Perhaps Fortune does not buffet any set of beings with more industry,
and withal less effect, than Actors. There may be something in the
habitual mutability of their feelings that evades the blow; they live,
in a great measure, out of this dull sphere, "which men call earth;"
they assume the dress, the tone, the gait of emperors, kings, nobles;
the world slides, and they mark it not. The Actor leaves his home, and
forgets every domestic exigence in the temporary government of a state,
or overthrow of a tyrant; he is completely out of the real world until
the dropping of the curtain. The time likewise not spent on the stage is
passed in preparation for the night; and thus the shafts of fate glance
from our Actor like swan-shot from an elephant, If struck at all, the
barb must pierce the bones, and quiver in the marrow.
Our Actor--mind, we are speaking of players in the mass--is the most
joyous, careless, superficial flutterer in existence. He knows every
thing, yet has learned nothing; he has played at ducks and drakes over
every rivulet of information, yet never plunged inch-deep into any thing
beyond a play-book, or Joe Miller's jests. If he venture a scrap of
Latin, be sure there is among his luggage a dictionary of quotations;
if he speak of history,--why he has played in _Richard_ and
_Coriolanus_. The stage is with him the fixed orb around which the
whole world revolves; there is nothing worthy of a moment's devotion one
hundred yards from the green-room. It is amusing to perceive how blind,
how dead, is our real Actor to the stir and turmoil of politics; he will
turn from a Salamanca to admire a _Sir John Brute's_ wig; Waterloo
sinks into insignificance before the amber-headed cane of a _Sir Peter
Teazle_. What is St. Stephen's to him--what the memory of Burke and
Chatham? To be sure, Sheridan is well remembered; but then Sheridan
wrote the _Critic_.
A mackerel lives longer out of water than does an Actor out of his
element: he cannot, for a minute, "look abroad into universality."
Keep him to the last edition of a new or old play, the burning of the
two theatres, or an anecdote of John Kemble, and our Actor sparkles
amazingly. Put to him an unprofessional question, and you strike him
dumb; an abstract truth locks his jaws. On the contrary, listen to the
stock-joke; lend an attentive ear to the witticism clubbed by the whole
green-room--for there is rarely more than _one_ at a time in
circulation--and no man talks faster--none with a deeper delight to
himself--none more profound, more knowing. The conversation of our
Actor is a fine "piece of mosaic." Here Shakspeare is laid under
contribution--here Farquhar--here Otway. We have an undigested mass of
quotations, dropping without order from him. In words he is absolutely
impoverishable. What a lion he stalks in a country town! How he stilts
himself upon his jokes over the sleek, unsuspecting heads of his
astonished hearers! He tells a story; and, for the remainder of the
night, sits embosomed in the ineffable lustre of his humour.--_Monthly
Mag_.
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