"For, doubtless, that indeed according to art is most eloquent,
which turns and approaches nearest to nature, from whence it came."
--MILTON.
"_Professed diversions!_ cannot these escape?
.....
We ransack tombs for _pastime_; from the dust
Call up the sleeping hero; bid him tread
The scene for our amusement: How like Gods
We sit; and, wrapt in immortality,
Shed generous tears on wretches born to die;
Their fate deploring, to forget _our own!_"
--YOUNG.
I had scarcely thought of the theater for some years, when Kean arrived
in this country; and it was more from curiosity than from any other
motive, that I went to see, for the first time, the great actor of the
age. I was soon lost to the recollection of being in a theater, or
looking upon a great display of the "mimic art." The simplicity,
earnestness, and sincerity of his acting made me forgetful of the
fiction, and bore me away with the power of reality and truth. If this
be acting, said I, as I returned home, I may as well make the theater my
school, and henceforward study nature at second hand.
How can I describe one who is almost as full of beauties as nature
itself,--who grows upon us the more we become acquainted with him, and
makes us sensible that the first time we saw him in any part, however
much he may have moved us, we had but a partial apprehension of the
many excellences of his acting? We cease to consider it as a mere
amusement. It is an intellectual feast; and he who goes to it with a
disposition and capacity to relish it, will receive from it more
nourishment for his mind, than he would be likely to do in many other
ways in twice the time. Our faculties are opened and enlivened by it;
our reflections and recollections are of an elevated kind; and the voice
which is sounding in our ears, long after we have left him, creates an
inward harmony which is for our good.
Kean, in truth, stands very much in that relation to other players whom
we have seen, that Shakspeare does to other dramatists. One player is
called classical; another makes fine points here, and another there;
Kean makes more fine points than all of them together; but in him these
are only little prominences, showing their bright heads above a
beautifully undulated surface. A continual change is going on in him,
partaking of the nature of the varying scenes he is passing through, and
the many thoughts and feelings which are shifting within him.
In a clear autumnal day we may see, here and there, a massed white cloud
edged with a blazing brightness against a blue sky, and now and then a
dark pine swinging its top in the wind, with the melancholy sound of the
sea; but who can note the shifting and untiring play of the leaves of
the wood, and their passing hues, when each seems a living thing full of
sensations, and happy in its rich attire? A sound, too, of universal
harmony is in our ears, and a wide-spread beauty before our eyes, which
we cannot define; yet a joy is in our hearts. Our delight increases in
these, day after day, the longer we give ourselves to them, till at last
we become, as it were, a part of the existence without us. So it is with
natural characters. They grow upon us imperceptibly, till we become
bound up in them, we scarce know when or how. So, in its degree, it
will fare with the actor who is deeply filled with nature, and is
perpetually throwing off her beautiful evanescences. Instead of becoming
tired of him, as we do, after a time, of others, he will go on giving
something which will be new to the observing mind, and will keep the
feelings alive, because their action will be natural. I have no doubt,
that, excepting those who go to a play as children look into a show-box,
to admire and exclaim at distorted figures, and raw, unharmonious
colors, there is no man of a moderately warm temperament, and with a
tolerable share of insight into human nature, who would not find his
interest in Kean increasing with a study of him. It is very possible
that the excitement would lessen, but there would be a quieter pleasure,
instead of it, stealing upon him, as he became familiar with the
character of the acting.
Taken within his range of characters, the versatility of his playing is
striking. He seems not the same being, now representing Richard, and,
again, Hamlet; but the two characters alone appear before you, and as
distinct individuals who had never known or heard of each other. So does
he become the character he is to represent, that we have sometimes
thought it a reason why he was not universally better liked here, in
Richard; and that because the player did not make himself a little more
visible, he must needs bear a share of our dislike of the cruel king.
And this may be still more the case, as his construction of the
character, whether right or wrong, creates in us an unmixed dislike of
Richard, till the anguish of his mind makes him the object of pity; from
which time, to the close, all allow that he plays the part better than
anyone has done before him.
In his highest-wrought passion, when the limbs and muscles are alive and
quivering, and his gestures hurried and vehement, nothing appears
ranted or overacted; because he makes us feel, that, with all this,
there is something still within him struggling for utterance. The very
breaking and harshness of his voice, in these parts, help to this
impression, and make up, in a good degree, for this defect, if it be a
defect here.
Though he is on the very verge of truth in his passionate parts, he does
not fall into extravagance; but runs along the dizzy edge of the roaring
and beating sea, with feet as sure as we walk our parlors. We feel that
he is safe, for some preternatural spirit upholds him as it hurries him
onward; and while all is uptorn and tossing in the whirl of the
passions, we see that there is a power and order over the whole.
A man has feelings sometimes which can only be breathed out; there is no
utterance for them in words. I had hardly written this when the terrible
"Ha!" with which Kean makes Lear hail Cornwall and Regan as they enter
in the fourth scene of the second act, came to my mind. That cry seemed
at the time to take me up and sweep me along in its wild swell. No
description in the world could give a tolerably clear notion of it;--it
must be formed, as well as it may be, from what is here said of its
effect.
Kean's playing is sometimes but the outbreaking of inarticulate
sounds;--the throttled struggle of rage, and the choking of grief,--the
broken laugh of extreme suffering, when the mind is ready to deliver
itself over to an insane joy,--the utterance of over-full love, which
cannot and would not speak in express words, and that of wildering
grief, which blanks all the faculties of man.
No other player whom I have heard has attempted these, except now and
then; and should anyone have made the trial in the various ways in which
Kean gives them, probably he would have failed. Kean thrills us with
them, as if they were wrung from him in his agony. They have not the
appearance of study or artifice. The truth is, that the labor of a mind
of his genius constitutes its existence and delight. It is not like the
toil of ordinary men at their task-work. What shows effort in them comes
from him with the freedom and force of nature.
Some object to the frequent use of such sounds, and to others they are
quite shocking. But those who permit themselves to consider that there
are really violent passions in man's nature, and that they utter
themselves a little differently from our ordinary feelings, understand
and feel their language as they speak to us in Kean. Probably no actor
has conceived passion with the intenseness and life that he does. It
seems to enter into him and possess him, as evil spirits possessed men
of old. It is curious to observe how some, who have sat very
contentedly, year after year, and called the face-making, which they
have seen, expression, and the stage-stride, dignity, and the noisy
declamation, and all the rhodomontade of acting, energy and passion,
complain that Kean is apt to be extravagant; when in truth he seems to
be little more than a simple personation of the feeling or passion to be
expressed at the time.
It has been so common a saying, that Lear is the most difficult of
characters to personate, that we had taken it for granted no man could
play it so as to satisfy us. Perhaps it is the hardest to represent. Yet
the part which has generally been supposed the most difficult, the
insanity of Lear, is scarcely more so than that of the choleric old
king. Inefficient rage is almost always ridiculous; and an old man, with
a broken-down body and a mind falling in pieces from the violence of its
uncontrolled passions, is in constant danger of exciting, along with our
pity, a feeling of contempt. It is a chance matter to which we may be
most moved. And this it is which makes the opening of _Lear_ so
difficult.
We may as well notice here the objection which some make to the abrupt
violence with which Kean begins in Lear. If this be a fault, it is
Shakspeare, and not Kean, who is to blame; for, no doubt, he has
conceived it according to his author. Perhaps, however, the mistake lies
in this case, where it does in most others, with those who put
themselves into the seat of judgment to pass upon great men.
In most instances, Shakspeare has given us the gradual growth of a
passion, with such little accompaniments as agree with it, and go to
make up the whole man. In Lear, his object being to represent the
beginning and course of insanity, he has properly enough gone but a
little back of it, and introduced to us an old man of good feelings
enough, but one who had lived without any true principle of conduct, and
whose unruled passions had grown strong with age, and were ready, upon a
disappointment, to make shipwreck of an intellect never strong. To bring
this about, he begins with an abruptness rather unusual; and the old
king rushes in before us, with his passions at their height, and tearing
him like fiends.
Kean gives this as soon as the fitting occasion offers itself. Had he
put more of melancholy and depression and less of rage into the
character, we should have been much puzzled at his so suddenly going
mad. It would have required the change to have been slower; and besides,
his insanity must have been of another kind. It must have been
monotonous and complaining, instead of continually varying; at one time
full of grief, at another playful, and then wild as the winds that
roared about him, and fiery and sharp as the lightning that shot by him.
The truth with which he conceived this was not finer than his execution
of it. Not for a moment, in his utmost violence, did he suffer the
imbecility of the old man's anger to touch upon the ludicrous, when
nothing but the justest conception and feeling of the character could
have saved him from it.
It has been said that Lear is a study for one who would make himself
acquainted with the workings of an insane mind. And it is hardly less
true, that the acting of Kean was an embodying of these workings. His
eye, when his senses are first forsaking him, giving an inquiring look
at what he saw, as if all before him was undergoing a strange and
bewildering change which confused his brain,--the wandering, lost
motions of his hands, which seemed feeling for something familiar to
them, on which they might take hold and be assured of a safe
reality,--the under monotone of his voice, as if he was questioning his
own being, and what surrounded him,--the continuous, but slight,
oscillating motion of the body,--all these expressed, with fearful
truth, the bewildered state of a mind fast unsettling, and making vain
and weak efforts to find its way back to its wonted reason. There was a
childish, feeble gladness in the eye, and a half-piteous smile about the
mouth at times, which one could scarce look upon without tears. As the
derangement increased upon him, his eye lost its notice of objects about
him, wandering over things as if he saw them not, and fastening upon the
creatures of his crazed brain. The helpless and delighted fondness with
which he clings to Edgar, as an insane brother, is another instance of
the justness of Kean's conceptions. Nor does he lose the air of
insanity, even in the fine moralizing parts, and where he inveighs
against the corruptions of the world. There is a madness even in his
reason.
The violent and immediate changes of the passions in Lear, so difficult
to manage without jarring upon us, are given by Kean with a spirit and
with a fitness to nature which we had hardly thought possible. These
are equally well done both before and after the loss of reason. The most
difficult scene, in this respect, is the last interview between Lear and
his daughters, Goneril and Regan,--(and how wonderfully does Kean carry
it through!)--the scene which ends with the horrid shout and cry with
which he runs out mad from their presence, as if the very brain had
taken fire.
The last scene which we are allowed to have of Shakspeare's Lear, for
the simply pathetic, was played by Kean with unmatched power. We sink
down helpless under the oppressive grief. It lies like a dead weight
upon our hearts. We are denied even the relief of tears; and are
thankful for the shudder that seizes us when he kneels to his daughter
in the deploring weakness of his crazed grief.
It is lamentable that Kean should not be allowed to show his unequaled
powers in the last scene of Lear, as Shakspeare wrote it; and that this
mighty work of genius should be profaned by the miserable, mawkish sort
of by-play of Edgar's and Cordelia's loves. Nothing can surpass the
impertinence of the man who made the change, but the folly of those who
sanctioned it.
* * * * *
When I began, I had no other intention than that of giving a few general
impressions made upon me by Kean's acting; but, falling accidentally
upon his Lear, I have been led, unawares, into particulars. It is only
to take these as some of the instances of his powers in Lear, and then
to think of him as not inferior in his other characters, and some notion
may be formed of the effect of Kean's playing upon those who understand
and like him. Neither this, nor anything I might add, would be likely to
reach his great and various powers.
If it could be said of anyone, it might be said of Kean, that he does
not fall behind his author, but stands forward, the living
representative of the character he has drawn. When he is not playing in
Shakspeare, he fills up where his author is wanting; and when in
Shakspeare, he gives not only what is set down, but whatever the
situation and circumstances attendant upon the being he personates would
naturally call forth. He seems, at the time, to have possessed himself
of Shakspeare's imagination, and to have given it body and form. Read
any scene in Shakspeare,--for instance, the last of _Lear_ that is
played,--and see how few words are there set down, and then remember how
Kean fills out with varied and multiplied expression and circumstances,
and the truth of this remark will be obvious enough. There are few men,
I believe, let them have studied the plays of Shakspeare ever so
attentively, who can see Kean in them without confessing that he has
helped them to a truer and fuller conception of the author,
notwithstanding what their own labors had done for them.
It is not easy to say in what character Kean plays best. He so fits
himself to each in turn, that if the effect he produces at one time is
less than at another, it is because of some inferiority in stage-effect
in the character. Othello is probably the character best adapted to
stage-effect, and Kean has an uninterrupted power over us in playing it.
When he commands, we are awed; when his face is sensitive with love and
love thrills in his soft tones, all that our imaginations had pictured
to us is realized. His jealousy, his hate, his fixed purposes, are
terrific and deadly; and the groans wrung from him in his grief have the
pathos and anguish of Esau's, when he stood before his old, blind
father, and sent up "an exceeding bitter cry."
Again, in Richard, how does he hurry forward to his object, sweeping
away all between him and it! The world and its affairs are nothing to
him, till he gains his end. He is all life, and action, and haste,--he
fills every part of the stage, and seems to do all that is done.
I have before said that his voice is harsh and breaking in his high
tones, in his rage, but that this defect is of little consequence in
such places. Nor is it well suited to the more declamatory parts. This,
again, is scarce worth considering; for how very little is there of mere
declamation in good English plays! But it is one of the finest voices in
the world for all the passions and feelings which can be uttered in the
middle and lower tones. In Lear,--
"If you have poison for me, I will drink it."