Theatrically the Nineties were less interesting than the preceding decade. The Eighties saw the great glories both of the Savoy and the Lyceum; they might be likened to a glorious May and a blazing June; the Nineties were rather a tired late summer fading into an inglorious autumn. There was little new, and the old was not quite at its best.

Perhaps it was the discovery by a large class of a new pleasure that chiefly contributed to make the theatre of thirty and forty years ago an institution only second in interest to politics. The theatre-going habit has now become general; the theatre itself tends to be a specialist interest—like sport. Certain classes of young people have their pet pieces and actors, and perhaps lavish on them just as much worship as their grandfathers and grandmothers did on Irving and Ellen Terry, on Grossmith and Jessie Bond, on Hare, and Wyndham, and Toole. But no actor or actress commands the same general adoration that was rendered to the great stage people of the golden age when the cinema and the standardised music-hall were still unborn. The most splendid first night is only an item in the morning’s news. In the old days it competed seriously with a despatch from the Front or the speech of a Prime Minister. I can well remember the appearance of the daily papers on the morrow of a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera. The sketch of the plot and extracts from the libretto occupied perhaps three columns; another couple of columns were devoted to the score; perhaps another one and a half to the dresses and the “brilliant house.” It is true that we have no Gilbert and Sullivan to-day. But if both were with us in the happiest inspiration of their whole collaboration it is inconceivable that they should occupy such a space in the public eye. The viands of the Eighties and Nineties may be equalled again; after all, with the solitary exception of light opera, they were not specially wonderful. It is the appetite that we seek in vain. The English people were then, theatrically speaking, children, and had the zest of the child. They have since grown up, and, while leaning more on stronger drink, find the tipple less exhilarating.

How much of the earlier glories of the Lyceum were due to the fascination exerted by Miss Ellen Terry, and how much to the genius of Henry Irving, must always remain a matter of opinion. But concerning Irving’s greatness there can be only one view. There were all sorts of things he was not. He was not a good judge of a play; whenever he forsook the straight path of Shakespeare he tended woefully to the pretentious or the trivial. He was in some ways not even a good actor; his mannerisms were often unpleasing, and his declamation was sometimes absurd. He was not, probably, a man of very high general intellect. But one thing Irving undoubtedly was: he was great—as great in his own line as Gladstone in Gladstone’s. He dominated the stage as no other man did in his time, or has done since, and he raised the whole public conception of the profession to a level before undreamed of. The diaries of Macready are full of lamentations concerning the hard fate which condemned an authentic public school boy to a degrading servitude. When Irving sent his own boys to Marlborough the arrangement seemed perfectly natural, and when they left nobody was astonished that they should follow their father’s instead of the more “reputable” careers which Macready eyed with envy.

This elevation of the stage was very largely Irving’s personal work, and it was a work which no common man could have achieved. Irving was a most uncommon man. Though natural and unaffected in private, he impressed everybody with whom he came in contact, and was almost more eloquent in his silences than in his speech, excellent as that was. He was a quite incomparable host, and no man ever received so various a society: nearly everybody who was anybody knew Irving. The Emperor Frederick and Mr. Gladstone were among the many distinguished people who at one time or another “went behind” at the Lyceum, and the list of those who partook of Irving’s “chicken and champagne”—to quote a long-lived remark of a rather ill-natured critic—would swell to the limits of a select “Who was Who.” For instance, at the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 he entertained all the Colonial Premiers, Indian Princes, and visitors from overseas who had been mentioned in the official lists!

All this lavish hospitality meant the spending of money, and money could only come by labour. As he went on, Irving put a greater and greater strain on his nervous system, and, made of steel as he seemed in his prime, he suffered heavily in later years for his prodigal expenditure of energy. His luck turned about the middle of the Nineties; a seemingly slight accident cast him aside for best part of three months, involving a heavy loss; a year later he suffered heavily by the burning of his stage properties; still another year, and he was stricken with an illness which left a permanent mark on his physique and his spirit. For some years an overpowering depression rested on him, a sense of tragic disappointment, and it was only when he had reached the confines of old age that his old serenity returned. But even in the heyday of his success he never showed more essential gallantry than in the last fight against embarrassment, infirmity, and (in a sense) solitude. He had not been spoiled by his successes, and he remained above his reverses. He should have died, considering the vast sums he received, a rich man—his last tour in America yielded him, for example, a net profit of over £32,000—but, if he was “unsatisfied in getting,” he was too princely in bestowing to save money. Himself temperate, sparing in diet, satisfied with moderate lodgment, without vices or personal extravagances, and no gambler, he literally showered money on all pursuits and projects tending to increase the finish of his own productions or to improve the standing of the stage in the eyes of the world. He was the first to translate into terms of gorgeous expense Mr. Crummies’s faith in “real water—splendid tubs.” In his plays no detail was omitted. For Becket he obtained the services of a high Roman Catholic dignitary to secure that the cathedral scenes, while impressively realistic to the general, should not offend the religious susceptibilities of the understanding. This devotion to stage upholstery set a vicious fashion of subordinating the picture to the frame, the actor to the scenery, and in the end it nearly ruined Irving. But it had its due effect in raising the stage in public estimation; clearly anything which wanted so much capital could not be quite disreputable.

Irving was survived nearly a year by his old friend Toole. Like Irving, Toole started as a London clerk, but, while Irving to the last retained some small trace of his native province, Somersetshire, Toole was wholly Cockney. The pair met at Edinburgh in 1857, and the friendship then formed lasted undiminished till Irving’s death. When Toole was told the news he said quietly, “Then let me die too.” Toole’s chief triumphs came before the Nineties, and the young people who saw him for the few years before his retirement could hardly comprehend the legend that had gathered round his name. Still less could they appreciate the stories of his rather naÏve fooling in private. But then, all humour is a mystery, and people who “sneer when you inform them that a door may be a jar” will roar their sides out at something no more complex, but more modish.

Irving, much as he had to do with the making of the modern stage, smacked a good deal of the floridity of an earlier period. Sir John Hare was more typical of modern finish; his acting in A Pair of Spectacles set a standard that may often have been equalled by the polished comic actors of to-day, but has hardly been excelled. Hare got so much in the habit of playing old gentlemen’s parts that he had the credit of being much more advanced in years than he really was. He was once at dinner where Mr. Gladstone was also a guest. “Who is that?” whispered Gladstone to his hostess. “Hare? Oh, yes, yes, yes. I once met his father, the manager of the Garrick.”

Hare belonged to a distinctly higher social class than either Irving or Toole. So also did Sir Charles Wyndham. The son of a London doctor, he had received a first-rate education, and practised for some time as a doctor before going on the stage. A handsome person, great vivacity, and a well-bred lightness of touch made him a king of comedy, and his tradition is still one of the strongest inspirations in the modern theatre.

No account of the entertainers of the Nineties would be complete without reference to a form of amusement which, though it still exists in a small way, was in its biggest way thirty years ago. Its chief exponents were Corney Grain and George Grossmith. The German Reed entertainments have now a very far-away sound; the sight of the name gives the same sort of feeling as the sign over some old-fashioned confectioners’, “Routs Catered For.” Yet German Reed was very much alive in its time. It could not be otherwise with the aid of so very vital a person as the gigantic Corney Grain. Grain, who was intended for the Bar, reached the stage by easy stages of amateurism and semi-professionalism, and his career was complicated by a difficulty of classification. At first the Press would barely notice him, because the musical critics said he was not Music, and the dramatic critics said he was not Drama, and everybody agreed that he was not Art. The German Reed entertainment, however, at last found its public—a very peculiar one, very proper, very middle-class, and very much intrigued with what were supposed to be the ways and humours of a superior order of society. It is a public now very largely extinct; people want either stronger or more delicate meat. But those days were different. They were the days when nigger minstrels were a considerable “financial proposition.” I remember well the Press agent of one famous troop complaining to a Brighton newspaper that they had received scant notice during the visit of Sarah Bernhardt. “If it were a circus I could understand, but fancy playing second fiddle to that Frenchwoman!” he remarked in high dungeon. Both with the minstrels and with German Reed people could be sure of a due censorship of jokes and songs; they could enjoy all the luxury of wickedness without wickedness itself. “Thank you, Mr. Grain,” said a bishop once at the end of a performance, “I have been not only amused, but—edified.”

George Grossmith also tended to edification. In physique he was the exact opposite of Corney Grain, wizen and under-sized, and once when they appeared together—the rivals were very excellent friends—Grain ended a scene by picking up Grossmith and carrying him off the stage like a baby. George Grossmith was the son of one of those curious men who supply the newspapers with police court reports; the business is largely hereditary, and in this case the son began life as assistant to his father. Police courts, however, rarely sit late, and the “liners” have considerable leisure to follow any other occupation. Grossmith pÈre was already established as a lecturer and entertainer, and it was quite natural that the two sons—George and Weedon—should follow in his footsteps. In the late Seventies George attracted the notice of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and as a result had a run of twelve years in Savoy Opera. Gilbert was at first violently opposed to the introduction, but had to acknowledge that it was a great success, though he could never refrain from an occasional tilt at what he considered the vulgarities of Grossmith’s style. In a certain part Grossmith received a box on the ear from one of the female characters, and used to fall head over heels on the stage. “I should be very much obliged if you would omit that piece of business, Mr. Grossmith,” suggested Gilbert. “Why? I get a tremendous laugh with it,” pleaded the actor. “So you would if you sat down on a pork pie,” retorted Gilbert, who could never bear that applause should be diverted from his “book” by mere “gag.”

It was just at the end of the Eighties that Grossmith left the Savoy for the business of “society entertainer” on the Corney Grain plan. He made an immediate success, the best tribute to which may be quoted; it was that of a girl at a Yorkshire seaside place: “Oh, how we did laugh! It was laugh, laugh, laugh! All the people kept laughing, and then we laughed. Then the people laughed again, and so did we, and when we got home we laughed more than ever, for none of us knew what we had been laughing at.” But for that happy weakness of human nature, fewer professional funny men would pay super-tax.