Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary
performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical
image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain
I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite
associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics
of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do.
--There the antic sate
Mocking our state--
his queer visnomy--his bewildering costume--all the strange things
which he had raked together--his serpentine rod, swagging about in his
pocket--Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics--O'Keefe's wild
farce, and _his_ wilder commentary--till the passion of laughter, like
grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep
which in the first instance it had driven away.
But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers,
than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape
of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me,
like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been
taking opium--all the strange combinations, which this strangest of
all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the
day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss
of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil
to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since there was
exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a
Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far
short of the former.
There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one
it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down,
and call _his_. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks,
in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an
entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion.
Not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied
like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone,
literally _makes faces_: applied to any other person, the phrase is a
mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance.
Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend
Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be
surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or
come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.
I have seen this gifted actor, in Sir Christopher Curry--in Old
Dornton--diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a
crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of
the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen
some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players.
But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and
unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers.
The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.
Can any man _wonder_, like him? can any man _see ghosts_, like
him? or _fight with his own shadow_--"SESSA"--as he does in that
strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston--where his
alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico
to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment,
as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him
can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over
the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his
conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It
is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it
with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar
in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of
Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it
touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the
seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter,
contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg
of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place
materials of life, like primæval man with the sun and stars about him.