emotion and passion, as they are called.' He was of a directly_contrary opinion to that of Fielding, in his Tom Jones,' who makes Partridge say of Garrick, 'Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.' For, when I asked him, 'Would not you, sir, start as Mr. Garrick does, if you saw a ghost?' he answered, 'I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost.' Goldsmith's similar disposition to vilipend Garrick and his class, elicits some semi-apologetic remarks from Mr. Forster, who says that uneasy relations, existing only between author and actor, have had a manifest tendency at all times unfairly to disparage the actor's intellectual claims, and to set any of the inferior arts above them. "Nevertheless, the odds might be made more even. The deepest and rarest beauties of poetry are those which the actor cannot grasp; but in the actor's startling triumphs, whether of movement, gesture, look, or tone, the author has no great share. Thus, were accounts fairly struck with the literary class, a Garrick might be honestly left between the gentle and grand superiority of a Shakspeare on the one hand, who, from the heights of his immeasurable genius, smiles down help and fellowship upon him; and the eternal petulance and pretensions of an Arthur Murphy, on the other, who, from the round of a ladder to which of himself he never could have mounted, looks down with ludicrous contempt on what Mr. Ralph would call the implements' of his elevation." Campbell was much of the same mind when he said, or sang, of Kemble, that His was the spell o'er hearts Full many a tone of thought sublime, But, by the mighty actor brought, Verse ceases to be airy thought, Colley Cibber writes with only natural esprit de corps, magnifying his office, and upholding his order, when he thus nicely adjusts the balance between Shakspeare and Mr. Betterton. "Betterton was an actor, as Shakspeare was an author, both without competitors, formed for the mutual assistance and illustration of each other's genius! How Shakspeare wrote, all men who have a taste for nature may read and know, but with what higher rapture would he still be read, could they conceive how Betterton played him! Then might they know, the one was born alone to speak what the other only knew to write! Pity it is, that the momentary beauties flowing from an harmonious elocution, cannot, like those of poetry, be their own record; that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that pre * Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (August 15, 1773). 1 sents them; or at best can but faintly glimmer through the memory, or imperfect attestation, of a few surviving spectators. Could how Betterton spoke be as easily known as what he spoke, then might you see the muse of Shakspeare in her triumph, with all her beauties in their best array, rising into real life, and charming her beholders."* The inference is, that a generation that knows not Betterton, knows not Shakspeare; so that the poet without the player cannot be made perfect-cannot, indeed, be properly conceived at all. There is an amusing entry, which bears on this vexed question, in Thomas Moore's journal, during one of his residences in Paris: "Went with Bessy to market, and afterwards called upon Wordsworth. A young Frenchman called in, and it was amusing to hear him and Wordsworth at cross purposes upon the subject of Athalie;' Wordsworth saying that he did not wish to see it acted, as it would never come up to the high imagination he had formed in reading it, of the prophetic inspiration of the priests, &c., &c.; and the Frenchman insisting that in acting alone could it be properly enjoyed,-that is to say, in the manner it was acted now; for he acknowledged that till the Corps de Ballet came to its aid, it was very dull, even on the stage,-une action morte."† Wordsworth was not the man to think Hamlet and the Ghost sublimed by stage-management, or the storm scenes in Lear intensified in effect by a mouthing actor, and an unlimited allowance of property thunder and lightning; while the Frenchman, as a Frenchman, was not the man to understand a possible preference of the book, at home, to its attractions at the spectacle. Not that all Frenchmen are inevitably of this way of thinking. At any rate some of them recognise the closet claims of our, and the German, dramatic literature, whatever they may think of the stage supremacy of their own. M. Philarète Chasles, for instance, says, that the two great northern nations of modern times, Germany and England, have created dramas (it is of chefs-d'œuvres he speaks) far more adapted to the philosopher than to the spectator, and composed rather to be meditated upon than to be represented. "The noble poetry of Goethe's 'Faust' evanishes on the boards. Never was the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' intelligible on the stage; while the Festin de Pierre,' or rather the 'Convive-statue' of Tirso de Molina (Juan Tellez), has been triumphant in every theatre throughout Europe. The 'Orestes' of the ancients is an infinitely better acting-piece than the Hamlet' of Shakspeare. The North looks for thought, not for action; in the thought, it descries the cause of the thought, and studies the nuances of this cause. Not that it despises passion, but it is ever ready to chill it by cold analysis. When suffering and bleeding, it ponders itself, and scrutinises its own suffering. This it is which makes the dramas of Shakspeare (dramas which are not dramas, and wherein the action is a mere pretext) so eternally fruitful for meditative intellects and contemplative souls. "I do not allege that Shakspeare is deficient either in action or passion; what I affirm is, that they are to him the means only, not the end; this great man has frequently neglected theatrical effect, and sacrificed it to meditation, to observation, to graduated tints, to analysis, to the infinite *Cibber's Apology, ch. iv. † Memoirs, Journals, &c., of Thomas Moore. study of character and of human events. in his completeness by a public concourse. the theatre; but he is above it."* Never will he be understood M. Chasles may leave much to be desired, and may advance something that is objectionable; but at least his stand-point is not amid the thick clouds and darkness, fogs and vapour mists and muddlement, which seem the natural envelope of so many who discourse of the divine Williams. The worst objection that one of Mr. Landor's imaginary interlocutors can find against the theatre, is, that he loses in it his original idea of such men as Cæsar and Coriolanus, and, where the loss affects him more deeply, of Juliet and Desdemona. "Alexander was a fool to wish for a second world to conquer: but no man is a fool who wishes for the enjoyment of two, the real and ideal: nor is it anything short of a misfortune, I had almost said of a calamity, to confound them. This is done by the stage: it is likewise done by engravings in books, which have a great effect in weakening the imagination, and are serviceable only to those who have none, and who read negligently and idly." Hence the speaker would be sorry if the most ingenious print in the world were to cover the first impression left on his mind of such characters as Don Quixote and Sancho: yet probably a very indifferent one, he apprehends, might do it; for we cannot master our fancies, nor give them at will a greater or less tenacity, a greater or less promptitude in coming and recurring. Charles Lamb writes identically to the same effect, when he says in a letter to Samuel Rogers-apropos of a gift-copy, from the author, of the "Pleasures of Memory," illustrated: "But I am jealous of the combina tion of the sister arts. Let them sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatre) did not Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery do me with Shakspeare? to have Opie's Shakspeare, Northcote's Shakspeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakspeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakspeare, wooden-headed West's Shakspeare (though he did the best in Lear), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakspeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakspeare; to be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! to have Imogen's portrait! to confine the illimitable!"‡ 66 66 Haydon, the historical painter, harps on the same string. "I will not go again to see any of Shakspeare's plays," he resolves, in his .Journal: you always associate the actors with the characters." This was after going with Wilkie to see Macbeth," in 1808. It is observable that Sir George Beaumont had, in 1807, expressed to Haydon his doubt as to the prudence of painting subjects taken from the poets, where you have to contend with the preconceived ideas of the spectators. Especially was Sir George urgent with this warning, in painting from Shakspeare, when, said he, "you not only have the powerful production of his mind's pencil to contend with, but also the perverted representations of the theatres, which have made such impressions on most people in early life, that I, for my part, feel it more difficult to form a picture in my mind from any *Etudes sur le Drame Espagnol, par M. Philarète Chasles, § xvii. † Landor's Imaginary Conversations: William Penn and Lord Peterborough. Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: Letter to Rogers, Dec. 1833. scene of his that I have seen frequently represented, than from the works of any other poet. Haydon's friend and fellow-labourer, both in art and in art criticism, William Hazlitt-who was also a theatrical critic by profession, and in constant practice-declares the representing the very finest of Shakspeare's plays, upon the stage, even by the best actors, to be an abuse of the poet's genius,-adding, that even in those of a second-rate class, the quantity of sentiment and imagery greatly outweighs the immediate impression of the situation and story. Not only, he argues, and his argument tallies with what we have quoted from M. Chasles are the more refined poetical beauties and minuter strokes of character lost to the audience, but the most striking and impressive passages, those which having once read we can never forget, fail comparatively of their effect, except in one or two rare instances indeed. "It is the pantomime part of tragedy, the exhibition of immediate and physical distress, that which gives the greatest opportunity for inexpressible dumb-show and noise,' which is sure to tell, and tell completely on the stage." All the rest, he adds, all that appeals to our profounder feelings, to reflection and imagination-all that affects us most deeply in our closets, and, in fact, constitutes the glory of Shakspeare is little else than an interruption and a drag on the business of the stage ;-those parts of the play on which the reader dwells the longest, and with the highest relish in the perusal, being hurried through in the performance, while the most trifling and exceptionable are obtruded on his notice, and occupy as much time as the most important. “We do not mean to say that there is less knowledge or display of mere stage effect in Shakspeare than in other writers, but that there is much greater knowledge and display of other things, which divide the attention with it, and to which it is not possible to give an equal force in the representation. Hence it is that the reader of the plays of Shakspeare is almost always disappointed in seeing them acted; and, for our own parts, we should never go to see them acted, if we could help it."+ Hazlitt further contends that Shakspeare has embodied his characters so very distinctly, that he stands in no need of the actor's assistance to make them more distinct; and that the representation of the character on the stage "almost uniformly interferes with our conception of the character itself." The only exceptions to this observation he can call to mind are Mrs. Siddons and Edmund Kean-"the former of whom in one or two characters, and the latter, not certainly in any one character, but in very many passages, have raised our imagination of the part they acted." Especially would this last concession, hedged in as it is by a restricted application, hold good of such intervals of acting, where the acting is all in all, as Steele admired so much in Betterton's handkerchief scene, in "Othello." Sir Richard affirms that "whoever reads in his closet this admirable scene, will find that he cannot, except he has as warm an imagination as Shakspeare himself, find any but dry, incoherent, and broken sentences: but a reader that has seen Betterton act it, observes there could not be a word added; that longer speeches had been * Autobiography of B. R. Haydon. † Hazlitt, in the Examiner, March 16, 1815. unnatural, nay impossible, in Othello's circumstances."* An actor of real genius will, in occasional opportunities of this kind, transcend the highest expectations; and for such parentheses of power the spectator will be grateful to him, for ever after. Again, in minor and middling parts, there is often scope for a player of cultured taste and spirit, to achieve an effect which, not only would an ordinary actor egregiously miss on the stage, but which the intelligent student would seldom, perhaps, "realise" in the closet. Sir Walter Scott wisely counselled Terry to exert himself in studying those characters which have little in them, and so give a grace which you cannot find in the author." Audiences, Sir Walter assured his correspondent, are always grateful for this or rather-" for gratitude is as much out of the question in the Theatre, as Bernadotte says to Boney, it is amongst sovereigns" (this was written in 1813+)-or rather, then, the audience is gratified by receiving pleasure from a part which they had no expectation would afford them any. It was in this view that Scott avowed, that, had he been an actor by profession, and possessed talents, he would have made a point of getting many of those parts with which ordinary performers quarrelled, and of studying to give them an effect which their intrinsic merit might not entitle them to. 6 We can fancy Shakspeare himself thoroughly sympathising with this volition of Scott's; nay, more, that, being an actor by profession, he put it, as opportunity offered, in practice. It was not his design, at any rate, to be a closet-poet. He wrote for, sometimes perhaps on, the stage. One of his modern critics has said, that a play by Shakspeare reads as if it were written in a playhouse, and proves his knowledge both of the necessity and the art of keeping a theatrical audience awake. "When you read him you feel a sensation of motion, a conviction that there is something up,' a notion that not only is something being talked about, but also that something is being done. We do not imagine that Shakspeare owed this quality to his being a player, but rather that he became a player because he possessed this quality, of mind." In one of Lovell Beddoes' letters to a literary friend we read: "You are, I think, disinclined to the stage: now I confess that I think this is the highest aim of the dramatist, and I should be very desirous to get on it. To look down on it is a piece of impertinence, as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play, and is generally the result of a consciousness of one's own inability to produce anything striking and affecting in that way. Shakspeare wrote only for it."§ (Contrast with the last sentence, what Eckermann reports Goethe to have said of Shakspeare: "He is not a theatrical poet; he never thought of the stage; it was far too narrow for his great mind; nay, the whole visible world was too narrow."-" It is singular," observed Eckermann, "that the Dramas of Shakspeare are not theatrical pieces properly so called, since he wrote them all for the theatre." -"Shakspeare," replied Goethe, "wrote those pieces direct from his own nature. Then, too, his age and the existing arrangements of the stage * See the paper by Steele on Betterton's funeral, in the Tatler, No. 168, May 4, 1710. † See Lockhart's Life of Scott, ch. xxvi. Walter Bagehot's "Estimates:"-Shakspeare. |