Not many nights ago we had come home from seeing this extraordinary
performer in Cockletop; and when we retired to our pillow, his
whimsical image still stuck by us, in a manner as to threaten sleep.
In vain we tried to divest ourselves of it by conjuring up the most
opposite associations. We resolved to be serious. We 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 we were not to escape so easily. No sooner did we fall into
slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed us in
the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing
before us, 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 we awoke! A season or two since
there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. We 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 face (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. We should
not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a
river horse; or come forth a pewit, or lapwing, some feathered
metamorphosis.
We 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. We have seen
some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players.
But in what has been truly denominated "the sublime 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 Cobler of Preston--where his
alternations from the Cobler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico
to the Cobler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment,
as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him, or as if Thalaba
were no tale! Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a
supernatural 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 commonplace materials of life, like primæval man, with the sun and
stars about him.