Fleeming was all his life a lover of the play and all that
belonged to it. Dramatic literature he knew fully. He
was one of the not very numerous people who can read a play: a
knack, the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination,
comparable to that of reading score. Few men better
understood the artificial principles on which a play is good or
bad; few more unaffectedly enjoyed a piece of any merit of
construction. His own play was conceived with a double
design; for he had long been filled with his theory of the true
story of Griselda; used to gird at Father Chaucer for his
misconception; and was, perhaps first of all, moved by the desire
to do justice to the Marquis of Saluces, and perhaps only in the
second place, by the wish to treat a story (as he phrased it)
like a sum in arithmetic. I do not think he quite
succeeded; but I must own myself no fit judge. Fleeming and
I were teacher and taught as to the principles, disputatious
rivals in the practice, of dramatic writing.
Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the Marseillaise, a
particular power on him. ‘If I do not cry at the
play,’ he used to say, ‘I want to have my money
back.’ Even from a poor play with poor actors, he
could draw pleasure. ‘Giacometti’s
Elisabetta,’ I find him writing, ‘fetched the
house vastly. Poor Queen Elizabeth! And yet it was a
little good.’ And again, after a night of Salvini:
‘I do not suppose any one with feelings could sit out
Othello, if Iago and Desdemona were acted.’
Salvini was, in his view, the greatest actor he had seen.
We were all indeed moved and bettered by the visit of that
wonderful man.—‘I declare I feel as if I could
pray!’ cried one of us, on the return from
Hamlet.—‘That is prayer,’ said
Fleeming. W. B. Hole and I, in a fine enthusiasm of
gratitude, determined to draw up an address to Salvini, did so,
and carried it to Fleeming; and I shall never forget with what
coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor
with what spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw
himself into the business of collecting signatures. It was
his part, on the ground of his Italian, to see and arrange with
the actor; it was mine to write in the Academy a notice of
the first performance of Macbeth. Fleeming opened
the paper, read so far, and flung it on the floor.
‘No,’ he cried, ‘that won’t do. You
were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini!’ The
criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through
ignorance; it was not of myself that I was thinking, but of the
difficulties of my trade which I had not well mastered.
Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure which Fleeming and I shared
the year of the Paris Exposition, was the Marquis de
Villemer, that blameless play, performed by Madeleine Brohan,
Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat—an actress, in such parts at
least, to whom I have never seen full justice rendered. He
had his fill of weeping on that occasion; and when the piece was
at an end, in front of a café, in the mild, midnight air,
we had our fill of talk about the art of acting.
But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an
inheritance from Norwich, from Edward Barron, and from Enfield of
the Speaker. The theatre was one of Edward
Barron’s elegant hobbies; he read plays, as became
Enfield’s son-in-law, with a good discretion; he wrote
plays for his family, in which Eliza Barron used to shine in the
chief parts; and later in life, after the Norwich home was broken
up, his little granddaughter would sit behind him in a great
armchair, and be introduced, with his stately elocution, to the
world of dramatic literature. From this, in a direct line,
we can deduce the charades at Claygate; and after money came, in
the Edinburgh days, that private theatre which took up so much of
Fleeming’s energy and thought. The company—Mr.
and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain Charles
Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr.
Charles Baxter, and many more—made a charming society for
themselves and gave pleasure to their audience. Mr. Carter
in Sir Toby Belch it would be hard to beat. Mr. Hole in
broad farce, or as the herald in the Trachiniæ,
showed true stage talent. As for Mrs. Jenkin, it was for
her the rest of us existed and were forgiven; her powers were an
endless spring of pride and pleasure to her husband; he spent
hours hearing and schooling her in private; and when it came to
the performance, though there was perhaps no one in the audience
more critical, none was more moved than Fleeming. The rest
of us did not aspire so high. There were always five
performances and weeks of busy rehearsal; and whether we came to
sit and stifle as the prompter, to be the dumb (or rather the
inarticulate) recipients of Carter’s dog whip in the
Taming of the Shrew, or having earned our spurs, to lose
one more illusion in a leading part, we were always sure at least
of a long and an exciting holiday in mirthful company.
In this laborious annual diversion, Fleeming’s part was
large. I never thought him an actor, but he was something
of a mimic, which stood him in stead. Thus he had seen Got
in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when he came to play it,
breathed meritoriously of the model. The last part I saw
him play was Triplet, and at first I thought it promised
well. But alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a
train, and were not heard of at home till late at night.
Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated to give his sons a
chisel or a gun, or to send them abroad in a canoe or on a horse,
toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler, Triplet
growing hourly less meritorious. And though the return of
the children, none the worse for their little adventure, brought
the colour back into his face, it could not restore him to his
part. I remember finding him seated on the stairs in some
rare moment of quiet during the subsequent performances.
‘Hullo, Jenkin,’ said I, ‘you look down in the
mouth.’—‘My dear boy,’ said he,
‘haven’t you heard me? I have not one decent
intonation from beginning to end.’
But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part,
when he took any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at
whist; and found his true service and pleasure in the more
congenial business of the manager. Augier, Racine,
Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere’s translation,
Sophocles and Æschylus in Lewis Campbell’s, such were
some of the authors whom he introduced to his public. In
putting these upon the stage, he found a thousand exercises for
his ingenuity and taste, a thousand problems arising which he
delighted to study, a thousand opportunities to make these
infinitesimal improvements which are so much in art and for the
artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the
professional costumer, with unforgetable results of comicality
and indecorum: the second, the Trachiniæ, of
Sophocles, he took in hand himself, and a delightful task he made
of it. His study was then in antiquarian books, where he
found confusion, and on statues and bas-reliefs, where he at last
found clearness; after an hour or so at the British Museum, he
was able to master ‘the chitôn, sleeves and
all’; and before the time was ripe, he had a theory of
Greek tailoring at his fingers’ ends, and had all the
costumes made under his eye as a Greek tailor would have made
them. ‘The Greeks made the best plays and the best
statues, and were the best architects: of course, they were the
best tailors, too,’ said he; and was never weary, when he
could find a tolerant listener, of dwelling on the simplicity,
the economy, the elegance both of means and effect, which made
their system so delightful.
But there is another side to the stage-manager’s
employment. The discipline of acting is detestable; the
failures and triumphs of that business appeal too directly to the
vanity; and even in the course of a careful amateur performance
such as ours, much of the smaller side of man will be
displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and
levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own
view; he might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind
us) were after all his, and he must decide. He was, in this
as in all other things, an iron taskmaster, sparing not himself
nor others. If you were going to do it at all, he would see
that it was done as well as you were able. I have known him
to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the
same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary
afternoon. And yet he gained and retained warm feelings
from far the most of those who fell under his domination, and
particularly (it is pleasant to remember) from the girls.
After the slipshod training and the incomplete accomplishments of
a girls’ school, there was something at first annoying, at
last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of
accomplishment and perseverance.
