager we owe all the most worthy achieve- ment of our theatre, the preservation from decay and disorder of all that is highest in theatrical art. To Gibber, Garrick, and John Kemble, as actor-managers, is due the credit of rescuing the theatres of the eighteenth century from the dishonesty or incompetence or extravagance of such worthless managers as Rich, or Fleetwood, or Sheridan. Gibber says truly of his own record and it applies to those of his immediate successors "our being actors ourselves was an advantage to our government, which all former managers who were only idle gentlemen wanted." In the absence of a State theatre, it has fallen to the task of individual actors to do what they can to uphold the finer traditions of our stage ; and history proves to us that, in face of difficulties that time has increased rather than diminished, these actors have not failed in their duty. Whether it has brought them profit or loss, prosperity or ruin, they have successively devoted themselves to an enterprise which, in almost every other country but our own, has been deemed not unworthy of the assistance of the State. If, as some tell us, we are to see in the future a great extension of State control in our domestic concerns, it will be interesting 'to see if that extension spreads as far as the theatre. Gibber sums up very fairly the history of his own management. "Though,"" he says, "our best merit as actors was never equal to that of our predecessors, yet I will venture to say that in all its branches the stage had never been under so just, so prosperous, and so settled a regulation for forty years before. 11 It is true that in Gibber's time no actor of genius appeared who could challenge, to those who remembered him, the supreme 19 THE ENGLISH STAGE excellence of Betterton. Though the best part of his career belongs to the seventeenth century, Betterton was still playing Hamlet in 1709 at the advanced age of seventy-four, and playing it with a successful assumption of youth that extorted the admiration of Steele. Gibber does his best to give posterity some notion of the extra- ordinary powers of this great actor, and, as far as such a thing is possible, he is not altogether unsuccessful. Though Betterton's voice was manly rather than sweet, his figure short and inclining to corpulence, his limbs athletic rather than delicate, yet with these disadvantages he had that personality, that something indefinable in bearing and countenance, which, from the moment of his appearance on the stage, seemed to seize and rivet the attention of the audience, the eyes and ears of even the giddy and the inadvertent. Betterton must have had just that quality of personal magnetism there seems no better word by which to describe this peculiar attribute which is as essential to the great actor as it is to the great orator, the great statesman, the great soldier, which is, indeed, a part of what men call greatness. As an actual instance of the method of Betterton's art, Gibber describes for us his treatment of the scene in Hamlet, in which the Prince first sees his father's spirit. It was the custom, he says, of most actors, on seeing the ghost, to throw themselves into a strained and violent tone of voice expressive of rage and fury, and bring down thunders of applause by the force of their declamation. Betterton was the first to give to the scene its real significance ; it was with mute amazement he first looked on his dear father's spirit, and then in a solemn, trembling voice, which made the ghost as terrible to the spectator as to himself, with awe and reverence, from which all thought of violence or defiance was banished, he addressed the spirit. One writer avers that in this scene Betterton's countenance, which was naturally ruddy and sanguine, turned as white as his neckcloth in the stress of 20 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY his emotion. If this be true, he was not only a great, but peculiarly gifted, actor. But the whole description is perhaps a little highly coloured, for the same author says that at the sight of Betterton's horror and distress the blood of the audience seemed to shudder in their veins. More convincing than such criticism as this, is the testi- mony of Barton Booth, the tragedian, who succeeded Betterton in " many of his characters." " When I acted the ghost with Betterton, 1 ' 1 said Booth, "instead of my aweing him, he terrified me. But divinity hung round that man ! " Truly there must have been about Betterton a grandeur, a nobility of soul, that on the stage and in private life alike compelled the love and veneration of the men who knew him. It was this love and respect that took Steele to Westminster Abbey to see the last office done to one whom, he wrote in The Taller, " I have always very much admired, and from whose action I had received more strong expressions of what is great and noble in human nature than from the arguments of the most solid philosophers, or the descriptions of the most charming poets I have ever read." A greater, a finer tribute was never paid to an actor. If the eighteenth century produced in Garrick Betterton's equal as a player, perhaps his superior in some respects, Garrick never held in men's hearts the place that Betterton held in the love and esteem of his contemporaries. History repeats itself in the theatre as elsewhere. The treatment of this very scene with his father's ghost which made Betterton's Hamlet something of a revelation in his day, is the same that impressed a German critic who witnessed the Hamlet of David Garrick, and made Fielding put into the mouth of Partridge in Tom Jones the famous criticism of Garrick's deportment in this scene. The secret of all these striking and immediate successes by which in the past actors have suddenly leapt into fame has at all times been a return to nature in the presentment of some THE ENGLISH STAGE character, a revolt against the staginess and unreality of a hide-bound convention, a treatment of a character or a scene that, instead of calling down the customary applause which an experienced actor can always provoke by tricks of declamation, quite regardless of good sense, produces rather that mute astonishment in an audience which is more eloquent to the artist than the clapping of hands. And just as Garrick in Richard III. and Hamlet, by a return to nature brought back on to the stage the true spirit and genius of acting which had died for a time with Betterton, so did Edmund Kean repeat, more than seventy years after, the striking success which, in 1741, Charles Macklin had made in the character of Shylock by playing the Jew for the first time as a real and serious human being. Kean was a genius and Macklin was not ; Kean leapt into a fame which did not depend only on his conception of Shylock ; Macklin made no deep impression in any other Shakespearean character. But both these actors were courageous enough to depart from tradition in their reading of this particular part, to face at rehearsal nothing but discouragement, ridicule, or contempt from their fellow-actors, and were sufficiently gifted, sufficiently masters of their art, to convince audiences accustomed to laugh at the grotesque and comic Jew of stage conven- tion that Shylock, whatever the unreality, the fancifulness of the fable of the play, was a living, breathing embodi- ment of a type conceived and executed by the dramatist in all seriousness and earnestness. II ROBERT WILKS, Barton Booth, and Mrs. Oldfield are the principal figures in stage history during Gibber's time, and, if not three of the greatest, they are three of the most amiable and distinguished persons who have ever adopted the calling of a player. Many are apt to think that the 22 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY actors of the past were people of obscure and vulgar origin, mere strollers, who sacrificed little in following an ignoble and despised occupation. Such a view is incorrect. The majority of those players who attained to fame were of gentle birth, many of them the equals in manners and culture of the distinguished persons with whom the successful actor or actress of the day was invited to associate. Of the three just alluded to, Wilks was grand- son of a judge, and gave up a lucrative post in the War Office at Dublin to become an actor ; Booth was the son of a country gentleman, related to the Earls of Warrington ; and Mrs. Oldfield the daughter of a captain in the Army. Gibber, Quin, Garrick, Foote, Macklin, Henderson, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Clive all came of what we may call respectable antecedents. Robert Wilks excelled as an actor by the refinement, the grace, the charm of his personality. He could not rise to great heights, but in such a character as Prince Hal in Henry IV. he was the embodiment of elegance, gallantry, and high spirit. Wilks had feeling as well as charm ; " to beseech gracefully, to approach respectfully, to pity, to mourn, to love," said Steele, " are the places wherein Wilks may be said to shine with the utmost beauty." Though his love of his calling made him in the theatre too greedy of work, too impatient of rivals, and so a constant source of trouble to his colleague Gibber, Wilks was in private life a generous, warm-hearted gentleman of high character, whose kindness to Farquhar and Savage testifies to the unfeigned goodness and liberality of his disposition. His colleague in management, and in some parts his rival, Barton Booth, was the great tragedian of his day. A man of scholarly tastes, educated at Westminster and Cambridge, he fled from these highly respectable sur- roundings to join a company of strolling players. His fine voice and dignified bearing soon brought him to the front. He had no sense of humour ; comedy he was unable to 23 THE ENGLISH STAGE appreciate ; but in such parts as the Ghost in Hamlet, Othello, Cato, in which a sense of humour is hardly a necessity, he was unrivalled in his day. It was Addison's Cato which made Booth's reputation and fortune. No one reads Cato now, but when it was produced, in 1713, its success was phenomenal ; it ran for the < then astonishingly long period of thirty-five nights ; and Booth's performance so pleased Lord Bolingbroke that he used his influence to get him made one of the managers of Drury Lane. The refined solemnity of Booth must have found full scope for its employment in the title-role of Addison's tragedy ; one can see him sitting in the last act, according to the stage directions, " in a thoughtful posture, in his hand Plato's book on the Immortality of the Soul" a drawn sword on the table beside him ; one can hear Gate's groans off stage : But hark ! what means that groan ? says his son : Oh ! give me way ! He rushes oft' to his father's aid. One of those left on the stage exclaims : Ha ! a second groan. Heaven guard us all ! Cato is brought on dying from a self-inflicted wound. At the end of a long speech he at length gives up the ghost with the words : Oh ! ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not ! The best may err ; but you are good and oh ! This final: " and oh ! " of Cato is worthy to rank with the more famous " Oh, Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh ! '" of Thomson's tragedy, as typical of the stilted, mechanical, 24 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY uninspired muse of these eighteenth-century writers of tragedy. It must have indeed demanded a genius such as Garrick to give life and animation to the soulless characters that fill the prolix tragedies of Rowe and Henry Jones and the Rev. Mr. Miller. But men were quite satisfied in his day with such plays, and with the grave and rounded utterance with which Booth spoke their inanimate lines ; though at times, we are told, the popular tragedian would have a lethargic fit on him, and then would not choose to exert himself in the part he was playing. With that freedom of criticism which distinguishes the audiences of the eighteenth century, when Booth, on one occasion, was acting with unusual apathy, a gentleman in a stage-box sent him a polite note asking him whether he was acting for his own diversion or that of the public. At other times the sight of a friend of Addison's sitting in the pit, or an Oxford man whose judgment he respected, would be sufficient to rouse Booth to exert his full powers. Booth, like Wilks, was a man of an open and generous disposition, loved and respected by many friends. Indeed, there would seem to have been no more popular people in their day than these three prime favourites of the stage Wilks, Booth, and Mrs. Oldfield. Mrs. Oldfield was perhaps the most remarkable of the three. What Fielding termed her "ravishing perfection,"" her beauty, the fire and spirit of her acting, the charm and refinement of her personality, made her, both on and off the stage, the idol of friends and public. " Women of the first ranks," writes Horace Walpole, " might have borrowed some part of her behaviour without the least diminution of their sense of dignity." As an artist she took high rank both in comedy and tragedy, though her inclination lay towards the former ; she hated, she said, as a tragedy queen, to have a page dragging her train about, and would rather such parts were given to her rival, Mrs. Porter. Her countenance, benevolent like her heart, was capable of 25 THE ENGLISH STAGE expressing the most varied passions. When an impudent beau, for some private grudge, rose and hissed her from the pit, she turned to him, paused, and uttered the words, " Poor creature ! " with such withering contempt that the unmannerly interrupter was glad to sit down again. " Even her amours," says one writer, " seemed to lose that glare which appears round the persons of the failing fair ; neither was it ever known that she troubled the repose of any lady's lawful claim ; and was far more constant than millions in the conjugal noose." Generous to her friends, faithful to her lovers, consummate in her art, Mrs. Oldn'eld attended royal levees, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Her death in 1730, the death of Wilks two years later, the retirement of Booth, and finally that of Gibber in 1732, closed a period in stage history which, if not glorious, marked an improvement in the general admini- stration and conduct of the theatre that reflects credit on the three managers of Drury Lane. If they did not train up any younger players of conspicuous talent to take the place of Wilks and Booth, Gibber defends them by reminding his critics that making actors is not as easy as planting cabbages. Obscure, unsuccessful, disappointed authors uttered bitter complaints against the arrogance of Gibber towards struggling playwrights, and the vanity of Wilks in rejecting plays that afforded him no oppor- tunity for personal distinction. There may have been some justice in such complaints, but I think we may safely assume that the judgment of Gibber and his colleagues, which was respected by Congreve, Steele, and Farquhar, did not oppress or neglect much real talent. The cry of the disappointed dramatist goes up unceasingly through the eighteenth century. It was generally uttered in pamphlet form, and made up of diatribes against the stage, its actors and its managers. Gibber pleads guilty to one reproach, that of encouraging 26 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY such new-fangled foppery to draw the multitude, such " monstrous medleys " as the popular pantomimes, pieces like The Harlequin Sorcerer, in which music, dancing, and novel scenic effects were employed to attract the more giddy spectators. As an actor Gibber had been so scandalised by Christopher Rich's attempt to bring elephants and rope-dancers on to the stage of Drury Lane Theatre, that he had gone down into the pit and asked his patrons to excuse him from appearing any longer on a stage degraded by such unseemly exhibitions. But as a manager, Gibber found himself compelled to fall back on these very meretricious shows, which, as an actor, he had so gravely resented ; he frankly acknowledges his apostasy and pleads managerial necessity as his excuse. Here, he says, was one of the deplorable consequences of the re-division of the actors and actresses of London into two companies. When Gibber first went on the stage, there had been only the one company of players at Drury Lane, a condition that lasted for eleven yeai-s, until 1695. In that year Betterton seceded from Drury Lane, and obtained from William III. a licence to open a new theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Then, according to Gibber, began the deterioration in theatrical entertainment. The least successful of the two theatres was bound, sooner or later, to resort to illegitimate means in order to make head against its rival. Thus it was that pantomime, and, what Gibber regards with almost equal indignation, Italian opera, found its way on to the English stage. But the cause of these dangerous innovations is surely more general than Gibber is willing to admit. There must always be a majority of the public who prefer what is light and thoughtless in theatrical entertainment to what is grave and thoughtful, and as life becomes more strenuous and exacting, their number is not likely to diminish. The serious drama will always have a harder fight for existence than the gay and frivolous, and will yield less profit to those who devote themselves to its 27 THE ENGLISH STAGE cause. It fared better in the eighteenth century than it does now ; but we can see that in Gibber's day the time had come when it was not to have things all its own way, as in the days of Shakespeare and Pepys. The more generally popular the theatre became, the sooner it was obliged to cater for all forms of popular taste, and popular taste responded joyfully when it opened its doors to elephants, rope-dancers, and Italian warblers. The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, and Gibber, and Garrick after him, found themselves, as managers, obliged to sandwich the legitimate drama between opera and pantomime. They did so with reluctance ; but managers such as Christopher Rich and his son John, men utterly unsympathetic towards actors, threw themselves with ardour into the development of spectacular entertain- ments. In 1732 John Rich moved his company of players from the old theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields to the new playhouse in Covent Garden, and from this date Covent Garden and Drury Lane became the two principal London theatres. It was at Covent Garden that John Rich, under the name of " Mr. Lun," made himself famous as the first and greatest of English harlequins. Says Churchill, See from afar, The hero seated in fantastic car, Wedded to novelty, his only arms Are wooden swords, wands, talismans, and charms ; On one side Folly sits, by some called Fun, And on the other his arch-patron Lun. Behind, for liberty athirst in vain, Sense, helpless captive ! drags the galling chain. Pope, Dr. Johnson, Cibber, and Churchill might satirise or denounce these trivial exhibitions, and lament that the stage should be given over to flying chariots, grinning dragons, and practicable eggs, but they were powerless 28 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY to confine the public appetite to the plain fare of tragedy and comedy, unable to persuade them To chase the charms of sound, the pomp of show, For useful mirth and salutary woe. It was in a magnificent attempt to outdo the spectacular triumphs of John Rich at Covent Garden, called the Chinese Festival, that Garrick brought on his head riotous demonstrations of indignation at Drury Lane. He had engaged for this pantomime some French performers, and, as England was at the time at war with France, the Jingoes of the day thought they could not better display their rampant patriotism than by inflicting a thousand pounds' 1 worth of damage on the property of a manager who had dared to engage a handful of French artists. A riot and the demolition of the front of his house were contingencies that a theatrical manager in the eighteenth century had to be prepared to face ; instances of such pro- ceedings abound in the theatrical memoirs of the time ; an alteration in prices, an unpopular regulation by the managers, the employment of foreigners, the non-appearance of an artist, the reported ill-usage of a popular actor, the resentment of a player at some act of aristocratic imper- tinence, all these trivial causes on different occasions led to violent tumults, the tearing up of seats, the wanton destruction of furniture and decorations. Resolute men like Quin and Beard, the managers of Covent Garden, would withstand the rioters ; the more timorous Garrick would bend before the storm ; but it was on very rare occasions that the managers received any compensation for their loss. Apart from the fact that the punishment of having his theatre gutted was quite out of proportion to the offence the manager might have committed, this riotous disposition of certain portions of the audience was some- times made use of by some mean and worthless individual to gratify as in the case of the rascally Fitzpatrick some 29 THE ENGLISH STAGE private spite. Quarrels and controversies of any kind in the eighteenth century, literary or theatrical, were fought out with a vigour, an absence of decorum, and an unscrupulousness of attack that enliven, if they do not always edify, the reader. One who bore himself stoutly on all such occasions a sturdy and hard-hitting adversary, who killed two of his fellow-actors in duels, not, be it said, of his own seeking, was James Quin. He fills the most prominent place in the theatrical history of those nine years that elapsed between the retirement of Gibber in 1732 and the first appearance of David Garrick in 1741. The son of an Irish barrister, himself intended for the Bar, lack of means and con- sciousness of ability sent Quin on to the stage. He made his first success in 1720, when he persuaded Christopher Rich to allow him to appear as FalstafF in the Merry Wives of Windsor. After Booth's death he advanced still further in public esteem by what he modestly described on the play-bill as " his attempt" to follow that tragedian in his greatest part of Cato. He so delighted the audience by his attempt that, after his delivery of the line : Thanks to the gods my boy has done his duty ! they cried " Booth outdone ! Booth outdone ! " and after he had spoken the then famous soliloquy on the immor- tality of the soul, the enthusiasm reached such a pitch that, in answer to a vociferous demand for an " encore," Quin was obliged to repeat the speech. From this night Quin, as an actor, reigned supreme for ten years. It was a solemn reign, dignified, weighty, traditional ; he was unsurpassed in such characters as FalstafF and Sir John Brute, but in tragedy he did no more than uphold, with fine elocution, ponderous majesty, and rugged independence, that solemn unreality of speech and action which, both in England and France, was then considered the appropriate expression of tragic sentiment. As in France Le Kain was the first to 30 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY restore nature to tragic acting, so did Garrick in England, by a similar return to nature, expose the dulness, the life- lessness of the settled methods of the actors of the type of Quin. And Quin had too much good sense not to see it himself, for as a man he was the rather coarse embodiment of that rough but ready-witted, prejudiced but generous and warm-hearted disposition which we admire and respect in Dr. Johnson. The few of Quints sayings preserved to us almost make one regret that he had no Boswell by his side. Lords and bishops, clergy and gentry, all were represented in the circles of Quin's many friends who delighted in his wit and conversation. He could hold his own in argument with any man. One instance must suffice. At some gathering Bishop Warburton, dictatorial and overbearing, was arguing in support of royal pre- rogative. Quin said he was a republican, and thought that perhaps even the execution of Charles I. by his subjects might be justified : " Ay, 1 ' asked the indignant Warburton, "by what law?" "By all the laws he had left them," answered Quin. The shocked Bishop then cited the wrath of the divine judgment as visited upon the regicides ; they all, he said (though it is not strictly true) had come to violent ends. " I would not advise your lordship," said Quin, " to make use of that inference, for, if I am not mistaken, that was the case with the twelve apostles." Horace Walpole greatly admired this instance of the player's readiness and aptness of retort. Quin's kindness and generosity to Thomson, the poet, and the unfortunate Mrs. Bellamy, eloquently attest the real worth of the vigorous, downright, resolute old actor, who said, on his deathbed, after drinking a bottle of claret, " I could wish that the last tragic scene was over ; and I hope I may be enabled to meet and pass through it with dignity." Quin had retired from the stage some fifteen years before his death ; he had become the warm friend of his rival, 31 THE ENGLISH STAGE Garrick, who wrote the epitaph engraved on his monument in the Abbey church at Bath : That tongue which set the table in a roar, And charmed the public ear, is heard no more ! Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit, Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ : Cold is that hand, which, living, was stretched forth At Friendship's call, to succour modest worth. Here lies James Quin Deign, reader, to be taught Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought, In Nature's happiest mould however cast, To this complexion thou must come at last. If the period of Quin's popularity had reared no great actors, four actresses, who were to contribute in no slight degree to the splendour of the reign of Garrick, had, in those ten years, been advancing rapidly to the very front of their profession. Mrs. Gibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Clive, and Margaret Woffington, all these ladies had already established their artistic reputations when, in the year 1741, a young man of twenty-three, who, said the play-bill, had never appeared on any stage before, leapt into fame by his performance of Richard III. at a second- rate London theatre. Mrs. Gibber was a sister of Dr. Arne, the celebrated musician. Charmed by her singing voice, her brother had sent her into opera. Colley Gibber heard her ; he was disappointed with her singing, but convinced that her speaking voice would, if properly trained, carry her far in the legitimate drama. He set about instructing her, was astonished at her rapid progress, and permitted her to make her first appearance at Drury Lane in 1736, in the character of Zara in an adaptation of Voltaire's Zaire. Before this event, Miss Arne had had the misfor- tune to marry her teacher's son, Theophilus. Than this Theophilus Gibber a more despicable scoundrel has seldom disgraced any calling ; mean and contemptible to the last degree, a bully and a coward, the younger Gibber has only IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY found one apologist for his turpitude. This writer attributes the peculiar baseness of Theophilus to the unhappy fact that he was born during the progress of the awful and memorable storm that raged over London on the night of November 26th, 1703. Such a convulsion of nature occurring at his birth may explain, if it cannot reconcile us to, the depravity of Theophilus Gibber. In Goldsmith's opinion it required a somewhat similar inter- position of nature to save Theophilus Gibber from his ultimate fate, the gallows ; he was drowned at sea during a violent storm in the Irish Channel. When his wife made her debut at Drury Lane they had only been married two years, and Theophilus in the prologue pleaded for the indulgence of the audience : But now the Player, With trembling heart, prefers his humble prayer. To-night the greatest venture of her life Is lost, or saved, as you receive a wife. If she conveys the pleasing passions right, Guard and support her this decisive night. If she mistakes or finds her strength too small, Let interposing pity break her fall. In you it rests to save her or destroy ; If she draws tears from you, I weep for joy. We may presume that Theophilus did on this occasion shed tears of joy, for his wife's success was immediate, and in those days a wife's independent earnings were her husband's property. Gibber's profligacy and extravagance were as shameless as they were insatiate. He soon made wreck of his married life. Having connived at his wife's dishonour in order to get money from her lover, he then sued the gentlemen for damages, and so persecuted Mrs. Gibber, that for two years she left the London stage. A truce having been patched up, she returned in 1742, and appeared as Desdemona at Covent Garden. She played THE ENGLISH STAGE the part of the ill-used wife with such real fervour and pathos, that the audience, quick to recognise the signifi- cance of the occasion, overwhelmed her with unwonted applause. From that moment Mrs. Gibber was restored to her place in the public favour. As an actress Mrs. Gibber was remarkable for an extreme sensibility to all that was tender and pathetic. As Constance in King John no actress could approach her ; her delivery of the lines : Here I and sorrow sit ; This is my throne, bid kings come bow to it ; her scream of agony as she left the stage exclaiming : Oh, Lord ! my boy ! my Arthur ! my fair son ! these things lived in the memory of those who witnessed them as supremely tragic in their expression. The great fault of Mrs. Gibber's acting, -less intolerable then than now, was the highpitched " demi-chant," as it was called, in which she recited rather than spoke her lines ; she must have learnt this method of speaking from old Gibber, who tried to force it on his daughter-in-law's rival, Mrs. Pritchard, when she was to play Gonstance in his adapta- tion of King John. Mrs. Pritchard, an actress of great, if somewhat rough and unrefined, power, would have none of Gibber's instruction ; she preferred untutored nature to antiquated art ; she opposed to the charm and tenderness of Mrs. Gibber in Juliet and Desdemona the tragic force of her Hermione and Lady Macbeth in the opinion of Mrs. Siddons the greatest of all Lady Macbeths. Mrs. Pritchard was a player born and bred. Her first appear- ance had been made at Bartholomew Fair ; with her acting was an instinct ; it was said that she had never read more of the play of Macbeth than her own part. Rachel has been accused of somewhat similar ignorance. Talma, the great French actor, declares that sensibility of tempera- ment and intelligence are the two principal ingredients 34 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY that go to the making of an actor, but claims the first to be more essential to the artist than the second. If he had to choose between the actor of sensibility and the actor of intelligence, Talma declares he would unhesitatingly select the former. Dr. Johnson said that Mrs. Pritchard in private life was a " vulgar idiot," but on the stage seemed inspired by gentility and understanding. Here surely is a striking instance of what Talma says can be achieved by sensibility of temperament, uninformed by any great intelli- gence. Mrs. Pritchard was a woman of umblemished virtue. To those who are inclined to believe that the lives of players are little more than a series of scandalous chronicles, the private lives of these eighteenth-century actors and actresses would come, if they took the trouble to read them, as something of a surprise; to some readers, perhaps, something of a disappointment. They hardly yield as much scandalous entertainment as those of the princes and noblemen of the day. When we consider the great tempta- tion that beset the actresses of this time, the fierce light that beat upon the most private concerns of the popular player, the history of the eighteenth-century theatre pro- vokes fewer blushes than we might suppose. Occasionally an unhappy career, like that of the unfortunate Miss Bellamy, would tempt some hack writer to put together a spurious memoir of her frailties ; Mrs. Baddeley might, for a price, lend her name to an account of her singular adventures ; but, broadly speaking, we shall find the lives of these famous actors and actresses Betterton, Wilks, Booth, Garrick, Macklin, Barry, Henderson, John Kemble, Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Pritchard, and Mrs. Siddons as decorous as those of other people ; while even Mrs. Oldfield, Mrs. Gibber, and Mrs. Woffington ladies of not wholly un- blemished reputation were quite seemly in the uncon- ventionality of their private circumstances, and not less popular and acceptable in society than their more respectable colleagues. 35 THE ENGLISH STAGE While Mrs. Gibber and Mrs. Pritchard were winning their way to fame as tragic actresses, Mrs. Woffington and Mrs. Clive were proving themselves to be rare comedians. Mrs. Woffington captivated a London audience in 1740 by her appearance as Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar's play of that name. This had been one of Wilks's great parts ; but the piquancy and charm of Margaret Woffington's performance of this dashing young spark eclipsed all former memories. From that night till her premature death at forty-two, Mrs. Woffington reigned supreme in the higher comedy. She could play Ophelia, Jane Shore, Hermione, and play them well ; but it was in such parts as Rosalind, in portraying fine ladies of high degree, that this daughter of a Dublin bricklayer was unequalled by any rival. The actress who so shocked the Duchess of Queensberry on her visit to the green-room by shouting, with a pot of porter in her hand, " Confusion to all order ! " was the ideal representative of the Lady Townleys and Lady Betty Modishes of polite comedy. Mrs. Clive, also an Irish- woman, but of gentle birth, could not approach Mrs. Woffington in characters that called for refinement and distinction of bearing ; she was rather a low than a high comedian, the best " romp," Dr. Johnson declared, he ever saw ; the first of " chambermaids," a type of character almost extinct on the modern stage, but a favourite one in the comedies and farces of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Clive was one of the fortunate few who escaped the awful censure of Churchill : First giggling, plotting chambermaids arrive, Hoydens and romps, led on by General Clive. In spite of outward blemishes, she shone, For humour famed, and humour all her own : Easy as if at home the stage she trod, Nor sought the critic's praise, nor feared his rod Original in spirit and in ease, She pleased, by hiding all attempts to please. 36 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY One attempt of Olive's to please, and that a blatant one, must have made the judicious shudder, though we are told she carried it through successfully. When she played Portia the actress sought to enliven the part by giving in the trial scene imitations of some of the leading advocates of the day. With a burlesque Portia and, as was then the fashion, a comic Shylock, the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice must have afforded in these days quite a rollicking entertainment. Both Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Woffington were generous, good-hearted women, who spent the greater part of their earnings in supporting poor relations ; very troublesome in the theatre, worrying the life out of their managers, and quarrelling violently at times with each other. On one occasion the two Irish ladies fell out in the green-room about their respective powers to draw good houses ; they used most violent language to each other, and Mrs. dive's brother caught hold of the jaw of an Irish admirer of Mrs. Woffington, Mr. MacSwiney. " Let go my jaw, you villain ! " exclaimed MacSwiney. " Throw down your cane ! " cried Mrs. dive's brother ; and the ladies abused each other roundly, until the manager, fearing their voices would be heard on the stage, put an end to the scene. But, in spite of occasional outbursts of spleen, which in ladies of uncertain temper the atmosphere of the theatre is liable to provoke, Mrs. Woffington and Mrs. Clive were both lovable creatures. " Forgive her one female error," said a friend and contemporary of Margaret Woffington, " and she was adorned with every virtue ; honour, truth, benevolence, and charity were her distinguishing qualities." Her last appearance was strangely pathetic. She was in no condition of health on the night of May 3rd, 1757, to play Rosalind ; but she had never disappointed an audience, and, like many an actor before and since, her pride would not allow her to fail in her duty to the public. She went on to the stage and played the part as saucily and prettily 37 as ever until she reached the epilogue. Then, as she spoke to the audience the lines, " If I were among you, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me," she paused, lost all power of speech, and fell stricken with paralysis. She lingered for two years a hopeless invalid, two years which " partook," says one author, " of all that was blameless in her previous life." The year 1741 was memorable in the great theatre of European history for the first appearance, as a leading actor in the affairs of Europe, of the great Frederick ; in the small world of the London stage this year was no less memorable for the first appearance of a player who not only in his own country was to reign supreme as the greatest actor and most accomplished manager of his time, but was to be famous and admired in Europe as no English actor had ever been before. In the history of the English drama there are two great occasions on which an actor, hitherto unknown to the London public, won an immediate triumph on his first appearance before a scanty and sceptical audience, converted, by the force of his genius, cold critics into astonished admirers, and achieved this signal success in a play which had in it no element of novelty, but depended almost entirely for its interest that night on the performance of the particular player. One such occasion was David Garrick's performance of Richard III. at the Goodman's Fields Theatre, on October 19th, 1741 ; a second the first appearance of Edmund Kean as Shylock at Drury Lane, on January 26th, 1814. Garrick was only twenty-three years of age at the time of his first appearance, Kean twenty-seven. But Kean had been on the stage since his childhood ; Garrick had only played a short season at Ipswich before he faced the ordeal at Goodman's Fields. Garrick was an actor born, if ever there was one, " an actor, a complete actor, and nothing but an actor," says Dibdin, " as Pope, during the whole course of his life, was a poet and nothing but a poet." 38 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY It was Pope \vho, on seeing Garrick play, declared the young rnan never had his equal as an actor, and never would have a rival. Garrick had rivals, plenty of them, during his career, Quin, Macklin, Barry, Mossop, Henderson ; but they never seriously affected his position ; they may have played some parts better than he, but they could not challenge his versatility, the fire and rapidity, the liveliness and spirit of all that he did and said on the stage. The moment of his appeai'ance was undoubtedly propitious for the success of one gifted as he was ; there is something naive in the reasons assigned by the writers of the day for the peculiar impression made by the young actor ; they reveal a deplorable condition of the stage, the prevalence of a thoroughly vicious and meaningless style of acting. The critics are astonished that Mr. Garrick should identify himself so completely with his part, that he should speak naturally and not in the accustomed " demi-chant," his voice neither whining, bellowing, nor grumbling : he neither struts nor minces, is neither stiff nor slouching. " When others are on the stage with him,"' they remark with astonishment, "he is attentive to whatever is spoke, and never drops his character when he has finished his speech, by either looking contemptuously on an inferior performer, unnecessary spitting, or suffering his eyes to wander through the whole circle of spectators." Here was indeed a Daniel come to judgment, if these virtues in Garrick attest the vices of the older actors ; the success of this mercurial youth, the grandson, be it remembered, of French refugees, graceful, easy, vivacious in an unwonted degree, is less surprising when it comes as a relief from such a style of acting as these criticisms suggest. Macklin, an actor of far less spirit, had, earlier in the same year, made a profound impression by breaking away from theatrical convention in his performance of Shylock. He, as I described in my previous lecture, made the Jew for the first time a serious character. Physically a man of strong and rugged feature, 39 THE ENGLISH STAGE rough, a " sour-faced dog," according to Fielding, Macklin imported into the part of Shylock an element of the strong and terrible that has never been equalled. When Sir Robert Walpole lamented to King George II. that there was no way of frightening the House of Commons, the King, who had the night before visited Drury Lane, and been greatly impressed by Macklin's performance, replied, " What do you think of sending them to the theatre to see that Irishman play Shylock ? " But Macklin was an actor very limited in his capacity ; hard, without charm, ill- suited to any but unsympathetic and strongly marked characters a vain, quarrelsome, and disappointed man, who for a time became a tavern-keeper in order that he might deliver lectures to his customers, after they had dined, on theatrical history and the art of acting ; who taught elocution, and taught it well, and at eighty-two wrote a much-admired comedy, The Man of the World, in which he himself created the famous part of Sir Pertinax McSycophant. Macklin was the very antithesis to Garrick ; the surly, grudging actor of ability, opposed to the polite and insinuating actor of genius. Of this genius of Gar-rick's how difficult it is to form for one's self, much more to convey to others, any adequate notion ! A rather short figure, but perfectly symmetrical and graceful in all its movements, dark, restless piercing eyes, and a face mobile in every feature ; these would seem to have been the physical characteristics of the player. Many critics dwell on the completeness of his physical equipment, the perfect harmony of voice, feature, and figure, that made them unite with imperceptible ease to give expression to the actor's thought. Grimm, the French philosopher, describes with enthusiasm the skill and con- viction with which Garrick got up in a drawing-room and, after thrilling his hearers by his delivery of the " dagger " speech in Macbeth, convulsed them with laughter by his imitation of a baker's boy who, carrying a tray of cakes on 40 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY his head, lets it fall into the mud and bursts into tears at his misfortune. This drawing-room performance epitomises the whole art of the player who could achieve equal success in the pathetic tragedy of Lear and the low comedy of Abel Drugger. And this success was gained by a natural, unforced, spontaneous method of playing that astonished and delighted both an English and a French spectator, for the French stage in those days suffered, as the English, from the conventional actor's sing-song, mechanical habit of ladling out his lines. In all probability Lear was Garrick's greatest part. Here, in spite of his comparative shortness, of the unsuitability of his attire he walked with a crutch his delivery of the curse was held to be terrific, his madness simple and pathetic. The testimony of his fellow-players is perhaps the most conclusive of his extraordinary powers. Mrs. Siddons was terrified by the power of his eye in Richard III. ; Mrs. Clive swore he could act a gridiron ; Bannister said that in Lear his very stick acted ; Smith wrote, " I never can speak of him but with idolatry, and have ever looked upon it as one of the greatest blessings of my life to have lived in the days of Garrick/' Garrick had his limitations; in parts such as Othello, Faulconbridge, Hotspur, where physical force and powerful declamation were demanded, he was inadequate. But these failures were, as a contemporary critic observed, " spots on the sun, only visible to long-sighted astronomers." As an actor from the age of twenty-three till he retired at fifty-nine, Garrick was the greatest master and exponent of his art. Ill WHEN we turn to the other side of his career, that of a manager of a theatre, for thirty years joint-manager of Drury Lane, the story wears a different aspect. In spite of his triumphs as an artist, in spite of the success of his management, the wealth and prosperity his calling brought 41 THE ENGLISH STAGE him, the reader of Garrick's biography cannot fail to be surprised, astonished, indignant at the worries and mortifi- cations that made the player's life as a theatrical manager anxious and miserable. Never was man so tried, so ill- treated, so badgered and worried by players, authors, critics, even by those who called themselves his friends. His peculiar, his phenomenal success, unequalled by that of any previous actor, roused up all that envy and un- charitableness which even religion has sometimes sanctioned when it has been employed against the theatre. Prejudice in the shape of Dr. Johnson, envy in the person of Macklin, resentment in that of Churchill, disappointment in that of Smollett, foppery in that of Fitzpatrick, and villainy in that of Hifternan, all these mischievous qualities were at different times exerted to injure or distress Garrick. As Mr. Fitzgerald has justly observed, one of the most curious features about Garrick's relations with certain of his con- temporaries is the fact that men otherwise reputed decent and honest by posterity, should, in their relations with him, descend to all manner of meanness and dissimulation. This is indeed a curious circumstance, only to be explained if we consider the very peculiar position occupied by the successful actor in the eighteenth century. Courted and caressed by the greatest in the land on one side, he was every now and then rudely reminded that he belonged to what some were pleased to consider an inferior and despised calling, and was held fair game for persecution and insult at the hands of all sorts and conditions of men. When a member of this calling was seen to be brilliantly successful, popular and admired, and, above all, rich and prosperous, envy filled the breasts of less prosperous persons who held themselves to be vastly superior to mere players, rage stirred up the bile of incompetent playwrights whose wretched dramas the player had dared to reject, a desire to pull down what they had set up seized hold of the more malicious part of their audience; and so the most unworthy 42 cause, the most human infirmity, the most trivial error, would be seized upon as a weapon with which to strike at the unprotected player. Fully allowing for their very venial imperfections of character, humanity has seldom displayed itself in more odious colours than in its treat- ment of David Garrick and Mrs. Siddons at certain periods of their careers ; success was dearly bought that could bring with it such ignoble treatment, such underserved humiliation. But it is certain literary gentlemen and dramatists who, above all others, cut such sorry figures in their dealings with Garrick Smollett, Ralph the historian, Churchill, even Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. There has been at all times a certain resentment on the part of some writers against the player, against his immediate fame, the reward he reaps in his own lifetime, -the adulation he receives in his own person, even the high rate at which he is considered to be paid for his labour. It is a form of jealousy that has warped many otherwise enlightened minds ; an envy that forgets that a capacity to act is a much rarer gift than a capacity to write, that, ephemeral as is the actor's art, it is by way of compensation more vivid in its appeal, more immediate in its effect, than any other form of art. Bishop Tillotson asked Betterton how it was that a player exercised a vaster power over human sympathies than a preacher. " You in the pulpit," was Betterton ""s answer, " only tell a story ; I show facts." It is to the shower of facts that the public heart goes out in a way that distresses, irritates, provokes those who judge the worth of the player from the impressive nonsense that Dr. Johnson talked about his art, or the unsympathetic reflections of Charles Lamb. Dr. Johnson's disparagement of play-acting may be allowed to pass ; being short-sighted and hard of hearing, the doctor could hardly have been in a position to appreciate the full significance of what was passing on a stage ; but his personal treatment of Garrick is difficult to explain on THE ENGLISH STAGE any other ground than that of rather unworthy jealousy. The friendship that Garrick had showed him in producing, to the best of his ability, the sage's unendurable tragedy of Irene, was poorly repaid by the ill-natured picture Johnson drew of his friend in No. 200 of the Rambler, a number published on the very morning that Garrick, always sensitive and nervous, was to make his first appearance in a new part. The spiteful depreciation of Garrick in the character of Prospero is in no worse taste than the self- glorification of Johnson as the rugged Asper. That Johnson should have been a little envious of the wealth that was being accumulated by his old friend is natural ; they had started life together ; Garrick, the more energetic of the two, had outstripped the indolent Johnson in the acquisition of the good things of this world ; but, as Leslie Stephen wrote, " a grave moral philosopher has no right to look askance at the rewards which fashion lavishes upon men of lighter and less lasting merit which he professes to despise." Johnson's depreciation of acting is ignorant and unfeeling the utterance of a Philistine ; his behaviour to Garrick, in more ways than one, grudging and ungenerous ; he was not philosopher enough to accept with equanimity either the failure of his own tedious play, or the success of his old schoolfellow. Throughout Johnson's life, by the side of occasional commendation of Garrick, runs a constant stream of depreciation of the man and unjust ridicule of his art. Smollett's conduct towards Garrick is a good specimen of the kind of treatment the actor had to endure from even a celebrated man. Garrick had politely, and with the usual protestations of regret, rejected a bad play of Smollett's called The Regicide. In Roderick Random the author takes his revenge by drawing a portrait of Garrick under the significant name of Mr. Marmo/et. Thus he writes : " It is not for the qualities of his heart that this little parasite is invited to the tables of dukes 44 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and lords, who hire cooks for his entertainment ; his avarice they see not, his ingratitude they feel not, his hypocrisy accommodates itself to their humours, and is of consequence pleasing ; but he is chiefly courted for his buffoonery, and will be admitted into the choicest parties for his talent of mimicking Punch and his wife Joan." This attack appeared in 1748; but in 1757 we find Smollett, in his History of England, lauding Garrick to the skies for his genius as an actor and the service which, as a manager, he had done the English stage. What has occurred in the interval to bring about this sudden change from venomous attack to glowing panegyric ? Why, in this same year, 1757, we find Garrick producing at Drury Lane a patriotic farce of Smollett's called Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England, and paying him well for it. From this moment Smollett is his contrite friend. Garrick's biography teems with unpleasant experiences of this kind. He procures from Mr. Pelham the minister, by his influence, and his influence alone, a pension for Ralph the historian ; but because he will not perform Ralph's stupid plays, all gratitude is forgotten, and the author attacks the actor in a pamphlet in which he holds Garrick responsible for the present deplorable state of a theatre that rejects the masterpieces of Mr. Ralph. It should be added that a play of Ralph's, called The Astrologer, had been produced in 1744, and on the second night of its run the theatre had to be closed for want of an audience. Again, Garrick helps with money one Hiffernan, an Irish adventurer, and allows a play of his to be put on at Drury Lane ; but it is so unsuccessful that it convinces everybody but the author of his utter incapacity to please an audience. Thereupon Hiffernan writes and threatens to publish what Davies described as a " bloody libel " on the private character of Garrick. As the name of his wife 45 THE ENGLISH STAGE was concerned in the libel, Garrick, on hearing of Hiffernan's intention, paid the blackmailer to suppress it. Dodsley, Hawkins, Mrs. Griffith, and many another author whose merit neither Garrick nor anybody else could perceive, vented their spleen against the manager by ascribing to all manner of unworthy motives his rejec- tion of their plays. But the case of the poet Churchill is perhaps the most interesting. In 1761 this very irregular clergyman woke to find himself famous by the publication of his poem The Rosciad, a dramatic review in satirical verse of all the leading actors of the day. Small wonder that its publica- tion caused a panic among the players, for some of them were scourged cruelly, their imperfections ruthlessly exposed in cutting verses. Poor Tom Davies, afterwards Garrick's biographer, was driven from the stage by the lines : Statesman all over, in plots famous grown, He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone. An assiduous but mediocre actor, one Havard, is thus described : His easy, vacant face proclaim'd a heart Which could not feel emotions, nor impart. Yates, an admirable comedian, whose only infirmity was an imperfect memory, which he would try to conceal by repeating his words over again, or using some such expression as " Hark ye ! hark ye ! " until he could remember what came next, is thus hit off': Lo Yates ! Without the least finesse of art He gets applause. I wish he'd get his part ! When live Impatience is in full career, How vilely " Hark ye ! hark ye ! " grates the ear ! When active fancy from the brain is sent, And stands on tip-toe for some wish'd event, I hate those careless blunders, which recall Suspended sense, and prove it fiction all. 46 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Macklin is not Spared, Macklin, Whose acting's hard, affected, and constrain'd, Whose features, as each other they disdain'd, At variance set, inflexible and coarse, Ne'er know the workings of united force. Mossop, an Irish actor of power and vehemence, but awkward and ungainly in his movements, who, possessed of a strong voice and unbounded vanity, was considered, after Garrick and Barry, the leading tragedian of his day, did not please the satirist ; he practised what was known as the teapot attitude that is, he sawed the air too much with the right hand : Mossop, attach'd to military plan, Still kept his eye fixed on his right-hand man ; Whilst the mouth measures words with seeming skill, The right hand labours, and the left lies still. For he, resolved on Scripture grounds to go, What the right doth, the left hand shall not know. Mossop's emphasis was evidently eccentric : With studied impropriety of speech, He soars beyond the hackney critic's reach ; To epithets allots emphatic state, Whilst principals, ungraced, like lackeys, wait. Conjunction, preposition, adverb join To stamp new vigour on the nervous line ; In monosyllables his thunders roll, He, she, it, and, we, ye, they, fright the soul. Even the elegant and admired Barry did not escape censure. As Hamlet, in Churchill's opinion, he anticipated too prematurely the appearance of his father's ghost : Some dozen lines before the ghost is there, Behold him for the solemn scene prepare ; See IIOAV he frames his eyes, poises each limb, Puts the whole body into proper trim From whence we learn, with no great stretch of art, Five lines hence comes a ghost, and ha ! a start. 47 THE ENGLISH STAGE Perhaps the most masterly lines, as they are certainly the most severe in the whole poem, are those describing the imperfections of an obscure actor named Jackson, after- wards lessee of the Edinburgh theatre. By Nature formed in her perversest mood, With no one requisite of art endued, Next Jackson came Observe that settled glare, Which better speaks the puppet than the player ; List to that voice did ever Discord hear Sounds so well fitted to her untuned ear ? When to enforce some very tender part The right hand slips by instinct to the heart, His soul, of every other thought bereft, Is anxious only where to place the left. Awkward, embarrass'd, stiff, without the skill Of moving gracefully, or standing still, One leg, as if suspicious of his brother, Desirous seems to run away from t'other. Fortunately Churchill was a burly man "the clumsy curate of Clapham,"" Foote called him or some of the players might have wreaked physical vengeance on their assailant. As it was, Davies, who, although one of the sufferers, gives a very candid account of the affair, describes the censured actors as running about like " stricken deer." Garrick found himself in an awkward position. He alone of all the players was wholly praised by the poet, he alone declared worthy to fill the chair once occupied by Roscius. His colleagues, smarting under the lash, felt a natural resentment at his immunity. Garrick, always anxious to please all parties, affected to think lightly of Churchill's eulogy, and ascribed it to a desire on Churchill's part to obtain free admission to Drury Lane. Garrick's sentiments were repeated to the poet, who resented them bitterly and determined to punish such ingratitude. He sat down and wrote The Apology, which was intended to reply to the indignant actors and literary critics of The Rosciad, and at 48 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY the same time drag down Garrick from his former eminence. Bitterly he poured contempt and ridicule on the luckless strolling players of the day, from whose necessitous ranks was soon to emerge the genius of Mrs. Siddons ; players were the " lowest sons of earth " ; and Garrick "a hero from a puppet-show." Forgetful of himself, he rears his head, And scorns the dunghill, where he first was bred. Let the vain tyrant sit amidst his guards, His puny green-room wits and venal bards, Who meanly tremble at the puppet's frown, And for a playhouse freedom lose their own. Ne'er will I flatter, cringe, or bend the knee To those who, slaves to all, are slaves to me. Garrick, conscious that by his own indiscretion he had incurred this scathing attack, affected to take it in good part ; he wrote to a friend of Churchill expressing his admiration of the poem : " I appear," he wrote, " as I once saw a poor soldier on the parade, who was acting a pleasantry of countenance, while his back was most woefully striped with the cat-o^-nine-tails." From this moment Churchill and Garrick became friends. There is a strange irony in the poet who could pour such scorn upon the straits and distresses of the poor strolling actor, writing, when profligacy and extravagance had played havoc with his fortune, to beg a loan from the player, Garrick : "Half drunk, half mad, and quite stripped of all my money, I should be much obliged if you would enclose and send by the bearer five pieces, by way of adding to the favours already received by yours sincerely, " CHARLES CHURCHILL." With his usual generosity, Garrick repeatedly assisted the unfortunate poet, up to the hour of his untimely death, in 1764, at the early age of thirty-three. 49 THE ENGLISH STAGE Of a very different type from Churchill was another of Garrick^s tormentors, Mr. Fitzpatrick. His case affords a striking instance of the power that lay in the hands of any unworthy creature to use, or abuse, his opportunity as one of the public to insult and degrade an actor against whom he cherished resentment. Fitzpatrick was an impudent and effeminate Irish fop, whose mincing and wriggling manners were in unpleasant contrast to his large and athletic build. Originally befriended and encouraged by Garrick, he came to think himself a critic, and in order to better display his critical acumen and serve the interests of his fellow-countryman, the tragedian Mossop, he soon turned on Garrick and attacked his acting. Not content with writing his depreciation, he would go to the pit of Drury Lane on the nights Garrick was playing ; if it were a tragedy, he and his friends would talk and laugh and utter scornful sounds ; if it were a comedy, they would sit with grave and immovable features, while the rest of the audience were laughing heartily. Even off' the stage he pursued Garrick with his offensive conduct ; at the Shakespeare Club, to which they both belonged, he grossly insulted the great actor. Garrick was moved to retort ; he published a passable satire in verse, The Fribbleriad, in which Fitzpatrick was ridiculed as chief of the " fribble " tribe of inane and insignificant dandies. Churchill, in The Rosciad, took up the parable, and drew an awful picture of the effeminate creature : Nor male, nor female ; neither and yet both ; Of neuter gender, though of Irish growth ; A six-foot suckling, mincing in its gait ; Affected, peevish, prim and delicate ; Fearful it seem'd, though of athletic make, Lest brutal breezes should too roughly shake Its tender form, and savage motion spread, O'er its pale cheeks, the horrid manly red. No one will deny that Fitzpatrick had brought on him- self this chastisement, which was well within the rules 50 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY of fair play, as literary controversy was conducted in these days. But an actor who indulged in encounters of this kind had a vulnerable spot in his armour at which a coward would not hesitate to strike; he exposed himself, whenever he appeared on the public stage, to any mean or unscrupulous attack his adversary might organise against him. Fitzpatrick found the desired opportunity when Garrick, as manager of Drury Lane, decided to abolish the rule that allowed persons to come into the theatre at half-price after the third act of a play. The measure was, of course, unpopular with a large section of playgoers ; to these Fitzpatrick appealed and, under the cloak of public-spirited indigna- tion, determined to gratify his private spite. He organised a riot. On the night of January 25th, 1762, the audience, led by Fitzpatrick, who addressed them in a speech from the front of the boxes, refused Garrick a hearing, tore up the benches, destroyed the furniture, and were only pre- vented from setting fire to the theatre by the presence of mind of Moody, an Irish player, who stopped a ruffian in the act of setting fire to the scenery. Difficult as it is to believe, Moody's conduct on this occasion was considered most impudent, and when, the following night, he tried to apologise to the audience in a jocular way by saying he was sorry ;t he had displeased them by saving their lives, 11 they shouted to him to go on his knees and ask pardon for his effrontery. " I will not, by heaven ! " answered the resolute Irishman, and walked off the stage. Fitzpatrick and his friends declared Moody should never act again in London ; but Moody, having no fear, went to see Fitzpatrick, told him he intended to fight him, and by his firmness compelled the dandy to put a stop to his persecution. It was this miserable incident, combined with other causes of mortification and disappointment, that impelled Garrick to leave England in 1763 and travel abroad for two years. It was a wise step ; not only did he meet with a reception on the Continent such as no English actor before or since has 51 THE ENGLISH STAGE experienced, but when he returned in 1765 to Drury Lane, he found a public ready to take him once more to their hearts ; and until his retirement in 1776 he had no cause to complain of their want of appreciation or respect. But ignoble wretches to the last sought to get money from Garrick by disturbing his peace of mind ; by threatening him with the publication of gross libels, and hinting that it was in his power to mitigate their severity by a timely disbursement of ready money. Williams, a Welsh dis- senting minister, wrote a scathing personal attack on Garrick as actor and manager, but before publishing it, he writes himself to Garrick, warning him that a pamphlet, eloquently written by a young man of genius, and calculated to do him irreparable mischief, is about to be issued, unless Mr. Garrick " take some method to undeceive the young man." During his last illness an anonymous writer, signing himself "Curtius," threatened the publication of three letters in which Garrick was to be humbled to the dust by the public exposure of his true character, " But, 1 ' adds " Curtius," in a letter privately sent to Garrick, " if, in the swelling heap of charges they contain, you can obviate some, they shall be expunged." This " Curtius " was a dangerous assailant, no other than the Rev. William Jackson, a disreputable Anglican clergyman, who had killed by a hideous slander Foote, the actor. Foote had caricatured Williams on the stage as " Dr. Viper," and Williams revenged himself by suborning Foote's coachman to bring an infamous charge against his master. The misery of it had brought about Foote's death in 1777. Now, two years later, this time without any provocation, the Rev. William Jackson, alias Curtius, employs his foul arts against the dying Garrick. But death outstripped his villainous purposes, and spared Garrick the humiliation of facing this clerical ruffian. Sixteen years after Garrick's death, Jackson committed suicide in the dock in Dublin, when he was about to be condemned to death as a French 52 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY spy. It is shocking to think that a man of Garrick's refinement and high character should have been brought into contact with such men as Williams and Jackson. Here we have unabashed blackmailing, not by ordinary criminals, but by reverend persons of education and position, who should have known better than to approach even a player in so vile a habit. With the members of his own calling Garrick paid the penalty of extraordinary success by encountering jealousy and hostility open and avowed, treacherous and clandes- tine ; but it never amounted to much, nor very seriously disturbed his peace of mind, except in ono instance, that of Samuel Foote. This ill-natured humorist was a perpetual thorn in the side of Garrick, as he was in those of a great number of persons. To Foote nothing was sacred from the exercise of his unfeeling wit ; a heart- less and cowardly buffoon, nothing but the threat of physical chastisement could restrain his malice. Going out to dinner immediately after his wife's death, he enter- tained the table by an extravagantly comic assumption of grief. " By Footers buffoonery and broad-faced merri- ment," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "private friendship, public decency, and everything estimable among men, were trod underfoot." His strokes of humour and his bursts of sport, says Churchill, Are all contained in this one word, distort. Doth a man stutter, look asquint, or halt? Mimics draw humour out of nature's fault ; With personal defects their mirth adorn, And hang misfortune out to public scorn. Garrick was not likely to escape from the malicious ridicule of a jester who said of audiences in general : " Who will give money to be told Mr. Such-a-one is wiser and better than himself? Demolish a conspicuous 53 THE ENGLISH STAGE character, and sink him below our level ; then we are pleased, then we chuckle and grin, and toss the half-crown on the counter." Foote, at the Haymarket Theatre, invited the ready half-crowns of his patrons by performing pieces of his own composition, the characters in which were thinly disguised burlesques of well-known persons. Gratitude was a word unknown in the mimic's vocabulary ; he might owe Garrick some hundreds of pounds ; borrow his scenery, ask favours of him, place himself under all manner of obligations to the other's good nature ; none of these considerations could deter him from wounding his benefactor's susceptibilities by holding him up to ridicule on the stage, from scoffing behind his back at his so-called stinginess, pouring contempt on his acting, and vilifying his character. Yet in the hour of his awful misfortune, when he had to defend himself against the vilest slander, Foote found no more loyal friend, no more faithful sup- porter, than David Garrick. In considering the controversies, disputes, and misunder- standings that affected the relations of Garrick with certain of his contemporaries, it would be unfair to assert that in many instances Garrick's own faults of character had not contributed to exasperate his opponents, encourage their attacks, provoke their jealousy. " Of inordinate vanity," says one writer in describing Garrick, " at once the most courteous, genial, sore, and sensitive of men ; full of kindliness, yet ever quarrelling ; scheming for applause, even in the society of his most intimate friends ; a clever writer, a wit, and a friend of wits, yet capable of mutilat- ing Hamlet and degrading A Midsummer Night's Dream into a ballet-opera." This is no very unjust account of the contradictions that are to be found in the character of this remarkable man. Vain not perhaps inordinately vain Garrick certainly was, but not half so vain as, in the opinion of Dr. Johnson, he had a right to be; the sage declared he would have had a couple of fellows with 54 long poles walking before him to knock everybody down if he had enjoyed as much applause and adulation as Garrick. It is true that Garrick was too sensitive to criticism and attack ; undoubtedly it was this extreme sensitiveness, his eagerness to anticipate, if he could, unfavourable criti- cism, even by writing it himself, that provoked envious, malicious, or designing persons to torment him, to see him writhe under their ill-treatment, in some cases to extract money from him as the price of silence. Nor was Garrick sufficiently straightforward and courageous in facing his enemies ; he preferred to conciliate, to employ what he called "finesse" with men whose ingratitude and baseness one could have wished he had treated with the scorn and indignation they deserved; his diplomacy, on which he prided himself, only exasperated those on whom he prac- tised it. His very good nature, that made it so difficult for him to say " No, kd him to dodge and procrastinate, until those he had not the determination to refuse were worn out and irritated. Garrick loved the notice of the great, the society of persons of rank. So did Dr. Johnson ; but he had the courage to say so, whereas Garrick, in his heart delighted, would affect to be unconcerned at a royal command or a nobleman's invitation. Like many great men, he liked to be surrounded by flatterers and dependants, and as such persons are not to be found among men of superior worth, Garrick was reproached for encouraging the sycophancy of such an ignoble crew as the Kenricks and Kellys and Woodfalls. These were the great actor's failings. I have enumerated them because, without them, it is impossible to do justice to Garrick or his contemporaries ; but they were failings in every sense venial and superficial, the natural imperfec- tions of a human character. Had Garrick not been an extraordinarily successful player, an object of envy and resentment to bigoted and prejudiced minds, they would not have been so severely visited on him in his lifetime, THE ENGLISH STAGE and we should have heard less about them after his death. " In the height of the public admiration for you," wrote Mrs. Clive, who had acted and quarrelled with Garrick all her life, " when you were never mentioned with any other appellation but the Garrick, the charming man, the fine fellow, the delightful creature, both by men and ladies ; when they were admiring everything you did and everything you scribbled at this time I was a livirg witness that they did not know, nor could they be sensible, of half your perfections." If Garrick were vain, ubiquitous, affected, economical in trifles, he was at heart good- natured, forgiving, and noble in his generosity. He gave with a lavish hand to those needy and distressed ; they repaid him by treachery and ingratitude ; he overlooked their trespass and gave again. No man better deserved his good fortune ; no man less deserved the detraction, the envy, the malice that poisoned the cup of his happiness. He raised the dignity of the player, he improved the con- dition of the theatre. He was a generous and charitable man in the highest sense of the words, a devoted husband, an amiable and accomplished gentleman, in whom the vanity, the sensitiveness, the restlessness of the artist, obscured only from an unfriendly eye a heart that pitied and forgave, a hand ever ready to succour the afflicted, a gentle and a Christian spirit. Davies, who knew Garrick well, no fulsome eulogist, closes his life of the great actor with these words : " No man of his profession had ever been so much the object of admiration ; few men were ever more beloved ; nor was any man better formed to adorn society, or more sincerely disposed and qualified to serve mankind, than David Garrick." Of the actors who were Garrick's contemporaries, only one was ever seriously his rival, and that was Spranger Barry. Originally a Dublin silversmith, his failure in business obliged him to turn to some other means of earning a living. His graceful figure, his handsome face, 56 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY his musical voice, tempted him to try his fortunes on the stage. He first appeared at the Dublin theatre, then the nursery of many famous players : Quin, Barry, Mossop, Sheridan, Macklin, Mrs. Woffington, Mrs. Clive, and Mrs. Bellamy, all hailed from Ireland. It was at Garrick's suggestion that Barry came to London. His success was immediate. Above all, he charmed the ladies " by the soft melody of his love complaints and the noble ardour of his courtship." He had not Garrick's fire or versatility ; he had no gift for comedy ; but in such parts as Othello, Romeo, and Alexander the Great, his superior physique, his stately grace, his charming pathos, gave him victory. Nothing can give us a better idea of the difference between the two players than a lady's criticism of their respective performances of Romeo. " Had I been Juliet," she said, " to Garrick's Romeo, so ardent and impassioned was he, I should have expected that he would come up to me in the balcony ; but had I been Juliet to Barry's Romeo, so tender, so eloquent, and so seductive was he, I should certainly have gone down to him." It is no slight proof of Garrick's freedom from jealousy that he was always Barry's friend, and Barry dearly valued his friendship. After a chequered career he lost a fortune in managing one of the Dublin theatres Barry died the year after Garrick's retirement, a martyr to gout. Two months later his wife, an accomplished actress, made her re-appearance at Covent Garden in her great part of Lady Randolph in Dougia*. According to the curious custom of the day, she spoke a prologue, in which she described her lone condition to her audience : Of the lov'd pilot of my life bereft, Save your protection, not a hope is left. The tree cut down on which she clung and grew, Behold, the propless woodbine clings to you. 57 THE ENGLISH STAGE With the death of Barry in 1777, the retirement of Garrick the year before, Mrs. Gibber and Mrs. Woffington dead, Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Clive in retirement, a generation of great players had passed from the stage. But in 1782 the glory of the theatre was revived by the first appearance of Mrs. Siddons as Isabella in The Fatal Marriage at Drury Lane. It was not her first appearance in London. Garrick had engaged her seven years before ; but she had not been cast for parts that suited her ; her genius was yet immature, and Garrick had failed to detect even the promise of it. Now she astonished and electrified her audience by the power of her declamation, the intensity of her passion. In 1785 she reached the zenith of her greatness by her performance of Lady Macbeth. The year before, old Mrs. Clive, then over seventy years of age, had come up from her retirement at Twickenham to see the new actress who had so taken the town by storm. She was eagerly asked what she thought of her ; her reply is a truly delightful criticism : "Think ! " she said, "why, I think it's all truth and day- light ! " The year after Mrs. Siddons 1 appearance as Isabella, her brother, John Kemble, had made a distinct success at Drury Lane as Hamlet ; it was the beginning of a career honourable and distinguished. The Kembles were the first great players who had sprung from the itinerant ranks of their calling. Their father, Roger, had been a strolling player, and many were the hardships that John Kemble and his brother Stephen would relate of their own strolling days. The adversity of their early lives had given the Kembles John and Mrs. Siddons strong and resolute characters ; they were honourable, upright, worthy people, with all their rather Crummies-like solemnity, players who supported the dignity and independence of their calling. Their history lies to a great extent in the nineteenth century. The school of acting they introduced had neither the fire and vivacity of that of Garrick, nor the fierceness 58 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and intensity of that of Kean and George Frederick Cooke. With some allowance for the prejudice of an actress whom Mrs. Siddons eclipsed, Mrs. Barry's account of the Kemble style of acting has some truth in it. " The Garrick school, 1 ' 1 she said, " was all rapidity and passion ; while the Kemble school is so full of paw and pause, that, at first, the per- formers, thinking their new competitors had either lost their cues or forgotten their parts, used frequently to prompt them."" That solemn pause, which in theatrical history has become associated with the name of Macready, would seem to have had its origin with the Kembles. But the genius of Mrs. Siddons, the undoubted power of John Kemble in all that was eloquent and dignified in tragedy, these must not be confounded with, or judged by, the mannerisms which their admirers or pupils copied and converted into a habit of acting that had all the faults but none of the genius of the originals. No actor or actress has ever left so unmistakable an impress on those who saw them, won such a unanimous tribute of praise from the most diverse critics as Mrs. Siddons. In tragedy she is supreme in the history of our English theatre. " Of actors," said Lord Byron, " Cooke was the most natural, Kemble the most supernatural, Kean the medium between the two. But Mrs. Siddons was worth them all put together."" We are apt to think to-day that there was something mechanical, stagey, rather unnatural, about even Mrs. Siddons, with all her greatness. Those who would correct such an impression may refer to Charles Young, the actor's, account of her entrance as Volumnia in Coriolanus, in the scene of her son's triumph. Most actresses had been content to follow the procession with the conventional stately steps of the tragedy queen ; but Mrs. Siddons recollected she was the proud mother of a proud son: "Instead of dropping each foot at equi-distance in cadence subservient to the orchestra, deaf to the guidance of her woman's ear, with head erect and hands pressed 59 firmly to her bosom, as if to repress by manual force its triumphant swellings, she towered above all around her, and almost reeled across the stage, her very soul, as it were, dilating and rioting in its exultations, until her action lost all grace and yet became so true to nature, so picturesque, and so descriptive, that pit and gallery sprang to their feet, electrified by the transcendent execution of the con- ception." Few written criticisms can give any real picture of a great piece of acting ; this one comes very near to it. We catch a glimpse of the power and originality, the "truth and daylight," 1 as Mrs. Clive called it, of Mrs. Siddons 1 acting ; we see her doing a daring and difficult thing that might well have been absurd or vulgar but for the genius of the artist. Mrs. Siddons, though a woman, could not escape the penalty of success in those days, any more than Garrick. No sooner had she won her great triumph in London than scurrilous attacks were made on her private character and that of her brother. Her morality being unassailable, Mrs. Siddons was attacked and caricatured as an ungener- ous, grasping woman, whose only desire as an artist was to get money, who was deaf to all prayers of suffering or distress, who would even suffer her relatives to starve or subsist on public charity, sooner than give them a shilling of her great earnings. She and her brother were falsely accused of neglecting their aged father, and refusing assist- ance to their most eccentric sister, Mrs. Curtis. Mrs. Siddons may not have been as liberal with her money as some of her fellow-artists, but we must always remember that she was the mother of five children and supported her husband. Even if there had been any truth in the charges of meanness levelled against her, they were no concern of the public ; but that is a later view. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the very zenith of her success, such libellous statements were sufficient to persuade an audience at Drury Lane theatre to greet Mrs. Siddons with yells 60 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and hoots of disapprobation, and compel her to address them in her own defence. The actor was just as exposed at the end of the century as in the time of Garrick to the slander of some malicious penman, or the brutality of an audience. But John Kemble was manfully indifferent to such things, far more resolute in withstanding them than David Garrick. Kemble, with all his affectation of Roman dignity and solemn speech, had a nice sense of humour and a stout heart. It was a happy omen for the theatre when, towards the close of the century, John Kemble became manager of Drury Lane. Though he could not succeed in averting the ruin brought about by Sheridan's disreputable administration, he preserved the stage itself from many of the ill effects of the patentee's unscrupulous extravagance. In 1802, weary of Sheridan, he took a share in the management of Covent Garden Theatre, and throughout the fifteen years that he governed its affairs, upheld those high traditions of theatrical administration, the legacy of Colley Gibber and David Garrick. The traditions handed down to their successors by these eighteenth-century actors are worthy of the beautiful art they so faithfully pursued. The pure art of acting, unassisted by the collaboration of other arts, received in them its highest expression. The intention of all the arts, says Sir Joshua Reynolds and he includes the art of the actor among them is to supply the natural imper- fection of things ; they are addressed not to the gross senses, but to the desires of the mind, to that spark of divinity which we have within, impatient of being circum- scribed and pent up by the world that is about us ; painting and acting are as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation as the refined civilised state in which we live is removed from a gross state of nature. I believe that the conditions of the eighteenth-century theatre were peculiarly favourable to the realisation by the actor of these, the highest possibilities of his art, that he had to 61 THE ENGLISH STAGE make a single, an individual appeal to the imagination, the emotion of his audience which taxed to the full all the resources of art, of temperament, of intelligence, that he possessed. And to follow his art in this eighteenth century, the would-be player had to be prepared to face difficulties and disadvantages which to-day have disappeared. I have in these lectures been obliged to confine myself to the London stage ; we have seen that there the actor had to endure much that was odious, that he was exposed on occasions to treatment which to-day is regarded by all sensible people as a relic of Puritan barbarism. But the ambitious actor who began his career as a strolling player had to endure, if we may accept the reminiscences of John Kemble, such humiliation, ignominy, actual suffering, as only a great devotion to his work could have determined a man of ordinary sensitiveness to go through. Towards the end of the century, however, a great improvement in these conditions took place. Ifcstead of booths and barns, the provincial actor began to find in the more considerable towns theatres ready to receive him. Within a period of ten years, theatres were patented at Edinburgh, Bath, Norwich, York, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Chester, and Bristol, and at the end of the century we find the London "stars," Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, and others, for the first time making tours to the chief provincial centres. The theatre was becoming more and more a part of the life of the people, and, unprotected, unassisted by the State, more and more at the mercy of popular taste. No art that is left to the mercy of popular taste, that has to fight for its existence, can escape some measure of corruption. In the case of every other theatre in Europe, of every other art in England save theatrical art, this truth has been realised. It is the art of the actor that has suffered most in the course of the struggle ; long runs, constant performances, no reasonable man will deny, are baneful to the artist 62 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Perhaps some persons in this country may be found who will say that the art of the actor is not worthy of protec- tion or encouragement ; there are persons to whom it gives quite exceptional delight to call violinists " fiddlers," writers " ink-slingers," painters " daubers, 11 and actors " mummers.'" They are the Philistines, and belong to all centuries. We see them at their fell work in the eighteenth as well as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But an impartial study of the history of this eighteenth-century theatre proves to us conclusively that, under propitious conditions, England is a soil as favourable to the production of fine actors as any other, and that the traditions of the English stage are as deserving as those of any other theatre of fostering care and preservation. That any system approaching the conditions of our eighteenth-century theatres could ever be reproduced in our own time may be a vain, a delusive hope ; and we shall be perhaps forced to content ourselves with looking back with longing and regret to the splendid vitality, the zealous emulation, the spacious record of those great and palmy days of the English actors. The Art and Status of the Actor 65 THE ART AND STATUS OF THE ACTORi 1 ON the only occasion on which I had the pleasure of attending one of the ordinary meetings of the Playgoers' 1 Club, I heard a very entertaining paper read on the subject of " The Overrated Drama," in which the extrava- gant proportions to which the business of the theatre had attained at the present moment were feelingly deplored and pleasantly satirised. With your permission I would to-night, for a short space, direct your attention to an integral part of this inflated factor in our modern life I mean the overrated actor ; and I would ask you to look with me into some of the popular fallacies that still lurk around the theatre, its art, and the exponents of its art. Though the art of the actor has become firmly fixed in the respect and esteem of most thinking men, one is still liable to meet with occasional outbursts of vigorous and unsparing denunciation directed against this particular art and the calling it employs. When these diatribes are sincere, when they do not bear evident marks of personal spleen or rancour, we are naturally led to ask ourselves what is the cause or causes from which they spring, for there must be some reason for manifestations of this kind, however extravagant they may at first appear. I believe that if we look into them we shall find 1 Read before the O. P. Club, April, 1901, and reprinted from The Fortnightly Review. 67 THE ART AND STATUS that their origin is to be traced to the peculiar conditions of the histrionic art, to illusions it cherishes in the minds of many even of its admirers, to prejudices it excites in the minds of persons ignorant of its real working, to the envy and hostility it evokes from those who regard its glittering triumphs and widespread popularity as unalloyed with serious endeavour, with anxiety and disappointment, with those cares and troubles that are the universal accompaniments of every other form of human undertaking. By examining some of these fallacies, by trying to see the art and position of the actor as it really is, by seeing how easily men may frame mistaken ideas of the purposes and achievements of the theatre, it may be possible to explain, if not to allay, these periodical bursts of indignation, to disarm of some of their terrors the last eruptions of the now almost extinct volcano of anti-theatrical prejudice. If we are to pay attention to the note of alarm and distress sounded by one or two writers, we must believe that the inflation of the actor has reached a degree of tumefaction that brings him very near to bursting point ; in his efforts to swell himself out to the propor- tions of other artists, or to emulate the ways and manners of the real ladies and gentlemen with whom, by a deplorable relaxation of social restraints, he has been allowed to mingle, he is approaching within measurable distance of the melancholy catastrophe that overtook the too ambitious frog. For my own part, I believe that this alarming picture of the aggrandisement of the actor is rather a nightmare caused by an over-indulgence in trivial gossip and unimportant newspaper paragraphs than a real presentation of a crying evil. The public at large are, I feel certain, practically unmoved by the case that has been put before them. Those who have lent themselves to the promotion of the actor from the outskirts of social respectability, and have admitted him into the gilded saloons of the aristocracy in which he is, by some people, 68 OF THE ACTOR supposed to uneasily disport himself, have acted in obedience to the levelling spirit of an age that has broken down barriers which class distinction or religious prejudice had set up ; and as the actor has borne himself with a sufficient grace and an abstention from actual outrage equal to that displayed by successful merchants or musicians under similar circumstances, our social leaders are not likely to at present revoke the privilege accorded to him, at the bidding of those who represent him as a standing menace to a well-conducted household. For playgoers, keenly interested in the actor as they see him on the stage and follow him in the exercise of his art, it is a matter, I am sure, of supreme indifference whether the player's doings are assiduously and often indiscreetly chronicled in the press, or whether he is received into gilded saloons, be they those of noblemen or those not infrequently associated with spirituous refreshment. To most reasonable men, the social position of any body of artists signifies little : it is to their achievements in their respective fields of art that men look with interest and anxiety. But if competent judges admire an actor's work, if they see in it evidences of high intelligence and careful study, they will be rather pleased than dissatisfied that such work should meet with recognition from those who are in a position to encourage and stimulate such talent or genius as we may have amongst us, whatever the form of artistic effort in which it chooses to manifest itself. No unworthy feeling of envy would arise in their minds on seeing an art that, in its higher manifestations, has a long record of well-accredited genius, raised from an unworthy obscurity, which had formerly re-acted with baleful effect on the lives and characters of its exponents ; they would rather rejoice that, in the words of Hazlitt, " the actor has now an opportunity of being as respectable as he may be, because his profession is respected as it ought to be." 69 THE ART AND STATUS At the same time, it is not unnatural that the rapid advancement in certain directions of a calling, long re- garded with contempt and disapproval by a large section of our countrymen, should have excited in some breasts sincere feelings of astonishment and resentment ; in some a feeling of jealousy that those they had, as the habit of a lifetime, regarded as beneath them should, in some respects, be promoted over their heads; in some, blind to the higher aspects of the art and capable only of fixing their gaze on its obvious imperfections, a regrettable spirit of uncharitable hostility. It is from persons belonging to these categories that come those attacks upon the actor and his art which break out periodically, and which, if they reflected public opinion, might seriously distract the actor in the midst of his fancied security in public esteem. Fortunately, these attacks are matters of supreme in- difference to the public for reasons I have already indicated, and that is why they meet with no considerable response from the actors themselves. A newspaper, in reviewing a work of this kind, remarked with some asperity that actors were notoriously indifferent to attacks on their profession. But I think the reason for this indifference should provoke, on the part of those who make these attacks, a reconsideration of the wisdom of their course rather than resentment at the actor's silence. The actor is indifferent to such attacks merely because the public, his masters, are indifferent to them. They form their own judgment of actors both in their public and private capacities ; they are shrewd enough to exercise their own discretion in the distribution of their favours, and the actor will only be alarmed for the decline of his prestige when he finds his art sunk and degraded in the estimation of his honest fellow-countrymen. One other topic suggests itself with regard to the changes that have occurred in the relative status of the actor. 70 OF THE ACTOR The resentment felt by some at his advance in public esteem, or a spirit of blind conservatism that believes that the actor finds his best intellectual development in tavern bars or billiard saloons, is responsible for a sneer occasion- ally levelled at our modern stage which is as unjust as it is illogical. We sometimes come across the complaint, not only outside but inside our calling, that the art of acting is steadily deteriorating, because the stage is being nowadays invaded by a number of well-born, well-bred, or well-educated young men and women, who are represented as being totally ignorant of their business, and apparently incapable of ever learning it. Now if the art of acting is nowadays really in a state of deterioration (a question open to argument), it is, I venture to think, in the highest degree fallacious to represent such deterioration as in any way due to the influx into our calling of well-bred or well-educated recruits. Of course the genius for acting is, as any other form of artistic genius, conferred upon persons, irrespective of their rank or education, of whether they come from the palace or the plough, the board school or the university ; and with such persons we have no concern ; they may be trusted to look after themselves. But if the ordinary level of acting appears to be in a depressed condition that condition is due to the fact that our modern actors lack the opportunities for acquiring training and experience that were enjoyed by our predecessors, and not to the fact that they now number among them a greater percentage of well-educated men. It is, on the other hand, difficult to believe that any profession or calling or art does not indirectly benefit, in the general level of its excellence, by being pursued by well-educated men and women, and that that of the actor will not appreciably suffer, but will rather gain in some respects, by numbering among its exponents men and women who enjoy such advantages as a good education confers on any reasonable being. Birth and breeding and education will 71 not make great actors, but they will not mar them. To the many who are not great they will not take the place of training and experience, but they will enable them to satisfy the demands of those who expect to see accurately represented on the stage every side of our social life, and who believe that the stage, to fulfil that purpose, should draw its exponents from all classes of the community. As the prejudice against the theatre diminishes in intensity, the calling of the actor will be necessarily open to classes by whom it had been hitherto severely neglected. If this stock of new blood does not materially add to our stock of great actors, in other respects it will, I believe, be of indirect benefit to our art. We must not, however, forget that, according to some, the performance of the actor is hardly to be dignified by the name of an art, or, if it is, it is an art so paltry and unintellectual as wholly unworthy to be ranked with its sisters. The actor is usually subjected to destructive criticism in his dual capacity of artist and man. As an artist he is said to be the exponent of a form of mimicry little raised above that practised by the ape, unworthy to be dignified by the name of art, demanding, as it does, no exercise of study or intelligence ; as a man, he is said to be so corrupted by the inherent immorality of his calling and the vanity fostered in him by excessive adulation that he is unfitted to hold social intercourse with respectable or intellectual people. If this view of the conduct and capacity of the actor can be successfully established and generally accepted as the true one, it is obvious that he will sink to a level in the social scale only slightly above that occupied by the common hangman, without, however, the excuse enjoyed by the latter artist that, in pursuing his ignoble calling, he is conferring a practical service on the community. Indeed, from the extremely unamiable tone adopted by some recent critics in their strictures on the unfortunate actor, one would be 72 OF THE ACTOR inclined to infer that if these gentlemen were obliged to strike a balance between the respective claims of the great actor Betterton and his famous contemporary, John Ketch, to the respectful esteem of posterity, they would pronounce unhesitatingly in favour of the latter. But to pass to more serious criticism, criticism that is not conspicuously wanting in that " sweetness and light " which should be the first attribute of all such controversy, there are one or two points raised by those who represent the art of acting as an inferior and unworthy art that claim passing consideration. It is true that Leigh Hunt pronounced all such attempts to degrade the actor's art as unworthy of argument ; and so for the most part they may be. At the same time, by discussing some of them in a general way, one may arrive at certain truths with regard to that art, truths which at the present time, when, in the opinion of many, the art of acting has lost something of that distinct prominence which it enjoyed a hundred years ago, may serve to remind us of its higher aspects and possi- bilities, and stimulate those who are sincerely anxious that it should not decline from its glorious past. If the art of acting is to look for its credentials to our admiration and respect, to the judgment of the world's great critics of art, it finds arrayed on its side a wealth of powerful testimony that is too frequently entirely ignored oy modem writers in dealing with this question. At the hands of his detractors, from Mr. Augustine Birrell down- wards, the actor finds himself confronted at the outset with lines penned by Shakespeare and Macready in those moments of passing disappointment or depression that are the almost inseparable accompaniments of the artistic temperament, and is told that his art is irrevocably con- demned out of the mouths of its greatest exponents. But the reverse side of the picture is seldom presented to him. He is not reminded that, in the words of Shakespeare's latest and best biographer, such self-pity as the poet 78 THE ART AND STATUS expresses in the Sonnets on account of his pursuit of the actor's calling is, if literally interpreted, the reflection of an evanescent mood, that his interest in all that touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active, and that he loyally and uninterruptedly pursued that pro- fession until he had resigned all connection with the theatre ; nor do we find invoked against the grumblings of Macready his definition of the art of acting which, if somewhat turgid in expression, is none the less dignified and inspiring. Are we, in similar fashion, to condemn the profession of the advocate because Mr. Birrell, K.C., in his essay on " Actors," writes that Macready these are his actual words "was always regretting heaven help him! that he wasn't a barrister-at-law ? " Should we not rather decide that Mr. Bin-ell's mournful exclamation springs from a painful but evanescent recollection of early brieflessness rather than from an enduring contempt for the profession he adorns ? In the same spirit are an actor's momentary expressions of a passing discontent with his lot, such as are to be found in most auto- biographical records, to stand against the considered judgments of Goethe and Schiller, Voltaire and Lessing, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes ? all pronouncing in favour of the beauty and dignity of an art "which Horace did not think it beneath his genius to advise, Addison to recommend, and Voltaire to practise as well as to protect." If the value of an art is to be decided by the impression it makes in its more perfected form on the highest intellects of its time and it is perhaps difficult to find a more satisfactory criterion for ordinary men then the art of acting comes to us stamped with the respect of genius, confided to our care by illustrious men as a product of the imagination and intellect of mankind that is to be encouraged and esteemed, not belittled and derided. The commonest fallacy, cherished by many in regard to 74 OF THE ACTOR the actor's art, is that it is the art of the mimic and nothing more, an art of sedulous imitation, offering no scope to originality or independent, intellectual exertion. A rough-and-ready answer to this common assertion is contained in the fact that good mimics are as a rule notoriously bad actors, and that obviously the sedulous imitation of actual men and women in the circumstances of our daily life can afford an actor little help in the portrayal of such creations of imaginative genius as Hamlet or Othello. That the art of acting had its origin, in common with the pictorial arts, in an imitation of nature, is possible and probable ; that it soon passed from mere imitation to representation is certain ; and therefore equally certain is it to my mind that, as a result of that transition, the actor is called upon, in common with other representative artists, to reproduce in idealised form that branch of nature man which is his especial study. As one great critic has tersely expressed it, " neither the poet nor the actor pretends closely to copy nature, but only to represent nature sublimated into the ideal," and it is this process of idealism that the actor must apply to every character he undertakes to portray, no matter how nearly that character may seem to approach to everyday reality, if he would present it conformably to those rules of correct and beautiful expression that are as imperative in the art of the theatre as they are in the arts that express them- selves on canvas or in marble. The carrying out of this process calls on him for gifts of insight and imagination similar to those we look for in any other form of artist ; and as insight and imagination of the highest order are employed in the creation by the poet of such transcendent beings as Hamlet or Lear, so in translating such beings into action, in putting them before the spectator as creatures of flesh and blood, insight and imagination of a high order will alone enable the actor to achieve that " union of grandeur without pomp, and nature without 75 THE ART AND STATUS triviality,"" that supreme idealisation of man in action as we see him about us, which is the fitting and worthy complement of the art of the dramatic poet. Without in any way detracting from the share of the dramatist in the productions of the theatre, it must, I think, be ad- mitted by any one who takes the trouble to consider the question from an enlightened standpoint, that the actor is not the mere parrot-like reciter of the words of the play- wright, that the higher the dramatist soars the greater is his need of some kind of intellectual response on the part of his actors, and that instead of setting up actor and author as rivals who are perpetually endeavouring to extend their frontiers at each other's expense, they should be regarded as equal participators in the highest achieve- ments of the theatre. The answer of G. H. Lewes to the question propounded by Diderot in his famous Parodoxe, How far does or should the actor really feel the passion he expresses ? is not only interesting as a correct solution of a rather simple problem that has given rise to a good deal of ignorant and thoughtless comment, but shows us very clearly the point in his art where the actor is called upon to exercise a faculty for intelligent selection similar to that demanded from any other artist. "As in all art," writes Lewes, "feeling lies at the root, but the foliage and flowers, though deriving their sap from emotion, derive their form and structure from the intellect." Poet and actor must be capable of feeling the emotions they translate into word or action, but must be so far masters of themselves as to be able to select from their emotions those elements that will serve as materials for their art. " The sudden flash of suggestion which is called inspiration may be valuable, it may be worthless ; the artistic intellect esti- mates the value, and accepts or rejects it accordingly." Passion and reflection are the two elements that, happily combined, compose great acting; for passion alone pro- 76 OF THE ACTOR duces disordered results, reflection alone a cold and unreal imitation. If the combination be a rare one, that is a cause for constant regret ; we may lament the absence of worthy exponents of an art to our heart's content ; but we must not allow the absence of great acting to blind us to the fact that acting is a great art ; those who deplore our modern acting, and call for its reform, too often forfeit our attention and respect by telling us at the same time that our art is contemptible and an unworthy employment for an intellectual man. Such criticism can only have the effect of placing the modern actor, who seeks to improve and develop his art, on the horns of a dilemma, from which, however, a moderate exercise of reason and common sense may successfully extricate him. Another common objection urged against the claims of the actor's art to occupy a place by the side of other arts, is that the actor's is an art for which no special training is required, his calling one into which anybody can enter and, no matter how inferior his attainments, find immediate employment. But the same might be said of the art of literature, or the art of oratory. All those arts which have not, like music and painting, a visible technique written, so to speak, across their faces, which operates as an immediate deterrent to thoughtless aspirants, are liable to reckless invasion at the hands of people whose desires and ambitions are hopelessly in excess of their gifts. To write or to speak or to act seem uncommonly easy to a number of over-confident persons ; some of these are content with merely regarding the art from a disrespectful distance, and nursing an obstinate conviction that they could easily practise it if they only took the trouble to try ; others do try, and in course of time go to swell the melancholy army of those who have mistaken their vocations in life. But because bad literature, bad oratory, and bad acting are, like the poor, always with us, and there are probably few here who at various times in their 77 THE ART AND STATUS armchair, at church, or in the theatre, have not suffered distress at the hands of incompetence in one or all of these forms, are we to deny that writing or speaking or acting, if thoughtfully, instead of thoughtlessly practised, reveal their rules of form and expression to those who cultivate them seriously, and demand the same lifelong adherence on the part of those who follow them in the hope of attaining to some measure of perfection, as the arts whose preliminaries are more obviously technical ? At the same time it would be idle to deny that, of all artistic callings, that of the actor offers most temptation to loafers and those who have failed in almost every other capacity in life. The term " actor " is a wide one, and covers a multitude of persons who would no doubt frankly confess that their presence on the stage was not due to any desire to pursue acting as an art. For purposes of legislation, and in everyday talk, all kinds of stage representation, each excellent in its way, are lumped together, and the exponents of these various forms of entertainment, in some of which the art of acting plays a comparatively subordinate part, are grouped together generically as actors and actresses. And thus it is that persons who have never acted in their lives, whose associa- tion with the theatre has been dumb and fleeting, do not hesitate to satisfy, when occasion demands, the exigencies of their country^ justice by describing themselves on charge sheets and other legal documents of a melancholy character as actors and actresses. No calling is so rich in sutlers and camp-followers, because no calling is so easy to enter in some capacity or other, no term is so loosely employed as that of actor, and no calling offers to the outsider such seeming allurements to decoy the ignorant and unwary. We all of us have known, in some form or other, the glamour of the theatre to those who sit in front of the curtain. How many really well-informed persons find it difficult to believe that acting is not " such fun," 78 OF THE ACTOR and the whole business nothing but one long round of applause and suppers. There are four prime fallacies that I have found to be constantly entertained by intelligent ladies and gentlemen with regard to the work of the actor ; they are : firstly, that he is surrounded in the theatre by a large staff' of intelligent and willing attendants whose nightly duty it is to dress him and make up his face for him ; secondly, that, in his performance, he speaks the author's words or not, as his fancy may dictate ; thirdly, that, during the run of a piece he can accept an invitation to dinner by merely mentioning to his manager his in- tention of absenting himself on that particular evening, when his understudy will, as a matter of course, take his place ; and, fourthly, that the evening's performance in- variably terminates with a delightful supper served in the green-room, to which all the actors and actresses concerned in the piece are bidden. Let me assure you that not one of these delightful suppositions has the least foundation in fact, and that I have only cited them as instances of the illusions cherished by rational persons as to the actual conditions of the actor's calling. Further, they will explain those attractions that the theatre offers to lazy, thoughtless, vain, or indolent persons, who find their way behind the curtain, not because they wish to take the first step in pursuing an art for which they feel a genuine love, and in which they have some reason to hope that they may, by hard work, ultimately enjoy some measure of success, but because they look forward to being highly paid for doing little, much applauded for making fools of themselves, and constantly supplied with opportunities for dissipation and indulgence of every kind. Illusions of this kind will be cherished in regard to the business of the theatre as long as the theatre exists ; they spring from the nature of things, from the glamour that surrounds the actual representation of a play ; from the ignorance of ordinary persons as to the real conditions of 79 THE ART AND STATUS such representation. What is more, they are the ground- work of those reckless and uncharitable charges levelled against men and women of the dramatic profession by unblushing Pharisees who would hold up their hands in horror if you asked them to enter a theatre, but who yet continue to unsparingly denounce the sins and follies of actors and actresses. These teachers and preachers who, I am sorry to say, number among them more than one religious minister of respectable eminence, seem to forget, in their fervid zeal, that there is no sin more ugly and unchristian than want of charity, no proceeding more dishonest than to accuse without investigation and to judge without evidence. If such persons are honestly bent on correcting what they believe to be the evils that corrupt the theatre, let them adopt the same methods for reforming the theatre they would apply to Ratcliffe High- way, or to the conversion of African savages ; let them come amongst us, let them manfully face the perils and dangers of the dark continent that lies behind the curtain, let them watch in its actual working the life of the theatre, let them satisfy themselves by personal investi- gation of the evils they denounce ; then, having reformed their methods of arriving at a judgment, they may, if there be need, reform us ; then we may, if we require the lesson, learn to be true to our profession, when they have shown themselves true to theirs ; but unchristian anathema from those who profess themselves followers of Christ will not convince the simplest sinner of the error of his ways. It was not a teacher of this kind who reformed the publican. Speaking from my own experience, I would assure those who are honestly anxious to see the calling of an actor as it really is, that it is one in which a great deal of hard, and at times, tiresome work has to be done, that its advantages and its drawbacks are like those of any other profession, equally divided ; that success in it is generally proportionate to merit ; that it has its trials and tempta- 80 OF THE ACTOR tions and what profession has not trials and temptations peculiar to itself? that it is a calling very varied in its many forms of expression, some less dignified and intel- lectual than others, but that if we regard its highest examples, the examples of a Garrick or a Kean, as in judging the real service of painting or poetry we should regard the examples of Raphael and Milton as distinct from those of the pot-boiler or the ballad-monger, it is worthy to rank by the side of arts that rely on the intellect or the imagination of man for their supreme manifestation. Let men once free their minds from the wealth of illusion and misrepresentation that hangs round the glittering achievements of the theatre, and they will come to regard the actor not as a kind of meretricious bogey, but as in reality an ordinary worker in the field of art, neither better nor worse than his fellows ; then, and not till then, will they arrive at a juster and kindlier estimate of the actor's work, and save themselves the ineffectual labour of trying to bring into contempt an art that has too long ministered to the higher pleasure of mankind to be uprooted from their affection and esteem by an ill-natured catalogue of the weaknesses of its ex- ponents and the trivial side of its practice. The critic who would obscure the intellectual importance of an art, the real essence of its genius, by the slighting enumeration of such accidents in its practice as that the actor paints his face and shaves his chin, or by misrepresenting him as a slavish mimic or an insincere mountebank, such a critic merely confounds the accidents of an art with its essence, its rude origin with the perfected form to which the progress of the human intellect has brought it. I have said that the actor is open to disparagement, and receives it sometimes in the heartiest fashion both as an artist and a man. We have dealt with him in his former capacity ; what are we to say of him in the latter ? What has the actor done as a man to deserve the re- Si & THE ART AND STATUS probation that we find some writers now and then so cordially bestowing on him ? After careful examination I find that the gravamen of the charge, the real cause that agitates and distresses certain persons, is the extra- ordinary publicity and adulation of which the actor is made the object, publicity and adulation which, in their opinion, he would not receive if his own vanity and love of praise did not imperatively demand it. The actor is represented as craving for and living upon puffs and paragraphs, miserable if his most trivial doings escape the notice of a reporter, elated if he find himself the hero of some absurd adventure or puerile controversy. What- ever the real causes of this exaggerated importance that is said to be attached to the actor and his doings, and however unfair to the actor the inferences that may be drawn from it, it is, I think, undeniable that we frequently read very foolish things written about actors, and some- times very foolish words spoken by actors and actresses in the course of interviews ; it would be idle to pretend that the members of the dramatic profession have never supplied food for laughter and ridicule by absurd examples of disordered vanity or exaggerated self-importance. But the broad question which underlies these manifestations of human weakness, and is raised by the criticisms they provoke, is the simple one of cause and effect. Are these paragraphs and these interviews concerning the actor that are prominent in almost any newspaper we may choose to open, caused by his insatiate craving for publicity, or are they printed and published by the newspapers themselves in response to public curiosity which, penetrating as it does by means of journalism into the privacy of any class of public character, finds most gratification and amusement in invading the seclusion of the actor ? I do not think that anybody who regards the question from the stand- point of the general conditions of our modern life, can be in any doubt as to the true answer to be given. Are our 82 OF THE ACTOR newspapers, in giving so much space in their columns to actors and their affairs, making themselves the agreeable slaves of the actor's vanity, or are they acting as judicious caterers for the entertainment of the public ? Are they obliging or businesslike ? Without in any way detracting from the genial benevolence of the journalist, I think we may fairly say that considerations of business are as paramount in journalism as in any other form of public enterprise, and that if the journalist pays great attention to the actor it is because it profits him to do so, because thereby he is responding to a public demand. Indeed so urgent is this demand, so paramount in the public mind is the interest in the fortunes of actors, that the journalist is on occasions obliged to forego considerations of good feeling and good taste in his anxiety to make a paragraph to catch the eye of the general reader as he hastily glances over the columns of his newspaper. For it can only be the all-important motive of arresting at all cost the attention of a reader that induces even the best class of newspaper to invariably head in large type, with a conspicuous reference to their calling, the most trivial errors or misfortunes of an actor or actress, and that in a fashion that is not extended to other callings or professions. The only possible justification for this miserable privilege accorded to members, or so-called members, of the dramatic profession is that paltry wrong- doing or sordid misfortune acquires for the ordinary reader a peculiar interest if it be associated, however remotely, with an actor or actress. But as it would be grossly unfair to attribute the glaring headlines of our daily papers in these unfortunate circumstances to envy or un charitableness on the part of the journalist towards the actor, so is it equally unfair to entirely attribute to the actor's greedy vanity and self-importance the interviews and paragraphs that are usually extorted from him to gratify a genuine thirst on the part of the public for 83 THE ART AND STATUS information relating to the most generally popular of all their servants. " There is no class of society," wrote Hazlitt nearly a hundred years ago, " whom so many persons regard with affection as actors," and it was the same critic who declared that the public felt more respect for John Kemble in a plain coat than the Lord Chancellor on the woolsack. What was true then is equally true now, and to withstand or endeavour to correct the affection with which a great mass of people regard the theatre and its artists, is to beat one's head against the proverbial brick wall. There are many and obvious reasons for this affection ; the immediate appeal made by the actor in the exercise of his art to the imaginations of the spectators, the fascination that the theatre possesses for persons of all classes, the inevitable interest that an audience feels in a man whom they see constantly placed in situations that directly appeal either to their sense of beauty or to their emotions, the feeling of gratitude that we all experience towards an artist who delights us, which is quite irrespective of our shilling paid at the turnstile or the bookstall, or the gallery door. That the affection and interest aroused by these circumstances should be accompanied by a certain amount of silly and thoughtless adulation and prying curiosity is only to be expected from human nature. However worthy and justifiable may be great outbursts of popular enthusiasm, when are they not marred by much that is foolish and excessive ? In a lesser degree the public admiration for and interest in the actor will always exhibit a ridiculous side and an unpleasant side. In the one respect it will show itself by the excessive worship in an actor or an actress of qualities that are not, strictly speaking, intellectual, in the other by a great deal of wanton and mischievous gossip about the private lives of popular favourites. But for all that the affection of the public for its actors has in it little of which either 84 OF THE ACTOR party need be ashamed ; it is sincere, it is natural, it springs from no unworthy cause, and it is but a fair compensation for the comparative oblivion into which the achievements of histrionic genius must ultimately sink. To resent and seek to destroy it is not only a futile labour but a niggardly and an ungracious one. Far be it from me to deny that actors and public not unfrequently make fools of themselves ; so do judges and bishops and states- men, even, in these days of journalistic temptation ; but the follies of men are not to be made the measure of the fitting place of their work or employment in the scheme of things, be they judges or bishops or statesmen or actors. There is one other topic dwelt on with some asperity by opponents of the theatre with which I will deal as briefly as it deserves. I mean the topic of the morals of the theatre. The public discussion of the mean level of morality in any profession, if pushed to inquisitorial lengths, is a highly undesirable proceeding. I would only suggest a few considerations which should be preliminary to any investigation of this kind in relation to the theatre. In the first place, it is commonly believed by persons who have never entered a theatre, or at least passed behind the curtain, that the tender emotions and sentiments portrayed by actors and actresses towards each other in the course of a play seldom stop short on the fall of the curtain. The words of Mole, the French actor, are sufficient answer to that ; he writes : " I am dissatisfied with myself this evening ; I let myself go too much, I was not master of myself ; I was the character itself, not the actor playing it. 11 The actor or actress worthy of the name are not the slaves but the masters of the emotions they portray. As Voltaire pointed out there is, or should be, no greater moral danger to the dramatic artist who portrays the passions of the human heart, than to the painter or sculptor who paints or models from the nude. 85 THE ART AND STATUS Unless we are sunk in the depths of Pharisaical pre- judice and deliberate ignorance, we shall resent the moral shortcomings that we may meet with in the accredited biographies of our great actors and actresses, in the same degree as we should resent them in those of poets and musicians. But one word of warning. It is difficult for those who have not personally experienced it, to credit the amount of wanton and utterly unfounded scandal that is spread abroad by tattling and uncharitable persons with regard to the private lives of actors and actresses. Where admiration and interest degenerate into mischievous curiosity, or excite envy in inferior minds, there will be found the source of many a lying tale or reckless invention about those whom the theatre brings prominently before the public. But this is a truth little realised, by many hardly understood. The popular fallacy that the actor lives the character he portrays not only on the stage but in all the relations of everyday life, may seem to many a very foolish and weak-minded one. But we must remember that the audience in a theatre is for the most part composed of persons entirely unfamiliar with the real conditions of theatrical representation, hence - and so far it is as it should be the illusion of the theatre is to them complete, often unfortunately too complete ; with many, from the very nature of the case, this illusion follows the actor or actress after they have quitted the scene ; it is difficult to many persons to believe that men and women who have delighted an audience in extra- ordinary and moving situations, who have represented astonishing and impressive characters, are not at home equally astonishing and impressive, or equally ludicrous or wicked or amorous, according to the nature of the parts they play. It is this afterglow of illusion that survives the fall of the curtain, which tempts people to pry into the actor's private concerns, and greedily swallow any fantastic story that may suit their preconceived notions 86 OF THE ACTOR of what his private life should be, which is at the root of the many improbable stories and far-fetched inventions about themselves that an actor or actress is occasionally privileged to enjoy, and which makes it difficult for an ordinary spectator to believe that the morals of theatres are not as eccentric and disordered as those of the morally eccentric or disordered persons actors and actresses are not unfrequently called on to portray. How difficult to many to believe that the man who is a charming representative of the gay Lothario is not similarly employed during the greater part of the daytime, or that the representative of a brutal villain is not continually engaged in rehearsing his brutality on his wife and children ! I could repeat instances of such unfounded scandal ad nauseam ; some of them so monstrous as to be incredible but for one^s personal experience of them. How they arise and are disseminated is a mystery ; but why they arise and spread rapidly abroad is clear enough. Can the ambitious youth who seeks social distinction in middle-class drawing-rooms or at suburban dinner-tables better attract the attention of his hearers and exalt his own reputation as a knowing and popular man about town, than by retailing some choice bit of gossip about a popular actor or actress ? I believe there is no better receipt. As some people believe any- thing they see in print, so many will believe anything they hear of an actor or actress they have seen on the stage. Although this readiness on the part of many persons to swallow unreal stories of men and women whom they have seen in unreal situations, springs from the conditions of the theatre, no man or woman of ordinary courage is likely to be deterred from pursuing the art of acting because, if they are in any degree successful, all sorts of pranks will be played with their private and domestic concerns. At the same time the morals of a calling are not to be judged by the irresponsible gossip that from its very conditions it is bound to excite. We would not judge 87 THE ART AND STATUS the morals of princes from the pages of a scandalous chronicle, or those of judges and barristers from the gossip of a circuit mess-room ; on the same principle we must not judge the morals of actors and actresses from the tattle of clubs and drawing-rooms. I would not assert the im- peccability of my own calling any more than I would assert the impeccability of those other classes or professions whose private lives are not public property in the sense that ours are, but I would regard with peculiar mistrust stories about any body of men and women that, like those of the dramatic profession, are so entirely at the mercy of malicious or thoughtless gossip, and I \ would, for the reasons I have given, emphatically warn those who hear scandal relating to the private lives of actors or actresses that, of all gossip and all scandal, that which hangs round the theatre is the most untrustworthy, that it is to a great extent the outcome of an illusion which, if natural and excusable, is none the less inconvenient, and that it is very liable to reckless dissemination because of the peculiar, sometimes unfortunately exaggerated interest of the public in the affairs of its victims. One statement recently made with regard to the moral aspect of the theatrical art was to the effect that purity in a woman was a serious draw- back to success as an actress a specious and invidious statement, but one, I think, not very difficult to refute. It really comes to this : as in literature, so in the theatre, a woman who has been a wife and a mother is more likely to be successful in dealing with human passions and emotions than a nun. At the same time, if acting gains so much from the actual experiences of passion, how is it that men, whose opportunities of cultivating their passions are so much more varied and extensive than those of women, do not surpass in any extraordinary degree the other sex in the delineation of those emotions that are supposed to depend on actual experience for their true expression ? The history of the stage has shown that 88 OF THE ACTOR they certainly do not. M. Coquelin's cadet's jesting re- pudiation of the virgin actress has no deeper or more unpleasant signification in regard to the efforts of a young girl to achieve success as an actress than it would have in regard to similar attempts in art or literature. I am afraid I have dealt very incompletely with what is, all said and done, a very extensive and not alto- gether unimportant subject. I have left untouched many topics suggested by the present conditions of our modern stage, for I have been rather concerned in endeavouring to dissipate certain fallacies that cling round the questions of the status of the actor's art and the general worthiness of his calling; of the present state of that art, of its advance in some directions, its retrogression in others, of its hopes and prospects in the future I have not spoken ; there are others better fitted to do so than myself. But I hope that any actor, how- ever humble his position or modest his achievement, has the right to uphold the dignity of the art which he pursues. There is no question that, though greatly diminished in extent and power of recent years, there still exists a feeling of hostility on the part of certain classes of men against the art and calling of the actor. Though these feelings are, no doubt, shared to some extent, even by a certain number of men of intellectual distinction, I believe them to be, for the most part, the outcome of ignorance of the real nature of the art and the real con- ditions of the calling. The best proof, to my mind, that they are not rooted in truth and justice is the fact that the numbers of those who hold them are steadily de- creasing, and that the position of the actor has been advanced in this country to a higher level than in any other country in the world. 89 Colley Gibber's "Apology 91 COLLEY GIBBER'S APOLOGY A WRITER in the St. James's Gazette has said that if a conspiracy of silence could be arranged by which the theatrical world players, play-makers, and play-critics were, like the good little boy, seen and not heard of for a while, the rest of humanity would gain immeasurably, while the stage and the drama would certainly not lose. Indeed, it seems almost impossible to open any newspaper or review without lighting on criticisms, reflections, stric- tures mostly strictures on the condition of the drama, the poverty of our dramatists, the unfitness of our actors, the vulgarity of the public taste. Wise and unwise utter- ances, some earnest and impartial, some bearing all the marks of spleen and disappointment, meet one at every turn, all proceeding from those advisers, professional and unprofessional, who, ever since the theatre began to have a history, have been gathered round the bed of the sick drama, which, however, in spite of the many remedies that are being perpetually administered to it, continues to live after its own fashion, really far less hindered than might be supposed by the attentions showered upon it by well- meaning outsiders. The extraordinary and in no way diminishing hold that the theatre has ever had on the popular imagination an overflowing measure of popu- larity which is the lasting despair of its enemies and detractors will always expose it to a great deal of what 1 Read before the members of the O. P. Club, April 24th, 1904, and reprinted from Tht Nineteenth Century. 93 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY 11 one cannot at times help feeling to be rather unnecessary interference from promiscuous persons, eager to catch the public ear by dealing with a topic irresistibly attractive to the general run of mankind. Such interference must be patiently endured as springing from the nature of things. At the same time, it seems to me that it would be wiser, more dignified, in those whose business in life it is to write for, or to act on the stage, to refrain from taking part in discussions of this kind ; their work will speak for them with far greater eloquence than their words ; and if they have complaints to make about the present conditions under which they are called upon to do their work, let them set about remedying these ills from within, by deeds, not words, by practical assistance instead of the public airing of grievances that may interest and amuse the public but will never become to them matters of real concern. I am going to ask you to lend your consideration for a short space to a book little known, indeed, to the ordinary reader, little known, I have no doubt, at the present day to many actors, authors, and critics ; a work not only highly edifying and instructive to those interested in the theatre, but one of the most brilliant and entertaining autobiographies in our language ; a book that Dean Swift found it impossible to lay down, that Horace Walpole declared to be " inimitable," and that is to-day as fresh, as true, and as pungent in many of its reflections and sugges- tions as it was in its author's day. The man who wrote this book this Apology for his Life, as he called it may be accounted, if not one of the great figures in the history of our actors, at least one of the most conspicuous ; the most lively, irrepressible, and good-humoured of those who as actor, author, and manager have served the theatre. For over forty of the eighty-six years of his life Colley Gibber was a busy actor ; for more than twenty of these years a successful manager; and 94 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY 11 during that time the author of some thirty comedies, tragedies, farces, adaptations, and personal interludes, all more or less successful ; he was, moreover, for the last twenty-seven years of his life, one of the worst of our many indifferent Poets Laureate a record which for activity, for quantity, if not quality of work, may stand alongside with those of Shakespeare and Garrick. Pert, foppish, vain and affected, loving the society of persons of quality, light in his morals, Colley Gibber was at the same time an honest, hard-working actor, proud of his calling, conscious of the abuses to which the theatre of his day was subject, and doing his best, when occasion offered, to mend them : a straightforward and fair-dealing manager, a shrewd and sensible man of the world, a good-humoured but dangerous adversary, as Pope and Fielding found to their cost ; above all, not a dull man, as Pope, goaded to madness by the merited, if indecorous, retort that Gibber made to the poet's insult, would have had posterity believe when he deposed Theobald to make Gibber the hero of The Dunciad. Of Gibber's dramatic works not one, if we except his adaptation of Richard III., now rarely played, holds the stage in the present day. His comedies were written to please the taste of his time, and often to furnish himself with the kind of parts in which the public delighted to see him : these were light, comic characters, chiefly of the order of fops, " coxcombs and men of fashion," old and young. In his playing of these parts, in dress, deport- ment, and manner, he was a model to the beaux of his day. He would have loved to have been accepted as a tragedian, in spite of his weak voice and insignificant appearance ; but he was wise enough to recognise wherein his real excellence lay, and when he did essay tragedy, to content himself with such characters as Richard III. and lago, in which there was less call for harmony of voice and majesty of bearing than in the Hamlets and Othellos. A 95 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" further reason he gives us for his choice of these parts and his reasons in this instance smack somewhat of excuses is that your villains are generally " better written, thicker sown with sensible reflections, and come so much nearer to common life and nature than characters pf admiration, as vice is more the practice of mankind than virtue." Be this as it may, there seems little doubt that Justice Shallow, in which he would appear to have been inimitable, and not lago or Richard, would have been Shakespeare's measure of Gibber's quality as a player. As a poet, and as laureate, Gibber was the laughing- stock of his contemporaries : it pleased his vanity to think his odes superior to those of Pindar, but it is hardly too much to say that, in the twenty-seven years during which he composed lyrics, he did not write one good line. In literature he lives by his Apology, and by his Apology alone. Though its style is often incorrect and affected, and he makes at times curiously simple blunders, it has, what no style is of any value if it lack, character. The reader will find in its pages no little wit, no little know- ledge of human nature, the ripe experience of a life spent in humouring successfully the whims and tempers of artistic colleagues, quaint and happy turns of expression, much lively description, a good deal of self-revelation, and the healthy, active spirit of the busy, tireless man to whom Horace Walpole, on meeting him when he had already passed his eighty years, exclaimed, " I am glad, sir, to see you looking so well." "Egad, sir," replied the veteran, "at eighty-four it is well for a man that he can look at all." Gibber went on the stage in the year 1690, being then nineteen years of age. His father was a sculptor of some note ; his mother belonged to an old Rutlandshire family, her grandfather, Sir Anthony Colley, having ruined him- self in the cause of King Charles I. His father had hoped to have made a parson or a soldier of Colley, but, for 96 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY' 1 various reasons, these plans miscarried, to the secret joy of the son, who had only entered the theatre to be at once possessed with that strange and invincible fascination it exercises alike over the capable and the incapable. To be an actor instead of a clergyman or a soldier was, in the seventeenth century, no small sacrifice to make in the cause of dramatic art. Gibber sets forth very fairly the advantages and disadvantages of the profession in his own day, and tells one or two anecdotes of the ill repute in which the theatre was then held. He cites a moving tale of a lady of real title whose " female indiscretions had occasioned her family to abandon her." The unfortunate lady, anxious to make an honest penny out of what beauty she had left, wanted to go on the stage. Her family, hearing of this, advised the managers of the theatre not to engage her, and they, unwilling " to make an honourable family their unnecessary enemies," felt constrained to decline her services. Gibber laments over the hard case of the lady, who found herself denied by prejudice the means of earn- ing an honest living. And he is no doubt just in his reflection. At the same time it seems doubtful whether the modern stage is to be congratulated upon the fact that recruits of this kind will in our own day find little diffi- culty in swelling at any time the ranks of the incompetent. A more serious instance of the ignominious treatment which actors were liable to suffer is that of Mr. William Smith, a barrister turned actor, a man of high moral character and very popular with people of rank. A gentleman having grossly insulted Smith behind the scenes, was dismissed the court by King James II., who was a great admirer of the actor. The courtly gentleman revenged himself upon the player by having him so soundly hooted at his next appearance that Smith withdrew for a time from the stage. But the actor showed his gratitude to the king by joining his army as a volunteer on the landing of William of Orange. 97 H COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" Certainly Smith's experience, coupled with other stories of the insolence that characterised the attitude of many so-called gentlemen in the playhouse, arouses indignation in the mind of any man ; but at the same time we must remember that there were good reasons in 1690 why the stage should be regarded by respectable persons with some disfavour, and actors should find it difficult to uphold their right to common consideration. In the first place, the gross indecency of the plays performed an indecency which in 1698 inspired Jeremy Collier's extravagant denunciation of the theatre degraded the actor's occupa- tion ; and, in the second place, the familiarity that existed between the actor and his audience seriously diminished the independence of the artist. The very conditions under which he acted, the wings crowded with gentlemen who had the run of the stage-door (" those buzzing mosquitoes who took their stand where they might best elbow the actor and come in for their share of the auditor's atten- tion"), the audience often noisy and intractable such conditions as these were hardly calculated to inspire respect for the art of the player. Again, the kind of happy family feeling that naturally sprang up between actors and audience when two theatres at most were sufficient for the needs of no doubt a very limited number of play- goers, had its inconveniences. A modest expression coming from the mouth of some admirable artist of more or less doubtful reputation, was apt to provoke " fleers from the witlings of the pit." As a consequence of the sensitiveness provoked by such impertinences, Gibber gives an instance indeed, an extraordinary instance of an actress who, conscious that beauty was not her strong point, desired that the warmth of some lines she had to speak empha- sising her personal beauty might be abated ; but he adds, " in this discretion she was alone ; few others were afraid of undeserving the finest things that could be said of them." One actress, a Mrs. Rogers, justly proud of her 98 COLLEY GIBBER'S " APOLOGY ' virtue, was in the habit of announcing it to the public. In an epilogue to an obscure play in which she acted a part of impregnable chastity, she bespoke the favour of the ladies in the audience by protesting that, in honour of their goodness and virtue, she would dedicate her un- blemished life to their example : I'll copy you ; At your own virtue's shrine my vows I'll pay, Study to live the character I play. That in her subsequent career she forgot her vow, only shows how much wiser Mrs. Rogers would have been to have let the subject alone. If the treatment accorded to the actors in Gibber's day was often familiar and impertinent, that of authors was far worse. Gibber, himself be it remembered, a popular author, complains bitterly of the severity and impatience of the audiences in their reception of a new play. " The vivacity of our modern critics is of late grown so riotous that an unsuccessful author has no more mercy shown him than a notorious cheat in a pillory ; every fool, the lowest member of the mob, becomes a wit, and will have a fling at him. They come now to a new play like hounds to a carcase, and are all in a full cry, sometimes for an hour together, before the curtain rises, to throw it amongst them. ... In a word," he concludes, "this new race of critics seem to me like the lion-whelps in the Tower, who are so boisterously gamesome at their meals, that they dash down the bowls of milk brought for their own break- fast." We must be thankful indeed that to-day the bowls of milk are at least consumed in quiet before the young lions pass judgment on their fare. Whilst Gibber enumerates those peculiar disadvantages attaching to the calling of an actor in the late years of the seventeenth century, he sets against them certain compen- sations. Apart from the pleasure derived from the exercise 99 COLLEY GIBBER'S " APOLOGY " of an art in which, as he quaintly phrases it, "to excel requires as ample endowments of nature as any one pro- fession (that of holy institution excepted)," he notices the fact that if an actor excel in his profession, he will be received among people of condition with a social distinction to which he would never have attained had he followed the most profitable pursuits of trade ; and he cites Betterton, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Nance Oldfield, and others as instances of those thus distinguished. Let us suppose, he adds, that these men had been eminent mercers and the women famous milliners, can we imagine that merely as such, though endowed with the same natural understanding, they would have been called into the same honourable parties of conversation in which, he affirms, these actors and actresses were capable of sustaining their part with spirit and variety, though the stage were never tne subject of discussion ? Gibber here touches very happily on one of the principal causes of the vulgar resentment cherished by the mercers and milliners of different ages against a calling which religious prejudice has taught them to despise, but which they find to their astonishment encouraged and courted by their social superiors a confusion of ideas that in dull capacities aggravates rather than allays resentment. He takes, too, an opportunity of administering almost contemporaneously witn Voltaire a well-deserved rebuke to the Roman Catholic Church for its treatment of actors, which was in his day one of the least charitable and amiable features of that religion. He hits the nail on the head, as Gibber often does, when he remarks that, in many countries where the Papal religion prevails, the holy policy, though it allows not an actor Christian burial, is so con- scious of the usefulness of his art, that it will frequently take in the assistance of the theatre to recommend sacred history to the more pathetic regard of the people. How then, he asks, can they refuse an actor Christian burial 100 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY 1 when they admit his profession to serve the solemn pur- poses of religion ? How far, he asks, is such inhumanity short of that famous painter's who, to make his crucifix a masterpiece of nature, stabbed the innocent hireling from whose body he drew it, and having heightened the holy portrait with his victim's last agonies of life, sent the picture to serve as the consecrated ornament of an altar ? Never was a cruel prejudice more thoroughly and trench- antly exposed. Happily such prejudice is for the most part a thing of the past, and there are now few religious bodies of any denomination that will not gladly accept the gladly -given services of actors and actresses in support of their charitable undertakings. But, even since Gibber wrote, traces of such prejudice, though in a more obscure form, are to be met with. A recent writer, I believe a Roman Catholic, in a historical monograph on " Robespierre," an admirable and picturesque, if at times histrionic, biography, misses no opportunity of insulting a profession of which he in all probability knows nothing, and allows his prejudice at least, so it appears to betray him into the most singular inaccuracy. The violent and eccentric conduct of Tallien, the conventionalist and contemporary of Robespierre, he appears to explain and justify throughout by the fact that he had been a comedian, an actor. I should very much like to know what evidence he can produce that Tallien was ever an actor ? Is he not thinking of Collot d'Herbois ? And if Tallien were an actor and did flourish a dagger at Robespierre in the Convention, a piece of "actor's foolery," as he describes it, what, pray, of Edmund Burke and the Birmingham dagger he flourished in the House of Commons? If the writer means to imply that Tallien was an actor and it certainly reads as if he did then he is incorrect ; if he means that his conduct in flourishing a dagger in the Convention, in shedding blood in Bordeaux, in lounging in drawing-rooms posing as a southern voluptuary was the conduct of 101 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY' 1 an actor, then he is not only incorrect but unjust and offensive into the bargain. When the actor has recovered from his astonishment at such gratuitous flouts, Gibber opportunely reminds him that we actors can claim a canonised saint in the Roman Martyrology, one Masculas, master of interludes, put to death by Genseric the Vandal, with great torment and reproach, for confession of the truth ; from which and other instances, such as the fact that some ten noted actors took up arms for King Charles I. when the Civil War shut the theatres, Gibber concludes that "that there have been players of worthy principles as to religion, loyalty, and other virtues ; and if the major part of them fall under a different character, it is the general unhappiness of mankind that the most are the worst." One would hardly dwell on facts of this kind, were it not for the amazing ignorance that is at the bottom of the dregs of prejudice that still survive against the theatre, and that one sees so egregiously dis- played whenever some newspaper, reverting to a topic that always " draws,"" opens its columns to the lucubrations of the descendants of the dismal Prynne and the intemperate Collier. Colley Gibber should always at such seasons be referred to as a wholesome antidote to the doldrums and megrims of those who can neither find nor permit satisfac- tion in what he very justly describes as " the most rational scheme that human wit can form to dissipate with innocence the cares of life, to allure even the turbulent or ill-disposed from worse meditations, and to give the leisure hours of business and virtue an instructive recreation." For twenty years Gibber remained a salaried actor, playing for the most part at Drury Lane under the management of Christopher Rich. He commenced work at a salary of ten shillings a week, which just before he went into management had risen to the then considerable sum of 5 a week. This, with his benefit, brought him in some 162 for the year 1708 1709, the largest sum made 102 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" by any actor in the company that year being ^259, earned by the popular and industrious Wilks, who added to his playing the duties of stage manager. The story of Gibber's first salary is interesting. Hanging about the wings wait- ing for employment Master Colley, as he was called by his familiars, was sent on to the stage in the part of a messenger charged to deliver his message to the great actor, Thomas Betterton, perhaps the noblest figure in the recorded annals of our players, a man whose pre-eminent artistic and moral excellence made him in his day the un- questioned leader of his profession and won the respect and admiration of such various beholders as Steele, Pope, and Gibber. If his artistic genius was surpassed by Garrick and Kean, they neither of them could inspire that personal affection and regard that the generous, simple nature of Betterton extorted from his contemporaries. To this commanding actor entered Master Colley with his message, but so appalled was he to find himself in the presence of the great tragedian, that he forgot entirely message and everything. Betterton, annoyed at his confusion, asked his name. " Master Colley ! " replied the prompter. " Then forfeit him ! " " But," urged the prompter, " he has no salary." " No," replied Betterton, " then put him down ten shillings a week, and forfeit five ! " This ten shillings, so pleasantly earned by Gibber, was shortly after raised to twenty on the recommendation of Congreve, the author, and then to thirty shillings on the secession of Betterton and other of Mr. Rich's discontented actors. It was little wonder that actors who could afford to quarrel soon quitted a theatre of which Mr. Christopher Rich was the chief director. Gibber's sketch of this seventeenth-century manager is one of his happiest. The great art of Mr. Rich as a manager seems to have been to do his actors out of as much of their salary as he con- veniently could. He was as sly a tyrant, says Gibber, as ever was at the head of a theatre ; for he gave the actors 103 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" more liberty and fewer days' pay than any of his pre- decessors ; he would laugh with them over a bottle and bite them in their bargains. He would judge the merit of a leading actor by his ability to keep the other actors quiet when they had gone six weeks without any salary. He was always promising his actors what he was pleased to term " arrears," but in fifteen years Gibber declares he never received more than nine days' of them. The actors in Rich's day were paid by shares of the profits, ten going to the management, ten to the actors ; but Rich so con- trived it he had been a lawyer that " the actors were limited sharers of loss., and he the sole proprietor of profits." Much criticism is expended on our actor-managers of to-day, but it is only fair to record in their favour that it was not until Gibber, Wilks, and Dogget, three actors, took over Drury Lane in 1710 and entered on their twenty years of successful management, that a theatre was once again honestly and decently administered. It is with justifiable pride that Gibber tells us that, in the twenty years of his management, he never had a creditor that had occasion to come twice for his bill, that every Monday morning discharged us of all demands before we took a shilling for our own use : " we never asked any actor, nor were desired by them, to sign any written agreement what- soever." As he truly says, " Our being actors ourselves was an advantage to our government, which all former managers who were only idle gentlemen wanted." Among the many reforms introduced by Gibber was the closing of the stage-door to the idle gentlemen who were accustomed to haunt the wings of the theatre and elbow the actor during his performance ; and in this regard he shrewdly touches on the inadvisability of actors making themselves cheap, and allowing the curious to penetrate the mystery that should to some extent shroud the practice of their calling a mystery which it is, alas ! to-day almost impossible to preserve. " In admitting these gentlemen 104 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" behind the scenes," says Gibber, " we too often showed them the wrong side of our tapestry, and many a tolerable actor was the less valued when it was known what ordinary stuff he was made of." Gibber and his colleagues had their share of good fortune. It is not often that the author of a successful play foregoes his fees, yet such was the case with Addjson when he presented Cato, free of encumbrance, to the man- agers of Drury Lane. Cato was perhaps the greatest triumph of the Gibber management. Its production was the occasion of intense excitement, both in the literary and political world. Pope wrote a prologue for it, Garth an epilogue ; Swift came to the rehearsals and, not being accustomed to the ways of rehearsal, was very much astonished to hear the " drab that acts Gate's daughter *" stopping in the midst of a passionate part to call out to the prompter, " What's next ? " By the term " drab " Swift is describing the brilliant Mrs. Oldfield, from whom, said Horace Walpole, no bad judge, women of the first rank might have learnt behaviour, and whose morality was sufficiently respectable to allow of her interment in West- minster Abbey. Had Swift been versed in the conditions of an art the ignorance of which seems to many a literary critic the highest qualification for depreciating the art itself, he might have known that imperfection at rehearsal is sometimes the privilege of genius and no criterion of the achievement of the first night. It must be indeed a warped or unthinking prejudice that makes Pope incarnate dulness in the person of the lively Gibber, and Swift style the elegant and accomplished Mrs. Oldfield a drab. But to-day, whatever the fate of our actors, our actresses seem to be in no danger of such rude deprecia- tion as Swift treated them to, in the person of Mrs. Oldfield ; no " drabs " from the Dean are likely to affront them ; they must rather be on their guard lest they be lured to ruin by the subtle flattery of specious 105 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" wooers. Mr. Walkley, the accomplished critic of The Times, most subtle and most specious, openly courts their favours at the Royal Institution and the Playgoers 1 Club; he tells these ladies that, while we actors are something rather less than men, impaired citizens in the words of Henley, neither masters of our fates nor captains of our souls like, as I venture to think, the barrister and the novelist, dealers in emotions not our own, states of feeling, portrayals of character not our own ; our actresses, on the other hand, are something more than women ; the practice of their art induces a sublimation of their sex until they pass to something beyond it, whether in the direction of greater masculinity or some more ethereal class of being, whether they put on the wings of angels or develop the thews of men, I have never quite been able to understand. But in any case I would venture to warn these ladies against this apparently artless wooer. Beware this gay and debonair suitor ! Beware lest he be merely piping you on to ruin, until when you fall at his feet prostrate with praise, worshipping this unexpected deliverer, he turn upon you, and with the vftpw of the young Greek, the insouciance of the flippant Gaul, spurn your advances, and show you that, in becoming more than women, you have been transformed into some unattractive and un- natural cross between a Gorgon and a mermaid. I, for my part, mistrust these dulcet attempts to lure our damsels from the fold. We actors must stand together, lest our women be torn from our unmanly arms and handed over to the more virile protection of full citizens, complete masters of their fate, perfect captains of their souls. The first performance of Cato under Gibber's manage- ment was wildly successful. Addison, nervous and excited, sat in a box with Berkeley, the philosopher, fortifying his spirits with burgundy and champagne. Political feeling had been stirred by rumours of the play being a covert attack on the Tory Government ; but that seemed only to 106 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" make the approval of the audience the more unanimous ; for the Whigs applauded vociferously what they considered a Whig play, whilst the Tories applauded no less vocifer- ously to show that it was not. Lord Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, called Booth, who played Cato, into his box and presented him with fifty guineas for his honest opposition to a perpetual dictator, otherwise the Whig Duke of Marlborough ; whereupon the Whigs vowed that they also would get up a subscription of fifty guineas to present to Booth, to show their appreciation of his services to the Whig dramatist, Addison. But history does not relate whether the fortunate tragedian ever received this second dole ; he may well have been content with the first. The play on its first production ran for thirty-five nights, an unexempled record in those days. This long run was followed by a visit of the actors to Oxford, and in this connection Gibber sheds a pleasing light on his managerial ways. It had been the custom for the actors when at Oxford to play twice a day, and, as in those days there were no half salaries for matinees, they consequently received double pay. But on this occasion, as the Oxford theatre had been enlarged and the London season so successful, the managers, anxious to keep their players fresh and make the visit pleasant and profitable to the rest of their society, whilst only giving one performance in the day, paid the actors the usual double salary ; and they were no losers by their generosity. The visit was both pleasant and profitable ; the three performances of Cato were witnessed by overflowing audiences. Gibber's criticism of the respective quality of the London and Oxford audience is instructive. "A great deal," he writes, " of that false, flashy wit and forced humour which had been the delight of our metropolitan multitude, was only rated there (at Oxford) at its bare, intrinsic value." Here, he tells us, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson inspired as deep a reverence as the Ethics of Aristotle ; from which account 107 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" we may gather that whilst Cato was received with enthusiasm, the up-to-date fashionable London comedies, some of them no doubt Gibber's own, fell rather flat. Such was the Oxford of 1713. In the Oxford of 1904, whilst we have no doubt that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson still inspire the same reverence as the Ethics of Aristotle, our only fear is lest that reverence become an awful regard, too solemn to brook the rough intrusion of dramatic representation. This was a great year, this 1713, to Gibber, Wilks, and Dogget ; at the end of the season, when all expenses had been paid, they found themselves the proud possessors of <^?1,500 apiece. They left Oxford honoured with the thanks of the Vice-Chancellor for the decency and order observed by their company, an honour of which they showed their appreciation by contributing fifty pounds to the repair of St. Mary's church. Prosperous as were the years of Gibber's management, he did not escape the trials and anxieties inseparable from such a situation. The authors of bad plays were a great thorn in his side ; he complains of their persecution, and their indignation against the actors for rejecting the abortive piles of poetry that they sought to twist into the likeness of a play. Who are these actors, the indignant playwrights would exclaim, to judge of their merit? To which Gibber retorts by asking these gentlemen how they can suppose that actors can have risen to any excellence in their calling without feeling or understanding the value of such productions ? Would you have reduced them, he asks, to the mere mimicry of parrots and monkeys that can only prate and play tricks without reflection ? And he concludes by asking these gentlemen authors the very pertinent question, if neither Dryden nor Congreve, Steele nor Addison complained of the actors' incapacity to judge a play, who will believe that the slights you have met with are undeserved or particular ? We can hardly wonder at Gibber's pointed resentment against these gentlemen when 108 COLLEY GIBBERS "APOLOGY" we recall the fact that it was the usual custom of the unsuccessful author of his day to publish his play, after its failure, with a preface in which the actors of it were roundly abused and charged with its want of success. What Gibber says of his own day is equally applicable to the present time. I have often known actors abused by obscure and unsuccessful authors ; but it is very rarely that the author of distinction finds fault publicly with his players, even if he have cause. Both author and actor are too well aware that the balance of failure and success will, in the long run, generally hang fairly evenly between the two of them ; that they are both working in most cases for a common end, and that recrimination coming from either side is not only undignified and useless, but is bound to be frequently ill-considered and unjust. Gibber narrates a pleasing anecdote of one of these fine gentlemen, would-be authors, who, on the second night of the performance of his poor play, came swaggering in fine full-bottomed periwig into the lobby of the theatre with a lady of condition on his arm, and called out to the box- keeper to direct him to his seats. " Sir," replied Mr. Trott, the then box-keeper, " we have dismissed the audience, there was not company enough to pay candles ! " In which " mortal astonishment," adds Gibber, we may leave the worthy gentleman. Another source of constant trouble to the assiduous Colley were his partners in management, and of these most especially Mr. Robert Wilks, their leading actor. Wilks, a man of gentle birth holding, before he went on the stage, a post in the office of the Irish Secretary at Dublin, out of which his successor made some ,50,000, was an accomplished actor, indefatigable in his passion for work, but of a hasty and difficult temper. When, on the death of Mountford, the famous light comedian, murdered by Lord Mohun, he came to London in the hope of being his successor, he found that place already filled by one 109 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" George Powell, son of an actor, himself an able but rough and uncultivated player, of loose life and intemperate habits. The story of the dethroning of Powell by Wilks, who certainly, in the opinion of the critics of the day, had, in comedy, the inestimable advantage over his rival of being able to appear a gentleman, is the old story of the two apprentices. Though Powell had a better voice, a better ear for speaking than Wilks, as excellent and tenacious a memory, and greater assurance, by an unheedful confidence, an over-indulgence in Nantz brandy and perpetual impecuni- osity, he was soon outstripped by his industrious com- petitor, but not before the spectacle of his intemperance had cured Barton Booth (then a young man) of a love of drink which might have robbed the stage of a remarkably fine actor. It is related of poor Powell, that being in constant apprehension of Sheriff's officers, he would walk the streets carrying a sheathed sword in his hand, and if he sighted from afar a bailiff, would call out, " Get on the other side of the way, you dog ! " to which the bailiff would politely reply, " We do not want you now, Mr. Powell." Such a man could not hope to stand long against the assiduous Mr. Wilks, whose passion for work seems almost unequalled in the history of the stage. Gibber tells us how, on one occasion, Wilks had prevailed on an author to cut out of his part a long and crabbed speech which he found it difficult to master. The author consented, but Wilks, thinking it an indignity to his memory that any- thing should be considered too hard for it, went home and made himself perfect in the speech, though well knowing it was never to be spoken on the stage. Such perseverance, added to a charming and sympathetic personality, enabled Wilks to follow, though at a distance, in the steps of Betterton. " To beseech gracefully," writes Steele in the Tatler, "to approach respectfully, to pity, to mourn, to love, are the places wherein Wilks may be made to shine with the utmost beauty." 110 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY' 1 Such was Wilks as an actor ; but as manager, if we may believe Gibber, he was a perpetual trial to his colleagues. His temper was impossible, his jealousy, like that of many artists, ever wakeful, his greed for parts insatiable. No amount of money could compensate him for a bad part ; the great success of the revival of the Tempest only dis- gusted him, because it condemned him to go on playing the indifferent role of Ferdinand. If he ever gave up one of his parts, it was only to appear magnanimous, and by surrendering it to some raw young actor, to be the more regretted in it. In accordance with such a plan, he, on one occasion, surrendered the part of Macduff, in which he had won enthusiastic praise, to a young recruit to the com- pany, one Charles Williams, contenting himself with what was then considered the less effective part of Macbeth. Booth, his fellow- manager and rival tragedian, was to play Banquo, but, hearing of Wilks's change of characters and suspecting the real motive, he went to Williams and asked him to give him Macduff in exchange for Banquo. Williams readily consented, but no sooner did the news reach Wilks that the experienced Booth and not the inexperienced Williams was to be his successor in Macduff, than he immediately gave up his projected appearance as Macbeth and resumed his old part. But Gibber gives a yet more amusing instance of the difficult temper of his colleague. Wilks, it appears, was in the habit of constantly complaining that he was over- worked a drudge, in fact ; that he needed rest and repose. At length Gibber and Booth, weary of these protestations, determined to try their value. They were about to revive Vanbrugh's comedy of The Provoked Wife. Here seemed an excellent opportunity for testing the alleged fatigue of Wilks. After the play, which had been in some degree revised since its original production, had been read to the company, Gibber turned to Wilks. Says Gibber, the part 111 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY 11 of Constant in this play being a character of less action than he, Wilks, had generally appeared in, this seemed a fitting occasion for him to ease himself by giving it to another; here Wilks looked grave that, as the love scenes, suggested Gibber, were rather serious than gay, the part might sit very well on Booth ; down dropped Wilks's brow, furled were his features that if, continued Gibber, they were never to revive a play without him, what would they do if he were indisposed ? here Wilks pretended to stir the fire that for one, urged Gibber, in Wilks's position it was unprofitable trouble to play so un- important a part. At this point, says Gibber, the pill began to gripe him ; Wilks, bursting into a passion, charged his colleagues with a desire to ruin him with the public, and, flinging the part on the table, sat knocking his heel on the floor. Booth, to calm him down, said he quite saw his point ; that, after all, acting was the most wholesome exercise in the world in fact, it always gave him, Booth, a good stomach. At this point Mrs. Oldfield, who was to play the opposite part to Wilks's Constant, began to titter behind her fan. The titter seemed to suggest to Wilks a sudden way out of his embarrassment. He turned to Mrs. Oldfield and said that if she would choose her own Constant, he would readily give it up to whomsoever she might select. Whereupon Mrs. Oldfield jumped to her feet, took Gibber by the shoulder, with her usual frankness called them all a parcel of fools to make such a rout about nothing, and insisted on Wilks sticking to the part. Thus, by help of a woman's ready wit, ended happily a very quaint and amusing scene ; but Wilks had been made to see that his fellow-managers understood the proper value of his complaints. Gibber, in spite of their disagreements and the frequent trouble and offence caused by Wilks's irascible disposition, acknowledges its service as a rod by which to keep in order the hired actors, and prevent slackness and carelessness 112 entering into the performances. The sharp authority exercised by Wilks on the stage made the dreaming idleness and jolly negligence of rehearsal, which had grown up under Powell's casual supervision, things unknown while Gibber and Wilks were managers of Drury Lane. Even the great Betterton, from his gentle, easy temper, had proved himself incapable of keeping order among his players ; so that we may consider Mr. Wilks well worth that extra 50 a year paid him by his colleagues nominally for writing out the playbills, really for keeping order and preserving discipline behind the scenes. In another of his managerial troubles Gibber touches us very nearly. We are accustomed to think to-day that never was the legitimate drama in so parlous a condition, never did the more serious forms of dramatic entertainment have so hard a struggle for life. To mention only musical comedy, the most powerful rival of the legitimate drama in the affection of the public, here we have a highly delightful species of theatrical fare spread before the public with a skill, a luxury, a distinction that have never before been bestowed on them ; artists of the highest quality are engaged in its service ; nothing is spared to render it attractive, and ample has been, and is, the reward of those who have lavished so much pains on its adornment. And in addition to this attractive competitor, we have on the one side the opera, now an annual institution ; on the other music halls and circuses flourishing in popular favour. Certainly the conditions are difficult, more difficult than ever before ; the legitimate drama has to battle bravely to keep its head above the waters of public taste. But, when we read Gibber's Apology, we are inclined to ask, Was it not ever thus? Had not the purveyors of the drama pure and simple ever the same contest with the natural tendency of busy men to fly to forms of entertain- ment that offer a few hours of thoughtless enjoyment, the natural tendency of the crowd to the more frivolous forms 113 i COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" of relaxation ? Though the struggle may be more intense now that men lead more rapid, strenuous lives, and con- sequently require in a greater measure light and mentally restful entertainment, may we not to-day take some con- solation from the fact that it is no new struggle we are watching, no peculiar affliction of our own generation, that the successful exponents of serious drama in the past had to fight the same battle, to hold up their heads against the same competing forces, different in style, but similar in kind. Gibber would have us believe such a struggle is as old as the days of Terence, who in one of his prologues reproves the Roman audience of his day for their fondness for the " funambuli," or rope-dancers. It is certainly as old as Horace. With Colley Gibber the wail of the injured manager and dramatist is continuous throughout the pages of the Apology, whilst we find Dryden, Pope, Steele, and later Dr. Johnson complaining constantly of the degrada- tion of the drama by the introduction of singers, dancers, puppets, and elephants on a stage that should, in their opinion, be reserved for the productions of pure tragedy and comedy. Gibber reproaches Sir William Davenant with being the first manager to try to combat the success of a rival company of actors more popular than his own by resorting to the production of dramatic operas, and ver- sions of The Tempest and Macbeth decked out in expensive scenes and habits, and lightened by the efforts of the best singers and dancers ; says Gibber, it was little wonder that these frivolous spectacles grew too hard for sense and simple nature, when it is considered how many more people there are that can see and hear than think and judge. Later Betterton is rebuked for having brought over three famous French dancers, " mimics and tumblers," and we find an angry dramatist exclaiming in a prologue : Must Shakespeare, Fletcher and laborious Ben Be left for Scaramouch and Harlequin ? 134 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY 1 Anon, Italian opera steals in, in the person of one Valentini, a true and sensible singer, according to Gibber, but " of a throat too weak to sustain those melodious warblings for which the fairer sex have since idolised his successors."" Horror upon horror accumulates when Rich, always anxious, as Gibber admits, to please the majority, meditates the introduction on to his stage of a phenomen- ally large elephant, and is only deterred from the outrage by the bricklayer's assurance that if he takes down any part of the wall to admit the beast, the elephant will assuredly bring down the house. Cheated of his elephant, Rich fell back on some rope-dancers. This was too much for Gibber, then a member of Rich's company. On the first night of the rope-dancers 1 performance the indignant actor stepped down into the pit, and told those sitting near him that he hoped they would excuse him if he declined any longer to appear on a stage brought so low as it was by that night's disgraceful entertainment ; and he tells us the audience took the player's protest in good part, and Rich was obliged shortly after to get rid of his rope-dancers. From all quarters, it would appear, the actors of the eighteenth century received sympathy in a predicament of this kind. Gibber relates how a nobleman, indignant at the attention an opera was attracting at one of the theatres, told Gibber that it was shameful to take part of the actors 1 bread from them to support the silly diversion of people of quality. One can hardly help contrasting with the utterance of this nobleman that of the Viscount in Martin Chuzzlewit. " What's the good of Shakespeare, Pip ? " he asks. " I never read him. What the devil is it all about, Pip ? There's a lot of feet in Shakespeare's verse, but there ain't any legs worth mentioning in Shakespeare's plays, are there, Pip ? Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the rest of 'em, whatever their names are, might as well have no legs at all, for anything the audience know about it, Pip. . . . I'll tell you what it is. What the 115 COLLEY GIBBER'S ''APOLOGY 11 people call dramatic poetry is a collection of sermons. Do I go to the theatre to be lectured ? No, Pip. If I wanted that, I'd go to church. What's the legitimate object of the drama, Pip ? Human nature. What are legs ? Human nature. Then let us have plenty of leg pieces, Pip, and I'll stand by you, my buck ! " As to which of these two noblemen are to be regarded as voicing the true sentiments of the majority of their order at the present day towards the relative merits of serious and light entertainments, we cannot pause to determine ; we can only express a passing hope that the Viscount has not got it all his own way. But Nemesis, in the shape of managerial necessity, was to overtake Gibber, and bring him to his knees for his affronts to the singers and dancers. When he had been manager of Drury Lane for some time he found himself obliged, from the accustomed lack of sufficiently good plays, to fight a rival theatre by resorting to these same singers and dancers whom he had roundly censured, and to all the arts and graces of pantomime. The Loves of Mars and Venus was the first of these crutches, as he calls them, to which he was driven for support ; thence swiftly declining, we find him producing Harlequin Sorcerer, in which Harlequin is hatched on the stage from a huge egg, and so incurring the castigation of his enemy, Pope, who, alluding to this entertainment and its scenic triumphs, writes in The Dunciad : The forests dance, the rivers upward rise, Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies ; And last, to give the whole creation grace, Lo ! one vast Egg produces human race ! And again : But, lo ! to dark encounter in mid air New wizards rise : here Booth, and Gibber there, Booth in his cloudy tabernacle shrin'd, On grinning Dragons Cibber mounts the wind. 116 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY* Gibber was much too shrewd and honest not to be con- scious of his guilt in this respect, and confess his error in making use of fooleries he had condemned. And he seeks to excuse himself by drawing a parallel between his own conduct and that of King Henry IV. of France in adopting the Roman Catholic religion to suit the exigencies of his political situation. " I was still in my heart," he writes, " as much on the side of truth and sense as the French King, but with this difference, that I had leave to quit them when they could not support me ; for what equivalent could I have found for falling a martyr to them ? " And he goes on in a pleasant spirit to justify his vanity in venturing to compare his conduct with that of so great a man as Henry IV. " What I want of the king's grandeur, nature has amply supplied to me in vanity, a pleasure which neither the pertness of wit nor the gravity of wisdom will ever persuade me to part with. . . . Vanity is of all complexions, the growth of every clime and capacity ; authors of all ages have had a tincture of it ; and yet you read Horace, Montaigne, and Sir William Temple with pleasure. Nor am I sure, if it were curable by precept, that mankind would be mended by it. Could vanity be eradicated from our nature, I am afraid that the reward of most human virtues would not be found in this world. And happy is he who has no greater sin to answer for in the next ! "" With this pleasing admission of a fault which, confessed, loses half its mischief, let us leave old Gibber. Over his sketches, brilliant many of them, of his brother actors, over his quarrel with Pope, over the many incidents of his varied, busy life that he narrates with such unfailing spirit, such a humorous appreciation of the realities of things, of the good and ill in human character, I have no time to linger ; I can only advise those who read "me to turn to the book itself, which will very pleasantly while away a leisure hour. It is a book which must have an abiding interest for 117 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY" those who are lovers of the theatre. Gibber has some- thing to say to us after two hundred years have gone by, because his book is written from the inside of the theatre, not from without ; not by one ignorant of actors, unsympathetic towards their art, but by a successful actor, manager and author, a man who, whatever his faults of character, at least loved and respected his profession, up- held its dignity, reformed its abuses, and paid his way as an honest man ; one of the best as he was one of the first of actor-managers. Gibber's Apology is the shrewd reply of the practical man of the world to the pedants and theorists who, sitting in their studies, would fain conduct from their desks the business of the theatre. And it is the best reply to those who would have us believe that the actor is a strange, peculiar being, something rather less than a man, but possibly more than a monkey, an impaired, unmanly citizen. Gibber's actors and actresses, as he pictures them for us in his book, are on the whole as good specimens of ordinary men and women as we are likely to meet with in any other society of his day ; and they are the same now. There are, of course, and have been, actors and actors, as there are varied specimens of every class ; actors, like Betterton, great and worthy men ; like Scum Goodman who, in addition to being an actor, was a cheat, a highway- man, a traitor, and a would-be murderer ; the Addisons and the Savages, the Johnsons and the Boyces of our calling; but in their essential characteristics no different from other men, neither better nor worse. When I read these disquisitions on the natural inferiority of the actor as a man, I am irresistibly reminded of Mr. Disraeli's famous speech before the Oxford Diocesan Society on the Darwinian theory of the descent of man, when he asked, " What is the question placed before society with such glib assurance ? Is man an ape or an angel ? My Lord," he replied, addressing the bishop who presided, 118 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY 11 " I am on the side of the angels." When we hear it asked whether the actor is rather less than a man, a damaged specimen of humanity, or whether he is a man and an artist in the ordinary acceptance of the terms, may we not range ourselves on the side of the angels, on the side of such great and glorious men of genius as Goethe and Voltaire, Lessing and Hazlitt, who admired and respected the art of the player, the achievements of the theatre ; on the side of those two good archbishops, Bancroft and Tillotson, who admitted actors to their society and enjoyed the friendship of the great players of their day ? To deny the full privilege of manhood to the actor, to take from him but one jot or tittle of full citizenship in whatever state he has his place, is, in the words of Mr. Disraeli, foreign to the conscience of humanity, a conclusion that from the strictest intellectual point of view cannot be sustained. The history of the theatre, of the careers of those whose lives have been devoted to its service, furnishes abundant and overwhelming proof, that, if we are to quote Henley's poem in this relation, to live a few hours on the stage in those "knightly years that have gone with the old world to the grave," be it as King in Babylon or Christian slave, does not unsex the player or impair his character ; that he is as much the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, as the advocate who pleads for the man he cannot help knowing to be guilty, the journalist who has to sustain a cause against which his inward conviction rebels, or the novelist who throws the full energy of his genius into the creation of some splendid type of human villainy. The prejudice against the actor is dying, but, like any prejudice that has religion to support it, it is dying hard. A prejudice that can cite pulpit justification for uncharit- able conduct is such is the inconsistency of human nature strangely hard to kill ; any opportunity that a Chadband 119 COLLEY GIBBER'S APOLOGY" can enjoy of looking down on and anathematising one not too obviously his inferior, will be ever welcome to crawling minds. But that such a prejudice is anything but one of those many unsightly masks by which in past ages human weakness has hidden the face of true religion I refuse to believe. And the religion of the future will wonder at those who have shuddered and held up their hands at what Gibber has well described as " the most rational scheme that human wit could form to dissipate with innocence the cares of life," and will consider the man who has devoted his life to such a cause no mean citizen, no unworthy servant to the public good. Of course, we actors must not look to all men for sympathy, nor expect it from them. As some men of high ability, of refined taste in many things, are deaf to the charms of music, it has no appeal to them, the sense of it is lacking in their natures ; so are there men of culture and attainment, men of genius like Rousseau, to whom the art of acting makes no appeal, who have no sympathy with the actor's work. Such men have, no doubt, at different times been called on to write about the theatre, and that they should write with little sympathy is all that we can expect ; nor should we resent what we cannot correct. But we have at least the right to ask that such a want of sympathy should be the strongest reason for making any man pause and consider before he proclaims himself to be the constant witness or judge of what, if it be true that to act unmans a man, must be a degrading spectacle, before he even suggests, however ingeniously, against any section of his fellow-men that, in comparison with himself, in comparison with those who watch and enjoy their achievements, they are impaired and unmanly citizens. In all times and ages since the theatre has been established, and never more so than at the present day, the actor, to succeed and hold his own, to encounter the difficulties, the 120 COLLEY GIBBER'S "APOLOGY chances, the, at times, cruel anxieties of his calling, has required, shall I say, a greater mastery of his fate, a higher captaincy of soul, than many another man is called on to exercise whose work is done in more peaceful and secure surroundings ; and when I look around on the careers of those who are to-day at the head of my profession, I feel that, whatever the varieties of their artistic achievement, to reach the positions to which they have attained they have had to exercise those same qualities of endurance, pluck, determination and self-control that we look for in all men who have made their mark, in however modest a sphere, on the history of their time. 121 The Calling of the Actor 123 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR I RECEIVED, not very long ago, in a provincial town, a letter from a young lady, who wished to adopt the stage as a profession but was troubled in her mind by certain anxieties and uncertainties. These she desired me to relieve. The questions asked by my correspondent are rather typical questions questions that are generally asked by those who, approaching the stage from the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intel- lectually contemptible ; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a " fancy for the stage," and has " heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a " fancy for the stage " is in itself the height of folly. There is no calling, I would venture to say, which demands on the part of the aspirant greater search- ing of heart, thought, deliberation, real assurance of fitness, reasonable prospect of success before deciding to follow it, than that of the actor. And not the least advantage of a dramatic school lies in the fact that some of its pupils may learn to reconsider their determination to go on the stage, become convinced of their own unfitness, recognise in time that they will be wise to abandon a career which must always be hazardous and difficult even to those who 1 A lecture given to the students of the Academy of Dramatic Art, reprinted from The Fortnightly Review. 125 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR are successful, and cruel to those who fail. Let it be something far sterner and stronger than mere fancy that decides you to try your fortunes in the theatre. My correspondent says she has "heard a great many things about the stage." If I might presume to offer a piece of advice, it would be this : " Never believe anything you hear about actors and actresses from those who are not actually familiar with them." The amount of nonsense and untruth (sometimes mischievous, often silly) talked by otherwise rational people about the theatre, would be in- conceivable were it not for one^s own personal experience. It is one of the penalties of the glamour, the illusion of the actor's art, that the public who see men and women in fictitious but highly exciting and moving situations on the stage, cannot believe that when they quit the theatre, they leave behind them the emotions, the actions they have portrayed there. And as there is no class of public servants in whom the public they serve take so keen an interest as actors and actresses, the wildest inventions about their private lives and domestic behaviour pass as current, and are eagerly retailed at afternoon teas in suburban drawing-rooms. Now, the first question my correspondent asks me is this : " Does a young woman going on the stage need a good education and also to know languages ? " To answer the first part of the question is not, I think, very difficult. The supremely great actor or actress of natural genius need have no education or knowledge of languages ; it will be immaterial whether he or she has enjoyed all the advantages of birth and education or has been picked up in the streets ; genius, the highest talent, will assert itself irrespective of antecedents. But I should say that any sort of education was of the greatest value to an actor or actress of average ability, and that the fact that the ranks of the stage are recruited to-day to a certain extent from our great schools and universities, from among classes of 126 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR people who fifty years ago would never have dreamed of entering our calling, is one on which we may congratulate ourselves. Though the production of great actors and actresses will not be affected either one way or the other by these circumstances, at the same time our calling must benefit in the general level of its excellence, in its fitness to represent all grades of society on the stage, if those who follow it are picked from all classes, if the stage has ceased to be regarded as a calling unfit for a man or woman of breeding or education. The second question this lady asks me is this : " Does she need to have her voice trained, and about what age do people generally commence to go on the stage ? " The first part of this question as to voice training touches on the value of an Academy of Acting. Of the value the practical value of such an institution, rightly conducted, there can be no doubt. That acting cannot be taught is a well-worn maxim, and perhaps a true one ; but acting can be disciplined ; the ebullient, sometimes eccentric and disordered manifestations of budding talent may be modi- fied by the art of the teacher ; those rudiments, which many so often acquire painfully in the course of rehearsal, the pupils who leave an academy should be already masters of, and so they will save much time and trouble to those whose business it is to produce plays. The want of any means of training the beginner, of coping at all with the floods of men and women, fit and unfit, who are ever clamouring at the doors of the theatre, has been a long-crying and much-felt grievance. The establishment of this academy should go far to remove what has been by no means an unjust reproach to our theatrical system. As to the age at which a person should begin a theatrical career, I do not think there is any actor or actress who would not say that it is impossible to begin too early at least, as early as a police magistrate will allow. That art is long and life short applies quite as truthfully to the actor's as to 127 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR any other art, and as the years go on there must be many who regret that they did not sooner decide to follow a calling which seems to carry one all too quickly through the flight of time. My correspondent also asks me a question which I shall answer very briefly, but which it is as well should be answered. She writes : " Are there many temptations for a girl on the stage, and need she necessarily fall into them ? " Of course there are such temptations on the stage, as there must be in any calling in which men and women are brought into contact on a footing of equality ; perhaps these temptations are somewhat intensified in the theatre. At the same time I would venture to say, from my own experience of that branch of theatrical business with which I have been connected and in such matters one can only speak from personal experience that any woman yielding to these temptations has only herself to blame, that any well-brought-up, sensible girl will, and can, avoid them altogether, and that I should not make these temptations a ground for dissuading any young woman in whom I might be interested from joining our calling. To say, as a writer once said, that it was im- possible for a girl to succeed on the stage without impaired morals, is a statement as untrue as to say that no man can succeed as a lawyer unless he be a rogue, a doctor unless he be a quack, a parson unless he be a hypocrite. To all who intend to become actors and actresses, my first word of advice would be : Respect this calling you have chosen to pursue. You will often in your experience hear it, see it in print, slighted and contemned. There are many reasons for this. Religious prejudice, fostered by the traditions of a by no means obsolete Puritanism, is one ; the envy of those who, forgetting the disadvantages, the difficulties, the uncertainty of the actor's life, see only the glare of popular adulation, the glitter of the comparatively large salaries paid to a few such 128 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR unreasoning envy as this is another ; and the want of sympathy of some writers with the art itself, who, unable to pray with Goethe and Voltaire, remain to scoff with Jeremy Collier, is a third. There are causes from without that will always keep alive a certain measure of hostility towards the player. The public regard for the actor provokes in some instances the resentment of those whose achievements in art appeal less immediately, less strikingly, to their audience. But if they would only pause to consider, surely they might lay to their souls the unction that the immediate reward of the actor in his lifetime is merely nature's compensation to him for the comparative oblivion of his achievements when he has ceased to be. Imagine for one moment Shakespeare and Garrick con- templating at the present moment from the heights the spectacle of their fame. Who would grudge the actor the few years of fervid admiration he was privileged to enjoy some hundred and fifty years ago as compared with the centuries of living glory that have fallen to the great poet? Sometimes you may hear your calling sneered at by those who pursue it. There are few professions that are not similarly girded at by some of their own members, either from disappointment or some ingrained discontent. When you hear such detraction, fix your thoughts not on the paltry accidents of your art, such as the use of cos- metics and other little infirmities of its practice, things that are obvious marks for the cheap sneer, but look rather to what that art is capable of in its highest forms to what is the essence of the actor's achievement, what he can do and has done to win the genuine admiration and respect of those whose admiration and respect have been worth the having. You will read and hear, no doubt, in your experience, that acting is in reality no art at all, that it is mere sedulous copying of nature, demanding neither thought nor 129 K THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR originality. I will only cite in reply a passage from a letter of the poet Coleridge to the elder Charles Mathews, which, I venture to think, goes some way to settle the question. "A great actor,"" he writes, "comic or tragic, is not to be a mere copy, a fac-simile, but an imitation of nature ; now an imitation differs from a copy in this, that it of necessity implies and demands a difference, whereas a copy aims at identity ; and what a marble peach on the mantelpiece, that you take up deluded and put down with a pettish disgust, is compared with a fruit-piece of Van- huysen's, even such is a mere copy of nature, with a true histrionic imitation. A good actor is Pygmalion's statue, a work of exquisite art, animated and gifted with motion ; but still art, still a species of poetry." So writes Cole- ridge. Raphael, speaking of painting, expresses the same thought, equally applicable to the art of acting. "To paint a fair one," he says, " it is necessary for me to see many fair ones ; but because there is so great a scarcity of lovely women, I am constrained to make use of one certain ideal, which I have formed to myself in my own fancy." So the actor who has to portray Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth any great dramatic character has to form an ideal of such a character in his own fancy, in fact, to employ an exercise of imagination similar to that of the painter who seeks to depict an ideal man or woman ; the actor certainly will not meet his types of Hamlet and Othello in the street. But, whilst in your hearts you should cherish a firm respect for the calling, the art you pursue, let that respect be a silent and modest regard ; it will be all the stronger for that. I have known actors and actresses who were always talking about their art with a big A, their " art- life,"" their "life- work," their careers and futures, and so on. Keep these things to yourselves, for I have observed that eloquence and hyper-earnestness of this kind not infrequently go with rather disappointing achievement. 130 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR Think, act, but don't talk about it. And, above all, be- cause you are actors and actresses, for that very reason be sincere and unaffected ; avoid rather than court publicity, for you will have quite enough of it if you get on in your profession ; the successful actor is being constantly tempted to indiscretion. Do not yield too readily to the blandish- ments of the photographer or the enterprising editor who asks you what are the love scenes you have most enjoyed playing on the stage, and whether an actor or actress can be happy though married. Be natural on the stage, and be just as natural off it ; regard the thing you have to do as work that has to be done to the best of your power ; if it be well done it will bring its own reward. It may not be an immediate reward, but have faith, keep your purpose serious, so serious as to be almost a secret ; bear in mind that ordinary people expect you, just because you are actors and actresses, to be extraordinary, unnatural, peculiar ; do your utmost at all times and seasons to dis- appoint such expectations. English actors and actresses should remember that they are fortunate at least in one respect ; in no country in the world are actors so well considered, so socially acceptable as here in England. This was true more than a hundred years ago, when Voltaire bitterly compared the refusal of the Roman Catholic Church in France to bury with decency the famous actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur, with the fact that our Nance Oldfield was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. It is equally true in, of course, a modified form to-day. Whilst, abroad, in some countries the actor and actress are barely regarded as ordinary citizens, here in England they labour under few serious disabilities. To the successful actor society, if he desire it, offers a warm and cordial welcome. The fact of a man being an actor does not debar him from such gratification as he may find in the social pleasures. And I believe that the effect of such a raising of the actor's status as has been witnessed 131 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR in the last fifty years has been to elevate the general tone of our calling and bring into it men and women of education and refinement. At the same time, remember that social enjoyments should always be a secondary consideration to the actor, something of a luxury to be sparingly indulged in. An actor should never let himself be beguiled into the belief that society, generally speaking, is seriously interested in what he does, or that popularity in drawing-rooms con- notes success in the theatre. It does nothing of the kind. Always remember that you can hope to have but few, very few, friends or admirers of any class who will pay to see you in a failure ; you will be lucky if a certain number do not ask you for free admission to see you in a success. It is to a public far larger, far more real and genuine than this, that you will one day have to appeal. It is in their presence that you will finish your education. The final school for the actor is his audience ; they are the necessary complement to the exercise of his art, and it is by the impression he produces on them that he will ultimately stand or fall ; on their verdict, and on their verdict alone, will his success or failure as an artist depend. But, if you have followed carefully, assiduously, the course of instruction now open to you, when the time has arrived for you to face an audience you will start with a very considerable handicap in your favour. If you have learnt to move well and to speak well, to be clear in your enuncia- tion and graceful in your bearing, you are bound to arrest at once the attention of any audience, no matter where it may be, before whom you appear. Obvious and necessary as are these two acquirements of graceful bearing and correct diction, they are not so generally diffused as to cease to be remarkable. Consequently, however modest your beginning on the stage, however short the part you may be called upon to play, you should find immediately the benefit of your training. You may have to unlearn 132 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR a certain amount, or rather to mould and shape what you have learnt to your new conditions ; but if you have been well grounded in the essential elements of an actor's education, you will start with an enormous advantage over such of your competitors as have waited till they go into a theatre to learn what can be acquired just as well, better, more thoroughly, outside it. It has been my object to deal generally with the actor's calling, a calling difficult and hazardous in character, demanding much patience, self-reliance, determination, and good temper. This last is not one of its least important demands on your character. Remember that the actor is not in one sense of the word an independent artist ; it is his misfortune that the practice of his art is absolutely dependent on the fulfilment of elaborate external con- ditions. The painter, the musician, so long as they can find paint and canvas, ink and paper, can work at their art, alone, independent of external circumstances. Not so the actor. Before he can act, the theatre, the play, scenery, fellow -actors, these requisites, not by any means too easy to find, must be provided. And then it is in the company of others, his colleagues, that his work has to be done. Consequently patience, good temper, fairness, un- selfishness, are qualities he will do well to cultivate, and he will lose nothing, rather gain, by the exercise of them. The selfish actor is not a popular person, and, in my experience, not as a rule a successful one. " Give and take," in this little world of the theatre, and you will be no losers by it. Learn to bear failure and criticism patiently. They are part of the actor's lot in life. Critics are rarely animated by any personal hostility in what they may write about us, though we are always inclined when we read an unfavourable criticism, to set it down to anything but our own deserving. I heard a great actor once say that we should never read criticisms of ourselves till a week 133 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR after they were written admirable counsel but I fear we have not, many of us, yet reached that pitch of self- restraint that would enable us to overcome our curiosity for seven days. It is, however, a state of equanimity to look forward to. In the meantime, content yourselves with the recollection that ridicule and damning criticism have been the lot at some time in their lives of the most famous actors and actresses, that the unfavourable verdict of to-day may be reversed to-morrow. It is no good resenting failure ; turn it to account rather ; try to understand it, and learn something from it. The uses of theatrical adversity may not be sweet, but, rightly understood, they may be very salutary. Do not let failure make you despond. Ours is a calling of ups and downs ; it is an advantage of its uncertainty that you never know what may happen next ; the darkest hour may be very near the dawn. This is where Bohemian- ism, in the best sense of the term, will serve the actor. I do not mean by Bohemianism chronic intemperance and insolvency ; I mean the gay spirit of daring and enterprise that greets failure as graciously as success, the love of your own calling and your comrades in that calling a love that, no matter what your measure of success, will ever remain constant and enduring ; the recognition of the fact that, as an actor, you but consult your own dignity in placing your own calling as a thing apart, in leading such a life as the necessities of that calling may demand, and choosing your friends among those who regard you for yourself, not those to whom an actor is a social puppet, to be taken up and dropped as he happens for the moment to be more or less prominent in the public eye. If this kind of Bohemianism has some root in your character, you will find the changes and chances of your calling the easier to endure. Do not despond in failure, neither be over-exalted by success. Remember one success is as nothing in the history 134 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR of an actor's career ; he has to make many before he can lay claim to any measure of fame ; and over-confidence, an inability to estimate rightly the value of a passing triumph, has before now harmed incalculably many an actor or actress. You will only cease to learn your business when you quit it ; look on success as but another lesson learnt to be turned to account in learning the next. The art of the actor is no less difficult, no less long in comparison with life, than any other art. In the intoxicating hour of success let this chastening thought have some place in your recollection. When you begin work as actors or actresses, act when- ever you can and whatever you can. Remember that the great thing for the actor is to be seen as often as possible, to be before the public as much as he can, no matter how modest the part, how insignificant the production. It is only when an actor has reached a position very secure in the public esteem that he can afford, or that it may be his duty, to be careful as to what he undertakes. But before such a time is reached his one supreme object must be to get himself known to the public, to let them see his work under all conditions, until they find something to identify as peculiarly his own ; he should think nothing too small or unimportant to do, too tiresome or laborious to undergo. Work well and conscientiously done must attract attention ; there is a great deal of lolling and idle- ness among the many thoughtless and indifferent persons who drift on to the stage as the last refuge of the negligent or incompetent. The stage will always attract a certain number of worthless recruits because it is so easy to get into the theatre somehow or other ; there is no examina- tion to be passed, no qualification to be proved before a person is entitled to call himself an actor. And then the life of an actor is unfortunately, in these days of long runs, one that lends itself to a good deal of idleness and waste of time, unless a man or woman be very determined to 135 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR employ their spare time profitably. For this reason, I should advise any actor or actress, especially in London, to cultivate some rational hobby or interest by the side of their work ; for until the time comes for an actor to assume the cares and labours of management, he must have a great deal of time on his hands that can be better employed than in hanging about clubs or lolling in drawing-rooms. At any rate, the actor or actress who thinks no work too small to do, and to do to the utmost of his or her ability, who neglects no opportunity that may be turned to account and every line he or she speaks is an opportunity must outstrip those young persons who, though they may be pleased to call themselves actors and actresses, never learn to regard the theatre as anything but a kind of enlarged back drawing-room, in which they are invited to amuse themselves at an altogether inadequate salary. In regard to salary, when you start in your profession, do not make money your first consideration ; do not suffer a few shillings or a pound or two to stand between you and work. This is a consideration you may keep well in mind, even when you have achieved some measure of success. Apart from the natural tendency of the individual to place a higher value on his services than that attached to them by others, it is often well to take something less than you ask, if the work offered you is useful. Remember that the public judge you by your work ; they know nothing and care little about what is being paid you for doing it., To some people their own affairs are of such supreme importance that they cannot believe that their personal concerns are unknown to, and unregarded by, the outside world. The intensely personal, individual character of the actor's work is bound to induce a certain temptation to an exaggerated egotism. We are all egotists, and it is right that we should be, up to a point. But I would urge the young actor or actress to be always on the watch against developing, especially in success, an extreme egotism which 136 THE CALLING OF THE ACTOR induces a selfishness of outlook, an egregious vanity that in the long run weakens the character, induces disappoint- ment and discontent, and bores to extinction other persons. Disraeli on one occasion, when asked to speak words of pregnant wisdom to the small child of an admirer, laid his hand on the infant's head, and said, " My dear child, never ask who cut off the head of King Charles I., or wrote The Letters of Junius ; for, if you do, people will regard you as a bore, and that is the worst thing that can befall any man. 1 ' I cannot help thinking that had Disraeli encountered some of those actors and actresses whose one absorbing topic is themselves, their careers, their futures, their triumphs, and their grievances, he would have said, " Do by all means ask who cut off Charles I.'s head, or who wrote The Letters of Junius ; study the questions exhaus- tively, and talk about them at every opportunity ; anything, any subject, however trite or well worn, would be preferable to the very limited and comparatively uninteresting topic of yourself." I would not for one moment advise an actor never to talk " shop " ; it is a great mistake to think that men and women should never talk in public or private about the thing to which they devote their lives ; people, as a rule, are most interesting on the subject of their own particular business in life. Talk about the affairs of the theatre within reason, and with due regard to the amenities of polite conversation, but do not confuse the affairs of the theatre, broadly speaking, with your own. The one is lasting, general ; the other particular and fleeting. " II n'y a pas de Thomme necessaire." Many persons would be strangely surprised if they could see how rapidly their place is filled after they are gone, no matter how consider- able their achievement. It may not be filled in the same way, as well, as fittingly, but it will be filled, and humanity will content itself very fairly well with the substitute. This is especially true of the work of the actor. He can but live as a memory, and memory is proverbially short. 137 The True Story of Eugene Aram 139 THE TRUE STORY OF EUGENE ARAM 1 THE poet, the novelist, and the dramatist have vied with one another in lending the charm of romance to the history of Eugene Aram ; love and remorse have spread their becoming cloaks over his misdeeds ; the commonplace of fiction has adorned the commonplace of fact. But it not infrequently happens that, in disengaging fact from fable, the plain truth from the attractive lie, real circumstances come to light as interesting and extraordinary as any that can be invented by the imagination of the story-teller. To record as distinct and yet present in the one man the attributes of the thoughtful and gifted scholar and those of the sordid and deliberate murderer must surely yield a more profitable and singular result than the endeavour to blend the two into a sympathetic whole, by melting together in the crucible of lachrymose heroism those dis- crepancies which lie at the very root of character, and everlastingly mock the efforts of the methodical biographer to force consistency upon the inconsistent. Eugene Aram was born at Netherdale, in Yorkshire, in the year 1704. His father was a gardener, but a gardener of more than ordinary skill ; he possessed a remarkable knowledge of botany, and was an excellent draughtsman. He had originally been in the service of Dr. Compton, the Bishop of London, famous for his resistance to James II., and, on leaving the bishop, had gone into the service of 1 Reprinted from The Nineteenth Century. 141 THE TRUE STORY Sir Edward Blackett, at Newby, in Yorkshire. Yorkshire was the native county of the Arams, who had not always been gardeners. Their name they derived from the village of Aram or Haram, on the south bank of the Tees. In the reign of Edward III. the family was possessed of three knights' fees near Newark. They would seem to have gradually gone further south until one Aram is found a professor of divinity at Oxford ; another, whom Eugene saw, a Commis- sioner of the Salt Tax under Queen Anne, living at his seat in Hertfordshire. The branch to which Eugene belonged, and 'which had apparently remained in Yorkshire, must have fallen from the high estate of their ancestors, or had never emerged like the others from their original obscurity. The first is the more likely supposition ; for Eugene Aram, though driven by circumstances to associate with the shopkeepers and ale-drapers of Yorkshire villages, was always feared and respected as a very high, proud man, solitary and retiring. He was himself fully conscious of his superiority in respect of birth and lineage, for it is to his investigations that we owe these details of his ancestry; and his assiduous study of antiquities makes his information on this point the more reliable. His portrait, too, in The Newgate Calendar, said by those who had seen him to be a very accurate likeness, shows a face in which there is little trace of the rough and homely ; and throughout his life he seems to have attracted the regard and confidence of those whose stations in life were above his own. Whilst working at Newby with Sir Edward Blackett, Eugene's father had bought a little house at Bondgate, near Ripon, in which he installed his wife and child, visit- ing them in his intervals of leisure. Here Eugene was sent to school and instructed in the Testament. At the age of fourteen he joined his father at Newby, and, with the help of Sir Edward Blackett, who seems to have been attracted by his intelligence and zeal for study, entered upon that career of intense and unwearied application to various 142 OP EUGENE ARAM branches of learning on which rests his real claim to honourable recognition, and which only the misfortune of circumstance has rendered fruitless of a great result. He first applied himself to mathematics, and, self-taught, mastered the ghastly problems of the higher algebra. But his studies were interrupted at the age of sixteen by his being sent to London to fill the place of bookkeeper in the counting-house of a relative of Sir Edward's, a Mr. Christopher Blackett. After remaining two years in the counting-house Aram was attacked by a very severe form of small-pox. His mother's anxiety was so great at her son's illness that she was only prevented from journey- ing to London by Eugene's giving up the counting-house and returning home. Here the young man resumed his mathematical studies, and at the same time dived into poetry, history, and antiquities. But these new mistresses quite seduced him from his boyish love ; poor mathematics were cruelly deserted : " The charms of the other three," he writes, " quite destroyed all the heavier beauties of numbers and lines, whose applications and properties I now pursued no longer." As the time had come when Eugene must choose a pro- fession, he settled upon that of a schoolmaster as the one for which he was best fitted. With that intention he returned to Netherdale, his birthplace, and there engaged himself as teacher in the village school. At Netherdale, according to Aram, he committed the first great error of his life, took the first unfortunate step which started him on his progress to the gibbet he married. Of his wife's family nothing is known, except that Aram thought her very much beneath him, shunned her in the street, and never spoke to her in public. Those who remembered her described her as a tidy little body, a very weak, soft kind of woman, to whom Aram made an indifferent husband, a kind of woman who can hardly have affected the destiny of Aram so powerfully as he afterwards asked his friends 143 THE TRUE STORY to believe. One friend, more indiscreet and reckless than the rest, speaks of Mrs. Aram as low, mean, and vulgar, unworthy the lofty intellect of her husband, f