But the ruin of the piece was the fifth act. Virginia dead, it remains only to punish Appius according to the good old laws of tragic justice. For that, a single moment and a single gesture had been enough. Sheridan Knowles was in the position of being obliged to write his fifth act and having nothing to put into it. He had recourse to a mad scene. Merimée has written that “il faut laisser aux débutants les foux et les chiens.” This doctrine has Homer and Shakespeare against it. On the other hand, the example of Sheridan Knowles proves that the recourse to madness will not always get the beginner out of his difficulty.
Virginius has succeeded in making his way into Appius’s prison —
“How if I thrust my hand into your breast,
And tore your heart out, and confronted it
With your tongue. I’d like it. Shall we try it?”
When the old centurion plunged his hands into the robes of the decemvir, as though he expected to find Virginia in his pocket, and when Appius, horrified at finding himself “caged with a madman,” appealed for help with all the strength of his lungs whilst calling out to his assailant, “Keep down your hands! Help! Help!” – I cannot imagine how the spectators of 1820 can have refrained from laughter. The two men quitted the scene fighting, and turned up again in another room, – for the prison was a veritable suite of rooms. Having killed Appius, the old man grew calm, and Icilius had but to call him by his name to bring back to him his reason. He slipped a small urn into his hands. “What is this?” asks Virginius. “That is Virginia.” And the curtain fell.
Contemporary critics admitted that the last act was somewhat weak. It was curtailed, but delete it as one would, it was still too long. Had it been reduced to ten lines, these ten lines had been ten lines too much.
In spite of everything, however, Virginius, by Macready’s help, remained a masterpiece for twenty-five years! Knowles made haste to produce some more. He tells in one of his naïve prefaces, how he went to stop with his friend, Mr. Robert Dick, near an Irish lough known for its scenery and its fish, how he would spend the morning at his composition and the afternoon angling, and how his host would snatch his fishing line from his hands whenever he caught him using it before midday… If only Mr. Dick had let him fish in peace! The trout he might have hooked had been at least as valuable as his verse and prose.
If there was any sort of foreshadowing of a national drama in the years 1830 to 1840, it must be sought for in the works of Douglas Jerrold. France knows little of Jerrold, who knew France so well. His was a valiant little soul; his life was one long battle – a battle against obscurity, against ill luck, against the enemies of his country, against the oppressors of the poor, last but not least, against all those whom he disliked. He belonged to that theatrical world at which I have glanced. He was the son of a provincial manager who had met with failure. In his early youth, while yet a child, one may say, he served as midshipman in the wars against Napoleon. He became a journalist later, and threw himself into the midst of politics. Whatever may be said of his caustic and aggressive temperament, he belonged, every inch of him, to that noble generation which aspired so fervently after better things, which strove so strenuously for what was right, which believed it could help humanity forward on the way to a progress without bounds. For forty years he vibrated with generous passions, and grew calm only in the presence of death, which he met like a stoic but with a simplicity not all the stoics knew. I have been brought into intimate relations with his son, who has repeated to me his last words – “This is as it should be.” To fight for justice and to accept the inevitable without fear, – this was the life of a man.
The Rent Day was played on January 25, 1832, that is to say, at the commencement of the memorable year which was to see the passing of the Reform Bill. It is the day upon which the rents have become due. The tenants have brought their money. There is drinking and laughing and singing, the while the heaps of crowns are exchanged for receipts, – for nothing was accomplished in England in those days without drinking, and on rent day it had been almost a disgrace not to be at least “well on.” The middleman is presiding over the function. This morning he has received a letter from the young squire, thus expressed – “Master Crumbs, use all despatch, and send me, on receipt of this, five hundred pounds. Cards have tricked me and the devil cogged the dice. Get the money at all costs, and quickly. – Robert Grantley.” The middleman therefore must have no pity. There is one farmer who cannot pay; his brother the schoolmaster comes to plead for him. He himself is too poor to lend —
Toby (the schoolmaster): “My goods and chattels are a volume of Robinson Crusoe, ditto Pilgrim’s Progress, with Plutarch’s Morals, much like the morals of many other people – a good deal dog’s eared.”…
Crumbs: “Has your brother no one to speak for him?”
Toby: “Now, I think on’t, yes. There are two.”
Crumbs: “Where shall I find them?”
Toby: “In the churchyard. Go to the graves of the old men, and there are the words the dead will say to you: – ‘We lived sixty years in Holly Farm; in all that time we never begged an hour of the squire; we paid rent, tax, and tithe; we earned our bread with our own hands, and owed no man a penny when laid down here. Well, then, will you be hard on young Heywood; will ye press upon our child, our poor Martin, when murrain has come upon his cattle and blight fallen upon his corn?’ This is what they will say.”
The middleman is not one to be moved by the supplications of the schoolmaster. He replies monotonously, inexorably – “My accounts; I must settle my accounts!” Grouped round him, farther back, are the instruments of his lowly tyrant, the beadle (for whom a young writer now hidden from the public eye in the gallery of the House of Commons, Charles Dickens, has in store so terrible a cudgelling) and the appraiser. In those days it was the beadle’s function to execute evictions for the benefit of young squires who had lost at cards. The first act of The Rent Day concludes with a spectacle of this kind. We witness the seizing of the peasant’s bed and of all his furniture, down to a bird-cage and the children’s toys. The scene follows its course; entreaties, curses, threats, then silence and desolation. It was thus that the social question was submitted. Had we been there, and in our twentieth year, – you and I who have to contest against the grandsons of the victims, become in their turn slave-drivers, – we should have joined with the rest of the pit in cheering Jerrold.
The first act gives promise of a vigorous comedy of manners, but we sink gradually into a dense melodrama crowded with absurd incidents and extravagant surprises. Was this Jerrold’s fault, or that of a public which insisted upon monster jokes and monster crimes? I am inclined to adopt the latter explanation, for supply is regulated by demand; a mercantile axiom which resolves itself in a great natural and highly scientific law.
Jerrold could achieve a light and realistic touch at need, and he has given proof of it in A Prisoner of War. The scene is laid in France shortly after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Quite impartially, and with consummate wit, Jerrold holds up to ridicule the chauvinisme of the two nations. He does not confound bombast with valour. “Soldiers,” says one character, “should die and civilians lie for their country.” We are shown – and this has some historical value – the English prisoners living comfortably in a French town, frequenting the Café Imperial, regaling themselves on the bulletins of the “Grande Armée,” with no other obligation than that of answering the roll-call morning and evening. They have money, for the lodging-house keepers compete for their favour; and they pay little French boys to sing “Rule Britannia.” As it seems to me, if Garneray’s Memoirs are to be believed, our compatriots were hardly so well off on the English hulks.
But what strikes me most in A Prisoner of War is one really ingenious and moving scene. It is the evening. An old officer, a prisoner, has remained late over a game of cards with a comrade. Meantime his daughter Clary has a man in her bedroom. Don’t be alarmed – the man is her husband. A secret marriage is always introduced in English plays wherever a seduction is to be found in ours. Suddenly Clary is called out to, loudly, by her father. She imagines herself found out, and arrives quite pallid. What had she been doing?