when, within a stone’s throw of sixty, he was to act for the last time,
and then go home for ever. This was upwards of thirty years ago, so
rapidly does time fly--the 28th of February, 1851. His emotion was not
in the acting, but in the taking leave of it, and of those who came
to see it for the last time. He says himself of his Macbeth that he
never played it better than on that night. There was a reality, with
a vigour, truth, and dignity, which he thought he had never before
thrown into that favourite character. ‘I rose with the play, and the
last scene was a real climax.’ On his first entrance, indeed, at the
beginning of his part, ‘the thought occurred to me of the presence of
my children, and that for a minute overcame me; but I soon recovered
myself into self-possession.’ Still more deeply moved at the ‘farewell’
to a house bursting into a wild enthusiasm of applause, he ‘faltered
for a moment at the fervent, unbounded expression of attachment from
all before me; but preserved my self-possession.’ Those of his ten
children who had survived and were present on that occasion had
ample reason to be proud of their father. For many years he would not
sanction their being present at his public exhibitions. This was really
to doubt the dignity and usefulness of his art, to feel a false shame,
and to authorise in others that contempt for the ‘playactor’ which,
entertaining it, as he did thoroughly, for many of his fellows, he
neither felt for himself nor for those whom he could recognise as being
great and worthy masters in that art. When his children were allowed
the new delight of witnessing how nobly he could interpret the noblest
of the poets, the homage of their reverential admiration must have been
added to that of their unreserved affection. That he was not popular
at any time with inferior or subordinate players is undoubtedly true.
Such persons thought that only want of luck and opportunity placed them
lower in the scale than Macready. It would be as reasonable for the
house-painters to account in the same way for their not being Vandycks
and Raffaelles.
Sensitive to criticism he was, and yet scarcely believed himself to be
so. He belabours critics pretty roughly; but we observe that theatrical
critics dined with him occasionally, and we mark that he praises the
good sense and discrimination of one of these critics--whose criticism
was very much in the actor’s favour. Vanity he also had, certainly.
We should have come to this conclusion, had we nothing more to justify
the assertion than what we find in his own record. We see his vanity in
the superabundant excess of his modesty; but we think none the worse
of him for it. An artist who is not somewhat vain of his powers has,
probably, no ground for a little wholesome pride. It was in Macready
tempered with that sort of fear that a vain man may feel, lest in the
exercise of his art he should fall in the slightest degree short of
his self-estimation, or of that in which he believed himself to be
held by the public. He never, on entering a town, saw his name on a
bill, without feeling a flutter of the heart, made up of this mingled
fear and pride. So, Mrs. Siddons never went on the stage at any time
without something of the same sensation. We should think little of any
actor or actress who should avow that they ever ‘went on,’ in a great
part, without some hesitation lest the attempt might fall short of what
it was their determination to achieve, and what they felt themselves
qualified to accomplish. Vanity and timidity? All true artists are
conscious of both--ought to possess both; just as they ought to possess
not only impulse but judgment; not only head, but heart; heart to flash
the impulses, head to control them.
Macready carried to the stage his genuine piety. It is, perhaps, a
little too much aired in his ‘Diary,’ but it is not the less to be
believed in. He went by a good old-fashioned rule, to do his duty in
that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him--as the
Catechism teaches, or used to teach, all of us. In his pious fervour,
in his prayers that what he is going to act may be for good, that what
in the management he has undertaken may be to the increase of the
general happiness rather than to that of his banking account; in these
and a score of other instances we are reminded of those French and
Italian saints of the stage who, as they stood at the wing, crossed
themselves at the sound of sacred names in the play; or, who counted
their beads in the green-room; kept their fasts; mortified themselves,
and never missed a mass. Nay, the religious feeling was as spontaneous
in Macready as it was in the Italian actors whom he himself saw, and
who, at the sound of the ‘Angelus’ in the street, stopped the action of
the play, fell on their knees, gently tapped their breasts, and were
imitated in these actions by the sympathising majority of the audience.
We fully endorse the judgment of a critic who has said that with the
worst of tempers Macready had the best of hearts. Some of the tenderest
of his actions are not registered in the volumes of his life, but they
are recorded in grateful bosoms. There were married actresses in his
company, when he managed the ‘Garden,’ and afterwards the ‘Lane,’ whom
he would rate harshly enough for inattention; but there were certain
times when he was prompted to tell them that their proper place, for
a while, was home; and that till they recovered health and strength
their salary would be continued, and then run on as usual. The sternest
moralist will forgive him for knocking down Mr. Bunn, when he remembers
this tender part in the heart of Macready.
Towards women that heart may be said to have been sympathetically
inclined. His early life led him into many temptations; he had, as he
confesses, many loves in his time, real and imaginary; but the first
true and ever-abiding one was that which ended in his marriage with
a young actress, Miss Atkins. The whole story is touchingly told.
We feel the joys and the sorrows of the April time of that love. We
share in the triumph of the lovers; and throughout the record of their
union Macready inspires us with as much respectful affection for that
true wife as in other pages he stirs us to honour the memory of his
mother. He was singularly happy in the women whom it was his good
fortune to know. Early in life, after his mother’s death, he found
wise friends in some of them, whose wisdom ‘kept him straight,’ as the
phrase goes, when crooked but charming ways opened before him. At his
latest in life, the inestimable good of woman’s best companionship was
vouchsafed to him; and further than this it would be impertinent to
speak.
The dignity of the departed actor was his attribute, which in his busy
days atoned for such faults as cannot be erased from his record. How he
supported the dignity of the drama, and, we may say, of its patrons,
may be seen in the registry of the noble dramas he produced, and in his
purification of the audience side of the house. No person born since
his time can have any idea of the horrible uncleanness that presented
itself in the two patent theatres in the days before Macready’s
management commenced. When he found that he was bound by the terms of
his lease to provide accommodation and refreshment for women who had no
charm of womanhood left in them, Macready assigned a dingy garret and a
rush-light or two for that purpose, and the daughters of joy fled from
it, never to return.
It is a strange and repulsive thing to look back at the sarcasm flung
at him by the vile part of the press at that time, for his enabling
honest-minded women to visit a theatre without feeling ashamed at
their being there, in company with those who had no honest-mindedness.
In this, as in many other circumstances, he was worth all the Lord
Chamberlains--silly, intruding, inconsistent, unreasonable beings--that
have ever existed.
The career of the actor--we may say, of the actor and of the private
gentleman--was a long one. Among the great dramatic personages whom
Macready saw in the course of that career, were ‘a glimpse of King
dressed as Lord Ogilvy,’ his original character, ‘and distinguished
for its performance in Garrick’s day;’ Lewis, whose face he never
forgot, but he never saw that restless, ever-smiling actor on the
stage. Macready was struck with the beauty and deportment of Mrs.
Siddons, long before he acted with her; and he was enthralled by Mrs.
Billington, though he could in after years only recall the figure of a
very lusty woman, and the excitement of the audience when the orchestra
struck up the symphony of Arne’s rattling bravura, ‘The Soldier
Tired,’ in the opera of ‘Artaxerxes.’ One of the most remarkable of
these illustrious persons was seen by him at the Birmingham Theatre,
1808. The afterpiece was ‘Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene,’ a
ballet pantomime. The lady fair was acted by the manager’s wife, Mrs.
Watson--ungainly, tawdry, and as fat as a porpoise, an enormous hill of
flesh. Alonzo the Brave was represented by ‘a little mean-looking man
in a shabby green satin dress ... the only impression I carried away
was that the hero and heroine were the worst in the piece’ (a ballet
of action, without words). Macready adds that he neither knew nor
guessed that ‘under that shabby green satin dress was hidden one of
the most extraordinary theatrical geniuses that have ever illustrated
the dramatic poetry of England!’ In half a dozen years more, what was
Macready’s astonishment to find this little, insignificant Alonzo the
Brave had burst out into the grandly impassioned personator of Othello,
Richard, and Shylock--Edmund Kean!
Macready’s testimony to Kean’s marvellous powers is nearly always
highly favourable. Macready saw the great master act Richard III. at
Drury Lane in his first season, 1814. ‘When,’ he tells us, ‘a little
keenly-visaged man rapidly bustled across the stage, I felt there was
meaning in the alertness of his manner and the quickness of his step.’
The progress of the play increased the admiration of the young actor in
his box, who was studying the other young actor on the stage. He found
mind of no common order in Edmund Kean. ‘In his angry complaining of
Nature’s injustice to his bodily imperfections, as he uttered the line,
“To shrink my arm up like a withered shrub,” Kean remained looking
on the limb for some moments with a sort of bitter discontent, and
then struck it back in angry disgust.’ To his father’s whisper, ‘It’s
very poor,’ the son replied readily, ‘Oh, no! it is no common thing.’
Macready praises the scene with Lady Anne, and that in which Richard
tempts Buckingham to the murder of the young princes. In the latter,
he found Kean’s interpretation ‘consistent with his conception,
proposing their death as a political necessity, and sharply requiring
it as a business to be done.’ Cooke interpreted the scene in another
way. In Cooke’s Richard, ‘the source of the crime was apparent in the
gloomy hesitation with which he gave reluctant utterance to the deed of
blood.’ If Cooke was more effective than Kean on one or two solitary
points, Kean was superior in the general portraiture. As Macready
remarks, Kean ‘hurried you along in his resolute course with a spirit
that brooked no delay. In inflexibility of will and sudden grasp of
expedients he suggested the idea of a feudal Napoleon.’
With respect to the characters enacted by the greatest actor of the
present century, Macready’s testimony of Kean is that in none of Kean’s
personations did he display more masterly elocution than in the third
act of ‘Richard III.’ In Sir Edward Mortimer, Kean was unapproachable,
and Master Betty (whom Macready praises highly) next to him, though
far off. In Sir Edward, Kean ‘subjected his style to the restraint of
the severest taste. Throughout the play the actor held absolute sway
over his hearers; and there is no survivor of those hearers who will
not enjoy a description which enables them to live over again moments
of a bygone delight which the present stage cannot afford. There are,
perhaps, not so few who remember Kean’s Sir Edward Mortimer as of
those who remember his ‘Oroonoko.’ Those who do will endorse all that
Macready says of that masterly representation of the African Prince
in slavery, where Kean, with a calm submission to his fate, still
preserved all his princely demeanour. There was one passage which was
‘never to be forgotten’--the prayer for his Imoinda. After replying
to Blandford, ‘No, there is nothing to be done for me,’ he remained,
says Macready, ‘for a few moments in apparent abstraction; then, with
a concentration of feeling that gave emphasis to every word, clasping
his hands together, in tones most tender, distinct, and melodious,
he poured out, as if from the very depths of his heart, his earnest
supplication:--
Thou God ador’d, thou ever-glorious Sun!
If she be yet on earth, send me a beam
Of thy all-seeing power to light me to her!
Or if thy sister-goddess has preferr’d
Her beauty to the skies, to be a star,
Oh, tell me where she shines, that I may stand
Whole nights, and gaze upon her!’
We may refer to another passage, in ‘Othello,’ in which the tenderness,
distinctness, and mournful melodiousness of Edmund Kean’s voice used
to affect the whole house to hushed and rapt admiration; namely, the
passage beginning with, ‘Farewell, the plumed troop!’ and ending with,
‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’ It was like some magic instrument, which
laid all hearts submissive to its irresistible enchantment.
While Macready allows that flashes of genius were rarely wanting in
Kean’s least successful performances, he does not forget to note that
when he played Iago to Kean’s Othello, he observed that the latter was
playing not at all like to his old self. It is to be remembered that
this was in 1832, when Kean was on the brink of the grave, broken in
constitution, and with no power to answer to his will. But Macready
justly recognised the power when it existed, and set the world mad with
a new delight. Others were not so just, nor so generous. ‘Many of the
Kemble school,’ he says, ‘resisted conviction of Kean’s merits, but the
fact that he made me feel was an argument to enrol me with the majority
on the indisputable genius he displayed.’ Some of the Kemble family
were as reluctant to be convinced as many of the Kemble school were,
but we must except the lady whom we all prefer to call ‘Fanny Kemble.’
She, in her ‘Journal,’ speaks without bias, not always accurately, but
still justly and generously. To her, the great master was apparent,
and she truly says that when Kean died there died with him Richard,
Shylock, and Othello.
Before quitting Kean for the Kembles, we must permit ourselves to
extract the account given by Macready of a supper after Richard III.
had been played:--
We retired to the hotel as soon as the curtain fell, and were soon
joined by Kean, accompanied, or rather attended, by Pope. I need
not say with what intense scrutiny I regarded him as we shook
hands on our mutual introduction. The mild and modest expression
of his Italian features, and his unassuming manner, which I might
perhaps justly describe as partaking in some degree of shyness,
took me by surprise, and I remarked with special interest the
indifference with which he endured the fulsome flatteries of Pope.
He was very sparing of words during, and for some time after,
supper; but about one o’clock, when the glass had circulated
pretty freely, he became animated, fluent, and communicative. His
anecdotes were related with a lively sense of the ridiculous; in
the melodies he sang there was a touching grace, and his powers of
mimicry were most humorously or happily exerted in an admirable
imitation of Braham; and in a story of Incledon acting Steady the
Quaker at Rochester without any rehearsal, where, in singing the
favourite air, ‘When the lads of the village so merrily, oh!’ he
heard himself to his dismay and consternation accompanied by a
single bassoon; the music of his voice, his perplexity at each
recurring sound of the bassoon, his undertone maledictions on the
self-satisfied musician, the peculiarity of his habits, all were
hit off with a humour and an exactness that equalled the best
display Mathews ever made, and almost convulsed us with laughter.
It was a memorable evening, the first and last I ever spent in
private with this extraordinary man.
Macready’s estimation of Kemble and the Kemble school is not at all
highly pitched, save in the case of Mrs. Siddons; but he notes how she
outlived her powers, and returned a few times to the stage when her
figure had enlarged and her genius had diminished. When John Kemble
took leave of the Dublin stage, in 1816, Macready was present; he
records that ‘the house was about half full.’ Kemble acted Othello
(which, at that time, Kean had made his own). ‘A more august presence
could hardly be imagined.’ He was received with hearty applause,
‘but the slight bow with which he acknowledged the compliment spoke
rather dissatisfaction at the occasional vacant spaces before him than
recognition of the respectful feeling manifested by those present. I
must suppose he was out of humour, for, to my exceeding regret, he
literally walked through the part.’ The London audiences, as Kemble’s
career was drawing to a close, were not more sympathetic. At Kemble’s
Cato, ‘The house was moderately filled; there was sitting room in the
pit, and the dress circle was not at all crowded.’ To the dignity
of the representation Macready renders homage of admiration; but he
says that Cato was not in strict Roman attire, and that with only one
effort, the ‘I am satisfied,’ when he heard that Marcius ‘greatly
fell,’ Kemble’s husky voice and laboured articulation could not
enliven the monotony of a tragedy which was felt to be a tax on the
patience of the audience. The want of variety and relief rendered it
uninteresting, and those at least who were not classical antiquaries
found the whole thing uncommonly tedious.
It is unquestionably among the unaccountable things connected with
‘the stage’ that Kemble’s farewell performances in London, 1817, were
as a whole unproductive. Those closing nights, not answering the
manager’s expectations of their attraction, were given for benefits
to those performers who chose to pay the extra price. Macready was
not present on the closing night of all, when Kemble nobly played his
peerless Coriolanus; but he witnessed several other representations,
and he dwells especially on the last performance of ‘Macbeth,’ when
Mrs. Siddons acted the Lady to her brother’s Macbeth. Macready was
disappointed with both. Mrs. Siddons was no longer the enchantress
of old: ‘years had done their work, and those who had seen in her
impersonations the highest glories of her art, now felt regret that
she had been prevailed on to leave her honoured retirement, and force
a comparison between the grandeur of the past and the feeble present.
It was not a performance, but a mere repetition of the poet’s text;
no flash, no sign of her pristine, all-subduing genius.’ Kemble, as
Macbeth, was ‘correct, tame, and ineffective,’ through the first four
acts of the play, which moved heavily on; but he was roused to action
in the fifth act. With action there was pathos; and ‘all at once, he
seemed carried away by the genius of the scene.’ Macready brings the
scene itself before his readers, ending with the words: ‘His shrinking
from Macduff, when the charm on which his life hung was broken, by the
declaration that his antagonist “was not of woman born,” was a masterly
stroke of art. His subsequent defiance was most heroic; and, at his
death, Charles Kemble received him in his arms and laid him gently on
the ground, his physical powers being unequal to further effort.’
Of persons non-dramatic, many pass before the mind’s eye of the reader.
Lord Nelson visited the Birmingham Theatre, and Macready noted his
pale and interesting face, and listened so eagerly to all he uttered
that for months after he used to be called upon to repeat ‘what Lord
Nelson said to your father,’ which was to the effect that the esteem
in which the elder Macready was held by the town made it ‘a pleasure
and a duty’ for Lord Nelson to visit the theatre. With the placid and
mournful-looking Admiral was Lady Hamilton, who laughed loud and long,
clapped her uplifted hands with all her heart, and kicked her heels
against the foot-board of her seat, as some verses were sung in honour
of her and England’s hero.
There was a time when Macklin ceased to belong to the drama, when he
was out of the world, in his old age, and his old Covent Garden house.
One of the most characteristic of incidents is one told of Macklin in
his dotage, when prejudice had survived all sense. Macready’s father
called on the aged actor with lack-lustre eye, who was seated in an
arm-chair, unconscious of anyone being present. Mrs. Macklin drew his
attention to the visitor: ‘My dear, here is Mr. Macready come to see
you.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Mr. Macready, my dear.’ ‘Ah! who is he?’ ‘Mr. Macready,
you know, who went to Dublin, to play for your benefit.’ ‘Ha! my
benefit! what was it? what did he act?’ ‘I acted Egerton, sir,’ replied
Mr. Macready, ‘in your own play.’ ‘Ha! my play! what was it?’ ‘The “Man
of the World,” sir.’ ‘Ha! “Man of the World!” devilish good title! who
wrote it?’ ‘You did, sir.’ ‘Did I? well, what was it about?’ ‘Why, sir,
there was a Scotchman’--‘Ah! damn them!’ Macklin’s hatred of the Scotch
was vigorous after all other feeling was dead within him.
Equally good as a bit of character-painting is the full length of Mrs.
Piozzi, whom William Charles Macready met at Bath, in the house of
Dr. Gibbs. She struck the actor as something like one of Reynolds’s
portraits walking out of its frame: ‘a little old lady dressed _point
devise_ in black satin, with dark glossy ringlets under her neat black
hat, highly rouged, not the end of a ribbon or lace out of its place,’
and entering the room with unfaltering step. She was the idol of the
hour, and Macready, specially introduced to her, was charmed with her
vivacity and good humour. The little old lady read, by request, some
passages from Milton, a task she delighted in, and for doing which
effectively she considered herself well qualified. She chose the
description of the lazar-house, from the 11th Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’
and dwelt with emphatic distinctness on the various ills to which
mortality is exposed. ‘The finger on the dial-plate of the _pendule_
was just approaching the hour of ten, when, with a Cinderella-like
abruptness, she rose and took her leave, evidently as much gratified
by contributing to our entertainment as we were by the opportunity of
making her acquaintance.’ According to Dr. Gibbs, the vivacious old
Cinderella never stayed after ten was about to strike. Circumstances
might indeed prompt the sensitive lady to depart earlier. Mr. Macready
subsequently met the lively little lioness at the Twisses. The company
was mixed, old and young; the conversation was general, or people
talked the young with the young, the old among themselves. Mrs. Piozzi
was not the oracle on whose out-speakings all hearers reverentially
waited. Consequently, ‘long before her accustomed hour,’ Mrs. Piozzi
started up, and coldly wishing Mr. and Mrs. Twiss ‘good night,’ she
left the room. To the general inquiries, by look or word, the hostess
simply remarked, ‘She is very much displeased.’ The really gifted old
lady’s vanity was wounded; lack of homage sent her home in a huff.
Some of the best sketches in the book are of scenes of Macready’s
holiday travel. On one occasion, in a corner of an Italian garden, near
a church, he caught a priest kissing a young girl whom he had just
confessed. Nothing could be merrier or better-humoured than Macready’s
description of this pretty incident. The young Father, or brother, was
quite in order; Rome claims absolute rule over faith--and morals.
We close this chronicle of so many varied hues with reluctance. That
which belongs to the retired life of the actor is fully as interesting
as the detail of the times when he was in harness. Indeed, in the
closing letters addressed to the present Lady Pollock, there are
circumstances of his early career not previously recorded. The record
of the home-life is full of interest, and we sympathise with the old
actor, who, as the fire of temperament died out, appeared purified and
chastened by the process.