VIIITHACKERAY AND THE THEATER

In the never-ending comparisons and contrasts between Thackeray and Dickens, which show no sign of abating even now, when the younger of the two has been dead for half-a-century, one striking difference between them has often been dwelt upon—Dickens was incessantly theatrical, in his dress, in his novels, in his readings, whereas Thackeray shrank from all theatricality, in his own apparel, in his fiction and in his lecturing. Dickens delighted in reading the most dramatic passages from his novels, actually impersonating the characters, and adjusting the lighting of his reading-desk so as to enable his hearers to see his swiftly changing expression. Thackeray’s lectures were narratives enhanced in interest by anecdote and by criticism; he read them simply, seeking no surcharged effects; and he disliked his task. As he wrote to an American friend, “I shall go on my way like an old mountebank; I get more and more ashamed of my nostrums daily.”

The author of ‘Vanity Fair’ might in his preface feign that he was only a showman in a booth, and he might talk of “putting the puppets away”; but as Austin Dobson phrased it aptly in his centenary tribute:

These are no puppets, smartly dressed,But jerked by strings too manifest;No dummies wearing surface skinWithout organic frame within;Nor do they deal in words and looksFound only in the story-books.No! For these beings use their brains,Have pulse and vigor in their veins;They move, they act; they take and giveE’en as the master wills; theylive—Live to the limit of their scope,Their anger, pleasure, terror, hope.

These are no puppets, smartly dressed,

But jerked by strings too manifest;

No dummies wearing surface skin

Without organic frame within;

Nor do they deal in words and looks

Found only in the story-books.

No! For these beings use their brains,

Have pulse and vigor in their veins;

They move, they act; they take and give

E’en as the master wills; theylive—

Live to the limit of their scope,

Their anger, pleasure, terror, hope.

His stories are never puppet-plays and they never have the concentrated color which the theater demands. Nor was this because he was not a constant playgoer, enjoying the drama in all its manifestations. Altho he had no close intimacy with actor-folk, such as Dickens had with Macready and later with Fechter, he was for years meeting at the weeklyPunchdinners, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and Tom Taylor, all of them playwrights by profession.

Nor were his novels influenced in any marked degree by the dramatists, since it was not the plays of Cervantes and Fielding and Balzac thatattracted him but their richer and more varied works of fiction. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens reveal the impress made upon him by the melodramas and by the farces which had a fleeting vogue in his early manhood; he relished the boldly melodramatic and he revelled in the broadly farcical. More especially was Dickens under the domination of Ben Jonson, whose plays were still occasionally seen on the stage when Dickens was young and impressionable. It might almost be said that Dickens transferred the method of the comedy-of-humors from the play to the novel; and it is significant that when he made hisfirst appearance asan amateur actor it was to assume the superbly caricatural character of Captain Bobadil. It is perhaps because of Dickens’ theatricality that he exerted a deep and wide influence upon the British playwrights from 1840 to 1870, whereas it was not until Robertson began in 1865 to deal more simply with life than the immediately preceding playwrights of Great Britain, that any of the English writers of comedy allowed himself to profit by Thackeray’s less highly colored portrayals of men and manners.

Yet Thackeray’s enjoyment of the theater was not less than Dickens’. His biographer, Lewis Melville, has recorded that Thackeray once asked a friend if he loved the play, and when he received the qualified answer, “Ye-es, I like agood play,” he retorted, “Oh, get out! You don’t even understand what I mean!” Almost his first published effort as a draftsman was a series of sketches of a ballet,‘Flore et Zephyr’; and toward the end of his life, in 1858, he presided at the annual dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund.

In his days of arduous hack-work he wrote half-a-dozen papers on the French stage. One of these essays was entitled ‘Dickens in France’; and in this he described with abundant gusto the gross absurdities of a Parisian perversion of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ produced at the Ambigu. Another is called ‘English History and Character on the French Stage’; and in this he has an easy task to show up the wilful disregard of veracity which taints the ingenious ‘Verre d’Eau’ of Scribe. A third paper is devoted to ‘French Dramas and Melodramas’; and in this he begins by an unfortunate prediction, that French tragedy, the classic plays of Corneille and Racine, “in which half-a-dozen characters appear and spout sonorous alexandrines” was dead or dying, and that Rachel was trying in vain to revive tragedy and

to untomb Racine; but do not be alarmed, Racine will never come to life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore. Madam Rachel can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it. Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled,patched and be-periwigged, lies in its grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised.

Here Thackeray revealed his insularity, his inability to “penetrate French literature by an interior line.” Red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged as French tragedy may be, and as it undoubtedly is in some of its aspects, it is not dead even now, more than three-quarters of a century since Thackeray preached this funeral sermon, nor is it dying. After the fiery fervor of the Romanticist revolt it may have needed the genius of Rachel to bring it back to favor; but to-day it is kept alive by the more modest talent of her successors.

Before he was of age Dickens had thought seriously of becoming an actor; and he even went so far as to apply to a manager for an engagement. Not long after he wrote a farce or two; and he was responsible for the book of a little ballad-opera. Late in his career he collaborated with Wilkie Collins in writing ‘No Thoroughfare,’ an effective melodrama, compounded specifically for Charles Fechter, who acted it successfully, first in London in English and then in Paris in French (under the title of ‘L’Abîme’).In Dickens’ letters we are told of the trouble he took in getting all the details of stage-management arranged to his satisfaction. It is evident that he found these labors congenial and that he did not doubt his possession of the intuitivequalities of theplay-producer, so distinct from those of the artist in pure narrative.

Thackeray also made one or two juvenile attempts at the dramatic form. Perhaps it is safer to say that these early efforts were dramatic only in form, in their being wholly in dialog; and there is little reason to suppose that he endeavored to have them acted. In 1840, the year in which the ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ was published, there was produced in Paris a melodrama, called the ‘Abbaye de Penmarque’ and founded upon Southey’s ‘Mary, the Maid of the Inn.’ Its authors were announced as MM. Tournemine and Thackeray; and an American translator fearlessly ascribed it to the author of the ‘Paris Sketch Book,’ finding possible justification in the catalog of the British Museum and in the early edition of Shepard’s bibliography. The ascription was erroneous; and the “nautical melodrama” (as the translator termed it) seems to have been written by a distant kinsman of the novelist otherwise unknown to fame. The explanation recalls that given by an Irish critic, who solved his doubts as to another case of disputedauthorship by the opinion that “Shakspere’s plays were not written by Shakspere himself, but by another man of the same name.”

Once and once only did Thackeray make a serious effort to appear before the public as a playwright. In 1854 after he had established his fame by ‘Vanity Fair’ and consolidated it by ‘Pendennis’ and the ‘Newcomes,’ he composed a comedy in two acts, the ‘Wolves and the Lamb.’ He proffered the play to two managers in turn, first to Buckstone of the Haymarket Theater, and then to Alfred Wigan of the Olympic. They declined it, one after the other; and apparently Thackeray made no further effort to have it produced. In 1860 he utilized the plot of his play in a story, ‘Lovel the Widower,’ which was never one of his attractive novels, perhaps because it was more or less deprived of spontaneity by its enforced reliance upon a plot put together for another purpose.

When he moved into his own home in Kensington in 1862, only a few months before his untimely death, he arranged an amateur performance of the ‘Wolves and the Lamb’ as a special attraction for his house-warming. He did not undertake any part in his own play; but he appeared in the character of Bonnington just before the final fall of the curtain, and spoke arhymed epilog, by way of salutation to his guests:

Our drama ends;Our Landlord gives a greeting to his friends;Some rich, some poor, some doubtful, some sincere,Some tried and loved for many a faithful year.He looks around and bids all welcome here.And as we players unanimously sayA little speech should end a little play;Through me he tells the friendliest of pitsHe built this story with his little wits;These built the house from garret down to hall;These paid the bills,—at least, paid nearly all.And though it seems quite large enough already,I here declare the Landlord’s purpose steadyBefore the novel-writing days are o’erTo raise in this very house one or two stories more.

Our drama ends;

Our Landlord gives a greeting to his friends;

Some rich, some poor, some doubtful, some sincere,

Some tried and loved for many a faithful year.

He looks around and bids all welcome here.

And as we players unanimously say

A little speech should end a little play;

Through me he tells the friendliest of pits

He built this story with his little wits;

These built the house from garret down to hall;

These paid the bills,—at least, paid nearly all.

And though it seems quite large enough already,

I here declare the Landlord’s purpose steady

Before the novel-writing days are o’er

To raise in this very house one or two stories more.

As we recall the pitiful penury of the English drama in the midyears of the nineteenth century, when the stage relied largely upon misleading adaptations of French plays, we may wonder why Buckstone and Wigan were inhospitable to the ‘Wolves and the Lamb.’ It is true that Thackeray’s little piece was slight in story, devoid of novel situation, obvious in its humor, simple in its character-delineation, and traditional in its methods. But at that time both Buckstone and Wigan were willing enough to risk their money on other plays by authors of less authority, plays which were quite as superficialand quite as artificial as this. Perhaps the two managers were moved to decline it partly because they were disappointed in that it had none of the captivating characteristics of Thackeray’s major fictions. So few of these qualities did the play possess that if it had been published anonymously it might have been attributed to some unknown imitator of Thackeray rather than to Thackeray himself. It revealed more of his mannerisms than of his merits.

Obviously he did not take his little comedy very seriously; he did not put his back into his work; he was content to write no better than his contemporary competitors in comedy and without their experience and their knack. It is difficult to deny that in the ‘Wolves and the Lamb’ most of the characters are only puppets; and that therefore Thackeray was for once well advised to put them away. The real hero of the play, it may be amusing to remark, is John, the butler, who has a soul above his station, and who is a sketchy anticipation of Barrie’s Admirable Crichton.

Setting aside his single venture into playmaking and attempting to estimate Thackeray’s potentiality as a playwright, we cannot help feeling that he lacked the swift concision, the immitigable compression, imposed on the dramatist by the limitation of the traffic of the stage to twohours. Also he rarely reveals his possession of the architectonic quality, the logical and inevitable structure, which is requisite in the compacting of a plot and in the co-ordination of effective incidents. Not often in his novels does he rise to the handling of the great passionate crises of existence, which, so Stevenson has told us, are the stuff out of which the serious drama is made. He is so little theatrical that he is only infrequently dramatic, in the ordinary sense of the word. He prefers the sympathetic portrayal of our common humanity in its moments of leisurely self-revelation.

Finally, if Thackeray had made himself a dramatist, by dint of determination, he would have lost as an artist more than he gained since he would have had perforce to forego the interpretive comment in which his narrative is perpetually bathed. In his unfolding of plot and his presentation of character, Thackeray could act as his own chorus, his own expositor, his ownraisonneur(to borrow the French term for the character introduced into a play not for its own sake but to serve as the mouthpiece of its author). “Thackeray,” so W. C. Brownell has asserted in his sympathetic study,

enwraps and embroiders his story with his personal philosophy, charges it with his personal feeling, draws out with inexhaustible personal zest its typical suggestiveness,and deals with his material directly instead of dispassionately and disinterestedly.

This is a privilege implacably denied to the playwright, even if he has abundant compensation in other ways. As Brownell also reminded us, the novel is

a picture of life, but a picture that not only portrays but shows the significance of its subject; its form is particularly, uniquely elastic, and it possesses epic advantages which it would fruitlessly forego in conforming itself to purely dramatic canons.

Dickens’s novels were both theatrical and dramatic; they were influenced by the melodramas and farces of his youth, as has already been noted; and it was natural that they should tempt adapters to dramatize them. They abounded in robustly drawn character, often verging into caricature; and therefore they appealed to the actor. They had episodes of violence certain to prove attractive to the public which liked to be powerfully moved and which had little delicacy as to the passions portrayed. Dickens’s sprawling serials were too straggling in story ever to make it possible to compress them into a solidly built framework of plot; but it was not difficult to disentangle a succession ofsituations sufficient to make an effective panorama of action, peopled with familiar figures. And of these there have been an unnumbered host.

If Thackeray’s novels lend themselves less temptingly to the paste-and-scissors method of the dramatizer, they had an immediate vogue and an enduring reputation, which have allured a host of playwrights, most of whom have confined their exertion to the singling out of a salient character and to the presentation in a play of the more important situations in which this personality is involved, utilizing the other figures and the other episodes only in so far as these might be necessary to set off the chosen hero or heroine. Naturally enough it is upon ‘Vanity Fair’ that they have laid hands most frequently. The final monthly part of the original publication had scarcely been issued when John Brougham ventured upon a stage-version of it, which he produced at Burton’s theater in New York in 1849.

This was an attempt to dramatize the novel as a whole, although necessarily Becky Sharp held the center of the stage. There was a revival of Brougham’s adaptation a few years later; there was another attempt by George Fawcett Rowe; and then in 1893 Sir James Barrie made a one-act playlet out of the last glimpseof Becky that Thackeray affords us, when she and Jos. Sedley, Amelia and Dobbin find themselves together in the little German watering-place and when Amelia learns the truth about her dead husband’s advances to Becky. Sir James has kindly informed me that he thinks that every word spoken in his little piece was Thackeray’s, “but some of them were probably taken from different chapters.”

A few years later two other Becky Sharp pieces were produced, one on either side of the Atlantic. The American play was adroitly prepared by Langdon Mitchell; it was called ‘Becky Sharp’; it was produced in 1899 and it has been revived at least once since; Mrs. Fiske was the Becky. The British play was by Robert Hichens and Cosmo Gordon Lennox; it was originally performed in London, with Marie Tempest as Becky; and she came over to the United States to present it a few times at the New Theater in New York in 1910.

A similar method—the method of focussing the attention of the audience on a single dominating personality and of excluding all the episodes in which this personality was not supreme—was followed in more recent plays cut out of the ‘Newcomes’ and ‘Pendennis.’ No doubt this was the only possible way of dramatizing novels of such complexity of episode. Brownellhas declared that the range of the ‘Newcomes’ is extraordinary for the thread of a single story to follow:

Yet all its parts are as interdependent as they are numerous and varied. It is Thackeray’s largest canvas, and it is filled with the greatest ease and to the borders.... It illustrates manners with an unexampled crowd of characters, the handling of which, without repetition or confusion, without digression or discord, exhibits the control of the artist equally with the imaginative and creative faculty of the poet.

A story as vast as the ‘Newcomes’ simply defies the dramatizer; and all he can do is to build his play about a single group or, better still, around a single character, relentlessly excluding all the other allied groups of personages not less interesting in themselves. This has been the method,it may be recorded, chosen by the several French playwrights who have been moved to make dramas out of one or another of the almost equally complex novels of Balzac.

So it was that Michael Morton made a ‘Colonel Newcome’ piece for Beerbohm Tree in 1906 and that Langdon Mitchell made a ‘Major Pendennis’ piece for John Drew in 1916. So it was that Francis Burnand made a ‘Jeames’ piece for Edward Terry in 1878 out of the ‘Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche.’ Altho Edward Terry was an amusing Jeames and althoNelly Farren was an amusing Mary Ann Hoggins, the “New and Original Comedy” (as its adapter styled it) did not strike me as amusing in itself; it was three-quarters Burnand and barely one quarter Thackeray—and the blending was not to my taste. As I sat through the performance patiently I came to understand the provocation which had led a gallery boy to shout down to Burnand as he took the author’s curtain call on the first night,—“I say, Frank, it’s a good thing Thackeray is dead, isn’t it?”

As the author had provided the ‘History of Henry Esmond’ with a unifying figure, the dramatizers have only too abundant material for a chronicle-play showing him at different periods in his long and honorable career. To make a compact play, a true drama, out of the protracted story, would be plainly impossible, yet it might not be so difficult to select salient episodes which would serve as a succinct summary of the story. But altho the attempt has been made several times—once for Henry Irving—no one of the versions has ever been put up for a run in any of the principal playhouses of either New York or London. In any dramatization one scene would impose itself, the scene in which Esmond breaks his sword before the prince whom he has loyally served, the scene in which Thackeray is most truly dramatic in the noblest sense of theword. If this had been put on the stage it would have been only a rendering unto the theater of a thing that belonged to the theater, since perhaps Thackeray had it suggested to him by the corresponding scene in the opera of ‘The Favorite’—altho the suggestion may also have come from the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne’ or from the later play which Dumas made out of his own story.

There remains to be mentioned only one other dramatization, that of the ‘Rose and the Ring,’ made by H. Savile Clark in 1890. From all accounts the performance of this little play, with its music by Walter Slaughter, provided a charming spectacle for children, one to which we may be sure that Thackeray would have had no objection and which indeed might have delighted his heart.

It is testimony to Thackeray’s own liking for the theater that he is continually telling us that this or that character went to the play. He also informs us that Henry Esmond was the author of the ‘Faithful Fool,’ a comedy performed by Her Majesty’s Servants and published anonymously, attaining a sale of nine copies, whereupon Esmond had the whole impression destroyed.And the first of the George Warringtons wrote two plays, ‘Carpezan’ and Pocahontas,’ both of them tragedies, the first of which caught the public taste, whereas the second failed to prove attractive. We are all aware that Becky Sharp took part in the private theatricals at Gaunt House, making a most impressive Clytemnestra; but we are less likely to recall the hesitating suggestion that she may have been the Madame Rebecque who failed to please when she appeared in the ‘Dame Blanche’ at Strasburg in 1830. It was natural enough that Becky should go on the stage, since her mother had been a ballet-dancer.

Altho neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever attempted to write a novel of theatrical life, each of them gave us an inside view of a provincial stock-company in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. In ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ we are introduced to the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Crummles; and in ‘Pendennis’ we have a less elaborate study of the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Bingley. The group that Dickens portrays is more boldly drawn and more richly colored than the group that Thackeray sketches in with a few illuminating strokes. “What a light of benevolence it is that plays round Crummles and the Phenomenon and all those poor theatrical peoplein that charming book,” said Thackeray in his lecture on ‘Charity and Humor.’ “What a humor! And what a good humor!”

Altho in these episodes neither Dickens nor Thackeray aimed at the penetrating inquisition into the histrionic temperament that we find in Henry James’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and in Howells’s ‘Story of a Play,’ there is both validity and originality in Thackeray’s portrait of Miss Fotheringay. In all the dozens and scores of theatrical novels that I have read, I do not recall any other attempt to show the actress who is only an instrument in the hands of a superior intelligence, a woman who has the divine gift and who can display it only when she is taught, perhaps by one himself deficient in the mimetic faculty but possessed of interpretative imagination. Possibly Thackeray bestows overmuch stupidity on the Fotheringay; but she was not too stupid to profit by the instruction of the devoted Bows. She had beauty, voice, manner, the command of emotion, without which the tragic actor is naught; and all she lacked was the intelligence which would enable her to make the most of her native endowment.

Except when she was on the stage Mrs. Siddons was an eminently uninspired woman; and not a little of her inspiration in the theater has been credited to the superior intellect of herbrother, John Philip Kemble. Rachel was intelligent, so intelligent that she was always eager to be aided by the intelligence of others. Legouvé recorded that if he gave her a suggestion, she seized on it and transmuted his copper into silver. She used to confess the immensity of her debt to Samson, a little dried up actor of “old men”; and she said once that she did not play a part half as well as she could play it, unless she had had the counsel of Samson. Even if she was a genius, she was rather a marvellous executant than a great composer; and there has been many another actress, even in our own time, who has owed a large part of her talent to the unsuspected guidance given by some one unknown to the public which pressed to applaud her.

Miss Fotheringay was not intelligent like Rachel and she was far duller than Mrs. Siddons, but she had in her the essential quality. She was teachable and Little Bows taught her.

He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from him by rote. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers.... With what indomitable patience and dulness she followed him. She knew that he made her; and she let herself be made.... She was not grateful, or ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humored.

She might not be grateful, but she knew very well who had made her; she said so simplyenough, explaining why she had not earlier played the more important parts, “I didn’t take the leading business then; I wasn’t fit for it till Bows taught me.”

So it was that Adrienne Lecouvreur, in the play which Scribe and Legouvé wrote for Rachel, thanked the little old prompter, Michonnet, who had taught her, “I was ungrateful in saying I had never had a teacher. There is a kind-hearted man, a sincere friend, whose counsels have always sustained me.” And Legouvé has told us that at one of the rehearsals Rachel suddenly turned from Regnier, who was the Michonnet, and knelt before Samson, who was the Duc de Bouillon, and addressed this speech directly to him.

It would be interesting to know whether Thackeray ever saw ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ which was produced in Paris in April, 1849, six months before ‘Pendennis’ began to appear in monthly parts.

(1920)

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