"Many are the sayings of Elia, painful and frequent his lucubrations,
set forth for the most part (such his modesty!) without a name,
scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From
the dust of some of these it is our intention occasionally to revive a
tract or two that shall seem worthy of a better fate, especially at a
time like the present, when the pen of our industrious contributor,
engaged in a laborious digest of his recent Continental tour, may haply
want the leisure to expatiate in more miscellaneous speculations. We
have been induced, in the first instance, to reprint a thing which
he put forth in a friend's volume some years since, entitled 'The
Confessions of a Drunkard,' seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly
Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful
quotations therefrom; adding, from their peculiar brains, the gratuitous
affirmation, that they have reason to believe that the describer (in his
delineations of a drunkard, forsooth!) partly sat for his own picture.
The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the essays of a
contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in
which Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously complaineth of an inordinate
appetite; and it struck him that a better paper--of deeper interest, and
wider usefulness--might be made out of the imagined experiences of a
Great Drinker. Accordingly he set to work, and, with that mock fervor
and counterfeit earnestness with which he is too apt to over-realize
his descriptions, has given us a frightful picture indeed, but no more
resembling the man Elia than the fictitious Edax may be supposed to
identify itself with Mr. L., its author. It is, indeed, a compound
extracted out of his long observations of the effects of drinking upon
all the world about him; and this accumulated mass of misery he hath
centred (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure.
We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into
the picture, (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some times
have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup?)--but then how
heightened! how exaggerated! how little within the sense of the Review,
where a part, in their slanderous usage, must be understood to stand for
the whole! But it is useless to expostulate with this Quarterly slime,
brood of Nilus, watery heads with hearts of jelly, spawned under the
sign of Aquarius, incapable of Bacchus, and therefore cold, washy,
spiteful, bloodless. Elia shall string them up one day, and show their
colors,--or rather, how colorless and vapid the whole fry,--when he
putteth forth his long-promised, but unaccountably hitherto delayed,
'Confessions of a Water-Drinker.'"
* * * * *
In turning over the leaves of divers old periodicals in search of the
"Religion of Actors," I accidentally and unexpectedly found an article
by Charles Lamb entitled, "On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres,
with some Account of a Club of Damned Authors."
Lamb, we know, was a great lover of the drama,--a true patron and
admirer of playwrights and play-actors. He was, perhaps, the greatest
theatrical critic that ever lived. Many of the happiest hours of his
life were passed in reading the works of the old English dramatists, and
in witnessing the performances of favorite actors. He once had hopes of
being a successful dramatist himself, and to that end devoted many of
his spare hours and odd moments to the composition of a tragedy. ("John
Woodvil,") which John Kemble, "the stately manager of Drury Lane,"
refused to bring out. But not wholly discouraged by the ill success of
his tragedy, he tried his hand at a farce, and produced "Mr. H.," which,
to the author's exceeding great delight, was accepted by the manager of
Drury-Lane Theatre.[B]
[Footnote B: Talfourd says that the acceptance of "Mr. H." gave Lamb
some of the happiest moments he ever spent.]
To Manning, then sojourning among the Mandarins, he thus writes of "Mr.
H.":--
"Now you'd like to know the subject. The title is 'Mr. H.',--no more:
how simple! how taking! A great H sprawling over the play-bill, and
attracting eyes at every corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing at
Bath, vastly rich,--all the ladies dying for him, all bursting to know
who he is; but he goes by no other name than Mr. H.: a curiosity like
that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I
won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you an
idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you, that, after much vehement
admiration, when his true name comes out, 'Hogsflesh,' all the women
shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change their name for
him: that's the idea: how flat it is here! but how whimsical in
the farce! And only think how hard upon me it is, that the ship is
despatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the
Wednesday after;--but all China will ring of it by-and-by."
Would that Lamb's joyous and exultant anticipations of "Mr. H."'s
success had proved true! But, instead of being greeted with the applause
of pit and gallery, which would have stood Elia instead of "the unheard
voice of posterity," the piece was hissed and hooted from the stage.
In a letter to Manning, written early in 1808, he thus, half humorously,
half pathetically, describes the reception the town gave "Mr. H.":--
"So I go creeping on since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off
the top of Drury-Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year
ago. However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house
was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed!
It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
congregation of mad geese, with roaring sometimes like bears, mows and
mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas
like Saint Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his
favorite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally,
to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to
counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that
they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and
whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations
of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their
fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to
make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore! Make them a reproach, and
all that pass by them to loll out their tongue at them! Blind mouths! as
Milton somewhere calls them."
If his farce had been--what "Gentleman Lewis," who was present on the
night of its performance, said, if he had had it, he would have made it,
by a few judicious curtailments--"the most popular little thing that
had been brought out for some time," Lamb would not have written the
following article.
"ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB
OF DAMNED AUTHORS.
"Mr. Reflector,--I am one of those persons whom the world has thought
proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable
season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than
two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces suffered at
Drury-Lane Theatre, I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece,
and was _damned_.
"Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no
appeal. The Clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the
decision of Cade and his followers, who were then _the public_. Like
him, I was condemned because I could write.
"Not but it did appear to some of us that the measures of the popular
tribunal at that period savored a little of harshness and of the
_summum jus_. The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon
the 'Vindictive Man,' and some pieces of that nature, and it retained
through the remainder of it a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have
said: Sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house.
"Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative
lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which,
to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation
as some of those which met with it. I am willing to put, a favorable
construction upon the votes that were given against us; I believe that
there was no bribery or designed partiality in the case;--only 'our
nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense'; that was all.
"But against the _manner_ in which the public on these occasions think
fit to deliver their disapprobation I must and ever will protest.
"Sir, imagine--but you have been present at the damning of a
piece,--those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine--a vast
theatre, like that which Drury Lane was, before it was a heap of dust
and ashes, (I insult not over its fallen greatness; let it recover
itself when it can for me, let it lift up its towering head once
more, and take in poor authors to write for it; _hic coestus artemque
repono_,)--a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting
sounds,--shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise
of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling-mills,
or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which Saint Anthony
listened to in the wilderness.
"Oh, Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which
was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in,
to express compliance, to convey a favor, or to grant a suit,--that
voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a Siren Catalani
charms and captivates us,--that the musical, expressive human voice
should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and
irrational, venomous snakes?
"I never shall forget the sounds on _my night_; I never before that time
fully felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the 'Paradise
Lost' meets with from the critics in the _pit_, at the final close of
his Tragedy upon the Human Race,--though that, alas! met with too much
success:--
"'from innumerable tongues,
A dismal universal _hiss_, the sound
Of public scorn. Dreadful was the din
Of _hissing_ through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear,
And Dipsas.'
"For _hall_ substitute _theatre_, and you have the very image of what
takes place at what is called the _damnation_ of a piece,--and properly
so called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was
derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this none
can doubt the propriety of the appellation.
"But, Sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling,
heart-withering denunciations of the popular obloquy upon the venial
mistake of a poor author who thought to please us in the act of filling
his pockets,--for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than
that,--it does, I own, seem to me a species of retributive justice far
too severe for the offence. A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs)
meets with no severer exprobration.
"Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed
that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some
convenient part of the _proscenium_, which an unsuccessful author should
be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and
oranges of the pit. This _amende honorable_ would well suit with the
meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their
skulls to the audience, and seem to invite a pelting.
"Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their
heads, as the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath
administered to them that they should never write again?
"Seriously, _Messieurs the Public_, this outrageous way which you have
got of expressing your displeasures is too much for the occasion. When
I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking what
crime of great moral turpitude I had committed: for every man about me
seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself, as something which
public interest and private feelings alike called upon him in the
strongest possible manner to stigmatize with infamy.
"The Romans, it Is well known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler
method of marking their disapprobation of an author's work. They were a
humane and equitable nation. They left the _furca_ and the _patibulum_,
the axe and the rods, to great offenders: for these minor and (if I may
so term them) extra-moral offences _the bent thumb_ was considered as a
sufficient sign of disapprobation,--_vertere pollicem_; as _the pressed
thumb, premere pollicem_, was a mark of approving.
"And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method,
a correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence. For, as
the action of writing is performed by bending the thumb forward, the
retroversion or bending back of that joint did not unaptly point to the
opposite of that action, implying that it was the will of the audience
that the author should _write no more:_ a much more significant, as
well as more humane, way of expressing-that desire, than our custom of
hissing, which is altogether senseless and indefensible. Nor do we find
that the Roman audiences deprived themselves, by this lenity, of any
tittle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have thought
themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates for their
applause. On the contrary, by this method they seem to have had the
author, as we should express it, completely _under finger and thumb_.
"The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public
are so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility
of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries: for the
public _never writes itself_. Not but something very like it took place
at the time of the O.-P. differences. The placards which were nightly
exhibited were, properly speaking, the composition of the public. The
public wrote them, the public applauded them, and precious morceaux of
wit and eloquence they were,--except some few, of a better quality,
which it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic writers.
After this specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should be a
little slow in condemning what others do for it.
"As the degrees of malignancy vary in people according as they have more
or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition,
I have sometimes amused myself with analyzing this many-headed hydra,
which calls itself the public, into the component parts of which it is
'complicated, head and tail,' and seeing how many varieties of the snake
kind it can afford.
"First, there is the Common English Snake.--This is that part of the
auditory who are always the majority at damnations, but who, having
no critical venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear
others hiss, and then join in for company.
"The Blind Worm is a, species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some
naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same.
"The Rattle--Snake.--These are your obstreperous talking critics,--the
impertinent guides of the pit,--who will not give a plain man leave to
enjoy an evening's entertainment, but, with their frothy jargon and
incessant finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force
him in his own defence to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss
always originates with these. When this creature springs his _rattle_,
you would think, from the noise it makes, there was something in it; but
you have only to examine the instrument from which the noise proceeds,
and you will find it typical of a critic's tongue,--a shallow membrane,
empty, voluble, and seated in the most contemptible part of the
creature's body.
"The Whip-Snake.--This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in
the newspapers.
"The Deaf Adder, or _Surda Echidna_ of Linnaeus.--Under this head may be
classed all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly
are not) who, not finding the first act of a piece answer to their
preconceived notions of what a first act should be, like Obstinate in
John Bunyan, positively thrust their fingers in their ears, that they
may not hear a word of what is coming, though perhaps the very next act
may be composed in a style as different as possible, and be written
quite to their own tastes. These Adders refuse to hear the voice of the
charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them offence.
"I should weary you, and myself too, if I were to go through all the
classes of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They
are creatures of remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt _pits_
and low grounds.
"I proceed with more pleasure to give you an account of a club to which
I have the honor to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all
authors that have been once in our lives what is called _damned_. We
meet on the anniversaries of our respective nights, and make ourselves
merry at the expense of the public. The chief tenets which distinguish
our society, and which every man among us is bound to hold for gospel,
are,--
"That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf,
obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his
senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful
rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick
their pockets, and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and
abuse them as much as ever we think fit.
"That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they made
use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of
the multitude, obtuse to everything but the grossest flattery, have by
degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to
children till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are
and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the public,
and not _vice versâ_. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus,
and Musaeus, and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove
traitors to themselves. That, in particular, in the days of the first of
those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been
perfect models of what audiences should be; for, though along with the
trees and the rocks and the wild creatures, which he drew after him to
listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music,
it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up _a dissentient
voice_. They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock
and stone turns into a serpent, and has a voice.
"That the terms 'Courteous Reader' and 'Candid Auditors,' as having
given rise to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as
if they conferred upon them some right, _which they cannot have,_ of
exercising their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded.
"These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause
in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed
unhealthy animal, to Aesculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose,
an animal typical of _the popular voice_, to the deities of Candor and
Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we
should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but the stomachs of
some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of
that highly salutary and _antidotal dish_.
"The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as
have been fairly _damned_. A piece that has met with ever so little
applause, that has but languished its night or two, and then gone out,
will never entitle its author to a seat among us. An exception to our
usual readiness in conferring this privilege is in the case of a writer
who, having been once condemned, writes again, and becomes candidate for
a second martyrdom. Simple damnation we hold to be a merit, but to be
twice-damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we utterly reject, and
blackball without a hearing:--
"_The common damned shun his society._
"Hoping that your publication of our Regulations may be a means of
inviting some more members into our society, I conclude this long
letter.
"I am, Sir, yours, SEMEL-DAMNATUS."
* * * * *