Shadows of the Stage. Winter William West

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СКАЧАТЬ when they were under influences surviving from those ancient days are confused, bewildered, and distressed by much that is offered in the theatres now. I have listened to the talk of an aged American acquaintance (Thurlow Weed), who had seen and known Edmund Kean, and who said that all modern tragedians were insignificant in comparison with him. I have listened to the talk of an aged English acquaintance (Fladgate), who had seen and known John Philip Kemble, and who said that his equal has never since been revealed. The present day knows what the old school was,[1] when it sees William Warren, Joseph Jefferson, Charles Fisher, Mrs. John Drew, John Gilbert, J.H. Stoddart, Mrs. G.H. Gilbert, William Davidge, and Lester Wallack—the results and the remains of it. The old touch survives in them and is under their control, and no one, seeing their ripe and finished art, can feel surprise that the veteran moralist should be wedded to his idols of the past, and should often be heard sadly to declare that all the good actors—except these—are dead. He forgets that scores of theatres now exist where once there were but two or three; that the population of the United States has been increased by about fifty millions within ninety years; that the field has been enormously broadened; that the character of, the audience has become one of illimitable diversity; that the prodigious growth of the star-system, together with all sorts of experimental catch-penny theatrical management, is one of the inevitable necessities of the changed condition of civilisation; that the feverish tone of this great struggling and seething mass of humanity is necessarily reflected in the state of the theatre; and that the forces of the stage have become very widely diffused. Such a moralist would necessarily be shocked by the changes that have come upon our theatre within even the last twenty-five years—by the advent of "the sensation drama," invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was formerly concentrated is now scattered.

      The stage is keeping step with the progress of human thought in every direction, and it will continue to advance. Evil influences impressed upon it there certainly are, in liberal abundance—not the least of these being that of the speculative shop-keeper, whose nature it is to seize any means of turning a penny, and who deals in dramatic art precisely as he would deal in groceries: but when we speak of "our stage" we do not mean an aggregation of shows or of the schemes of showmen. The stage is an institution that has grown out of a necessity in human nature. It was as inevitable that man should evolve the theatre as it was that he should evolve the church, the judiciary tribunal, the parliament, or any other essential component of the State. Almost all human beings possess the dramatic perception; a few possess the dramatic faculty. These few are born for the stage, and each and every generation contributes its number to the service of this art. The problem is one of selection and embarkation. Of the true actor it may be said, as Ben Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure, takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution. The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however, impulse soon recognises the curb of common sense, and the aspirant finds his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way the several types of dramatic artist—each type being distinct and each being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry—are maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art, every species of person; in order that all human life—whether of the street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most ideal state—may be so copied that the picture will express all its beauty and sweetness, all its happiness and mirth, all its dignity, and all its moral admonition and significance, for the benefit of the world. Such a dramatic stock-company, for example (and this is but one of the commendable products of the modern stage), has grown up and crystallised into a form of refined power and symmetry, for the purpose to which it is devoted, under the management of Augustin Daly. That purpose is the acting of comedy. Mr. Daly began management in 1869, and he has remained in it, almost continually, from that time to this. Many players, first and last, have served under his direction. His company has known vicissitudes. But the organisation has not lost its comprehensive form, its competent force, and its attractive quality of essential grace. No thoughtful observer of its career can have failed to perceive how prompt the manager has been to profit by every lesson of experience; what keen perception he has shown as to the essential constituents of a theatrical troop; with what fine judgment he has used the forces at his disposal; with what intrepid resolution and expeditious energy he has animated their spirit and guided their art; and how naturally those players have glided into their several stations and assimilated in one artistic family. How well balanced, how finely equipped, how distinctively able that company is, and what resources of poetry, thought, taste, character, humour, and general capacity it contains, may not, perhaps, be fully appreciated in the passing hour. "Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit." Fifty years from now, when perchance some veteran, still bright and cheery "in the chimney-nook of age," shall sit in his armchair and prose about the past, with what complacent exultation will he speak of the beautiful Ada Rehan, so bewitching as Peggy in The Country Girl, so radiant, vehement, and stormily passionate as Katherine; of manly John Drew, with his nonchalant ease, incisive tone, and crisp and graceful method; of noble Charles Fisher, and sprightly and sparkling James Lewis, and genial, piquant, quaint Mrs. Gilbert! I mark the gentle triumph in that aged reminiscent voice, and can respect an old man's kindly and natural sympathy with the glories and delights of his vanished youth. But I think it is not necessary to wait till you are old before you begin to praise anything, and then to praise only the dead. Let us recognise what is good in our own time, and honour and admire it with grateful hearts.

      Note.—At the Garrick club, London, June 26, 1885, it was my fortune to meet Mr. Fladgate, "father of the Garrick," who was then aged 86. The veteran displayed astonishing resources of memory and talked most instructively about the actors of the Kemble period. He declared John Philip Kemble to have been the greatest of actors, and said that his best impersonations were Penruddock, Zanga, and Coriolanus. Mrs. Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great genius—the precursor of Dickens. For Edmund Kean he had no enthusiasm. Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and after that in Shylock. Miss O'Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet: a beautiful, blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who retained her beauty to the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher.

II.

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HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST.

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      It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe's colossal poem—a work which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius—should find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly dramatic in movement. It cannot СКАЧАТЬ