AT THE HAYMARKET THEATRE

The compiler of the Bath programme was right when he spoke of Lord Dundreary as the "Spirit of the Hour." The phenomenal success of the late E. A. Sothern in this eccentric and most original character, at the Haymarket Theatre, had taken all London (nay, all England) by storm. At the time of which I am writing the name of Dundreary was upon the lips of every one. Men cultivated Dundreary whiskers, and affected Dundreary coats, waistcoats, and trousers; indeed, Sothern had become such a good friend to the tailors that, if he would have accepted them, he might have been furnished, without any mention of payment, with clothes sufficient for a dozen lifetimes. His dressing-room at the Haymarket was crowded with parcels sent by energetic haberdashers, who knew that if by wearing it upon the stage he would set the fashion for a certain sort of necktie, or a particular pattern of shirt-cuff or collar, their fortunes would be half made; and hatters and boot-makers followed in the haberdashers' wake. Dundreary photographs were seen everywhere. "Dundrearyisms," as they came to be called, were the fashionable mots of the day; and little books (generally very badly done) dealing with the imaginary doings of Dundreary under every possible condition, and in every quarter of the globe, were in their thousands sold at the street corners. Concerning Dundreary quite three parts of England went more than half mad, and not to know all about him and his deliciously quaint sayings and doings was to argue yourself unknown.

The actor who not only caused but sustained all this excitement must have achieved something far greater than the mere creation of a new type of "stage swell." Dundreary was a study for the philosopher as well as a laughing-stock for the idler, and he thus became popular with all classes of the community.

But in 1863 Sothern was growing tired of toujours Dundreary. He was a restless as well as an ambitious actor, and he longed for a change. An Englishman by birth and training, all his great successes (including Dundreary) had been won in America, and he wished to show the Haymarket audiences what he could do in other characters. For the time being that fine old actor-manager, J. B. Buckstone, could not hear of his "Lordship" being out of the bill, so Sothern had to content himself with occasional afterpieces.

Among the characters that he fancied was that of Captain Walter Maydenblush in that pretty little adaptation from the French, "La Joie de la Maison," entitled "The Little Treasure." It is a very effective light comedy part, but the mainstay of the piece is the "joy of the house," the sweet young girl, Gertrude. When the piece was first produced at the Haymarket this part had been played by Blanche Fane, the idol of her day, and it had also been made familiar to playgoers by the ever-fascinating Marie Wilton, now Lady Bancroft. Sothern knew very well that without an attractive Gertrude his Walter Maydenblush would go for nothing. Where was she to be found? Well, as we have seen, Ellen Terry had played the part in Bristol. Her growing fame had reached London, and she was engaged to re-create it at the Haymarket.

Although the piece was a subordinate one, her ordeal was formidable, for she had to challenge comparison with her popular and gifted predecessors in a character that required an abundance of delicacy and finesse.

Her success was instantaneous. In writing of it that outspoken critic and encyclopÆdia of dramatic lore, Edward Leman Blanchard, said:—

"She is very young, but shows no trace of immaturity either in her style or figure. Tall for her age, of prepossessing appearance, and with expressive features full of vivacity and intelligence, she secured at once the sympathies of her audience, and retained them by the joyous spirit and deep feeling with which she imbued the personation. In the girlish playfulness exhibited through the first act Miss Ellen Terry was especially happy, and in characters illustrative of a frank and impulsive temperament the young actress will prove a most desirable addition to the feminine strength of the stage."

And so it was with all the leading critics, they, and delighted audiences, telling her that in a moment her permanent popularity in London was a thing assured.

Of course she had in due course to support Lord Dundreary in "Our American Cousin," a play which, not very good to begin with, had, for the sake of Sothern's superbly droll performance, been whittled down to a mere nothing. With the exception of the characters of Asa Trenchard (and he had been converted into an absurd caricature of an American) and Mary Meredith, the one sympathetic woman of the piece, the other parts were indeed thankless ones, and it seems impossible to think that Ellen Terry, our greatest living Shakespearean actress, was once wasted on the insipid role of Georgina, the affected girl on whom Dundreary was "spoony." Georgina was simply a foil for the ridiculous fop's unconscious and wonderfully uttered witticisms, and she had little more to do than to keep her countenance while the audiences roared with laughter at Sothern's wild but always coherent absurdities of speech and manner. Under this trying ordeal I have seen many Georginas break down and laugh heartily with their "kind friends in front," and I have reason to know that the mischief-loving Sothern, at the risk of missing his own points, often tried to make them do so.

Of the sweet "Spirit of the Future," as this stage lay figure playing with the restless "Spirit of the Hour," Clement Scott has said:—

"When Ellen Terry played Georgina she was a young girl of enchanting loveliness. She was the ideal of every pre-Raphaelite painter, and had hair, as De Musset says, 'comme le blÉ.' I always sympathised with Dundreary when he, within whispering distance of Ellen Terry's harvest-coloured hair, said: 'It makes a fellow feel awkward when he's talking to the back of a person's head.'"

In the same inexhaustible play she was called upon, a little later on, to enact the prettily limned Mary Meredith. She says she did it "vilely"; but neither critics nor audiences agreed with her.

Sothern, both on and off the stage, and both with men and women, was one of the most popular beings of his day, and it is therefore all the more surprising to hear Ellen Terry say that she could never like him. She admired him, but she could not understand his mania for practical joking. By some this has been thought odd, for it is known that she herself dearly loves a joke. I think I can explain her prejudice. Having begun one of his "sells," as he called them, Sothern did not know when to leave off, and he never seemed to reflect that it was unkind to practise his pleasantries on nervous young actors.

That he did not mean to be unkind, and that if he felt he had made a mistake or had gone too far he was deeply penitent and anxious to make any atonement in his power, I, who knew him so intimately, can asseverate. But if he saw the chance of a "sell" he could hardly resist temptation, and many of those associated with him on the stage, and who did not understand his bewildering sense of humour, suffered in silence, and were secretly tortured by his odd and incessant pranks. I have no doubt this was poor Ellen Terry's position when she complains that he teased her—made her forget her part, and "look like an idiot." The following anecdote concerning the way in which he treated me (his personal friend!) and a little company of actors and actresses, working their hardest to gain a word of approbation from the great star of the period, will illustrate my meaning.

In the days of many years ago he accepted a comedietta from my pen wildly called (Sothern gave it its title) "My Wife's Father's Sister," and the little piece was produced at the Theatre Royal, Brighton. He was anxious that I should be present at its first night, but I was unable to join him until its second representation. I was to be his guest, but when I entered his room at the Grand Hotel he seemed amazed and discomforted to see me.

"What on earth brings you here?" he exclaimed. "Why, to see you and my piece," I replied. "Then you didn't get my telegram last night?" he inquired. I told him that I had received no telegram and should be glad to know its purport. "Well," he said, in a vexed tone of voice, "I wired to beg you as a personal favour to me not to come to Brighton, but as you are here, we'll say no more about it."

Of course this did not satisfy me, and on being very hard pressed, he reluctantly told me that my poor little play had been a dead failure, and that he had telegraphed to me to stay away because he wanted to spare me humiliation.

"But," I said, in an agony of disappointment, "the newspapers speak well of it!"

"Yes," replied Sothern, "the critics here are good friends of mine, and I persuaded them that it was a sorry task to break a butterfly on a wheel. It was impossible for me at a moment's notice to get another after-piece ready to put in its place, but to-night 'My Wife's Father's Sister' will be played for the second and last time. Don't shirk seeing it, it will be a useful, if painful, lesson to you, and at supper to-night we'll try and find out where the fatal kink in it lies, for, as you know, I felt certain that it was going to be a hit."

In spite of my friend's kindness, sympathy, and unbounded hospitality, I, crushed with mortification, spent a wretched afternoon, and in the early evening (Sothern, who was to play Dundreary, had preceded me) I wended my sad way to the theatre. On my walk I met a mutual friend.

"Well, how did the piece go last night?" he asked. "I was sorry I couldn't be there to see."

Miserably I told him my bitter news, and how the play had failed.

"Then I believe it was Sothern's fault," he said. "He was half mad on practical jokes last night, and one of the actors has told me how he declared that you were in front, that you are a most exacting and irritable author, and that you were intensely annoyed at the grossly vulgar way in which, according to your reported views, your work was interpreted. One by one the actors and actresses had from his lips their dose of what they supposed, and still suppose, to be your harsh criticism. 'Abominable!' 'Atrocious!' and 'Actionable' were among the mildest expressions you were said to have used, and the poor people became so nervous that they hardly knew what they were doing. At the end of the performance Sothern told them collectively that you had left the theatre 'a shattered and prematurely old man.'"

When I crept into an obscure corner of a private box that night, expecting to witness the complete failure of a number of nerveless artists to galvanise a dead play into life, I was very angry with Sothern. I felt that I had been "butchered" to make a "Roman Holiday," and I did not like the sensation. But, to my bewilderment, the comedietta went capitally, and applause of the right sort followed the fall of the curtain. At supper, Sothern, with that marvellous diamond-like sparkle in his speaking blue-grey eye which his friends so well remember, "gave away" the greater part of the story. That delighted and delightful familiar twinkle was sufficient to tell me the truth. "Oh!" I cried, "you have 'sold' me! I believe the piece went as well last night as it did to-night!"

"Much better," he replied calmly. "I sent you no telegram, but I could not resist the sell. Now light a cigar and be happy."

And I was happy until, in the early hours of the morning, Sothern said, "By the way, I wonder how your supper party is getting on?"

"My supper party?" I asked. "What do you mean?"

"Oh," he replied, as he lighted another cigar, "now I think of it, I forgot to tell you that I mentioned to the performers in 'My Wife's Father's Sister' that you were so delighted with their marked improvement on the second night of the production that you wished to welcome them at a little supper you had ordered at the 'Old Ship.'"

And I heard the next day that the poor "sold" people went and waited and came supperless away. And then I sneaked out of Brighton, leaving "My Wife's Father's Sister" behind me.

I have never seen her since. This is only an example of Sothern's constant and, it must be owned, often exasperating practices. It was wonderful that some of his escapades were so easily forgiven, but those who narrowly watched his marvellous dexterity in keeping up the deceptions of his rapid invention, causing one practical joke to overtake another like sea waves; those who could understand his infectious vitality and quick sense of humour, were, even when they chanced to be the wrathful objects of his extravagancies, lost in admiration for his peculiar genius.

In some way his temperament must have resembled that of the great David Garrick, whom he so often impersonated on the stage.

Of the English Roscius it has been said that he was always acting, whether upon the stage, in his own house, in the houses of his friends, and even in the streets.

He would suddenly stop in the middle of a public thoroughfare, and look up at the sky as if he saw something remarkable, until a crowd gathered about him, and then he would turn away with the wild stare of insanity. He could not sit down to have his hair dressed without terrifying the barber by making his face assume every shade of expression, from the deepest tragic gloom to the vacancy of idiotcy.

His enemies ascribed these feats to a restless egotism that must always be conspicuous, but might they not rather have arisen from the over-exuberant animal spirits of "the cheerfulest man of his age"?

Such, in a great measure, was Sothern's nature, and it is not to be wondered at if it sometimes jarred upon those who had to act with him, and who were desirous to do justice to themselves. I cannot suppose that his "My Wife's Father's Sister's" victims loved him any more than they did the innocent writer of these lines, or than Ellen Terry seems to have done.

Such things are to be understood, but I cannot mention Edward Askew Sothern without recording the fact that to his intimate friends he was ever the most consistent, affectionate, and generous of men. At the hospitable table of Henry Irving I once met the famous American tragedian, the late John M'Cullough. Turning to me in the course of the evening, he said: "I am told you are a close friend of Ned Sothern's;" and when I answered "Yes," he said, as if it were a matter of course, "Then you love him."

And that of all men who really knew him well was true.

But if in Sothern Ellen Terry chanced to find an uncongenial fellow-actor, in another member of the Haymarket Company she made a friend, destined to play with her in some of her greatest subsequent triumphs. This was that grand old actor, Henry Howe, "dear old Mr. Howe," as she calls him, who was a staunch member of the once celebrated band of Haymarket comedians for forty years.

Howe played the part of father to "the little treasure"; his kindly, winsome ways at once won her sympathy, and in the now forgotten play no scene was more successful than that in which the supposed parent and child, moved by the pathos of each other's acting, united in genuine tears.

Macready aptly described Charles Kemble as a first-rate actor of second-rate parts, and the same somewhat lukewarm praise may be attributed to Henry Howe; but he was an actor who lent distinction to his profession, and his honoured memory should surely be kept green.

It is odd to think of an actor being a Quaker, and yet throughout his long life Howe was a loyal member of the Society of Friends. It was the impression made upon him, when he was a mere boy, by the soul-inspiring acting of Edmund Kean as King Lear, that gave him a passion for the stage. With a cousin of his own age he contrived to take stolen pleasure in the gallery of Drury Lane Theatre, and on his way home, half-choked with enthusiasm and emotion, he said to his comrade, "I am going to be an actor." His family and friends did their utmost to dissuade him from this rash step, but fate willed that it should be taken, and the stage-struck lad became one of the most accomplished and self-respecting of the actors of his day.

Although he never paraded it, I think he was always influenced by his simple religious faith. I well remember how, in the kindest of ways, he would warn the young fellows of those Sothern-Haymarket days against keeping late (and possibly loose) hours in London after curtain-fall. I can hear him now telling us of his long midnight walks to his beloved country home at Isleworth (beyond Brentford!), and of his active morning work in his garden on those days on which rehearsals did not call him to town. "And at such times," he would say, with a good-humoured shake of his head, "some of you are lying in bed trying to cure carefully manufactured head-aches."

Years afterwards he became a notable member of the Lyceum Company, and served until his death under the banner of Henry Irving. During this period, and when with his chief and comrades he was fulfilling a fortnight's engagement in Birmingham, my good old friend, when on a visit to my house, made me his confidant in a little personal trouble. It was this. During the two weeks of his stay in the city he had only been called upon to act twice, and then only in small parts.

I naturally thought that he felt hurt at apparent neglect, and I tried to say a few consolatory words to him. "Oh, it isn't that!" said the fine old gentleman, "I've no feeling on that score; but the fact is, I am being paid a very handsome salary, and doing next to nothing for it. As things are, I know I am not earning it. I must speak to Irving about it, and tell him either my stipend must be reduced, or I must go." Shortly afterwards I saw him again. His fine face was radiant with smiles and his spirits were buoyant. He had had his interview with Irving, and the upshot of it was that no alteration could be made in his emolument, that he would be called upon to act whenever the repertory contained a part that could be suitably allotted to him, and that his "chief" would regard it as a great personal sorrow if his distinguished name did not figure as a member of his company.

Thus did the most tactful and generous of managers make a time-honoured servant of the public easy in his pocket, and supremely happy in the retention of his amour propre.

Frequenters of the Lyceum will remember how, even in the smallest of parts, Henry Howe was always sure of a hearty reception.

This is only one amongst a thousand of the acts of tender consideration and unstinted liberality shown by Henry Irving towards those who have acted for and with him.

But besides "little treasures," Georginas, and Mary Merediths, there were other opportunities for Ellen Terry at the Haymarket. She had the sympathy and encouragement of such sterling actors as Henry Compton and William Farren, the Chippendales, and the always kindly and attentive Walter Gordon, a gentleman who, on his retirement from the stage, resumed his own name, and was well known as William Aylmer Gowing.

She played Julia in "The Rivals" to the Faulkland of Howe, the Sir Anthony Absolute of Chippendale, the Captain Absolute of William Farren, the Bob Acres of Buckstone, and the Mrs. Malaprop of Mrs. Chippendale. In "Much Ado about Nothing" she appeared as Hero to the Beatrice of Louisa Angell, and when that lady appeared as Letitia Hardy in "The Belle's Stratagem," Ellen Terry was the Lady Touchwood. Let it not be forgotten that her own bewitching Letitia was destined to be one of the most attractive of her comedy impersonations at the Lyceum.

Thanks to Sothern, I was in those days quite at home at the Haymarket Theatre, and in "Walter Gordon" I found a true friend and adviser when, later on, I tried to write on things theatrical. He did much admirable work with his own pen, and was full of good stories of famous actors and actresses with whom he had played. I remember how he told me of an ephemeral entertainment by Sterling Coyne, entitled "Buckstone at Home," in which Ellen Terry, being then in a frolicsome mood, made an unexpected effect and sensation. In this wild production she had to appear as Britannia, and she was surrounded by the Knights of the Round Table. These stalwarts were supposed to be unable to remove a certain "property" stone, concerning which there was much superstition to the effect that it was so heavy that mortal could not stir it. The situation was meant to be taken seriously, but the light-hearted Britannia—possibly annoyed with the absurdity of the production and the poverty of her part in it, came forward, took the mock boulder in her hands, "played ball" with the flimsy thing, at the same time gleefully crying out—"Why, a child could toss it!"

BUST OF ELLEN TERRY, BY W. BRODIE, R.S.A.

Presented to The Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, by Sir Henry Irving.

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