Chapter XXIII: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (10)

M. Perlet took the _Avare_ for his benefit at this theatre last week. We are sorry we are about to lose this excellent actor, who has given us much pleasure and instruction. _Au revoir._ We saw him only in the latter part of Moliere’s _Miser_: his thinness, his dress, and the keys at his girdle fitted the character exactly. It was chiefly in the scenes where he runs mad at losing his casket of gold, or seizes on _Anselme_ as the father of the supposed robber to demand restitution of him, that the ruling passion and the greater actor broke out. In the first of these scenes particularly, where he catches hold of his own arm, thinking to arrest the thief, he shews all the rage and phrensy of the most tragic vehemence; and in throwing himself exhausted on the ground, bewailing his hard hap, and appealing to the pity of an imaginary audience, whom his despair conjures up, and then lashing himself up to impatience and fury again, proves his entire acquaintance with the ebb and flow, the risings and sinkings of the human heart. These particular passages appeared to us, however, like patches or excrescences on the general texture of the performance (perhaps they are so in the play itself, which is not one of Moliere’s best). If we may hazard a conjecture on a subject on which we do not feel altogether _at home_, we should say that M. Perlet’s _Miser_ was in its ordinary aspect rather the serving-man in a half-famished house, than a personification of the demon of selfishness, fretfulness, and avarice. It was hard and indifferent—not gloating enough, not morbid enough, not restless and harassed enough. Farther, we suspect there is this fault in his general acting and in French comedy: we grant it is not gross; is it not, on the other hand, too slight and evanescent? They charge us with over-doing; are they not then liable to under-do, and fall short of the mark? If there is such a thing as caricature, there is also an antithesis to it, and not only a danger of loading a character to excess, but of giving a profile or section of it for the whole, and not taking all the licence that truth and nature gives. We are dreadfully afraid of being misled by national prejudices; but (that being premised) we cannot but add our conviction that M. Perlet’s acting, with all its purity, propriety, and spirit, wants something of richness and breadth.—The little piece which followed the _Avare_, _Ninette à la cour_, was delightful both in itself and as giving Mademoiselle Fanny Vertpres an opportunity to display her _mignon_ figure and provoking ways. There seem to be two styles of female coquetry in France, extreme flutter and vivacity, or perfect calmness and self-possession. The one is set in motion by everything; the other is put out of its way by nothing. Miss Fanny Vertpres is of the latter class. With great presence of mind and ready wit, she joins to the symmetry the apparent coolness and indifference of a marble statue. She takes everything in good part, and slides into a number of ticklish adventures and situations with all the ease imaginable. She is only troubled at being laughed at—a misfortune against which no French patience is proof. The scenes behind the looking-glass and behind her fan with her rustic lover (Laporte), whom she beguiles in an enchanting feigned voice (prettier even than her own) are quite delightful, and dispose one to believe that comedy has not yet exhausted all its precious stores. Mademoiselle St. Ange played the _Countess_ with all her country’s ease and grace. Monsieur Laporte strikes us as a confirmation of the remarks we have made above on French comedy, by the very circumstance of his being an exception to them. There is nothing _automatic_ in his manner. He not only utters a jest, but he enjoys it too—not that he forces it upon us either, except by the gentle violence of sympathy. There is (so to speak) an atmosphere of humour about him, which reflects the immediate object with kindly warmth and lustre. His acting both in _Maître Jacques_ and in the after-piece evinced that easy play of feeling, that transition from grave to gay, that mixture of wit and folly, those natural varieties of laughter and tears, which mark the master in his art and the genuine son of Momus.

We dropped in at Covent Garden to see Mr. Warde in the _Seraglio_ and Charles Kemble in _Charles the Second_, who seems really born for the character, and whose fine person and accomplishments are thrown away in these degenerate days. Mr. Power makes a very passable Irish _Rochester_: but the wit and the rake had defects enough of his own to answer for, without having the _brogue_ added to them. The same fault may be found with Mr. Warde, who would make a very respectable actor in the middle walk of tragedy, could he but controul his voice within the compass of the four seas.

MRS. SIDDONS

_The Examiner_] [_May 25, 1828._

There has been no novelty this week at any of our theatres, English or French, except that little Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre has been metamorphosed into a cat, and has been playing in the _Pie Voleuse_ at the Lyceum. She played the first charmingly; the last prettily, though we have seen it done better. There is a _calibre_, a weight of metal in Miss Kelly’s pathos, which the French actress is without. Our lively neighbours are doubtless ‘born to converse, to live, and _act_ with ease’—all is set in motion like a feather, stopped like a feather. Smiles play upon the lips, tears start into their eyes and are dried up for nothing; an exclamation and a sigh settle the account between life and death; all is a game at _make-believe_, thoughtless and innocent as childhood, in the baby-house of their imagination—but if you wish to see the heart-strings crack, go and see Miss Kelly in the _Maid of Palisseau_; or if you would see the stately pillar of Tragedy itself fall and crush the subjected world, then you should have witnessed Mrs. Siddons formerly in some of her overwhelming parts. That was a flood of tears indeed—a drinking of the brimming cup of human joys and woes to the very last drop, the recollection of which may serve one all the rest of one’s life. We understand that not long ago Sir Walter Scott and Mrs. Siddons met in the same room before Mr. Martin’s picture of the _Fall of Nineveh_—two such spectators the world cannot match again, the one by the common consent of mankind the foremost writer of his age, the other in the eyes of all who saw her prime or her maturity, the queen and mistress of the tragic scene. Forgive us, gentle, ever-living shade of Jenny Deans, agonised soul of Balfour of Burley, heroic spirit of Rebecca of York, immortal memory of Dumbie Dikes and of a thousand more, if we should have turned from you and from him who invented you, to bow the knee and kiss the hem of the garment of her who represented to our youthful gaze the Mourning Bride, Hermione, Belvidera, Beverley’s wife, and was the Muse of Tragedy personified. We are sorry that Mrs. Siddons has abridged _Paradise Lost_, and that Sir Walter has written a triumphant peroration over ‘the worst, the second fall of man.’ We are perhaps runagates and Goths; but the smell of the links that used to ply between Covent garden and Drury lane prevails in our imagination over all the heather-bloom of Scotland, and we declare that Mrs. Siddons appears to us the more masculine spirit of the two. Sir Walter (when all’s said and done) is an inspired butler, a ‘Yes and No, my Lord’ fellow in a noble family—Mrs. Siddons is like a cast from the antique, or rather like the original, divine or more than human, from which it was taken. Yet close to each other, within narrow space, were placed two heads, on which glory sat plumed, beat two hearts over which had rolled the volume of earth’s bliss or woe, were interchanged glances that had reflected the brightness of the universe. Who would not rather see Sir Walter Scott’s fringed eyelids and storied forehead than the vacant brow of prince or peer? When Mrs. Siddons used to sit in parties and at drawing-rooms, the Lady Marys and the Lady Dorothys of the day came and peeped into the room to get a glance of her, with more awe and wonder than if it had been a queen. This was honour, this was power. There was but one person in the world who would have drawn the gaping gaze of curiosity from these and from all the crowned heads in Europe; and Sir Walter exults that he perished like a felon in the grasp of a jailor. We must indeed admire the talents, when we forgive the use of them: or is it that genius, with its lofty crest and variegated colours, seems destined like the serpent to lick the dust, and crawl all its life with its belly on the ground? We can reckon up in our time three great tragic performers; Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Kean, and Madame Pasta. (If there is a fourth instance, we either know not of it, or it is Miss Kelly: but that in a parenthesis, as our private opinion, or that of persons no wiser than ourselves.) Of these three, Mrs. Siddons seemed to command every source of terror and pity, and to rule over their wildest elements with inborn ease and dignity. Her person was made to contain her spirit; her soul to fill and animate her person. Her eye answered to her voice. She wore a crown. She looked as if descended from a higher sphere, and walked the earth in majesty and pride. She sounded the full diapason, touched all chords of passion, they thrilled through her, and yet she preserved an elevation of thought and character above them, like the tall cliff round which the tempest roars, but its head reposes in the blue serene! Mrs. Siddons combined the utmost grandeur and force with every variety of expression and excellence: her transitions were rapid and extreme, but were massed into unity and breadth—there was nothing warped or starting from its place—she produced the most overpowering effects[42] without the slightest effort, by a look, a word, a gesture. Mr. Kean, in the intellectual and impassioned part, is in our judgment equal to any one, but he produces his most striking effects by fits and starts, without the same general tone and elevation of character, and, for want of the instrumental advantages, with an appearance of effort and sometimes of extravagance. Madame Pasta, on the contrary, never goes out of her way, never aims at effect or startles by any one pointed passage, nor does she combine a variety of feelings together (as far as we have seen) but she rises to the very summit of her art, and satisfies every expectation by absolute and unbroken integrity of purpose, and by the increasing and unconscious intensity of passion. She has neither Mr. Kean’s inequalities nor Mrs. Siddons’s scope: she neither deviates from the passion nor rises above it, but she commits herself wholly to its impulse, borrows strength from its strength, ascends with it to heaven, or is buried in the abyss. In a word, she is the creature of truth and nature, and joins the utmost simplicity with the utmost force. This has little to do with Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre: ah! she is charming too, and we hope to have a great deal to say in her praise—twenty years hence. She counts her silver spoons inimitably, and when she is suspected of stealing one of them says, ‘_C’est desagreable_,’ in a voice and manner that none but a Frenchwoman can. The _Misanthrope_ and the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ have been repeated at this theatre; and M. Perlet has done equal justice to Moliere’s sententious gravity in the one, and to his delightful flighty farce and fanciful exaggeration of folly in the other. Moliere is our Wycherley and O’Keefe, both in one: or it might be said that he possessed the critical sense of Montaigne, with the exuberant mirth and humour of Rabelais.—We believe this little theatre, with its lively company and excellent pieces, answers tolerably well, as most French theatres do. We were thinking of this the other evening, and thought we had accounted for it. The French performances, with a tenth of the audience, pay better than the English with ten times the number and receipts. How so? It arises, on a critical inquiry, from the unity of place, which is the fundamental law of the French drama. One barbarism leads to another;—a slight technical distinction involves manager after manager in bankruptcy and ruin. Where there is no change of situation, the scenery is the same; and where this is the case, it is no object either of attraction or expense. Little more is required than a drop-scene. Therefore, all you have to do is to get good plays, and a good company to perform them: three or four hundred people in the house will maintain a dozen or a score of comedians on the stage; and the excellence of the performance and the taste of the town keep pace with one another, and with the absence of show and extrinsic decoration. But with us all this is reversed. The scene travels, and our scene-shifters, scene-painters, mechanists, and the whole theatrical _commissariat_ go along with it. The variety, the gaudiness, the expense is endless: to pay for the getting up such an immense apparatus, the houses must be enlarged to hold a proportionable rabble of ‘barren spectators:’ the farther off they are thrown, the stronger must be the glare, the more astonishing the effect, and the play and the players (with all relish for wit or nature) dwindle into insignificance, and are lost in the blaze of a huge chandelier or the grin of a baboon. We do not see the features of the actors, but we admire (very justly) Mr. Stanfield’s landscape back-grounds, or a castle set on fire by Mr. Farley; we hear the din and bray of the orchestra, not the honeyed words of the poet; and still we wonder that operas and melo-drames flourish, and that the legitimate stage and good old English Comedy languishes. Poor old green curtain! when thou wast withdrawn to make room for gas lights and shining marble pillars, the last relic of the heart-felt pageant faded; and the _Veluti in speculum_ flew after _Astræa_ to the skies!

THE THREE QUARTERS, &c.

_The Examiner_] [_June 1, 1828._

DRURY LANE.

The new comedy in three acts brought out at this theatre on Tuesday evening is, we apprehend, taken from a French piece, entitled _Les Trois Quartiers_. The Three Quarters of the town indicate the three sorts or stages of society, as they are to be met with in the _Rue St. Honoré_, the _Rue Mont Blanc_, and the _Fauxbourg St. Germain_, which may be supposed to answer (we speak under correction of the Secretary of the Admiralty, skilled as he is in the transitions from low to high life) to our Fish-street-hill, Russell and Grosvenor square. It was thought a nice distinction in Miss Burney, forty years ago, to place the residence of the Harrells in Portman square, and to assign Grosvenor square to the Delville family; the one being considered as the resort of the upstart fashionables, the other of the old gentry. To know whether this court-geography holds good in the present year, see the files of the _John Bull_, or the _Last Series of Sayings and Doings_, where such matters are noted and discussed with a becoming want of elegance and decorum, which is made up for by the innate loftiness of the subject. In the French piece, a rich adventurer from South America is introduced into these different circles by an officious go-between, as a travelled prodigy, _un homme qui a vu_ Bolivar; and in each his perplexity and astonishment increases with the progress and refinement of manners in the _Three Quarters_ of the town. There is some sense in that; and the French actors have the skill to make the line of demarcation intelligible. But here we vow that though we shift the scene, no progress is made; or we are _at the top of the tree_ in the second stage. _Kitty Corderoy_ is sufficiently forward and vulgar, it is true; _Amelia Mammonton_ is naturally elegant and genteel; but we get no farther; or rather _Lady Charlewood_ is a falling off, having neither natural nor acquired grace; and the _Countess Dowager Delamere_ is distinguished by nothing but a rude and harsh familiarity of manner. The Banker (Mr. Cooper) has evidently the advantage of the Lord (Mr. Hooper); and _Jack Pointer_ (Mr. Jones) a busybody and toad-eater, carries it hollow by dint of sheer impudence and impertinence. Mr. Jones’s Bond street slang—‘She’s a delicious creature’—is echoed every five minutes by _Lady Delamere’s_—‘You’ll excuse my freedom, _Lady Charlewood_;’ the changes are rung upon a few and slender notes of fashion, while the author has the full range of the Cockney dialect, and sinks deep in the bathos of low life. _Mrs. Corderoy_, we observe, is played by a Mrs. C. Jones. Is Mr. Jones lately married? If so, we congratulate him: she is an excellent cook. We could wish the accomplished author of _Killing no Murder_, he who dips his pen so carelessly in poison or honey, the expert _improvisatori_ in fact or fiction, would turn his thoughts to this matter; give us a comedy or criticism to show our actors or play-wrights what they ought to do in these degenerate days; and from his ease of access to palaces or princes, give us a taste of true refinement, the court-air, the drawing-room grace, the after-dinner conversation, the mornings and the evenings of the great, instead of confining his abilities to teaching young gentlemen at Long’s how to eat their fish with a silver fork: the waiters might do that just as well. Or could not Mr. Croker, now that Augustus has given peace to sea and land, and who shakes epics and reviews from his brow ‘like dew-drops from the lion’s mane,’ _smile_ a comedy that should point the nice gradations from the city to the court—

‘Fine by degrees, and beautifully less,’

and make it for ever impossible for Cheapside to pass Temple-bar or Russell-square to step into the Regent’s Park? We understand, indeed, that Mr. Colburn has a plan in contemplation to remedy all this, and that we may look forward to the dawn of a new era in literature, through the happy idea which the little bookselling Buonaparte has conceived of establishing an inviolable _Concordat_ between the world of genius and fashion. The proposal is to buy up the manuscripts of all authors by profession, to lock them in a drawer, so as to put the whole corps of Garretteers and Grub street writers on the shelf, and leave the door open to none but persons of quality and amateurs, lords, ladies, and hangers-on of the great. The scheme has in a great measure succeeded in the periodical department, and only requires a little management to be extended to the stage. What an air already breathes from the New Parnassus! What a light breaks over Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden! What delicacy, what discrimination, what refinement of sentiment! What halycon days! What peaceable productions! There will be no grossness, no violence, no political allusions or party spite! The best understanding will subsist between Government and men of letters, nor will there be any occasion for a Dramatic Censor, when Ministers of State furnish the plot, and Peeresses in their own right suggest the last corrections to the dialogue. There is no doubt the taste for the drama will be revived by means of such an arrangement—people of fashion will go to see what people of fashion write—the manners of high life will be reflected on the stage as in the mirrors at each end of the dress circle—

‘They best can paint them who have known them most;’

the hireling crew will withdraw to hide themselves in a garret or a jail—the pit will wonder—the galleries be silent or shut up—Lord Porchester’s tragedy will be crowned with bays, Lord Morpeth’s transferred from the closet to the stage—Mr. Moore, by particular desire of several persons of distinction, will try his hand at another _Blue-Stocking_ affair—and the _Sphynx_, the _Athenæum_, the _Argus_ (a new evening), and the _Aurora_ (a new morning paper), which Mr. Buckingham will by that time have set up on the same independent principles of voluntary contribution, will applaud to the skies the change which Mr. Colburn’s spirit and genius will have brought like a perfect paradise upon earth. It is whispered that a certain Duke has got through the first act of a piece, called ‘The Deaf and Dumb Politician,’ but dreads the vulgar composition of the public taste:—nay, who knows but the coast being cleared of plebeian scribblers and the rabble of competitors, Majesty itself might not take the field, the _Lady Godiva_ of the scene, in a night-gown and slippers, with a grand romantic interlude called ‘The Prince and the Pretender, or the Year 1745’—with Mr. O—holding the glass-door in Burlington street for three days together in his hand, and Mr. C—p—b—ll to officiate as _Peeping Tom_—‘Oh! dearest Ophelia, we are ill at these numbers:’ but neither _Ups and Downs_ nor _Carron-Side_ suggested anything better. Mr. Liston in the first played a city fortune-hunter, who pays his addresses to, who jilts, and is jilted by three mistresses in succession, to whom he is introduced by _Jack Pointer_ (Jones), his pretensions rising with his fortune, and with whom he is confronted and exposed without much effect in the last act. He at first aspires no higher than to _Kitty Corderoy_, a tradesman’s daughter; but having twenty thousand pounds left him, he contrives to cut with her, to her great joy, she being secretly in love with _Mr. Christopher Higgins_ (Russell), her father’s apprentice, a person by no means approved by her mother _Mrs. Corderoy_ (Mrs. C. Jones), because he himself is ‘a little sneaking chap,’ and his father a tailor—as if tailors were not in the order of nature or of civil society. Our hero, that is, _Mr. Felix Mudberry_, next offers himself, with a large bunch of flowers and a suit of clothes picked up on the way at the _Readymade Depôt_, to _Miss Amelia Mammonton_ (the charming Miss Ellen Tree), a banker’s sister, who is in love with _Earl Delamere_ (Mr. Hooper), love and romantic sentiment, according to the situation or rank in which it is found, aiming at still greater and more airy heights. She laughs at him and his ‘delicate attentions’ (as she well may)—but being led to suppose that his uncle, _Mr. Stanley_, a Liverpool merchant, or as he used to call him ‘_Black Boy Billy_,’ is dead, and has left him a fortune of half a million, he begins to blubber out his sorrow for his uncle’s death and his own ‘good, he means, bad fortune,’ stammers his excuses for leaving the company of _Mr. Mammonton_ and his sister, and is wound up to a Countess by his mischievous prompter. _Lady Charlewood_ (Miss I. Paton) is disgusted with the behaviour of her new and absurd admirer; her mother, the _Countess Dowager Delamere_ (Mrs. Davison), admires his fortune, and patronises the match according to the etiquette of rank and high life. His inconstancy and meanness are however exposed in the meantime by _Miss Kitty Corderoy_, who is intimate with both the young ladies, having been at the same school with them somewhere in the neighbourhood of London, and runs up and down ‘the Ladder of Life’ as she pleases (in the French play the corresponding character is a milliner, which is a little more in keeping)—and _Mr. Felix Mudberry_, in his own emphatic phrase, is ‘blown’ by all the three at once;—the bubble of his legacy also bursts, and _Jack Pointer_ turning short round upon him at this extremity, advises him to go abroad again, make another fortune, and on his return, promises to introduce him to a Princess! Mr. Liston produced a good deal of laughter in the part, but perhaps from not being near enough to see his face, the drollery fell flat upon us. It was (to get within bow-shot of an Hibernicism) like hearing the report of a pistol, before seeing the flash. Weepers and a round hat do not move our risible muscles. We think Mr. Liston shines in the cockney, more than in the cockney and dandy together. ‘He knows his cue best without a prompter.’ His affectation even must be unaffected. We will match his lead against anybody’s, we will not answer for the tinsel. We have a delicate request to make of him, that he would play _Madge_ for his benefit and our satisfaction—unless _Moll Flagon_ should complain of it as compromising her dignity. Is this piece Mr. Kenney’s? It shivers on the brink of nothing, and plunges over head and ears into nonsense. We wish our authors and architects, if they must give us foreign models, would give them entire, and not by bits and samples, altering only to spoil.

COVENT-GARDEN.

_Carron-Side, or the Fête Champêtre_, a new Opera, the words by Mr. Planche, the music by M. Liverati, was brought out here on Tuesday, and was repeated on Thursday. The dialogue is tolerable; and so are the songs. Miss Stephens was the chief attraction in it; though she does not make much figure by Scottish stream or mountain. Mr. Sapio and Mr. Wood personated, the one a military, the other a naval hero in it, and maintained the superiority of their several professions in song and bold defiance—with equal loudness and skill. Miss Stephens (_Blanche Mackay_) the supposed daughter of a peasant, is in love with _Captain Allan Lindsay_ (Sapio), and he with her, though he is about to be married to _Grace Campbell_ (Miss Cawse), who likes another of her cousins, _Cornet Hector Lindsay_ (Mr. Wood) quite as well or better, as far as we could judge by the event. When _Blanche_ has to present a _bouquet_ to the intended couple on the morning of their nuptials, and to sing a song of congratulation, her voice falters and she faints away in the midst of it. She then, partly through shame and partly through vexation, escapes to the house of the miller (Little Keely) and his wife (Miss Goward), where she is kindly received, but supposed by her own friends to have rashly drowned herself. The anguish of _Captain Allan Lindsay_ is not to be restrained on this occasion, and betrays his passion for the unhappy girl, who is at the same time discovered not to be the real daughter of the old trumpeter _Donald Mackay_ (Bartley), but the daughter of _Mrs. Campbell_, who had been supposed to be lost when an infant in the Spanish campaign. The mystery being cleared up, the secret of her birth is communicated to poor _Blanche_ amidst her smiles and tears. _Miss Grace Campbell_ under the circumstances, and from her previous indifference, declares for _Cornet Lindsay_, and _Blanche_ is united to the Captain. Mr. Keely crept on and off the stage as usual; and Miss Cawse danced and flourished round it as she sung, because Madame Vestris does so. We are quite satisfied with Madame Vestris, without wishing to see her imitated.

MR. KEAN

_The Examiner._] [_June 15, 1828._

We do not wonder at Mr. Kean’s want of success in Paris. As they do not like or understand Shakespear, it is not to be supposed they should like or understand any one who goes near to represent him, or who gives anything more than a trite version or modernised paraphrase of him. Voltaire has borrowed largely from the English dramatist, and has taken _Othello’s_ dying speech almost entire, as far as the prose-ground of it, but has contrived to leave out all the striking, picturesque points of it:—so they would no doubt object to and cancel, by a sweeping condemnation, all the unexpected and marked beauties of an impassioned recitation of it. Whatever is not literal and conventional, is with them extravagant and grotesque: they have so long been accustomed (we are speaking of serious matters) to consider affectation as nature, that they consider nature when it comes across them as affectation and quaintness.

‘The poet’s eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.’

So the actor’s eye (if truly inspired) comprehends more than is set down for him, starts at hidden fancies that only pale passion sees; and his voice is the trembling echo and the broken instrument of thoughts and of an agony that lie too deep for mere words to express. This licence, that is, this truth of nature is, with our accomplished and more thorough-bred neighbours, entirely out of the question. Their art, whether in poetry, acting, painting, is well-drilled regimental art:—it is art in uniform and on parade. Thus tragic poetry cannot, in its dumb despair, call on all nature to supply it with an appropriate language, that places what it feels in palpable and lofty imagery before the reader: it must, on the contrary, have its rhetorical and didactic flourishes all ready for the occasion—these may be as tedious, as pompous, as bombastic as you please, but to pass or allude to anything beyond them, is vile and Gothic indeed. The actor may mouth, rant, and whine as much as he pleases, so that he does it in measured time, and seems in perfect health and spirits all the while; but if he is once thrown off his guard, and loses sight of himself and the audience in the sufferings of his hero, it is all over with him. Again, an actor’s face ‘should be as a book where one may read strange matters.’ This would be an inexpiable offence in France, where there is nothing strange, and where all must appear upon the surface or be kept quite out of sight, on the score of decency and good manners. As the poet must introduce no image or sentiment for which there is not a prescribed _formula_, so the tragedian must give no shade or inflection of feeling which the entire audience were not prepared complacently to anticipate. The self-love of the pit would rise in open rebellion if he did. In France it is a rule that no person is wiser than another: you cannot be beforehand with their conceit and infinite superiority in impertinence. So they themselves tell the story of a man who, hearing of the assassination of the Duke of Berri, and not willing to allow that his informant had the start of him on so interesting a topic, made answer—‘Yes, I knew it!’ We are not therefore surprised that the Parisians find fault with the only actor of much genius we possess: he must puzzle them almost as much as the Hetman Platoff; and this assuredly they cannot forgive, as in the present case their rank cowardice cannot get the better of their consummate vanity. It is ludicrous too that they should charge us with extravagance and fustian—they, who have their _Pensions de l’Univers_ and _Diligences de l’Univers_[43] stuck on every pillar and post! As we know what the most refined people in the universe do not like, we are also happy in learning what they do like. For others to despise what we admire, is always to assume an attitude of seeming superiority over us: to admire what we do not think much of, is to give us our revenge again. Fastidiousness is here, as in many other cases, the effect not of an excess of refinement, but of a want of conception. When Voltaire called Shakespear a barbarian, we were a little staggered in our previous opinion, as we could not tell what lofty models of excellence he contemplated in his own mind; but when he pronounced Addison’s _Cato_ to be a perfect tragedy, we knew what to think of him and ourselves. He might as well have pronounced a marble slab to be a perfect statue. In like manner, it might ‘give us pause’ that such competent critics are dissatisfied with Mr. Kean, if we did not learn in the same breath that they are in raptures with Mr. C. Kemble, Mr. Macready, and Miss Smithson; not that we disapprove of the last, but that being our own country people, we beg leave to judge of their relative merits better than foreigners. If they scouted our pretentions altogether, we might despond; but as they _laud_ us in the wrong place, we may smile in our turn. The contradiction between us is not owing to an inferiority of nature, but to a difference of opinion. We can understand why, with reason, they admire Macready: he declaims well, and so far resembles good French actors. Mr. C. Kemble is not only an excellent actor, but a very good-looking man; and good looks are a letter of recommendation, whether among the Laplanders or Hottentots, at Zenith or the Pole. Miss Smithson is tall; and the French admire tall women. All these come under a class, and meet with obvious sympathy and approbation. Mr. Kean, on the other hand, stands alone,—is merely an original; and the French hate originality: it seems to imply that there is some possible excellence or talent that they are without! Beside it appears that they expected him to be a giant. _Mon Dieu qu’il est petit!_—as if this was an insuperable bar to his bestriding the theatric world like a Colossus. He is diminutive, it is true: so was the _Little Corporal_: but since the latter disappeared from the stage, they have ceased to be the _Great Nation_. They stir up our bile by their arrogance and narrow-mindedness, and we cannot help its overflowing in some degree of ill-humour and petulance. We were heartily glad to find that Mr. Knowles’s tragedy of _Virginius_ is well received in Paris—(we would always rather agree with, than differ from them, for we know their subtlety and double edge)—but this is to be attributed to the inherent and classical excellence of the composition. Its scenes present a series of elegant bas-reliefs, and are equally enchanting to the eye and to the ear.

We have received a letter from a Correspondent, praying us to put down the large poke-bonnets which ladies at present take with them to the theatre, and often persist in keeping on, as a female privilege. We confess, we do not see the custom in that amiable light: it appears to us the privilege of annoying others without any object. He says, that on applying to a gentleman in the gallery of the King’s Theatre, to know if a lady with him would have any objection to take off her bonnet, which, with her involuntary movements from side to side, prevented three persons behind her from seeing or enjoying the Opera, her friend answered, ‘You see she is in the same situation with yourself,’ pointing to another lady just before her. So that the evil being doubled was an argument for it. At this rate, people might go to the play with umbrellas, and hold them open the whole time,—or ladies with their parasols, if we must have a more light and portable nuisance,—and by thus setting up a screen to the performance, and making the absurdity truly English and complete, put an end to it by common consent of those who are only bent on incommoding others, when they think they are in some degree singular in doing it. We expect some novelty (of which we have had a dreary dearth of late) on the opening of the Haymarket Theatre next week, and a treat, which we greatly long for, in little Bartolozzi. But we must not count upon our good fortune too soon.

MUNDEN’S SIR PETER TEAZLE

_The Times._] [_September 8, 1817._

DRURY-LANE THEATRE.

This theatre opened on Saturday with _The School for Scandal_ and _Past Ten O’clock_. The chief novelty in the former was Munden’s _Sir Peter Teazle_. We cannot speak very favourably of it. He did not feel at home in the part, which is indeed quite out of his way. His lengthened visage and abrupt tones did not suit the character or sentiments of _Sir Peter_. _Sir Peter_ is a common every-day sort of character, a tetchy amorous old bachelor, who has married a young wife, with an uneasy consciousness of his own infirmities, and placed in situations to make those infirmities more ridiculous. But still he is a classical character, and not a grotesque; and, therefore, the actor’s peculiar talents were thrown away upon him, or rather were judiciously kept as much as possible in the back-ground, and hardly dared to show themselves once the whole evening. Mr. Munden went through the part with laudable gravity and decorum, without _making any hole in his manners_; nor did he purposely play the clown or _pantomime_ in any of the scenes. Yet the negation of farce is not comedy. _Sir Peter_ was a knight newly dubbed as well as married, a gentleman on his good behaviour both with his mistress and the public. We missed the irresistible expansion of his broad, shining face; and reckoned up a number of suppressed shrugs, and embryo grimaces, that shrunk from the glare of the new gas lights. His eyebrows were not lifted up with wonder; his lips were not moistened with jests as with marmalade; nor did his chin drop down once its whole length as with a total dislocation of his ideas. In the scene of the discovery in the fourth act, where his wife as ‘the little _French Milliner_’ is concealed behind the screen, he took a greater license, but from the mechanical restraint to which he had been subjected, there was something even here dolorous and petrified in his manner. If, however, Mr. Munden did penance in _Sir Peter_, it was a holyday-time with him, high carnival in _Old Nosy_ in the farce, where he made himself and the audience amends for all the temptations he had resisted to indulge his natural genius, and let out his whole faculties of face, voice, and gesture. In his character, as an old steward, he is reeling-ripe from the beginning to the end of the piece; and he produces a dizziness in the heads of the audience as unavoidable, though more pleasant than that which overtakes the passengers in a Margate hoy. The _School for Scandal_ was, in the other characters, cast much as usual, and as well as the strength of the company in genteel comedy would permit. Mrs. Davison’s _Lady Teazle_, though not without spirit, is too coarse and hoydening. Wallack’s _Joseph Surface_ wanted dignity and plausibility. Not to compare him with old Jack Palmer, he does not hit off the officious condescending solemnity of the character so well as Young. He seems sulky and reserved, instead of being self-complacent and ostentatious; to shrink into a cautious contemplation of his own designs and villainy, instead of protecting others under the shadow of his assumed virtues, and covering their failings and defects with a veil of pompous sentiment. It was said of Garrick, that he played the footman too like the fine gentleman; Mr. Wallack, on the other hand, plays the fine gentleman too much like the footman. When dressed to most advantage, he puts us in mind of a valet out of livery. Mr. Rae’s _Charles Surface_ was without any thing to recommend it, but the wit, gaiety, and magnanimity of the author. His mode of speaking is more harsh and untuneable in comedy than in regular declamation, which in some measure hides its habitual defects. It is a brogue in full gallop suddenly stopped short by the turnpike gate of criticism. Harley’s _Sir Benjamin Backbite_ was inoffensive from its insipidity; and Knight as old _Crabtree_ had painted his eyebrows very naturally. The house was not very crowded. The curtain drew up punctually at seven, without any previous expression of impatience; and the play was over before ten: but the rapidity with which the acts followed one another, and the almost immediate interruption of the music between the acts as soon as it had struck up, produced on us an unpleasant effect. It was like going a journey in the mail-coach, where they do not allow you time for your meals. A good play, like a hearty dinner, requires some time for digestion: the music in the orchestra acts upon the imagination, like wine upon the stomach; and habit makes it as ungrateful to us to be disappointed of the one as to be deprived of the other.

YOUNG’S HAMLET

_The Times._] [_September 9, 1817._

COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.

This theatre opened last night with _Hamlet_, and the _Miller and his Men_. The chief improvement in the house seems to us to be the large mirrors at each end of the first row of boxes, which reflect the company in a brilliant perspective, and have a very magical effect. The great chandelier suspended from the top of the theatre, we should admire more, if it did not put out our eyes in looking at it; nor do we think the glare it produces any addition to the general appearance of the company or the house. The only advantage resulting from it—that of throwing the light upon the countenances of the actors from above instead of from below (which last method inverts the natural shadows of the face, and distorts the expression), is defeated by the gas lights which are still retained between the stage and the orchestra. Nor do we know how these can well be dispensed with, as it is by raising or withdrawing them that the stage is enlightened or darkened as the occasion requires it. The house was exceedingly full, and the play went off as well as could be expected. Mr. Young’s _Hamlet_ is not his most happy or successful effort. He in a great measure imitates Mr. Kemble, and Mr. Kemble is a bad model in this part; even where he is original he is not more what he ought to be, not more like _Hamlet_. He declaims it very well, and rants it very well; but where is the expression of the feeling?—where the thought beyond all ordinary means of expression, wrapped up in itself as in a dim cloud, shown most by being hid, that derives its energy from rest, not from action, and is as it were audible from its very silence? Mr. Young, we allow, rehearsed several passages very well, as detached passages from a school-boy’s exercise: but he wanted keeping—the fine inflections, sudden or gradual, of the character—the unthought-of swellings of the passion—the involuntary ebbing and flowing of his idle purposes. This actor in fact executes his conception well: but then his conception is either common-place, or wrong. He has not always the judgment or the genius to pitch each passage in the right key, and in harmony with the rest. We will mention only two instances. In reciting the description of man as the noblest of creatures, ‘the paragon of animals,’ &c., Mr. Young was so vehement, that he seemed quite angry; and his sudden turning round to the players at the conclusion of the speech was exactly as if they had given him some serious offence by their ‘smiling.’ Again, he spoke the soliloquy after the scene in which the player gives the description of Pyrrhus, in a style not conveying the idea of his own melancholy and weakness as contrasted with the theatrical fury of the imaginary hero, but as if he had himself caught by mere physical infection the very fury which he describes himself to be without. This was certainly not right, but (what is perhaps better) it was applauded. Mr. Bonnell Thornton was _Horatio_, and appeared not to have recovered all the evening from his fright at first seeing the _Ghost_. His pronunciation is thick, as if he spoke with pebbles in his mouth; nor is his emphasis judicious. Mr. Egerton’s _Ghost_ is the most substantial we ever saw. He does not look like one that has ‘peaked or pined’ long, and has by no means realized _Hamlet’s_ wish—

‘Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.’

Miss Matthews played ‘the pretty _Ophelia_’ very pleasingly. She is as good an _Ophelia_ as we have lately seen—better, we think than Miss Stephens, because she does not sing _quite_ so well. This character ought not indeed to be in general given to a fine singer; for it has been well observed, that ‘_Ophelia_ does not go mad because she can sing, but she sings because she has gone mad.’

DOWTON IN THE HYPOCRITE

_The Times._] [_September 19, 1817._

DRURY LANE THEATRE.

The excellent comedy of _The Hypocrite_ was acted here last night. Dowton’s _Dr. Cantwell_, is a very admirable and edifying performance. The divine and human affections are ‘very craftily qualified’ in his composition, which is a mixture of the Methodist parson ingrafted on the old French pietist, and accomplished Abbé. The courtly air of Moliere’s _Tartuffe_ has been considerably lowered down and vulgarised to fit the character to the grossness of modern times and circumstances: only the general features of the character, and the prominent incidents of the story, have been retained by the English translator, and they seem to require the long speeches, the oratorical sentiments, and laboured casuistry of the original author to render them probable or even credible. It has been remarked, that the wonderful success of this piece on the French stage is a lasting monument of the stress laid by that talking and credulous nation on all verbal professions of virtue and sincerity, and of the little difference they make between words and things. With all the pains that have been taken to bring it within the verge of verisimilitude by the aid of popular allusions and religious prejudices, it with difficulty _naturalizes_ on our own stage, and remains at last an incongruous, though a very striking and instructive caricature. Dowton’s jovial and hearty characters are his best; his demure and hypocritical ones are only his second best. His _Dr. Cantwell_ is not so good as his _Major Sturgeon_, or his _Sir Anthony Absolute_, but still it is very good. Their excellence consists in giving way to the ebullition of his feelings of social earnestness, or vainglorious ostentation; the excellence of _this_ in the systematic concealment of his inmost thoughts and purposes. _Cantwell_ sighs out his soul with the melancholy formality of a piece of clockwork, and exhibits the encroachments of amorous importunity under a mask of _still life_. The locks of his hair are combed with appropriate sleekness and unpretending humility over his forehead and shoulders: his face looks godly and greasy; his person and mind are well fortified in a decent suit of plain broad cloth, and the calves of his legs look stout and saint-like in stockings of dark pepper-and-salt fleecy hosiery. Bitter smiles contend with falling tears; the whining tones of the conventicle with the insolence of success, and the triumph of his unbridled rage in the last act over his phlegmatic hypocrisy is complete. He was admirably supported by Mrs. Sparks, as old _Lady Lambert_, and by Oxberry as _Mawworm_. This last character is as loose and dangling as the sails of a windmill, and is puffed up and set in motion by one continuous blast of folly and fanaticism. The other characters in the piece were less happily supported.

MISS BRUNTON’S ROSALIND

_The Times._] [_September 20, 1817._

COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.

At this theatre last night Miss Brunton appeared in _Rosalind_, in _As you Like it_. She certainly played the part very respectably and very agreeably, but not _exquisitely_; and if it is not played exquisitely, in our mind it is spoiled. ‘But would Shakspeare’s _Rosalind_ do so?’ is a question that, if put home as it ought to be, might deter many an accomplished young lady from attempting to give life to the careless, inimitable graces of this ideal creation of the poet’s art. Miss Brunton recited the different passages with considerable point, intelligence, and archness, like a lively and sensible school-girl, repeating it as an exercise; but she was not half giddy, fond, and rapturous enough for _Rosalind_. She spoke her sentences with ‘good emphasis and discretion,’ instead of running herself and the imaginations of the audience fairly out of breath with pleasure, love, wit, and playful gaiety. She has, however, white teeth and black eyes, a clear voice, a pleasing figure, with youth on her side, and a very good understanding to boot. What more can be required in a young actress, except by fastidious critics like us? She sung the _Cuckoo_ song very prettily, and was encored in it. The other parts were not very elaborately got up. We liked Mr. Duruset’s two songs as well as any thing else. Mr. Young’s _Jaques_ was less spirited than we have sometimes seen it: indeed, the character is in some measure spoiled to his hands by the prompt-book critics, who have put a great deal of improper praise of himself into the mouth of the melancholy _Jaques_. It required some contrivance to make him or Shakspeare an egotist! Mr. Fawcett’s _Touchstone_ was amusing, but too rapid and slovenly. There are some parts of this character which the actor probably thinks it becoming his Managerial dignity to hurry over as fast as possible. Mrs. Gibbs’s _Audrey_ is almost too good. If ‘the gods have not made her poetical,’ they have at least inspired her with the very spirit of folly, and with all its bliss. A Russian ballet, and _The Libertine_, closed the entertainments of the evening. The former of these is a curious exhibition of Russian costume, but it does not exhibit the Miss Dennetts to any advantage. The play of _As you Like it_ was given out again for Monday, instead of _The Slave_.

MAYWOOD’S ZANGA

_The Times._] [_October 3, 1817._

DRURY-LANE THEATRE.

Mr. Maywood appeared here in _Zanga_ last night. It is not certainly from any wish to discourage, but we cannot speak so favourably of his performance of this character as of his _Shylock_. Considerable diffidence still appears in this actor’s manner, and retards his progress to reputation and excellence. He does not give sufficient scope and vehemence to the impassioned parts of the character, nor sufficient decision and significance to its wily and malignant duplicity. _Zanga’s_ blood is on fire; it boils in his veins; it should dilate, and agitate his whole frame with the fiercest rage and revenge: and again, the suppression of his constitutional ardour, of the ungovernable passions that torment and goad on his mind, ought to be marked with a correspondent degree of artful circumspection and studied hypocrisy. In both extremes (for the character is in extremes throughout) we thought Mr. Maywood failed. His rage and hatred, where it had opportunity to vent itself in a torrent of exclamations, was not strong or sustained enough, and appeared in the very tempest and whirlwind of the passion, to recoil affrighted ‘from the sound itself had made.’ In the concealment of his purposes, and in the villainous insinuations with which he fills _Alonzo’s_ mind, ‘distilling them like a leprous poison in his ear,’ he was ‘too tame,’ too servile and mechanical, and resembled more the busy, mercenary, credulous tale-bearer, than the dark, secret assassin of the peace, life, and honour, of his unsuspecting patron. The passage in which Mr. Maywood failed most, and in which the greatest symptoms of disapprobation manifested themselves, was that in which the greatest effect is generally produced, and where consequently the expectations are raised the highest: we mean, in the terrific and overpowering exclamation to _Alonzo_, ‘’Twas I that did it!’ In the long and nasal emphasis which Mr. Maywood laid on the monosyllable ‘I’ he shocked the ears and tired the patience of the auditors; less, we apprehend, from any thing wrong in his conception of the part, than from the remains of a provincial accent hanging on his pronunciation, and in passages of great vehemence and ardour, preventing him from having the full command of his utterance. In the less violent expression of passion, he was more successful; and gave one or two of the short soliloquies which occur of a more thoughtful and reasoning cast, with considerable depth of tone and feeling. We are not without hopes, when Mr. Kean returns, and imparts some of his confidence and admirable decision to his young rival or pupil, of seeing some very good acting _between_ them: we say so without meaning a double-entendre.