DISRAELI AND THE PLAY
We have all been reading Mr. Buckle’s concluding volumes, and when we have recovered from the fascination of the great man and the splendid historical pageant they present to us, we dip into them again in search of trifles agreeable to our own individual taste. And I shall make no apology for turning for a moment from Disraeli in robes of ceremony, the friend of Sovereigns, the hero of Congresses, the great statesman and great Parliament man, to Disraeli the playgoer. That dazzling figure is not readily thought of as a unit in the common playhouse crowd. Yet it is with a feeling of relief from the imposing spectacle of great mundane affairs that you find Disraeli, after receiving in the afternoon the “awful news” of the Russian ultimatum to Turkey (October, 1876), going in the evening with his Stafford House hosts to seePerilat the Haymarket, and pleased with the acting of Mrs. Kendal. The play, he tells his correspondent, Lady Bradford, is—
“An adaptation from the FrenchNos Intimes—not over-moral, but fairly transmogrified from the original, and cleverly acted in the chief part—awoman whom, I doubt not, you, anhabituéeof the drama, know very well, but quite new to me. Now she is married, but she was a sister of Robertson, the playwright. She had evidently studied in the French school. The whole was good and the theatre was ventilated; so I did not feel exhausted, and was rather amused, and shd. rather have enjoyed myself had not the bad news thrown its dark shadow over one’s haunted consciousness....”
Mrs. Kendal’s training was, I fancy, entirely English, but her acting was on a level with the best of “the French school.” Disraeli was an old admirer of French acting, as we know from “Coningsby,” and I think it is pretty clear from the same source that he particularly liked Déjazet. For he had Déjazet in mind, I guess, in the member of Villebecque’s troop of French comedians engaged for the delectation of Lord Monmouth, “a lady of maturer years who performed the heroines, gay and graceful as May.” This was the lady, it will be remembered, who saved the situation when Mlle. Flora broke down. “The failure of Flora had given fresh animation to her perpetual liveliness. She seemed the very soul of elegant frolic. In the last scene she figured in male attire; and in air, fashion, and youth beat Villebecque out of the field. She looked younger than Coningsby when he went up to his grandpapa.” This is Déjazet to the life. The whole episode of the French players in “Coningsby” shows Disraeli as not only an experiencedplaygoer but a connoisseur of the theatre. His description of the company is deliciously knowing—from the young lady who played old woman’s parts, “nothing could be more garrulous and venerable,” and the old man who “was rather hard, but handy; could take anything either in the high serious or the low droll,” to the sentimental lover who “was rather too much bewigged, and spoke too much to the audience, a fault rare with the French; but this hero had a vague idea that he was ultimately destined to run off with a princess.”
In “Tancred” there is another, and an entirely charming, glimpse of French strolling players or strollers who played in French, the Baroni family—“Baroni; that is, the son of Aaron; the name of old clothesmen in London, and of Caliphs in Baghdad.” There is no more engaging incident in the romantic career of Sidonia than his encounter with this family in a little Flanders town. They played in a barn, to which Sidonia had taken care that all the little boys should be admitted free, and Mlle. Josephine advanced warmly cheered by the spectators, “who thought they were going to have some more tumbling.” It was Racine’s “Andromaque,” however, that she presented, and “it seemed to Sidonia that he had never listened to a voice more rich and passionate, to an elocution more complete; he gazed with admiration on her lightning glance and all the tumult of her noble brow.” Sidonia played fairy godmother to the whole family, and“Mlle. Josephine is at this moment [1849] the glory of the French stage; without any question the most admirable tragic actress since Clairon, and inferior not even to her.” If for Josephine we read Rachel, we shall not be far wrong.
Anyhow, it is evident that, when Disraeli thought Mrs. Kendal must have studied in the French school, he was paying her the highest compliment at his disposal. It is disappointing that we have no criticism from Disraeli of Sarah Bernhardt. Matthew Arnold said that Sarah left off where Rachel began. Disraeli says nothing, which is perhaps significant, for he did see Sarah. He was first asked to see her play at a party at Lord Dudley’s, but declined, as he “could not forgo country air.” A few weeks later, however, he was at the Wiltons’, where “the principal saloon, turned into a charming theatre, received the world to witness the heroine of the hour, Sarah Bernhardt.” And that is all. A playgoer of seventy-five is hardly disposed to take up with new favourites—which accounts, perhaps, for Disraeli’s verdict on Irving. “I liked theCorsican Brothersas a melodrama,” he writes to Lady Bradford (November, 1880), “and never saw anything put cleverer on the stage. Irving whom I saw for the first time, is third-rate, and never will improve, but good eno’ for the part he played, tho’ he continually reminded me of Lord Dudley....” Why “though”?
On another popular favourite he was even harder.Writing again to Lady Bradford, he says:—“Except at Wycombe Fair, in my youth, I have never seen anything so bad asPinafore. It was not even a burlesque, a sort of provincialBlack-eyed Susan. Princess Mary’s face spoke volumes of disgust and disappointment, but who cd. have told her to go there?” Staying later at Hatfield, however, he found all the Cecil youngsters singing thePinaforemusic. A few years earlier he tells Lady Bradford a story he had just heard from a friend of a visit paid by a distinguished Opposition party toThe Heir at Lawat the old Haymarket. “Into one of the stalls came Ld. Granville; then in a little time, Gladstone; then, at last, Harty-Tarty! Gladstone laughed very much at the performance; H.-T. never even smiled. 3 conspirators....” Another remarkable trio figures in another story. Disraeli had been to the Aquarium to see a famous ape and the lady who used to be shot out of a cannon. “Chaffed” (if the word is not improper) about this by the Queen at the Royal dinner table, Disraeli said, “There were three sights, madam; Zazel, Pongo, and myself.”
It will be seen that there are few records of Disraeli’s playgoing or show-going in his old age. Gladstone, we know, was to the last a frequent playgoer—and, I believe, an enthusiastic admirer of Irving. Disraeli, I take it, had become rather the book-lover than the playgoer. The humblest of us may share that taste with the great man, andeven take refuge in his illustrious example for the habit, denounced by the austere, of reading over solitary meals. Mr. Buckle tells us that “over his solitary and simple dinner he would read one of his favourite authors, mostly classics of either Latin, Italian Renaissance, or English eighteenth century literature, pausing for ten minutes between each course.” That passage will endear Disraeli to many of us, simple, home-keeping people, unacquainted with Courts and Parliaments, who feel, perhaps, a little bewildered amid the processional “drums and tramplings” and the gorgeous triumphs of his public career.