THE NEW PLAY AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE.
MR. WILLS'S "historical play" Charles 1. is neither historical, nor strictly speaking a play, in the sense of a connected series of events presented in the dramatic form. It is a succession of tableaux en action, with considerable gaps of time between each, in which certain isolated events, some real, some imaginary, con- nected with the life of King Charles I. are represented, with many beautiful accessories of art, with a good deal of poetic language and licence, and in one instance with great dramatic power and finish. For the just appreciation of these tableaux, as well as for the due enjoyment of them, we should understand at once, as we are enabled to do by the programme, that "the author feels it to be unnecessary to confess or enumerate certain historical inaccuracies as to period and place which have arisen from sheer dramatic necessity, and are justified, he believes, by the highest precedents." The only ground of difference of opinion, then, between the author and his audience is that of the "sheer dramatic necessity" in this instance, which is certainly debateable. The question turns upon the interpretation of dramatic necessity, upon whether it means the requirements of the piece as a work of dramatic art, or the requirements of the actors according to theatrical custom. If the former is the true meaning of the phrase, we think that Mr. Wills has failed to meet the dramatic necessity exactly in proportion to his widest and most signal departure from historic truth ; if the latter, then the ex- ceeding badness of most English plays is comprehensible, if not excusable, and we heartily desire the speedy reformation of the Theatrical system by the infusion of a genuine artistic spirit into its authoritative members. We admit at once that Mr. Wills's reading of the, character of King Charles is no business of ours ; he has a right to be plus royaliste que le rot, if he chooses ; our fault- finding is entirely from his own point of view, and would, we think, be equally just if the central figure in the drama were an imaginary personage. He gives us the Charles of the poets, the painters, and the cavaliers, as romance has represented the cavaliers ; personated by Mr. Irving, who looks as if he had stepped off the canvas, now of Rubens, anon of Vandyck,—a magnanimous, gallant, chivalrous, right royal king, loving to his people, faithful to his friends, pious and patriotic, passionately devoted to his wife and children, as firmly attached to his duties as to his rights. Accepting this utterly unhistorical picture, we follow Mr. Irving's impersonation with the interest and admiration it is calculated to inspire, through several scenes of unequal, but always considerable merit. The garden scene at Hampton Court is very impressive. The peacefulness of its familiar beauty, contemplated foralittle, while the stage is yet empty, awakens exactly the yearn- ing, remonstrating regret for the foreknown interruption of its peace, the ruin of its old traditions, which ought to be aroused before the monarch, fresh from the arbitrary exercise of power which ruptured the sacred pact between King and Commons, enters, in the black-satin suit, graceful cloak, and rich collar and ruffles of Spanish lace, with the long, rippling, pale brown hair, the peaked beard, and the doomed look so familiar to us all, and which have given King Charles an unfair advantage over poor fat, material, stumpy Louis of France. The effect of Mr. Irving's entrance as the King, with the royal children, who are dressed from Vandyck's family group, is perfect in itself, and acceptable as a change from a scene between Queen Henrietta Maria (Miss Isabel Bateman), Lady Eleanor Davys (Miss Pauncefort), and the Marquis of Huntley (Mr. H. Forester), which is tedious, though not ill acted, except that the Queen, just after a reference to the fact that she is Henry IV.'s daughter, flounces about the stage in a most unroyal rage, which would have astonished the Court of Her Majesty's good nephew, and that Miss Bateman forgets her French accent at every second sentence. One remarkable and reiterated defect in Miss Bateman's imitation of the French accent occurs in her pronunciation of the word "majesty," in which she reverses it, emphasising the first syllable, and sounding the whole word" mad-jesty," while the true French intonation would soften the j, and throw the emphasis on the final syllable. The scene with the children is quite beautiful, the King throws off his weariness and depression, and plays with them, repeating the ballad of King Lear—while his wife im- patiently urges him to attend to his business—with exquisite natural tenderness and sweetness, talking to them with little touches in the dialogue which do great credit to' the author and his interpreter. Very fine, too, is the King's interview with Huntley, who has brought him bad news, and offers him good advice. There is a great deal of genuinely good writing in this dialogue, and the King's lament for the change which has come over the relations between sovereign and people, holding them so far apart, is noteworthy, and very finely delivered. But why does Mr. Forester, who plays the noble but slightly bombastic part of Huntley, swear, at that date, " By'r Lady," and say " bloot " for "blood," and why do they both call Lord Moray " Moray "? It is enough to account for the Scottish lord's treason. The unpleasant changing of person which mars Sir Walter Scott's style, comes disagreeably to the ear in many instances in this dialogue, not- ably in one, where Huntley says, "Your Majesty, thy Commons, arc." We should like to know whether Mr. Wills has any authority for making Charles call his wife "Mary." Her name was Henriette Marie, the English, or rather the Latin form, Henrietta Maria, was that by which she was designated in England. We have nowhere found her called "Mary." On the other hand, in the last scene the king mentions his English-born daughter as Hen- riette. There is an admirable bit of by-play in the first act be- tween Huntley and Moray, and at its conclusion, when the royal pair with their children step into their barge, and are rowed across the Thames, reproducing Etty's well-known picture, the scenic effect is exceedingly beautiful. Not we protest against the kissing. The Charles I. of Mr. Wills's fancy is not the Charles I. of ours, but we do not believe either would have done it. Mr. Wills's Charles is perpetually hugging Henrietta Maria in everybody's presence, and it is not the least significant of the many proofs of Mr. Irving's consummate art, that the audience takes these pro- ceedings quite gravely. Not a titter from the gallery turns this " business " into the ridiculous, and this is not because the audience is deeply impressed by the intrinsic solemnity of the piece, for they laugh unhesitatingly at an awful crisis, when the little Duke of York makes the historic reply to his father's solemn injunction in a shrill, pretty, piping cry. It is because Mr. Irving's acting is so fine that the escape from the absurd, though narrow, is complete.
The connection between this first act and the succeeding three is but slight, but the strongest point brought out in it is that on which we chiefly found our objection to the fourth act, in which it appears to us that Mr. Wills falsifies history to an extent that puts his play out of the very liberal bounds of so-called historical drama, and does it so vainly, that he unmakes his own points and demolishes the character which he has constructed. Here we have Charles, full of love for his wife, and of consideration for her, alive to the growing dislike and distrust of her in the public mind, so swayed by it, that he offends her by the dismissal of her suite, and gravely warns her against the lightest indiscre- tion. The same chivalrous devotion characterises him in the second act ; and in the third, when he is betrayed and sold by the Scottish lords, and taken prisoner by Cromwell at Newark, his passionate pleading for the fulfilment of Moray's promise, the grandeur and pathos of his address to the traitor, are equalled by the intensity of his solicitude for his wife, and the anguish of his regret for his friends. The words which Aytoun puts into the month of Charles's grandson,—
" Oh, the brave, the noble-hearted,
Who have died in vain for me r.
come to one's mind with the mere look of the wan face, and the burning woeful eyes.
So far, the frame work of history has been preserved suffi- ciently to keep this fancy-portrait of the King from distor- tion. But how does it come out in the fourth act, in which we have to test the validity of Mr. Wills's plea of dramatic neces- eity by either of its possible meanings? The Queen has returned to England, comes to Whitehall, has a fruitless interview with 'Cromwell on the morning of the day fixed for the execution of Charles, is present at the famous parting between him and his children, on which ensues a solemn, agonising, farewell scene between the wretched husband and wife, and Charles goes out to the scaffold, his last word being the historic "Remember." We -freely grant that the closing scene is beautiful, but we believe that the real closing scene was infinitely more so, and that Mr. Wills has lost dramatic effect by the change, besides having destroyed the unity of his great central character. Let it be said at once that what Mr. Irving has to represent, he represents to absolute perfection ; that the farewell scene with the children is so dreadfully, so agonisingly pathetic, so simply beautiful, that it is hardly bearable ; and that the pictorial effect of the farewell to the wife is wonderfully fine. As she stands in his arms, the King's hands grasp the Queen's lead, bending it backwards with fingers sunken in the hair upon -the temples, and his eyes devour her face with greedy love and grief, in which the joy of the past, the anguish of the'present, the reluctant dread of tre future are all visible. But Charles is going to die, she has to live ; he is leaving her hated by the people as he never was, the foreign papist woman made a pretext by his enemies throughout (and more strongly insisted on in that light in the play than in history), quite defenceless, with the tradition of murder in her own country and in his, to quicken his -sensibilities now slumbering for the first time, as to her fate. His beautiful, touching, eloquent address to her, full of exquisitely subtle traits, might have been spoken had he been leaving her in perfeet security, to the indulgence of the grief he covets, for whose con- tinuance, in softened form of sweet memory, he prays in words 'and tones which wring the heart. Here is the great flaw, the fatal inconsistency, in this is the surrender of Mr. Wills's ideal, and a departure from the laws of nature which, in our opinion, is a no dess signal offence against the artistic perfection of drama. dlistory is more true to the latter. Charles and Louis had each a consolation in his death, in the belief that in himself the 'expiatory victim was offered. In the case of Charles, the trust -WU not quite unfounded ; his wife had safety and shelter, though cold and grudging, with her own people. In the case of Louis, so baseless was the trust, that his own fate was the most enviable. d3ut the dramatist who changes either, must distort the whole por- trait of each of the doomed sovereigns, must do away with Louis's last Will, the only true reading of his character to be had ; be must, .as Mr. Wills has done, destroy the reasonable courage of Charles's serenity. Not only does his own ideal of the King suffer, but the famous " Remember " loses in interest. That Charles, /parted in his later trials and in his death from his wife, should wear her picture on his heart, and denounce the hand that would deprive him of it ; that Charles, parted from his wife, should leave with Bishop Juxon, his last friend and ghostly counsellor, an assurance of his faithful love, to be borne to her when his heart should lie still beneath the miniature presentment of her 'fair face, and bid him " remember " that last commission, -would be true in every sense. But that he should pass 'from his wife's arms to the scaffold, thinking of her picture, and should hold it up as he takes his last look of her, sayiug, 4‘ Remember !" is not true, and is much feebler, as a mere matter 'of effect, than the truth. That the husband and father, about to 'die, should give the trinkets he designs as keepsakes for his children to a third person, would be natural ; but that he should instruct the wife and mother about their destination, in that last trancelike clasp of parting, is not natural, and all the beauty of the language, all the perfection of the acting, cannot give it dramatic truth. But we suspect this departure from history and from art is the result of a theatrical custom, which demands the presence of the leading lady in the final scene, and if so, there is little to be hoped for in the future of English drama. Miss Isabel Bateman is careful and painstaking, but she is hardly up to the part of Henrietta Maria in the domestic scene in the first act. Her brief share in the second is less trying, and she acquits her- self well, but in the third act she fails lamentably. The guns are thundering—by the way, they intermit in a very odd way, in the representation of a raging battle—and she, awaiting the issue in the royal tent, strata and rants, tossing her arms about, with
singularly ineffective gestures, through a prolonged soliloquy of suspense and terror, which ought to be muttered, on her knees, with her hands clasped over her head, and interrupted with fur- tive peepings from the tent curtains. Mr. Wills has imposed on her in the fourth act a part altogether beyond her powers, which are not remarkable, a part which would tax those of an actress such as our stage does not at present boast. The Queen's interview with Cromwell is a painful mistake. Miss Bateman can neither speak the words of the part, nor produce the gestures, so as to give the effect intended by the author, and failing this, she makes it almost absurd. She scolds, but she cannot impress ; she begs, but she cannot implore ; and her attitude, neither standing nor kneeling, but crouching in some strange way under the heavy folds of her gown, is neither graceful nor pathetic. One feels a nervous long- ing for the entrance of the King, lest the scene should become ridiculous, just as in the first act he is wanted to relieve tedious- ness. We do not think, in such circumstances, and in the pre- sence of Oliver Comwell, Henrietta Maria would have invoked the aid of Our Lady and the Saints, even under her breath ; but as it is so set down, Miss Bateman would do well to manage her " asides " better,--she makes so little distinction between them and her dialogue, that she seems to utter a papistical prayer with the joint " intention " of herself and Oliver.
Of Mr. Wills's Cromwell we shall merely say that he should have made him more like the Oliver of fact, and so would have gained also in dramatic effect. "A foeman worthy of his steel" would have but enhanced Charles, as Mr. Irving renders him. This mean and mercenary bully is not a fair foil to the royal gentleman in the Cabinet at Whitehall, to the royal soldier pre- sented to us as so ineffably grand and gentle in his defeat and disaster at Newark. Of Mr. Belmore as Cromwell we shall only say that he does his best, and any man's best would be ungracious and in- effective in such a part. He has some fine lines to speak, and he delivers them well, especially those of scorn of the Scottish lords, and his gestures are expressive ; but he never changes the set of his features,—the exaggerated mixture of scowl and sneer with which he makes his first appearance lasts to the end. The character is one which must, with any treatment, be a trying one ; it has been made as trying as possible by Mr. Wills's treatment, especially in the second act ; but the fine acting of Mr. Irving, the grandeur of the attitude assumed by the King, the beauty of the language of the piece, the forcible rivettiog of the attention of the audience upon the monarch, relieve Mr. Belmore from much of the ungenerous and unnecessary weight of such a representa- tion. Some of the finest of Mr. Irving's effects are in that scene,— the outlook of the brilliant, scornful, commanding eyes, the presage of their more frequent droop, the gesture never exaggerated, always easy, but wonderfully sudden, and speaking like the flash before the thunder-roll, ere his words are uttered,—the quick sentence, "More shame for London !"—the grand anger, grandly subdued, —the calm resumption of a tone of business and direction, the quiet attitude before the fire, the slow permissive bow of dismissal, the brushing aside of considerations of danger, the lion-spring of injured honour, the fierce bound to fight and punish,—these are but a few of the points which delight and satisfy the audience. And the audience must be a delight and a satisfaction to the author and his interpreter. They are highly sym- pathetic, and demonstrative to an extent explicable only when we remember that it is not the season.'
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