John Doran - Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 2 of 3)

Cibber then accused him of inconsistency, and expressed indifference whether he accepted or rejected the part which he then held in his hand, and which Wilks at once threw down on the table whereupon the angry player sate, with crossed arms, and "knocking his heel upon the floor, as seeming to threaten most when he said least." Booth, good-naturedly, struck in with a cheerful comment, to the effect that, "for his part, he saw no such great matter in acting every day, for he believed it the wholesomest exercise in the world; it kept the spirits in motion, and always gave him a good stomach."

At this friendly advance Mrs. Oldfield was seen laughing behind her fan, while Wilks, after a few hesitating remarks, which showed some little jealousy of Booth, proposed that Mrs. Oldfield should herself select which of the two she would have play with her. He would be glad to be excused if she selected another.

"This throwing the negative upon Mrs. Oldfield," says Cibber, "was indeed a sure way to save himself; which I could not help taking notice of, by saying, it was making but an ill compliment to the company, to suppose there was but one man in it fit to play an ordinary part with her. Here Mrs. Oldfield got up, and turning me half round, to come forward, said with her usual frankness, 'Pooh! you are all a parcel of fools to make such a rout about nothing!' Rightly judging that the person most out of humour would not be more displeased at her calling us all by the same name."

Finally, Wilks accepted the part, at Mrs. Oldfield's suggestion, and all went well. Irascible as he was, yet he was more remarkable for his zeal and industry, for the carefulness with which he superintended rehearsals, and for the elaborate pains-concealing labour, which distinguished him on the public stage. Cibber renders him full measure of justice in this respect, and generously confesses: "Had I had half his application I still think I might have shown myself twice the actor that, in my highest state of favour, I appear to be."

Cibber, indeed, has painted his colleague Wilks with great elaboration. From Colley we learn that Wilks excelled Powell, and that hot-headed Powell challenged him to the duello in consequence. So painstaking was the young Irishman, that in forty years he was never once forgetful of a single word in any of his parts. "In some new comedy he happened to complain of a crabbed speech in his part which, he said, gave him more trouble to study than all the rest of it had done." The good-natured author cut the whole of the speech out; but "Wilks thought it such an indignity to his memory that anything should be thought too hard for it, that he actually made himself perfect in that speech, though he knew it was never to be made use of." Cibber praises his sober character, but hints at his professional conceit, and somewhat overbearing temper; and he calls him "bustle master-general of the company." If he was jealous and impatient, "to be employed on the stage was the delight of his life;" and of his unwearied zeal, unselfishly exercised for the general good, Cibber cannot speak too highly. Nothing came amiss to Wilks that was connected with the stage. He even undertook the office of writing the bills of performance; but he charged £50 a year for the trouble.

In the plaintive and tender, this light comedian excelled even Booth, who used to say that Wilks lacked ear and not voice to make a great tragedian. 12 12 In the 2d edition Dr. Doran adds: – "He was not altogether original; for the Tatler , in 1710, advises him to 'wholly forget Mr. Betterton, for that he failed in no part of Othello but when he has him in view.' Thomson says of him, as the hero in Sophonisba, 'Whatever was designed as amiable and engaging in Masinissa, shines out in Mr. Wilks's action.'" Wilks's greatest successes were in his friend Farquhar's heroes, – Sir Harry Wildair, Mirabel, Captain Plume, and Archer. He played equally well, but with less opportunity for distinction, the light gentlemen of Cibber's comedies. In Don Felix, in Mrs. Centlivre's "Wonder," he almost excelled the reputation he had gained in Sir Harry. "When Wilks dies," Farquhar once remarked, "Sir Harry may go to the Jubilee." Of the above characters he was the original representative, as he was of some fourscore others of less note, – among them Dumont, in "Jane Shore," for which he may be said to have been cast by Mrs. Oldfield. "Nay!" she cried to him, in her pretty way; "if you will not be my husband, I will act Alicia, I protest." And accordingly, the two most brilliant and gleesome actors of their day, enacted married tribulation, and kept their wreathed smiles for the crowd which clustered round them at the wings.

Few men ever loved acting for acting's sake more than Wilks. At the same time, no one ever warned others against it with more serious urgency. He had a nephew, who was in fair prospect of such good fortune as could be built up in an attorney's office. How little the young fellow merited the fortune, and how ill he understood the duties and advantages of attorneyship he manifested fully, by a madness for appearing on the stage. No counsel availed against his resolution; and, in 1714, Wilks despatched him to Dublin, with a letter to Ashbury, the manager. "He was bred an attorney," wrote the uncle, despondingly, "but is unhappily fallen in love with that fickle mistress, the stage; and no arguments can dissuade him from it. I have refused to give him any countenance, in hopes that time and experience might cure him; but since I find him determined to make an attempt somewhere, no one, I am sure, is able to give him so just a notion of the business as yourself. If you find my nephew wants either genius or any other necessary qualification, I beg you will freely tell him his disabilities; and then it is possible he may be more easily persuaded to return to his friends and business, which I am informed he understands perfectly well."

Young Wilks proved as poor an actor as he probably was an attorney; but his uncle received him at Drury Lane, after a year's novitiate in Dublin, where he played, at first, better "business" than Quin himself. But he never advanced a step, and died at the age of thirty, having never obtained above that number of shillings a week. And for that, he deserted his vocation as an attorney, in the practice of which he might have gained, if not earned, at a low estimate, twice that amount in a single morning.

There was a pious young Duke of Orleans, who, to keep a fair character, was obliged to assume the fashionable vices of his day. Wilks, with all his love of home, was a fine gentleman among the fine gentlemen. His appreciation of matrimony was shown by the haste with which he espoused the widow Fell, daughter of Charles II.'s great gun-founder, Browne, in April 1715, after losing his first wife in the previous year. During the first union, he must have trod the stage with many a heart-ache, while he was exciting hilarity, for eleven of his children died early, and the airy player was for ever in mourning. His stepson, Fell, married the granddaughter of William Penn, and brought his bride to the altar of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, not to be married, but christened. Wilks and his wife were the gossips to the pretty quakeress; and the former, probably, never looked more imposing than when he pronounced the names of the fair episcopalian, — Gulielma Maria .

Betterton used to rusticate in Berkshire; Booth, at Cowley; Cibber, at Twickenham; his son, at Brook Green. Wilks, too, had his villa at Isleworth. He is said to have kept a well-regulated and extremely cheerful home. He had there seen so much of death that we are told he was always prepared to meet it with decency. His generosity amounted almost to prodigality. "Few Irish gentlemen," says his biographer, "are without indigent relatives." Wilks had many, and they never appealed to him in vain. He died, after a short illness and four doctors, in September 1732, 13 13 "5 Oct. 1732. Robert Wilks in the Church on the north side of the north aisle, under the pews Nos. 9 and 10" ( Reg. Burials, St. Paul, Covent Garden ). — Doran MS. leaving his share in the Drury Lane Patent, and what other property he possessed, to his wife. Throughout his life, I can only find one symptom of regret at having abandoned the Irish Secretary's office for the stage. "My successor in Ireland," he once said to Cibber, "made by his post £50,000."