Or if thy sister-goddess has preferr’d
Her beauty to the skies, to be a star,
Oh, tell me where she shines, that I may stand
Whole nights, and gaze upon her!’
We may refer to another passage, in ‘Othello,’ in which the tenderness, distinctness, and mournful melodiousness of Edmund Kean’s voice used to affect the whole house to hushed and rapt admiration; namely, the passage beginning with, ‘Farewell, the plumed troop!’ and ending with, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’ It was like some magic instrument, which laid all hearts submissive to its irresistible enchantment.
While Macready allows that flashes of genius were rarely wanting in Kean’s least successful performances, he does not forget to note that when he played Iago to Kean’s Othello, he observed that the latter was playing not at all like to his old self. It is to be remembered that this was in 1832, when Kean was on the brink of the grave, broken in constitution, and with no power to answer to his will. But Macready justly recognised the power when it existed, and set the world mad with a new delight. Others were not so just, nor so generous. ‘Many of the Kemble school,’ he says, ‘resisted conviction of Kean’s merits, but the fact that he made me feel was an argument to enrol me with the majority on the indisputable genius he displayed.’ Some of the Kemble family were as reluctant to be convinced as many of the Kemble school were, but we must except the lady whom we all prefer to call ‘Fanny Kemble.’ She, in her ‘Journal,’ speaks without bias, not always accurately, but still justly and generously. To her, the great master was apparent, and she truly says that when Kean died there died with him Richard, Shylock, and Othello.
Before quitting Kean for the Kembles, we must permit ourselves to extract the account given by Macready of a supper after Richard III. had been played:—
We retired to the hotel as soon as the curtain fell, and were soon joined by Kean, accompanied, or rather attended, by Pope. I need not say with what intense scrutiny I regarded him as we shook hands on our mutual introduction. The mild and modest expression of his Italian features, and his unassuming manner, which I might perhaps justly describe as partaking in some degree of shyness, took me by surprise, and I remarked with special interest the indifference with which he endured the fulsome flatteries of Pope. He was very sparing of words during, and for some time after, supper; but about one o’clock, when the glass had circulated pretty freely, he became animated, fluent, and communicative. His anecdotes were related with a lively sense of the ridiculous; in the melodies he sang there was a touching grace, and his powers of mimicry were most humorously or happily exerted in an admirable imitation of Braham; and in a story of Incledon acting Steady the Quaker at Rochester without any rehearsal, where, in singing the favourite air, ‘When the lads of the village so merrily, oh!’ he heard himself to his dismay and consternation accompanied by a single bassoon; the music of his voice, his perplexity at each recurring sound of the bassoon, his undertone maledictions on the self-satisfied musician, the peculiarity of his habits, all were hit off with a humour and an exactness that equalled the best display Mathews ever made, and almost convulsed us with laughter. It was a memorable evening, the first and last I ever spent in private with this extraordinary man.
Macready’s estimation of Kemble and the Kemble school is not at all highly pitched, save in the case of Mrs. Siddons; but he notes how she outlived her powers, and returned a few times to the stage when her figure had enlarged and her genius had diminished. When John Kemble took leave of the Dublin stage, in 1816, Macready was present; he records that ‘the house was about half full.’ Kemble acted Othello (which, at that time, Kean had made his own). ‘A more august presence could hardly be imagined.’ He was received with hearty applause, ‘but the slight bow with which he acknowledged the compliment spoke rather dissatisfaction at the occasional vacant spaces before him than recognition of the respectful feeling manifested by those present. I must suppose he was out of humour, for, to my exceeding regret, he literally walked through the part.’ The London audiences, as Kemble’s career was drawing to a close, were not more sympathetic. At Kemble’s Cato, ‘The house was moderately filled; there was sitting room in the pit, and the dress circle was not at all crowded.’ To the dignity of the representation Macready renders homage of admiration; but he says that Cato was not in strict Roman attire, and that with only one effort, the ‘I am satisfied,’ when he heard that Marcius ‘greatly fell,’ Kemble’s husky voice and laboured articulation could not enliven the monotony of a tragedy which was felt to be a tax on the patience of the audience. The want of variety and relief rendered it uninteresting, and those at least who were not classical antiquaries found the whole thing uncommonly tedious.
It is unquestionably among the unaccountable things connected with ‘the stage’ that Kemble’s farewell performances in London, 1817, were as a whole unproductive. Those closing nights, not answering the manager’s expectations of their attraction, were given for benefits to those performers who chose to pay the extra price. Macready was not present on the closing night of all, when Kemble nobly played his peerless Coriolanus; but he witnessed several other representations, and he dwells especially on the last performance of ‘Macbeth,’ when Mrs. Siddons acted the Lady to her brother’s Macbeth. Macready was disappointed with both. Mrs. Siddons was no longer the enchantress of old: ‘years had done their work, and those who had seen in her impersonations the highest glories of her art, now felt regret that she had been prevailed on to leave her honoured retirement, and force a comparison between the grandeur of the past and the feeble present. It was not a performance, but a mere repetition of the poet’s text; no flash, no sign of her pristine, all-subduing genius.’ Kemble, as Macbeth, was ‘correct, tame, and ineffective,’ through the first four acts of the play, which moved heavily on; but he was roused to action in the fifth act. With action there was pathos; and ‘all at once, he seemed carried away by the genius of the scene.’ Macready brings the scene itself before his readers, ending with the words: ‘His shrinking from Macduff, when the charm on which his life hung was broken, by the declaration that his antagonist “was not of woman born,” was a masterly stroke of art. His subsequent defiance was most heroic; and, at his death, Charles Kemble received him in his arms and laid him gently on the ground, his physical powers being unequal to further effort.’