Chapter XVIII: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (5)

It will perhaps be amusing to the reader (though not initiated in such studies) to see the manner in which an idea is bandied about, in these speculations, from author to author, to no sort of purpose. ‘In one of Mr. Locke’s most noted remarks,’ (says the learned Professor) ‘he has been anticipated by Malbranche, on whose clear yet concise statement he does not seem to have thrown much new light by his very diffuse and wordy commentary.’—‘If in having our ideas in the memory ready at hand, consists quickness of parts; in this of having them unconfused, and being able nicely to distinguish one thing from another, where there is but the least difference, consists, in a great measure, the exactness of judgment and clearness of reason; which is to be observed in one man above another. And hence perhaps may be given some reason of that common observation, that men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason. For Wit, lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy: Judgment on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.’—_Essay_, _etc._ B. ii. c. xi. § 2.

‘Il y a donc des esprits de deux sortes. Les uns remarquent aisément les différences des choses, et ce sont les bons esprits. Les autres imaginent et supposent de la ressemblance entr’elles, et ce sont les esprits superficielles.’—_Recherche de la Vérité._

‘At an earlier period, Bacon had pointed out the same cardinal distinction in the intellectual characters of individuals.

“The greatest and as it were radical distinction of geniuses, in respect of philosophy and science, is this; that some are more able and apt at noting the differences of things; others at noting their similitudes. For steady and acute minds can fix their contemplations, and remain and dwell on every subtlety of distinction; whereas more lofty and discursive imaginations recognize and compound even the slightest and commonest resemblances of things.”

‘_That strain I heard was of a higher mood!_—It is evident that Bacon has here seized, in its most general form, the very important truth perceived by his two ingenious successors in particular cases. _Wit_, which Locke contrasts with _Judgment_, is only one of the various talents connected with what Bacon calls the _discursive genius_; and indeed a talent very subordinate in dignity to most of the others.’—_Note to the Dissertation_, p. 116.

Mr. Locke, by Wit, in the passage here referred to, evidently means ingenuity or fancy generally speaking; for in the last hundred years, the use of this term has undergone a great alteration. He however borrowed his definition immediately from ‘that exploded author,’ Hobbes, who says in the _Leviathan_, p. 32,—‘Whereas, in the succession of thoughts, there is nothing to observe in the things we think on, but either in what they be like one another, or in what they be unlike;—those that observe their similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others, are said to have a good wit, by which is meant on this occasion a good fancy. But they that observe their differences and dissimilitudes, which is called distinguishing and discerning and judging between thing and thing, in case such discerning be not easy, are said to have a good judgment; and particularly in matters of conversation and business, wherein times, places, and persons, are to be discerned, this virtue is called Discretion.’

What is most remarkable in this traditional definition of wit and judgment, is, that it is altogether unfounded; for as Harris, the author of _Hermes_, has very well observed, the finding out the equality of the three angles of a triangle to two right ones, would, upon the principles here stated, be a sally of wit, instead of an act of the understanding, and Euclid’s Elements a collection of _bon mots_.

It may be said in explanation, that wit discovers false resemblances only. But neither is this true. Wit consists in an illustration of an idea by some lucky coincidence or contrast, which idea may be either false or true, as it happens. But the best wit is always the truest. When the French punsters the other day changed the title of some loyal order from _Compagnons du Lys_ into _Compagnons d’Ulysse_, the wit lost none of its efficacy, because there was a lurking suspicion in the mind that the insinuation was true. When Mr. Grattan, some years ago, said, that the only resources of Ministers were ‘the guinea or the gallows,’ the alliteration proved nothing, but neither did it disprove any thing. When the late ingenious Professor Porson, in reply to some enthusiast of the modern school of poetry, who was exclaiming ‘that some contemporary bards would be admired when Homer and Virgil were forgotten,’ made answer,—‘And not till then,’—he shewed more wit, and perhaps not less judgment, than his antagonist. Besides, the wit here consisted in the distinction.

We shall shortly go more into this subject in three papers, which we propose to write, on Imagination, Wit, and Judgment, when we shall endeavour to shew that these faculties, though not the same, nor always found together, are not so incompatible as dullness on the one hand, and folly on the other, would lead the world to suppose. The most sensible man of our acquaintance is also the wittiest; and the most extravagant blockhead the dullest matter-of-fact man. The greatest poet that ever lived, had the most understanding of human nature and affairs. Martinus Scriblerus contains the best commentary on the Categories; and we shrewdly suspect that Voltaire and Moliere were two as wise men, that is, knew as many things that were true and useful, as Malbranche and Descartes. It would have been hard to persuade either of those laughing philosophers that they saw all things in God, or that animals were machines. These are ‘the laborious fooleries’ of the understanding.

Mr. Stewart has interspersed his history of the progress of opinions with some interesting biographical sketches. Of Anthony Arnaud, the author of the _Port Royal Logic_, we learn, that ‘he lived to the age of eighty-three, continuing to write against Malbranche’s opinions concerning _Nature and Grace_, to his last hour.’ He died, says his biographer, in an obscure retreat at Brussels, in 1692, without fortune, and even without the comfort of a servant; he, whose nephew had been a minister of state, and who might himself have been a cardinal. The pleasure of being able to publish his sentiments was to him a sufficient recompense. Nicole, his friend and companion in arms, worn out at length with these incessant disputes, expressed a wish to retire from the field, and to enjoy repose. ‘_Repose!_’ replied Arnaud; ‘won’t you have the whole of eternity to repose in?’—An anecdote which is told of his infancy, when considered in connection with his subsequent life, affords a good illustration of the force of impressions received in the first dawn of reason. He was amusing himself one day with some childish sport, in the library of the Cardinal du Perron, when he requested of the Cardinal to give him a pen:—And for what purpose? said the Cardinal.—To write books, like you, against the Huguenots. The Cardinal, it is added, who was old and infirm, could not conceal his joy at the prospect of so hopeful a successor: and, as he was putting the pen into his hand, said, ‘I give it to you as the dying shepherd Damaetas bequeathed his pipe to the little Corydon.’ Of the celebrated metaphysician Descartes, it appears that he was ‘a bold campaigner’ in his youth; that he served in Holland under Prince Maurice of Nassau; in Germany, under Maximilian of Bavaria, in the thirty years’ war; in Hungary, and at the siege of Rochelle, as a volunteer against the English. He passed his life in camps till the age of five-and-twenty, when he retired to spend the remainder of it—in proving his own existence! What then, it may be asked after all, is the use of such studies and pursuits? Of the same use as pursuing gilded butterflies, or any other toy that amuses the mind. Mr. Hume fixed his residence, while composing his Treatise of _Human Nature_, at the village of La Flèche, where Descartes was brought up. This is an interesting trait in the life of a philosopher, who was by no means of the romantic cast. We do not very well understand the lenity or rather the respect with which the memory of Mr. Hume is always treated by our author, who is so hard upon Hobbes and others. There is also too much notice taken of Adam Smith, who, whatever might be his merits as a political economist, was of a very subordinate class as a philosopher—

‘The tenth transmitter of a foolish creed.’

May we add, that the distinctions of Metaphysics and Geography have nothing in common, nor is truth of any particular country.

The learned Professor makes too little account of the German philosopher Kant, whose maxim that ‘the mind alone is formative,’ is the only lever by which the modern philosophy can be overturned. He has indeed overlaid this simple principle by his logical technicalities, his categories and stuff, as Locke has confounded all common sense with his ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection. Nothing can be done towards a true theory of the mind, till philosophers are convinced that all ideas are ideas of the understanding; and that it requires all the same faculties to have the _idea_ of the stud of a brass nail in an old arm-chair, that is, the perception of connection, limits, form, difference, aye, and of abstraction, in this simple object, as in the highest speculations of theological or metaphysical science. The modern philosophers contend that the mind has no idea of any thing but sensible images: the way to turn the tables upon them is then to prove, that in the idea of every one of these sensible objects, there is necessarily involved the exercise of all those faculties, of which they deny the existence, and which are exerted, only in a different degree, in the most simple or the most refined operations of the understanding.

SHAKESPEAR’S FEMALE CHARACTERS

_The Examiner._] [_July 28, 1816._

Shakespear’s women (we mean those who were his favourites, and whom he intended to be the favourites of the reader) exist almost entirely in the relations and charities of domestic life. They are nothing in themselves, but every thing in their attachment to others. We think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by stealth and at intervals. We catch their beauties only sideways as in a glass, but we everywhere meet their hearts coming at us,—_full butt_, as _Miss Peggy_ meets her husband in the Park. No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear—no one ever so well painted natural tenderness free from all affectation and disguise, that

‘Calls true love acted simple modesty’—

no one else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, urged to an extremity, grow romantic and extravagant, for the romance of his heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the common prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to their affections, and taught by the force of their feelings when to forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women are in this respect exquisite logicians, for they argue from what they feel, and that is a sure game, when the stake is deep. They know their own minds exactly. High imagination springs from deep habit; and Shakespear’s women only followed up the idea of what they liked, of what they had sworn to with their tongues, and what was engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record.

We have almost as great an affection for _Imogen_ as she had for _Posthumus_; and she deserves it rather better. Of all Shakespear’s women she is perhaps the most touching, the most tender, and the most true. As to _Desdemona_, who was alone a match for her in good faith and heroic self-devotion, she had her faults, and she suffered for them. _Imogen’s_ incredulity as to her husband’s infidelity is much the same as _Desdemona’s_ backwardness to believe Othello’s jealousy. Her answer to the most distressing part of the picture is only, ‘my Lord, I fear, has forgot Britain.’ Her readiness to pardon _Iachimo’s_ falsehoods, and his designs upon her virtue, is a good lesson to prudes; and shews (as perhaps Shakespear intended it, or nature for him) that where there is a strong attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The morality of Shakespear in this way is great; but it is not to be found in the four last lines of his plays, in the form of extreme unction. The scene in which _Pisanio_ gives _Imogen_ her husband’s letter accusing her of incontinency, is as fine as anything could be:—

‘_Pisanio._ What cheer, Madam?

_Imogen._ False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there, and to think on him?
To weep ’twixt clock and clock! If sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,
And cry myself awake? That’s false to ’s bed, is it?

_Pisanio._ Alas, good lady!

_Imogen._ I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo,
Thou didst accuse him of incontinency,
Thou then look’dst like a Villain: Now methinks,
Thy favour’s good enough. Some Jay of Italy,
Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him:
Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,
And for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,
I must be ript; to pieces with me. Oh,
Men’s vows are women’s traitors. All good seeming
By thy revolt, oh Husband, shall be thought
Put on for villainy: not born where ‘t grows,
But worn a bait for Ladies.

_Pisanio._ Good Madam, hear me—

_Imogen._ Talk thy tongue weary, speak:
I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear,
Therein false struck, can take no greater wound,
Nor tent to bottom that.’——

When _Pisanio_, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a way to live, she says—

‘Why, good fellow,
What shall I do the while? Where bide? How live?
Or in my life what comfort, when I am
Dead to my Husband?’

Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy’s clothes, and suggests ‘a course pretty and full in view,’ by which she may ‘happily be near the residence of _Posthumus_,’ she exclaims—

‘Oh, for such means,
Though peril to my modesty, not death on ‘t,
I would adventure.’

And when _Pisanio_, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must change—

——‘Fear and niceness,
The handmaids of all women, or more truly,
Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage,
Ready in gibes, quick answer’d, saucy, and
As quarellous as the weazel’—

She interrupts him hastily:—

‘Nay, be brief:
I see unto thy end, and am almost
A man already.’

In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully,—

——‘My dear Lord,
Thou art one of the false ones: now I think on thee,
My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was
At point to sink for food.’

She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of _Posthumus_, and engages herself as a foot-boy to serve a Roman Officer, when she has done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master:

——‘And when
With wild wood-leaves and weeds I ha’ strewed his grave,
And on it said a century of pray’rs,
Such as I can, twice o’er, I’ll weep and sigh,
And leaving so his service, follow you,
So please you entertain me.’

Now this is the very religion of love. Is it not? All this, which is the essence of the character, is free from every thing like personal flattery or laboured description. She relies little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of Italy; she relies only on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is excited as it were with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. _Arviragus_ thus addresses her:

——‘With fairest flowers,
While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flow’r that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azure’d hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander,
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.’

The yellow _Iachimo_ gives another thus, when he steals into her bed-chamber:

——‘Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch—
But kiss, one kiss—’Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ th’ taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see th’ enclosed lights now canopied
Under the windows, white and azure, laced
With blue of Heav’n’s own tinct—on her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’

There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich surfeit of the fancy,—as that well-known passage beginning, ‘Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance,’ sets a keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and self-denial. _Desdemona_ is another instance (almost to a proverb) of the devotedness of the sex to a favourite object. She is ‘subdued even to the very quality of her lord,’ and to _Othello’s_ ‘honours and his valiant parts her soul and fortunes consecrates.’ The lady protests as much herself, and she is as good as her word. There is not a set description of her in any part of the play; and the only thing that tends that way is the equivocal and somewhat luscious dialogue that takes place between _Iago_ and _Cassio_ as an accompaniment to the ceremonies of the wedding-night. We see her visage in her mind: her character every where predominates over her person:

‘A maiden, never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush’d at itself.’

She is not a painted idol, carved out of the poet’s brain, but is herself a worshipper at the shrine of duty. As Milton dashes the luxurious effect of his descriptions by a moral, Shakespear qualifies it by the interest of the story, as in the scene where _Othello_ takes _Desdemona_ by the hand. The truth of conception, with which timidity and boldness are united in the same character, is marvellous. The extravagance of her actions, the pertinacity of her affections, in a manner arises out of the gentleness of her nature. It is an unreserved reliance on the purity of her intentions, a surrender of her fears to her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) to the fate of another. Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical and self-willed (though that may be accounted for in the same way from an inability to resist a rising inclination) her whole character consists in having no will of her own, no prompter but her obedience. Her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic and practical part of her disposition; and instead of following _Othello_ to Cyprus, she would rather have remained at home, ‘a moth of peace,’ if her husband could have staid with her. Her resignation and angelic sweetness of nature do not desert her at the last. The scenes in which she laments and tries to account for _Othello’s_ harsh usage of her are exquisitely managed. After he has struck her and called her names, she says:

——‘Alas, Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him; for by this light of Heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel;
If e’er my will did trespass ’gainst his love,
Either in discourse, or thought, or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense
Delighted them on any other form;
Or that I do not, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me. Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love....

_Iago._ I pray you be content: ’tis but his humour.
The business of the state does him offence.

_Desdemona._ If ’twere no other.’——

The scene which follows with her maid and the song of the Willow are equally beautiful, and shew Shakespear’s extreme power of varying the expression of passion, in all its moods and in all circumstances.

One of the finest passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems is that where he has given us his opinion of _Desdemona_:

‘Books, dreams, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good,
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness may grow;

· · · · ·

Matter wherein right voluble I am,
Two let me mention dearer than the rest,
The gentle lady wedded to the Moor,
And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.’

We have said enough to explain our idea of the general turn of Shakespear’s female characters. We need not mention _Ophelia_ or _Cordelia_, both of which admit of little external decoration, and which it would seem impossible to treat in any other way than as Shakespear has represented them, abstracted from every thing but their heart-breaking ties to others, if Tate had not adorned the person of _Cordelia_ with a number of beauties, and finished her story with a lover. _Cleopatra_, who has certainly a personal identity of her own, and who is described in all the glowing pomp of eastern luxury, is not an exception to what we have said, for she is not intended as a model of her sex. What we best recollect of _Cressida_, is _Pandarus’s_ description of her after bringing her to the tent, where he says,—‘And her heart beats like a new-ta’en sparrow’—which must be allowed to be quite Shakesperian. _Miranda_ appears to be the most conscious of her charms of any of his favourites (perhaps from the very solitude in which she had lived), a sort of miracle of her father’s island, and the goddess of her new-found lover’s idolatry. _Perdita_ is a very pretty low-born lass, the Queen of curds and cream—but she makes us think of other things more than of her face. There is one passage in which the poet has, we suspect, very artfully rallied the indifference of the sex to abstract reasoning:

‘_Perdita._ Sir, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,
Which some call Nature’s bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.

_Polixenes._ Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?

_Perdita._ For I have heard it said,
There is an art which, in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.

_Polixenes._ Say, there be,
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so o’er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes: you see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scyon to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.

_Perdita._ So it is.

_Polixenes._ Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers,
And do not call them bastards.

_Perdita._ _I’ll not put
The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them_,’ etc.

Here the lady gives up the argument, but keeps her opinion. We had forgot one charming instance to our purpose, which is the character of _Helen_ in _All’s Well that Ends Well_; and this also puts us in mind that Shakespear probably borrowed his female characters from the Italian novelists, and not from English women.

MISS O’NEILL’S WIDOW CHEERLY

_The Examiner._] [_January 12, 1817._

We have few idols, and those few we do not like to lose. But the warmth of our idolatry of Miss O’Neill will be brought to a much lower temperature if she goes on playing comedy at this rate. We cannot form any compromise in our imagination between _Belvidera_ and the _Widow Cheerly_. To speak our minds plainly, Miss O’Neill is by far the best tragic actress we ever saw, with one great exception, and she is the worst comic actress we remember, without any exception at all. Her comedy is cast in lead, and sad _doleful dumps_ she makes of it. It is tragedy in low-heeled shoes. Her spirit is boisterousness; her playfulness languid affectation; her familiarity oppressive; her gaiety lamentable. There never was such labour in vain. A smile trickles down her cheek like a tear, and her voice whines through a repartee in as many winding bouts of mawkish insinuation as through the most pathetic address. We cannot bear all this evident condescension; it overpowers us. In one scene she was very much applauded: it is that in which the _Widow Cheerly_ gives a characteristic description of her former husband’s introduction of her to his bottle-companions: ‘This is _my_ wife,’ etc. Now it cannot be denied that she mimicked the airs and manner of the fox-hunting squire very well, and her voice fairly gave the house a box on the ear. But we do not wish to see Miss O’Neill in the part of _Squire Western_. We conceive that this delightful actress cannot descend lower than the soldier’s daughter, except by playing the sailor’s daughter, and giving the word of command in a striped blue jacket and trowsers instead of a striped green gown. In these tom-boy hectoring heroines Mrs. Charles Kemble, whom, to the best of our belief, she imitates, beats her out and out; and Mrs. Mardyn, besides being taller and handsomer, has really more of the _vis comica_. But we will have done with this ungrateful subject. The comedy itself, of _The Soldier’s Daughter_, is the _beau ideal_ of modern comedy. It contains the whole theory and practice of sentimentality, of which a bank-note offered and declined is the circulating medium, and a white cambric pocket-handkerchief, that catches the crystal tear in the eye of sensibility ere it falls, the visible emblem. _Mr._ and _Mrs. Melford_ are an amiable young couple in lodgings and in great distress, but you do not learn how they got into one any more than the other. They utter their complaints, but are too delicate to touch upon the cause, and you sympathise with their sorrows, not with their misfortunes. They have a little girl, who has a little doll, which she christens ‘Miss Good Gentleman,’ after a person whose name she does not know. This is a very palpable hit, and tells amazingly. The unknown benefactor of these unfortunates _incognito_ is a young _Mr. Heartall_, a wild, giddy character, that is, in the modern sense, a person who never stands still on the stage—who is always running into scrapes, which he walks out of without leaving any apology or account behind him. Then there is the _Widow Cheerly_, in the same house with the _Melfords_, whose heart and whose _ridicule_ are ever open to the distressed, and who makes a match with _Young Heartall_, because he makes her an offer, it not being consistent with the gallantry of a soldier’s daughter to decline a challenge of that sort. Then there is _Old Heartall_, uncle to _Young Heartall_, and an East Indian Governor, who says one thing and does another; calls his nephew a scoundrel, and throws his arms round his neck. He is not a character, but a contradiction. Then there is a Mr. Ferret, who commits all sorts of unaccountable villainies through the piece, without any ostensible motives, and at the end of it you find that he has acted upon an abstract principle of avarice.

‘If,’ he says, ‘there had been no such thing as avarice, I had not been a villain.’ This is a very edifying confession of faith; and so not finding this principle answer, he repents upon an abstract principle of repentance, and also at the instigation of his old benefactor, (just arrived from the East and accordingly a great moralist), who reads him a great moral lecture, and advises him to give up his ill-gotten gains. As _Mr. Ferret_ submits to his advice backed by the law, _Old Heartall_ is prevailed on to forgive his designs upon the lives, characters, and fortunes of his acquaintance, from an amiable weakness of heart, and because the _Widow Cheerly_, who intercedes for him, ‘has roguish eyes.’ Mr. Liston plays a foolish servant in the _Heartall_ family, whose name is _Timothy_. The name of _Timothy_ is one of the jokes of this part: Mr. Liston’s face is the other, and the best of the two.

The whole tone of this play reminded us strongly of a very excellent criticism which we had read a short time before on the _cant_ of Modern Comedy, in one of the notes to Mr. Lamb’s Specimens of Early Dramatic Poetry:—

‘The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iteratively inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd and unnatural) is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which a writer may be supplied, without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour—to be judiciously valiant—to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth—to esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering—to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately—to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a common-place against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now a days in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.’

PENELOPE AND THE DANSOMANIE.

_The Examiner._] [_January 19, 1817._

KING’S THEATRE.

This theatre was opened for the present season under very favourable auspices; and we congratulate the public on the prospect of the continuance of this addition to the stock of elegant amusement. Though the opera is not among the ordinary resources of the lovers of the drama, it is a splendid object in the _vista_ of a winter’s evening, and we should be sorry to see it mouldering into decay, its graceful columns and Corinthian capitals fallen, and its glory buried in Chancery. We rejoice when the Muses escape out of the fangs of the law, nor do we like to see the Graces arrested—in a _pas de trois_. We do not ‘like to see the unmerited fall of what has long flourished in splendour; any void produced in the imagination; any ruin on the face of Art.’ At present we hope better things from the known tastes and talents of the gentleman who is understood to have undertaken the management of the principal department, and from what we have seen of the performances with which the company have commenced their career. The pieces on Saturday and Tuesday were the Opera of _Penelope_ by Cimarosa, and the inimitable comic Ballet, _The Dansomanie_. The first is, what it professes to be, a Grand Serious Opera: but it is somewhat heavy and monotonous. It introduced to the English Stage several actors of considerable eminence abroad. The principal were Mad. Camporese as _Penelope_, Madame Pasta as _Telemachus_, and Signor Crivelli as _Ulysses_. The last of these appears to be as good an actor as a singer. His gestures have considerable appropriateness and expression, besides having that sustained dignity and studied grace, which are essential to the harmony of the Opera; and his tones in singing are full, clear, and so articulate, that any one at all imbued with the Italian language can follow the words with ease. Madame Camporese performed _Penelope_, and drew down the frequent plaudits of the house by the sweetness of her voice, and the flexibility of execution which she manifested in some of the most difficult and impassioned passages. If we were to express our opinion honestly, we should say that we received most pleasure from Madame Pasta’s _Telemachus_. There is a natural eloquence about her singing which we feel, and therefore understand. Her dress and figure also answered to the classical idea we have of the youthful _Telemachus_. Her voice is good, her action is good: she has a handsome face, and _very_ handsome legs. The ladies, we know, think otherwise: this is the only subject on which we think ourselves better judges than they.—Of the _Dansomanie_ we will say nothing, lest we should be supposed to have caught the madness which it ridicules so sportively and gracefully. The whole is excellent, but the Minuet de la Cour is sublime: and the Gavot which succeeds it, is as good. Madame Leon was exquisite, and she had a partner worthy of her.

‘Such were the joys of our dancing days.’

Really when we see these dances, and hear the music, which our old fantastical dancing master used to scrape upon his kit, played in full orchestra, we do not know what to make of it; we wish we were old dancing-masters, or learning to dance; or that we had lived in the time of Henry IV. The tears do not come in our eyes; that source is dry: but we exclaim with the Son of Fingal,

‘Roll on, ye dark-brown years! ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian.’

OROONOKO.

_The Examiner._] [_January 26, 1817._

DRURY-LANE.

Southern’s tragedy of _Oroonoko_, which has not been acted, we believe, for some years, has been brought forward here to introduce Mr. Kean as the Royal Slave. It was well thought of. We consider it as one of his best parts. It is also a proof to us of what we have always been disposed to think, that Mr. Kean, when he fully gives up his mind to it, is as great in pure pathos as in energy of action or discrimination of character. In general, he inclines to the violent and muscular expression of passion, rather than to that of its deep, involuntary, heart-felt workings. If he does this upon any theory of the former style of expression being more striking and calculated to produce an immediate effect, we think the success of his _Richard II._ and of this play alone (not to mention innumerable fine passages in his other performances), might convince him of the perfect safety with which he may trust himself in the hands of the audience, whenever he chuses to indulge in ‘the melting mood.’ We conceive that the range of his powers is greater in this respect than he has yet ventured to display, and that if the taste of the town is not yet ripe for the change, he has genius enough to lead it, wherever truth and nature point the way. His performance of _Oroonoko_ was for the most part decidedly of a mild and sustained character; yet it was highly impressive throughout, and most so, where it partook least of violence or effort. The strokes of passion which came unlooked for and seemed to take the actor by surprise, were those that took the audience by surprise, and only found relief in tears. Of this kind was the passage in which, after having been harrowed up to the last degree of agony and apprehension at the supposed dishonourable treatment of his wife, and being re-assured on that point, he falls upon her neck with sobs of joy and broken laughter, saying, ‘I knew they could not,’ or words to that effect. The first meeting between him and _Imoinda_ was also very affecting; and the transition to tenderness and love in it was even finer than the expression of breathless eagerness and surprise. There were many other passages in which the feelings, conveyed by the actor, seemed to gush from his heart, as if its inmost veins had been laid open. In a word, Mr. Kean gave to the part that glowing and impetuous, and at the same time deep and full expression, which belongs to the character of that burning zone, which ripens the souls of men, as well as the fruits of the earth! The most striking part in the whole performance was in the uttering of a single word. _Oroonoko_, in consequence of his gentle treatment, and the flattering promises that are held out to him of safe conduct to his own country, of the restoration of his liberty and his beloved _Imoinda_, thinks well of the persons into whose hands he has fallen; and it is in vain that _Aboam_ (Mr. Rae) tries to work him up to suspicion and revenge by general descriptions of the sufferings of his countrymen, or of the cruelty and treachery of their white masters: but at the suggestion of the thought, that if they remain where they are, _Imoinda_ will become the mother, and himself, a prince and a hero, the father of a race of slaves, he starts and the manner in which he utters the ejaculation ‘Hah!’ at the world of thought which is thus shewn to him, like a precipice at his feet, resembles the first sound that breaks from a thunder-cloud, or the hollow roar of a wild beast, roused from its lair by hunger and the scent of blood. It is a pity that the catastrophe does not answer to the grandeur of the menace; and that this gallant vindicator of himself and his countrymen fails in his enterprise, through the treachery and cowardice of those whom he attempts to set free, but ‘who were by nature slaves!’ The story of this _servile war_ is not without a parallel elsewhere: it reads ‘a great moral lesson’ to Europe, only changing _black_ into _white_; and the manner in which _Oroonoko_ is prevailed on to give up his sword, and his treatment afterwards, by a man in British uniform, seems to have been the model of the Convention of Paris. It only required one thing to have made it complete, that the Governor, who is expected in the island, should have arrived in time to break the agreement, and save the credit of his subaltern. The political allusions throughout, that is, the appeals to common justice and humanity, against the most intolerable cruelty and wrong, are so strong and palpable, that we wonder the piece is not prohibited. There is that black renegade _Othman_, who betrays his country in the hopes of promotion, and the favour of his betters: how like he is to many a white-faced loon, but that ‘the devil has not damned them black!’ Politics apart—_Oroonoko_ is a very interesting moral play. It is a little tedious sometimes, and a little common-place at all times, but it has feeling and nature to supply what it wants in other respects. The negroes in it (we could wish them out of it, but then there would be no play) are very _ugly customers_ upon the stage. One blackamoor in a picture is an ornament, but a whole cargo of them is more than enough. This play puts us out of conceit with both colours, theirs and our own; the sooty slave’s, and his cold, sleek, smooth-faced master’s.—Miss Somerville was a great relief to the natural and moral deformity of the scene. She looked like the _idea_ of the poet’s mind. Her resigned, pensive, unconscious look and attitude, at the moment she is about to be restored to the rapturous embrace of her lover, was a beautiful dramatic picture. She is an acquisition to the milder parts of tragedy. She interests on the stage, for she is interesting in herself. She cannot help being a heroine, if she but shews herself. She was as elegantly dressed in _Imoinda_, for an Indian maid, in light, flowered drapery, as she was in _Imogine_, for a lady of old romance, in trains of lead-coloured satin. Her voice is sweet, but lost in its own sweetness; and we who hear her at some distance, can only catch ‘the music of her honey-vows,’ like the indistinct murmur of a hive of bees. Mr. Bengough does not improve upon us by acquaintance. All that we have of late discovered in him is that he has grey eyes. Little Smith made an excellent representative of the coasting Guinea captain. John Bull could not desire to have better justice done to his mind or his body.—Southern, the author of _Oroonoko_, was also the author of _Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage_, in both of which ‘he often has beguiled us of our tears.’ He died at the age of eighty-six, in 1746. Gray, the poet, speaks thus of him in a letter, dated from Burnham, in Buckinghamshire, 1737. ‘We have here old Mr. Southern, at a gentleman’s house a little way off: he is now seventy-seven years old, and has almost wholly lost his memory: but is as agreeable as an old man can be: at least I persuade myself so, when I look at him, and think of _Isabella_ and _Oroonoko_.’

‘THE PANNEL’ AND ‘THE RAVENS’

_The Examiner._] [_February 2, 1817._

There has been little new this week. A new after-piece or melo-drame has been brought forward at Covent-garden, and the old farce of the _Pannel_ revived at Drury-Lane. We can say but little in praise of the former, except the excellence of the acting and the manner in which it is got up. The strength of the house is mustered in a second-rate production, and from the list of names in the play-bills, the public go to see the performers, if not the performance, and come away at least half satisfied. They manage these things differently at Drury-lane, and not so well. We deny that the comic strength of the two houses is so unequal as is sometimes supposed. For instance, at Drury-lane, they have Munden, Dowton, Oxberry, and Knight; Harley is droll too; and in women, they beat them out and out, for they have Miss Kelly. To be sure, they have not Liston; so they must kick the beam. Mr. Liston is the greatest comic genius of the age. If we were very dull and sad indeed, we should avoid going to any farce or comedy in which he did not appear, as only tantalising to our feelings, and promising relief without affording it: but we must be dull indeed, if we did not bite at the bait of Mr. Liston’s _Lubin Log_. His comic humour is a sort of oil or ‘balsam of fierabras’ for all imaginary wounds that are not a foot deep. His laugh might tickle royalty itself after the howling of the rabble, or make one of the wax figures at Mrs. Salmon’s relax from the inflexibility of its state. Then there is Miss Stephens at Covent-garden, and there are the three Miss Dennets—like ‘Circe and the Sirens three.’ We always see the Miss Dennets at the theatre, and they sometimes glide before our imagination at other times; but we seldom hear Miss Stephens now. We want to see her again in _Mandane_, in which we have seen her eight times already, and to hear her sing _If o’er the cruel tyrant Love_, which we could hear her sing for ever. We want to see her in _Polly_ for the seventh time, and in _Rosetta_ for the fifth, we believe it will be, when we see her in it again, which will be when she next plays in it. Pray how long will it be first, Mr. Fawcett? We suppose not till Miss O’Neill is tired of tiring the audience in _Mrs. Oakley_, or ‘the ravens are hoarse that croak over Mr. Emery’s head’ in the Pangs of Conscience. _Something new, always something new._ That is the taste of Covent Garden, and the town. It is not our’s. We are for something old. _Toujours perdrix._ We like to read the same books, and to see the same plays, and the same faces over again—_always provided_ we liked them at first. Now there is one face which we never liked, and never shall like, which is the face of Tyranny, and the older it gets, the uglier it gets in our eyes, and in this, as a matter of taste, we differ entirely with Mr. Canning, though he has been declared by a classical authority to be ‘the most elegant mind since Virgil.’ We differ with him notwithstanding.—_The Ravens, or the Pangs of Conscience_, is a melo-drame taken from the French, of the same breed, but an inferior specimen, as the _Maid and Magpie_, and the _Family of Anglade_. It is a kind of renewal of the age of augury adapted to the modern theories of probability, by being reduced within the limits of natural history. These pieces take for their text the lines,

‘And choughs and magpies shall bring forth
The secret’st man of blood.’

In the _Pangs of Conscience_, as in the _Maid of Palisseau_, there is a robbery, a trial of persons innocently suspected of it, and a discovery of the real perpetrators, just at the critical moment, by the intervention of two of the feathered creation. Just as sentence has been pronounced on the supposed criminals (Terry and Blanchard) by the Judge, (Barrymore, who really performed this character admirably) two Ravens fly in upon the stage, the same who had hovered over the scene of the murder and robbery in the adjacent forest, and by their silent but dreadful appeal to the conscience of _Jacques du Noir_ (Emery), who is not like his cousin _Bruno du Noir_ (poor Farley) a hardened, but a conscientious villain, reveal the mystery of the whole transaction, by which the guilty are punished, and the innocent miraculously escape.—There was some fine and powerful acting by Emery in the part of the repentant assassin. _Bruno_ in vain endeavours to appease and quiet him, but he still roars out lustily to give vent both to the pangs of his conscience and the ‘grief of a wound’ which he has got in the encounter from an old rusty fowling-piece of Fawcett’s, whom they plunder and kill. The greatest part of this romantic fiction is tedious, and the whole of it improbable, but from the goodness of the acting, and some strokes of interest in the situations, it went off with applause. Of the _Pannel_, we have only room to add that we think _Beatrice_, who is the subordinate heroine of the piece, the best specimen of Mrs. Alsop’s acting. We saw it from a remote part of the house, and her _voice and manner_ at this distance sometimes reminded us of her mother’s.

JOHN GILPIN

_The Examiner._] [_May 4, 1817._

DRURY-LANE.

When Mr. Dowton advertised for his benefit that he was to appear in the after-piece as _John Gilpin_, and to ride for that night only, we immediately felt tempted to go as the self-appointed executors and residuary legatees of the original author of the story, who concludes his account with these two lines—

‘And when he next does ride abroad,
May we be there to see.’

So we took upon us to fulfil Cowper’s wish, and went to see, not _John Gilpin_, nor, as we are credibly informed, even Mr. Dowton, but something very laughable, and still more absurd, which had however a certain charm about it, from the very name of the hero of the piece. We have an interest in _John Gilpin_; aye, almost as great an interest as we have in ourselves; for we remember him almost as long. We remember the prints of him and his travels hung round a little parlour where we used to visit when we were children—just about the time of the beginning of the French Revolution. While the old ladies were playing at whist, and the young ones at forfeits, we crept about the sides of the room and tracked _John Gilpin_ from his counter to his horse, from his own door to the turnpike, and far beyond the turnpike gate and the bell at Edmonton, with loss of wig and hat, but with an increasing _impetus_ and reputation, the farther he went from home.

‘The turnpike men their gates wide open threw,
He carries weight, he rides a race,
’Tis for a thousand pounds.’