T. W. ROBERTSON
Fifty years ago to-morrow (February 3rd, 1871) died Thomas William Robertson, a great reformer of the English drama in his day, but now, like so many other reformers, little more than a name. His plays have ceased to hold the stage. Very few of them still allow themselves to be read. To-day their matter seems, for the most part, poor, thin, trivial, and their form somewhat naïve. “Robertsonian” has become for the present generation a meaningless epithet, and “teacup and saucer school” an empty gibe. Even within a few years of Robertson’s death George Meredith could only say of him: “In a review of our modern comedies, those of the late Mr. Robertson would deserve honourable mention.” As the old tag says, times change and we in them. Robertson is now a “back number.” His comedies are not classics, for classics are live things; they are merely historical documents. Yet you have only to turn to such a record as “The Bancrofts’ Recollections” to see how live these comedies once were, how stimulating to their time, how enthusiastically they were hailed as a new birth, a new portent, a new art. Indeed, for my part, when I read the glowing eulogiesof John Oxenford and Tom Taylor and the other critics of that time I am filled with something like dismay. All that warm (and rather wordy—it was the way of the ’sixties) appreciation gone dead and cold! I wonder how many of our own judgments will stand the test of fifty years. Br—r—r!
Well, to understand Robertson’s success, we have to think ourselves back into his time. We have to ignore what followed him and to see what he displaced. Up to his date the theatre, under the great French influence of the ’thirties, still remained romantic. But that influence was wearing out. A new influence was making itself felt in France, through the dialectics of Dumasfilsand Augier’s commonsense, though the new influence still bore trace of the old romanticism, as we can see at least to-day.La Dame aux Camélias, so romantic to-day, was greeted in 1855 as a masterpiece of realism! And itwascomparatively realistic, realistic for its time. But the English theatre, a second-hand theatre, still stuck to the old French romantic tradition. It lived largely on adaptations from Scribe. Robertson himself adapted a Scribe play (and not a bad one),Bataille de Dames. He had, however, come under the newer, the realistic, or romantico-realistic influence. He adapted Augier’sL’Aventurière. Tom Stylus’s pipe in the ballroom (inSociety) had previously been dropped by Giboyer inLes Effrontés. I cannot help thinking that the new French reaction had a good deal to do with theRobertsonian reaction, certainly as much as the influence of Thackeray to which Sir Arthur Pinero traces it.
But I must let Sir Arthur speak for himself. In a letter in which he has been so good as to remind me of to-morrow’s date he says:—
“I look upon Robertson as a genius. Not that he wrote anything very profound, or anything very witty, but because, at a time when the English stage had sunk to even a lower ebb than it is usually credited with reaching; when the theatres stank of stale gas and orange-peel and the higher drama was represented mainly by adaptations from Scribe by Leicester Buckingham; he had the vision to see that a new public could be created, and an old and jaded one refreshed, by invoking for dramatic purposes the spirit, and using some part of the method, of Thackeray.”
This is admirable, and I only wish our dramatists would more often be tempted into the region of dramatic criticism. All the same I confess that (after going through all Robertson’s plays) it seems to me to overrate the Thackerayan influence. There is a little sentimental cynicism in Robertson and there is much in Thackeray. There is a tipsy old reprobate inPendennisand there is another inCaste. Tom Stylus helped to found a newspaper and so did George Warrington. Esther D’Alroy tried vainly to buckle on her husband’s sword-belt when he was ordered on service, and Amelia Osborne hoveredhelplessly about her husband with his red sash on the eve of Waterloo. But such matters as these are common property,communia, and the artist’s business, which Horace said was so difficult, isproprie communia dicere, to give them an individual turn. Drunkenness apart I don’t think Eccles is a bit like Costigan. As to the Thackerayan spirit, would that Robertson had “invoked” it! His plays might then be classics still, as Thackeray is, instead of merely documents.
If we are to connect Robertson with some typical Victorian novelist, I would myself, with all deference to Sir Arthur, suggest Trollope. His young women, his Naomi Tighes and Bellas, his Polly and Esther Eccles, strike me as eminently Trollopean. There are traces of Mrs. Proudie in both Mrs. Sutcliffe and Lady Ptarmigant. But, probably, these also are only instances ofcommunia. Probably the young ladies (and, for all I know, the old ones, too) were real types of the ’sixties, as we see them in Leech’s drawings. Bless their sweet baby-faces and their simple hearts and their pork-pie hats!
The Robertsonian way is often spoken of as a “return to nature.” It is, in fact, a common eulogy of most reactions in art. “Don Quixote” was a return to nature, compared with the romances of chivalry, and “Tom Jones” was a return to nature, compared with “Don Quixote.” The world gradually changes its point of view and sees the facts of life in a new light. Artists change with the rest of theworld, and give expression to the new vision. They are hailed as reformers until the next reformation; they seem to have returned to nature, until the world’s view of “nature” again changes. I think, as I have said, that Robertson’s work is to be related to the general anti-romantic reaction that started in France in mid-nineteenth century. But all reactions keep something of what they react against, and Robertson’s reaction retains a good deal of romance.Schoolis as romantic as the German Cinderella-story, on which it was founded. The central situation ofCaste—the return home of the husband given up for dead—is essentially romantic, not a jot less romantic than inLa joie fait peur. The scenes at the “Owl’s Roost” inSociety, applauded for their daring realism, are realistic presentations of the last stronghold of the romantic Murger tradition, literary “Bohemia.” Robertson’s dialogue was often the high-flown lingo of the old romance. (In dialogue we have “returned to nature” several times over since his day.) But more often it was not. He astonished and delighted his contemporaries by making many of his people speak in the theatre as they spoke out of it. He invented sentimental situations that were charming then and would be charming now—love-passages in London squares and over milk-jugs in the moonlight. He had been an actor and a stage manager and knew how to make the very most of stage resources. Take the scene of George’s return inCaste. There is acry of “milkaow” and a knock at the door. “Come in,” cries Polly to the milkman—and in walks with the milk-can one risen from the dead! This thrillingcoup de théâtreis followed, however, by something much better, the pathetic scenes of Polly’s hysterical joy and her tender artifice in breaking the news to Esther. I confess that I cannot read these scenes without tears. There was a quality of freshness and delicate simplicity in Robertson’s work at its best that was a true “return to nature.” No need, is there? to speak of the luck his work had in finding such interpreters as the Bancrofts and their company or of the luck the actors had in finding the work to interpret—the Bancrofts themselves have already told that tale. But it all happened half a century ago and I suppose we are not to expect a future Robertson revival. The past is past. Life is perpetual change. The more reason for not neglecting occasions of pious commemoration. Let us, then, give a friendly thought to “Tom” Robertson to-morrow.