Dibdin’s success as an actor was so complete, that we can only wonder at his leaving it so soon for authorship, musical composition, and entertainments in which he was the sole performer. He was the original Ralph, in ‘The Maid of the Mill,’ and straightway London fluttered with ‘Ralph handkerchiefs.’ Dibdin’s Mungo, in ‘The Padlock,’ another creation, was so naturally and thoroughly to the purpose, it was said that the performer had gone to Jamaica and spent weeks there in order to study the manners and speech of the negroes! The fact is, that he combined impulse with intelligence, and never lost an opportunity. The very first sea-song of his which took the national ear and the national heart, was ‘Blow high, blow low!’ and this, if he did not compose, he imagined, not in the open stormy ocean, on board a man-of-war, but on board a Calais packet which took thirteen hours on a stormy passage across the Straits of Dover.
In nearly all cases of composition, with Dibdin, his method was most singular. In his musical entertainments, he introduced hundreds of songs, words and music by himself. But when he seated himself at the piano, before the public, not a note of the accompaniment was written. He improvised, and never thought of putting a single note down on paper till the music-sellers wanted copy for the engravers.
Dibdin went abroad in the early part of his career to study music; but he merely practised by himself, and noted little but the manners and morals of the people amongst whom he was thrown. The English society at Calais, during his sojourn there, he describes as consisting of three or four fraudulent bankrupts, two or three too successful duellists, a few rich smugglers under strong suspicion of having committed murder, which was the most likely thing in the world, and a high official personage, guilty of forgery, and ‘the father of a nobleman who was afterwards singularly remarkable for having publicly exhibited the hand and head of Struensee.’
Dibdin exchanged Calais for ever pleasant, and then especially pleasant, Nancy. He makes a very curious observation on one incident of his sojourn there. He saw the Emperor of Germany, Joseph, brother of Marie Antoinette, pass through the old capital of the province which had once belonged to the imperial house of Hapsburg Lorraine. There was an outburst of the old affection of the Lorrainers at the sight of the descendant of their old dukes; and such expression was given to this manifestation that Dibdin states his conviction that if the Emperor of Germany were once resolved to relieve Lorraine from the oppression of the French yoke, the inhabitants of the old duchy would give him their enthusiastic support.
We will not follow out Dibdin’s professional career. The biographical dictionaries and his own works tell of his struggles, his ups and downs, his reverses and his triumphs. We rather care to look at him in some of his picturesque moments. We seem to see and to hear him when we look in at St. Bride’s—a mere lad, playing the congregation out with such exquisite power, that instead of departing, they remained to listen. We seem to see the young fellow’s enraptured look when he first heard the crash of an overture. What emotion there must have been in the young soul when he discovered that from simply hearing the combination and working of sounds in that overture, he had grasped the secret of composition; and later, on returning home from some grand musical banquet, he could write out the whole score from memory, with very few errors indeed. It was only natural after Dibdin had composed a great part of the music to ‘Love in the City,’ and to ‘Lionel and Clarissa’—as we write the words, Tom Cooke’s manly voice seems to fill the house with ‘I’ll love thee ever dearly!‘—it is natural, we say, that ‘Charley’ should find himself growing famous. We find him in strange company the year after ‘Lionel and Clarissa’ was produced.
Perhaps the last place in which one would expect to find Dibdin is, not indeed with Dr. Johnson, but in Boswell’s life of the erudite savage. Boswell had composed a ‘little epigrammatical song’ which, he says, he was ‘volatile enough’ to repeat to Johnson, adding, ‘that Garrick had, a few days before, got it set to music by the ingenious Mr. Dibdin.’ This was in 1769, when Charles was four-and-twenty; and this is what he had to go to work upon:—
A MATRIMONIAL THOUGHT.
In the blithe days of honeymoon,
With Kate’s allurements smitten,
I lov’d her late, I lov’d her soon,