PAULINE. "Hear thee? Her son! Do fiends usually indulge in the luxury of
parents? Speak!"
CLAUDE. "Gurse me. Thy gurse would plast me less than thy forgifeness."
(_He rants in broken English with unintelligible rapidity for next
half-hour, until his mother puts an end to the universal misery by
carrying Pauline off to bed. Curtain_.)
_Young Lady, who reads Dickens_. "Oh, how sweetly pretty!"
_Accompanying Young Man_. "Yes. He is even a better actor than MCKEAN
BUCHANAN."
_Voices from all Parts of the House. "Let's go home. I can't stand two
more acts of this sort of thing."_
One of these voices was the soft, silvery and modest voice of MATADOR,
who went out, and sitting upon a convenient hydrant, (not one of the
infamous cast-iron abortions with an unpleasant knob on the cover,)
contemplated the midnight stars, and seriously meditated upon Mr.
FECHTER. And in spite of a previous unhesitating belief in Mr. DICKENS'
critical judgment, and in spite of a desire to find in Mr. FECHTER the
greatest actor of the age, he could not perceive in what respect that
distinguished gentleman deserves his world-wide reputation. Is his
manner natural? Is his elocution even tolerably good? Is his
pronunciation of English words any thing but barely intelligible? To
these questions a mental echo answered with a melancholy negative. And
when the occupant of the meditative hydrant demanded to know what single
merit could be found in Mr. FECHTER'S acting, his only answer was a
suggestion from a prosaic policeman that he cease to put idiotic
questions to the unoffending lamp-post.
There are those--and enough of them to fill any theatre--who sincerely
admire Mr. FECHTER; but it is impossible to resist the conviction that
their admiration is only a dutiful acquiescence in the judgment of Mr.
DICKENS. With the utmost desire to do no injustice to a genial
gentleman, who conscientiously strives to carry out his theories of what
acting should be, the undersigned is forced to confess that Mr. FECHTER
in an English play is a spectacle so hopelessly and earnestly absurd, as
to call for commiseration rather than for the laughter which it would
deserve were it professedly a burlesque entertainment.