Note 21 — JOURNAL. (continued 2)

Were the morality that I constantly hear uttered a little more consistent, not only with right reason, but with itself, I think it might be more deserving of attention and respect. But the mock delicacy, which exists to so great a degree with regard to theatrical exhibitions, can command neither the one nor the other. To those who forbid all dramatic representations, as exhibitions of an unhealthy tendency upon our intellectual and moral nature, I have no objections, at present, to make. Unqualified condemnation, particularly when adopted on such grounds, may be a sincere, a respectable, perhaps a right, opinion. I have but one reply to offer to it: the human mind requires recreation; is not a theatre (always supposing it to be, not what theatres too often are, but what they ought to be), is not a theatre a better, a higher, a more noble, and useful place of recreation than a billiard-room, or the bar of a tavern? Perhaps in the course of the moral and intellectual improvement of mankind, all these will give way to yet purer and more refined sources of recreation; but in the mean time, I confess, with its manifold abuses, a play-house appears to me worthy of toleration, if not of approbation, as holding forth (when directed as it should be) a highly intellectual, rational, and refined amusement.

However, as I before said, my quarrel is not with those who condemn indiscriminately all theatrical exhibitions; they may be right: at all events, so sweeping a sentence betrays no inconsistency. But what are we to say to individuals, or audiences, who turn with affected disgust from the sallies of Bizarre and Beatrice, and who applaud and laugh, and are delighted, at the gross immorality of such plays as the Wonder, and Rule a Wife and have a Wife; the latter particularly, in which the immorality and indecency are not those of expression only, but of conception, and mingle in the whole construction of the piece, in which not one character appears whose motives of action are not most unworthy, and whose language is not as full of coarseness, as devoid of every generous, elevated, or refined sentiment. (The tirades of Leon are no exception; for in the mouth of a man who marries such a woman as Marguerita, by such means, and for such an end, they are mere mockeries.) I confess that my surprise was excited when I was told that an American audience would not endure that portion of Beatrice's wit which the London censors have spared, and that Othello was all but a proscribed play; but it was infinitely more so, when I found that the same audience tolerated, or rather encouraged with their presence and applause, the coarse productions of Mrs. Centlivre and Beaumont and Fletcher. With regard to the Inconstant, it is by far the most moral of Farquhar's plays; that, perhaps, is little praise, for the Recruiting Officer, and the Beaux' Stratagem, are decidedly the reverse. But in spite of the licentiousness of the writing, in many parts, the construction, the motive, the action of the play is not licentious; the characters are far from being utterly debased in their conception, or depraved in the sentiments they utter (excepting, of course, the companions of poor Mirable's last revel); the women, those surest criterions, by whose principles and conduct may be formed the truest opinion of the purity of the social atmosphere, the women, though free in their manners and language (it was the fashion of their times, and of the times before them, when words did not pass for deeds, either good or bad), are essentially honest women; and Bizarre, coarse as her expressions may appear, has yet more real delicacy than poor Oriana, whose womanly love causes her too far to forget her womanly pride. Of the catastrophe of this play, and its frightfully-pointed moral, little need be said to prove that its effect is likely to be far more wholesome, because far more homely, than that of most theatrical inventions; invention, indeed, it is not, and its greatest interest, as perhaps its chief utility, is drawn from the circumstance of its being a faithful representation of a situation of unequalled horror, in which the author himself was placed, and from which he was rescued precisely as he extricates his hero. Of the truth and satirical power of the dialogue, none who understand it can dispute; and if, instead of attaching themselves to the farcical romping of Bizarre and her ungallant lover, the modest critics of this play had devoted some attention to the dialogues between young and old Mirable, their nice sense of decency would have been less shocked, and they might have found themselves repaid by some of the most pointed, witty, and pithy writing in English dramatic literature. I am much obliged to such of my friends as lamented that I had to personate Farquhar's impertinent heroine; for my own good part, I would as lief be such a one, as either Jane Shore, Mrs. Haller, Lady Macbeth, or the wild woman Bianca. I know that great crimes have a species of evil grandeur in them; they spring only from a powerful soil, they are in their very magnitude respectable. I know that mighty passions have in their very excess a frightful majesty, that asserts the vigour of the natures from which they rise; and there is as little similarity between them, and the base, degraded, selfish, cowardly tribe of petty larceny vices with which human societies abound, as there is between the caterpillar blight, that crawls over a fertile district, gnawing it away inch-meal, and the thunderbolt that scathes, or the earthquake that swallows the same region, in its awful mission of destruction. But I maintain that freedom of expression and manner is by no means an indication of laxity of morals, and again repeat that Bizarre is free in her words, but not in her principles. The authoress of the most graceful and true analysis of Shakspeare's female characters has offered a better vindication of their manners than I could write; I can only say, I pity sincerely all those who, passing over the exquisite purity, delicacy, and loveliness of their conception, dwell only upon modes of expression which belong to the times in which their great creator lived. With respect to the manner in which audiences are affected by what they hear on the stage, I cannot but think that gentlemen, who wish their wives and daughters to hear no language of an exceptionable nature, had better make themselves acquainted with what they take them to see, or, at all events, avoid, when in the theatre, attracting their attention to expressions which their disapprobation serves only to bring into notice, and which had much better escape unheard, or at least unheeded. Voluminous as this note has become, I cannot but add one word with respect to the members of the profession to which I have belonged. Many actresses that I have known, in the performance of unvirtuous or unlovely characters (I cannot, however, help remembering that they were also secondary parts), have thought fit to impress the audience with the wide difference between their assumed and real disposition, by acting as ill, and looking as cross as they possibly could, which could not but be a great satisfaction to any moral audience. I have seen this done by that fine part in Milman's Fazio, Aldabella, repeatedly, and not unfrequently by the Queen in Hamlet, Margarita in Rule a Wife and have a Wife (I scarcely wonder at that, though), and even by poor Shakspeare's Lady Falconbridge. I think this is a mistake: the audience, I believe, never forget that the actress is not indeed the wicked woman she seems. In one instance that might have been the case, perhaps. I speak of a great artist, whose efforts I never witnessed, but whose private excellence I have a near right to rejoice in, and who was as true in her performance of the wretch Millwood, as in her personifications of Shakspeare's grandest creations.