"The story of his swallowing opium-pills to keep him lively upon the
first night of a certain tragedy we may presume to be a piece of
retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed,
John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you
knew not where to quarrel with) over a piece which he did not like,
beyond any of his contemporaries. John Kemble had made up his mind early
that all the good tragedies which could be written had been written, and
he resented any new attempt. His shelves were full. The old standards
were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute, and
'fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone.' He succeeded to the old
lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward
Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered.
"I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he
put upon my friend G.'s 'Antonio' G., satiate with visions of political
justice, (possibly not to be realized in our time,) or willing to let
the skeptical worldlings see that his anticipations of the future did
not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been, wrote a
tragedy. He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish,--the plot
simple, without being naked,--the incidents uncommon, without being
overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive
young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honor, immolates his
sister--
"But I must not anticipate the catastrophe. The play, reader, is extant
in choice English, and you will employ a spare half-crown not
injudiciously in the quest of it.
"The conception was bold, and the _dénouement_--the time and place in
which the hero of it existed considered--not much out of keeping; yet it
must be confessed that it required a delicacy of handling, both from the
author and the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a
modern English audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part. John, who
was in familiar habits with the philosopher, had undertaken to play
Antonio. Great expectations were formed. A philosopher's first play was
a new era. The night arrived. I was favored with a seat in an
advantageous box, between the author and his friend M.G. sat cheerful
and confident. In his friend M.'s looks, who had perused the manuscript,
I read some terror. Antonio, in the person of John Philip Kemble, at
length appeared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and
in most irreproachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly
correct on these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent.
It went off, as G. assured M., exactly as the opening act of a
piece--the _protasis_--should do. The cue of the spectators was to be
mute. The characters were but in their introduction. The passions and
the incidents would be developed hereafter. Applause hitherto would be
impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all-desirable. Poor M.
acquiesced,--but in his honest, friendly face I could discern a working
which told how much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand
(however misplaced) would have been than all this reasoning. The second
act (as in duty bound) rose a little in interest; but still John kept
his forces under,--in policy, as G. would have it,--and the audience
were most complacently attentive. The _protasis_, in fact, was scarcely
unfolded. The interest would warm in the next act, against which a
special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with a
friendly perspiration,--'tis M.'s way of showing his zeal,--'from every
pore of him a perfume falls.' I honor it above Alexander's. He had once
or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavor to elicit
a sound; they emitted a solitary noise without an echo; there was no
deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet. The
third act at length brought on the scene which was to warm the piece
progressively to the final flaming forth of the catastrophe. A
philosophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G., as it approached.
The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and
there was promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this
extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make
a ring,--when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the
tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman, (who, by the way, should
have had his sister,) balks his humor, and the pit's reasonable
expectation at the same time, with some speeches out of the new
philosophy against duelling. The audience were here fairly
caught,--their courage was up, and on the alert,--a few blows, _ding
dong_, as R----s the dramatist afterwards expressed it to me, might have
done the business,--when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly
called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure.
They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not condemn, for
morality's sake. The interest stood stone-still; and John's manner was
not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and the
atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections. One began to
cough, his neighbor sympathized with him, till a cough became
epidemical. But when, from being half artificial in the pit, the cough
got frightfully naturalized among the fictitious persons of the drama,
and Antonio himself (albeit it was not set down in the stage-directions)
seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of
the author and his friends,--then G. 'first knew fear,' and, mildly
turning to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. Kemble
labored under a cold, and that the performance might possibly have been
postponed with advantage for some nights further,--still keeping the
same serene countenance, while M. sweat like a bull.
"It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening.
In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the
dialogue wax more passionate and stirring, and the progress of the
sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous development which
impended. In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood
still. From the beginning, John had taken his stand,--had wound himself
up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of
dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his
rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous;
for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an
eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to
the end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the
under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt.
There was excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive
it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against
decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent
symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked
on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would
come of it, when, towards the winding-up of the latter, Antonio, with an
irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself,--for she had been
coolly arguing the point of honor with him,--suddenly whips out a
poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was as if a
murder had been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in
clamorous indignation, demanding justice. The feeling rose far above
hisses. I believe at that instant, if they could have got him, they
would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces. Not that the act
itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion different from what they
themselves would have applauded upon another occasion in a Brutus or an
Appius,--but, for want of attending to Antonio's _words_, which palpably
led to the expectation of no less dire an event, instead of being
seduced by his _manner_, which seemed to promise a sleep of a less
alarming nature than it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira, they found
themselves betrayed into an accompliceship of murder, a perfect
misprision of parricide, while they dreamed of nothing less.
"M., I believe, was the only person who suffered acutely from the
failure; for G. thenceforward, with a serenity unattainable but by the
true philosophy, abandoning a precarious popularity, retired into his
fast hold of speculation,--the drama in which the world was to be his
tiring-room, and remote posterity his applauding spectators, at once,
and actors."
* * * * *
"The least shavings of gold are valuable, men say," says Archbishop
Leighton, in his masterly Commentary on Peter; and the veriest trifle
from the pen of such a writer as Charles Lamb should be highly prized by
all readers that are readers. Therefore I think it would be unwise in me
not to print Elia's Postscript to his "Chapter on Ears," and his
Answers to Correspondents. Indeed, I do not know but that they contain
some of the most racy sentences Lamb ever wrote. At any rate, they do
contain some delightful banter and "most ingenious nonsense." In their
pleasantry, archness, and good-natured raillery, these two little
articles of Elia's remind me of some of Addison's happiest papers in the
"Spectator."
Better than anything in Southey's "Doctor" concerning the authorship of
that queer, quaint, delightful book are Elia's affected anger and
indignation against the author of the "Indicator" for attributing the
essays of Elia to their right author. Leigh Hunt must have "laughed
consumedly," as he read the P.S. to the "Chapter on Ears." And in his
Answers to Correspondents how many delightful changes Elia rings upon
the name of the unlucky Peter Bell! How cavalierly he answers
"Indagator," and the others, who are so importunate about the true
locality of his birth,--"as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to
be passed to his parish "!
* * * * *