MRS. SIDDONS

The Examiner][May 25, 1828.

There has been no novelty this week at any of our theatres, English or French, except that little Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre has been metamorphosed into a cat, and has been playing in the Pie Voleuse at the Lyceum. She played the first charmingly; the last prettily, though we have seen it done better. There is a calibre, a weight of metal in Miss Kelly’s pathos, which the French actress is without. Our lively neighbours are doubtless ‘born to converse, to live, and act with ease’—all is set in motion like a feather, stopped like a feather. Smiles play upon the lips, tears start into their eyes and are dried up for nothing; an exclamation and a sigh settle the account between life and death; all is a game at make-believe, thoughtless and innocent as childhood, in the baby-house of their imagination—but if you wish to see the heart-strings crack, go and see Miss Kelly in the Maid of Palisseau; or if you would see the stately pillar of Tragedy itself fall and crush the subjected world, then you should have witnessed Mrs. Siddons formerly in some of her overwhelming parts. That was a flood of tears indeed—a drinking of the brimming cup of human joys and woes to the very last drop, the recollection of which may serve one all the rest of one’s life. We understand that not long ago Sir Walter Scott and Mrs. Siddons met in the same room before Mr. Martin’s picture of the Fall of Nineveh—two such spectators the world cannot match again, the one by the common consent of mankind the foremost writer of his age, the other in the eyes of all who saw her prime or her maturity, the queen and mistress of the tragic scene. Forgive us, gentle, ever-living shade of Jenny Deans, agonised soul of Balfour of Burley, heroic spirit of Rebecca of York, immortal memory of Dumbie Dikes and of a thousand more, if we should have turned from you and from him who invented you, to bow the knee and kiss the hem of the garment of her who represented to our youthful gaze the Mourning Bride, Hermione, Belvidera, Beverley’s wife, and was the Muse of Tragedy personified. We are sorry that Mrs. Siddons has abridged Paradise Lost, and that Sir Walter has written a triumphant peroration over ‘the worst, the second fall of man.’ We are perhaps runagates and Goths; but the smell of the links that used to ply between Covent garden and Drury lane prevails in our imagination over all the heather-bloom of Scotland, and we declare that Mrs. Siddons appears to us the more masculine spirit of the two. Sir Walter (when all’s said and done) is an inspired butler, a ‘Yes and No, my Lord’ fellow in a noble family—Mrs. Siddons is like a cast from the antique, or rather like the original, divine or more than human, from which it was taken. Yet close to each other, within narrow space, were placed two heads, on which glory sat plumed, beat two hearts over which had rolled the volume of earth’s bliss or woe, were interchanged glances that had reflected the brightness of the universe. Who would not rather see Sir Walter Scott’s fringed eyelids and storied forehead than the vacant brow of prince or peer? When Mrs. Siddons used to sit in parties and at drawing-rooms, the Lady Marys and the Lady Dorothys of the day came and peeped into the room to get a glance of her, with more awe and wonder than if it had been a queen. This was honour, this was power. There was but one person in the world who would have drawn the gaping gaze of curiosity from these and from all the crowned heads in Europe; and Sir Walter exults that he perished like a felon in the grasp of a jailor. We must indeed admire the talents, when we forgive the use of them: or is it that genius, with its lofty crest and variegated colours, seems destined like the serpent to lick the dust, and crawl all its life with its belly on the ground? We can reckon up in our time three great tragic performers; Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Kean, and Madame Pasta. (If there is a fourth instance, we either know not of it, or it is Miss Kelly: but that in a parenthesis, as our private opinion, or that of persons no wiser than ourselves.) Of these three, Mrs. Siddons seemed to command every source of terror and pity, and to rule over their wildest elements with inborn ease and dignity. Her person was made to contain her spirit; her soul to fill and animate her person. Her eye answered to her voice. She wore a crown. She looked as if descended from a higher sphere, and walked the earth in majesty and pride. She sounded the full diapason, touched all chords of passion, they thrilled through her, and yet she preserved an elevation of thought and character above them, like the tall cliff round which the tempest roars, but its head reposes in the blue serene! Mrs. Siddons combined the utmost grandeur and force with every variety of expression and excellence: her transitions were rapid and extreme, but were massed into unity and breadth—there was nothing warped or starting from its place—she produced the most overpowering effects[[42]] without the slightest effort, by a look, a word, a gesture. Mr. Kean, in the intellectual and impassioned part, is in our judgment equal to any one, but he produces his most striking effects by fits and starts, without the same general tone and elevation of character, and, for want of the instrumental advantages, with an appearance of effort and sometimes of extravagance. Madame Pasta, on the contrary, never goes out of her way, never aims at effect or startles by any one pointed passage, nor does she combine a variety of feelings together (as far as we have seen) but she rises to the very summit of her art, and satisfies every expectation by absolute and unbroken integrity of purpose, and by the increasing and unconscious intensity of passion. She has neither Mr. Kean’s inequalities nor Mrs. Siddons’s scope: she neither deviates from the passion nor rises above it, but she commits herself wholly to its impulse, borrows strength from its strength, ascends with it to heaven, or is buried in the abyss. In a word, she is the creature of truth and nature, and joins the utmost simplicity with the utmost force. This has little to do with Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre: ah! she is charming too, and we hope to have a great deal to say in her praise—twenty years hence. She counts her silver spoons inimitably, and when she is suspected of stealing one of them says, ‘C’est desagreable,’ in a voice and manner that none but a Frenchwoman can. The Misanthrope and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme have been repeated at this theatre; and M. Perlet has done equal justice to Moliere’s sententious gravity in the one, and to his delightful flighty farce and fanciful exaggeration of folly in the other. Moliere is our Wycherley and O’Keefe, both in one: or it might be said that he possessed the critical sense of Montaigne, with the exuberant mirth and humour of Rabelais.—We believe this little theatre, with its lively company and excellent pieces, answers tolerably well, as most French theatres do. We were thinking of this the other evening, and thought we had accounted for it. The French performances, with a tenth of the audience, pay better than the English with ten times the number and receipts. How so? It arises, on a critical inquiry, from the unity of place, which is the fundamental law of the French drama. One barbarism leads to another;—a slight technical distinction involves manager after manager in bankruptcy and ruin. Where there is no change of situation, the scenery is the same; and where this is the case, it is no object either of attraction or expense. Little more is required than a drop-scene. Therefore, all you have to do is to get good plays, and a good company to perform them: three or four hundred people in the house will maintain a dozen or a score of comedians on the stage; and the excellence of the performance and the taste of the town keep pace with one another, and with the absence of show and extrinsic decoration. But with us all this is reversed. The scene travels, and our scene-shifters, scene-painters, mechanists, and the whole theatrical commissariat go along with it. The variety, the gaudiness, the expense is endless: to pay for the getting up such an immense apparatus, the houses must be enlarged to hold a proportionable rabble of ‘barren spectators:’ the farther off they are thrown, the stronger must be the glare, the more astonishing the effect, and the play and the players (with all relish for wit or nature) dwindle into insignificance, and are lost in the blaze of a huge chandelier or the grin of a baboon. We do not see the features of the actors, but we admire (very justly) Mr. Stanfield’s landscape back-grounds, or a castle set on fire by Mr. Farley; we hear the din and bray of the orchestra, not the honeyed words of the poet; and still we wonder that operas and melo-drames flourish, and that the legitimate stage and good old English Comedy languishes. Poor old green curtain! when thou wast withdrawn to make room for gas lights and shining marble pillars, the last relic of the heart-felt pageant faded; and the Veluti in speculum flew after Astræa to the skies!

THE THREE QUARTERS, &c.

The Examiner][June 1, 1828.

Drury Lane.

The new comedy in three acts brought out at this theatre on Tuesday evening is, we apprehend, taken from a French piece, entitled Les Trois Quartiers. The Three Quarters of the town indicate the three sorts or stages of society, as they are to be met with in the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue Mont Blanc, and the Fauxbourg St. Germain, which may be supposed to answer (we speak under correction of the Secretary of the Admiralty, skilled as he is in the transitions from low to high life) to our Fish-street-hill, Russell and Grosvenor square. It was thought a nice distinction in Miss Burney, forty years ago, to place the residence of the Harrells in Portman square, and to assign Grosvenor square to the Delville family; the one being considered as the resort of the upstart fashionables, the other of the old gentry. To know whether this court-geography holds good in the present year, see the files of the John Bull, or the Last Series of Sayings and Doings, where such matters are noted and discussed with a becoming want of elegance and decorum, which is made up for by the innate loftiness of the subject. In the French piece, a rich adventurer from South America is introduced into these different circles by an officious go-between, as a travelled prodigy, un homme qui a vu Bolivar; and in each his perplexity and astonishment increases with the progress and refinement of manners in the Three Quarters of the town. There is some sense in that; and the French actors have the skill to make the line of demarcation intelligible. But here we vow that though we shift the scene, no progress is made; or we are at the top of the tree in the second stage. Kitty Corderoy is sufficiently forward and vulgar, it is true; Amelia Mammonton is naturally elegant and genteel; but we get no farther; or rather Lady Charlewood is a falling off, having neither natural nor acquired grace; and the Countess Dowager Delamere is distinguished by nothing but a rude and harsh familiarity of manner. The Banker (Mr. Cooper) has evidently the advantage of the Lord (Mr. Hooper); and Jack Pointer (Mr. Jones) a busybody and toad-eater, carries it hollow by dint of sheer impudence and impertinence. Mr. Jones’s Bond street slang—‘She’s a delicious creature’—is echoed every five minutes by Lady Delamere’s—‘You’ll excuse my freedom, Lady Charlewood;’ the changes are rung upon a few and slender notes of fashion, while the author has the full range of the Cockney dialect, and sinks deep in the bathos of low life. Mrs. Corderoy, we observe, is played by a Mrs. C. Jones. Is Mr. Jones lately married? If so, we congratulate him: she is an excellent cook. We could wish the accomplished author of Killing no Murder, he who dips his pen so carelessly in poison or honey, the expert improvisatori in fact or fiction, would turn his thoughts to this matter; give us a comedy or criticism to show our actors or play-wrights what they ought to do in these degenerate days; and from his ease of access to palaces or princes, give us a taste of true refinement, the court-air, the drawing-room grace, the after-dinner conversation, the mornings and the evenings of the great, instead of confining his abilities to teaching young gentlemen at Long’s how to eat their fish with a silver fork: the waiters might do that just as well. Or could not Mr. Croker, now that Augustus has given peace to sea and land, and who shakes epics and reviews from his brow ‘like dew-drops from the lion’s mane,’ smile a comedy that should point the nice gradations from the city to the court—

‘Fine by degrees, and beautifully less,’

and make it for ever impossible for Cheapside to pass Temple-bar or Russell-square to step into the Regent’s Park? We understand, indeed, that Mr. Colburn has a plan in contemplation to remedy all this, and that we may look forward to the dawn of a new era in literature, through the happy idea which the little bookselling Buonaparte has conceived of establishing an inviolable Concordat between the world of genius and fashion. The proposal is to buy up the manuscripts of all authors by profession, to lock them in a drawer, so as to put the whole corps of Garretteers and Grub street writers on the shelf, and leave the door open to none but persons of quality and amateurs, lords, ladies, and hangers-on of the great. The scheme has in a great measure succeeded in the periodical department, and only requires a little management to be extended to the stage. What an air already breathes from the New Parnassus! What a light breaks over Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden! What delicacy, what discrimination, what refinement of sentiment! What halycon days! What peaceable productions! There will be no grossness, no violence, no political allusions or party spite! The best understanding will subsist between Government and men of letters, nor will there be any occasion for a Dramatic Censor, when Ministers of State furnish the plot, and Peeresses in their own right suggest the last corrections to the dialogue. There is no doubt the taste for the drama will be revived by means of such an arrangement—people of fashion will go to see what people of fashion write—the manners of high life will be reflected on the stage as in the mirrors at each end of the dress circle—

‘They best can paint them who have known them most;’

the hireling crew will withdraw to hide themselves in a garret or a jail—the pit will wonder—the galleries be silent or shut up—Lord Porchester’s tragedy will be crowned with bays, Lord Morpeth’s transferred from the closet to the stage—Mr. Moore, by particular desire of several persons of distinction, will try his hand at another Blue-Stocking affair—and the Sphynx, the Athenæum, the Argus (a new evening), and the Aurora (a new morning paper), which Mr. Buckingham will by that time have set up on the same independent principles of voluntary contribution, will applaud to the skies the change which Mr. Colburn’s spirit and genius will have brought like a perfect paradise upon earth. It is whispered that a certain Duke has got through the first act of a piece, called ‘The Deaf and Dumb Politician,’ but dreads the vulgar composition of the public taste:—nay, who knows but the coast being cleared of plebeian scribblers and the rabble of competitors, Majesty itself might not take the field, the Lady Godiva of the scene, in a night-gown and slippers, with a grand romantic interlude called ‘The Prince and the Pretender, or the Year 1745’—with Mr. O—holding the glass-door in Burlington street for three days together in his hand, and Mr. C—p—b—ll to officiate as Peeping Tom—‘Oh! dearest Ophelia, we are ill at these numbers:’ but neither Ups and Downs nor Carron-Side suggested anything better. Mr. Liston in the first played a city fortune-hunter, who pays his addresses to, who jilts, and is jilted by three mistresses in succession, to whom he is introduced by Jack Pointer (Jones), his pretensions rising with his fortune, and with whom he is confronted and exposed without much effect in the last act. He at first aspires no higher than to Kitty Corderoy, a tradesman’s daughter; but having twenty thousand pounds left him, he contrives to cut with her, to her great joy, she being secretly in love with Mr. Christopher Higgins (Russell), her father’s apprentice, a person by no means approved by her mother Mrs. Corderoy (Mrs. C. Jones), because he himself is ‘a little sneaking chap,’ and his father a tailor—as if tailors were not in the order of nature or of civil society. Our hero, that is, Mr. Felix Mudberry, next offers himself, with a large bunch of flowers and a suit of clothes picked up on the way at the Readymade Depôt, to Miss Amelia Mammonton (the charming Miss Ellen Tree), a banker’s sister, who is in love with Earl Delamere (Mr. Hooper), love and romantic sentiment, according to the situation or rank in which it is found, aiming at still greater and more airy heights. She laughs at him and his ‘delicate attentions’ (as she well may)—but being led to suppose that his uncle, Mr. Stanley, a Liverpool merchant, or as he used to call him ‘Black Boy Billy,’ is dead, and has left him a fortune of half a million, he begins to blubber out his sorrow for his uncle’s death and his own ‘good, he means, bad fortune,’ stammers his excuses for leaving the company of Mr. Mammonton and his sister, and is wound up to a Countess by his mischievous prompter. Lady Charlewood (Miss I. Paton) is disgusted with the behaviour of her new and absurd admirer; her mother, the Countess Dowager Delamere (Mrs. Davison), admires his fortune, and patronises the match according to the etiquette of rank and high life. His inconstancy and meanness are however exposed in the meantime by Miss Kitty Corderoy, who is intimate with both the young ladies, having been at the same school with them somewhere in the neighbourhood of London, and runs up and down ‘the Ladder of Life’ as she pleases (in the French play the corresponding character is a milliner, which is a little more in keeping)—and Mr. Felix Mudberry, in his own emphatic phrase, is ‘blown’ by all the three at once;—the bubble of his legacy also bursts, and Jack Pointer turning short round upon him at this extremity, advises him to go abroad again, make another fortune, and on his return, promises to introduce him to a Princess! Mr. Liston produced a good deal of laughter in the part, but perhaps from not being near enough to see his face, the drollery fell flat upon us. It was (to get within bow-shot of an Hibernicism) like hearing the report of a pistol, before seeing the flash. Weepers and a round hat do not move our risible muscles. We think Mr. Liston shines in the cockney, more than in the cockney and dandy together. ‘He knows his cue best without a prompter.’ His affectation even must be unaffected. We will match his lead against anybody’s, we will not answer for the tinsel. We have a delicate request to make of him, that he would play Madge for his benefit and our satisfaction—unless Moll Flagon should complain of it as compromising her dignity. Is this piece Mr. Kenney’s? It shivers on the brink of nothing, and plunges over head and ears into nonsense. We wish our authors and architects, if they must give us foreign models, would give them entire, and not by bits and samples, altering only to spoil.

Covent-Garden.

Carron-Side, or the Fête Champêtre, a new Opera, the words by Mr. Planche, the music by M. Liverati, was brought out here on Tuesday, and was repeated on Thursday. The dialogue is tolerable; and so are the songs. Miss Stephens was the chief attraction in it; though she does not make much figure by Scottish stream or mountain. Mr. Sapio and Mr. Wood personated, the one a military, the other a naval hero in it, and maintained the superiority of their several professions in song and bold defiance—with equal loudness and skill. Miss Stephens (Blanche Mackay) the supposed daughter of a peasant, is in love with Captain Allan Lindsay (Sapio), and he with her, though he is about to be married to Grace Campbell (Miss Cawse), who likes another of her cousins, Cornet Hector Lindsay (Mr. Wood) quite as well or better, as far as we could judge by the event. When Blanche has to present a bouquet to the intended couple on the morning of their nuptials, and to sing a song of congratulation, her voice falters and she faints away in the midst of it. She then, partly through shame and partly through vexation, escapes to the house of the miller (Little Keely) and his wife (Miss Goward), where she is kindly received, but supposed by her own friends to have rashly drowned herself. The anguish of Captain Allan Lindsay is not to be restrained on this occasion, and betrays his passion for the unhappy girl, who is at the same time discovered not to be the real daughter of the old trumpeter Donald Mackay (Bartley), but the daughter of Mrs. Campbell, who had been supposed to be lost when an infant in the Spanish campaign. The mystery being cleared up, the secret of her birth is communicated to poor Blanche amidst her smiles and tears. Miss Grace Campbell under the circumstances, and from her previous indifference, declares for Cornet Lindsay, and Blanche is united to the Captain. Mr. Keely crept on and off the stage as usual; and Miss Cawse danced and flourished round it as she sung, because Madame Vestris does so. We are quite satisfied with Madame Vestris, without wishing to see her imitated.