William Macready’s position there in 1793 was much the same that it was when he first appeared. Perhaps he had a little improved it, by the popular farce of which he was the author, ‘The Irishman in London,’ which was first acted at Covent Garden in 1792. In 1793 he was held good enough to act Cassio to Middleton’s Othello, and was held cheap enough to be cast for Fag in the ‘Rivals.’ On his benefit night—he was in a position to share the house with Hull—the two partners played such walking gentlemen’s characters as Cranmer and Surrey (the latter by Macready) to the Wolsey and Queen Catharine of Mr. and Mrs. Pope; but Macready, in the afterpiece, soared to vivacious comedy, and acted Figaro to the Almaviva of mercurial Lewis. If he ever played an Irish part, it was only when Jack Johnstone was indisposed—which was not his custom of an afternoon.
The best of these actors, and others better than the best named above, received but very moderate salaries. Mr. Macready’s was probably not more than three or four pounds per week. Upon certainly some such salary the worthy actor maintained a quiet home in Mary Street, Tottenham Court (or Hampstead) Road. At the head of the little family that gathered round the table in Mary Street was one of the best of mothers; and chief among the children—the one at least who became the most famous—was William Charles Macready, whom so many still remember as a foremost actor, and in whom some even recognised a great master of his art.
Among the earliest remembrances of this eminent player, he has noticed in his most interesting ‘Reminiscences,’ that ‘the res angustæ domi called into active duty all the economical resources and active management of a mother’ (whose memory, he says, is enshrined in his heart’s fondest gratitude) ‘to supply the various wants’ of himself and an elder sister, who only lived long enough to make him ‘sensible of her angelic nature.’ Macready was the fifth child of this family, but his sister, Olivia, was the only one (then born) who lived long enough for him to remember. She was older than he by a year and a half, and she survived only till he was just in his sixth year; ‘but she lives,’ he says, ‘like a dim and far-off dream, to my memory, of a spirit of meekness, love, and truth, interposing itself between my infant will and the evil it purposed. It is like a vision of an angelic influence upon a most violent and self-willed disposition.’
It may be added here that Macready had a younger brother, Edward, who distinguished himself as a gallant officer in the army, and two younger sisters, Letitia and Ellen, to whom he was an affectionate brother and friend. Meanwhile Macready passed creditably through a school at Birmingham, and thence to Rugby. At the latter place, where one of his kinsmen was a master, the student laid the ground of all the classical knowledge he possessed, took part in private plays, and was hurt at the thought that he had any inclination to be a professional actor. At Rugby, too, he showed, but with some reason, the fiery quality of his temper. He was unjustly sent up for punishment, and was flogged accordingly. ‘Returning,’ he says, ‘to my form, smarting with choking rage and indignation, where I had to encounter the compassion of some and the envious jeers of others, my passion broke out in the exclamation, “D——n old Birch! I wish he was in Hell!’”
Macready’s excellent mother, of whom he never speaks without dropping, as it were, a flower to honour her memory, died before he reached home from Rugby, so that the world was, for a time, without sun to him, for the sire was not a very amiable person. The younger Macready resorted to the best possible cure for sorrow, steady and active work, and plenty of both. At last, with no very cheerful encouragement from his father and with doubt and fear on his own part, he, in June 1811, made his début, in Birmingham, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘the part of Romeo by a Young Gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.’ He, who was afterwards so very cool and self-possessed, nearly marred all by what is called ‘stage-fright.’ A mist fell on his eyes; the very applause, as he came forward, bewildered him; and he describes himself as being for some time like an automaton, moving in certain defined limits. ‘I went mechanically,’ he says, ‘through the variations in which I had drilled myself;’ but he gradually gained courage and power over himself. The audience stimulated the first and rewarded the second by their applause. ‘Thenceforward,’ says Macready, ‘I trod on air, became another being or a happier self, and when the curtain fell and the intimate friends and performers crowded on the stage to raise up the Juliet and myself, shaking my hands with fervent congratulations, a lady asked me, ‘Well, sir, how do you feel now?’ my boyish answer was without disguise, ‘I feel as if I should like to act it all over again!’
Between this and his first appearance in London Macready acted in most of the theatres of every degree in the three kingdoms. Often this practice was rendered the more valuable by his having to perform with the most perfect actors and actresses who were starring in the country. But, whether with them or without, whether with audiences or with a mere two or three, he did his best. Like Barton Booth, he would play to a man in the pit. ‘It was always my rule,’ he says, ‘to make the best out of a bad house, and before the most meagre audiences ever assembled it has been my invariable practice to strive my best, using the opportunity as a lesson; and I am conscious of having derived great benefit from the rule. I used to call it acting to myself.’ Macready had another rule which is worth mentioning. Some of the old French tragedy queens used to keep themselves all day in the temper of the characters they were to represent in the evening. So that, at home or on the boards, they swept to and fro in towering rage. So, Macready was convinced of the necessity of keeping, on the day of exhibition, the mind as intent as possible on the subject of the actor’s portraiture, even to the very moment of his entrance on the scene. With the observance of this rule, Macready must have made 64 Frith Street, Soho, re-echo with joyous feelings and ebullitions of fury, to suit the temper of the night, when in 1816 he made his bow to a London audience as Orestes in the ‘Distressed Mother,’ and when the curtain rose grasped Abbot almost convulsively by the hand, and dashed upon the stage, exclaiming as in a transport of the highest joy, ‘Oh, Pylades! what’s life without a friend?’ The Orestes was a success; but it was never a favourite character with the public, as Talma’s was with the French. The career thus begun (at ten, fifteen, and at last eighteen pounds per week for five years) came to a close in 1851. Five-and-thirty years out of the fifty-eight Macready had then reached. We need not trace this progressive career, beginning with Ambrose Phillips and ending with Shakespeare (‘Macbeth’). During that career he created that one great character in which no player could come near him, namely, Virginius, in 1820. Macready, however, was not the original representative of Virginius. That character in Knowles’s most successful play was first acted by John Cooper in Glasgow; but Macready really created the part in London. Further, Macready did his best to raise the drama, actors, and audiences to a dignity never before known, and gained nothing but honour by his two ventures at management. He was the first to put a play upon the stage with an almost lavish perfection. In this way he was never equalled. Mr. Charles Kean imitated him in this artist-like proceeding; but that highly respectable actor and man was as far behind Macready in magnificence of stage management as he was distant from his own father in genius.
If Macready, on his début as a boy, was scared, he was deeply moved when, within a stone’s throw of sixty, he was to act for the last time, and then go home for ever. This was upwards of thirty years ago, so rapidly does time fly—the 28th of February, 1851. His emotion was not in the acting, but in the taking leave of it, and of those who came to see it for the last time. He says himself of his Macbeth that he never played it better than on that night. There was a reality, with a vigour, truth, and dignity, which he thought he had never before thrown into that favourite character. ‘I rose with the play, and the last scene was a real climax.’ On his first entrance, indeed, at the beginning of his part, ‘the thought occurred to me of the presence of my children, and that for a minute overcame me; but I soon recovered myself into self-possession.’ Still more deeply moved at the ‘farewell’ to a house bursting into a wild enthusiasm of applause, he ‘faltered for a moment at the fervent, unbounded expression of attachment from all before me; but preserved my self-possession.’ Those of his ten children who had survived and were present on that occasion had ample reason to be proud of their father. For many years he would not sanction their being present at his public exhibitions. This was really to doubt the dignity and usefulness of his art, to feel a false shame, and to authorise in others that contempt for the ‘playactor’ which, entertaining it, as he did thoroughly, for many of his fellows, he neither felt for himself nor for those whom he could recognise as being great and worthy masters in that art. When his children were allowed the new delight of witnessing how nobly he could interpret the noblest of the poets, the homage of their reverential admiration must have been added to that of their unreserved affection. That he was not popular at any time with inferior or subordinate players is undoubtedly true. Such persons thought that only want of luck and opportunity placed them lower in the scale than Macready. It would be as reasonable for the house-painters to account in the same way for their not being Vandycks and Raffaelles.
Sensitive to criticism he was, and yet scarcely believed himself to be so. He belabours critics pretty roughly; but we observe that theatrical critics dined with him occasionally, and we mark that he praises the good sense and discrimination of one of these critics—whose criticism was very much in the actor’s favour. Vanity he also had, certainly. We should have come to this conclusion, had we nothing more to justify the assertion than what we find in his own record. We see his vanity in the superabundant excess of his modesty; but we think none the worse of him for it. An artist who is not somewhat vain of his powers has, probably, no ground for a little wholesome pride. It was in Macready tempered with that sort of fear that a vain man may feel, lest in the exercise of his art he should fall in the slightest degree short of his self-estimation, or of that in which he believed himself to be held by the public. He never, on entering a town, saw his name on a bill, without feeling a flutter of the heart, made up of this mingled fear and pride. So, Mrs. Siddons never went on the stage at any time without something of the same sensation. We should think little of any actor or actress who should avow that they ever ‘went on,’ in a great part, without some hesitation lest the attempt might fall short of what it was their determination to achieve, and what they felt themselves qualified to accomplish. Vanity and timidity? All true artists are conscious of both—ought to possess both; just as they ought to possess not only impulse but judgment; not only head, but heart; heart to flash the impulses, head to control them.
Macready carried to the stage his genuine piety. It is, perhaps, a little too much aired in his ‘Diary,’ but it is not the less to be believed in. He went by a good old-fashioned rule, to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him—as the Catechism teaches, or used to teach, all of us. In his pious fervour, in his prayers that what he is going to act may be for good, that what in the management he has undertaken may be to the increase of the general happiness rather than to that of his banking account; in these and a score of other instances we are reminded of those French and Italian saints of the stage who, as they stood at the wing, crossed themselves at the sound of sacred names in the play; or, who counted their beads in the green-room; kept their fasts; mortified themselves, and never missed a mass. Nay, the religious feeling was as spontaneous in Macready as it was in the Italian actors whom he himself saw, and who, at the sound of the ‘Angelus’ in the street, stopped the action of the play, fell on their knees, gently tapped their breasts, and were imitated in these actions by the sympathising majority of the audience.