‘Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated comedian,’ is the title inscribed
by a contemporary--who knew how the lady should be spoken of--upon
the copper which Edward Fisher engraved in mezzotint from the
picture by Richardson. A photogravure reproduction from this rare,
desirable print--which shows the lissome grace and flexible charm of
a young woman who enchanted the town, and who was the delight of Mr.
Mainwaring before she was the delight of General Churchill--forms the
frontispiece to the slight and gossipy and unscientific, but by no
means disagreeable volume which Mr. Robins has compiled--we cannot
say written--about the actress whom he dubs familiarly ‘Nance.’ A
cheaper reproduction of another portrait of her--the original also by
Richardson--is to be found upon a later page. In both portraits she
is represented _in propria persona_, of which we need not complain,
but which it is expedient to chronicle, inasmuch as such portraiture
throws no direct illumination upon the achievements of her art.
Deprived of any such assistance as might well have been given, at all
events had the compiler of the volume been dealing with a comedian of
later time--with Garrick, say, whose Abel Drugger is known to us by
the canvas of Zoffany; with Siddons, who not only as the ‘Tragic Muse’
reveals the characteristics of her power; or even with Mrs. Abington,
whose performance as Miss Prue in _Love for Love_ we seem to witness
by dint of familiarity with Sir Joshua’s picture--we are thrown back
entirely, for our acquaintance with Mrs. Oldfield, upon the written
records produced for our survey.
These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating woman
much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the actress there
is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of opinion,’
but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in the
_Spectator_ discuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic
epilogue to a tragic play--for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to
act Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that
the management should ‘give such things to Porter’--and a few other
contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day was
before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professional or
not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making her
a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative
amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the world
cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs. Knipp and
of Nell Gwynne--‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I thought’--was
deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial over the personal
grace of Mrs. Oldfield.
Accordingly, we receive from an industrious American a volume written
‘round’ Mrs. Oldfield, rather than actually about her. We cannot
altogether blame him for it. We do blame him for once or twice
slinking away, as it were, from the evidence of his own, perhaps
unavoidable, ignorance, under cover of propriety and a regard for the
conventionalities. Of this nature is his exceedingly slight treatment
of the possible existence of a daughter of the actress; but he had
already brought himself to chronicle some particulars of two sons--and
this was perhaps as much as we could expect. Mrs. Oldfield was never
married. Her time looked leniently upon such freedom as she took
in love affairs; and the transference of her affection was neither
frequent nor brutal. She was a woman of impulse and of sensibility and
of magnetic charm. Men who ‘dined with Walpole’ passed on without
a trace of consciousness of inferiority in her companionship to the
agreeable converse of Oldfield. She was as kind as she was pleasant.
She relieved Savage, who rose to excellence in the verses penned by him
on her demise. She was endowed with common sense, which is frequently
possessed, though not invariably exercised, by people of genius. She
was nice to the humblest, and she walked with Royalty on the slopes
of Windsor. Brought up in a third-rate street in Westminster and in
a tavern in St. James’s Market, she died at her house in Grosvenor
Street, in only middle age, and left a comfortable fortune to the two
youths born of her connection with distinguished and superior men.
Such, briefly, was the woman--mercurial, gay, and charming; bringing
tears, bringing laughter, never bringing regret. Would that it were
possible to write even as definitely as that of the actress and of the
method of her art!
Mr. Robins, who has filled his pages with the stories of the plot of
a few of her pieces and with extracts from two or three comedies in
which she was presumably most brilliant, would have made his book
perhaps not more generally engaging, but more instructive, had he
printed from Mr. Joseph Knight’s scholarly record in the _Dictionary
of National Biography_ the immense list of her _rôles_. He does, of
course, speak incidentally at least of the actress’s range; but nothing
convinces one of it quite so surely as the scanning of that record of
her honourable labour. So far as one can tell, she must have been about
at her best in _The Provoked Husband_; but, did she play Andromache or
even Sophonisba, she got from each the maximum of its effect. Though
poor originally, she was of gentle blood, and perhaps she played best,
with her poetic realism, the parts of ladies of her day. Over a spell
of twenty years, her art--like Ellen Terry’s and Mrs. Kendal’s in our
own time--knew no decay. Like Aimée Desclée, she acted at the last in
presence of great physical suffering. When she died the Town grieved
‘sincerely’; and though, with curious English compromise, she was
refused a monument, she was not forbidden to be buried in the great
grey Abbey whose walls rise cliff-like over against the street in which
she passed her childhood. It is a pity that her story has been told
by Mr. Robins with so naïve an absence of anything approaching style.
She was a theme for a writer. But the amiable book-maker and genuinely
interested student of her craft and period who is responsible for the
various prolixity of this volume must be forgiven much because he has
loved much. He tells us, it is true, by way of permissible yet not
wholly praiseworthy padding, much more about her contemporaries in
her palmy days, and in her days not palmy, than about herself. Mrs.
Oldfield meanders, like a thin stream, through a meadow of Queen Anne
and early Georgian gossip. We do not resent the gossip. If it is not
authentic information, it is readable chatter. Would only that it were
easier to disengage from the mass of it the delightful and enlivening
and kindling personality of Mrs. Oldfield!
(_Literature_, 22nd October 1898.)