CHAPTER III. Mr. Kemble arrives in town.-State of our theatres as to talent.-Drury lane.-Smith-Fine gentleman in comedy. -Change of Manners.-Its effect upon former comedies.John Palmer-Dodd.-Bensley-King.-Parsons.--The Critic.--Its first night,--Moral sensitiveness of the audience.--Sheridan an unexpected imitator of Dr. Barrow. --The passages compared. AT the period when Kemble arrived in the metropolis, our theatres could boast many distinguished ornaments of the stage. He did not come to throw light upon obscurity, but he added a new and brilliant planet to the host that shed their lustre upon our evening pleasures. The great master of the art had formed in his own theatre some very respectable artists, who, from a long habit of acting together, had rendered their performances very smooth and attractive; and although no one actor greatly predominated, yet together, they gave evidence that they had been well disciplined, that rehearsals had not been spared, and that every advantage had been drawn from the existing materials. Mr. Smith certainly occupied a very distinguished station in the theatre, and his merits though peculiar were of no common order. In tragedy he performed most of the first rate characters with great energy, but, I think, not much discrimination. He made no mark upon peculiar portions of the dialogue--he lifted no beauties of expression into prominence--there was no light and shade in his manner. One uniform cadence seemed in him able to convey the most striking opposites of sentiment and character. It was consequently never objected to him that he ventured upon new readings, or any readings. He spoke the obvious meaning of the text, and satisfied common auditors; and this he did in one unvaried song, in a tone of measured power. His articulation was not nice; indeed, from some compression of the organs, what he uttered in tragedy, always seemed laborious and even painful. But all that was outside was fair and noble. His deportment was dignified and manly--his action graceful, and never redundant. Nature had denied to him that first of all requisites, an expressive countenance, yet was he certainly a handsome man, and an elegant stage figure. In tragedy he might be said just barely to keep his place--in comedy there was nobody qualified to take it. The fine gentleman in comedy was then very different from what it has since become--it was regulated by higher manners, and seemed indeed born in polished life, and educated in drawing-rooms. The dress kept the performer up to the character. It was necessary to wear the sword, and to manage it gracefully. As the hair was dressed and powdered, the hat was supported under the arm. The mode of approaching the lady was more respectful; and it required the most delicate address to lead and seat her upon the stage. It will be recollected that ladies wore the hoop, and in all the brilliancy of court dress, appeared very formidable beings. The flippancy of the modern style makes a bow look like a mockery: it does not seem naturally to belong to a man in pantaloons and a plain blue coat, with a white or a black waistcoat. I cannot doubt that what is called genteel comedy, among us, suffers greatly from the comparative undress of our times. What can you do, for instance, with such a comedy as the Careless Husband? Its dialogue could never proceed from the fashionables of the present day--different times can only be signified by difference of costume. Should we therefore venture back to the lace and embroidery, the swords and bags of the last age? I think not: the difference from our present costume would excite a laugh. What is the result unfortunately? We drop, or impoverish these comedies. That profound philosopher, Mr. Burke, has somewhere observed the reason why these comedies in higher life are so pleasing. Generally speaking, it would seem, that such a mode of existence was too artificial, and therefore not so fit for painting, as deficient in character, and consisting of little more than lords and footmen, ladies and their waiting-maids. But he adds, "I have observed that persons, and especially 66 women, in lower life and of no breeding, are fond of such "representations-it seems like introducing them into good "company, and the honour compensates the dulness of the "entertainment."* Here is therefore a mode of existence purely artificial, stript at once of all its external illusions. In their dress, at least, the characters are sunken to common life; and the charm of being, as it were, introduced into good company is taken from the great bulk of the spectators-they are there * Hints for an Essay on the Drama. Works, vol. v. 4to. p. 433. fore sure of the dulness, but neither feel nor fancy any of the honour, which without any such design the poet gave them as the compensation. Palmer, in comedy, assumed the refined manners I have been describing with great case, but they were assumed he seemed to me to have attained the station, rather than to have been born to it. In his general deportment he had a sort of elaborate grace and stately superiority, which he affected on all occasions, with an accompaniment of the most plausible politeness. He was the same on and off the stage -he was constantly acting the man of superior accomplishments. This it was that rendered Palmer so exquisite in High Life below Stairs. He was really my Lord Duke's footman, affecting the airs and manners of his master-and here was the difference between him and Dodd, who, from the radical gentility of his fops, became in the kitchen the real Sir Harry, instead of his coxcomb and impudent valet. Palmer, however, was an actor of infinite address, and sustained a very important line of business in the company. He was a man of great expense and luxurious habits, perfectly irreclaimable, and usually negligent; but he could throw up his eyes with astonishment that he had lost the word, or cast them down with penitent humility, wipe his lips with his eternal white handkerchief to smother his errors, and bow himself out of the greatest absurdities that continued idleness could bring upon him. If Palmer was not the first of tragedians, he was one of the most useful-the tyrants came to him from his stately deportment; the villains from his insidious and plausible address. His Stukely yielded only to his Joseph Surface. But he was not confined in tragedy to the tyrannic or the designing; his Villeroy, in the Fatal Marriage, had a delicate and hopeless ardour of affection, that made it a decided impossibility for Isabella to resist him-he seemed a being expressly provided by fate, to wind about that lovely victim the web of inextricable misery. In all that Palmer did you saw that he had the greatest mastery over his art. He walked the stage like no other man, and seemed made for his profession. Practice was I believe nearly all his study. In his closet he did little; but experience showed him what was still wanting in his efforts, and he became at length one of the most general favourites that the stage had ever known. If Sir Fretful be right in his assertion, (which I do not presume to doubt,) that "the "women are the best judges after all," Palmer certainly bore away the palm of their decided and lasting preference. Dodd, with more confined powers, was one of the most perfect actors that I have ever seen. He was the fopling of the drama rather than the age. I mean by this, that his own times rarely showed us any thing so highly charged with the vanity of personal exhibition. He was, to be sure, the prince of pink heels, and the soul of empty eminence. As he tottered rather than walked down the stage, in all the protuberance of endless muslin and lace in his cravats and frills, he reminded you of the jutting motion of the pigeon. His action was suited to his figure. He took his snuff, or his bergamot, with a delight so beyond all grosser enjoyments, that he left you no doubt whatever of the superior happiness of a coxcomb. The modern fop is a creature of a different kind-he is pert and volatile, incessantly in action. and becoming risible by awkward gestures and mere grimace. He has no dignity to keep up; you may laugh not only at him but in his face. Besides he is usually taken from low life, and is a caricature rather than a character. But Dodd was not confined to the beau monde, he could enter into the humours of a distant age, and exhibit the fatuity of the GULL, with a truth and richness, that left every rival at an immense distance. I need only to remind his spectators of his Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in the Twelfth Night, and relate a simple fact to which I was a witness. The late Mr. Edwin went into the pit of Drury-Lane expressly to see Dodd, before he himself appeared in Sir Andrew. On his coming out he exclaimed to a friend, "This is indeed perfection! I cannot touch him in his own "way; but I hope, at all events, to do something." I saw Mr. Edwin in the character. He was in that, as in every thing, quite irresistible; but the smoothness, the native imbecility of Dodd's Sir Andrew, were transcendant. Edwin could not entirely reach that paragon of folly, to whom a common expression is a problem; who cannot conceive the meaning of accost; speaks four or five languages word for word without book, and demands what is pourquoy. Has the back trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria, plays on the viol de gambo, and goes to church in a corranto. No, Sir Toby, these things were not hidden; they were the only lights that shone through Dodd's Sir Andrew, and the most sportive malice could not render him more ridiculous, than he came forth from the forming hands of nature. Mr. Bensley here offers himself to my recollection as the only perfect representative of another character in the same comedy; the smiling, yellow stockinged, and cross-gartered Malvolio. All his peculiarities of deportment here aided his exhibition of the steward--the sliding zig-zag advance and retreat of his figure fixed the attention to his stockings and his garters. His constrained smile, his hollow laugh, his lordly assumption, and his ineffable contempt of all that opposed him in the way to greatness, were irresistibly diverting. In that amazing production of dramatic science, the Fox, Mr. Bensley gave to the fine fly, the parasite Mosca, what no other actor in my time could pretend to give, and seemed in truth, like the character, to come back to us from a former age. He spoke Ben Jonson's language, as if he had never been accustomed to a lighter and less energetic diction, and with the Volpone of Palmer and the Corbaccio of Parsons, presented a feast to the visitors of Colman's theatre, which has seldom been equalled, and will I believe never be surpassed. In Pierre Mr. Bensley distinguished himself greatly; and his lago, if it yielded to any, yielded only to the profound skill of Henderson. His voice had something super-human in its tone, and his cadence was lofty and imposing. If I had been suddenly asked what Bensley was most like, I should have said, a creature of our poet's fancy, Prospero. In that part he was in truth a mighty magician, and the awful accents that he poured out seemed of power to wake sleepers from their graves, and to control those who possessed an absolute mastery over the elements. There was a very delicate and nice discrimination in Bensley, when he addressed his daughter, and the spirit Ariel. They were not two young ladies of the theatre, to whom he announced his pleasure in one common tone of command. He lowered himself parentally to Miranda's innocence and inexperience : it was evidently by his art that he raised himself to the control of the spirit Ariel; with whom a kind of personal attachment seemed to mitigate the authority by which that gentlest of his kind was kept in a yet unwilling allegiance. Our own day has shown us an Ariel, who almost realizes the delicate imagination of the poet.* From Prospero, who called spirits from their confines, it is but a step to the awful shade of Hamlet's father. No man in my judgment ever delivered his harrowing tale so terribly as Mr. Bensley. "This was no MORTAL business, nor no sound, Miss Tree. |