ESSAYS ON THE ACTED DRAMA IN LONDON CONTRIBUTED TO THE LONDON MAGAZINE (1820) (continued 2)

We have been long trying to find out the meaning of all this, and at last we think we have succeeded. The cause of the evil complained of, like the root of so many other grievances and complaints, lies in the French revolution. That event has rivetted all eyes, and distracted all hearts; and, like people staring at a comet, in the panic and confusion in which we have been huddled together, we have not had time to laugh at one another’s defects, or to condole over one another’s misfortunes. We have become a nation of politicians and newsmongers; our inquiries in the streets are no less than after the health of Europe; and in men’s faces, we may see strange matters written,—the rise of stocks, the loss of battles, the fall of kingdoms, and the death of kings. The Muse, meanwhile, droops in bye-corners of the mind, and is forced to take up with the refuse of our thoughts. Our attention has been turned, by the current of events, to the general nature of men and things; and we cannot call it heartily back to individual caprices, or head-strong passions, which are the nerves and sinews of Comedy and Tragedy. What is an individual man to a nation? Or what is a nation to an abstract principle? The affairs of the world are spread out before us, as in a map; we sit with the newspaper, and a pair of compasses in our hand, to measure out provinces, and to dispose of thrones; we ‘look abroad into universality,’ feel in circles of latitude and 417longitude, and cannot contract the grasp of our minds to scan with nice scrutiny particular foibles, or to be engrossed by any single suffering. What we gain in extent, we lose in force and depth. A general and speculative interest absorbs the corroding poison, and takes out the sting of our more circumscribed and fiercer passions. We are become public creatures; ‘are embowelled of our natural entrails, and stuffed,’ as Mr. Burke has it in his high-flown phrase, ‘with paltry blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man,’ or the rights of legitimacy. We break our sleep to argue a question; a piece of news spoils our appetite for dinner. We are not so solicitous after our own success as the success of a cause. Our thoughts, feelings, distresses, are about what no way concerns us, more than it concerns any body else, like those of the Upholsterer, ridiculed as a new species of character in the Tatler: but we are become a nation of upholsterers. We participate in the general progress of intellect, and the large vicissitudes of human affairs; but the hugest private sorrow looks dwarfish and puerile. In the sovereignty of our minds, we make mankind our quarry; and, in the scope of our ambitious thoughts, hunt for prey through the four quarters of the world. In a word, literature and civilization have abstracted man from himself so far, that his existence is no longer dramatic; and the press has been the ruin of the stage, unless we are greatly deceived.

If a bias to abstraction is evidently, then, the reigning spirit of the age, dramatic poetry must be allowed to be most irreconcileable with this spirit; it is essentially individual and concrete, both in form and in power. It is the closest imitation of nature; it has a body of truth; it is ‘a counterfeit presentment’ of reality; for it brings forward certain characters to act and speak for themselves, in the most trying and singular circumstances. It is not enough for them to declaim on certain general topics, however forcibly or learnedly—this is merely oratory, and this any other characters might do as well, in any other circumstances: nor is it sufficient for the poet to furnish the colours and forms of style and fancy out of his own store, however inexhaustible; for if he merely makes them express his own feelings, and the idle effusions of his own breast, he had better speak in his own person, without any of those troublesome ‘interlocutions between Lucius and Caius.’ The tragic poet (to be truly such) can only deliver the sentiments of given persons, placed in given circumstances; and in order to make what so proceeds from their mouths, at once proper to them and interesting to the audience, their characters must be powerfully marked: their passions, which are the subject-matter of which they treat, must be worked up to 418the highest pitch of intensity; and the circumstances which give force and direction to them must be stamped with the utmost distinctness and vividness in every line. Within the circle of dramatic character and natural passion, each individual is to feel as keenly, as profoundly, as rapidly as possible, but he is not to feel beyond it, for others or for the whole. Each character, on the contrary, must be a kind of centre of repulsion to the rest; and it is their hostile interests, brought into collision, that must tug at their heart-strings, and call forth every faculty of thought, of speech, and action. They must not be represented like a set of profiles, looking all the same way, nor with their faces turned round to the audience; but in dire contention with each other: their words, like their swords, must strike fire from one another,—must inflict the wound, and pour in the poison. The poet, to do justice to his undertaking, must not only identify himself with each, but must take part with all by turns, ‘to relish all as sharply, passioned as they;’—must feel scorn, pity, love, hate, anger, remorse, revenge, ambition, in their most sudden and fierce extremes,—must not only have these passions rooted in his mind, but must be alive to every circumstance affecting them, to every accident of which advantage can be taken to gratify or exasperate them; a word must kindle the dormant spark into a flame; an unforeseen event must overturn his whole being in conceipt; it is from the excess of passion that he must borrow the activity of his imagination; he must mould the sound of his verse to its fluctuations and caprices, and build up the whole superstructure of his fable on the deep and strict foundations of nature. But surely it is hardly to be thought that the poet should feel for others in this way, when they have ceased almost to feel for themselves; when the mind is turned habitually out of itself to general, speculative truth, and possibilities of good, and when, in fact, the processes of the understanding, analytical distinctions, and verbal disputes, have superseded all personal and local attachments and antipathies, and have, in a manner, put a stop to the pulsation of the heart—quenched the fever in the blood—the madness in the brain;—when we are more in love with a theory than a mistress, and would only crush to atoms those who are of an opposite party to ourselves in taste, philosophy, or politics. The folds of self-love, arising out of natural instincts, connections, and circumstances, have not wound themselves exclusively and unconsciously enough round the human mind to furnish the matter of impassioned poetry in real life: much less are we to expect the poet, without observation of its effects on others, or experience of them in himself, to supply the imaginary form out of vague topics, general reflections, far-fetched tropes, affected sentiments, and fine writing. To move the world, 419he must have a place to fix the levers of invention upon. The poet (let his genius be what it will) can only act by sympathy with the public mind and manners of his age; but these are, at present, not in sympathy, but in opposition to dramatic poetry. Therefore, we have no dramatic poets. It would be strange indeed (under favour be it spoken) if in the same period of time that produced the Political Justice or the Edinburgh Review, there should be found such an ‘unfeathered, two-legged thing’ as a real tragedy poet.

But it may be answered, that the author of the Enquiry concerning Political Justice, is himself a writer of romances, and the author of Caleb Williams. We hearken to the suggestion, and will take this and one or two other eminent examples, to show how far we fall short of the goal we aim at. ‘You may wear your bays with a difference.’ Mr. Godwin has written an admirable and almost unrivalled novel (nay, more than one)—he has also written two tragedies, and failed. We can hardly think it would have been possible for him to have failed, but on the principle here stated; viz. that it was impossible for him to succeed. His genius is wholly adverse to the stage. As an author, as a novel writer, he may be considered as a philosophical recluse, a closet-hero. He cannot be denied to possess the constructive organ, to have originality and invention in an extraordinary degree: but he does not construct according to nature; his invention is not dramatic. He takes a character or a passion, and works it out to the utmost possible extravagance, and palliates or urges it on by every resource of the understanding, or by every species of plausible sophistry; but in doing this, he may be said to be only spinning a subtle theory, to be maintaining a wild paradox, as much as when he extends a philosophical and abstract principle into all its ramifications, and builds an entire and exclusive system of feeling and action on a single daring view of human nature. ‘He sits in the centre’ of his web, and ‘enjoys’ not ‘bright day,’ but a kind of gloomy grandeur. His characters stand alone, self-created, and self-supported, without communication with, or reaction upon, any other (except in the single instance of Caleb Williams himself):—the passions are not excited, qualified, or irritated by circumstances, but moulded by the will of the writer, like clay in the hands of the potter. Mr. Godwin’s imagination works like the power of steam, with inconceivable and incessant expansive force; but it is all in one direction, mechanical and uniform. By its help, he weaves gigantic figures, and unfolds terrific situations; but they are like the cloudy pageantry that hangs over the edge of day, and the prodigious offspring of his brain have 420neither fellow nor competitor in the scene of his imagination. They require a clear stage to themselves. They do not enter the lists with other men: nor are actuated by the ordinary wheels, pulleys, and machinery of society: they are at issue with themselves, and at war with the nature of things. Falkland, St. Leon, Mandeville, are studies for us to contemplate, not men that we can sympathise with. They move in an orbit of their own, urged on by restless thought and morbid sentiment, on which the antagonist powers of sense, habit, circumstances, and opinion have no influence whatever. The arguments addressed to them are idle and ineffectual. You might as well argue with a madman, or talk to the winds. But this is not the nature of dramatic writing. Mr. Godwin, to succeed in tragedy, should compose it almost entirely of long and repeated soliloquies, like the Prometheus of Æschylus; and his dialogues, properly translated, would turn out to be monologues, as we see in the Iron Chest.^[43]

The same, or similar, remarks would apply to Mr. Wordsworth’s hankering after the drama. We understand, that, like Mr. Godwin, the author of the Lyric Ballads formerly made the attempt, and did not receive encouragement to proceed. We cannot say positively: but we much suspect that the writer would be for having all the talk to himself. His moody sensibility would eat into the plot like a cancer, and bespeak both sides of the dialogue for its own share. Mr. Wordsworth (we are satisfied with him, be it remembered, as he is), is not a man to go out of himself into the feelings of any one else; much less, to act the part of a variety of characters. He is not, like Bottom, ready to play the lady, the lover, and the lion. His poetry is a virtual proscription passed upon the promiscuous nature of the drama. He sees nothing but himself in the universe: or if he leans with a kindly feeling to any thing else, he would impart to the most uninteresting things the fulness of his own sentiments, and elevate the most insignificant characters into the foremost rank,—before kings, or heroes, or lords, or wits,—because they do not interfere with his own sense of self-importance. He has none of the bye-play, the varying points of view, the venturous magnanimity of dramatic fiction. He thinks the opening of the leaves of a daisy, or the perfume of a hedge (not of a garden) rose, matters of consequence enough for him to notice them; but he thinks the ‘daily intercourse of all this unintelligible world,’ its cares, its crimes, its noise, love, war, ambition, (what else?) mere vanity and vexation of spirit, with which a great poet cannot condescend to disturb the 421bright, serene, and solemn current of his thoughts. This lofty indifference and contempt for his dramatis personæ would not be the most likely means to make them interesting to the audience. We fear Mr. Wordsworth’s poetical egotism would prevent his writing a tragedy. Yet we have above made the dissipation and rarefaction of this spirit in society, the bar to dramatic excellence. Egotism is of different sorts; and he would not compliment the literary and artificial state of manners so much, as to suppose it quite free from this principle. But it is not allied at present to imagination or passion. It is sordid, servile, inert, a compound of dulness, vanity, and interest. That which is the source of dramatic excellence, is like a mountain spring, full of life and impetuosity, sparkling with light, thundering down precipices, winding along narrow defiles; or

‘Like a wild overflow, that sweeps before him

A golden stack, and with it shakes down bridges,

Cracks the strong hearts of pines, whose cable roots

Held out a thousand storms, a thousand thunders,

And so, made mightier, takes whole villages

Upon his back, and, in that heat of pride,

Charges strong towns, towers, castles, palaces,

And lays them desolate.’

The other sort is a stagnant, gilded puddle. Mr. Wordsworth has measured it from side to side. ‘’Tis three feet long and two feet wide.’—Lord Byron’s patrician haughtiness and monastic seclusion are, we think, no less hostile than the levelling spirit of Mr. Wordsworth’s Muse, to the endless gradations, variety, and complicated ideas or mixed modes of this sort of composition. Yet we have read Manfred.

But what shall we say of Mr. Coleridge, who is the author not only of a successful but a meritorious tragedy? We may say of him what he has said of Mr. Maturin, that he is of the transcendental German school. He is a florid poet, and an ingenious metaphysician, who mistakes scholastic speculations for the intricate windings of the passions, and assigns possible reasons instead of actual motives for the excesses of his characters. He gives us studied special-pleadings for involuntary bursts of feeling, and the needless strain of tinkling sentiments for the point-blank language of nature. His Remorse is a spurious tragedy. Take the following passage, and then ask, whether the charge of sophistry and paradox, and dangerous morality, to startle the audience, in lieu of more legitimate methods of exciting their sympathy, which he brings against the author of Bertram, may not be retorted on his own head. Ordonio is made to defend 422the project of murdering his brother by such arguments as the following:—

‘What? if one reptile sting another reptile,

Where is the crime? The goodly face of nature

Hath one disfeaturing stain the less upon it.

Are we not all predestined Transiency,

And cold Dishonour? Grant it, that this hand

Had given a morsel to the hungry worms

Somewhat too early—where’s the crime of this?

That this must needs bring on the idiotcy

Of moist-eyed Penitence—’tis like a dream!

Say, I had lay’d a body in the sun!

Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse

A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings

In place of that one man. Say, I had killed him!

Yet who shall tell me that each one and all

Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy,

As that one life, which, being push’d aside,

Made room for these unnumber’d!’

This is a way in which no one ever justified a murder to his own mind. No one will suspect Mr. Southey of writing a tragedy, nor Mr. Moore either. His Muse is light. Walter Scott excels in the grotesque and the romantic. He gives us that which has been preserved of ancient manners and customs, and barbarous times and characters, and which strikes and staggers the mind the more, by the contrast it affords to the present artificial and effeminate state of society. But we do not know that he could write a tragedy: what he has engrafted of his own in this way upon the actual stock and floating materials of history is, we think, inferior to the general texture of his work. See, for instance, the conclusion of the Black Dwarf, where the situation of the parties is as dramatic as possible, and the effect is none at all. It is not a sound inference, that, because parts of a novel are dramatic, the author could write a play. The novelist is dramatic only where he can, and where he pleases; the other must be so. The first is a ride and tye business, like a gentleman leading his horse, or walking by the side of a gig down a hill. We shall not, however, insist farther on this topic, because we are not convinced that the author of Waverley could not write a first-rate tragedy, as well as so many first-rate novels. If he can, we wish that he would; and not leave it to others to mar what he has sketched so admirably as a ground-work for that purpose.

The Hebrew, Ivanhoe, etc.—We have been led to make these general remarks, partly in consequence of the two new dramas, taken from the romance of Ivanhoe, the one called Ivanhoe at Coventgarden, 423and the other under the title of the Hebrew at Drury-lane. It argues little for the force or redundance of our original talents for tragic composition, when our authors of that description are periodical pensioners on the bounty of the Scottish press; and when with all the craving which the public and the Managers feel for novelty in this respect, they can only procure it at second-hand by vamping up with new scenery, decorations, and dresses, what has been already rendered at once sacred and familiar to us in the closet. Mr. Walter Scott no sooner conjures up the Muse of old romance, and brings us acquainted with her in ancient hall, cavern, or mossy dell, than Messrs. Harris and Elliston, with all their tribe, instantly set their tailors to work to take the pattern of the dresses, their artists to paint the wild-wood scenery or some proud dungeon-keep, their musicians to compose the fragments of bewildered ditties, and their penmen to connect the author’s scattered narrative and broken dialogue into a sort of theatrical join-hand. The thing is not ill got up in general; it fills the coffers of the theatre for a time; gratifies public curiosity till another new novel appears; and probably flatters the illustrious prose-writer, who must be fastidious indeed, if, at the end of each representation, he exclaims with Hamlet, ‘I had as lief the town-crier had spoken my lines!’—It has been observed by an excellent judge, that it was next to impossible to spoil a picture of Titian’s by copying it. Even the most indifferent wood-cut, a few scratches in an etching, gave something of a superior look of refinement, an air of grace and grandeur; the outline was so true, the disposition of light and shade so masterly in the original, that it could not be quite done away. So it is with these theatrical adaptations: the spirit of the real author shines through them in spite of many obstacles; and about a twentieth part of his genius appears in them, which is enough. His canvas is cut down, to be sure; his characters thinned out, the limbs and extremities of his plot are lopped away (cruel necessity!), and it is like showing a brick for a house. But then what is left is so fine! The author’s Muse is ‘instinct with fire,’ in every part, and the disjecta membra poetæ, like the polypus when hacked and hewed asunder, piece together again, or sprout out into new life. The other plays that we have seen taken from this stock are merely selections and transpositions of the borrowed materials: the Hebrew (we mean the principal character itself) is the only excrescence from it; and though fantastic and somewhat feeble, compared with the solid trunk from which it grew, it is still no unworthy ornament to it, like the withered and variegated moss upon the knotted oak.—Of Ivanhoe itself, we wish to say a single word, before we proceed to either drama. It is the 424first attempt of Mr. Scott (we wish the writer would either declare himself, or give himself a nom de guerre, that we might speak of him without either a periphrasis or impertinence) it is, we say, Mr. Scott’s first attempt on English ground, and it is, we think, only a comparative, but comparatively with himself, a decided failure. There are some few scenes in it, and one or two extraneous characters, equal to what he has before written; but we think they are, in comparison, few; and by being so distinctly detached as they are, from the general groundwork (so that no two persons taking the work to dramatise would not pitch upon the same incidents and individuals to bring forward on the stage) show that the other parts of the story are without proportionable prominence and interest. In the other novels it was not so. The variety, the continued interest, the crowded groups, the ever-changing features distracted attention, and perplexed the choice: the difficulty was not what to select, but what to reject. All was new, and all was equally, or nearly equally, good—teeming with life and throbbing with interest. But here, no one, if called upon for a preference, can miss pointing out Friar Tuck in his cell, and the Jew and his daughter Rebecca. These remain, and stand out after the perusal, as above water mark; when the rest are washed away and forgotten. For want of the same pulse, the same veins of nature circling throughout, the body of the work is cold and colourless. The author does not feel himself at home; and tries to make up for cordial sympathy and bold action, by the minute details of his subject—by finishing his Saxon draperies, or furbishing up the armour of his Normans, with equal care and indifference—so that we seem turning over a book of antiquarian prints, instead of the pages of an admired novel-writer. In fact, we conceive, as a point of speculative criticism, that the genius of the author of Waverley, however lofty, and however extensive, still has certain discernible limits; that it is strictly national; that it is traditional; that it relies on actual manners and external badges of character; that it insists on costume and dialect; and is one of individual character and situation, rather than of general nature. This was some time doubtful: but the present work ‘gives evidence of it.’ Compare his Rob Roy with Robin Hood. What rich Highland blood flows through the veins of the one; colours his hair, freckles his skin, bounds in his step, swells in his heart, kindles in his eye: what poor waterish puddle creeps through the soul of Locksley; and what a lazy, listless figure he makes in his coat of Lincoln-green, like a figure to let, in the novel of Ivanhoe! Mr. T. Cooke, of the Theatre Royal, Drury-lane, does not make him much more insipid. Mr. Scott slights and slurs our archer good. His imagination mounts 425with Rob Roy, among his native wilds and cliffs, like an eagle to its lordly nest: but it cannot take shelter with Robin Hood and his crew of outlaws in the Forest of Merry Sherwood: ‘his affections do not that way tend.’ Like a good patriot and an honest man, he feels not the same interest in old English history, as in Scottish tradition; the one is not bound up with his early impressions, with his local knowledge, with his personal attachments, like the other; and we may be allowed to say, that our author’s genius soars to its enviable and exclusive height from the depth of his prejudices. He has described Scottish manners, scenery, and history so well, and made them so interesting to others, from his complete knowledge and intense love of his country. Why should we expect him to describe English manners and events as well? On his native soil, within that hallowed circle of his warm affections and his keen observation, no one will pretend to cope with him. He has there a wide and noble range, over which his pen ‘holds sovereign sway and masterdom;’ to wit, over the Highlands and the Lowlands, and the Tolbooth and the good town of Edinburgh, with ‘a far cry to Lochiel,’ over gleaming lake and valley, and the bare mountain-path, over all ranks and classes of his countrymen, high and low, and over all that has happened to them for the last five hundred years, recorded in history, tradition, or old song. These he may challenge for himself; and if he throws down his gauntlet, no one but a madman will dare to take it up. But on this side the Tweed we have others as good as he. The genius of that magic stream may say to him, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’ We have novels and romances of our own as good as Ivanhoe; and we will venture to predict, that the more this admirable and all but universal genius extends his rapid and unresisted career on this side the border, the more he will lose in reputation, and in real strength—

‘Like kings who lose the conquests gain’d before,

By vain ambition still to make them more.’

How feeble, how slight, how unsatisfactory and disjointed, did the adaptations from Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, and the Antiquary appear, contrasted with the story we had read! The play of Ivanhoe at Covent Garden, on the contrary, seems to give all (or nearly so), that we remember distinctly in the novel; and the Hebrew, which constantly wanders from it, without any apparent object or meaning, yet does so without exciting much indignation or regret. We have in both the scene, the indispensable scene, at the hermitage of Copmanhurst, between the Black Knight, and 426Robin Hood’s jolly Friar (which, however, has not half the effect on the stage that it has in reading, though Mr. Emery plays the Friar, and sings a jolly stave for him admirably well at Covent Garden)—we have the trial of Rebecca, and the threat to put her father to the torture, almost carried into execution at the castle of Torquilstone; we have the siege and demolition of the castle itself; we have the fair Rowena at one house, in her own proper shape; and at the other, metamorphosed into the fairer and more lovely Israelite; and at both we have Cedric the Saxon, Gurth the swineherd, and Wamba the jester, and Brian de Bois-Guilbert; and what more would any one require in reason? The details, however, of all these personages and transactions are much more accurately given, and more skilfully connected in Ivanhoe than in the Hebrew, and the former play is better got up than the latter, in all the characters, with the exception of one, which it is needless to mention. Yet, why should we not, envy apart? Mr. Farren played Isaac of York, well; Mr. Kean played the Hebrew still better. As for the rest, Charles Kemble played the same character at one house that Mr. Penley, Jun. did at the other: Mr. Emery was Friar Tuck at Covent Garden, Mr. Oxberry at Drury Lane: Mr. Macready was Sir Reginald Front de Bœuf, a character exactly fitted for his impetuous action, and his smothered tremulous tones, which we cannot say of his other representative, Mr. Hamblin, though we have nothing to say against him: Miss Foote looked the beautiful Rebecca (all but the raven locks and dark eye-lashes) which Mrs. West played but insipidly, with Miss Carew to help her: and Mrs. Fawcett was the wretched, but terrific daughter of the race of Torquilstone, a character omitted at the other house. As a literary composition, we have nothing to offer on Ivanhoe; but the Hebrew (which is published, and which is from the pen of Mr. Soane, the author of some former pieces which have been well received), requires a word or two of remark. As a play, it is ill-constructed, without proportion or connection. As a poem, it has its beauties, and those we think neither mean nor few. It is disjointed, without dramatic decorum, and sometimes even to a ludicrous degree: as where a principal hero, on hearing the sound of a horn or trumpet, jumps on a table to look out of a window, and receives an arrow in his breast from one of the besiegers, on which he is carried out apparently lifeless; and yet he is presently after introduced again, as well as if no such accident had happened. But notwithstanding this, and many other errors of the same kind, and a weakness and languor in the general progress of the story, there are individual touches of nature and passion, which we can account for in no other way so satisfactorily 427as by imagining the author to be a man of genius. The flowers of poetry interspersed were often sad, but beautiful—

‘Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe’—

the turns and starts of passion in feeble and wronged old age, were often delicate and striking. Among these we might mention the Jew’s comparison of his own feelings on receiving an unexpected kindness, to the cold and icy current of the river frozen by the winter, but melting in the genial warmth of the sun: his refusal, in the wanderings of his intellect, to go to witness his daughter’s death in company with any one else; ‘No: thou art not my child, I’ll go alone:’ and the fine conception of his hearing, in the deep and silent abstraction of his despair (before any one else), the sound of the trampling of the champion’s steed, who comes to rescue her from destruction, which is, however, nearly ruined and rendered ridiculous by Mr. Penley’s running in with armour on from the farthest end of the stage, as fast as his legs can carry him. Upon the whole, this character, compared to the rough draught in the novel, is like a curiously finished miniature, done after a bold and noble design. For the dark, massy beard, and coarse weather-beaten figure, which we attribute to Isaac of York, we have a few sprinkled grey hairs, and the shrivelled, tottering frame of the Hebrew; and Mr. Kean’s acting in it, in several places, was such as to terrify us when we find from the play-bills that he is soon to act Lear. Of the two plays, we would then recommend it to our readers to go to see Ivanhoe at Covent Garden: but for ourselves, we would rather see the Hebrew a second time at Drury Lane, though every time we go there it costs us three and sixpence more than at the other house—a serious sum! Notwithstanding this repeated and heavy defalcation from our revenue, which really hurts our vanity not less than our interest, we must do the Manager the justice to say, that we never laughed more heartily than we did at his Sir Charles and Lady Racket the other night. ‘Unkindness may do much,’ but it is not a little matter that will hinder us from laughing as long and as loud as any body, ‘to the very top of our lungs,’ at so rich a treat as Three Weeks after Marriage. Mr. Elliston never shines to more advantage than in light, genteel farce, after Mr. Kean’s tragedy. ‘Do you think I’ll sleep with a woman that doesn’t know what’s trumps?’ It was irresistible. It might have been encored with few dissentient voices, and with no greater violation of established custom than the distributing three different performers, Mr. Connor, Mr. Yates, and Mrs. Davenport, in the pit and boxes, to hold a dialogue with a person on the stage, in 428the introductory interlude of The Manager in Distress at Covent Garden. We, however, do not object to this novelty, if nobody else does, and if it is not repeated; and it certainly did not put us in an ill humour for seeing Mr. Jones’s ‘Too Late for Dinner.’ Mr. Jones is much such an author as he is an actor—wild, but agreeable, going all lengths without making much progress, determined to please, and succeeding by dint of noise, bustle, whim, and nonsense. There is neither much plot, nor much point in the new farce; but it tells, and keeps the house laughing by a sort of absurd extravagance and good humour. Besides, Mr. Jones plays in it himself, and exerts himself with his wonted alacrity; so do Mr. Liston, Mr. Emery, Mrs. Davenport, and Miss Foote. The author has, indeed, cut out a cockney character for Liston (who is the Magnus Apollo of farce writers), as good as our old friend Lubin Log; and the scene in which he comes in stuffing buns, and talking at the same time, till he nearly chokes himself in the double operation, is one that would do for Hogarth to paint, if he were alive; or, as he is not, for Mr. Wilkie. Emery is a country bumpkin, who is learning French, to fit himself for travel into foreign parts; and his Yorkshire dialect and foreign jargon, jumbled together, have a very odd effect. But Mr. Emery’s acting, we are sorry to say, is not a subject for criticism: it is always just what it ought to be; and it is impossible to praise it sufficiently, because there is never any opportunity for finding fault with it. To criticise him, would be like criticising the countryman, who carried the pig under his cloak. He is always the very character he undertakes to represent; we mean, in his favourite and general cast of acting.

No. V

[May, 1820.

We don’t know where to begin this article—whether with Mr. Matthews and his Country Cousins; or with Harlequin versus Shakespear; or Cinderella and the Little Glass Slipper; or the story of Goody Two-Shoes and the Fate of Calas, at the Summer Theatre of Sadler’s Wells; or with Mr. Booth’s Lear, which we have seen with great pleasure; or with Mr. Kean’s, which is a greater pleasure to come, (so we anticipate) and which we see is put off to the last moment, lest, we suppose, as the play-bills announce, ‘the immortal Shakespear should meet with opponents.’ And why should the immortal Shakespear meet with opponents in this case? Nobody can tell. But to prevent so terrible and unlooked-for a catastrophe, 429and to protect the property of the theatre at so alarming a crisis from cries of ‘fire’ the Manager has thought it his duty ‘to suspend the Free List during the representation, the public press excepted.’ As we have not the mortification of the exclusion, nor the benefit of the exception, we care little about the matter, but as a curiosity in theatrical diplomacy. The anxiety of the Manager about the double trust committed to him, the property of a great theatre, and the fame of a great poet, is exemplary; and the precautions he uses for their preservation, no less admirable and efficacious:—so that, if the tragedy of King Lear should pass muster for a night or two, without suffering the greatest indignities, it will be owing to the suspension of the Free List: if Mr. Kean should ride triumphant in a sea of passion, the king of sorrows, and drown his audience in a flood of tears, it will be owing to the suspension of the Free List: if the heart-rending tragedy of the immortal bard, as it was originally written, does not meet with the same untoward fate as the speaking pantomime of the late Mr. Garrick deceased, ‘altered by a professional gentleman of great abilities,’ it will be owing to the suspension of the Free List. In a word, if the glory of the ‘great heir of fame’ does not totter to its base at the representation of his noblest work, nor the property of the theatre tumble about our ears the very first night, we shall have to thank Mr. Elliston’s timely care in the suspension of the Free List! ‘Strange that an old poet’s memory should be as mortal as a new manager’s wits!’ This bold anticipation and defiance of opposition, where none can be expected, is not very politic, though it may be very valiant. It is bringing into litigation an unencumbered estate (we mean that part of it relating to the character of Shakspear) of which we are in full and quiet possession. It is not only waking the sleeping lion, but kicking him. Mr. Elliston’s shutting his doors in the face of the Free List is like Don Quixote’s throwing open the cages of the wild beasts in the caravan, and insisting that they should come out and fight him. If the Free List were that formidable and ill-disposed body of sworn foes to Shakspear, that ‘tasteless monster that the world ne’er saw,’ and into which the manager’s officious zeal for the interests of the theatre would convert them, it were best to let them alone, and not court their hostility by invidious and impracticable disqualifications. If they are determined to damn Shakspear, there is no help for it: if they hold no such antipathy to him, ‘if that they love the gentle bard,’ why should their ‘unhoused, free condition, be put in circumscription and confine,’ during the Manager’s pleasure? We are in no great pain for the deathless renown of Shakspear: but we really entertain apprehensions that these Berlin and Milan decrees (in imitation of a great 430man) which our arbitrary theatrical dictator is in the habit of issuing at the bottom of his play-bills, may be of no service to the life-renters of Drury-lane. We hear a report (which we do not believe, and shall be happy to contradict) that the Drury-Lane Management have put in a claim to the exclusive representation of Lear, and have proposed to suspend the performance at the other house. This we think too much, even for the gratuitous and imposing pretensions of Mr. Elliston. We shall, at this rate, soon see stuck up about the town,—‘Shakspear performed at this theatre, for a few nights only, by permission of the Manager of Drury-Lane!’ Why, this would be a sweeping clause indeed, a master-stroke at the liberty of the stage. It cannot be. It is ‘as if he would confine the interminable.’ He may seat himself in the manager’s chair, like the lady in the lobster, but the tide of Shakspear’s genius must be allowed to take its full scope, and overflow, like the Nile, the banks on either side of Russell Street. Our poet is national, not private property. The quondam proprietor of the Circus cannot catch this mighty Proteus to make a Harlequin of him: it is not in the bond, that he should not now let any one else but Mr. Kean play Shakspear, as he once objected to let it play at all! We suspect this idle report must have arisen, not from any hint of an injunction, on the part of Mr. Elliston, against ‘a beard so old and white’ as Mr. Booth’s; but as a critical reproof to the Covent-Garden Managers, for reviving Nahum Tate’s Lear, instead of the original text; and as a friendly suggestion to them instantly to deprive Cordelia of her lover—and to exclude the Free List ‘lest the immortal Shakspear should meet with opponents!’ But we have said enough on this ridiculous subject.

We proceed to another; Mr. Matthews’s Country Cousins. This is the third season that this gentleman has entertained the town successfully, and we trust profitably to himself, by a melange of imitations, songs, narrative, and ventriloquism, entirely of his own getting up. For one man to be able to amuse the public, or, as the phrase is, to draw houses, night after night, by a display of his own resources and feats of comic dexterity alone, shews great variety and piquancy of talent. The Country Cousins is popular, like the rest: the audiences are, at this present speaking, somewhat thinner, but they do not laugh the less. We do not regret that Mr. Matthews has been transferred from the common stage to a stage of his own. He himself complained, at first, (as the cause of this removal) that he had not regular opportunities afforded him at Covent Garden for appearing in legitimate comedy, which was the chief object of his study and his ambition. If it were not the most ridiculous of all 431things to expect self-knowledge from any man, this ground of complaint would be sufficiently curious. Mr. Matthews was seldom or never put into any characters but those of mimicry and burlesque by the managers of Covent Garden: into what characters has he put himself since he has been upon his own hands? why, seldom or never into any but those of mimicry and burlesque. We remember on some former occasion throwing out a friendly discouragement of Mr. Matthews’s undertaking the part of Rover in Wild Oats, (as not exactly fitted to his peculiar cast of acting) which we had reason to think was not received in good part: yet how did he himself propose to make it palatable, and how did he really contrive to make it tolerable, to the audience?—By the introduction of Imitations of all the actors on the London boards. It is not easy to give a character of a man (without making a fool of him) with which he shall be satisfied: but actors are in general so infatuated with applause, or sore from disappointment, that they are, of all men, the least accessible to reason. We critics are a sort of people whom they very strangely look upon as in a state of natural hostility with them. A person who undertakes to give an account of the acted drama in London, may be supposed to be led to this by some fondness for, and some knowledge of, the stage: here then ‘there’s sympathy’ between the actor and the critic. He praises the good, he holds out a warning to the bad. The last may have cause to complain, but the first do not thank you a bit the more. You cheer them in the path of glory, shew them where to pluck fresh laurels, or teach them to shun the precipice, on which their hopes may be dashed to pieces: you devote your time and attention to them; are romantic, gay, witty, profound in adorning their art with every embellishment you have in store to make it interesting to others; you occupy the eyes and ears of the town with their names and affairs; weigh their merits and defects in daily, weekly, monthly scales, with as much preparation and formality as if the fate of the world depended on their failure or success; and yet they seem to suppose that your whole business and only object are to degrade and vilify them in public estimation. What you say in praise of any individual, is set down to the score of his merit: what you say of others, in common justice to yourself, is considered as a mere effusion of spleen, stupidity, and spite—as if you took a particular pleasure in torturing their feelings. Yet, upon second thoughts, there may be some ground for all this. We do not like to have a physician feel our pulse, shake his head, and prescribe a regimen: many persons have objection to sit for their pictures, and there is, perhaps, something in the very fact of being criticised, to which human nature is not easily reconciled. To have every word 432you speak scanned, every look scrutinised,—never to be sure whether you are right or wrong; to have it said that this was too high, that too low; to be abused by one person for the very same thing that another ‘applauds you to the very echo, that does applaud again;’ to have it hinted that one’s very best effort only just wanted something to make it perfect; and that certain other parts which we thought tolerable, were not to be endured; to be taken in pieces in this manner, turned inside out, to be had up at a self-elected tribunal of impertinence,—tried, condemned, and acquitted every night,—to hear the solemn defence, the ridiculous accusation,—to be subjected to a living anatomy,—to be made the text of a perpetual running commentary,—to be set up in an antithesis, to be played upon in an alliteration,—to have one’s faults separated from one’s virtues, like the sheep from the goats by the good shepherd,—to be shorn bare and have a mark set upon one,—to be bewitched and bedevilled by the critics,—to lie at the mercy of every puny whipster, and not be suffered to know whether one stands on one’s head or one’s heels till he tells one how—has, to be sure, something very perplexing and very provoking in it; and it is not so much to be wondered at that the subjects of this kind of critical handling undergo the operation with so little patience as they do. They particularly hate those writers who pretend to patronize them, for this takes away even the privilege of resentment.

An actor, again, is seldom satisfied with being extolled for what he is, unless you admire him for being what he is not. A great tragic actress thinks herself particularly happy in comedy, and it is a sort of misprision of treason not to say so. Your pen may grow wanton in praise of the broad farcical humour of a low comedian; but if you do not cry him up for the fine gentleman, he threatens to leave the stage. Most of our best comic performers came out in tragedy as their favourite line; and Mr. Matthews does not think it enough to enliven a whole theatre with his powers of drollery, and whim, and personal transformation, unless by way of preface and apology he first delivers an epitaph on those talents for the legitimate drama which were so prematurely buried at Covent Garden Theatre!—If we were to speak our minds, we should say, that Mr. Matthews shines particularly, neither as an actor, nor a mimic of actors, but that his forte is a certain general tact, and versatility of comic power. You would say, he is a clever performer: you would guess he is a cleverer man. His talents are not pure, but mixed. He is best when he is his own prompter, manager, and performer, orchestra, and scene-shifter; and, perhaps, to make the thing complete, the audience should be of his own providing too.—If we had never 433known any thing more of Mr. Matthews than the account we have heard of his imitating the interior of a German family, the wife lying a-bed grumbling at her husband’s staying out, the husband’s return home drunk, and the little child’s padding across the room to get to its own bed as soon as it hears him, we should set him down for a man of genius. These felicitous strokes are, however, casual and intermittent in him:—they proceed from him rather by chance than design, and are followed up by others equally gross and superficial. Mr. Matthews wants taste, or has been spoiled by the taste of the town, whom ‘he must live to please, and please to live.’ His talent, though limited, is of a lively and vigorous fibre; capable of a succession of shifts and disguises; he is up to a number of good things—single hits here and there; but by the suddenness and abruptness of his turns, he surprises and shocks oftener than he satisfies. His wit does not move the muscles of the mind, but, like some practical joker, gives one a good rap on the knuckles, or a lively box on the ear. He serves up a pic-nic entertainment of scraps and odd ends (some of them, we must say, old ones). He is like a host, who will not let us swallow a mouthful, but offers us something else, and directly after brings us the same dish again. He is in a continual hurry and disquietude to please, and destroys half the effect by trying to increase it. He is afraid to trust for a moment to the language of nature and character, and wants to translate it into pantomime and grimace, like a writing-master, who for the letter I has the hieroglyphic of an eye staring you in the face. Mr. Matthews may be said to have taken tythe of half the talents of the stage and of the town; yet his variety is not always charming. There is something dry and meagre in his jokes: they do not lard the lean earth as he walks; but seem as if they might be written upon parchment. His humour, in short, is not like digging into a fine Stilton cheese, but is more like the scrapings of Shapsugar.—As an actor, we think he cannot rise higher than a waiter, (certainly not a dumb one,) or than Mr. Wiggins. In this last character, in particular, by a certain panic-struck expression of countenance at the persecution of which the hen-pecked husband is the victim, and by the huge unwieldy helplessness of his person, unable to escape from it and from the rabble of boys at his heels, he excites shouts of laughter, and hits off the humour of the thing to an exact perfection. In general, his performance is of that kind which implies manual dexterity, or an assumption of bodily defect, rather than mental capacity: take from Mr. Matthews’s drollest parts an odd shuffle in the gait, a restless volubility of speech and motion, a sudden suppression of features, or the continual repetition of some cant phrase with unabated vigour, and you reduce him to almost 434total insignificance, and a state of still life. He is not therefore like—

‘A clock that wants both hands,

As useless when it goes as when it stands:’

for only keep him going, and he bustles about the stage to some purpose. As a mimic of other actors, Mr. Matthews fails as often as he succeeds (we call it a failure, when it is with difficulty we can distinguish the person intended,) and when he succeeds, it is more by seizing upon some peculiarity, or exaggerating some defect, than by hitting upon the true character or prominent features. He gabbles like Incledon, or croaks like Suett, or lisps like Young; but when he attempts the expressive silver-tongued cadences of John Kemble, it is the shadow of a shade. If we did not know the contrary, we should suppose he had never heard the original, but was imitating some one who had. His best imitations are taken from something characteristic or absurd that has struck his fancy, or occurred to his observation in real life—such as a chattering footman, a drunken coachman, a surly traveller, or a garrulous old Scotchwoman. This last we would fix upon as Mr. Matthews’s chef-d’œuvre. It was a portrait of common nature, equal to Wilkie or Teniers—as faithful, as simple, as delicately humorous, and with a slight dash of pathos; but without one particle of caricature, of vulgarity, or ill-nature. We see no reason why the ingenious artist should not show his Country Cousins a gallery of such portraits, and of no others, once a year. ‘He might exhibit it every night for a month, and we should go to see it every night!’^[44] What has impressed itself on our memory as the next best thing to this exquisite piece of genuine painting, was the broad joke of the abrupt proposal of a mutton-chop to the man who is sea-sick, and the convulsive marks of abhorrence with which it is received. The representation also of the tavern-beau in the Country Cousins, who is about to swallow a lighted-candle for a glass of brandy and water, as he is going drunk to bed, is well feigned and admirably humoured; with many more, too long to mention. It is more to our performer’s credit to suppose that the songs which he sings with such rapidity and vivacity of effect are not of his own composing; and, as to his ventriloquism, it is yet in its infancy. The fault of these exhibitions—that which appears ‘first, midst, and last’ in them, is that they turn too much upon caricaturing the most common-place and worn-out topics of ridicule—the blunders of 435Frenchmen in speaking English,—the mispronunciations of the cockney dialect, the ignorance of Country Cousins, and the impertinence and foppery of relations in town. It would seem too likely from the uniform texture of these pieces, that Mr. Matthews had passed his whole time in climbing to the top of the Monument, or had never been out of a tavern, or a stage-coach, a Margate-hoy or a Dover packet-boat. We do not deny the merit of some of the cross-readings out of the two languages; but certainly we think the quantity of French and English jargon put into the mouths of French and English travellers all through these imitations, must lessen their popularity instead of increasing it, as two-thirds of Mr. Matthews’s auditors, we should imagine, cannot know the point on which the jest turns. We grant that John Bull is always very willing to laugh at Mounseer, if he knew why or how—perhaps, even without knowing how or why! But we thought many of the jokes of this kind, however well contrived or intended, miscarried in their passage through the pit, and long before they reached the two shilling gallery.

A new pantomime, called Shakspear versus Harlequin, has been produced at Drury-lane Theatre. It is called ‘a speaking pantomime:’ we had rather it had said nothing. It is better to act folly than to talk it. The heels and wand and motley coat of Harlequin are sacred to nonsense; but the words, the cap and wings of Mercury (who was here also made the representative of Shakspear) are worthy of a better use. The essence of pantomime is practical absurdity, keeping the wits in constant chase, coming upon one by surprise, and starting off again before you can arrest the fleeting phantom: the essence of this piece was prosing stupidity remaining like a mawkish fixture on the stage, and overcoming your impatience by the force of ennui. A speaking pantomime (such as this one) is not unlike a flying waggon: but we do not want a pantomime to move in minuet-time, nor to have Harlequin’s light wand changed into a leaden mace. If we must have a series of shocks and surprises, of violations of probability, common sense, and nature, to keep the brain and senses in a whirl, let us, at least, have them hot and hot, let them ‘charge on heaps, that we may lose distinction in absurdity,’ and not have time to doze and yawn over them, in the intervals of the battle. The bringing Harlequin to the test of reason resembles the old story of hedging in the cuckoo, and surpasses the united genius of the late Mr. Garrick (to whom this dull farce is ascribed) and of the professional gentleman who has fitted the above productions of ‘the olden times’ (viz. those of the late Mr. Garrick) to modern taste! After all, though Harlequin is tried by three grave judges, who are very unnecessarily metamorphosed into three old women, no competition, 436no collision takes place between him and the genius of Shakspear, unless Mr. T. Cooke’s playing very cleverly on a variety of musical instruments, so as to ravish the heart of Miss Dolly Snip (Madam Vestris) can be construed into so many proofs of the superiority of Shakspear’s Muse! Again, Mr. Harley, as Harlequin, and Mr. Oxberry (as a country clown) get up into a tree to see the sport, from which it was as difficult to dislodge them as owls from an ivy-bush; and the sport is to see Joey Snip, the tailor, have his head cut off, and walk with it about the stage, and, unlike the sign of the good woman, talk without his tongue. The slicing off a blackamoor’s head or two with the stroke of a scymitar, provided the thing is done quickly, and instantly got out of sight, we do not much object to; but we do not like to have a ghastly spectre of this sort placed before us for a whole evening, as the heads of the rebel Scotch lords were stuck on Temple-bar for half a century. It may be well said indeed, Quod sic mihi ostendis incredulus odi. Perhaps this exhibition of posthumous horror and impertinence might be meant as a sly hit at the ghost of Hamlet.

‘See o’er the stage the ghost of Munden stalks.’

If so, we cry the Manager mercy. We must add, that the strength of the theatre was put in requisition for this piece, and if it could have been saved, it would. Miss Tree, to enliven so many dreary objects, danced a pas seul. We would rather see this young lady dance round a may-pole at a country wake or fair.

‘But thou, oh Hope, with eyes so fair,

What was thy enchanting measure?

Still it whisper’d promised pleasure,

And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail:’—

We could not help repeating these lines as we saw the youngest of the Miss Dennetts, the tallest of the three, resume the part of Cinderella at Covent Garden,—restored, like Psyche, to her late-lost home, and transformed by the little hump-backed fairy, from a poor house-maid to a bright princess, drinking pleasure and treading air. This is a consummation more devoutly to be wished than the changing of a pipkin into a sign-post, or a wheel-barrow into a china-shop. A Fairy Tale is the true history of the human heart—it is a dream of youth realized! How many country-girls have fancied themselves princesses, nay, what country-girl ever was there that, some time or other, did not? A Fairy Tale is what the world would be, if every one had their wishes or their desserts, if our power 437and our passions were equal. We cannot be at a loss for a thousand bad translations of the story of Cinderella, if we look around us in the boxes. But the real imitation is on the stage. If we could always see the flowers open in the spring, or hear soft music, or see Cinderella dance, or dream we did, life itself would be a Fairy Tale. If the three Miss Dennetts are a little less like one another than they were, on the other hand, we must say that Miss Eliza Dennett (what a pretty name) is much improved, combines a little cluster of graces in her own person, and ‘in herself sums all delight.’ She has learned to add precision to ease, and firmness of movement to the utmost harmony of form. In the scene where Cinderella is introduced at court and is led out to dance by the enamoured prince, she bows as if she had a diadem on her head, moves as if she had just burst from fetters of roses, folds her arms as the vine curls its tendrils, and hurries from the scene, after the loss of her faithless slipper, as if she had to run a race with the winds. We had only one thing to desire, that she and her lover, instead of the new ballet, had danced the Minuet de la Cour with the Gavot, as they do in the Dansomanie; that we might have called the Minuet de la Cour divine, and the Gavot heavenly, and exclaimed once more, with more than artificial rapture—‘Such were the joys of our dancing days!’ We do not despair of seeing this alteration adopted, as our recommendations are sometimes attended to: and in that case we shall feel.—But the mechanical anticipation of an involuntary burst of sentiment in supposed circumstances is in vile taste, and we leave it to lords and pettifoggers. We hate to copy them: but we like to steal from Spenser. Here is a passage descriptive of dancing, and of the delights of love, of youth, and beauty which sometimes surround it, and of the eternal echo which they leave in the ear of fancy. The Managers of Covent-Garden may perhaps apply it to their own enchanted palace: we have nothing to do with the passage but to quote it.

‘They say that Venus, when she did dispose

Herself to pleasure, used to resort

Unto this place, and therein to repose

And rest herself as in a gladsome port,

Or with the Graces there to play and sport:

That even her own Cytheron, though in it

She used most to keep her royal court,

And in her sovereign majesty to sit,

She in regard hereof refus’d and thought unfit.

Unto this place, when as the Elfin knight

Approach’d, him seemed that the merry sound

Of a shrill pipe he playing heard on hight,

438And many feet fast thumping th’ hollow ground,

That through the woods their echo did rebound.

He nigher drew to weet what it mote be:

There he a troop of ladies dancing found

Full merrily, and making gladful glee,

And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.

All they without were ranged in a ring,

And danced round; but in the midst of them

Three other ladies did both dance and sing,

The whilst the rest them round about did hem,

And like a girlond did encompass them,

And in the midst of those same three was placed

Another damsel, as a precious gem,

Amidst a ring most richly well enchaced,

That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced.

Look how the crown which Ariadne wore

Upon her ivory forehead, that same day

That Theseus her unto her bridal bore

(When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray

With the fierce Lapiths that did him dismay)

Being now placed in the firmament,

Through the bright heaven doth her beams display,

And is unto the stars an ornament;

Which round her move in order excellent.

Such was the beauty of this goodly band,

Whose sundry shape were here too long to tell:

But she that in the midst of them did stand,

Seem’d all the rest in beauty to excel,

Crown’d with a rosy girlond, that right well

Did her beseem. And ever as the crew

About her danc’d, sweet flow’rs that far did smell,

And fragrant odours, they upon her threw,

But most of all, those three did her with gifts endue.

Those were the Graces, daughters of delight,

Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt

Upon this hill, and dance there day and night:

Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant;

And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt,

Is borrowed of them. But that fair one,

That in the midst was placed paravant,

Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone,

That made him pipe so merrily, as never none.’

Faery Queen, Book VI. Canto 10.

439On the subject of the pantomime and the miscellaneous Drama, we have two words to add, viz. that we have been to see the Heart of Midlothian at the Surrey Theatre, of which we spoke by hearsay in our last but one, and which answered our warmest expectations; and that we took a pleasant stroll up to the Aquatic Theatre of Sadler’s Wells, and after dining at the Sir Hugh Middleton’s Head, saw a very pretty play-house, Goody Two Shoes, the Monastery, and the Fate of Calas. Goody Two Shoes was played first, on the evening we were there, because Mr. Grimaldi and Mr. Barnes were in it, and they were obliged afterwards to perform in the pantomime at Covent Garden. Did Miss Vallancy go with them? Otherwise, we should like to have seen her again in the course of the evening. All that we could see to praise in the Monastery was its faithfulness to the original, and the acting of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley. We hope that under the management of a gentleman (Mr. Howard Paine,) so well acquainted with both departments of his undertaking, the literary and dramatic, this theatre will soon flourish in all the pride of summer. We had nearly omitted to notice a new Hamlet, that came out at Drury-lane a few weeks ago, who, it appeared to us, would have made the prettiest Hamlet we have seen, if he had been only equal to the part. Indeed he looked it to perfection; he had an elegant figure with a thoughtful face; and on the ordinary conduct and conception of the character, was at once the gentleman and scholar. In the more declamatory and impassioned scenes, however, his voice totally broke down under him, and he did not repeat the part as was given out; for he was the next morning pierced through with the feathered arrows of criticism, as if his breast had been a target. The gentlemen-critics of the daily press have not, in general, their cue on the first night of a performer’s appearance. If he fails, they fall upon him without mercy; if he succeeds, they are almost afraid to say so, lest others should say that they were wrong. They pretend (some of them) to lead public opinion and yet have no opinion of their own. They dare not boldly and distinctly declare their opinion of a new dramatic experiment, and the reason is, their convictions are not clear enough to warrant their placing any confidence in them, till they are confirmed by being put to the vote. The first quality of a good critic is courage; but mental courage, like bodily, is the result of conscious strength. Some of the Vampyre crew, indeed, retreat from the dimness and inanity of their perceptions, into the solid darkness of their prejudices, and the crude consistence of their everrankling spite; and, in that strong-hold of dirt and cob-webs, are impervious to every ray of sense or reason. We might leave them, if they had themselves been contented to remain, in their narrow, gloomy 440cells, the proper hiding-place of ignorance and bigotry; but when they come out into the blaze of noon,

‘Shut their blue-fringed lids, and hold them close,

And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven,

Cry out, where is it?’—

it is time to stop their ominous flight, and send them back to that life of sloth and pride, where the poison of dull-eyed envy preys only upon itself.

There was a want of proper spirit and gallantry shown the other day in the critical reception of Mr. Booth’s Lear. It was not thought that he would make any thing of it, and therefore it was not said that he did. Because he was on his trial, he was not to have a hearing. Because he was not ‘the most favoured actor of the day,’ he was to have no favour at all shown him. Fiat justitia, ruat cælum. When Mr. Booth does nothing but make wry faces and odd harsh noises in a character, in imitation of Mr. Kean, we will say, that he does it ill: but when he plays it as he did Lear, we will say that he does it not ill, but well, and that in prejudging him, we have been mistaken. It does not lessen Mr. Macready in our opinion, that (as we understand) he refused this character in obstinate despair of doing it justice: but if this was a proof of modesty and judgment in him, it certainly ought to raise our idea of Mr. Booth’s talents, that he was able to get through it in the way he did. Where failure would have been so fatal and so marked, it was a sufficient triumph even to a proud ambition not to fail. If the part in our adventurous actor’s hands wanted something of the breadth and majesty of Lear, it did not want for life or spirit, or a human interest. If he did not give the torrent and whirlwind of the passion, he had plenty of its gusts and flaws. Without his crown, or even the faded image of one, circling his brow, he bustled about the stage with a restlessness and impetuosity of feeling that kept expectation continually awake and gratified the attention which had been so excited. There was no feebleness, and no vulgarity in any part of Mr. Booth’s acting, but it was animated, vigorous, and pathetic throughout. The audience, we are sure, the first night, thought and felt as we did. In the exclamation, ‘I am every inch a king,’ his energy rose to dignity: again, in his reiteration of Gloucester’s epithet of ‘the fiery Duke,’ applied to his son-in-law, his manifest impatience, and increasing irritability, showed that Mr. Booth had felt the full force of that beautiful passage in which his own half-conscious infirmity is played off so finely on the ill-fated old king; and in the scenes with Edgar as mad Tom, where his wits begin to unsettle, the distraction and alienation 441of his mind, wandering from its own thoughts to catch hold of a clue less painful, and yet broken and entangled like them, were pourtrayed with equal skill and delicacy. In the more set speeches, as in the curse on his daughters, Mr. Booth, we thought, comparatively failed; but where action was to come in aid of the sentiment and point the meaning, he was almost uniformly correct and impressive. In fact, it is only when the poet’s language is explained by the comment of gesture or some sudden change of look, or situation—that is, when tragedy is enlivened by pantomime, that it becomes intelligible to the greater part of the audience; and we do not see how an actor can be supposed to do those things well which are almost abstractions in his art, and in which he is not encouraged by the sympathy or corrected by the judgment of his hearers. We observed, that the finest touches of thought, of poetry and nature in this play, which were not set off by the accompaniment of show and bustle, passed in profound silence, and without the smallest notice. The sublimity of repose is one in which our play-house frequenters do not seem to be proficients, and the players may be excused, if they do not always cultivate (as we might wish) this occult and mysterious branch of their profession. Of Mr. C. Kemble’s Edgar we cannot speak in terms of too high praise. In the supposed mad-scenes, his conception and delivery of the part excited the warmest approbation; his fine face and figure admirably relieved the horror of the situations; and, whenever we see Mad Tom played (which is not often), we should wish to see it played by him. The rest of the play was very respectably got up, and all we could object to was the interspersion of the love-scenes by Tate. The happy ending, and the triumph and dotage of the poor old king in repeating again and again, ‘Cordelia’s Queen, Cordelia’s Queen,’ were perhaps allowable concessions to the feelings of the audience.

Henri Quatre.—There are two lines in a modern poem which we often repeat to ourselves—

’Twas Lancelot of the Lake, a bright romance,

That like a trumpet made young spirits dance:’

and we were much disposed to apply them to this romantic, light and elegant drama. We prophesy that the Managers and the public have a splendid career before them for the season. This will do. We saw it in the first opening scene, a view near Paris, the clearest, the most sparkling, the most vivid we ever saw. ‘Ah! brilliant land! ah! sunny, cloudless skies! Not all the ink, that has been shed to blacken thee, can blot thy shining face! Not all the blood that has been spilt to enslave thee can choke up thy living breath!’ If we 442can thus be transported to another and a gayer region, and made to drink the warmth and lustre of another climate by the painter’s magic art, what can we desire more?—What the pencil had in this case done, the poet’s pen did not undo: what the author had written, the actors did not spoil. They do order these things well at Covent Garden. We never saw a piece better got up in all its parts, nor one more adapted to the taste of the town in scenery, in dresses, in songs, in passing allusions, in popular sentiments; nor one that went off with less ennui, or with more continual bursts of flattering applause. The writing (as far as it was French) was, as might be expected, lively and sentimental: as far as we could perceive Mr. Morton to have had a hand in it, it consisted of strong touches of obvious nature, and showed a perfect understanding with the actors and the audience. The characters were strikingly conceived, and admirably sustained. Mr. Macready’s Henri Quatre was (we think) his very happiest effort. There was an originality, a raciness in it that hit our palates. With something, nay, with much of the stiffness and abruptness of one of ‘the invincible knights of old,’ used to march in rusty armour, there was at the same time the ease, the grace and gallantry of an accomplished courtier. ‘He is ten times handsomer,’ says the fair Jocrisse, ‘than Uncle Jervais,’ and according to her husband’s comment, ‘Handsome is that handsome does.’ There was a spirit of kindness blended with authority in his tones and in his actions; he was humane, and yet a king and a soldier. Some of the sentiments put into his mouth were worthy of the attention of princes, if they had time for serious reflection, and called forth loud and repeated plaudits. Henry professed his desire to reign by love not fear in the hearts of his subjects; and quoted a saying of his mother’s on the mode of effecting this purpose, that ‘a pound of honey would draw more flies than a ton of vinegar.’ We seemed suddenly and unaccountably carried back to the heroic times of camps and courts, in the company of this good-natured, high spirited, old fashioned monarch, and his favourite counsellor, Sully, a pattern of sound thinking and plain-speaking, who was characteristically represented by Mr. Egerton. It is his business to prevent the king from doing anything wrong,—‘no sinecure,’ as he honestly declares. We like these bitter jests; and we found that others were of our thinking, though they flew about as thick as hail. We should have thought this piece more likely to have been imported from Spain than France, at the present crisis of affairs. At any rate, Mr. Morton has given a truly English version of it. Mr. Emery played a blunt, rough old soldier (Moustache,) well, who is afterwards appointed keeper of a prison—‘Because,’ he says to his sovereign, ‘you think me a savage.’ ‘No!’ (is the answer,) 443‘but because with the courage and rough outside of a lion you have the heart of a man.’ The scenes in which Charles Kemble, as Eugene de Biron, is committed to his charge under sentence of death—is liberated by him to perform a last act of friendship and of affection, and returns on his parole of honour to meet his fate (from which however he is delivered by having, in his night’s adventure, saved the lives of Henri and Sully, who had been attacked by assassins in a forest hard by) are among the most interesting of the story. We do not enter into the details of the plot, because we hope all our readers will go to see this piece, and it is anticipating a pleasure to come. Besides, we are bad hands at getting up a plot, and should on that account make but indifferent ministers of state. But the whole was delightful. Miss M. Tree was delightful as the village representative of the fair Gabrielle; Mr. Liston was happy as the husband of Jocrisse, ‘whom the king had deigned to salute,’ and to put a diamond ring on her finger, which was to introduce them to the Louvre in their wooden shoes on his coronation day.—Miss Stephens sung sweetly; Mr. Fawcett was at home in the old general; Irish Johnstone blundered in his own beautiful brogue, and every thing was as it should be. We like things to succeed in this manner: that they do not always do so, is assuredly no fault of ours.

L.

No. VI

[June, 1820.

Mr. Kean’s Lear.—We need not say how much our expectations had been previously excited to see Mr. Kean in this character, and we are sorry to be obliged to add, that they were very considerably disappointed. We had hoped to witness something of the same effect produced upon an audience that Garrick is reported to have done in the part, which made Dr. Johnson resolve never to see him repeat it—the impression was so terrific and overwhelming. If we should make the same rash vow never to see Mr. Kean’s Lear again, it would not be from the intensity and excess, but from the deficiency and desultoriness of the interest excited. To give some idea of the manner in which this character might, and ought to be, made to seize upon the feelings of an audience, we have heard it mentioned, that once, when Garrick was in the middle of the mad-scene, his crown of straw came off, which circumstance, though it would have been fatal to a common actor, did not produce the smallest interruption, or even notice in the house. On another occasion, while he was kneeling to repeat the curse, the first row in the pit stood up in order to see him 444better; the second row, not willing to lose the precious moments by remonstrating, stood up too; and so, by a tacit movement, the entire pit rose to hear the withering imprecation, while the whole passed in such cautious silence, that you might have heard a pin drop. John Kemble (that old campaigner) was also very great in the curse: so we have heard, from very good authorities; and we put implicit faith in them.—What led us to look for the greatest things from Mr. Kean in the present instance, was his own opinion, on which we have a strong reliance. It was always his favourite part. We have understood he has been heard to say, that ‘he was very much obliged to the London audiences for the good opinion they had hitherto expressed of him, but that when they came to see him over the dead body of Cordelia, they would have quite a different notion of the matter.’ As it happens, they have not yet had an opportunity of seeing him over the dead body of Cordelia: for, after all, our versatile Manager has acted Tate’s Lear instead of Shakspear’s: and it was suggested, that perhaps Mr. Kean played the whole ill out of spite, as he could not have it his own way—a hint to which we lent a willing ear, for we would rather think Mr. Kean the most spiteful man, than not the best actor, in the world! The impression, however, made on our minds was, that, instead of its being his master-piece, he was to seek in many parts of the character;—that the general conception was often perverse, or feeble; and that there were only two or three places where he could be said to electrify the house. It is altogether inferior to his Othello. Yet, if he had even played it equal to that, all we could have said of Mr. Kean would have been that he was a very wonderful man;—and such we certainly think him as it is. Into the bursts, and starts, and torrent of the passion in Othello, this excellent actor appeared to have flung himself completely: there was all the fitful fever of the blood, the jealous madness of the brain: his heart seemed to bleed with anguish, while his tongue dropped broken, imperfect accents of woe; but there is something (we don’t know how) in the gigantic, outspread sorrows of Lear, that seems to elude his grasp, and baffle his attempts at comprehension. The passion in Othello pours along, so to speak, like a river, torments itself in restless eddies, or is hurled from its dizzy height, like a sounding cataract. That in Lear is more like a sea, swelling, chafing, raging, without bound, without hope, without beacon, or anchor. Torn from the hold of his affections and fixed purposes, he floats a mighty wreck in the wide world of sorrows. Othello’s causes of complaint are more distinct and pointed, and he has a desperate, a maddening remedy for them in his revenge. But Lear’s injuries are without provocation, and admit of no alleviation or atonement. They are strange, bewildering, 445overwhelming: they wrench asunder, and stun the whole frame: they ‘accumulate horrors on horror’s head,’ and yet leave the mind impotent of resources, cut off, proscribed, anathematised from the common hope of good to itself, or ill to others—amazed at its own situation, but unable to avert it, scarce daring to look at, or to weep over it. The action of the mind, however, under this load of disabling circumstances, is brought out in the play in the most masterly and triumphant manner: it staggers under them, but it does not yield. The character is cemented of human strength and human weaknesses (the firmer for the mixture):—abandoned of fortune, of nature, of reason, and without any energy of purpose, or power of action left,—with the grounds of all hope and comfort failing under it,—but sustained, reared to a majestic height out of the yawning abyss, by the force of the affections, the imagination, and the cords of the human heart—it stands a proud monument, in the gap of nature, over barbarous cruelty and filial ingratitude. We had thought that Mr. Kean would take possession of this time-worn, venerable figure, ‘that has outlasted a thousand storms, a thousand winters,’ and, like the gods of old, when their oracles were about to speak, shake it with present inspiration:—that he would set up a living copy of it on the stage: but he failed, either from insurmountable difficulties, or from his own sense of the magnitude of the undertaking. There are pieces of ancient granite that turn the edge of any modern chisel: so perhaps the genius of no living actor can be expected to cope with Lear. Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there: but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass.—Indeed, he did not go the right way about it. He was too violent at first, and too tame afterwards. He sunk from unmixed rage to mere dotage. Thus (to leave this general description, and come to particulars) he made the well-known curse a piece of downright rant. He ‘tore it to tatters, to very rags,’ and made it, from beginning to end, an explosion of ungovernable physical rage, without solemnity, or elevation. Here it is; and let the reader judge for himself whether it should be so served.

‘Hear, Nature, hear; dear goddess, hear a father!

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful:

Into her womb convey sterility,

Dry up in her the organs of increase,

And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honour her! If she must teem,

Create her child of spleen, that it may live,

And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her:

446Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,

With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;

Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits

To laughter and contempt; that she may feel,

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child.’

Now this should not certainly be spoken in a fit of drunken choler, without any ‘compunctious visitings of nature,’ without any relentings of tenderness, as if it was a mere speech of hate, directed against a person to whom he had the most rooted and unalterable aversion. The very bitterness of the imprecations is prompted by, and turns upon, an allusion to the fondest recollections: it is an excess of indignation, but that indignation, from the depth of its source, conjures up the dearest images of love: it is from these that the brimming cup of anguish overflows; and the voice, in going over them, should falter, and be choked with other feelings besides anger. The curse in Lear should not be scolded, but recited as a Hymn to the Penates! Lear is not a Timon. From the action and attitude into which Mr. Kean put himself to repeat this passage, we had augured a different result. He threw himself on his knees; lifted up his arms like withered stumps; threw his head quite back, and in that position, as if severed from all that held him to society, breathed a heart-struck prayer, like the figure of a man obtruncated!—It was the only moment worthy of himself, and of the character.

In the former part of the scene, where Lear, in answer to the cool didactic reasoning of Gonerill, asks, ‘Are you our daughter?’ &c., Mr. Kean, we thought, failed from a contrary defect. The suppression of passion should not amount to immobility: that intensity of feeling of which the slightest intimation is supposed to convey everything, should not seem to convey nothing. There is a difference between ordinary familiarity and the sublime of familiarity. The mind may be staggered by a blow too great for it to bear, and may not recover itself for a moment or two; but this state of suspense of its faculties, ‘like a phantasma, or a hideous dream,’ should not assume the appearance of indifference, or still-life. We do not think Mr. Kean kept this distinction (though it is one in which he is often very happy) sufficiently marked in the foregoing question to his daughter, nor in the speech which follows immediately after, as a confirmation of the same sentiment of incredulity and surprise.

‘Does any here know me? This is not Lear:

Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, his discernings

Are lethargied—Ha! waking—’tis not so;

447Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Lear’s shadow? I would learn; for by the marks

Of sovereignty, of knowledge, and of reason,

I should be false persuaded I had daughters.

Your name, fair gentlewoman?’—

These fearful interrogatories, which stand ready to start away on the brink of madness, should not certainly be asked like a common question, nor a dry sarcasm. If Mr. Kean did not speak them so, we beg his pardon.—In what comes after this, in the apostrophe to Ingratitude, in the sudden call for his horses, in the defence of the character of his train as ‘men of choice and rarest parts,’ and in the recurrence to Cordelia’s ‘most small fault,’ there are plenty of stops to play upon, all the varieties of agony, of anger and impatience, of asserted dignity and tender regret—Mr. Kean struck but two notes all through, the highest and the lowest.

This scene of Lear with Gonerill, in the first act, is only to be paralleled by the doubly terrific one between him and Regan and Gonerill in the second act. To call it a decided failure would be saying what we do not think: to call it a splendid success would be saying so no less. Mr. Kean did not appear to us to set his back fairly to his task, or to trust implicitly to his author, but to be trying experiments upon the audience, and waiting to see the result. We never saw this daring actor want confidence before, but he seemed to cower and hesitate before the public eye in the present instance, and to be looking out for the effect of what he did, while he was doing it. In the ironical remonstrance to Regan, for example:

‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old—

Age is unnecessary, &c.’

he might be said to be waiting for the report of the House to know how low he should bend his knee in mimic reverence, how far he should sink his voice into the tones of feebleness, despondency, and mendicancy. But, if ever, it was upon this occasion that he ought to have raised himself above criticism, and sat enthroned (in the towering contemplations of his own mind) with Genius and Nature. They alone (and not the critic’s eye, nor the tumultuous voices of the pit) are the true judges of Lear! If he had trusted only to these, his own counsellors and bosom friends, we see no limit to the effect he might have produced. But he did not give any particular effect to the exclamation—

——‘Beloved Regan,

Thy sister’s naught: oh, Regan, she hath tied

Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture here:’

448nor to the assurance that he will not return to her again—

‘Never, Regan:

She hath abated me of half my train,

Look’d black upon me; struck me with her tongue,

Most serpent-like, upon the very heart.

All the stored vengeances of heaven fall

On her ingrateful top!’

nor to the description of his two daughters’ looks—

——‘Her eyes are fierce; but thine

Do comfort, and not burn:’

nor to that last sublime appeal to the heavens on seeing Gonerill approach—

‘Oh, heav’ns!

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway

Hallow obedience, if yourselves are old,

Make it your cause, send down, and take my part.

Art not asham’d to look upon this beard?

Oh, Regan, will you take her by the hand?’

One would think there are tones, and looks, and gestures, answerable to these words, to thrill and harrow up the thoughts, to ‘appal the guilty, and make mad the free,’ or that might ‘create a soul under the ribs of death!’ But we did not see, or hear them. It was Mr. Kean’s business to furnish them: it would have been ours to feel them, if he had! It is not enough that Lear’s crosses and perplexities are expressed by single strokes. There should be an agglomeration of horrors, closing him in like a phalanx. His speech should be thick with the fulness of his agony. His face should, as it were, encrust and stiffen into amazement at his multiplied afflictions. A single image of ruin is nothing—there should be a growing desolation all around him. His wrongs should seem enlarged tenfold through the solid atmosphere of his despair—his thoughts should be vast and lucid, like the sun when he declines—He should be ‘a huge dumb heap’ of woe! The most that Mr. Kean did was to make some single hits here and there; but these did not tell, because they were separated from the main body and movement of the passion. They might be compared to interlineations of the character, rather than parts of the text. In the sudden reiteration of the epithet—‘fiery quality of the Duke,’ applied to Cornwall by Gloucester, at which his jealousy blazes out to extravagance, we thought Mr. Kean feeble and indecisive: but in breaking away at the conclusion of the scene, ‘I will do such things: what they are, yet I know not; but they shall 449be the terrors of the earth,’—he made one of those tremendous bursts of energy and grandeur, which shed a redeeming glory round every character he plays.

Mr. Kean’s performance of the remainder of the character, when the king’s intellects begin to fail him, and are, at last, quite disordered, was curious and quaint, rather than impressive or natural. There appeared a degree of perversity in all this—a determination to give the passages in a way in which nobody else would give them, and in which nobody else would expect them to be given. But singularity is not always excellence. Why, for instance, should our actor lower his voice in the soliloquy in the third act, ‘Blow winds, and crack your cheeks,’ &c. in which the tumult of Lear’s thoughts, and the extravagance of his expressions, seem almost contending with the violence of the storm? We can conceive no reason but that it was contrary to the practice of most actors hitherto. Mr. Rae’s manner of mouthing the passage would have been ‘more germane to the matter.’ In asking his companion—

‘How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I’m cold myself’——

there was a shrinking of the frame, and a chill glance of the eye, like the shivering of an ague-fit: but no other feeling surmounted the physical expression. On meeting with Edgar, as Mad Tom, Lear wildly exclaims, with infinite beauty and pathos, ‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters, and art thou come to this?’ And again, presently after, he repeats, ‘What, have his daughters brought him to this pass? Couldst thou save nothing? Didst thou give ’em all?’—questions which imply a strong possession, the eager indulgence of a favourite idea which has just struck his heated fancy; but which Mr. Kean pronounced in a feeble, sceptical, querulous under-tone, as if wanting information as to some ordinary occasion of insignificant distress. We do not admire these cross-readings of a work like Lear. They may be very well when the actor’s ingenuity, however paradoxical, is more amusing than the author’s sense: but it is not so in this case. From some such miscalculation, or desire of finding out a clue to the character, other than ‘was set down’ for him, Mr. Kean did not display his usual resources and felicitous spirit in these terrific scenes:—he drivelled, and looked vacant, and moved his lips, so as not to be heard, and did nothing, and appeared, at times, as if he would quite forget himself. The pauses were too long; the indications of remote meaning were too significant to be well understood. The spectator was big with expectation of seeing some extraordinary means employed: but the general result did not 450correspond to the waste of preparation. In a subsequent part, Mr. Kean did not give to the reply of Lear, ‘Aye, every inch a king!’—the same vehemence and emphasis that Mr. Booth did; and in this he was justified: for, in the text, it is an exclamation of indignant irony, not of conscious superiority; and he immediately adds with deep disdain, to prove the nothingness of his pretensions—