My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss we all deplore,
was but slight.
My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an
acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter
of the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a branch
of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame--to auspicate, I suppose,
the filial concern, and set it a going with a lustre--was serving in
person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop ostensibly to
inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of
the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did
he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion upon the
worth of the work in question, and launching out into a dissertation
on its comparative merits with those of certain publications of a
similar stamp, its rivals! his enchanted customers fairly hanging on
his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a
gentleman in comedy _acting_ the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves
in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which he contrived to
carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation he had
so generously submitted to; and from that hour I judged him, with no
after repentance, to be a person, with whom it would be a felicity to
be more acquainted.
To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be superfluous. With
his blended private and professional habits alone I have to do;
that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of
every day life, which brought the stage boards into streets, and
dining-parlours, and kept up the play when the play was ended.--"I
like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one day, "because he is the
same natural, easy creature, _on_ the stage, that he is _off_." "My
case exactly," retorted Elliston--with a charming forgetfulness,
that the converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same
conclusion--"I am the same person _off_ the stage that I am _on_." The
inference, at first sight, seems identical; but examine it a little,
and it confesses only, that the one performer was never, and the other
always, _acting_.
And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deportment.
You had a spirited performance always going on before your eyes,
with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for
a night, the poorest hovel which he honours by his sleeping in it,
becomes _ipso facto_ for that time a palace; so where-ever Elliston
walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried about
with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable
playhouse at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon
flintiest pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme chanced
to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose
beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a love for his art.
So Apelles _always_ painted--in thought. So G.D. _always_ poetises.
I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known actors--and some of them of
Elliston's own stamp--who shall have agreeably been amusing you in
the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three hours of
their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the curtain fall with
its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their
faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their
families, servants, &c. Another shall have been expanding your heart
with generous deeds and sentiments, till it even beats with yearnings
of universal sympathy; you absolutely long to go home, and do some
good action. The play seems tedious, till you can get fairly out of
the house, and realise your laudable intentions. At length the final
bell rings, and this cordial representative of all that is amiable
in human breasts steps forth--a miser. Elliston was more of a piece.
Did he _play_ Ranger? and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the
town with satisfaction? why should _he_ not be Ranger, and diffuse
the same cordial satisfaction among his private circles? with _his_
temperament, _his_ animal spirits, _his_ good-nature, _his_ follies
perchance, could he do better than identify himself with his
impersonation? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the
stage, and give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical character
presented to us in actual life? or what would the performer have
gained by divesting himself of the impersonation? Could the man
Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he
had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, the
airy briskness, the forwardness, and 'scape goat trickeries of his
prototype?
"But there is something not natural in this everlasting _acting_; we
want the real man."
Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or
will not see, under some adventitious trappings, which, nevertheless,
sit not at all inconsistently upon him? What if it is the nature of
some men to be highly artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in
_players_. Cibber was his own Foppington, with almost as much wit as
Vanburgh could add to it.
"My conceit of his person,"--it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord
Bacon,--"was never increased towards him by his _place_ or _honours_.
But I have, and do reverence him for the _greatness_, that was only
proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the _greatest_
men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that
heaven would give him strength; for _greatness_ he could not want."
The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicuous in the
subject of these idle reminiscences, than in my Lord Verulam. Those
who have imagined that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a
great London Theatre, affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all
changed his nature, knew not the essential _greatness_ of the man whom
they disparage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dunstan's
Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust
and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that high office.
Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered,--"Have
you heard the news?"--then with another look following up
the blow, he subjoined, "I am the future Manager of Drury Lane
Theatre."--Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation
or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his
new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to
it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his
_great_ style.
But was he less _great_, (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity,
that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and
more recently transmuted for a more illustrious exile the barren
constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in
melancholy after-years, again, much near the same spot, I met him,
when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was
curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the
small Olympic, _his Elba?_ He still played nightly upon the boards
of Drury, but in parts alas! allotted to him, not magnificently
distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and
magnificently sinking the sense of fallen _material_ grandeur in
the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more
lofty _intellectual_ pretensions, "Have you heard" (his customary
exordium)--"have you heard," said he, "how they treat me? they put me
in _comedy_." Thought I--but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal
interruption--"where could they have put you better?" Then, after a
pause--"Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,"--and so
again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.
O, it was a rich scene,--but Sir A---- C----, the best of
story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as
well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it--that I was
witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that
same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury,
he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;"
himself "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before
him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment--how shall
I describe her?--one of those little tawdry things that flirt at
the tails of choruses--a probationer for the town, in either of its
senses--the pertest little drab--a dirty fringe and appendage of the
lamps' smoke--who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a
"highly respectable" audience, had precipitately quitted her station
on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.
"And how dare you," said her Manager--assuming a censorial severity
which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed
that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices--I verily
believe, he thought _her_ standing before him--"how dare you, Madam,
withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties?" "I
was hissed, Sir." "And you have the presumption to decide upon the
taste of the town?" "I don't know that, Sir, but I will never stand
to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence--when gathering
up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and
expostulatory indignation--in a lesson never to have been lost upon a
creature less forward than she who stood before him--his words were
these: "They have hissed _me_."
'Twas the identical argument _a fortiori_, which the son of Peleus
uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his
destiny with a good grace. "I too am mortal." And it is to be believed
that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want
of a proper understanding with the faculties of the respective
recipients.
"Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously conducting
me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and
recess, of his every-day waning grandeur.
Those who knew Elliston, will know the _manner_ in which he pronounced
the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud
day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which
I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful
partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort
of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare,
observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner.
"I too never eat but one thing at dinner"--was his reply--then after
a pause--"reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was all. It was as
if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all
the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving
Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was
_greatness_, tempered with considerate _tenderness_ to the feelings of
his scanty but welcoming entertainer.
_Great_ wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and _not
lessened_ in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that
thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no
inscription but one of pure _Latinity_. Classical was thy bringing
up! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting
the man with the boy, took thee back in thy latest exercise
of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and
Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the
roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline
Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they
shall celebrate thy praise.