Mental courage is the only courage I pretend to. I dare venture an

opinion where few else would, particularly if I think it right. I have

retracted few of my positions. Whether this arises from obstinacy or

strength, or indifference to the opinions of others, I know not. In

little else I have the spirit of martyrdom: but I would give up any

thing sooner than an abstract proposition.

CHARACTER OF MR. CANNING

_The Examiner._] [_July 11, 1824._

Mr. Canning was the cleverest boy at Eton: he is, perhaps, the cleverest

man in the House of Commons. It is, however, in the sense in which,

according to Mr. Wordsworth, ‘the child is father to the man.’ He has

grown up entirely out of what he then was. He has merely ingrafted a set

of Parliamentary phrases and the technicalities of debate on the themes

and school-exercises he was set to compose when a boy. Nor has he ever

escaped from the trammels imposed on youthful genius: he has never

assumed a manly independence of mind. He has been all his life in the

habit of getting up a speech at the nod of a Minister, as he used to get

up a thesis under the direction of his school-master. The _matter_ is

nothing; the only question is, how he shall express himself. The

consequence has been as might be expected. Not being at liberty to chuse

his own side of the question, nor to look abroad into the world for

original (but perhaps unwelcome) observations, nor to follow up a strict

chain of reasoning into its unavoidable consequences, the whole force of

his mind has been exhausted in an attention to the ornaments of style

and to an agreeable and imposing selection of topics. It is his business

and his inclination to embellish what is trite, to gloss over what is

true, to vamp up some feeble sophism, to spread the colours of a

meretricious fancy over the unexpected exposure of some dark intrigue,

some glaring iniquity—

‘Like as the sun-burnt Indians do array

Their tawny bodies in their proudest plight

With painted plumes in goodly order dight:

· · · · ·

As those same plumes, so seemed he vain and light,

That by his gait might easily appear;

For still he fared as dancing in delight,

And in his hands a windy fan did bear,

That in the idle air he moved still here and there.’

SPENSER.

His reasoning is a tissue of glittering sophistry; his language is a

_cento_ of florid common-places. The smooth monotony of his style is

indeed as much borrowed, is as little his own, as the courtly and often

fulsome strain of his sentiments. He has no steady principles, no strong

passions, nothing original, masculine, or striking in thought or

expression. There is a feeble, diffuse, showy, Asiatic redundancy in all

his speeches—something vapid, something second-hand in the whole cast of

his mind. The light that proceeds from it gleams from the mouldering

materials of corruption: the flowers that are seen there, gay and

flaunting, bloom over the grave of humanity!—Mr. Canning never, by any

chance, reminds one of the poet or the philosopher, of the admirer of

nature, or even the man of the world—he is a mere House-of-Commons man,

or, since he was transferred there from College, appears never to have

seen or thought of any other place. He may be said to have passed his

life in making and learning to make speeches. All other objects and

pursuits seem to have been quite lost upon him. He has overlooked the

ordinary objects of nature, the familiar interests of human life, as

beneath his notice.[38] There is no allusion in any of his speeches to

anything passing out of the House, or not to be found in the classics.

Their tone is quite Parliamentary—his is the Delphin edition of Nature.

Not an image has struck his eye, not an incident has touched his heart,

any farther than it could be got up for rhetorical and stage effect.

This has an ill effect upon his speeches:—it gives them that shining and

bloated appearance which is the result of the confined and heated

atmosphere of the House. They have the look of exotics, of artificial,

hot-house plants. Their glossiness, their luxuriance, and gorgeousness

of colour are greater than their strength or _stamina_: they are forced,

not lasting, nor will they bear transplanting from the rank and noxious

soil in which they grow. Or rather, perhaps, they bear the same relation

to eloquence that artificial flowers do to real ones—alike, yet not the

same, without vital heat or the power of reproduction, printed,

passionless, specious mockeries. They are, in fact, not the growth of

truth, of nature, and feeling, but of state policy, of art, and

practice. To deny that Mr. Canning has arrived to a great perfection

(perhaps the greatest) in the manufacture of these sort of

_common-places_, elegant, but somewhat tarnished, imposing, but not

solid, would, we think, show a want of candour: to affirm that he has

ever done anything more (in his serious attempts) would, we think, show

an equal want of taste and understanding.[39]

The way in which Mr. Canning gets up the staple-commodity of his

speeches appears to be this. He hears an observation on the excellence

of the English Constitution, or on the dangers of Reform and the

fickleness and headstrong humours of the people, dropped by some Member

of the House, or he meets with it in an old Debate in the time of Sir

Robert Walpole, or in Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy, which our

accomplished scholar read, of course, as the established text-book at

the University. He turns it in his mind: by dint of memory and ingenuity

he illustrates it by the application of some well-known and

well-authenticated simile at hand, such as ‘the vessel of the state,’

‘the torrent of popular fury,’ ‘the precipice of reform,’ ‘the

thunderbolt of war,’ ‘the smile of peace,’ &c. He improves the hint by

the help of a little play upon words and upon an idle fancy into an

allegory, he hooks this on to a verbal inference, which takes you by

surprise, equally from the novelty of the premises and the flatness of

the conclusion, refers to a passage in Cicero in support of his

argument, quotes his authority, relieves exhausted attention by a

sounding passage from Virgil, ‘like the morn risen on mid-noon,’ and

launches the whole freight of wisdom, wit, learning, and fancy, on the

floor of St. Stephen’s Chapel, where it floats and glitters amidst the

mingled curiosity and admiration of both sides of the House—

‘Scylla heard,

And fell Charybdis murmur’d soft applause.’

Beneath the broad and gilded chandelier that throws its light upon ‘the

nation’s Great Divan,’ Mr. Canning piles the lofty harangue, high

over-arched with metaphor, dazzling with epithets, sparkling with

jests—take it out of doors, or examine it by the light of common sense,

and it is no more than a paltry string of sophisms, of trite truisms,

and sorry buffooneries. There is also a House-of-Commons jargon as well

as a scholastic pedantry in this gentleman’s style of oratory, which is

very displeasing to all but professional ears. ‘The Honourable and

Learned Gentleman,’ and ‘his Honourable and Gallant Friend,’ are trolled

over the tongue of the Honourable Speaker, ‘loud as a trumpet with a

silver sound,’ and fill up the pauses of the sense or the gaps in the

logic with a degree of burlesque self-complacency and pompous inanity.

Mr. Canning speaks by rote; and if the words he utters become the mouth

and round a period well, he cares little how cheaply he comes by them,

or how dear they cost the country! Such mechanic helps to style and

technical flourishes and trappings of upstart self-importance are,

however, unworthy of the meanest underling of office.

There is, notwithstanding, a facility, a brilliancy, and an elegance in

Mr. Canning’s general style, always graceful, never abrupt, never

meagre, never dry, copious without confusion, dignified without

stiffness, perspicuous yet remote from common life, that must excite

surprise in an _extempore_ speaker. Mr. Canning, we apprehend, is _not_

an _extempore_ speaker. He only makes set speeches on set occasions. He

indeed hooks them in as answers to some one that has gone before him in

the debate, by taking up and commenting on a single sentence or so, but

he immediately recurs to some old and favourite topic, launches into the

middle of the stream, or mounts upon the _high horse_, and rides it to

the end of the chapter. He never (that we are aware of) grappled with a

powerful antagonist, overthrew him on the spot, or contested the point

with him foot to foot. Mr. Canning’s replies are _evasions_. He indeed

made a capital and very deservedly admired reply to Sir John Coxe

Hippesley; but Sir John had given notice of all his motions a month

beforehand, and Mr. Canning had only to lie in ambush for him with a

whole magazine of facts, arguments, alliterations, quotations, jests,

and squibs, prepared ready to explode and blow him up into the air in an

instant. In this manner he contrives to slip into the debate and speak

to the question, as if he had lately entered the House and heard the

arguments on the other side stated for the first time in his life. He

has conned his speeches over for a week or a month previously, but he

gives these premeditated effusions the effect of witty impromptus—the

spontaneous ebullitions of the laughter or indignation or lofty

enthusiasm of the moment. His manner tells this. It is that of a person

trying to recollect a speech, and reciting it from beginning to end with

studied gesture, and in an emphatic but monotonous and somewhat affected

tone of voice, rather than of a person uttering words and thoughts that

have occurred to him for the first time, and hurried away by an

involuntary impulse, speaking with more or less hesitation, faster or

slower, and with more or less passion, according as the occasion

requires.

Mr. Canning is a _conventional_ speaker; he is an _optional_ politician.

He has a ready and splendid assortment of arguments upon all ordinary

questions: he takes that side or view of a question that is dictated by

his vanity, his interest, or his habits, and endeavours to make the best

he can of it. Truth, liberty, justice, humanity, war or peace,

civilization or barbarism, are things of little consequence, except for

him to make speeches upon them. He thinks ‘the worse the better reason,’

if he can only make it appear so to others; and in the attempt to

confound and mislead, he is greatly assisted by really perceiving no

difference himself. It is not what a thing is, but what he can say about

it, that is ever uppermost in his mind; and why should he be squeamish

or have any particular choice, since his words are all equally fine, and

delivered with equal volubility of tongue! His balanced periods are the

scale ‘that makes these odds all even.’ Our Orator does not confine

himself to any one view of a subject. He does not blind himself by any

dull prejudice: he does not tie himself down to any pedantic rules or

abstract principle. He does not listen implicitly to common sense, nor

does he follow the independent dictates of his own judgment. No, he

picks and chuses among all these, as best suits his purpose. He plucks

out the grey hairs of a question, and then again the black. He shifts

his position; it is a _ride-and-tie_ system with him. He mounts

sometimes behind prejudice, and sometimes behind reason. He is now with

the wise, and then again with the vulgar. He drivels, or he raves. He is

now wedded to antiquity, anon there is no innovation too startling for

him. At one time he is literal, at another visionary and romantic. At

one time the honour of the country sways him, at another its interest.

One moment he is all for liberty, and the next for slavery. First we are

to hold the balance of Europe, and to dictate and domineer over the

whole world; and then we are to creep into our shells and draw in our

horns; one moment resembling Don Quixote, and the next playing the part

of Sancho Panza! And why not? All these are topics, are _cues_ used in

the game of politics, are colours in the changeable coat of party, are

dilemmas in casuistry, are pretexts in diplomacy; and Mr. Canning has

them all at his fingers’ ends. What is there then to prevent his using

any of them as he pleases? Nothing in the world but feeling or

principle; and as Mr. Canning is not withheld by these from running his

heedless career, the application of his ingenuity and eloquence in all

such cases is perfectly arbitrary, ‘quite _optional_,’ as Mr. Liston

expresses it. A wise man would have some settled opinion, a good man

would wish well to some cause, a modest man would be afraid to act

without feeling sure of his ground, or to show an utter disregard of

right or wrong. Mr. Canning has the luckless ambition to play off the

tricks of a political rope-dancer, and he chuses to do it on the nerves

of humanity! He has called out for war during thirty years without

ceasing, ‘like importunate Guinea fowls, one note day and night;’ he has

made the House and the country ring with his vain clamour, and now for

the first time he is silent, ‘quite chopfallen.’ Like _Bottom_ in the

play, ‘he aggravates his voice like a sucking-dove;’ ‘he roars you an

’twere any nightingale!’ After the failure of Buonaparte’s Russian

expedition, Mr. Canning exclaimed exultingly, and with a daring

enthusiasm that seemed to come from the heart, that ‘he rejoiced that

barbarism had been the first to resist invasion, since it showed that

the love of national independence was an instinctive principle in every

country, superior even to the love of liberty.’ This plea served its

turn at the time, and we heard no more of it last year when the French

invaded Spain. In the war to restore Ferdinand, Mr. Canning echoed with

lungs of brass the roar of ‘the universal Spanish nation,’ and the words

Liberty and Humanity hung like music on his tongue; but when the feeble

Monarch was restored, and trod upon the necks of those who had restored

him, and threw down the mock-scaffold of the Constitution that had

raised him once more to the throne, we heard no more of ‘the universal

Spanish nation,’ of Liberty and Humanity. When the speeches of Mr.

Canning and the Manifestos of his friends had raised the power of France

to a gigantic height that hung like a precipice over our heads, we were

to go on, and fight out the battle of liberty and independence, though

‘we buried ourselves under the ruins of the civilized world.’ When a

monstrous claim that threatens the liberty and existence of the

civilized world is openly set up and acted upon, and a word from Mr.

Canning would arrest its progress in the direction in which it is moving

with obscene, ghastly, bloodstained strides, he courteously and with

great condescension reminds his hearers of ‘the inimitable satire of

Cervantes,’ that there is a proverbial expression borrowed from it, and

that the epithet _Quixotic_ would be eminently applicable to the conduct

of Great Britain if she interfered in the affairs of the continent at

the present juncture. And yet there are persons who persist in believing

that Mr. Canning is any thing more than a pivot on whose oily hinges

state policy turns easily at this moment, unheard, unseen, and that he

has views and feelings of his own that are a pledge for his integrity.

If all this were fickleness, caprice, forgetfulness, accident, folly, it

would be well or would not much signify; we should stand a chance of

sometimes being right, sometimes wrong; or if the ostensible motives

were the real ones, they would balance one another. At one time we

should be giving a _lift_ to liberty, at another we should be advancing

our own interests: now we should be generous to others, then we should

be just to ourselves, but always we should be doing something or other

fit to be done and to be named, and acting up to one or other of Mr.

Canning’s fine pleas of religion, morality, or social order. Is that the

case? Nothing was said for twenty years about the restoration of the

Bourbons as the object of the war. Who doubts it now? This cause skulked

behind the throne, and was not let out in any of Mr. Canning’s speeches.

The cloven foot was concealed by so much flaunting oratory, by so many

different facings and piebald patch-work liveries of ruinous policy or

perfidious principle, as not to be suspected. This is what makes such

persons as Mr. Canning dangerous. Clever men are the tools with which

bad men work. The march of sophistry is devious: the march of power is

one. Its means, its tools, its pretexts are various, and borrowed like

the hues of the camelion from any object that happens to be at hand: its

object is ever the same, and deadly as the serpent’s fang. It moves on

to its end with crested majesty, erect, silent, with eyes sunk and

fixed, undiverted by fear, unabashed by shame, and puny orators and

patriot mountebanks play tricks before it to amuse the crowd, till it

crushes the world in its monstrous folds. There is one word about which

nothing has been said all this while in accounting for Mr. Canning’s

versatility of mind and vast resources in reasoning—it is the word,

_Legitimacy_. It is the key with which you ‘pluck out the heart of his

mystery.’ It is the touchstone by which all his other eloquence is to be

tried, and made good or found wanting. It is the casting-weight in the

scale of sound policy, or that makes humanity and liberty kick the beam.

It is the secret of the Ayes and Noes: it accounts for the Majorities

and Minorities. It weighs down all other considerations, hides all

flaws, makes up for all deficiencies, removes all obstacles, is the

crown of success, and makes defeat glorious. It has all the power of the

Crown on its side, and all the madness of the people. All Mr. Canning’s

speeches are but so many different _periphrases_ for this one

word—_Legitimacy_. It is the foundation of his magnanimity and the

source of his pusillanimity. It is the watch-word equally of his oratory

or his silence. It is the principle of his interference and of his

forbearance. It makes him move forward, or retreat, or stand still. With

this word rounded closely in his ear, and with fifty evasions for it in

his mouth, he advances boldly to ‘the deliverance of mankind’—into the

hands of legitimate kings, but can do nothing to deliver them out of

their power. When the liberty and independence of mankind can be

construed to mean the cause of kings and the doctrine of divine right,

Mr. Canning is a virago on the side of humanity—when they mean the cause

of the people and the reducing of arbitrary power within the limits of

constitutional law, his patriotism and humanity flag, and he is

‘Of his port as meek as is a maid!’

This word makes his tropes and figures expand and blaze out like

phosphorus, or ‘freezes his spirits up like fish in a pond.’ It smites

with its petrific mace, it deadens with its torpedo touch, the Minister,

the Parliament, the people, and makes this vast, free, enlightened, and

enterprising country a body without a soul, an inert mass, like the

hulks of our men of war, which Mr. Canning saw and described so well at

Plymouth. It is the same word, that announcing the profanation of ‘the

golden round that binds the hollow temples of a king’ by unhallowed

hands, would fill their sails, and hurl their thunders on rebel shores.

It denounces war, it whispers peace. It is echoed by the groans of the

nations, is sanctified by their blood, bought with their treasure. It is

this that fills the time-rent towers of the Inquisition with tears and

piercing cries; and owing to this, Manzotti shrieks in Italian dungeons,

while Mr. Canning soothes the House of Commons with the soft accents of

liberty and peace! In fine, Mr. Canning’s success as an orator, and the

space he occupies in the public mind, are strong indications of the

Genius of the Age, in which words have obtained a mastery over things,

‘and to call evil good and good evil,’ is thought the mark of a superior

and happy spirit. An accomplished statesman in our day is one who extols

the Constitution and violates it—who talks about religion and social

order, and means slavery and superstition. The Whigs are always

reminding the reigning family of _the principles that raised them to the

throne_—the Tories labour as hard to substitute those _that will keep

them there_. There is a dilemma here, which is not easily got over; and

to solve the difficulty and reconcile the contradiction, was the great

problem of the late King’s reign. The doubtful lubricity of Mr.

Canning’s style was one of the rollers by which the transition was

effected, and Legitimacy shown to be a middle term between _divine

right_ and _the choice of the people_, compatible with both, and

convertible into either, at the discretion of the Crown, or pleasure of

the speaker. Mr. Canning does not disgrace his pretensions on other

questions. He is a sophist by profession, a palliator of every powerful

and profitable abuse. His shuffling, trifling speeches on Reform are

well-known. He sometimes adds the petulance of the school-boy to his

stock of worn-out invention; though his unfeeling taunt on the ‘revered

and ruptured Ogden,’ met with a reception which will make him cautious

how he tampers again with human infirmity and individual suffering, as

the subject of ribald jests and profligate alliteration.

The thing in which Mr. Canning excels most is wit; and his wit is

confined to parody. The _Rejected Addresses_ have been much and

deservedly admired; but we do not think the parodies in them, however

ingenious or ludicrous, are to be compared with those in the ‘_Poetry of

the Anti-Jacobin_,’ and some of the very best of these are by Mr.

Canning. Among others are, we believe, the _German Play_, and the

imitation of Mr. Southey’s _Sapphics_. Much as we admire, we do not

wonder at Mr. Canning’s excellence in this department. Real, original

wit, he has none; for that implies sense and feeling, and an insight

into the real differences of things; but from a want of sympathy with

anything but forms and _common-places_, he can easily let down the sense

of others so as to make _nonsense_ of it. He has no enthusiasm or

sensibility to make him overlook the meanness of a subject, or a little

irregularity in the treatment of it, from the interest it excites: to a

mind like his, the serious and affecting is a kind of natural burlesque.

It is a matter of course for him to be struck with the absurdity of the

romantic or singular in any way, to whom every thing out of the beaten

track is absurd; and ‘to turn what is serious into farce’ by

transferring the same expressions to perfectly indifferent and therefore

contemptible subjects. To make any description or sentiment ludicrous,

it is only necessary to take away all feeling from it: the ludicrous is

ready-made to Mr. Canning’s hands. The poetry, the heart-felt interest

of every thing escapes through his apprehension, like a snake out of its

skin, and leaves the slough of parody behind it. Any thing more light or

worthless cannot well be imagined.[40]

THE DANDY SCHOOL.

_The Examiner._] [_November 18, 1827._

Vivian Grey is dedicated to the Best and Greatest of men, as if the

Illustrious Person who will take this compliment to himself approved of

the sentiments contained in it. Are ushers odious to the Best and

Greatest of men? Does he hate the great mass of his subjects, and scorn

all those beyond Temple-bar? Is he King only of the Dandies, and Monarch

of the West? We scarcely believe it. This volume with its impertinent

dedication is no more expressive of the sentiments of his heart than the

_Austrian Catechism_, dedicated in like manner, would be characteristic

of the principles of his reign. Oh! Mr. Grey, you should have been more

humble—you should have inscribed your work to the best-dressed Man in

his Majesty’s dominions—or to Jack Ketch.

It was formerly understood to be the business of literature to enlarge

the bounds of knowledge and feeling; to direct the mind’s eye beyond

the present moment and the present object; to plunge us in the world

of romance, to connect different languages, manners, times together;

to wean us from the grossness of sense, the illusions of self-love;—by

the aid of imagination, to place us in the situations of others and

enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them; and to make

books the faithful witnesses and interpreters of nature and the human

heart. Of late, instead of this liberal and useful tendency, it has

taken a narrower and more superficial tone. All that we learn from it

is the servility, egotism, and upstart pretensions of the writers.

Instead of transporting you to faery-land or into the _middle ages_,

you take a turn down Bond Street or go through the mazes of the dance

at Almack’s. You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to

you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or

repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air, as if you

had not already had enough of it. You dip into an Essay or a Novel,

and may fancy yourself reading a collection of quack or fashionable

advertisements:—Macassar Oil, Eau de Cologne, Hock and Seltzer Water,

Otto of Roses, _Pomade Divine_ glance through the page in inextricable

confusion, and make your head giddy. Far from extending your

sympathies, they are narrowed to a single point, the admiration of the

folly, caprice, insolence, and affectation of a certain class;—so that

with the exception of people who ride in their carriages, you are

taught to look down upon the rest of the species with indifference,

abhorrence, or contempt. A school-master in a black coat is a

monster—a tradesman and his wife who eat cold mutton and pickled

cabbage are wretches to be hunted out of society. That is the end and

moral of it: it is part and parcel of a system. The _Dandy School_

give the finishing touch to the principles of paternal government.

First comes the political sycophant, and makes the people over to

their rulers as a property in perpetuity; but then they are to be

handled tenderly, and need not complain, since the sovereign is the

father of his people, and we are to be all one family of love. So says

the _Austrian Catechism_. Then comes the literary sycophant to finish

what the other had begun; and the poor fools of people having been

caught in the trap of plausible professions, he takes off the mask of

_paternity_, treats them as of a different species instead of members

of the same family, loads them with obloquy and insult, and laughs at

the very idea of any fellow feeling with or consideration towards

them, as the height of bad taste, weakness, and vulgarity. So say Mr.

Theodore Hook and the author of _Vivian Grey_. So says not Sir Walter.

Ever while you live, go to a man of genius in preference to a dunce;

for let his prejudices or his party be what they may, there is still a

saving grace about him, for he himself has something else to trust to

besides his subserviency to greatness to raise him from

insignificance. He takes you and places you in a cottage or a cavern,

and makes you feel the deepest interest in it, for you feel all that

its inmates feel. The _Dandy School_ tell you all that a dandy would

feel in such circumstances, viz. that he was not in a drawing-room or

at Long’s. Or if he does forfeit his character for a moment, he at

most brings himself to patronise humanity, condescends to the

accidents of common life, touches the pathetic with his pen as if it

were with a pair of tongs, and while he just deigns to notice the

existence or endure the infirmities of his fellow-creatures,

indemnifies his vanity by snatching a conscious glance at his own

person and perfections. Whatever is going on, he himself is the hero

of the scene; the distress (however excruciating) derives its chief

claim to attention from the singular circumstance of his being

present; and he manages the whole like a piece of private theatricals

with an air of the most absolute _nonchalance_ and decorum. The WHOLE

DUTY OF MAN is turned into a butt and bye-word, or like Mr. Martin’s

bill for humanity to animals, is a pure voluntary, a caprice of

effeminate sensibility: the great business of life is a kind of

masquerade or melo-drame got up for effect and by particular desire of

the Great. We soon grow tired of nature so treated, and are glad to

turn to the follies and fopperies of high life, into which the writer

enters with more relish, and where he finds himself more at home. So

Mr. Croker (in his place in the House of Commons) does not know where

Bloomsbury Square is: thus affecting to level all the houses in the

metropolis that are not at the court-end, and leaving them tenantless

by a paltry sneer, as if a plague had visited them. It is no wonder

that his _protégés_ and understrappers out of doors should echo this

official impertinence—draw the line still closer between the East and

West-end—arrest a stray sentiment at the corner of a street, relegate

elegance to a fashionable square—annihilate all other enjoyments, all

other pretensions but those of their employers—reduce the bulk of

mankind to a cypher, and make all but a few pampered favourites of

fortune dissatisfied with themselves and contemptible to one another.

The reader’s mind is so varnished over with affectation that not an

avenue to truth or feeling is left open, and it is stifled for want of

breath. Send these people across the Channel who make such a fuss

about the East and West-end, and no one can find out the

difference.[41] The English are not a nation of _dandies_; nor can

John Bull afford (whatever the panders to fashion and admirers of

courtly graces may say to the contrary) to rest all his pretensions

upon that. He must descend to a broader and more manly level to keep

his ground at all. Those who would persuade him to build up his fame

on frogged coats or on the embellishments of a snuff-box, he should

scatter with one loud roar of indignation and trample into the earth

like grasshoppers, as making not only a beast but an ass of him.

A writer of this accomplished stamp, comes forward to tell you, not how

his hero feels on any occasion, for he is above that, but how he was

dressed, and makes him a mere lay-figure of fashion with a few pert,

current phrases in his mouth. The Sir Sedley Clarendels and Meadowses of

a former age are become the real fine gentlemen of this. Then he gives

you the address of his heroine’s milliner, lest any shocking surmise

should arise in your mind of the possibility of her dealing with a

person of less approved taste, and also informs you that the quality eat

fish with silver forks. This is all he knows about the matter: is this

all they feel? The fact is new to him: it is old to them. It is so new

to him and he is so delighted with it, that provided a few select

persons eat fish with silver forks, he considers it a circumstance of no

consequence if a whole country starves: but these privileged persons are

not surely thinking all the time and every day of their lives of that

which Mr. Theodore Hook has never forgotten since he first witnessed it,

viz. that _they eat their fish with a silver fork_. What then are they

thinking of in their intervals of leisure—what are their feelings that

_we_ can be supposed to know nothing of? Will Mr. Theodore Hook, who is

‘comforted with their bright radiance, though not in their sphere,’

condescend to give us a glimpse of these, that we may admire their real

elegance and refinement as much as he does a frogged coat or silver

fork? It is cruel in him not to do so. ‘The _court_, as well as we, may

chide him for it.’ He once criticised a city feast with great minuteness

and bitterness, in which (as it appears) the side-board is ill-arranged,

the footman makes a blunder, the cook has sent up a dish too little or

too highly seasoned. Something is wanting, as Mr. Hook insinuates is

necessarily the case whenever people in the neighbourhood of Russell

square give dinners. But that something is not the manners or

conversation of gentlemen—this never enters his head—but something that

the butler, the cook or the valet of people of fashion could have

remedied quite as well (to say the least) as their masters. It is here

the cloven foot, the under-bred tone, the undue admiration of external

circumstances breaks out and betrays the writer. Mr. Hook has a

fellow-feeling with low life or rather with vulgarity aping gentility,

but he has never got beyond the outside of what he calls _good society_.

He can lay the cloth or play the buffoon after dinner—but that is the

utmost he can pretend to. We have in _Sayings and Doings_ and in _Vivian

Grey_ abundance of Lady Marys and Lady Dorothys, but they are titles

without characters, or the blank is filled up with the most trite

impertinence. So a young linen-draper or attorney’s clerk from the

country, who had gained a thirty thousand pound prize in the lottery and

wished to set up for a fine gentleman, might learn from these Novels

what hotel to put up at, what watering place to go to, what hatter,

hosier, tailor, shoemaker, _friseur_ to employ, what part of the town he

should be seen in, what theatre he might frequent; but how to behave,

speak, look, feel and think in his new and more aspiring character he

would not find the most distant hint in the gross caricatures or flimsy

sketches of the most mechanical and shallow of all schools. It is really

as if, in lieu of our royal and fashionable ‘Society of Authors,’ a

deputation of tailors, cooks, lacqueys, had taken possession of

Parnassus, and had appointed some Abigail out of place perpetual

Secretary. The Congreves, Wycherleys, and Vanbrughs of former days gave

us some taste of gentility and courtly refinement in their plays:

enchanted us with their _Millamants_, or made us bow with respect to

their _Lord Townleys_. It would seem that the race of these is over, or

that our modern scribes have not had access to them on a proper

footing—that is, not for their talents or conversation, but as

mountebanks or political drudges.

At first it appears strange that persons of so low a station in life

should be seized with such a rage to inveigh against themselves, and

make us despise all but a few arrogant people, who pay them ill for what

they do. But this is the natural process of servility, and we see all

valets and hangers-on of the Great do the same thing. The powdered

footman looks down on the rabble that dog his master’s coach as beneath

his notice. He feels the one little above him, and the other (by

consequence) infinitely below him. Authors at present would be thought

gentlemen, as gentlemen have a fancy to turn authors. The first thing a

_dandy scribbler_ does is to let us know he is dressed in the height of

the fashion (otherwise we might imagine him some miserable garretteer,

distinguished only by his poverty and learning)—and the next thing he

does is to make a supercilious allusion to some one who is not so well

dressed as himself. He then proceeds to give us a sparkling account of

his Champagne and of his box at the Opera. A newspaper hack of this

description also takes care to inform us that the people at the Opera in

general, the Mr. Smiths and the Mr. Browns, are not good enough for him,

and that he shall wait to begin his critical lucubrations, till the

stars of fashion meet there in crowds and constellations! At present, it

should seem that a seat on Parnassus conveys a title to a box at the

Opera, and that Helicon no longer runs water but champagne. Literature,

so far from supplying us with intellectual resources to counterbalance

immediate privations, is made an instrument to add to our impatience and

irritability under them, and to nourish our feverish, childish

admiration of external show and grandeur. This rage for fashion and for

fashionable writing seems becoming universal, and some stop must be put

to it, unless it cures itself by its own excessive folly and insipidity.

It is well that the Editor of the _John Bull_ wrote the _Sayings and

Doings_. It solves the problem with how small a quantity of wit a person

without character or principle may set up for a political mouthpiece.

Nothing but the dullness of the one could account for the impudence and

the effect of the other. No one who could write a line of wit or sense

could bring himself from any inducement to repeat the same nickname, the

same stale jest, for weeks and months together. If the Editor of the

_John Bull_ had any resources in himself beyond the most vulgar _slang_

and hackneyed abuse, if he had any sense of shame at resorting to the

same wretched pun or more wretched calumny, week after week, as he is

paid for it, he would be unfit for his task: he would no longer be the

complete and unequivocal organ of the dulness, prejudices, malice, and

callous insensibility of his party. No argument tells with a minister of

State like calling a man a Jacobin and a Reformer for the fortieth time:

the sleek Divine chuckles at a dirty allusion for the fortieth time with

unabated glee. Mr. Hook, among wits, might be called _the parson’s

nose_: or perhaps the title of Mr. Vivacity Dull would suit him as well.

What a dearth of invention, what a want of interest, what a fuss about

nothing, what a dreary monotony, what a pert _slipslop_ jargon runs

through the whole series of the author’s tales! But what a persevering,

unabashed confidence, what a broad-shouldered self-complacency, what

robust health, what unrelenting nerves he must possess to inflict them

on his readers! Not one ray, not one line—but all the refuse of the

_Green-room_, the locomotions of a booth at a fair, the humours of a

Margate hoy, the grimace of a jack-pudding, the sentimentalities and

hashed-up scandal of a lady’s maid, the noise and hurry of a chaise and

four, the _ennui_ and vacancy of a return post-chaise! The smart

_improvisatori_ turns out the most wearisome of interminable writers. At

a moment’s warning he can supply something that is worth nothing, and in

ten times the space he can spin out ten times the quantity of the same

poor trash. Would the public read _Sayings and Doings_? Would Mr.

Colburn print them? No, but they are known to be the work of the Editor

of the _John Bull_, of that great and anonymous abstract of wit, taste,

and patriotism, who, like a Ministerial trull, calls after you in the

street, dubs Mr. Waithman Lord Waithman, cries _Humbug_ whenever

humanity is mentioned; invades the peace of private life, out of regard

to religion and social order; cuts a throat out of good-nature, and

laughs at it; and claps his Majesty familiarly on the shoulder, as the

best of Kings! Do you wonder at the face, the gravity, the impenetrable

assurance required to do all this, and to do it not once, but once a

week? Read _Sayings and Doings_, and the wonder ceases; you see it is

because he can do nothing else! He will feel obliged to us for this

character: his patrons were beginning to forget his qualifications.

ACTORS AND THE PUBLIC

_The Examiner._] [_March 16, 1828._

We once happened to be present, and indeed to assist in the following

conversation between a young lady and an elderly gentleman pretty much

of our own standing in such matters. ‘I believe, papa, grand-papa did

not think so highly of Mr. Garrick as most people did?’ ‘Why, my dear,

your grand-papa was not one of those who liked to differ very openly

with the world; but he had an opinion of his own, which he imparted only

to a few particular friends. He really thought Mr. Garrick was a quack,

a better sort of Barthelemy-fair actor. He used to say (for he was a man

that knew the world) ‘that the real secret of Mr. Garrick’s success was,

that his friend Bate Dudley had puffed him into notice, as he afterwards

did the Prince of Wales.’ We on this observed, in our individual

capacity, that at least the dispenser of popularity had been more

successful in the one case than in the other. ‘I believe, papa, you

yourself were never a great admirer of Mrs. Siddons?’ ‘Why no, my dear,

one does not like to say those things, but she always appeared to me one

of the great impositions on the world. There was nothing in her, a mere

tragedy-queen.’—‘Pray, ma’am, have you read Sir Walter’s last

novel?’—‘Why no, I really cannot say I have. I have tried to get through

one or two, but I find them so dry I have given up the attempt. I like

“Sayings and Doings” much better. Pray, sir, can you tell me the name of

the author?’ ‘Mr. Theodore Hook.’—‘Bless me, what a pretty name; I wish

papa would invite him to dinner.’—Here we have the genealogy of modern

taste. ’Fore gad, they were all in a story—three generations in

succession thinking nothing of Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, and the author of

‘Waverley,’ and preferring Mr. Theodore Hook before the quintessence of

truth and nature. And such is the opinion of nine-tenths of the world,

if we could get at their real thoughts. The vulgar in their inmost souls

admire nothing but the vulgar; the common-place admire nothing but the

common-place; the superficial nothing but the superficial. How should it

be otherwise? The rest is cant and affectation: and as to those who know

better and have pretensions themselves, they are actuated by envy and

malice, or some preconceived theory of their own. Instead of a great

actor, for instance, they are looking for a hat and feather, are

disappointed at not finding what they fondly expect, and more

disappointed still at coming in collision with a power that shocks all

their previous sympathies, rules, and definitions. Let a great man ‘fall

into misfortune’ (like _Captain Macheath_) and then you discover the

real dispositions of the reading, seeing, believing, loving public

towards their pretended idol. See how they set upon him the moment he is

down, how they watch for the smallest slip, the first pretext to pick a

quarrel with him, how slow they are to acknowledge worth, how they never

forgive an error, how they trample upon and tear ‘to tatters, to very

rags,’ the common frailties, how they overlook and malign the

transcendant excellence which they can neither reach nor find a

substitute for! Who has praised Sir Walter, who has not had a _fling_ at

him, since he lost all that he was worth? Oh! if he would but write the

‘Life of George IV.!’ Who that had felt Kean’s immeasurable superiority

in _Othello_, was not glad to see him brought to the ordinary level in a

vulgar _crim. con_? No: a man of true genius and common observation,

instead of being disappointed at not carrying the prize by acclamation,

and exciting gratitude equal to the pleasure he gives, ought to be

thankful that he is not hooted from the stage, and torn in pieces by the

rabble, as soon as he quits his lair of solitary obscurity. Every man of

that sort is assuredly looked upon by the vulgar as having dealings with

the devil, because they do not see ‘the spells, the mighty magic he hath

used’ and they would make an _auto-da-fé_ of him if they durst, as they

formerly burnt a witch! They contrive to torture him enough, as it is.

What was it made men burn astrologers and alchemists in former times,

but the sense of power and knowledge which the illiterate hind did not

possess? Are the _reading_ different from the _unreading_ public?

Believe it not. But this power was supposed to be exercised for evil

purposes, whereas genius has a beneficial influence. _That_ doubles the

obligation, and fixes the ingratitude. The critical public view the

appearance of an original mind with the sidelong glances and the _doux

yeux_ with which the animals at Exeter-’Change regard the strange

visitants; but if any one trusting to the amiable looks and playful

gambols of the one or the other opens the door of his own folly to let

them out, he will soon see how it will fare with him. There are a

million of people in this single metropolis, each of whom would

willingly stand on the pedestal which you occupy. Will they forgive you

for thrusting them from their place, or not triumph if they see you

totter? Beware how you climb the slippery ascent; do not neglect your

footing when you are there. Such is the natural feeling; and then comes

the philosophical critic, and tells you with a face of lead and brass

that ‘no more indulgence is to be shewn to the indiscretions of a man of

genius than to any other!’ What! you make him drunk and mad with

applause and then blame him for not being sober, you lift him to a

pinnacle, and then say he is not to be giddy, you own he is to be a

creature of impulse, and yet you would regulate him like a machine, you

expect him to be all fire and air, to wing the empyrean, and to take you

with him, and yet you would have him a muck-worm crawling the earth! But

it is a Scotch critic who says this—let us pass on. If an actor is

indeed six feet high, with a face like a pasteboard mask, he may pass in

the crowd and will have the mob on his side; but if he can only boast

‘The fiery soul, that working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy body to decay,

And o’er informed the tenement of clay’—

he stands in equal peril of the unthinking many, and the fastidious few.

Or, if an actress is a foreigner, she may escape ‘the envy of less

happier lands,’ and be encouraged as a luxury for the great—be wafted to

us on a name, and take back with her our sighs and tears. Yet how frail

is the tenure of fashion! Where is Madame Catalani now? Where does the

siren’s voice flutter in the sunshine of her smiles?—

It was some time since we had seen Mr. Kean’s _Shylock_. Fourteen years

ago we were desired to go and see a young actor from the country attempt

the part at Drury-lane; and, as was expected, add another to the list of

failures. When we got there, there were about fifty people in the pit,

and there was that sense of previous damnation which a thin house

inspires. When the new candidate came on, there was a lightness in his

step, an airy buoyancy and self-possession different from the sullen,

dogged, _gaol-delivery_ look of the traditional _Shylocks_ of the stage.

A vague expectation was excited, and all went on well; but it was not

till he came to the part, when leaning on his staff, he tells the tale

of Jacob and his flock with the garrulous ease of old age and an

animation of spirit, that seems borne back to the olden time, and to the

privileged example in which he exults, that it was plain that a man of

genius had lighted on the stage. To those who had the spirit and candour

to hail the lucky omen, the recollection of that moment of startling,

yet welcome surprise, will always be a proud and satisfactory one. We

wished to see after a lapse of time and other changes, whether this

first impression would still keep ‘true touch,’ and we find no

difference. Besides the excellence of the impassioned parts of Mr.

Kean’s acting, there is a flexibility and indefiniteness of outline

about it, like a figure with a landscape back-ground—he is in Venice

with his money-bags, his daughter and his injuries, but his thoughts

take wing to the East, his voice swells and deepens at the mention of

his sacred tribe and ancient law, and he dwells delighted on any

digression to distant times and places, as a relief to his vindictive

and rooted purposes. Of all Mr. Kean’s performances, we think this the

most faultless and least _mannered_, always excepting his _Othello_,

which is equally perfect and twenty times more powerful. Mr. Kean

succeeded so well in this part in which he came out, that with the

diffidence of the abilities of others so natural to us, it was concluded

by the managers he could do nothing else, and he was kept in it so long

that he had nearly failed in _Richard_, till the dying scene bore down

all opposition by a withering spell, and as if a preternatural being had

visibly taken possession of his form, and made the enthusiasm the

greater from the uncertainty that had before prevailed. The _Sir Giles

Overreach_ stamped him with the players and the town, and _Othello_ with

the critics. He who has done a single thing that others never forget,

and feel ennobled whenever they think of, need not regret his having

been, and may throw aside this fleshly coil, like any other worn-out

part, grateful and contented!

FRENCH PLAYS

_The Examiner._] [_March 23, 1828._

Monsieur Perlet is certainly a pearl of an actor. He does every part

well, and every part varied from another. He is, however, a jewel set in

lead: the rest of the company to which he belongs are but indifferent.

He is exactly what a London _star_, engaged for a few nights to gratify

the ‘upturned eyes of wondering audiences,’ is in a tattered troop of

country-actors. Those who fancy that they see here a thorough sample of

French acting, the _elite_ of the capital of civilised society, are

mistaken; and we perhaps should not undeceive them, but that we can

assure them that they have a pleasure to come, something to look forward

to, and something to look back upon, and which (we believe) can be found

only at Paris. Oh! Paris, thou hast the Louvre, the garden of the

Thuilleries, and the _Thêatre Français_; Madame Pasta we share by turns

with you, as the sun sheds its light on either world—the rest is

barbarous and common. A friend of ours once received a letter from a

friend of his, dated ROME, with three marks of admiration after it,

which he answered by writing LONDON, with four marks of admiration after

it: ‘and why shouldn’t he, since we had St. Paul’s, the Cartoons, the

Elgin Marbles, and the Bridges?’ As to the three first, they were not

ours; and as to the fourth, the reasoning puts me a little in mind of

Sir William Curtis’s, who remarked that ‘it was very good of God, that

wherever there was a great city, he had made a river by the side of it!’

There was another proud distinction, which our patriotic friend did not

enumerate, though it was a thumping make-weight in the scale, and might

have claimed a fifth mark of admiration, which was, that he himself was

there. This is the triumphant argument in every Englishman’s

imagination,—wherever he is, is the centre of gravity; whatever he calls

his own, is the standard of excellence. It is our desire to shake off

this feeling as much as possible that makes us frequent the theatre at

the English Opera-house, and try (all we can) to ‘leave our country and

ourselves’ at the door. Why in truth should an English Nobleman be

convinced in himself and speak upon that conviction in his place in

Parliament, that because he keeps a French cook, the French have no

genius for anything but cookery? Or why, my dear Madam, should you have

taken it in your head, that because you wear a French bonnet, there is

nothing in Paris but milliners’ girls who are no better than they should

be? Nay, that is what you really imagine, however you may deny it—but be

assured, good, gentle, honest, reflecting reader of either sex, who feel

your own existence so solid that every thing else is a fable to it, or

your own virtue so clear that everything else is a spot to it, that

there are things out of England besides what are imported into it—that

French women not only make caps and bonnets, but wear them with a

peculiar grace; that they have eyes glancing from under them full of

fire and discretion; that they do not make a false step at every turn,

though they do not walk like Englishwomen, that is, as if their limbs

were an incumbrance to them; that the Chamber of Deputies think your

Lordship’s speeches dry and tasteless, for want of a little French

seasoning; that there are cities not built of bricks, faces not made of

dough, a language that has a meaning though it is not ours, and virtue

that is neither a statue nor a mask! For instance, we think good-manners

is one part of ethics, and we do wish _en passant_ that our fine

gentlemen at the play would not loll on their seats, whistle, and thrust

their sticks nearly in your face to show their superiority to the

vulgar; and that those of the other sex, who are admitted on their good

behaviour could be prevailed on not to talk and laugh so loud, not to

nod or wink, not to slap their acquaintance on the back, or shut the

doors with such violence after them, to attract admirers and shew an

independent spirit. Strange that the English notion of independence

consists in giving offence to and displaying your contempt for others!

They order these things better in France, where they consult decency of

appearance at least, and Venus is a prude in public—not a hoyden or a

bully!

‘Our Cupid is a blackguard boy,

That thrusts his link in every face.’

This brings us back to the French Theatre. As we do not approve every

thing foreign or French, we are more bound to acknowledge and do justice

to what we do like. _Imprimis_, we abhor French pictures. In the second

place, we tolerate French tragedy. Thirdly, we adore French comedy. The

characteristic of this in its best state, and as compared with our

utmost efforts in the same line, is, that it is equally perfect

throughout; and as that great philosopher of idleness (Mr. Coleridge)

once wisely and wittily observed, ‘there is something in the idea of

perfection exceedingly satisfactory to the mind of man.’ It is not as

with us at present (it was not always so—or is it the haze of time, the

tints of youth that made the difference?) where the most we can expect

is one or two actors of disproportioned excellence, and all the others

merely to fill the stage; but there all are in their place, and all are

first-rate. Oh! it is a fine thing to see one of Moliere’s comedies

acted (as they should be) at the _Thêatre Français_, with the sense of

every pregnant line fully understood and developed, with the passion and

character delineated to the life, every situation painted, and every

shade and difference of absurdity hit off and realised; and not only

this, but the whole so managed, with such studious attention to the

public and respect to the art, that not the least bit of costume is out

of place, and (what is more important) that every part is filled by an

actor or actress not only who comprehends and enters into the spirit of

it, but who seems made for it in person, gesture and features, as if

they had been cast in a dramatic mould, or kept in a glass-case for that

purpose from the first representation to the present day. Thus the long,

nasal speeches are delivered by an actor with the prominent, pasteboard

nose and arched eyebrows of the Oratory, and whose unusual height and

shambling figure serve him as it were for a rostrum; the poetical

dedicator in the _Misanthrope_ has sparkling eyes and teeth, smiling

delighted on his patron and himself; the confidante of _Celimene_, in

the same piece, is slender, fragile, timid in appearance, a contrast to

the firm precision and maturer _enbon-point_ of Mademoiselle Mars; Orgon

has a little, round, dimpled, credulous face, and easy contented

corpulence; the _Tartuffe_ has the sneaking sanctity of a monk and the

grin of a monkey. Thus you have not only the poet’s verse exactly

expressed and recited; but you have, in addition, the natural history of

the part, the drapery, the grouping. The age of Louis XIV. revives again

in all its masqued splendour; the folding-doors are thrown open, and you

see men and women playing the fool deliciously, ‘new manners and the

pomp of elder days,’ court-airs, court-dresses, the strut, the shrug,

the bow, the curtsey, the paint, the powder, the patches, the perfume,

the laced ruffles, the diamond buckle, the hoop-petticoat. Happy time!

Enviable time to think of! When vanity and folly expanded in full bloom,

and were spread out ostentatiously like the figures in a gaudy tapestry,

instead of being folded up and thrust into a corner by the hand of a

cynic and austere philosophy; when personal appearance and amorous

intrigue were all in all; when a marquis stalked the God of his own

idolatry, and _Madame la Marquise_ was held for something divine by

_Monsieur Jourdain_; when the whole creation was supposed to be

concentred in the fantastic circle of lords and ladies, and the

universal, the abstract, and the critical were held in the utter

contempt which they deserve—and which they receive at the hands both of

the ignorant and the adept! Nothing that we know of is a specific for

conjuring up this shadow of the past, and making you (if you are in the

mood) feel like a great booby school-boy, with a large _bouquet_ at your

breast, or an antiquated fop with a bag-wig and sword—but sitting at the

_Thêatre Français_ with Mademoiselle Mars and the whole _corps

dramatique_ drawn up on the stage. Then you have the very thing before

you: it glitters in your eyes; it tingles in your ears, it sinks into

the heart, and makes warm tears roll down the cheek of those, who have

ever felt either what the present or the past is! It is said to be an

ill wind that blows nobody good; and probably we owe it to the very

exclusion of French players from general society, and their being

compelled in self-defence to devote themselves wholly to their

profession, that they keep up this sort of traditional copy of the

manners, peculiarities, and tone of another age, ‘unmixed with baser

matter.’ We could wish that a certain happy-spirited writer (who first

gave the true _pine-apple_ flavour to theatrical criticism, making it a

pleasant mixture of sharp and sweet) would resume the subject of the age

of Charles II. (our nearest approach to that of Louis XIV.) and as he

has shocked the upstart petulance of _Some of his Contemporaries_,

restore in his inimitable careless manner the wit and graces of a former

period.

We expected to have seen Monsieur Perlet on Thursday evening in the

_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_; and to make sure of the ground, had read three

acts in the morning with great care and an anticipated relish of the

acting. We were therefore disappointed; and the reader must accept of a

rhapsody in lieu of a criticism. We think it bad policy to have many new

pieces; for the English part of the audience in general require to

peruse the text beforehand in order to follow the performance. We like

to know exactly what we are about; and it is both a pride and a pleasure

to have an excuse for rubbing up our acquaintance with an old and

esteemed author. The universality of the French language is not an

unalloyed advantage to them: it saves the trouble of learning any other,

but the necessity of acquiring a new language is like the necessity of

acquiring a new sense. It is an increase of knowledge and liberality. We

are proud of understanding their authors. Why do they despise ours?

Because they are ignorant of them. If they had known what ‘stuff’ we are

made of, very likely we should not have beaten them. M. Perlet played

the part of a strolling comedian in the new piece of the _Landau_, and

eats and drinks in an admirable _bravura_ style at a gentleman’s house

on the road, where he passes himself off as a great man, and with that

lively absorption in the present enjoyment and disregard of the

consequences of his imposture, which are, we suspect, national traits.

In the _Landes_ which followed, he was equally happy in a poor,

frightened servant, and expressed the surprises of fear and the tricks

and disjointed pantomime antics, to which it resorted to screen itself,

with admirable quaintness and drollery. The swagger and self-possession

of the one character was totally opposed to the imbecility and

helplessness of the other. Madame Falcoz made her first appearance in

the _Tyran Domestique_ as _Madame Valmont_. She is an elegant woman and

an interesting actress, though with too much appearance of _still-life_.

This is not the case with Madame Daudel. She has all the vivacity and

bustle of a chambermaid. She ought always to come in with a broom in her

hand; or rather, it is quite unnecessary.

FRENCH PLAYS—(_Continued_)

_The Examiner._] [_March 30, 1828._

We exhausted that subject last week, and were complimented upon it,

which we took ill. Probably advisable to be ill this week, to let our

absence be felt, or to make up with scraps and quotation. To transcribe

four different accounts of the _Tartuffe_, Sir Walter Scott’s, Mr. Leigh

Hunt’s, Monsieur Perlet’s, and one of our own, and to make it understood

that the last is the best. To remark that Monsieur Perlet, ‘that soul of

pleasure and that life of whim,’ is a provoking actor—for there is no

fault to be found with him, and to give the reader an idea of his

peculiar excellence is next to impossible. Whatever he does, his ease,

self-possession, and spirit are the same. To make it a rule not to tell

any one who asks me the plot of the _Ecole des Maris_, but to tell it

myself. Borrowers of plots are like borrowers of snuff:—every one his

own _box-keeper_. (_Ha, ha, ha!_) The laugh here comes from a friend of

ours to whom we read this, and who kept repeating the whole

evening—‘Every man his own box-keeper.’ (_Ha, ha, ha!_) Very well

indeed. _Sganarelle_ and _Ariste_ are two brothers, both of them in

years, who have two wards, _Isabelle_ and _Leonore_, whom they propose

to marry. _Sganarelle_ is an old blockhead, who brings up his intended

bride with the greatest severity, and will let her see no plays, go to

no balls, receive no visits, lest it should corrupt her manners or

divert her affection from him. He is very angry at his brother _Ariste_,

who gives full liberty to his mistress _Leonore_, and contends that

bars, bolts, female Arguses, and ill-humour are not the way to make

women in love with virtue, or to prevent their inclination from

wandering. _Sganarelle_ laughs at him, but he turns out a true prophet.

_Isabelle_, not thinking the _disagreeable_ the most _agreeable_ thing

in the world, meets with a lover (_Valere_) more to her mind than her

guardian. And here begins the interest of the plot. Having no other mode

of communication, she sends _Sganarelle_ to him, to let him know that

she is apprized of the state of his affections, and to beg him not to

persecute her with his amorous thoughts, if he has any regard for her

honour or peace of mind. He understands the hint, and sends the supposed

husband away, delighted with his confusion and repulse, who has no

sooner returned to his intended, than she desires him to go back with a

letter, which _Ariste_ has just had the assurance to send her in his

absence, full of his absurd passion. This _Sganarelle_ consents to do,

but proposes to open the letter first, which she will not allow him to

do, saying it would betray curiosity to break the seal, and no woman of

virtue should feel even a wish to know the improper sentiments

entertained towards her. Her guardian delivers the letter with an air of

triumph and pity for his rival, which _Valere_ reads, and finds it a

frank and passionate declaration of _Isabelle’s_ attachment to him. Not

satisfied with this, she informs _Sganarelle_ that he has a design to

carry her off by force, who goes to reproach him with the baseness of

his conduct and the pretended terror and uneasiness of his ward.

_Valere_ affirming that _Sganarelle_ has no authority to bring him these

disdainful messages from the lady, _Sganarelle_ brings them together in

his presence, when an admirable scene of _double-entendre_ follows:

_Isabelle_ declaring that she sees two objects before her, one which she

adores, the other which she abhors, _Sganarelle_ taking to himself the

preference which is intended for _Valere_, and the latter rapturously

kissing her hand behind his back, while her guardian affectionately

embraces her. But in recompense for her fondness, he proposes to marry

her the next day instead of at the end of eight days; and this driving

_Isabelle_ to despair, she takes the resolution to quit the house in the

middle of the night, but is met by her guardian, who asking the meaning

of this nocturnal expedition, she tells him that her sister has come to

her house, violently in love with _Valere_, whom she is going in search

of, to console her; but _Sganarelle_ not being satisfied with this

assignation, will not allow her to remain, and presently after turns his

own bride out of doors, thinking it to be his brother’s ward _Leonore_,

and goes with great glee to inform _Ariste_ of the adventure, and to

lecture him on the difference of their schemes of female education. In

the meantime _Leonore_ comes in from a ball, is scandalized at the story

that she hears told of her; and the Notary that _Sganarelle_ had sent

for to witness her elopement and the treachery of _Valere_, having

married him to _Isabelle_, she comes out from his house, and explains

the whole mystery to the delight of every one but _Sganarelle_.—The plot

is charming, and the style is profuse of sense and wit; but there is

this remark to be made here, as on other of Moliere’s plays, that

however elegant, ingenious, or natural, the scene must be laid in

France, that the whole passes under that empire of words, which is

confined to her airy limits, and that there is a credulous and

unqualified assent to verbal professions necessary to carry on the plot,

which can be found nowhere but in France. This comedy was correctly but

somewhat faintly represented. Mademoiselle Falcoz, who played

_Isabelle_, was dressed as we have an idea servants were formerly

dressed, with a full handkerchief and a black silk apron. Perhaps it was

the costume of young ladies at that period; but we suspect that this is

carrying literal correctness too far, where it shocks instead of

assisting the imagination, and instructing us at the expense of our

amusement, which is against the law of dramatic propriety. If the play

was not done quite as it might be, it received a brilliant comment from

the looks of some of the audience: and as the stage is a mirror to

nature, so these are a mirror to the stage itself. Bright eyes! Laughing

lips! Tell-tale eyebrows! spare us or we retire incontinently from the

French play,—‘To the woods, to the waves, to the winds we’ll complain’

of your inexorable cruelty and endless persecution!

THE THEATRES AND PASSION-WEEK

_The Examiner._] [_April 6, 1828._

This being _Passion-week_, there was no play. ‘Because thou art

virtuous, shall we not have cakes and ale?’ In truth, however, we have

no objection to this alternation of festivity and mourning: it mimics

the order of the natural world. We require a truce with pleasure as well

as pain, to enable us to endure the one or to enjoy the other: and we

must put a stop at some period or other to the whirl of dissipation,

unless we would grow quite stupid or giddy. One week out of the

fifty-two, in which the theatres shut their doors in your face, in which

the play-bills do not flaunt on either side of the way, and you are not

followed through the streets while the letter-bell is ringing in your

ears, with the importunate repetition of ‘A Bill for Covent Garden or

Drury Lane,’ is not amiss or out of reason; and the cry of ‘Hot-cross

buns’ fills up the vacancy, and dallies with the interval of suspense

not disagreeably. There is a large class of persons who only go to the

play during Easter: it is hard if we cannot stay away from it during

Passion-week. Our expectations and satisfaction are enhanced by the

short restraint put upon them, and outward prevarication with our

scruples. Without a little spice of hypocrisy or gravity the world would

lose its savour: and by the periodical mark of reprobation thus set upon

it, the play becomes a sort of pleasant sin all the rest of the year. As

for the holiday-folks, Passion-week is to them a kind of bleak desert,

beyond which they behold the land of promise,—a _ha-ha_, or line of

circumvallation round the enchanted castle of Pleasure, over which they

rush to storm the citadel with double eagerness and obstreperous glee,

escaping from the formal gloom of Ash-Wednesday and Good-Friday, into

the bright radiance of Easter-Sunday, as from the grave to a bridal, and

‘seizing their pleasures

‘With rough strife,

Thorough the iron gates of life.’

We do not think the flutter of hope, the sparkle of joy, in the young or

old adventurers, on these occasions of mirth and licence, would be

complete, were it not for the sense of general restraint and privation

which precedes them, and makes the release from the dead pause, the

involuntary self-denial of the past week, a more precious achievement to

all parties concerned. At least, this inference is pretty plainly

discernible in the smiling looks and uneasy delight of the truant

visitors in the boxes, and the noise and uproar of the overflowing

galleries. To those who object to the disorderly interruptions of the

latter, and consider the being present at an Easter-play as vulgar on

that account, it may be proper to observe that there is no part of an

audience so quiet and attentive as the galleries after the curtain once

draws up, if it is not the fault of the actors or the author, who do not

make themselves heard or understood so far; and again, we conceive it

might be of service to dramatic writers sometimes to hazard their

persons or compromise their dignity in the gallery, to see what

impression their scenes make on hearts fresh from nature’s mint, instead

of stationing themselves in the dress-boxes, to overhear polite

whispers, or moulding their features in the glass of newspaper criticism

the next day. The tears shed in silence by these untutored spectators,

the breath held in, the convulsive sob, the eager gaze, the glance of

delight, would afford better hints and lessons how to revive the spirit

and the pathos of the primitive stage, than any instructions derived

from drivelling Jerdan or from ranting Croly—nay, than from our own

columns, the only ones, as modest Mr. Blackwood would say, worthy of the

least attention in such matters. As to the players themselves, we do not

know how Passion-week sits upon them. One would think it would be

welcome to them as a break in the routine of business, as a pause in the

wear-and-tear of life: but there is no saying. For they are so

‘stretched upon the rack of ecstasy,’ that almost any respite from it

may be scarcely endurable. The public eye, the public voice, becomes a

part of a man’s self, which he can hardly do without, even for an

instant. The player out of his part is like the dram-drinker without his

dram, the snuff-taker without his box. What organ is so sensitive as

that of vanity? What thirst so insatiable, so incessant, as that of

praise? The meagre days of Lent, one would argue previously, would be

‘gaudy-days’ to his Majesty’s servants, the drudges of public

recreation,—snatched from the town, and given to retirement and

oblivion,—brief interval to allay the feverish irritation of popular

applause, to soothe the smart of mortification and disappointment. But

no! the successful candidate thinks every moment lost in which he is

robbed of the need of admiration; the unsuccessful is impatient to

retrieve some error, to convince the public of theirs:—the hopeless

performer thinks it better to be hissed than not noticed at all. Even

the scene-shifters and candle-snuffers (to talk in the old style) fancy

themselves, in a full house and busy night, persons of importance; and

when left to themselves, must feel like fish out of water:—nothing else

but the want of the customary excitement could probably enable actors to

repeat their parts night after night: they stagger through them like

drunken men. Many of the most fortunate seem uneasy, listless, and

dissatisfied, when off the stage, because they do not see a thousand

faces beaming with delight, because they do not hear at every step the

shouts of Gods and men. Why do they not resort to Bartholomew-fair,

where they may act every half-hour during the day, and not get a wink of

sleep at night for the noise of cymbals and rattles? This is as if a man

could never be easy unless he saw his person reflected in a thousand

mirrors, or heard every word he utters repeated by a hundred echoes.

Contempt, poverty, pain, want, and ‘all the natural ills that flesh is

heir to,’ are preferable to this attainment of all that can be desired,

and the craving after more. The lady in _Love’s Labour Lost_ condemns

her lover _Biron_, for his excess of levity, ‘to jest a twelvemonth in

an hospital.’ For ourselves, we would impose it as a useful penance on

those who are spoiled by the admiration of friends, to take the stage to

the _Land’s End_, and return by themselves, so as to breathe for a few

days out of the atmosphere of habitual adulation; and as to actors (who

are anything more than _walking gentlemen_) we think they should be

bound over never to sing a song, or tell a story in private. Their

theatrical pulse is already at a hundred, without shining in company.

Those who have nothing to say but ‘what is set down for them,’ stand the

best chance for repose and moderation, and are also likely to make the

best actors. An actor has not to study his own part, but somebody

else’s, as a painter should not be taken up with himself, but his

sitters.

The account of the death of the late Mr. Conway, the actor, came this

week—a week of dole. It was melancholy enough, and must have occasioned

regret to some who had at any time commented freely on his acting. Yet

the original cause of it was not his fault, nor that of the critics—but

rather of those who pushed him forward to run the gauntlet of public

opinion, and attract a little momentary wonder and curiosity, without

his being prepared to stand the trial, or meet the consequences. Popular

favourites are too much like the innocent victims of superstition, led

out, garlanded with flowers, to slaughter and to sacrifice. This was, we

think, the case with Mr. Conway. He was a man of fine personal

appearance, of modesty, and merit; but his more than usual height, and

the disproportion between the shewiness of his figure and his genius for

the drama (though he was by no means devoid of passion or talent) which

at first made crowds of idle people run to look at and applaud him,

afterwards subjected him to unavoidable, though in one sense (and such

he felt it) unjust satire. It cannot be denied that he played _Jaffier_,

for instance, with considerable force and feeling; and had he been of

the ordinary stature (which is as necessary on the stage as in a group

of statuary) he would have been highly respectable in that and other

parts requiring a certain mixture of tenderness and vehemence. As it

was, those who had at first extolled him to the skies, now swelled the

cry against him; and the honey of adulation was naturally turned into

gall and bitterness. Young, enthusiastic, and sincere, he attributed to

malice and rooted enmity what was owing to accident, and the caprice and

levity of the world, who keep up the sense of self-importance and

excitement, by loading their thoughtless favourite with caresses one

moment, and treating him with every mark of obloquy the next. Poor

Conway was not prepared for this; he thought their admiration of him

lasting and invaluable, their desertion wounded him to the quick. He did

not know that the town was a hardened jilt, whose fondness or aversion

are equally suspicious. He retired from the conflict, but bore with him

the sense of ill-treatment which he had not knowingly merited, of

disappointed hopes, which only the waters of oblivion could wash out,

and which should deter others from encountering the same risk, who are

not sure of the victory, or are not armed with fortitude equally proof

against the homage or insults of mankind. Mr. Conway in his manners was

mild and unaffected, spirited in his conduct, and if not a scholar, was

distinguished by a love for reading and study.

CHARLES KEAN

_The Examiner._] [_April 13, 1828._

We went on Monday to see young Mr. Kean in _Lovers’ Vows_, with the

intention of expressing an opinion; but we have nothing to add in the

way of criticism to what we have already said. We will however in so

delicate a matter venture on two general remarks for our own

satisfaction, and we should hope for that of others. The first is, it

appears to us clear that Mr. Kean, _jun._, will never make so great an

actor as his father; and if not, he had better rest contented with his

father’s fame. The Marquis of Douro does not, we daresay, think of

fighting the battle of Waterloo over again: why then should the son of

Mr. Kean wish to lay up any hard-earned and doubtful theatrical laurels

of his own? The crammed pit of Covent-Garden is his Mount St. Jean: the

third act of _Othello_ should be his escutcheon and his hereditary

coat-of-arms. A pettifogging, cringing lawyer, a leader of a gang of

ruffians, is made a lord, and ennobles a race of ciphers: if this is

right, then why should not a man of genius reflect some of his glory on

those next to him, and leave the dower of his great name to his

immediate posterity? Because the gratitude of the public is insincere,

and nobility a mere state-trick. It is not sentiment, but servility,

that inclines us to pay respect to a long line of nobles or of princes.

Take from the Marquis of Douro his estate of Strathfieldsay, and in a

few years he might be in the King’s Bench, and the _Times_ newspaper

would not subscribe five pounds to help him out. If Mr. Kean had left a

hundred thousand pounds behind him, his son might have sat for a close

borough, or have made a ‘vulgar’ Minister of State. We _do_ think there

should be some distinctive mark, some ribbon of a Legion of Honour, with

the smallest possible reversion of independence, some Tyburn ticket of

merit, reserved for the sons of the Muses and the bastards of fortune,

to exempt them alike from starving and the office of serving the public

(which is much the same thing) for three generations. People talk of

birth as necessary to honour and to power: did not the popes, the sons

of peasants or of nobody, set their feet upon the necks of monarchs?

People talk of the upstart pretensions of authors and men of intellect

in modern times: did not the priest (the learned men of their day) come

in as the first estate between heaven and the nobles? Why then taunt the

flame of genius with being earth-born? It is the dotage of a prejudice

to do so. We repeat, the sons of celebrated men are hardly off: the

example of their parents (together with necessity) urges them to do

something: that very example, from being too near, and almost seeming to

save them the trouble of exertion, precludes the possibility of success.

Even where the genius might be the same, the imitation and also the

habitual idea of doing something extraordinary without knowing what, is

prejudicial, if not fatal; and if they wish to turn out anything, they

should strike into a path the opposite of what is always before them.

Young Kean perhaps would shine as a University-wrangler, or a

conveyancer under the bar; and the son of a philosopher should go to

court! Again, Mr. Kean is said by his friends to be a promising young

actor. We have nothing to say to that; but we will tell him one thing,

there is no such person as a promising actor. It is here, as in all

similar pursuits, performance or nothing. We do not say no great actor

improves, but no actor becomes great by improvement. The sun is seen as

soon as it appears above the horizon: there is the same glory round its

rising and its setting: so may it always be with the sun of genius,

which is the lamp of the world! Garrick fell as it were from the clouds:

Mr. Kean’s father rose at once from obscurity. The late Mr. Kemble was

the only actor that we remember to have attained to the first rank by

gradual advances; and he was sustained in his progress by great

stateliness of manner and advantages of person. In general, those who

are always improving on themselves, are surpassed by others, and

complain that, as they are about to seize the wreath of fame, it is

snatched from them by some bolder and more fortunate hand. We do not

presume to sit on Mr. Kean’s _quantum meruit_—we will not—but if he is

not likely to become a first-rate actor, his name forbids him to be

aught less. If he knows our tone in speaking when we are serious or

merely splenetic, he will know that these remarks are dictated by

anything but a feeling hostile to him.

A new melo-dramatic entertainment succeeded, called _The Dumb Savoyard

and his Monkey_. The story is in few words, as follows: The _Count

Maldecini_ having been condemned to die (we know not why—for these

inventions plunge us at once _in medias res_) his wife accompanied by

their little child appears suddenly on the stage with a pardon for him.

The ferryman at Ober Wesel, however, refuses to carry her up the river,

as the hour is too late; and she is in despair, when the Savoyard, with

the assistance of his monkey, undertakes to convey her to the place of

destination. They arrive safely at the Falls of the Grenfells, near the

salt-mine, in which her husband is confined, when they are attacked by a

band of robbers who take a number of valuable ornaments from her, and

among the rest the morocco-case, containing her husband’s pardon; but

this, at her passionate and distracted entreaty, the chief restores in a

fit of generosity, and with an appropriate speech for a German robber.

Meantime, the monkey contrives to pick the pardon out of the case, and

hide it in a crevice of the rock, on the top of which he sits grinning,

the demon of mischief and meddlesomeness. When the _Countess_ arrives at

the prison, she accordingly misses what she had built all her hopes

upon, but she deceives the jailor and escapes with her husband, also by

the aid of the Savoyard and the dextrous _Marmozette_. They are pursued

and overtaken just at the very spot where the precious document had been

lost; and as the Count is about to be shot, in conformity to his

sentence, which he reads and very sentimentally and loyally approves,

the monkey betrays the hiding-place of the pardon, which the frantic

_Countess_ eagerly rescues from his grasp, and the whole ends happily.

Mrs. W. West played the heroine, and looked forlorn and interesting.

Mrs. Barrymore was _Pipino_, the Dumb Savoyard, and made a very pretty

boy. As to the nimble _Marmozette_ (Master Wieland), if it depended on

us, we would make him skip. Our old acquaintance _Jocko_ has left a

numerous progeny behind him, and we are afraid we shall never see the

end of the breed. Why, in the midst of the beautiful and enchanting

scenery on the banks of the Rhine (so admirably represented in this

piece) must we have an artificial monster staring us in the face like an

ugly looking-glass the whole time. We have no patience on this point. We

never could bear to see that branch of the species on or off the stage,

and would shoot them like the man in Candide, even at a risk of similar

consequences. We have no need of a menagerie in a play-house; the money

taken at the door on such occasions should be a deodand to the

proprietors of Exeter-’Change. We wish the _Times_, in its gravity,

would take up the subject, and with its leaden mace drive these _lusus

naturæ_ and nauseous _double-entendres_ from the scene.—We did not

recover our equanimity till Miss Foote, as _Meggy Macgilpin_, and her

pretty Highland dress, put us into good humour; and O’Keefe’s song of

_Twang twang darillo_, between Gatty and Russell, scattered every

particle of bile in a roar of laughter.

COVENT-GARDEN.

The holiday attraction of the week has been a melodrama called

_Tuckitomba_, said to be founded on a fact which happened in Jamaica

fifty years ago. The interest turns on a black sorceress who steals her

master’s child out of revenge, on an old pirate (_Tuckitomba_) who runs

away with a mulatto-girl for love, and on the blowing up of the vessel

in which they set sail for Africa, by the carelessness of a tailor on

board (Blanchard) who sets fire to the powder-magazine with the contents

of his tobacco-pipe. There was a great deal of bustle, and a want of

interest in this piece. The prominent trait was the acting of Keeley,

who is called ‘for shortness’ Goliah. This gentleman really answers to

_Falstaff’s_ description of ‘a man made after supper of a

cheese-paring.’ He is a shred of comedy; a pocket-Liston. He is great in

little parts, and makes an amusing approach to a nonentity.—The Minor

Theatres have each had their novelties during the week, and been

tolerably successful. The critics are divided on the temper and

behaviour of John Bull at this season. Some say he was lumpish and

leaden at Drury-Lane on Monday, others, that he was in all his glory at

Covent-Garden on the same evening. It is from seeing the confusion and

uncertainty that prevail in the most authentic reports that we propose

shortly to publish two _Examiners_ a week, to set the town right in

these and such-like particulars, and to save them the trouble of

consulting the daily papers altogether. As to John’s behaviour, pleased

or sulky, drunk or sober, we never could see any difference in it. Where

we were, a man stood up on a bench in the pit, and another insisting on

his getting down, and on his refusal threatening to call him out the

next day, the first made answer—‘Aye, if your master will let

you!’—‘Master! what do you mean by that? I have no master: I come and go

where I please!’ The women now interfered, and one of them clapped her

handkerchief to her husband’s mouth to prevent further disagreeables.

All an Englishman’s ideas are modifications of his will; and it is

strange that with all his boasted independence and equality, he thinks

he has a right to insult every one who is not a better man than himself.

The reason is, he has no respect for himself, nor consequently for

others, except for some external advantage of wealth or situation; and

his ill-humour can only be bribed to keep the peace by his

self-interest. ‘Vice to be hated needs but to be seen:‘—we are sure that

this at least may be said of ill-manners.

Turn we from them to the French play, where the object is to enjoy the

scene, to be pleased with yourself, and not to insult your neighbours,

or inquire which is master and which is man. There have been several

_debûts_, all very creditable and successful, Monsieur Berteche, Madame

Beaufre, and Mademoiselle Irma. We saw the former (who is of the

Mademoiselle Mars school, and whose tongue runs faster than a

race-horse) in the _Ecole des Veillards_ with Monsieur Perlet, who plays

the jealous husband with great point and spirit: but shall we add, that

in the passionate parts, he does not _let out_ enough, there is an

interdicted and internal manner, a fidgetty and confined air, which is

probably owing to the subordinate parts in which he usually acts. In

this comedy, a gentleman pulls off his coat on the stage, which is with

us an indecorum, except in farce. We mention this to show the difference

of feeling in such matters. We missed Perlet in the _Cheats of Scapin_:

he always contrives to _cheat_ us of our favourite Moliere. But we had a

full taste of him in the _Anglaises pour rire_. And these are our fair

country-women—so they sit, speak, walk, sing, and dance, in the eyes of

foreigners! No, it is Monsieur Pelissie and Monsieur Perlet—but very

like!

SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS.

_The Examiner._] [_April 27, 1828._

The last week or two has been rich in theatricals; Miss Stephens in

_Love in a Village_, where the scene opens with those two young beauties

sitting in a bower of roses like a flower stuck in the stomacher of

beauty, and where that unconscious siren ‘warbles her native wood-notes

wild’ with such simplicity and sweetness; Charles Kemble in the

_Inconstant_, who in one glorious scene plays tragedy and comedy to the

life, and in one short moment tastes the ‘fierce extremes’ of pleasure

and agony, of life and death; and _Othello_, with bumpers and three

times three; to say nothing of Madame Vestris in the _Invincibles_, and

Mr. John Reeve in the immortal _Major Sturgeon_. Why then did we take no

notice of them? Notice we have taken, but it has been with ‘our mind’s

eye,’ in ‘our heart’s core.’ Ill will it fare with us, when we do not

cast a sidelong glance at those pregnant abridgments, the play-bills,

and when their flaunting contents, that unfold to us the map of our

life, no longer excite a smile or a sigh. Any one who pleases may then

write our epitaph, though it will not be worth writing. At such a

season, for instance, we saw Mrs. Siddons in such a part for the first

time; in such another, Kemble walked with regal air across the stage,

and his stately brow needed no diadem to set it off; in such a character

Bannister was in all his glory; in that, Suett vented his resistless

folly; here, Munden went the whole length of his face; here, Lewis was

all life and air; here, Jack Palmer was great indeed; here, King was

bitter in _Touchstone_, and Miss Pope romantic in _Audrey_; then, Mrs.

Goodall played the part of _Rosalind_, and tripped in becoming page’s

attire through the forest of Ardennes (days and years long past!); here,

Dignum warbled as _Amiens_ (before we had heard of the peace of Amiens);

and here, Mrs. Jordan’s laugh comes over the heart, and if it has grown

dry and seared, fills it with the remembrance of joy and gladness once

more. Dodd and Parsons hover in the extreme verge of the horizon, but

gay shadows, airy shapes. Then such a one took leave of the stage,

drawing a narrower circle within the natural circle of his being; then

Liston appeared in the _Finger-Post_, looking like a finger-post, with

his nose only pointing to fun; Elliston in _Wild Oats_ (will he never

sow ’em?); Matthews in the _Bee-Hive_, as busy as a bee; Miss Kelly in

chambermaids; Miss O’Neill in heroines; last, not least, Mr. Kean, the

‘bony prizer’ of the stage, who has knocked all other reputations and

his own on the head. What a host of names and recollections is here! How

many more are omitted, names that have embodied famous poets’ verse and

been the ‘fancy’s midwife,’ that have gladdened a nation and made life

worth living for, that have made the world pass in review as a gaudy

pageant, and set before us in a waking dream the bodily shapes and

circumstances of all that is most precious in joy or in sorrow! And is

it come to this, that the drama is accounted vulgar by the vulgar, and

that we are to cut our old acquaintances the players, those who have

thrown a light upon the morning, noon, and evening of our day, ‘gay

creatures of the element, that live ‘i th’ rainbow and play in the

plighted clouds,’ and who have taken us so many hundred times to sit and

laugh with them, or shed ‘tears such as angels weep,’ at a height where

we could look down at the sordid of the earth—and at a universe of

Operas, with their naked _figurantes_, and sense and soul muffled up in

sound to suit the callous taste or ranker gust of ears polite! We may

have said all this before; and here lies the misfortune of our office. A

theatrical audience is supposed to vary every night: the _reading

public_ is assumed to be always the same body. We could praise Mr.

Charles Kemble’s acting in _Young Mirabel_ every time he does it, and

are always glad to think he is going to play what does such credit to

his art and gives such pleasure to others; but we can say nothing about

it, having once expressed our opinion to that effect. An actor repeats a

favourite part till farther notice; a singer may be _encored_ in an air

as often as his friends please; thank God, we have stockpieces that

never wear out: but who ever ventured upon reviving a defunct criticism?

It might pass with the million, but some good-natured friend would

betray us. The writer’s secret would be found out, and he would be had

up as an imposter. Nevertheless, having meditated a new criticism (or

eulogy, for it is the same thing) on Mr. Kean’s _Othello_, and the

overflowing house having excluded us from the Free-List, we venture upon

borrowing an old one; and if we were to try, we do not know that we

could _mend our draught_.

‘Mr. Kean’s _Othello_ is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in the

world. It is impossible either to describe or praise it adequately. We

have never seen any actor so wrought upon—so “perplexed in the extreme.”

The energy of passion, as it expresses itself in action, is not the most

terrific part: it is the agony of his soul, shewing itself in looks and

tones of voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the

fiend-like insinuations of _Iago_, he presented the very face, the

marble aspect of Dante’s _Count Ugolino_. On his fixed eyelids “horror

sat plumed.” In another part, where a gleam of hope or of tenderness

returns to subdue the tumult of his passions, his voice broke in

faultering accents from his overcharged breast. His lips might be said

less to utter words than to distil drops of blood gushing from his

heart. An instance of this was in his pronunciation of the line—

“Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.”

The whole of this last speech was indeed given with exquisite force and

beauty. We only object to the virulence with which he delivers the last

line, and with which he stabs himself—a virulence which _Othello_ would

neither feel against himself at the moment, nor against the “turbaned

Turk” (whom he had slain) at such a distance of time. His exclamation on

seeing his wife, “I cannot think but _Desdemona’s_ honest,” was the

“glorious triumph of exceeding love,” a thought flashing conviction on

his mind, and irradiating his countenance with joy, like sudden

sunshine. In fact almost every scene or sentence in this extraordinary

exhibition is a master-piece of natural passion. The convulsed motion of

the hands, and the involuntary swelling of the veins in the forehead, in

some of the most painful situations, should not only suggest topics of

critical panegyric, but might furnish studies to the painter or

sculptor.’

After _Othello_ on Wednesday, _The Mayor of Garratt_ followed ‘with

kindliest change.’ Mr. Reeve played _Major Sturgeon_, and Mr. Keeley,

_Jerry Sneak_. Comparisons are odious: _therefore_ they are made. Mr.

Keeley’s _Jerry_ was not so good as Russell’s formerly; nor Mr. Reeve’s

_Major Sturgeon_ equal to Dowton’s. This is saying nothing, for both

those performances were of the very first water. Mr. Keeley’s person is

diminutive, and he seems the natural butt of a virago: Russell was a

goodly man of his inches; it was his spirit only that was hen-pecked,

and that submitted to buffets and blows. Dowton again was the model of a

train-band Captain in his own esteem, and never doubted of the ineffable

superiority of his own pretensions: Reeve, in the midst of his insolence

and vapouring, has a look of _quizzing_ himself, and sees through the

ridicule of his own character. He however throws much humour and

fantastic absurdity into the part, _à-la-Liston_; but his drollery is

conscious and knowing, not vacant and absolutely spontaneous, like that

of his unrivalled prototype. At the end of the farce, there was some

division of opinion whether the piece was not low, as if that which had

mainly driven such manners and characters almost from the knowledge of

the present generation was not a master-stroke of genius, and in fact an

historical drama.

THE COMPANY AT THE OPERA.

_The Examiner._] [_May 4, 1828._

COVENT-GARDEN.

There has been a new farce here (called, disagreeably enough, _The

Little Offsprings_). If Mr. Peake is one of the most amusing of our

farce writers, it is because he pretends to be nothing better. He

professes to write a _farce_, not a _genteel_ comedy; and he generally

succeeds accordingly. Our complaint against his present novelty is, that

unlike most of his previous ones, it is not quite _broad_ enough. He

himself will smile at this objection, because assuredly it is quite

broad enough where it _is_ broad. But it is not ‘as _broad_ as it is

_long_,’ which is what all farces ought to be. Young ladies as well bred

as they are well dressed, and young gentlemen ‘to match,’ are

interlopers in the region of farce. Let Mr. Peake eschew all such

amiable insipidities, and he will do well. In short, let him cultivate

the _gentilities_ of life not a step farther than they fall in with the

case (anything but genteel) of Mr. Wrench; and then he cannot go very

far wrong. Above all, let him have nothing to say to young ladies who

are a whit more like _Lady Teazle_ than Miss Kelly is. They are ticklish

handling in all cases; and in his there is no answering for the mischief

they may do.

‘Crabbed age and youth

Cannot live together’;—

and no more can the ultra-ridiculous and the flat common-place—Mr.

Keeley as a Savoyard organ-boy, and Miss Goward as a sensitive

school-girl. The contrast (so to speak) does not harmonize. _Au reste_,

the name of the new farce is the worst thing belonging to it. It

includes a fox-hunting Admiral, played, or rather worked, with great

effect by Bartley;—a bluff and blundering boatswain, which Fawcett acted

to the life, that is to say, somewhat disagreeably;—a person wearing a

white hat and pea-green pantaloons, things always enough to make the

sight of Mr. Wrench pleasant; a suppositious spinster (Mrs. Davenport),

who turns out to be the parent of one of the ‘little offsprings,’ her

brother the Admiral being similarly situated as to the other;—and

finally, the ‘offsprings’ themselves, played (as aforesaid) by Miss

Goward and Mr. Keeley, and about whom there is a good deal of ingenious

equivoque which touches upon the extreme edge where such matters are,

now-a-days, so apt to fall over. They pretty nearly did so on the above

occasion, which has, no doubt, induced Mr. Peake to make the proper

sacrifices to the suspicious delicacy of ‘some people’s ears.’

KING’S THEATRE.

_Don Giovanni_ was played at this theatre on Thursday for the benefit of

Madame Caradori, in which Mademoiselle Sontag sustained the part of

_Donna Anna_ with great truth and effect.

We said something lately on the company at the holiday theatres: we have

something to say on the company at the Opera. We have little hesitation

in stating (we speak of the pit) that in its way it is quite as bad:

from boisterous rudeness and familiarity it rises into distance and

superciliousness. If for instance at the Surrey or the Coburg you see

two fellows quarrelling which is the master and which is the man, at the

King’s Theatre you hear an elegant discourse on ‘the higher and the

lower orders.’ A critic at Covent-Garden or Drury-Lane thinks Sadler’s

Wells or the East London _low_: a critic of the self-same stamp, but one

of softer phrase, pronounces the condemnation of the drama in good set

terms as altogether exploded in the fashionable circles, and as

flourishing most in our manufacturing towns and the semi-barbarous

states of North America. You hear another take up the lamentable theme

of an interval in the succession of regular Opera-singers, as if it were

a pause in nature; and when notwithstanding he has heard Braham sing

very well in ‘_this house_,’ repeating the words as if the atmosphere at

the Haymarket wafted other sounds than common air, and music were a

geographical distinction. Thus it is that an Englishman is always

pinning his faith on places and persons; and that he cannot arrive (for

the soul of him, let him be taught and trammelled how he will) at the

contemplation of an abstract idea: and yet the booby talks of

refinement. He has no conception of anything but from the situation

where he finds it; or the figure it makes in the eyes of some one as

wise as himself; or from its being a foil to some defect in others. You

hear none of this gabble at the _Thêatre Français_, or the Italian Opera

in Paris, about those exploded authors Racine and Molière, or the low

buffoonery of the _Theatre des Varietés_, because they understand or

relish both: we, unfortunately, who understand and relish neither, are

obliged to create an artificial admiration of what is exotic out of our

contempt for what is native, and pamper our pretensions to refinement by

constantly dwelling on the vulgarity of the lower orders. Delightful it

is to hear the Frenchwomen speaking of ‘the vulgar Englishwomen’ in a

lump, as these same Englishwomen speak of all the rest of their

country-women! In France, to laugh and weep (at least with the comic or

the tragic Muse) is not held vulgar. All wit is not confined to a shake

of the toe, nor all sense to the squall of an Opera-singer, though they

dance and give concerts as well as we. But in England our object is not

the pursuit of pleasure, but to run away from the pleasures of others;

and when a taste for the drama or anything else becomes a little common,

we grow sulky and insensible by way of being spiritual and refined. We

see no other refinement in the case, unless the getting rid of thought

and feeling is a proof of refinement; and the _figurantes_ at the Opera

are an intermediate link, a soft imperceptible gradation, between the

grossness of human passion and the absence of all human sympathy. Do the

upper classes speak in recitative? Do they, in answer to a common

question, vault into the air? Perhaps a Noble Duke might make one of his

speeches intelligible by singing it, or solve the difficulties of the

Corn question by calling out the Lord Chancellor to dance a minuet with

him! We import Opera-singers, dancers, kings! Liberal land! That knows

its own deficiencies in what is refined and elevated! Happy, that it

finds others so ready to oblige it! All that they get from us, is hard

blows or hard cash: all that we get from them, is politeness and luxury!

In a word the question comes to this—_Are the English an essentially

vulgar people or not?_ If all that they have of their own is vulgar and

unworthy of the notice of the upper classes, then the unavoidable

inference is that the upper classes themselves are unworthy to see

anything better, and are the most vulgar, fashionable audience in

Europe. If we have the least possible capacity for the fine arts,

namely, dancing, music, painting, then we must be, in spite of

letters-patent of nobility, or a box at the opera, or a _chapeau-bras_,

or an opera-glass, the worst possible judges of them; and if we would be

anything at all, must set up for something else. Indeed, the effects are

plain enough. There is that little Brocard; she was at one time a model

of voluptuous, languishing grace; but it was thrown away upon the higher

orders, and she now does nothing but walk on the tips of her toes. The

little trifler, she that we have praised so often! We are after all in

such matters a Bartlemy-fair audience—or for a tumbler’s show! Is Madame

Pasta a favourite with the great vulgar? Not in the least. They hear her

fame, but not her. What piteous, vacant aspects in the fine gentleman in

the pit the first night of Mademoiselle Sontag’s appearance! And what

would they not have given (before committing themselves beyond an

applause which might be construed into a good-natured encouragement) to

know what the newspapers would say the next day! What then is the amount

of this exclusive preference and fastidious superiority of fashionable

taste? Mere arrogance and affectation. Look at the men in the pit. Are

they in raptures with the ballet or the music? They are solely occupied

in thinking how they themselves look, whether their coat is of the right

cut, their cravat properly tied, and whether their next neighbour is

good enough for them to speak to. Each opera-beau ought to have a

glass-case over him to keep him within a certain precise sphere of

_dandy_ repulsiveness and self-importance. In an O. P. row you are in

danger of being knocked down: in the _still-life_ of the Opera-house,

every one seems in fear of touching his neighbour’s elbow. The

disagreeable either in thought or action is inseparable from our fogs

and sea-coal fires. Look at the women in the boxes. Are they at their

ease? Or do they not keep one fixed attitude, or else loll, and laugh,

and stare without meaning? The great thing is not to seem to take an

interest; and this is not difficult, where none is felt. If to paint, to

dress, to intrigue, and be insensible, is the height of refinement, then

the women in the lobbies are even more refined than they. Do we then

subscribe to this total disqualification of the English character? No:

we have hearts and heads for other things besides the mechanism of the

senses. We have books, which we send through the heart of all Europe;

but our people of fashion and our parade of gentility are the

laughing-stock of the world. One service which the work on _Lord Byron

and his Contemporaries_ has done the public, one offence it has given to

the insolent few, is that it shews that even the strongest minds are not

exempt from the shallowness and pedantry of this kind of jargon. The

Noble Poet somewhere says that he and Tom Moore wrote well, because he

himself from birth, and Mr. Moore from circumstances (circumstances

indeed!) moved in the fashionable world. If this were all, we should

have some thousands of fine geniuses come out every year, ‘the mob of

gentlemen who write with ease!’ Why, instead of opening the casket to

examine the contents, are we to be always looking at the outside? Or

why, having found a jewel in it, persist that the wrapper was coarse

brown paper? When we hear all the inhabitants of this great country

whose names are not inscribed in the Red Book, or who are not crammed

into the stifling, glittering atmosphere of the King’s Theatre,

stigmatised with the sweeping epithet of ‘the lower orders,’ our

patience is a little out at elbows, and the answer, we fear, will not

come from the pen alone! What is it that my Lord-Duke brings with him

from the Continent—that he shews to his fellow-travellers as a precious

curiosity—that he folds up and unfolds with such care? Is it a cameo, a

drawing by Raphael, a bit of Claude? It is a copy of the Great Tun of

Heidelberg! When did the polite world think it allowable for the last

time to throng to the English theatre in crowds and with their

expectations excited to the utmost? To see young Mr. Kean, a boy just

come from Eton (classical reminiscence!) in the part of _Norval_! Or to

see the bottle-conjuror, or a thing born with a crown on its head, or

any other rare and striking novelty! Spare us, man of fashion, in the

name of refinement!

THE BEGGARS’ OPERA

_The Examiner._] [_May 11, 1828._

COVENT-GARDEN.

On Tuesday, the _Beggars’ Opera_ was acted here; or rather, half the

_Beggars’ Opera_ to half a house. This is as it should be: if the

Managers start and shrug up their shoulders at one half of a play, the

public will shrink from the other. It is always wrong to cry _stale

fish_. We suspect some clerical critic, some _Jeremy Collier_ of the

_Times_, has had a hand in this: what have these reverend divines to

do with profane stage-plays, any more than poets and novelists with

writing _lay-sermons_? Everything in our day is turned topsy-turvy:

nothing prevails but ‘vanity, chaotic vanity.’ The consequence of this

sort of slur and neglect thrown upon the piece is, that it is

indifferently acted. There is not, in the expressive green-room

phrase, ‘a hand in the house’: and without that, the performer has no

heart to proceed. A player can no more act with spirit unless he sees

the reflection of his excellences in the looks and satisfaction of the

audience, than a fine lady can dress without a looking-glass. He makes

a hit and it fails of effect; he is therefore thrown out, and the next

time he does wrong or he does nothing. _Filch_ (Meadows) picks a

pocket as if he was afraid of being detected by the pit: Miss Kelly is

shocked at the part of _Lucy_, and flounces and elbows through it as

if she wished to get out of it, putting a negative on an _encore_ that

is likely to detain her five minutes longer in Newgate: Miss Stephens

(the charming _Polly_) is frightened at the interest she _might_

inspire, and is loth to ‘waste her sweetness on a _blackguard_ air’:

the _Captain_ (Mr. Wood) is the only person who stands fire on the

trying occasion. This gentleman is the best _Macheath_ we have seen

for a long time (for in criticism as in law we must have our statute

of limitations)—more of a gentleman than Incledon, a better singer

than Davies, less affected than Young, less finical than Sinclair, as

‘pretty a fellow’ as Madame Vestris—good-looking, gallant, debonair,

and vocal. Bartley is too ‘splenetic and rash’ for _Lockitt_, who

should be sullen and hardened as his prison-walls; Blanchard is not

round and set enough for _Peachum_, his figure dangling and his voice

crackling like a lawyer’s parchment; Mrs. Davenport alone remained in

her original muslin apron, silk gown, and pinners (a Sybil, yet how

unlike a prophetess!) to overlook and wonder at the desolation of the

classic scene. We are more and more convinced that there is a time for

everything, and that good plays must give place to bad ones. It is not

possible (with a mixed audience) to keep alive the ridicule of manners

after the manners themselves have ceased, nor to preserve them in the

spirit of wit, or exhibit them even in mock-heroics. The stage is but

the counterpart of existing follies—

‘And when the date of Nock was out,

Off fell the sympathetic snout.’

However, the _Beggars’ Opera_ has run a century. That’s pretty well. Oh

George Colman the Younger, Messrs. Reynolds and Morton, how will you

rejoice, could you lift up your heads a hundred years hence, and see a

five-act play of yours cut down to a one-act farce! It is not that there

are not plenty of rogues and pick pockets at present; but the Muse is

averse to look that way; the imagination has taken a higher flight; wit

and humour do not flow in that dirty channel, picking the grains of gold

out of it. Instead of descending, we aspire; and the age has a sublime

front given to it to contemplate the heaven of drawing-rooms and the

milky-way of fashion. You are asked if you like Fielding, as if it were

a statuteable offence; and it was justly observed the other day in a

comparison between _De Vere_ and _Count Fathom_, that in a refined

period like ours, a rogue aims at nothing short of being Prime-Minister!

In a word, the French Revolution has spoiled all, like a great stone

thrown into a well ‘with hollow and rueful rumble,’ and left no two

ideas in the public mind but those of high and low. The jealousy of

gentility, the horror of being thought vulgar, has put an end to the

harmless _double-entendre_ of wit and humour; and the glancing lights

and shades of life (nothing without each other) are sunk into the dull

night of insipidity and affectation. So be it, and so it will be! Yet

‘we have heard the chimes at midnight’ for all this, and passed over

Hounslow and Bagshot, not without a _twinge_ of the recollection of

other times, as well as responsive to the names of Pope, of Gay, and

Queensberry’s Duchess! Nor is it so long since we have seen good company

and full houses grace the representation of Tyburn tree: we remember old

Sir John Sylvester among others (with we believe his two daughters) who

had a keen relish for an execution, and stedfastly contemplated under

black bushy eyebrows that irrefragable order of ideas (as Mr. Hobbes

calls it) ‘the thief, the judge, and the gallows;’ and Mr. Vansittart,

who smiled with conscious simplicity at the satirical allusions to

Ministers of State, might be supposed to be comparing the terseness and

point of Gay’s style with his own ‘wolds and sholds,’ and seemed to

think that nothing but an _evangelical_ housebreaker was wanting to the

perfection of the plot!—We could not stay out _A Race for Dinner_,

though invited by Mr. Wrench,—who has become as hungry as a hunter of

late,—but made the best of our way to the other house (old Drury) in

search of a criticism. We could almost fancy Covent Garden had got there

before us, for there we found nearly the whole former strength of the

rival house drawn up in battle-array before us—‘and Birnamwood was come

to Dunsinane’—through what bickerings, what strifes, what

heart-burnings, what jealousies between actors, what quarrels with

managers, what want of pay, and demands for more, is easy (though not

pleasant) to guess. They had also brought the _Poor Gentleman_ with

them; and both together brought a full house. Nothing could be better

acted. Looking at them with ‘eyes of youth’ (which we always take with

us to the theatre) we seemed as it were to witness something like a

_turn-out_ of Chelsea pensioners on the boards; and the sentiments of

the play were of a piece with this patriotic and charitable impression.

About thirty years ago, when John Bull took a particular fit of hatred

against the French, he also fell in love with himself; and the dramatic

writers of that day undertook to shew John his own face, his virtues or

vices ‘to advantage dressed’ in a succession of plays which were

properly _Dedications to the English nation_. We have the _Whole Duty of

Man_ bound up in a coarse, unattractive exterior; the Virtues in the

front of the stage, though the Graces stand a little in the back-ground;

and all the charities of private life clustering together on the stage,

as they do round the domestic hearth. We have nothing but generous

uncles, dry in their manner, but their heart and their purse overflowing

with liberality—dutiful nephews, thoughtless but well-meaning, and

falling into scrapes and love at every turn—reclaimed seducers—exemplary

young ladies—old servants surly, but honest (the English character)—a

chattering apothecary, the butt of the village and a foil to our

self-love—an old soldier, a favourite in the family, and with us, for he

has been wounded in our defence—a poor gentleman, in want of money which

he refuses by mistake from some munificent patron, in consequence of not

being so shrewd as the audience, and who is in hourly danger of a

prison, from which _we_ hope to escape. All this hits our delicate and

improved moral tastes much better than sneering at our vices or laughing

at our follies. Live sentiment, perish satire! Then there is so much

distress, which it is so delightful to sympathize with—so much money

circulating to relieve it (which it is so delightful to hear and to see;

it is almost like attending a charity-sermon, or seeing Mr. Irving

himself pawn his watch out of an excess of missionary zeal)—then there

are so many tears starting into the eye, so many squeezes of the hand,

so many friends and relations falling into one another’s arms, as cannot

but move the most obdurate—so many bailiffs in the wind, so many duels

broken off by the entrance of some antiquated spinster who is always

prying into mischief, or of some charming young creature who is the

cause of it. We hope the other actors and actresses who acquitted

themselves so admirably in their several parts,—Mr. Dowton in _Sir R.

Bramble_, Mr. Mathews in _Ollapod_, Mr. Liston in _Corporal Foss_, Mr.

Cooper in _Lieutenant Worthington_, Mr. Jones in _Frederic_, Mrs.

Davison in _Miss Mactab_,—will excuse us if we pass them over on this

occasion to pay our compliments to Miss Ellen Tree, who played _Emily

Worthington_, and who certainly comes under the description of persons

last-mentioned. Without any appearance of art, she played so well that

she seemed the character itself, with the ease and simplicity of an

innocent school-girl. Her figure is very pleasing—her voice is like her

sister’s—and she has the handsomest mouth in the world. We will not

attempt to describe it for two reasons: first, because we cannot;

secondly, because we _dare_ not. In Mr. Jones’s _School for Gallantry_

she might have been called the _bon bouche_. Amidst the chopping and

changing of the theatres, we had forgotten Mr. Jones was at Drury Lane;

and inquired after the success of his new piece at Covent Garden. We

naturally enough received an answer almost as cold as the moon which

shines through the bars of his hero’s prison-chamber. We were glad

however to find that the wit and pleasantry diffused over it, if faint,

had much of the agreeable lustre of that mild planet. We should suppose

the plot borrowed from the country where the scene is laid. Cupid seems

always on garrison-duty in the Prussian monarchy, and the spirit of

adventure and gallantry somewhat languishes and grows trifling when it

is kept (as everything there is) under lock and key. After what we have

said of Miss E. Tree, we will not forfeit our reputation for gallantry

by saying anything less obliging of Miss Love, who plays a young hussar

officer in this piece, than that we like her best when she is drest most

like herself.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND L’AVARE

_The Examiner._] [_May 18, 1828._

DRURY LANE.