Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day--to the victory of the horse "Gladiator," to _Lady Audley's Secret_ (then all the rage), to vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in Trafalgar Square, to Mudie's Circulating Library,--and a thousand other things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be intelligible.
To read _Ixion_, as I read it thirty-five years after its first production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making one's way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had become enigmas, and through all the _débris_ of these used-up fireworks, was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of things in general, the pervading odour of the _poudre de riz_, the _flonflons_ of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A débutante destined to a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon. Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman) the Goddess of Wisdom.
But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion. For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one could wish, and even more,--so much so that the list of his works, were I to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and work it up,--you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should be stocked. He collected them together in notebooks which in time must have come to rival the volume of Larousse's Dictionary. In the street he would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk, or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which never left him an instant's peace. Having failed as a manager in the provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring down the curtain on a witticism?