TOOLE ON AND OFF THE STAGE.*
Mn. TOOLE has now for so many years been the accepted head of the comedians of London, that it would be idle to discuss his merits at this time of day. It is to the class with which we rank Liston, and his succes- sor Wright, that Mr. Toole emphatically belongs. He is a " droll " rather than a comedian. The quiet domestic pathos of Keeley is as much out of his true line as the strange and exceptional power of Robson. The last is perhaps no fair test of comparison for any one, for his gifts were emphati- cally his own ; and his genius, in what we take to be that vexed word's one unmistakable sense, was unmistakable. He could be, and he was, really and intensely tragic at times ; and we believe that it was nothing but unaffected mistrust of his own powers, and his own size, that prevented his trying real work as a tragedian. At least, it is certain that Tom Taylor, who knew and could measure him as well as any man, wrote his Fool's Revenge—suggested by the Boi s'Amuse of -Victor Hugo—especially for Robson, and only fell back on Phelps some years afterwards because the little great man could not make up his mind to the experiment. Perhaps he knew his own limitations, and felt that with too much aiming at tragedy, he would only fall into the burlesque of which he was so immense a master. Perhaps it was but mistrust, and he did not know Churchill's famous line,—
‘. Pritchard's genteel, and Garrick six feet high."
Once, in a play called Dearer than Life, Toole faced a direct contrast with Robson, of whose popular piece, The Porter's _Knot, the later drama was a direct copy. And while he made of the part an excellent bourgeois character—the line in which as an actor he most succeeds, reminding us at times of Geoffroi of Gymnase fame—he missed the true note of domestic tragedy so conspicuous in Sampson Burr. Pathos was the absolute key-note of that wonderful piece of acting, as was force in Daddy Hardacre. It is needless to say that Mr. Joseph Hatton, the complacent chronicler of the reminiscences before us, for which he appears to have inter- viewed Mr. Toole in a curiously varied manner, at sundry times and in divers places, takes his own view of the contrast, and revels in the " consummate " and the "intense" till adjectival force faileth. But he is the good-natured mouth- piece of a good-natured man. One thing, however, we can certainly add to his reminiscences very highly to the actor's credit, a performance which, oddly enough, he does not mention at all. In the small part of a servant in Boucicault's drama of The Phantom at the Adelphi, he had to come on the stage after having seen a ghost which the audience did not see. It was a very brief scene, but splendid. We have never seen sheer nervous terror more wonderfully depicted, and have remembered it ever since. 'We do not know that Toole ever struck the same note again. The present writer does not remember ever to have seen him in any of the characters of "high low-comedy" like those of Shakespeare or Sheridan, and cannot well imagine him either as Acres or as Touchstone. But in Paul Pry he has held his own with any actor since Wright, vindicating his position as "first droll," which he kept up so well in parts like Charles or the Butler. During the earlier period of the run of The Don, be came much nearer again to comedy pure and simple. But he has always required to be "fitted" more carefully than most actors, and through his mouthpiece he is always kind and courteous to those who have provided for him,—to Byron, to Mr. Burnand, and to Mr. and Mrs. Merivale, the latter being the first of the ladies who have since taken the dramatic field, of whose fresh and genial writing we hope to hear more. Mr. Toole has, moreover, been an effective illustrator of Dickens, in parts like the Artful Dodger, or Buzfuz, or Caleb Plummer, though Keeley had preceded him very effectually in that field. But Dickens paid him the com- pliment of saying that when he wrote Great Expectations, though with no dramatic views for himself, he bad in his eye the comedian for Joe Gargery, and Webster for the convict. It is probably not the first time that a novelist has written characters with a view to imaginary actors, but it is an interesting record of the fact. It is a really good way of arriving at flesh-and-blood reality.
The book before us, of course, is a perfect storehouse of
• Reminiscences of J. L. Toole. Related by himself. and chronicled by Joseph Hatton. New and Cheap Edition. London : G. Rontledge and Son. 1855. anecdote of all kinds, new and old, true and dubious,—good, bad, and indifferent. The Americans, fertile in a language all their own, call an old story a "chestnut," and Mr. Hatton tells us that severe persons carry what they call a chestnut-bell with them, and tinkle it when anybody tells in their presence what we should, we suppose, describe most nearly as a "Joe Miller." One of these gentlemen distinguished himself by ringing his at church, when the preacher alluded to Jonah and the whale. It must depend very much where and amongst whom the reader of this book may have lived, which and how many of the stories of this volume may be as chestnuts to him. The majority of them are in any case entertaining enough to forbid the most severe of critics from ringing his bell. There are two capital anecdotes of the strange Irishman, Sheridan Knowles, a dramatist of singular capacity and know- ledge of stage effect, combined with a mastery of blank verse of a rather peculiar kind, which gives him his own niche in stage literature. He was an actor also, and afterwards turned preacher ; but was distinguished for bulls. He sent two hundred pounds in Bank of England notes to his wife in London, which failed to reach her. He angrily demanded of the Postmaster-General an explanation and an apology, as he happened to be unusually certain of the day and hour when he had posted them, and denounced the authorities with energy. The answer was pleasant and courteous, with the assurance that the Minister knew him as a friend by his works, and was only keeping the money at the Post Office till the address was known, as it had been sent in an envelope without any address whatever, and only, "I send you the money," written inside. "My dear Sir, you are right, and I am wrong. God bless you " was Knowles's answer. On another occasion, he rushed across the Strand to shake hands with "0. Smith," an actor well known by his initial, and ask after his health. Smith, who knew him only by sight, thanked him, but told him who he was. "I beg your pardon," said Knowles ; "I took you for your namesake, T. P. Cooke." As for the postal story, it has a quaint counter- part in that of one of Toole's many City friends, who never would put any address on his envelope but" J. L. Toole, Esq.," on the ground that the Post Office always knew where he was travelling. "You get it," he said ; "you get it, ray boy." It was Toole's suggestion that he might send him 2100 to test it. The point of the story is that Toole, though so well known in London as to have a theatre of his own name, is, and always has been, a country actor in a sense. No man could be so entitled to solve the question which recently occupied the Law-Courts, whether Islington is in London or the provinces. For throughout his career, at all events since he became independent, he has devoted a good half of the year to a provincial tourney, not only in the great centres, but in what are called "the one-night towns ; " so that in the course of his travels he has, as his chronicler says, been everywhere, in England and Ireland, in Scotland and in Wales, and will now act with as much personal satisfaction before the audience of a rural borough as to a critical crowd in London. "Toole is coming!" and" Toole for one night only !" are familiar legends in many an out-of-the-way country district, even among the modern placards surrounding them. And it was by finding himself face to face with one of these advertisements when wandering in a little Midland town, that the compiler of this book, at an early stage of the art of interviewing, was induced to attempt the fulfilment of a London editor's commission, to look up his old friend the comedian at the theatre, and to begin his talk. He found Toole characteristi- cally engaged in a discussion with a stolid policeman who, there being no stage-door, felt it his duty to refuse to the star of the evening admission into the hall at any price, without the "yellow ticket" which signalised the county people. This is not the only time that a star has been thus placed. Not long since, we had the pleasure of witnessing Mr. Tree civilly but firmly "moved on" before the door of his own theatre, for obstructing the queue waiting for a Hamlet matinee. And we have heard of a bridegroom who could obtain no admission from the official to his own crowded wedding at St. George's, till be had modestly ex- plained that the audience could have no fun without him. Such are the men in office whom the German Emperor delights to honour.
Edmund Kean and Elliston the great, and others of date as early, have their corners in this discursive volume : and among the army of jokers, it is pleasant to discover no leas a person than the Prince of Wales, who determined to surprise his family and friends at Sandringham by an impromptu per- formance by Toole and his company. As it was necessary to make the preparations, the Prince proposed to introduce Toole's manager and alter ego, Loveday, a man of singularly refined appearance and manners, under the guise of the "Spanish Ambassador." " Oh ! but I cannot speak Spanish, Sir!" said Loveday. "Nor can they," said the Prince. A less satisfactory appearance before Royalty must have been when Toole, accompanied by his friends, had to "rein up" a Scotch pony at Invercauld while the Queen passed. As an unskilled horseman, the actor did his best to "think of Mazeppa,," and made the Queen smile as a loyal low-comedian should. That such a joker as Mr. Toole should occasionally be the victim of a joke, is fair; and he is quite willing to tell of good-natured jests on himself,—as of his waiting about outside a photographer's in Bayswater, in the policeman's clothes in which he was to be taken, and very narrowly escaping capture by the real Simon Pure upon his beat, whose eye immediately suspected the comedian ; or of his friends, James the actor and the late Lewis Wingfield, taking him in on his own birthday as Irish lawyers interested in the career of his son, then studying for the Bar. There is much quaint reading in these all-round chronicles of the practical humonrists. Here we must close our brief chronicle of the relief-side of life, though it is but fair to Mr. Toole to give some instances of his sometimes undoubted wit. Tired by a very long delay at Bury St. Edmunds Station, he blandly asked for the station-master, who came up all politeness. "When is the funeral to take place ?" asked Toole. "Whose P" said the perplexed officer. "Why, we have come to bury St. Edmunds, haven't we ?" Not long since, when some energetic County Councillors, unless it was then Board-of-Workers, applied one morning at his theatre to inspect the ladies' dressing-rooms. " Oh ! send them away," said he. "Tell them the ladies aren't there." Equally ready was his retort, when awakened at Buxton by a railway-porter putting his head in at the window : " Buxton !" (Buckstone). "No, Toole !" These last two are not in the book, but we believe genuine. For many more nights than one only, may Toole be as able and willing as these pages show him.
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