Mademoiselle Mars (of whom so much has been said) quite comes up to my
idea of an accomplished comic actress. I do not know that she does more
than this, or imparts a feeling of excellence that we never had before,
and are at a loss how to account for afterwards (as was the case with
our Mrs. Jordan and Mrs. Siddons in opposite departments,) but she
answers exactly to a preconception in the mind, and leaves nothing
wanting to our wishes. I had seen nothing of the kind on our stage for
many years, and my satisfaction was the greater, as I had often longed
to see it. The last English actress who shone in genteel comedy was Miss
Farren, and she was just leaving the stage when I first became
acquainted with it. She was said to be a faint copy of Mrs. Abington—but
I seem to see her yet, glittering in the verge of the horizon,
fluttering, gay, and airy, the ‘elegant turn of her head,’ the nodding
plume of feathers, the gloves and fan, the careless mien, the provoking
indifference—we have had nothing like it since, for I cannot admit that
Miss O’Neil had the _Lady-Teazle_ air at all. Out of tragedy she was
awkward and heavy. She could draw out a white, patient, pathetic
pocket-handkerchief with great grace and simplicity; she had no notion
of flirting a fan. The rule here is to do every thing without effort—
‘Flavia the least and slightest toy
Can with resistless art employ.’
This art is lost among us; the French still have it in very considerable
perfection. Really, it is a fine thing to see Molière’s _Misanthrope_,
at the Theatre Français, with Mademoiselle Mars as _Celimène_. I had
already seen some very tolerable acting at the minor French Theatres,
but I remained sceptical; I still had my English scruples hanging about
me, nor could I get quite reconciled to the French manner. For
_mannerism_ is not excellence. It might be good, but I was not sure of
it. Whatever one hesitates about in this way, is not the best. If a
thing is first-rate, you see it at once, or the fault is yours. True
genius will always get the better of our local prejudices, for it has
already surmounted its own. For this reason, one becomes an immediate
convert to the excellence of the French school of serious comedy. Their
actors have lost little or nothing of their spirit, _tact_, or skill in
embodying the wit and sense of their favourite authors. The most
successful passages do not interfere with our admiration of the best
samples of English acting, or run counter to our notions of propriety.
That which we thought well done among ourselves, we here see as well or
better done; that which we thought defective, avoided. The excellence or
even superiority of the French over us only confirms the justness of our
taste. If the actor might feel some jealousy, the critic can feel none.
What Englishman does not read Molière with pleasure? Is it not a treat
then to see him well acted? There is nothing to recall our national
antipathies, and we are glad to part with such unpleasant guests.
The curtain is scarcely drawn up, when something of this effect is
produced in the play I have mentioned, and the entrance of Mademoiselle
Mars decides it. Her few first simple sentences—her ‘_Mon Ami_’ at her
lover’s first ridiculous suggestion, the mingled surprise, displeasure,
and tenderness in the tone—her little peering eyes, full of languor and
archness of meaning—the peaked nose and thin compressed lips, opening
into an intelligent, cordial smile—her self-possession—her slightest
gesture—the ease and rapidity of her utterance, every word of which is
perfectly distinct—the playful, wondering good-nature with which she
humours the Misanthrope’s eccentricities throughout, and the finer tone
of sense and feeling in which she rejects his final proposal, must stamp
her a favourite with the English as well as with the French part of the
audience. I cannot see why that should not be the case. She is all life
and spirit. Would we be thought entirely without them? She has a
thorough understanding and relish of her author’s text. So, we think,
have we. She has character, expression, decision—they are the very
things we pique ourselves upon. Ease, grace, propriety—we aspire to
them, if we have them not. She is free from the _simagrées_, the
unmeaning petulance and petty affectation that we reproach the French
with, and has none of the awkwardness, insipidity, or vulgarity that we
are so ready to quarrel with at home. It would be strange if the English
did not admire her as much as they profess to do. I have seen but one
book of travels in which she was abused, and that was written by a
Scotchman! Mademoiselle Mars is neither handsome nor delicately formed.
She has not the light airy grace, nor the evanescent fragility of
appearance that distinguished Miss Farren, but more point and meaning,
or more of the intellectual part of comedy.
She was admirably supported in _Celimène_. Monsieur Damas played the
hero of the _Misanthrope_, and played it with a force and natural
freedom which I had no conception of as belonging to the French stage.
If they drawl out their tragic rhymes into an endless sing-song, they
cut up their comic verses into _mincemeat_. The pauses, the emphasis,
are left quite _ad libitum_, and are as sudden and varied as in the most
familiar or passionate conversation. In Racine they are obliged to make
an effort to get out of themselves, and are solemn and well-behaved; in
Molière they are at home, and commit all sorts of extravagances with
wonderful alacrity and effect. Heroes in comedy, pedants in tragedy,
they are greatest on small occasions; and their most brilliant efforts
arise out of the ground of common life. Monsieur Damas’s personification
of the Misanthrope appeared to me masterly. He had apparently been
chosen to fill the part for his ugliness; but he played the lover and
the fanatic with remarkable skill, nature, good-breeding, and disordered
passion. The rapidity, the vehemence of his utterance and gestures, the
transitions from one feeling to another, the fond rapture, the despair,
the rage, the sarcastic coolness, the dignified contempt, were much in
the style of our most violent tragic representations, and such as we do
not see in our serious comedy or in French tragedy. The way in which
this philosophic madman gave a loose to the expression of his feelings,
when he first suspects the fidelity of his mistress, when he quarrels
with her, and when he is reconciled to her, was strikingly affecting. It
was a regular furious scolding-bout, with the ordinary accompaniments of
tears, screams, and hysterics. A comic actor with us would have made the
part insipid and genteel; a tragic one with them pompous and affected.
At Drury-lane, Mr. Powell would take the part. Our fine gentlemen are
walking suits of clothes; their tragic performers are a professor’s gown
and wig: the Misanthrope of Molière, as Monsieur Damas plays it, is a
true orator and man of genius. If they pour the oil of decorum over the
loftier waves of tragedy, their sentimental comedy is like a puddle in a
storm. The whole was admirably cast, and ought to make the English
ashamed of themselves, if they are not above attending to any thing that
can give pleasure to themselves or other people. Arsinoe, the friend and
rival of Celimène, was played by Madame ——, a ripe, full-blown beauty, a
prude, the redundancies of whose person and passions are kept in due
bounds by tight lacing and lessons of morality. Eliante was a
Mademoiselle Menjaud, a very amiable-looking young person, and exactly
fitted to be an _élève_ in this _School for Scandal_. She smiled and
blushed and lisped mischief in the prettiest manner imaginable. The man
who comes to read his Sonnet to Alceste was inimitable. His teeth had an
enamel, his lips a vermilion, his eyes a brilliancy, his smile a
self-complacency, such as never met in poet or in peer, since
Revolutions and Reviews came into fashion. He seemed to have been
preserved in a glass-case for the last hundred and fifty years, and to
have walked out of it in these degenerate days, dressed in brocade, in
smiles and self-conceit, to give the world assurance of what a Frenchman
was! Philinte was also one of those prosing confidants, with grim
features, and profound gravity, that are to be found in all French
plays, and who, by their patient attention to a speech of half an hour
long, acquire an undoubted right to make one of equal length in return.
When they were all drawn up in battle-array, in the scene near the
beginning, which Sheridan has copied, it presented a very formidable
aspect indeed, and the effect was an historical deception. You forgot
you were sitting at a play at all, and fancied yourself transported to
the court or age of Louis XIV.!—Blest period!—the triumph of folly and
of France, when, instead of poring over systems of philosophy, the world
lived in a round of impertinence—when to talk nonsense was wit, to
listen to it politeness—when men thought of nothing but themselves, and
turned their heads with dress instead of the affairs of Europe—when the
smile of greatness was felicity, the smile of beauty Elysium—and when
men drank the brimming nectar of self-applause, instead of waiting for
the opinion of the _reading public_! Who would not fling himself back to
this period of idle enchantment? But as we cannot, the best substitute
for it is to see a comedy of Molière’s acted at the Theatre Français.
The thing is there imitated to the life.
After all, there is something sufficiently absurd and improbable in this
play. The character from which it takes its title is not well made out.
A misanthrope and a philanthropist are the same thing, as Rousseau has
so well shewn in his admirable criticism on this piece. Besides, what
can be so nationally characteristic as the voluntary or dramatic
transfers of passion in it? Alceste suspects his mistress’s truth, and
makes an abrupt and violent declaration of love to another woman in
consequence, as if the passion (in French) went along with the speech,
and our feelings could take any direction at pleasure which we bethought
ourselves of giving them. And then again, when after a number of
outrages and blunders committed by himself, he finds he is in the wrong,
and that he ought to be satisfied with _Celimène_ and the world, which
turns out no worse than he always thought it; he takes, in pure spite
and the spirit of contradiction, the resolution to quit her forever,
unless she will agree to go and live with him in a wilderness. This is
not misanthropy, but sheer ‘midsummer madness.’ It is a mere idle
abstract determination to be miserable, and to make others so, and not
the desperate resource of bitter disappointment (for he has received
none) nor is it in the least warranted by the proud indignation of a
worthy sensible man at the follies of the world (which character Alceste
is at first represented to be). It is a gratuitous start of French
imagination, which is still in extremes, and ever in the wrong. Why, I
would ask, must a man be either a mere courtier and man of the world,
pliant to every custom, or a mere enthusiast and maniac, absolved from
common sense and reason? Why could not the hero of the piece be a
philosopher, a satirist, a railer at mankind in general, and yet marry
_Celimène_, with whom he is in love, and who has proved herself worthy
of his regard? The extravagance of _Timon_ is tame and reasonable to
this, for _Timon_ had been ruined by his faith in mankind, whom he
shuns. Yet the French would consider _Timon_ as a very _farouche_ and
_outré_ sort of personage. To be hurried into extremities by extreme
suffering and wrong, is with them absurd and shocking: to play the fool
without a motive or in virtue of making a set speech, they think in
character and keeping. So far, to be sure, we differ in the first
principles of dramatic composition. A similar remark might be made on
the Tartuffe. This character is detected over and over again in acts of
the most barefaced profligacy and imposture; he makes a fine speech on
the occasion, and _Orgon_ very quietly puts the offence in his pocket.
This credulity to verbal professions would be tolerated on no stage but
the French, as natural or probable. Plain English practical good sense
would revolt at it as a monstrous fiction. But the French are so fond of
hearing themselves talk, that they take a sort of interest (by proxy) in
whatever affords an opportunity for an ingenious and prolix harangue,
and attend to the dialogue of their plays, as they might to the
long-winded intricacies of a law-suit. Mr. Bartolino Saddletree would
have _assisted_ admirably at a genuine prosing French Comedy.
Mademoiselle Mars played also in the afterpiece, a sort of shadowy
_Catherine and Petruchio_. She is less at home in the romp than in the
fine lady. She did not give herself up to the ‘whole loosened soul’ of
farce, nor was there the rich laugh, the sullen caprice, the childish
delight and astonishment in the part, that Mrs. Jordan would have thrown
into it. Mrs. Orger would have done it almost as well. There was a
dryness and restraint, as if there was a constant dread of running into
caricature. The outline was correct, but the filling up was not bold or
luxuriant. There is a tendency in the lighter French comedy to a certain
_jejuneness_ of manner, such as we see in lithographic prints. They do
not give full swing to the march of the humour, just as in their short,
tripping walk they seem to have their legs tied. Madame Marsan is in
this respect superior. There was an old man and woman in the same piece,
in whom the quaint drollery of a couple of veteran retainers in the
service of a French family was capitally expressed. The humour of
Shakspeare’s play, as far as it was extracted, hit very well.—The
behaviour of the audience was throughout exemplary. There was no crowd
at the door, though the house was as full as it could hold; and indeed
most of the places are bespoke, whenever any of their standard pieces
are performed. The attention never flags; and the buzz of eager
expectation and call for silence, when the curtain draws up, is just the
same as with us when an Opera is about to be performed, or a song to be
sung. A French audience are like flies caught in treacle. Their wings
are clogged, and it is all over with their friskings and vagaries. Their
bodies and their minds _set_ at once. They have, in fact, a national
theatre and a national literature, which we have not. Even well-informed
people among us hardly know the difference between Otway and Shakspeare;
and if a person has a fancy for any of our elder classics, he may have
it to himself for what the public cares. The French, on the contrary,
know and value their best authors. They have Molière and Racine by
heart—they come to their plays as to an intellectual treat; and their
beauties are reflected in a thousand minds around you, as you see your
face at every turn in the _Café des Milles-Colonnes_. A great author or
actor is really in France what one fancies them in England, before one
knows any thing of the world as it is called. It is a pity we should set
ourselves up as the only reading or reflecting people—_ut lucus a non
lucendo_.[27] But we have here no oranges in the pit, no cry of porter
and cider, no jack-tars to _encore_ Mr. Braham three times in ‘The Death
of Abercrombie,’ and no play-bills. This last is a great inconvenience
to strangers, and is what one would not expect from a play-going people;
though it probably arises from that very circumstance, as they are too
well acquainted with the actors and pieces to need a prompter. They are
not accidental spectators, but constant visitors, and may be considered
as behind the scenes.
I saw three very clever comic actors at the Theatre des Variétés on the
Boulevards, all quite different from each other, but quite French. One
was _Le Peintre_, who acted a master-printer; and he _was_ a
master-printer, so bare, so dingy, and so wan, that he might be supposed
to have lived on printer’s ink and on a crust of dry bread cut with an
_oniony_ knife. The resemblance to familiar life was so complete and so
habitual, as to take away the sense of imitation or the pleasure of the
deception. Another was Odry, (I believe,) who with his blue coat,
gold-laced hat, and corpulent belly, resembled a jolly, swaggering,
good-humoured parish-officer, or the boatswain of an English man-of-war.
His _éclats de rire_, the giddy way in which he ran about the stage
(like an overgrown school-boy), his extravagant noises, and his gabbling
and face-making were, however, quite in the French style. A fat, pursy
Englishman, acting the _droll_ in this manner, would be thought drunk or
mad; the Frenchman was only gay! Monsieur Potier played an old lover,
and, till he was _drest_, looked like an old French cook-shop keeper.
The old beau transpired through his finery afterwards. But, though the
part was admirably understood, the ridicule was carried too far. This
person was too meagre, his whisper too inaudible, his attempts at
gallantry too feeble and vapid, and the whole too much an exhibition of
mere physical decay to make the satire pleasant. There should be at
least some revival of the dead; the taper of love ought to throw out an
expiring gleam. In the song in praise of Love he threw a certain
romantic air into the words, warbling them in a faint _demi-voix_, and
with the last sigh of a youthful enthusiasm fluttering on his lips. This
was charming. I could not help taking notice, that during his breakfast,
and while he is sipping his coffee, he never once ceases talking to his
valet the whole time. The concluding scene, in which, after kneeling to
his mistress, he is unable to rise again without the help of his nephew,
who surprises him in this situation, and who is also his rival, is very
amusing.[28] The songs at this theatre are very pleasing and light, but
so short, that they are over almost as soon as begun, and before your
ears have a _mouthful_ of sound. This is very tantalizing to us; but the
French seem impatient to have the dialogue go on again, in which they
may suppose themselves to have a share. I wanted to see Brunet, but did
not.
Talma and Mademoiselle Georges (the great props of French tragedy) are
not at present here. Talma is at Lyons, and Mademoiselle Georges has
retired _on a pique_ into the country, in the manner of some English
actresses. I had seen them both formerly, and should have liked to see
them again. Talma has little of the formal _automaton_ style in his
acting. He has indeed that common fault in his countrymen of speaking as
if he had swallowed a handful of snuff; but in spite of this, there is
great emphasis and energy in his enunciation, a just conception, and an
impressive representation of character. He comes more in contact with
nature than our Kemble-school, with more of dignity than the antagonist
one. There is a dumb eloquence in his gestures. In _Œdipus_, I remember
his raising his hands above his head, as if some appalling weight were
falling on him to crush him; and in the _Philoctetes_, the expression of
excruciating pain was of that mixed mental and physical kind, which is
so irresistibly affecting in reading the original Greek play, which
Racine has paraphrased very finely. The sounds of his despair and the
complaints of his desolate situation were so thrilling, that you might
almost fancy you heard the wild waves moan an answer to them.
Mademoiselle Georges (who gave recitations in London in 1817) was, at
the time I saw her, a very remarkable person. She was exceedingly
beautiful, and exceedingly fat. Her fine handsome features had the
regularity of an antique statue, with the roundness and softness of
infancy. Her well-proportioned arms (swelled out into the largest
dimensions) tapered down to a delicate baby-hand. With such a
disadvantage there was no want of grace or flexibility in her movements.
Her voice had also great sweetness and compass. It either sunk into the
softest accents of tremulous plaintiveness, or rose in thunder. The
effect was surprising; and one was not altogether reconciled to it at
first. She plays at the Odeon, and has a rival at the Theatre Français,
Madame Paradol, who is very like her in person. She is an immense woman;
when I saw her, I thought it was Mademoiselle Georges fallen away! There
are some other tragic actresses here, with the prim airs of a French
milliner forty years ago, the _hardiesse_ of a battered _gouvernante_,
and the brazen lungs of a drum-major. Mademoiselle Duchesnois I have not
had an opportunity of seeing.