THE THEATRE CRITICISM OF GEORGE STEWART, JR.

Carol W. Fullerton

George Stewart, Jr. was a conservative theatre critic who published drama reviews over a forty-year period in later nineteenth-century Canada. He was typical of his time in preferring legitimate theatre and the plays of Shakespeare, Sheridan and Goldsmith, as well as in looking for naturalness in an actor or actress. Stewart was an early advocate of the need for critical autonomy, and was active in supporting French- as well as English-Canadian theatre.

George Stewart, Jr. fut un critique dramatique conservateur qui sur une période de quelque quarante ans recensait les productions théâtrales du Canada durant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Typique de son époque quant à la préférence qu'il accordait au théâtre légitime, il appréciait surtout l'oeuvre de Shakespeare, Sheridan et Goldsmith, préconisant toujours le jeu naturel des interprètes tout en favorisant la naissance d'un théâtre et d'une critique théâtrale autonomes pour le Canada tant anglais que français.

George Stewart, Jr. (1848-1906), a nineteenth-century Canadian editor and author, was in his day a respected and influential man of letters. His publication of Stewart's Quarterly in Saint John, New Brunswick, from 1867 to 1872 won him national acclaim. His tireless support of Canadian literature and his reputation as a writer led to his election as a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1882. As secretary of the English literature section of the Society for twenty years and as a member of the Society's publishing committee he was in touch with virtually every English- and French-Canadian writer of the time. He was given honorary degrees by four Canadian universities for his work in Canadian letters, but since his death his name has all but disappeared.

Stewart had a life-long interest in the theatre. Early in his career he wrote two articles on drama for Stewart's Quarterly, ¹ and later, as a drama critic, he reviewed the plays he saw in Saint John and in Quebec City (where he moved in 1879), giving his readers news of the larger theatre world. Working as an associate editor or as an editor-in-chief, Stewart published theatre reviews and editorials on the theatre in four successive newspapers: the Saint John Daily News, where he was city editor and substitute drama critic from 1872 to 1875; ² the weekly Watchman in Saint John, where he was literary and drama editor from 1875 to 1877; ³ the Morning Chronicle in Quebec City, where he was editor-in-chief from 1879 to 1896; and the Quebec Mercury, an independent newspaper owned and run almost singlehandedly by Stewart from 1898 to 1902. None of the reviews or editorials is signed, and it is possible to attribute to Stewart with certainty only the material from the Watchman and the Quebec Mercury. However, from such internal evidence as literary reference and sentence style, the editorial comments on theatre in the Morning Chronicle may be said, with fair certainty, to be Stewart's. I have included reference to them, and to theatre comments from the Daily News, because, although I cannot be certain which columns were written by Stewart, the reviews were produced under Stewart's editorship and were part of his purview.

As a young man in Saint John during the golden years of J.W. Lanergan's legitimate theatre in the 1860's and earlier 70's, Stewart would have been able to attend a wide range of theatre, from Shakespeare, Sheridan, Bulwer and Knowles, to Tom Taylor and Dion Boucicault. As Stewart was later to recall:

Manager Lanergan of the Lyceum catered very well for his [patron]s. He employed such "stars" as Charles Matthews, Charles Dillon, E.L. Davenport, Fred Robinson, C.W. Couldock, Wyzeman Marshall, Carolotta Leclerq, Chanfrau and others. His stock company was always well selected, and as he kept his theatre open only during the summer months, he had the pick of the American stage for material. This was before the advent of the society drama. Mr. Lanergan's company gave us the tragedies and comedies of the great playwrights. ⁴

During these years Stewart developed the taste in drama and the standards of performance that were to shape his response to theatre throughout his writing career. The local reviewers favoured legitimate drama and approved those plays 'in which they could see literary and artistic merit, 'as Mary Elizabeth Smith has shown in her history of theatre in Saint John.' ⁵ Stewart reflects the attitudes of these reviewers in his conservative theatre criticism.

Stewart was influenced as well by the noted American drama critics E.P. Whipple and R. Grant White, whose work on the Elizabethan playwrights he admired. In an article called 'The Decline of the Legitimate Drama,' published in 1869, ⁶ Stewart indicated that, like these critics, he was a disciple of the classics, and like them, insisted on morality. Stewart's article also demonstrates that he was reading the London critics, who were at that moment in an uproar over the popularity of Boucicault's 'immoral' play, Formosa. Stewart agreed that if Formosa were as vulgar as it sounded, it must be the worst in theatre. Conceding that Boucicault's Irish pieces are fairly clever, and that some of his plays offer 'magnificent scenic effects,' he accused Boucicault of originating 'perhaps, half of the plays of the "fast" type, which have graced, or rather disgraced, the theatrical boards.' ⁷

From his articles on drama in the Quarterly, to his editorial in the Mercury thirty years later calling for a return to the legitimate theatre, ⁸ Stewart made clear the critical principles informing his comments on the theatre: a preference for traditional drama (or for the favorites of the earlier nineteenth-century), and a desire for naturalness in an actor or actress.

Stewart's preference for traditional theatre derived from his love of the classics and his sense of morality, and as well, from a faith in the power of good literature to change man for the better. This was a faith Stewart demonstrated in the introduction to the Quarterly in 1867 when he promised that the literature published in his journal would have the tendency to 'elevate and refine' its readers. ⁹ And it is evident all through his literary and dramatic criticism that for Stewart, the power of good prose, poetry, or drama derived from its use of emotion. He expected the best plays to be written and acted from a depth of feeling, and in turn to touch the emotions of the audience. Stewart took Shakespeare's plays as the ideal because of their 'passion and fervour.' ¹⁰ He ascribed the success of what he called Bulwer's 'sweet story of the heart,' The Lady of Lyons, to its passionate language. ¹¹ Stewart admired the actress or actor who could portray deep emotion, such as Sophie Miles, whose acting he termed 'intense, powerful, and appropriate, and E.L. Davenport, who as Sir Giles Overreach, Stewart said, 'touches our hearts as with a lance.' ¹²

Stewart's equation of good literature and drama with emotion may have been validated by the doctrines of the Common Sense school, an early system of psychology whose theories, according to A.B. McKillop, were the 'philosophical orthodoxy' in the English-speaking Canada of the 1860's. ¹³ William Lyall, the leading exponent of this school of thought, contributed heavily to the Quarterly, as did several other members of the school. Lyall, who was professor of moral philosophy at Dalhousie, believed that the emotions act as a source of knowledge - that the experience of noble emotion can have a beneficial effect on man. In an essay published in the Quarterly in 1868, Professor Lyall developed his argument by contending that the imaginative experience of 'all noble emotions, all generous acts ... all wider sympathies,' awakens in us 'an ideal of virtuous deeds' and 'call[s] us to its imitation.' ¹⁴

Stewart's interest in legitimate theatre as a means of education and of moral instruction found its expression in the Saint John Daily News in two columns published there during his tenure as city editor. In 1872 the News congratulated Lanergan of the Dramatic Lyceum as the first to teach people in Saint John 'the character and true objects of the moral stage.' ''Lanergan,' said the News, 'used first-class talent to instruct as well as amuse. He demonstrated that, in truth, the stage is a great educator of the people.' ¹⁵ In another instance the News commented, 'The drama, if properly conducted, can be ... refining and elevating,'¹⁶ echoing the terms used by Stewart in his introduction to the Quarterly.

Stewart became theatre critic of The Watchman when it was founded in Saint John in May, 1875. The newspaper was established by the outspoken editor John Livingston, and lived up to its inaugural promise to be fearless in discussing news, books, and the theatre. Given the freedom to be impartial in his reviews, Stewart began to find his voice as a critic and to display his academic and perhaps ultra-conservative tastes in theatre. He was a good deal less admiring of the production of the new American play Saratoga at the Academy of Music in June of 1875 than were the other reviewers in Saint John, and showed that he found it a poor substitute for traditional theatre. He felt the production was credible, but thought that Neil Warner, playing the lovesick Bob Sackett, must have inwardly lamented the popularity of these substitutes for the creations of the great authors. ¹⁷ Almost as an aside in the midst of a review of Augustin Daly's Pique, Stewart remarked, 'The play is above the average of American acting plays, but it is, we fear, only too life-like.' ¹⁸ Stewart even questioned the good taste of introducing such dramas as Camille at the Academy of Music, ¹⁹ although Camille had been a popular standard in Saint John for twenty years. And he voiced strong objections to the choice of plays at the Academy of Music under William Nannary's management in the spring of 1876, and to the mangling of his favorites: Sheridan's School for Scandal was poorly rehearsed; Romeo and Juliet was played in six acts instead of five; and the production of Boucicault's London Assurance was spoiled when one of the actors substituted his own words for those of the script. ²⁰ In the fall of that year, Stewart welcomed W.L. LeMoyne's dramatizations of Dickens to Saint John, speaking for himself as much as anyone when he wrote: 'Tired of trashy "realistic scenes"... resurrected melodramas and vulgar French Comedies, our citizens have turned with delight to a series of performances at once fresh, piquant, and homely.' ²¹

Stewart had less freedom when he became editor-in-chief of the Quebec Morning Chronicle, in 1879. The Chronicle, a long-established, conservative daily controlled by publisher John J. Foote, was devoted almost exclusively to political and commercial news. But Stewart continued to keep the idea of the legitimate theatre before his readers with items such as the following, in the editorial columns of the paper in 1885, entitled 'General Phil. Sheridan's New play.' General Sheridan, a hero of the American Civil War, was general-in-chief of the U. S. Army in 1885. Stewart must have smiled when he found the general confused with Richard Brinsley Sheridan (the author of School for Scandal) in a letter to the editor of the Chicago Daily News. Stewart must have been even more amused when he found the puritan letter-writer denouncing School for Scandal and he reprinted the letter in the Morning Chronicle. The letter reads:

I was pained to read in your morning paper a praise given to the acting of Sheridan's School for Scandal at McVicker's last night. Such a low, indelicate, obscene exhibition I have never seen before. It ought to be hissed off the stage. These modern plays are becoming as immoral as they are disgusting. It is indeed a sad disgrace that such a man as the writer of this vile, senseless trash should disgrace the office of the commander-in-chief of the army of the United States. Yours in behalf of decency,
'Modestas'

The Chronicle commented: 'The General should at once resign his position in the army of the United States or quit writing plays. It is clear that Chicago will have no more of the latter.' ²²

The Morning Chronicle continued the polite and superficial reviews it had published before Stewart arrived, making little adverse comment on the quality of plays being seen in Quebec. In 1898, however, when Stewart was the owner of his own paper, and the management of the Quebec Academy of Music invited comments on the type of plays Quebec would like to see, Stewart once again leapt to the fray, calling for wholesome, attractive plays and for the classics of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Goldsmith. 'What the public wants,' said Stewart, 'is a good play, and a good play is not what it is getting.' ²³ But Stewart was forced to recognize that the theatre audience in Quebec was too small to support much legitimate theatre, and that, as Byron Nicholson reported in the Toronto Globe, 'the variety of entertainment which finds favour [in Quebec City] is tuneful comic opera in either language, light French and English comedy which is picturesque and morally clean, character sketches and pantomime.' ²⁴ When the Quebec Academy of Music burned down in March of 1900, there was little hope for an early revival of Stewart's favorites.

Stewart was typical of his time in looking for naturalness in an actor or actress. In the 1860's and 70's in Saint John, as Mary Elizabeth Smith notes, 'to be natural, or to seem to be the character himself was, in the eyes of the press, the highest achievement of the actor.' ²⁵ To Stewart's eyes, the high point of Davenport's acting in A New Way to Pay Old Debts was the moment where Davenport, 'loses his identity and becomes in reality Sir Giles Overreach.' ²⁶ Stewart continued to use naturalness as a standard of performance, finding Sophie Miles 'acting' akin to nature, 'and W.L. Lemoyne's performance as Uriah Heap 'so intensely real that many in the audience felt the itching desire to hurl him from the stage.' ²⁷ Stewart objected to the booming Shakespearean excess of some of the actors he reviewed, and during the spring of 1876 in Saint John when he was in the process of demolishing William Nannary and Company, he was scathingly critical of the actor Frank Roche. 'Mr. Roche,' he said, 'played the part of Lord Rochester in Jane Eyre like a barbarian, and his bad habit of continually declaiming marred the better portions of his reading.' ²⁸ And again, in The Lady of Lyons, Stewart said, 'Mr. Roche roared as lustily as usual.' ²⁹ Stewart reported in great detail the acting and staging of the historical play Ambition, with both Nannary and Roche as his targets. He said:

The vault scene in Ambition was especially funny. instead of putting Mrs. Allen (who played Catherine Howard) in the family vault, the management ran up the curtain on a scene which baffles description. Mr. Roche was discovered kneeling at the base of a doorless refrigerator, on the lower shelf of which the body of Mrs. Allen lay, nice and cool and in a capital state of preservation. When the King came in, and Ethelwood and His Majesty began fumbling over the corpse like two boys quarrelling over a jar of pickles, the feelings of the audience overcame them and everyone roared with laughter. It sounded like mockery in that lonesome place. Mr. Roche's loud voice, however, awoke Mrs. Allen and she tumbled gracefully off the shelf and on to the stage, to the intense delight of the five boys who comprised the gallery audience. ³⁰

Stewart could supply constructive criticism to an actor inclined to rant, however, if he could see talent in the actor. When George C. Miln played in Quebec in the winter of 1886, the Chronicle produced an equivocal review of his acting in The Fool's Revenge, but by the next morning the Chronicle had made up its mind, and published an editorial at once critical and encouraging. 'Of Mr. Miln himself, we may say a word,' it began.

'His manner on the stage is prepossessing, [but] he is stagey and given considerably to rant. He reads with intelligence, but follows other tragedians rather than constructs for himself a conception of his part ... There is talent in Mr. Miln, however, and it ought not to be difficult for him to step from the Bowery to the Lyceum. He has a career before him and the intelligence to win it.' ³¹

When Miln returned the following December, though, the reviews in the Chronicle were still equivocal. They congratulated Miln for the careful study he had given his roles, without admitting he was successful in them, and, in terms calculated to preserve the integrity of the critic, remarked, 'Mr. Miln shows throughout his work an earnest spirit, and never turns aside from the lofty ideal he has set for himself.' ³²

When Stewart had the opportunity, and was not tied to the polite, encoded style typical of much nineteenth-century Canadian reviewing, he proved himself to be a thoughtful critic, with an understanding of the responsibility of the drama critic to his readers, and a belief in the need for critical autonomy. He defined his philosophy as a theatre critic in an editorial in the Mercury in 1898:

Theatre criticism for quite a number of years past in Quebec has become a solemn farce. The counting room of the newspapers has invaded the domain of the critic, and the result has been disastrous to the public taste ... As a rule, the reporter goes to the theatre with amiable intentions towards the management and the company. He condemns only if he cannot help it, and he ought not to be prevented from protecting the patrons of his newspaper from imposition ... The paltry cost of an advertisement ought not to interfere with the opinion of the critic, who has been detailed to see the show and describe it to the best of his ability. ³³

Stewart was anticipating by almost three decades Lawrence Mason's defence of his own critical standards in the Toronto Globe in 1926. Mason wrote:

The critic's first duty would seem to be to the public. Assuming that he is properly qualified for his task, he should use his special knowledge to keep people from being exploited for private profit and to help them form sound standards of judgement. Manifestly, he cannot serve the public in these desirable ways unless he is free to point out defects where they exist. ³⁴

Stewart was able to put his credo into practice only once - when he worked for the Watchman in Saint John and could say exactly what he thought of the management of the Academy of Music. At that time, when a rival newspaper, the New Dominion, called his criticism 'odious,' he replied with a statement of principle: 'In these notices we have endeavoured to exercise an impartial judgement. We have striven to serve the public and not to bolster up a tottering concern. The management has been written of as it really is, without fear or favour.' ³⁵ Stewart was a student of Matthew Arnold, and Stewart's phrase 'as it really is,' suggests that he was following the injunction of Arnold in Essays in Criticism to see the object of criticism 'as in itself it really is.' ³⁶

Under Stewart's guise as a professional journalist lay a serious critic. Stewart had the capacity to write criticism that was more than what Lawrence Mason has called 'fulsome flattery or outright propaganda.' ³⁷ But in the mercantilist society that was nineteenth-century Canada, where the counting room of the newspaper invaded the critic's domain, it is a wonder that Stewart was as forthright in his expression and demonstration of critical principle as he was.

Stewart's taste in plays and standards of performance tally with those of other drama reviewers of the later nineteenth-century in Canada, although he was perhaps more conservative, and had a markedly intellectual interest in the history and traditions of the theatre. Stewart's view that the theatre must instruct as well as amuse coincided with the views expressed by the anonymous Toronto reviewer who wrote the Music and Drama pages for the Canadian Monthly between 1874 and 1877. And like this reviewer, Stewart was an ardent supporter of the theatre at a time when some, on moral grounds, opposed the theatre altogether.

Stewart's enthusiasm for the drama extended to a continuing interest in French-Canadian theatre. Half Scots and half French-Canadian, Stewart was committed to developing a sympathy between the two cultures in Canada. He promoted the actors of French Canada, among them Julien Daoust, founder of the National Theatre in Montreal in 1900, Elzéar Hamel, an early member of the National Theatre troupe, and Paul Cazeneuve, the actor from France by way of Boston, who arranged the production of nearly fifty new plays by Quebecois writers. ³⁸ The Chronicle's leading editorial on Louis Fréchette's Papineau, produced in Quebec City on St. Jean Baptiste day in 1880, ³⁹ and Stewart's comments on the play published in the years thereafter, ⁴⁰ offer a perspective of the play from the point of view of a writer from English Canada who found inspiration and example in the literature of French Canada. Stewart's was only one of the voices commenting on theatre in nineteenth-century Canada, but it was a voice sustained over forty years, when Stewart, as a widely respected writer, was close to the heart of the nineteenth-century Canadian cultural experience, both English and French. In the work of a man such as this, it is possible to trace the beginnings of our unique cultural life.

Notes

THE THEATRE CRITICISM OF GEORGE STEWART, JR.

Carol W. Fullerton

1 'The Decline of the Legitimate Drama' Stewart's Quarterly vol 3, October 1869 pp 305-8; 'Mr. E.L. Davenport as Sir Giles Overreach' Stewart's Quarterly vol 4, April 1870 pp 98-102
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2 HENRY MORGAN, The Canadian Men and Women of the Time Toronto: Briggs 1898 pp 969-70; George Stewart Jr, 'The History of a Magazine' The Dominion Illustrated Monthly vol 1, August 1892 pp 400-8
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3 MORGAN p 969
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4 'The History of a Magazine' The Dominion Illustrated Monthly vol 1, August 1892 p 405
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5 Too Soon the Curtain Tell: A History of Theatre in Saint John Fredericton: Brunswick Press 1981 p 89
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6 Stewart's Quarterly vol 3, October 1869 pp 305-8
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7 Ibid p 306
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8 Quebec Mercury 6 June 1898
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9 'Introductory ' Stewart's Quarterly vol 1, April 1867 p 2
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10 'Mr. E.L. Davenport as Sir Giles Overreach' Stewart's Quarterly vol 4, April 1870 p 99
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11 Morning Chronicle (Quebec) 2 December 1882
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12 Watchman (Saint John) 29 May 1875; 'Mr-E.L. Davenport as Sir Giles Overreach' Stewart's Quarterly vol 4, April 1870 p 102
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13 A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Enquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era Montreal: McGill-Queen's 1979 p 57
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14 'The Ideal and the Practical' Stewart's Quarterly vol 3, January 1870 p 409
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15 Saint John Daily News 2 June 1872
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16 Saint John Daily News 17 May 1874
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17 Watchman 12 June 1875
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18 Watchman 17 April 1877
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19 Watchman 10 July 1875
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20 Watchman 3 June 1876; Watchman 17 June 1876; Watchman 8 July 1876
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21 Watchman 4 Nov 1876
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22 Morning Chronicle 11 August 1885
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23 Quebec Mercury 6 June 1898
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24 reprint Quebec Mercury 26 August 1899
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25 MARY ELIZABETH SMITH Too Soon the Curtain Fell - A History of Theatre in Saint John Fredericton: Brunswick Press 1981 p 75
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26 'Mr. E.L. Davenport as Sir Giles Overreach' Stewart's Quarterly vol 4, April 1870 p 102
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27 Watchman 11 September 1875; Watchman 4 Nov 1876
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28 Watchman 24 June 1876
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29 Watchman 1 July 1876
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30 Watchman 1 July 1876
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31 Morning Chronicle 11 February 1886
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32 Morning Chronicle 8 December 1886
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33 Quebec Mercury 16 May 1898
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34 Globe (Toronto) 22 May 1926
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35 Watchman 1 July 1876
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36 MATTHEW ARNOLD Essays in Criticism 1st Series Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1968 (1865) p 11
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37 Globe (Toronto) 22 May 1926
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38 JEAN BÉRAUD 350 ans de théâtre au Canada français Ottawa: le Cercle du livre de France 1958 p 95
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39 Morning Chronicle 26 June 1880
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40 See for example 'Prominent Canadians: Louis Honoré Fréchette' The Week 17 November 1888 pp 822-23 and 'Literature in French Canada' New England Magazine ns 53, September 1890 p 17.
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