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Henri de Neuville to another player. The public would interest themselves only in the acting of Robson; Mr. Wigan's spirited performance of the lover of the story was left almost unnoticed. After this it was observed that the manager and his low comedian rarely appeared upon the scene together or took part in the same play: two stars keep not their motion in one sphere." Then came a demand at the box-office for a revival of "The Wandering Minstrel," and Robson, after thrilling and exciting his public by his Desmarets, set them laughing again by his Jem Baggs, and his comic song of "Villikens and his Dinah." Subsequently he appeared in a long course of farces and burlesques. So that he played, his admirers were indifferent as to what he played; it was sufficient to see Robson. The editor of the Times counted "seeing Robson" among the few London attractions that could be offered to the intelligent foreigner visiting our capital. "It is as imperative to see Robson," wrote Mr. Sala in The Train, "as to see St. Paul's or the Falls of Niagara," and the critic went on to explain the extraordinary gifts of the actor, his insight into the human heart, his power of delineating passion. "It is his to seize, to demonstrate, to drag up from the depths of the soul, the latent, seldom seen, more seldom understood emotions that make up the sum of humanity . . . . He shows us the man turned inside out. He wears his coat on his sleeve. shows us the inner life. He shows us not only Prometheus, but Prometheus's vulture-torn liver. He lets us behind the scenes of his heart. His words are not cloaks to conceal his thoughts; you divine the innermost thought and the man's heart of hearts by his talk, in a gasp, a half-uttered ejaculation, a smothered curse, a scream," &c., &c. Mr. Sala held that Robson could play Shakespeare's Shylock, and even Hamlet; not after the conventional fashion, but rather in a Rembrandtish or Hogarthian manner, powerfully life-like, and yet mixed with baser matter, with touches of realism of an ignoble and gross kind. About the same time Mr. Donne, then the examiner of plays, was writing to the Quarterly Review: "With less than a cubit added to his stature, Mr. Robson would be among the first Shakespearean actors of the day. It is unfortunate for himself and the spectators that his physical qualifications are not in better accordance with his dramatic genius. He lacks presence only to mate Kean in Shylock and Overreach, or Macready in Virginius and Lear."

He

Churchill objected to the opinion that "heroes always should be tall," that "true natural greatness all consists in height," and denounced the snarling critics who produced Sergeant Kite as their

voucher; and it was Churchill who derided Barry for being "taller than a grenadier." Yet, assuredly, the actor has to submit to disqualifications because of physical shortcomings. Garrick's merits induced such complete forgetfulness of his low stature, it might be that he seemed to be six feet high. But Robson must have been shorter than Garrick by a head. And Robson was cast in a most unheroic mould. He was of mean presence, he was without dignity of port, his features were insignificant and of blunt form, his face lacked expression save when it was lit up with merriment. His hands and feet were especially small and delicate, and his limbs were neatly modelled, but they were disproportioned to his trunk. He could command a certain airy grace of movement, and was a most agile dancer; yet his figure and aspect were so quaint and grotesque that they seemed always to invite ridicule. Was success in poetic tragedy open to such an actor? It was very doubtful. He was not encouraged to make the experiment. The times were not favourable, and Robson was not ambitious. Already his triumphs in farce and burlesque had exceeded his fondest hopes, had almost turned his brain. He was singularly modest in estimating his own merits; he was diffident, shy, nervous, retiring. He blushed with pleasure at the praises awarded him, and yet shrank from them as though they pained him: they were so much in excess of his deserts. He was not trained to appear in the poetic drama. He had never spoken a line of blank verse. He seemed to avoid systematically the established repertory; he sustained few parts that others had played before him and made familiar or famous. It was understood that for him Mr. Tom Taylor had written his "Fool's Revenge," founding it upon Victor Hugo's tragedy "Le Roi s'amuse." Robson hesitated, he mistrusted his own powers, and the part of Bertuccio was eventually handed to Mr. Phelps. The dramatist believed that he had measured the actor accurately, and guaranteed a perfect fit; but Robson declined to assume the suit. After all, it may be that the player correctly judged his own capabilities; he may have lacked not so much the art as the force to sustain throughout a long play an arduous part of tragic and poetic quality. During his ten years' career upon the stage of Western London his Desmarets remained his most successful serious character. It seemed absolutely necessary to him that the parts he played should contain certain fantastic and even grotesque elements; he was repelled by the conventionalisms of grave impersonation; he could not long remain staid or solemn, he needed outlet for his humour; and his natural tendency was towards drollery. He delighted in quick changes of mood; his

audiences were laughing merrily one moment and the next they were all tears he had touched suddenly upon some unexpected exquisite note of pathos, and its effect had been magical. Perhaps he found excuse for his defects of aspect, his diminutive size and inferior proportions in this almost wanton toying now with tragedy and now with comedy. As Aaron Gurnock in Mr. Wilkie Collins's play of "The Lighthouse," Robson may be said to have failed completely, certain fine and interesting passages in his performance notwithstanding. But the part was wholly serious, needing sustained melodramatic intensity of interpretation; represented with masterly force by Mr. Charles Dickens in the private theatre of Campden House, it was found to be singularly impressive; it would have suited. Lemaître or Melingue; Robson could do little with it. His triumphs were in characters nicely blending comicality with pathos, and permitting displays of passionate emotion: such as the rustic miser in "Daddy Hardacre"-a version of "La Fille de l'Avare"-and Sampson Burr, the hero of "The Porter's Knot," a most adroit adaptation of "Les Crochets du Père Martin." Perhaps this Sampson Burr was the finest, the most elaborate, of all his assumptions. Acting more strictly true to nature, more complete, more tender and affecting, can never have been seen upon the stage. He was very happy too in "Uncle Zachary," derived from "L'Oncle Baptiste," which some years before had been translated for Farren, and as "Peter and Paul," produced at the Haymarket.

Many plays were written or adapted for Robson; at one time there prevailed quite a general ambition to provide "Robson parts"; but no permanent additions to our dramatic literature can be said to have resulted from this industry. Mr. Taylor wrote for him the comedy of "Going to the Bad," of which he represented the hero Mr. Peter Potts, and the domestic drama "Payable on Demand," with the part of a Jew of Frankfort, Reuben Goldsched, young in one act, and old in the next, specially devised for the actor; yet no great success attended these efforts. It was for Robson that Mr. Wilkie Collins contrived his powerful melodrama "The Red Vial," which failed however because of its excess of sombre terrors, the audience rising against a scene of the dead-house at Frankfort, with a supposed corpse stretched upon its bier, coming to life unexpectedly, and waving a nude arm in the air. Robson was provided with the part of Hans Grimm, a lunatic dwarf, who tampers with a medicine chest, poisons by misadventure, and undergoes many strange contortions and convulsions; but the honours of the representation were carried off by Mrs. Stirling, as a sort of middle

class Lady Macbeth. Of the many farces written for Robson few have survived; they served the end for which they were produced, and disappeared with the actor. The most successful, perhaps, were "To oblige Benson," "Retained for the Defence," "The Blighted Being," "Jones the Avenger," "Ticklish Times," and "A Regular Fix." It was in the drama of "Daddy Hardacre," and the farce "B. B." by Messrs. Montague Williams and F. C. Burnand, that Robson performed before Her Majesty at Windsor Castle in November 1860. It may be advisable now to explain that "B. B." are the initials of a Mr. Benjamin Bobbin, a harmless little gentleman who is mistaken for another "B. B."-the Benicia Boy-the pseudonym of a famous pugilist of those times, who, with other even more famous personages of the past, is now wholly forgotten.

With burlesques the Olympic was kept well supplied: the public at this time greatly relished burlesques, and the unaspiring actor figured in them with a singular air of enjoyment; he had made burlesque acting an art of his own. All the works of this class in which he appeared he leavened with his genius, "mingling the grotesque with the terrible," as the critics wrote again and again. Comic songs, strange dances, and "a mad scene," were always required in his burlesques. What a most gnome-like creature he seemed in Planché's "Yellow Dwarf"! How powerfully in the travesty of " Medea" he mimicked Ristori, expressing much of her own passion and pathos, and winning the applause even of the great artist he parodied! What a caricature of a tragedy queen he presented as the Eleanor of Mr. Burnand's "Fair Rosamond"! How especially marvellous he was as the hump-backed Prince Richcraft of the extravaganza called "The Discreet Princess." Richcraft is supposed to be deformed alike in body and in mind: a marvellous misshapen creature, splenetic, malignant, vindictive, vicious, seeking to be revenged upon the whole human race for the ill-treatment he has received at the hands of Nature. The deformity was everywhere, but least apparent in his outward man. As Mr. Sala wrote of Richcraft-"the heart is hunched, the soul squints, the mind is bow-legged, the feelings are wall-eyed, the passions high-shouldered." There was a moment in the play-Richcraft is supposed to have undergone some such punishment as Regulus endured-when the actor was brought on and laid upon the stage, seemingly so helpless, shattered, broken, so livid with suffering, such a ghastly, miserable, moribund creature, that the whole house was hushed into an awful terrified silence, and those in the pit rose furtively, one by one, from their seats, and stood on tip-toe the better to view the singular spectacle

just as the pit rose in Garrick's time to watch him when as Lear he knelt down to pronounce his curse upon Goneril. Other burlesques there were in which Robson distinguished himself and greatly gratified his patrons: "Mazeppa," "Alfred the Great,"" Masaniello," and "Timour the Tartar." Attempt was even made to give some freshness to this form of entertainment by dismissing parody for a while and substituting a newly invented story. It was for Robson that the extravaganza of "The Doge of Duralto, or The Enchanted Eyes," was written by Robert Brough, a genuine wit and graceful poet, who scarcely received the recognition and the rewards that were due to his genius, and who throughout his too brief life was hindered on his road to prosperity and fame by infirm health and "iron fortune." His Doge of Duralto was a mysterious potentate, a monster of avarice and cruelty, for ever constraining his daughter to weep, because, thanks to a fairy spell, the tears of beauty had acquired literally the gift poetry had so often endowed them with, and turned. instantly to real pearls of great price. Robson displayed extraordinary tragic power; was maleficently passionate as Sir Giles Overreach, and anon, in the indispensable mad scene, as pathetic and pitiable as Lear. The play was much to be commended for its ingenuity, originality, wit, and spirit; but perhaps it pleased less altogether than the more trite and familiar forms of extravaganza.

In 1857 Alfred Wigan relinquished his tenancy of the Olympic Theatre, and indeed bade farewell to the public, only to return to his profession, however, with recruited health, in the course of a very few years. To Robson had been mainly due the success of the Olympic; it seemed but right that he should fill the place left vacant by the retiring impresario. From the public point of view Robson was the Olympic, and the Olympic was Robson: they were indissolubly one. So Robson undertook the cares of management, with the assistance of a partner, Mr. Emden, who had been long connected with the stage direction of the theatre. The entertainments offered by the new managers did not differ in kind from those presented by Mr. Wigan. During several seasons Robson was to be seen nightly in comedy, farce, and burlesque, exerting himself strenuously, greatly delighting his patrons. His life as a London actor after his engagements at the Grecian Saloon was spent at the Olympic Theatre; he scarcely appeared, except on the occasion of benefit performances, upon any other stage.

A few more words must suffice; there is indeed little further to relate. The actor's triumph had its reverse side; his successes had to be paid for. His health began to fail him, while the calls upon

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