from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund
expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative
impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage,
like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle
stolid. Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an
actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with a face of
perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of
those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the
fancy of Shakespeare's age. Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly
dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these
portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to
whom they belonged. That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect;
the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many
very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into
play. Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble
foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength
and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for
sentiment,--Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the
skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man;
while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair
of just very nice young people. On the other hand, the tail-pieces,
chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety
there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study.
Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly
reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John,
Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched
countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might
well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into
power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times,
when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of
emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole,
actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Molière
was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog. Very different was
the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:--
"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland
nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which
latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new kid
gloves. In this dress the deceased actress received such honour as
actress never received before, nor has ever received since. The lady
lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber. Had she been really a queen the
public could not have thronged more eagerly to the spectacle; and after
the lying in state there was a funeral of as much ceremony as has been
observed at the obsequies of many a queen. There were anthems and
prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when
all was over, to a few particular friends, and with some equivocation,
as it seems to me, that he 'buried her very willingly, and with much
satisfaction.'"
Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors.
"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my
lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only
property they have to depend on." Wit, indeed, with the other gifts
that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too
often little to the benefit of the gifted persons. Theatrical society,
rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we see them in
these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic.
If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable
cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book
abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like;
one might collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a
blood-horse, remarked, "There goes Warburton on Shakespeare!" When he
heard that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to death and at its
wits' end, he exclaimed that it could not have been the length of the
journey which had tired it. Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party,
told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced
[81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than
I." Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great
liberties with authors and audience. He made Settle half mad and the
house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on
his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it,
"died," according to the direction of the acting copy. Quaint enough,
but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a
French translation of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim
only, but accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odéon, in
1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire
recently discovered. The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in
this as in the last century."
Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to
note:--that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically useful
patron." We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a difficult time
at the popularity of Richard the Second:--"The deposition and death of
King Richard the [82] Second." "Tongues whisper to the Queen that this
play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder
kings." It is perhaps not generally known that Charles Shakespeare,
William's brother, survived till the Restoration.
Oldys says, à propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:--
"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance,
more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his brother
could relate of him. But he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and
possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he could give them
but little light into their inquiries; and all that could be
recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was the faint,
general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen him act a
part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to personate a
decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and
drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and
carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some
company who were eating, and one of them sang a song."
[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It. Many are
the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time a
struggle to maintain itself. James Howard, in Pepys's day--
"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no
popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged
Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double dénouement--one serious,
the other hilarious. If your heart were too sensitive to bear the
deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding
afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured
domestic felicity."
In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the
acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius
as "Jack Puddins."
Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the
difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For
Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of
actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young
[84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices. Who
the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional actress is not
known, but her part was Desdemona. And yet it was long after that--
"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712). He lies buried in the churchyard of
St. Paul's, Covent Garden. If not the greatest actor of his day,
Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.' So exalted was his
reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the
judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the
audience as he.'"
In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of admission
to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act.
Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in
without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond
the time limited. Hence much noisy contention, to the great discomfort
even of Royalty. The brawling, drinking habits of the time were even
more discomforting. An angry word, passed one April evening of 1682
between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young [85]
Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows
not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought
there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited
fury on the part of the combatants. The mingling of the public with the
players was a practice which so annoyed the haughty French actor,
Baron, that to suggest to the audience the absurdity of it, he would
turn his back on them for a whole act, and play to the audience on the
stage. Sometimes the noise was so loud that an actor's voice would
scarcely be heard. It was about 1710 that the word encore was
introduced at the operatic performances in the Haymarket, and very much
objected to by plain-going Englishmen. It was also the custom of some
who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra volta! Altra volta!
Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and affords
many unexpected lights on historical characters. Oliver Cromwell,
though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at, and with,
men of less dignity than actors. Buffoonery was not entirely expelled
[86] from his otherwise grave court. Oxford and Drury Lane itself
dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where
a mean house is still pointed out as the first home of this mother of a
line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to occupy the neighbouring
palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her burial in St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached the sermon. When
this was subsequently made the ground of exposing him to the reproof of
Queen Mary, she remarked that the good doctor, no doubt, had said
nothing but what the facts authorized.
"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people of
fashion, that have sense?" And, in truth, the seventeenth century gave
many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of them.
Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which she would
utter one single expression in a play. Dr. Doran gives some curious
instances from later actors. "What mean my grieving subjects?" uttered
in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested by her with such
emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation [87]
which swelled into thunders of applause. Her noble head is here
engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent visionary man.
Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have
them before us? Should we find them too different from our accent of
thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which
are of the essence of all three? Dr. Doran's long and interesting
records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in
their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the
doubt. Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been
the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere,
bears no very distinct figure. One hardly sees the wood for the trees.
On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of
English actors," is delightfully fresh. That intimate friend of
Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by
Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his
career brings out the best elements in stage life. The stage in these
volumes presents itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but
as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
characters of the players. Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the
most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the
private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and
women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents
itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the
theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
27th June 1888
VI. WORDSWORTH
The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. With an
Introduction by John Morley. Macmillans.
The Recluse. By William Wordsworth. Macmillans.
Selections from Wordsworth. By William Knight and other Members of the
Wordsworth Society. With Preface and Notes. Kegan Paul.
[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's
careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth,
of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the
first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of an
excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof
that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is
increasing among us. Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything
more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter the
faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to thought
and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at the
present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the
essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself. In the collected
edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can be
ascertained, in the order of their composition--an arrangement which
has indisputable recommendations for the student of Wordsworth's
genius; though the former method of distributing his work into large
groups of subject had its value, as throwing light upon his poetic
motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the
circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation--a calm,
irresistible, well-being--almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless
[93] connected with physical conditions. Long ago De Quincey noted it
as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career,
pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the
material side of life. The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine
mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good
deal to do with that. What a store of good fortune, what a goodly
contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is
really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament;
especially, in the case of a poet--a great poet--who will, of course,
have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet.
Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present
century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction
of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the
imagination. Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical
theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one,
with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between
the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception
of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work. It was
Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis
for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new
edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more
realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. For though what may be
called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a
value in all that remains of him--could read anything he wrote, "even
the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and
Julia,'"--yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made
by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very
obvious difference of level in his poetic work.
This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and
higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the
reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the
study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those
mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination. It
begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their
spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in
the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right
appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth
having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain
discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect. Wordsworth
meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a
very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and
seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination. To
follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to
distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life
generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only
conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general
temper of our modern poetry. Critics of literary history have again
[96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals
itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic
in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is
exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist
poets. As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its
growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand,
from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure
relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied
people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much
difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is
between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait
by Reynolds or Romney. Of this new landscape sense the poetry of
Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more
exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet.
Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated
by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not
often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his;
and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.
His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most
human beings, count for incidents. His flight from the active world,
so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his
flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the
Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence. His life's
changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad,
untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have
very little to tell. What it really most resembles, different as its
superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious
artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly
visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic
industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it. This placid life
developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate
sensibility to natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on
the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and
Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To
read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day
spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its
precise and vivid incidents:--
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
On some grey rock:
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
In the meadows and the lower ground,
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he
conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
colour. He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a
rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was
for him almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to
possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a
companionship with man, full of fine intimacies. An emanation, a
particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but
to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective,
above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light
across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain
weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. That he awakened "a sort
of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in
Wordsworth's poetry.
It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion
and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life. For
him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional,
and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associations. Such influences have
sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them, at the
least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies. To
Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He raises physical nature to
the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights of
the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing
human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has always had
much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach themselves
to definite scenes and places. And what is true of it everywhere is
truest in those secluded valleys, where one generation after another
maintains the same abiding-place; and [101] it was on this side that
Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly. Having so much to do
with the recognition of local sanctities, the habit of connecting the
very trees and stones of a particular spot of earth with the great
events of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the
half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full of oracular voices, even the
religion of those people of the dales appeared but as another link
between them and the solemn imageries of the natural world. And,
again, this too tranquillized them, by bringing them under the rule of
traditional, narrowly localized observances. "Grave livers," they
seemed to him under this aspect, of stately speech, and something of
that natural dignity of manners which underlies the highest courtesy.