William Mackay on T. W. Robertson's Play "School"

WITH the new year has come new luck to the theatres. Covent Garden, and Drury Lane, with their pantomimes, are doing wonderfully well; the new Gaiety, with its brilliant extravaganza un-dresses, and Mr. Alfred Wigan’s admirable acting in the second piece, is, and has been, drawing crowded houses. The Strand, with its old burlesque, The Field of the Cloth of Gold, is taking its share of the luck, and the little Royalty’s novel style of burlesque-drama, Claude du Val, is in for as prosperous if not as lengthy a career as fell to the lot of Black-eyed Susan. The sensation drama is for a time in abeyance until Mr. Watts Phillips produces his next at the Queen’s, and its startling companion at the Holborn. The Princess’s coquetting with Mr. Boucicault, takes up with Mr. Palgrave Simpson, and plays his Marie Antoinette.

Two theatres are playing comedy, pure and simple; rather pure, and peculiarly simple. At the Haymarket, Mr. Buckstone now plays a comedy by T. W. Robertson, entitled Home; and at the Prince of Wales’s Miss Marie Wilton has produced a comedy by the same author, called School. Both are successful, on both a vast amount of praise has been lavished, and about both a great deal of nonsense has been written.

Home is an adaptation of L’Aventurière; and School, is an adaptation of a German piece; a fact of which but for the letters of Veritas, to the Times, most of us would have remained in blissful ignorance.

It matters not one atom to the public whether these plays are in every sense original (as we suppose the author’s Caste was—his third, and, to our mind his best) or are translated literally, or adapted ingeniously from the French, German, Sanskrit, or Hindu. The public, in general, goes to the theatre to be amused, and so long as this end is attained, cares nothing for details, however interesting they may be from a literary or artistic point of view. School and Home satisfy the public, which passes a very pleasant evening in seeing each piece—so far so good. With whom, then, and with what do we find fault? Assuredly with Mr. Robertson, if he has tacitly taken to himself and the praise which generous admiring critics have publicly given him. For what has been specially praised? what has specially attracted their notice in School? Why, the author’s originality of invention and graceful fancies, as displayed in (1) the choice of the old fairy story Cinderella on which to base an idyllic story; (2) the carrying out this idea at the end in fitting the slipper on the girl’s foot; (3) the love-making in the moonlight, when Lord Beaufoy and Bella talk in spooney tones about their shadows. Now it appears that not only has the Cinderella idea not originated in Mr. Robertson’s inner consciousness, but, beside the incident underlying the whole plot, the very name Cinderella was that of the original German play. We regret that facts like these have not been either acknowledged or contradicted by the author. For we are, and have been, glad, in the true interests of English dramatic art, to point to the author of Caste, Ours, and Society, as an original writer whose successful career is a sufficient answer to the taunts of the French dramatists and their admirers amongst ourselves.

The first act of School contains the gem of the piece in the way of dialogue, which rises here to true comedy standard. We allude to the luncheon in the wood, where Lord Beaufoy the beau, and Jack Poyntz converse together. Suggested by the original German or not, it is excellent. The scene is pretty, nothing remarkable; the schoolgirls sing with a unanimity perfectly astonishing, except, perhaps, to German schoolgirls out for a holiday after the foreign-peasant fashion.

The second act is a farce, and a stupid farce, too. Mr. Hare’s performance of the old beau is good, though not up to his previous delineations of character.

The third act is notable for its moonlight love-making scene. The dialogue runs somewhat in this fashion,—

Lord Beaufoy (to Bella), My shadow is taller than yours.

Bella (to Lord B.). Your shadow is shorter than mine.

Lord B. Now we’re together.

Bella. Now we’re apart.

Lord B. Now we’re together again.

Bella. Yes. The jug (a milk jug in her hand) joins us.

Lord B. (with pathos). Yes. But only for a time.

[_Exeunt to get the milk_.

And, we are told, that Mr. Robertson is a second Douglas Jerrold! No, this is certainly not the parallel. Mr. Robertson, in a way, may be the Antony Trollope of the drama; not as Jerrold, a writer of epigrams, repartees, and sparkling witticisms, but a very lively recorder of such natural conversation as would pass between two ordinary people, in an ordinary situation.

We should be inclined to say that it is upon this absence of style, polish, and turn, that Mr. Robertson especially prides himself. For ourselves we would rather have a comedy be the concentrated essence of conversation, trimmed, pruned, and polished, up to the School for Scandal smoothness and brilliancy.

As for Home, the first act is a prologue, the second is the play, the third is the epilogue. The three chief characters are more or less unprincipled, one of them (played by Mr. Sothern) justifying the end by the means; and the sympathy of the audience is, at the conclusion, entirely with the designing woman whose schemes have been foiled by the aforesaid unprincipled son. Much has been said in praise of the business of the love-making at the piano. There is nothing new under the sun or behind the foot-lights, and the details of this, the diffidence, the short sentences, the shyness, the nervousness, are as old as stage-courtship itself. Mr. Sothern gets some laughs out of misplacing words, by a sort of Dundreary habit, and obtains one roar by upsetting a music-stand when he is talking to the young lady at the piano. He makes false love, with affected earnestness, as he did in A Lesson for Life, and his stage business is all good and careful. By the way, there is a too brilliant screen in the corner, which distracts the attention of the audience. It is never used during the play, nothing is done with it, and, unless it be used to conceal some one who plays the piano, (something of the sort was done in Golden Daggers, at the Princess’s) while Miss Hill is pretending to perform a brilliant waltz, the screen is useless—is worse, being an eye-sore.

In fine, we shall be glad to see another piece of Mr. Robertson’s, but he owes it to his friends and the public, to inform us of its originality: and we heartily advise him to work his own ground, and to leave the French, German, and Italian fields to those who have no fertile soil of their own.

From “Bohemian Days in Fleet Street” By William Mackay.

When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the Times, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the Times letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my “diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called Once a Week lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,” as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.

Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but not to Once a Week, because the paper in question was then under the editorial control of a member of the staff of the Times. So that—a circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer. A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And, incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom” Robertson.

Once a Week, 27 March 1869 SCHOOL. By William Mackay.

WHEN in these days a dramatic author achieves undoubted success, without having recourse to sensational incident, to intricacies of plot, and to impossible situations, something has occurred to arrest the attention of those who are eternally bemoaning the degraded position of the modern stage. There is a play being performed in London at present which has ensnared the public into admiration; which fills a theatre night after night with pleased audiences; and in which, strange to say, there is introduced no railway train, no hansom cab, no real pump. The title of the play is School. The object of this article is to discover, if possible, the secret of the author’s success.

We take it for granted that the cloud of accusation which, erewhile, hung over Mr. Robertson’s head has been dissipated. Lord Macaulay informs us in his essay on Byron, that the British public is subject to periodical fits of morality. When School was produced at the Prince of Wales’ Theatre, the town was suffering from one of these attacks. Almost every event became a text. But it so happened that anent public exhibitions the Briton was especially asserting himself. The State was interfering in the matter of stage petticoats, and various journals were waxing eloquent over the degrading and demoralising spectacle of the Siamese Twins. It was impossible that School should escape. True there are no legs displayed in Tottenham Street,—nothing there to offend a correct taste. In a happy moment, however, it was discovered that Mr. Robertson had translated his comedy from the German. Here, indeed, was a charge of immorality compared with which an accusation of legs would be less than trivial. What Goldsmith once called “the busy disposition of some correspondents,” went to work with a will. Printing House Square helped it to utterance, and in a day or two the town rang with the echoes of it. Those who have read the German play about which the correspondents wrote, have been able to convince themselves, and those who have not, will have by this time been convinced by the Times article on the question that School is not a translation. Mr. Robertson has indeed borrowed the idea of a play, in which a boarding-school should afford some of the characters, and the legend of Cinderella a background. Further than this, the author of School is not indebted to his continental contemporary. If there be criminality in so borrowing we should at once commence to measure modern authors with a standard higher than that which we apply to the great masters of the dramatic art.