“A primrose by the river’s brim,A yellow primrose was to him,And it was nothing more.”
“A primrose by the river’s brim,A yellow primrose was to him,And it was nothing more.”
“A primrose by the river’s brim,A yellow primrose was to him,And it was nothing more.”
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
It will be observed that, in contrasting the two poles of realism, we have not made any allusion to the absence or the presence of imagination; and this because the word is so liable to misconception. But if we are correct in distinguishing the realism of youth from the realism of senility, by saying that in the one case every circumstance is recognised as a necessity, every detail is viewed as eternally and universally true, while in the other all is more or less regarded as chance-work, which might or might not have been—what is this but saying, that in the one case facts appeal to the imagination, in the other merely to sense? It is the imagination that magnifies insular facts into continental truths, and immortalises momentary feelings by raising them into eternal laws. The Imagination is,par excellence, the faculty of generalisation—a fact which the psychologists commonly overlook. It indeed always regards the concrete, always regards the individual; and that is the great fact which the psychologists are accustomed to dwell upon, while at the same time they overlook the principal characteristic of imagination, which is this, that it never regards the individual merely as an individual, nor the concrete merely as a concrete; it regards the individual as representative of a species, and the concrete as a type of something more general. The imagination is to our other faculties what Cuvier or Owen is to other men. Give to Professor Owen a single bone—even the single bone of an extinct animal, and he will determine the size and position of every other bone, and the entire structure of the bird or beast. Give to the imagination a single fact, and it has the same marvellous significance, and myriads of other facts link on to it by the most inevitable obligation. And it is because in this temper the youthful mind seizes upon facts, that even when it clings to them far more tenaciously, and dwells upon them far more minutely than superannuated minds do, its realism has a worth and a hopefulness to which any other kind of realism can make no pretensions. The realism of dotage is gossip—merest gossip. The lace in a Dutch portrait—every thread and loop painted, what is it but old wives’ gossip? Compare this uninteresting imitation of point lace, velvets, and silks and satins, with the young Titian painting in the eye of one of his figures the reflection of a window. This is the realism of a boy, that is the realism of old women.
The drift of our argument will now be apparent. We have shown that the distinguishing feature of the modern drama is its tendency to Realism, and that it exhibits this tendency at present in common with the other imitative arts. We have also shown that the tendency to realism is characteristic of art in two periods of its history—namely, its rise and its decline; and we have endeavoured to explain the difference between the realism that characterises the rise of art, and the realism that marks its decadence. Then here arises the question of questions: To which period does the realism that signalises at present the imitative arts in general, and the dramatic art in particular, belong? Is it the realism of progress, or the realism of decay? It is the most difficult question of all; at least, it is the question to which it is most difficult in our present circumstances to give a very decided answer. Having stated the law and summed up the evidence, we should certainly be glad to shift to a jury the responsibility of pronouncing an absolute verdict as to the question of fact. The difficulty of pronouncing such a verdict is easily accounted for. In a period which is one of revival and not of imitation, it is most natural that we should find the two kinds of realism more or less blending together—the literalness of an exhausted epoch, and the faithfulness of a regenerated life. And amid all the pre-Raphaelitism of the stage and of the picture-galleries, it is nothing wonderful that we should find much to condemn, much of that literalness which is unworthy and imbecile. When, to quote an extreme instance—when Thurtell’s gig, with “some of the real water from the pond,” is exhibited on the boards of the Surrey Theatre, it is such another exhibition as we find in the degradation of the Roman drama—a degradation, by the way, which old Thomas Heywood describes as amongst the highest honours of the drama. There is so much naïveté in his description that we shall quote it:—
“Julius Cæsar himself, for his pleasure, became an actor, being in shape, state, voice, judgment, and all other occurrents, exterior and interior, excellent. Amongst many other parts acted by him in person, it is recorded of him that, with general applause in his own theatre, he played Hercules Furens; and, amongst many other arguments of his completeness, excellence, and extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him: Being in the depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had from Dejanira brought him the poisoned shirt, dipt in the blood of the centaur Nessus, he, in the middest of his torture and fury, finding this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appointed him to creep into of purpose), although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Cæsar so carried away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of the madness of Hercules to which he had fashioned all his active spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, and after swung him,terque quaterque(as the poet says) about his head. It was the manner of their emperors in those days, in their public tragedies, to choose out the fittest amongst such as for capital offences were condemned to die, and employ them in such parts as were to be killed in the tragedy, who of themselves would make suit rather to die with resolution, and by the hands of such princely actors, than otherwise to suffer a shameful and most detestable end.”
And this, which honest old Heywood is willing to commend because done by an emperor, is in fact,parvis componere magna, the exact parallel to the incident already mentioned—the rat-killing in the pantomime ofWhittington and his Cat. It is parallel also, in a certain degree, to one of Mr Phelps’s early extravagances, who, in his determination to adhere to the text of Shakespeare, actually endedMacbethby the exhibition of the traitor’s head—“Reenter Macduff, with Macbeth’s head on a pole.” One is inclined to believe that had he not been himself the Macbeth of the evening, he would have made arrangements to exhibit the veritable head of the actor who performed the part.
But while it is impossible to deny the existence of such a baneful realism, is this all? and does there not predominate at the same time a far more healthy tendency? Are not Mr Charles Kean’s revivals ofKing JohnandMacbeth—are not Mr Phelps’s revivals, notwithstanding his early vagary—of this kind? Is not, for example, the historic fidelity with whichMacbethis represented in the Princess’s Theatre, something entirely different in kind from that species of realism which in the soliloquy,
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle towards my hand?”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle towards my hand?”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle towards my hand?”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle towards my hand?”
actually exhibited a dagger hanging in the air? There can be very little doubt of it; and it may be said generally that the realism displayed is most frequently of the earnest and healthy sort. If any misgiving should arise with regard to this in the case of the drama, one has a right to refer to the realism manifested at the very same time in the kindred art of painting, and if not entirely to interpret the one by the other, still to regard the analogy as of great importance. There are many of us who cannot admire pre-Raphaelitism, with all its extravagance and presumption, but at all events we do not regard its faults as the results of mental paralysis. They are the faults of youth, not of age—of the pleasant springtime which the pre-Raphaelites love to paint, when the leaves come forth in all their delicacy, almost diaphonous against the light, so that we trace the tender veins and fibres in all their minute windings—not of the yellowing autumn, when again all nature comes before us with excessive minuteness of detail, but the detail of faded leaves and the curious reticulation of their skeletons.
Right or wrong, it is at least more pleasant to look thus hopefully on the future of the drama than to fold one’s hands, shrug one’s shoulders, and give up all as lost. The drama! they say—fiddlesticks! the drama has all gone to the opera. Very well: and why should not the drama go to the opera? the music will do it no harm—on the contrary, a great deal of good. It is quite true that the opera, or, to speak more generally, the musical tendencies of the present time, act to the hurt of the existing theatres; but pity the man who ventures to dream that the fortunes of the British drama are to be identified with the fortunes of the present theatres, as at present conducted. On the contrary, it would probably be no great misfortune to the British drama, if, with one or two exceptions, they were all burnt to the ground; and however adverse to the drama the present musical taste may appear to be, it is not so really, but full of promise, if the dramatists would only see and use the opportunity. What is the use of running down illustration, dioramas, and concerts? Would it not be better for the dramatists to write up to them? The British drama has at the present moment two special haunts—the theatre and the concert-hall. It is needless for the dramatic authors to complain that their pieces are damned. Who cares for their pieces? All they have to say has no relation to our present habitudes and thoughts. If they will write for the theatres, let them write something worthy of illustration, and be as realistic in their writing as Mr Kean is in his acting, and in his stage appointments. And let them invade the concert-halls, where a new drama is springing up for the amusement of those who cannot away with the theatre.
Their position in the theatre at present is not good, is not creditable to them as a body, although we are far from looking on it with despair, and are far from saying that Othello’s occupation is gone. It may be worth our while to recognise clearly the position which the drama has always occupied in this country.
“Shikspur? Shikspur? who wrote it?” says Kitty, inHigh Life below Stairs, when the worshipful Lady Bab asks her if she had never read Shikspur. There are perhaps not many Mrs Kitties of the present day who would give a similar answer. But although the name of the great dramatist has become a household word amongst us, and his works are perhaps better known than those of any other writer in the language, he is known rather as an author to be read than as a dramatist whose plays are to be witnessed. It is not to be denied that upon the great majority of the British people, and especially of the middle classes, the theatre has had little or no influence. It is utterly ignored by them. From the days of Elizabeth and James, when the mayor and aldermen of London did what they could to discountenance the drama, and to oust Shakespeare and Burbage from the Blackfriars’ Theatre, up to this present hour, the playhouses, frequented by the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of education, and the players honoured as “His Majesty’s Servants,” or, “The Lord Chamberlain’s Company,” have been regarded with suspicion by the sober citizens of the middle class. When the theatres rose into importance, the Puritans rose into importance, and the former have never recovered from the denunciations of the latter. These denunciations, it is true, were often most intemperate, and based on the most ridiculous grounds (as when Gosson denounced the acting of women’s parts by boys as the sin which brought the fiery judgment of heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah), yet when in so many of the plays of the period, and still more of the profligate reign of the second Charles, we find profanity, obscenity, and hardness of heart presented as the most brilliant of qualities, it is nothing wonderful that the commonalty should have been estranged. From the memory of those impurities the theatre has never entirely recovered, and there are multitudes among us nowadays who regard it as little better than a lazaretto. It has indeed been very much altered, so that in every respectable theatre he must be nearly as squeamish as those Americans who are said by Sam Slick to have put trousers on the legs of their pianofortes, who is offended with what he sees or hears: and yet still the old repugnance remains; as if, like the man who had the devil cast out of him, the people regard it as a house swept and garnished only to receive seven other devils worse than before. The fact is, that it is not enough to introduce a negative morality into the theatres: it is not enough that the old devil should have been smoked out, and the house swept and garnished, if we find no positive substitute. It is a genuine and noble substitute that is wanted, not electroplate, nor nickel silver. The most offensive part of stage morality at present is its hypocrisy. We should infinitely prefer seeing the downright licentiousness of Etherege and Sedley to the sham sentiment and the canting virtues that sometimes take the place of it on the modern stage—we mean especially in the afterpieces. The former is an open enemy, the other a disguised one. And until we have true poetry in the sentiment, and true chivalry in the action, and that reverence which is implied in poetry and chivalry, it is not likely that the English people, as a whole, will ever look to the theatres. At present, the greater number of dramatic writers seem to expend their energies in the most ephemeral manner. The burlesques and pantomimes, we have said, are about the best things produced on the British stage. They are often very amusing, and display a strange prodigality of power—but power all run to seed. The wit consists of punning; the humour consists of practical jokes, horrible grimace, and elaborate buffoonery; the dialogue is in the vernacular of the London taverns and caves of harmony;[14]the plot is not simply improbable, it is impossible and incomprehensible; the characters are little better than marionettes, and their sentiments the sentiments of puppets. Of course there are exceptions, and brilliant ones they are. Bulwer Lytton, Sheridan Knowles, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, and a few others, have shown what they can do in a more serious vein. But, as a whole, the dramatic literature of the day is, as it has ever been since the Restoration, more remarkable for quantity than quality. Few persons out of London, and not many even in London, are well acquainted with that literature, the extent of its surface, the multiplicity of its currents, its utter shallowness, and the incredible mud that lies at the bottom of it; and were we to attempt a very slight analysis of its contents, run up a few statistics, give one or two extracts, and, in a word, describe it in its proper colours, a tale would probably be unfolded which would not only somewhat astonish those who, living in the provinces, seldom or never enter a theatre, and are thus blessedly ignorant of the carrion fare on which metropolitan playgoers fatten at half-price, but would also make some of those who frequent the dramatic temple not a little ashamed that afterpieces which are unreadable for their insipidity,[15]disgusting for their bad taste, and still worse, contemptible, although not so much for their licentiousness as for the cant and tremendous humbug of their hypocritical moralities, should have power, in the hands of a clever actor, to charm the purer sensibilities of their nature to sleep, so that, as if glamour had been cast in their eyes, trickery and tinsel pass for reality, falsehood appears to be true, evil good, and ugliness beautiful. In such a state of things it is not likely that the theatre should achieve a popularity which it has never enjoyed; and certainly its entire spirit must be revolutionised ere it can find a large welcome in the heart of the nation. Read the modern novelists and read the modern dramatists, and observe the difference of tone. There is in the common run of modern dramas—whether tragedy, comedy, or farce—such an utter absence of noble purpose, that not a whole army of claqueurs could ever succeed in establishing their popularity.
The fact is, the Muse of the British drama seems at this moment inclined to vacate the theatres, and to take up her abode in the halls and concert-rooms. Like the old fairies of the story-books, who, disgusted with the treatment they receive in one family, go and bestow their favours on the household next door, the dramatic Muse—a very old fairy indeed—is tired of the position assigned to her in the theatres. What is that? On the ceiling, gracefully gyrating round the gaselier, are the four lightly-draped muses of the theatre, with dagger, and mask, and harp, and castanets in hand, while certain naked amorini carry festoons of flowers before them, and from every jutty, frieze, and coign of vantage on the cornice, horned satyrs and ivy-crowned bacchantes leer out with astonishment. The Muse of the British drama is tired of dancing over the gaselier, dancing over our heads, and wishes to come down to our hearts, and so she enters the music-halls and concert-rooms, where she patronises two distinct classes of entertainments, the one more strictly lyrical, the other more strictly dramatic.
With regard to the more musical kind of entertainment, it must have been observed, that while songs and ballads, and instrumentation have a large sphere assigned to them, the operatic airs are day by day assuming more and more importance. It is quite true that a cavatina sung in a concert-room is very different from the same cavatina sung on the stage. The singing in a concert-room is like the singing of statues—so expressionless. We would rather not look at a concert-singer—one who is merely a concert-singer. Goethe makes the same remark with respect to singers generally. They remind one of the ludicrous story which the monks report of St Benedict,—that he was heard singing psalms two or three weeks before he was born, and saw the light of day. You hear these singers singing long before their faces are born, long before they attain the life of expression. Exceptions of course there are occasionally, and chiefly when a duet, a trio, or a quartette is to be sung. And it requires only an operatic singer, whose reputation as prima donna or primo tenore will excuse such a liberty, to throw a truly dramatic expression into the solos, for the practice to become general. Why should not some attempt be made by those who can, to escape from the starched formality of the concert-room—to forget that they are in dress boots and white gloves—and to impart somewhat of the animation of the theatre into the pieces of music which they hold so affectionately in their hands, because it saves their hands from even the inclination to gesticulate? And with glee and madrigal unions in every town, why do not the dramatists see their opportunity, and infuse somewhat more of the dramatic element into those part songs, out of which in time a little drama might arise? Everything has its insignificant beginnings, and, discreetly managed, the incoherence of our concerts might gradually be developed into the organic unity of the drama. It is coming to this, in fact. The music-halls are becoming theatres under a new and unobjectionable name.
With regard to the more dramatic entertainments that are so popular in those public halls, the new life is still more apparent. We do not simply refer to dramatic readings, although these too have a vast influence—an influence as superior to that of the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, to which we once heard the plays of Shakespeare irreverently compared, as the spell of the Ladye of Branksome, who could raise the spirits to her bidding, was to the power of William of Deloraine, who lifted the massy tombstone, and fetched the mystic book from the coffin of the departed wizard; an influence, too, as superior to that of the rhapsodists who travelled through the cities of Greece reciting the lays of Homer (for they recited these lays in detached fragments), as the palace of Aladdin, built in a night, is superior to the single brick that Scholasticos carried about with him as a specimen of the house which he wanted to sell. It is needless to dwell, however, upon this influence, important and ennobling though it be, because its tendency is to keep alive the memory of the past; and we wish rather to indicate the new life that is stirring. Albert Smith’s Ascent of Mont Blanc is the best specimen of a class of entertainments that are now very popular—perhaps the most popular of all, and which, when further and duly developed, promise to rival the present theatres. Mr Albert Smith goes to Mont Blanc, returns, gets Mr Beverley to paint the scenes through which he travelled, and enlivens those scenes by the description and impersonation of what he saw and heard. We have no doubt that Mr Smith’s entertainment is far more amusing, far more intellectual, and ten thousand times more artistic, than anything of the kind which England could furnish in the thirteenth or fourteenth century; and he will not resent the comparison if we say that he reminds us of the holy palmers and pilgrims who, in those crusading centuries, returned from Palestine, and with the aid of rude pictures—“the city of Jerusalem, with towers and pinnacles,—Old Tobye’s House,—A Fyrmament with a fyry cloud, and a double cloud,”—attempted in miracle plays and mysteries to convey an idea of the scenes they themselves had witnessed in the Holy Land, or of the events which in the olden time had been enacted there, and so laid the foundations of a theatre that ultimately grew into the fair proportions of the Elizabethan drama, as the rude earthwork which Romulus in the Palilia founded on the Palatine, grew in greatness and in pride, until it embraced the seven hills, a city of palaces and the marble mistress of the world. We might have run the comparison still more closely, if we had not forgotten for the moment Mr Smith’s Eastern Travels and Overland Route. No matter. In these entertainments we find a certain resemblance to the miracle plays out of which the modern drama was developed; and do we not also find a certain nineteenth century likeness of the ancient moralities, in these life-dramas, death-dramas, and devil-dramas, in which our young poets delight to sow their wild oats; giving us all manner of caprices for imagination, hysterics for passion, revolting descriptions for the sublime, soliloquy for dialogue, and dialogue for action? Yea, verily, and out of all these elements we are not without hope that a drama may yet arise more worthy of fame than that which at present exists. But again, we repeat, no more Shakespearean imitations, and legitimate suicide; let the dramatists be wise in their generation, accept the tendencies of the time, and think the thoughts and wear the dress of this year 1856.