I was, perhaps rather naïvely, surprised the other day to hear an actor
asking for Hazlitt’s “View of the English Stage.” Actors in general,
whether correctly or incorrectly I cannot say, are reputed to be not
enthusiastically given to reading. On the face of it, the thing seems
likely enough. Their business is to be men of action and talk and the
busy world—not sedentary contemplative, cloistered students. Your
bookworm is as a rule a shy, retiring solitary; the very opposite of your
actor who must not only boldly show himself but take a pride in being
stared at. Logically, then, I ought not to have been as shocked as I was
when the late Henry Neville some years ago roundly declared to me that an
actor “should never read.” Yet the thought of a life without literature
seemed so appalling! It is possible, however, to be a reader, and a
voracious reader, yet not to read Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. The epoch
is gone. Kean is long since dead. Our theatrical interests to-day are
widely different from those of our ancestors a century ago. And Hazlitt’s
criticisms have not the loose, discursive, impressionistic, personal,
intimate charm of his other essays, his “Table Talk,” his “Round Table,”
or his “Plain Speaker.” They simply show him in the “dry light” of the
specialist, the closet-student turned playgoer, but these give a warm,
coloured, speaking likeness of the whole man. I was surprised, then, to
hear my friend the actor asking for Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. I venture
to inquire what, particularly, he wanted them for. “Oh,” he said, “I like
to read about Kean.”
And certainly if you want to read about Kean, Hazlitt is your man. It has
been said, over and over again, that it was good luck for both actor and
critic that Hazlitt had just begun his theatrical work on the _Morning
Chronicle_ when Kean made his first appearance as Shylock at Drury
Lane. Hazlitt helped to make Kean’s reputation and Kean’s acting was an
invaluable stimulant to Hazlitt’s critical faculties. It is said, by the
way, that Kean was originally recommended to Hazlitt’s notice by his
editor, Perry. Things of this sort may have happened in that weird time
of a century ago, but the age of miracles is passed. Editors of daily
newspapers in our time are not on the look-out for unrevealed histrionic
genius. They have other fish to fry. But Perry seems to have been a
most interfering editor. He plagued his critic with his own critical
opinions. Hazlitt’s first “notice” in the _Chronicle_ was about Miss
Stephens as Polly in _The Beggar’s Opera_. “When I got back, after the
play” (note that he had meditated in advance his “next day’s criticism,
trying to do all the justice I could to so interesting a subject. I
was not a little proud of it by anticipation”—happy Hazlitt!) “Perry
called out, with his cordial, grating voice, ‘Well, how did she do?’ and
on my speaking in high terms, answered that ‘he had been to dine with
his friend the Duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject,
he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the true _sostenuto_
style; but as I had written the article’ (holding my peroration on _The
Beggar’s Opera_ carelessly in his hand), ‘it might pass.’... I had
the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens coming out of the
Editor’s room, who had been to thank him for his very flattering account
of her.” That “carelessly” is a delicious touch, which will come home to
every scribbler. But Perry and his friend the Duke and that glimpse of a
petticoat whisking out of the editor’s room! What a queer, delightful,
vanished newspaper-world! There were, however, even in those days,
editors who did not interfere. Hazlitt was, for a brief period, dramatic
critic of _The Times_ (his most notable contribution was his notice of
Kemble’s retirement in _Coriolanus_, June 25th, 1817), and was evidently
well treated, for in his preface to the “View” (1818) he advises “any one
who has an ambition to write, and to write _his best_ in the periodical
Press, to get, if he can, a position in _The Times_ newspaper, the editor
of which is a man of business and not a man of letters. He may write
there as long and as good articles as he can, without being turned out
for it.” One can only account for Hazlitt’s singular ideal of an editor
as Johnson accounted for an obscure passage in Pope, “Depend upon it,
Sir, he wished to vex somebody.” Hazlitt only wanted to be disagreeable
to Perry.
Nevertheless, the _Chronicle_ had had the best of Hazlitt’s stage
criticisms, his papers on Kean. Kean’s acting, as I have said, was
invaluable to Hazlitt as a stimulus. It stimulated him to a sort of
rivalry in Shakespearian interpretation, the actor fairly setting his
own conception of the part against the actor’s rendering of it, giving
him magnificent praise when the two agreed, and often finding carefully
pondered reasons for disagreement. Hazlitt might have said of Kean what
Johnson said of Burke: “This fellow calls forth all my powers.” The
result is twofold. You get vivid descriptions of Kean’s acting, his
voice, his figure, his gestures, his perpetual passionateness, in season
and out of season (misrepresenting—_e.g._, Shakespeare’s Richard II.,
as Hazlitt said, as a character of passion instead of as a character of
pathos). And at the same time you get the “psychology” (an inevitable
_cliché_, cast since Hazlitt’s day) of the chief Shakespearian tragic
characters, carefully “documented” by the text and elaborated and
coloured by Hazlitt’s sympathetic vision. You see the same process at
work in the criticisms of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons and Macready, but
(remember the great Sarah had had her day before Hazlitt began to write)
with a milder stimulant there was a milder response. In any case it was
a gallery of portraits—a series of full-length figures partly from life
and partly from the Shakespearean text. There was little background or
atmosphere.
That is what makes Hazlitt’s criticism so unlike any modern sort. He
wrote in an age of great histrionics, great interpretative art, but no
drama, no creative art. His elaborate studies of dead-and-gone players
have (except as illustrating Shakespeare) often a merely antiquarian
interest. It is a curious detail that Kean’s Richard III. in early
performances “stood with his hands stretched out, after his sword was
taken from him,” and later “actually fought with his doubled fists like
some helpless infant.” So it is a curious detail that Napoleon I. wore
a green coat and clasped his hands behind his back. But compare this
dwelling on the _minutiæ_ of an actor’s business or, to take a fairer
example, compare Hazlitt’s analysis of the character of Iago (as a test
of Kean’s presentation)—one of his acutest things—with the range and
variety and philosophic depth of a criticism by Jules Lemaître. You
are in a different world. Instead of the niggling details of how this
man raised his arm at a given moment or delivered a classic speech in
a certain way you get a criticism of life, all life, _quicquid agunt
homines_. It is interesting, mildly interesting, to know that Kean’s
Richard was (for Hazlitt) too grave and his Iago too gay, but after all
we cannot be perpetually contemplating these particular personages of
Shakespeare. We need fresh ideas, fresh creations, new views of society,
anything for a change, so long as it is a thing “to break our minds
upon,” We have no “great” Shakespearean actors now, but even if we had,
should we care to devote to them the minute, elaborate attention paid
by Hazlitt? One thinks of that time, a hundred years ago, of the great
tragedy kings and queens as rather a stuffy world. Playgoing must have
been a formidable enterprise ... but yet, you never can tell. There were
frolicsome compensations. You might come back from the play to the office
to learn your editor had been dining with a duke. And with luck next
morning you might find a pretty actress at his door.