last bow at Southampton, as the Earl of Warwick. Within the above
period he acted at Covent Garden, in 1812 and 1813. He proved to be a
highly ‘respectable’ actor; but the phenomenon no longer existed. His
last performance in London was in June 1813, when he played ‘Richard
III.’ and ‘Tristram Fickle’ for his benefit. In the following January
Edmund Kean, three years his senior, took the town by storm in Shylock,
and made his conquest good by his incomparable Richard. The genius of
Mr. Betty left him with his youth. Edmund Kean drowned his genius in
wine and rioting before his manhood was matured. Forty-eight years
have elapsed since he was carried to his grave in Richmond churchyard.
Honoured and regretted, all that was mortal of the once highly-gifted
boy, who lived to be a venerable and much-loved old man, ‘fourscore
years and upwards,’ was borne to his last resting-place in the cemetery
at Highgate. _Requiescat in pace!_
_CHARLES YOUNG AND HIS TIMES._
Charles Mayne Young, one of the last of the school of noble actors,
has found a biographer in his son, the Rev. Julian Young, Rector of
Ilmington. Here we have stage and pulpit in happy and not unusual
propinquity. There was a time when the clergy had the drama entirely
to themselves; they were actors, authors, and managers. The earliest
of them all retired to the monastery of St. Alban, after his theatre
at Dunstable had been burnt down, at the close of a squib-and-rocket
sort of drama on the subject of St. Theresa. At the Reformation the
stage became secularised, the old moralities died out, and the new
men and pieces were denounced as wicked by the ‘unco righteous’ among
their dramatic clerical predecessors. Nevertheless, the oldest comedy
of worldly manners we possess--‘Ralph Roister Doister’--was the work of
the Rev. Dr. Nicholas Udall, in 1540. During the three centuries and
nearly a half which have elapsed since that time, clergymen have ranked
among the best writers for the stage. The two most successful tragedies
of the last century were the Rev. Dr. Young’s ‘Revenge,’ and the Rev.
J. Home’s ‘Douglas.’ In the present century few comedies have made such
a sensation as the Rev. Dr. Croly’s ‘Pride shall have a Fall,’ but
the sensation was temporary, the comedy only illustrating local and
contemporary incidents.
A dozen other ‘Reverends’ might be cited who have more or less adorned
dramatic literature, and there are many instances of dramatic artists
whose sons or less near kinsmen having taken orders in the Church.
When Sutton, in the pulpit of St. Mary Overy, A.D. 1616, denounced
the stage, Nathaniel Field, the eminent actor, published a letter to
the preacher, in which Field said that in the player’s trade there
were corruptions as there were in all others; he implied, as Overbury
implied, that the actor was not to be judged by the dross of the craft,
but by the purer metal. Field anticipated Fielding’s Newgate Chaplain,
who upheld ‘Punch’ on the same ground that the comedian upheld the
stage--that it was nowhere spoken against in Scripture! The year 1616
was the year in which Shakespeare died. It is commonly said that the
players of Shakespeare’s time were of inferior birth and culture,
but Shakespeare himself was of a well-conditioned family, and this
Nathaniel Field who stood up for the honour of the stage against the
censure of the pulpit, had for brother that Rev. Theophilus Field
who was successively Bishop of Llandaff, St. David’s, and Hereford.
Charles Young was not the only actor of his day who gave a son to the
Church. His old stage-manager at Bath, Mr. Charlton, saw not only his
son but his grandsons usefully employed in the more serious vocation.
As for sons of actors at the universities, they have seldom been
wanting, from William Hemming (son of John Hemming, the actor, and
joint-editor with Condell of the folio edition of Shakespeare’s Works),
who took his degree at Oxford in 1628, down to Julian Charles Young,
son of the great tragedian, who took his degree in the same university
two centuries later; or, to be precise, A.D. 1827.
Charles Mayne Young, who owed his second name to the circumstance of
his descent from the regicide who was so called, was born in Fenchurch
Street, in 1777. His father was an able surgeon and a reckless
spendthrift. Before the household fell into ruin, Charles Young had
passed a holiday year, partly at the Court of Copenhagen. He had
seen a boy with flashing eyes play bits from Shakespeare before the
guests at his father’s table--a strolling, fantastically-dressed,
intellectual boy, whose name was Edmund Kean. Further, Charles Young
saw and appreciated, at the age of twelve, Mrs. Siddons as the mother
of Coriolanus. He also passed through Eton and Merchant Taylors’.
When the surgeon’s household was broken up, and Young and his two
brothers took their ill-used mother to their own keeping, they adopted
various courses for her and their own support, and all of them
succeeded. Charles Young, after passing a restless novitiate in a
merchant’s office (the more restless, probably, as he thought of two
personages--the bright, gipsy-looking boy who had acted in his father’s
dining-room, and the Volumnia of Mrs. Siddons, as she triumphed in the
tragedy of Coriolanus), went upon the stage, triumphed in his turn, and
assumed the sole guardianship and support of the mother he loved.
Young’s father was a remarkably detestable person. He never seems to
have forgiven his sons for the affection which they manifested towards
their mother. After the separation of the parents, George Young, the
eldest son, was in a stage-coach going to Hackney; on the road, a
stranger got in, took the only vacant seat, and, on seeing George
Young opposite to him, struck him a violent blow in the face. George
quietly called to the coachman to stop, and without exchanging a word
with the stranger, got out, to the amazement of the other passengers.
But, as he closed the door, he looked in and simply said, ‘Ladies and
gentlemen, that is my father!’ In 1807, when Charles Young made his
first appearance in London, at the Haymarket, as Hamlet, his father sat
ensconced in a corner of the house, and hissed him! Neither the blow
nor the hiss did more than momentarily wound the feelings of the sons.
Before Young came up to London, he had seen some of the sunshine and
some of the bitterness of life. He married the young, beautiful, and
noble woman and actress, Julia Grimani. They had a brief, joyous,
married time of little more than a year, when the birth of a son was
the death of the mother. For the half-century that Young survived her
no blandishment of woman ever led him to be untrue to her memory. To
look with tears on her miniature-portrait, to touch tenderly some
clustered locks of her hair, to murmur some affectionate word of
praise, and, finally, to thank God that he should soon be with her,
showed how young heart-feelings had survived in old heart-memories.
Charles Young adorned the English stage from 1807 to 1832. Because
he acted with the Kembles he is sometimes described as being of the
Kemble school. In a great theatre the leading player is often imitated
throughout the house. There was a time when everybody employed at Drury
Lane seemed a double of Mr. Macready. Charles Young, however, was an
original actor. It took him but five years to show that he was equal
in some characters to John Kemble himself. This was seen in 1812, in
his Cassius to Kemble’s Brutus. On that occasion Terry is said to
have been the Casca--a part which was really played by Fawcett. About
ten years later, Young left the Covent Garden company and 25_l._ a
week, for Drury Lane and 50_l._ a night, to play in the same pieces
with Kean. The salary proved that the manager thought him equal in
attractiveness to Kean; and Kean was, undoubtedly, somewhat afraid of
him. Young’s secession was as great a loss to the company he had been
acting with, as Compton’s has been to the Haymarket company. In both
cases, a perfect artist withdrew from the brotherhood.
Young was fifteen years upon the London stage before he could free
himself from nervousness--nervousness, not merely like that of Mrs.
Siddons, before going on, but when fairly in face of the audience. In
1826, he told Moore, at a dinner of the Anacreontics, that any close
observer of his acting must have been conscious of a great improvement
therein, dating from the previous four years. That is to say, dating
from the time when he first played in the same piece with Edmund Kean.
The encounter with that great master of his art seems to have braced
Young’s nerves. Kean could not extinguish him as he extinguished Booth
when those two acted together in the same play. Edmund, who spoke of
Macready as ‘a player,’ acknowledged Young to be ‘an actor.’ Kean
confessed Young’s superiority in Iago, and he could not bear to think
of playing either that character or Pierre after him. Edmund believed
in the greater merit of his own Othello. Young allowed that Kean had
genius, but he was not enthusiastic in his praise; and Edmund, whose
voice in tender passages was exquisite music, referred to the d----d
musical voice of Young; and in his irritable moments spake of him as
‘that Jesuit!’
The greatest of Young’s original characters was his Rienzi. In Miss
Mitford’s tragedy, Young pronounced ‘Rome’ _Room_. Many old play-goers
can recollect how ill the word fell from his musical lips. John Kemble
would never allow an actor in his company to give other utterance to
the monosyllable. It was a part of the vicious and fantastic utterances
of the Kemble family. Leigh Hunt has furnished a long list of them.
Shakespeare, indeed, has ‘Now it is Rome indeed, and room enough,’ as
Cassius says. But in ‘Henry VI.,’ when Beaufort exclaims, ‘Rome shall
remedy this!’ Warwick replies, ‘_Roam_ thither, then!’ The latter
jingle is far more common than the former. We agree with Genest, ‘Let
the advocates for _Room_ be consistent. If the city is _Room_, the
citizens are certainly _Roomans_.’ They who would have any idea how
John Kemble mutilated the pronunciation of the English language on the
stage, have only to consult the appendix to Leigh Hunt’s ‘Critical
Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres.’ Such pronunciation
seems now more appropriate to burlesque than to Shakespeare.
When the idea was first started of raising a statue in honour of
Kemble, Talma wrote to ‘mon cher Young,’ expressing his wish to be
among the subscribers. ‘In that idea I recognise your countrymen,’
said Talma. ‘I shall be too fortunate here if the priests leave me a
grave in my own garden.’ The Comte de Soligny, or the author who wrote
under that name, justly said in his ‘Letters on England,’ that Young
was unlike any actor on the stage. His ornamental style had neither
model nor imitators. ‘I cannot help thinking,’ writes the Count, ‘what
a sensation Young would have created had he belonged to the French
instead of the English stage. With a voice almost as rich, powerful,
and sonorous as that of Talma--action more free, flowing, graceful, and
various; a more expressive face, and a better person--he would have
been hardly second in favour and attraction to that grandest of living
actors. As it is, he admirably fills up that place on the English stage
which would have been a blank without him.’ This is well and truly
said, and it is applicable to ‘Gentleman Young’ throughout his whole
career--a period during which he played a vast variety of characters,
from Hamlet to Captain Macheath. He was not one of those players who
were always in character. Between the scenes of his most serious parts
he would keep the green-room merry with his stories, and be serious
again as soon as his part required him. Young’s modest farewell to the
stage reminds us of Garrick’s. The latter took place on June 10, 1776.
The play was ‘The Wonder,’ Don Felix by Garrick; with ‘The Waterman.’
The bill is simply headed, ‘The last time of the company’s performing
this season,’ and it concludes with these words: ‘The profits of this
night being appropriated to the benefit of the Theatrical Fund, the
Usual Address upon that Occasion Will be spoken by Mr. Garrick before
the Play.’ The bill is now before us, and not a word in it refers to
the circumstance that it was the last night that Garrick would ever
act, and that he would take final leave after the play. All the world
was supposed to know it. The only intimation that something unusual
was on foot is contained in the words, ‘Ladies are desired to send
their servants a little after 5, to keep places, to prevent confusion.’
Garrick’s farewell speech is stereotyped in all dramatic memories. His
letter to Clutterbuck in the previous January is not so familiar. He
says, ‘I have at last slipt my theatrical shell, and shall be as fine
and free a gentleman as you should wish to see upon the South or North
Parade of Bath. I have sold my moiety of patent, &c., for 35,000_l._,
to Messrs. Dr. Ford, Ewart, Sheridan, and Linley.... I grow somewhat
older, though I never played better in all my life, and am resolved
not to remain upon the stage to be pitied instead of applauded!’
Garrick was sixty years of age when he left the stage. Young was five
years less. In his modest farewell speech, after the curtain had
descended on his Hamlet, he said, ‘It has been asked why I retire
from the stage while still in possession of whatever qualifications
I could ever pretend to unimpaired. I will give you my _motives_,
although I do not know you will accept them as _reasons_--but reason
and feeling are not always cater-cousins. I feel then the toil and
excitement of my calling weigh more heavily upon me than formerly; and,
if my qualifications are unimpaired, so I would have them remain in
your estimate.... I am loth to remain before my patrons until I have
nothing better to present them than tarnished metal.’ Among Young’s
after-enjoyments was that of music. We well remember his always early
presence in the front row of the pit at the old Opera House, and the
friendly greetings that used to be exchanged between him and Mori,
Nicholson, Linley, Dragonetti, and other great instrumentalists, as
they made their appearance in the orchestra.
_Some_ theatrical impulses never abandoned him. During his retirement
at Brighton, he was a constant attendant on the ministry of Mr.
Sortain. ‘Mr. Bernal Osborne told me he was one day shown into
the same pew with my father, whom he knew. He was struck with his
devotional manner during the prayers and by his rapt attention during
the sermon. But he found himself unable to maintain his gravity when,
as the preacher paused to take breath after a long and eloquent
outburst, the habits of the actor’s former life betrayed themselves,
and he uttered in a deep undertone, the old familiar “_Bravo!_”’ As a
sample of his cheerfulness of character, we may quote what Mr. Cole
says of Young, in the life of Charles Kean:--‘Not long before he left
London for his final residence at Brighton, he called, with one of his
grandsons, to see the writer of these pages, who had long enjoyed his
personal friendship, and who happened at the moment to be at dinner
with his family. “Tell them,” he said to the servant, “not to hurry;
but when they are at leisure, there are two little boys waiting to see
them.”’
A quiet humour seems to have been among the characteristics of a life
which generally was marked by unobtrusive simplicity and moral purity.
A man who, when a boy, had been at Eton and Merchant Taylors’ could
not have been ignorant of such a fact as the Punic War, though he may
have forgotten the date. He was once turned to by a lady at table
(she had been discussing history with the guest on her other side),
and she suddenly asked Young to tell her the date of the Second Punic
War. Young frankly replied in one of his most tragic tones; ‘Madam,
I don’t know anything about the Punic War, and what is more, I never
did! My inability to answer your question has wrung from me the same
confession which I once heard made by a Lancashire farmer, with an
air of great pride, when appealed to by a party of his friends in a
commercial room, “I tell you what, in spite of all your bragging, I’ll
wedger (wager) I’m th’ ignorantest man in t’ coompany!”’ There can be
little doubt that many of the stories of mistakes made by actors may be
traced to him. Among them, perhaps, that of the player who, invariably,
for ‘poisoned cup,’ said ‘coisoned pup;’ and who, once pronouncing it
correctly, was hissed for his pains. Thence too perhaps came the tale
of him who, instead of saying,
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,
To have a thankless child,
exclaimed:
How sharper than a serpent’s _thanks_ it is,
To have a _toothless_ child.
Whatever may be the source of such stories, it is certain that Young’s
criticisms of others were always clear and generous. A few words tell
us of Mrs. Siddons’ Rosalind, that ‘it wanted neither playfulness nor
feminine softness; but it was totally without archness, not because
she did not properly conceive it--but how could such a countenance be
arch?’ Some one has said more irreverently of her Rosalind, that it
was like Gog in petticoats! Young looked back to the periods during
which he had what he called ‘the good fortune to act with her, as
the happiest of his own professional recollections.’ When he was a
boy of twelve years of age (1789), he saw Mrs. Siddons in Volumnia
(Coriolanus). Long after, he described her bearing in the triumphal
procession in honour of her son in this wise: ‘She came alone marching
and beating time to the music, rolling from side to side, swelling
with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which
flashed from her eye and lit up her whole face, that the effect was
irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession
to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus’ banner and
pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.’
We have spoken of the unobtrusive simplicity and the moral purity of
this great actor’s life. Temptations sprang up about him. Young first
appeared on the stage when the old drinking days had not yet come to an
end. His name, however, never occurs among the annals of the fast and
furious revelries. John Kemble belonged to the old school and followed
its practices. He was not indeed fast and furious in his cups. He
was solemnly drunken as became an earnest tragedian. It is somewhere
told of him that he once went to Dicky Peake’s house half-cocked, at
half-past nine P.M.; Sheridan, he said, had appointed to meet him
there, and he would not neglect being in time for the world. Peake sat
him down to wine with Dunn the treasurer: the three got exceedingly
drunk, and all fell asleep, Kemble occupying the carpet. The tragedian
was the first to wake. He arose, opened the window shutters, and
dazzled by the morning sun-light roused his two companions, and
wondered as to the time of day. They soon heard eight strike. ‘Eight!’
exclaimed Kemble; ‘this is too provoking of Sheridan; he is always
late in keeping his appointments; I don’t suppose he will come at all
now. If he _should_, tell him, my dear Dick, how long I waited for
him!’ Therewith, _exit_ John Philip, in a dreamy condition--leaving, at
all events, _some_ incidents out of which imaginative Dunn built this
illustrative story.
Great writers in their own houses, like prophets among their own
people, proverbially lack much of the consideration they find abroad.
Mrs. Douglas Jerrold always wondered what it was people found in her
husband’s jokes to laugh at. It is _said_ that many years had passed
over the head of Burns’s son before the young man knew that his father
was famous as a poet. It is certain that Walter Scott’s eldest son had
arrived at more than manhood before he had the curiosity to read one
of his sire’s novels. He thought little of it when he had read it.
This want of appreciation the son derived from his mother. Once, when
Young was admiring the fashion of the ceiling, in Scott’s drawing-room
at Abbotsford, Lady Scott exclaimed in her droll Guernsey accent, ‘Ah!
Mr. Young, you may look up at the bosses in the ceiling, as long as you
like, but you must not look down at my poor carpet, for I am ashamed
of it. I must get Scott to write some more of his nonsense books and
buy me a new one!’ To those who remember the charm of Young’s musical
voice, Lady Dacre’s lines on his reciting ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ to the other
guests at Abbotsford, will present themselves without any thought of
differing from their conclusion, thus neatly put:--
And Tam o’ Shanter roaring fou,
By thee embodied to our view,
The rustic bard would own sae true,
He scant could tell
Wha ’twas the livin’ picture drew,
Thou or himsel’!
It is a curious fact that Scott, harmonious poet as he was, had no ear
for music, unless it were that of a ballad, and he would repeat that
horribly out of tune. He was, however, in tune with all humanity; as
much so with a king as with the humblest of his subjects. When he went
on board the royal yacht which had arrived near Leith, with George
IV., amid such rain as only falls in Scotland, Scott, in an off-hand,
yet respectful way, told the king that the weather reminded him of
the stormy day of his own arrival in the Western Highlands, weather
which so disgusted the landlord of the inn, who was used to the very
worst, that he apologised for it. ‘Gude guide us! this is just awfu’!
Siccan a downpour, was ever the like! I really beg your pardon! I’m
sure it’s nae faut o’ mine. I canna think how it should happen to rain
this way just as you o’ a’ men i’ the warld should come to see us! It
looks amaist personal! I can only say, for my part, I’m just ashamed
o’ the weather!’ Having thus spoken to the king, Scott added; ‘I do
not know, sire, that I can improve upon the language of the honest
innkeeper. I canna think how it should rain this way, just as your
majesty, of all men in the world, should have condescended to come and
see us. I can only say in the name of my countrymen, I’m just ashamed
o’ the weather!’ It was at Scott’s petition that the royal landing was
deferred till the next day, which brought all the sunshine that was
considered necessary for the occasion.
It is singular to find Charles Mathews, senior, writing of himself;
‘I only perform for one rank of persons. The lower orders hate and
avoid me, and the middle classes cannot comprehend me.’ He used to
get fun enough out of his own man-servant, whose awe and pride at
seeing a titled personage at his master’s house were amply stimulated
by friends of Mathews who visited him under assumed dignities. Charles
Kemble was always announced as the Persian Ambassador, Fawcett as
Sir Francis Burdett, and Young as the Duke of Wellington. One day,
a real Lord--Lord Ranelagh--called and sent in a message expressive
of his desire to see Mathews. Mathews, supposing the visitor was a
fellow-player passing as a peer, sent a reply that he was just then
busy with Lord Vauxhall. When Mr. Julian Young once told Mathews he was
going to Lord Dacres at the Hoo, the actor replied, _Who?_ and thinking
Bob Acres was raised to the peerage, begged to be remembered to Sir
Lucius O’Trigger!
One of the most flattering kindnesses ever paid to the elder Mathews
was when he was once standing among the crowd in a Court of Assize,
where Judge Alan Park was presiding. His lordship sent a note down to
him, requesting him to come and take a seat on the bench. The actor
obeyed, and the judge was courteously attentive to him. Mathews was
subsequently the guest of his old friend Mr. Rolls, at whose house in
Monmouthshire the judge had previously been staying. The player asked
if his lordship had alluded to him. ‘Yes,’ said Rolls, who proceeded to
relate how Judge Park had been startled at seeing in court a fellow who
was in the habit of imitating the voice and manners of the judges on
the stage. Indeed, his imitation of Lord Ellenborough, in ‘Love, Law,
and Physic,’ had well nigh brought the imitator to grief. Park said the
presence of Mathews so troubled him that he invited the mimic to sit
near him, and behaved so kindly that he hoped the actor, out of simple
gratitude, would not include him in his Legal Portraits in comedy or
farce.