Journal of a Residence in America

by Fanny Kemble

However, as I before said, my quarrel is not with those who condemn indiscriminately all theatrical exhibitions; they may be right: at all events, so sweeping a sentence betrays no inconsistency. But what are we to say to individuals, or audiences, who turn with affected disgust from the sallies of Bizarre and Beatrice, and who applaud and laugh, and are delighted, at the gross immorality of such plays as the Wonder, and Rule a Wife and have a Wife; the latter particularly, in which the immorality and indecency are not those of expression only, but of conception, and mingle in the whole construction of the piece, in which not one character appears whose motives of action are not most unworthy, and whose language is not as full of coarseness, as devoid of every generous, elevated, or refined sentiment. (The tirades of Leon are no exception; for in the mouth of a man who marries such a woman as Marguerita, by such means, and for such an end, they are mere mockeries.) I confess that my surprise was excited when I was told that an American audience would not endure that portion of Beatrice's wit which the London censors have spared, and that Othello was all but a proscribed play; but it was infinitely more so, when I found that the same audience tolerated, or rather encouraged with their presence and applause, the coarse productions of Mrs. Centlivre and Beaumont and Fletcher. With regard to the Inconstant, it is by far the most moral of Farquhar's plays; that, perhaps, is little praise, for the Recruiting Officer, and the Beaux' Stratagem, are decidedly the reverse. But in spite of the licentiousness of the writing, in many parts, the construction, the motive, the action of the play is not licentious; the characters are far from being utterly debased in their conception, or depraved in the sentiments they utter (excepting, of course, the companions of poor Mirable's last revel); the women, those surest criterions, by whose principles and conduct may be formed the truest opinion of the purity of the social atmosphere, the women, though free in their manners and language (it was the fashion of their times, and of the times before them, when words did not pass for deeds, either good or bad), are essentially honest women; and Bizarre, coarse as her expressions may appear, has yet more real delicacy than poor Oriana, whose womanly love causes her too far to forget her womanly pride. Of the catastrophe of this play, and its frightfully-pointed moral, little need be said to prove that its effect is likely to be far more wholesome, because far more homely, than that of most theatrical inventions; invention, indeed, it is not, and its greatest interest, as perhaps its chief utility, is drawn from the circumstance of its being a faithful representation of a situation of unequalled horror, in which the author himself was placed, and from which he was rescued precisely as he extricates his hero. Of the truth and satirical power of the dialogue, none who understand it can dispute; and if, instead of attaching themselves to the farcical romping of Bizarre and her ungallant lover, the modest critics of this play had devoted some attention to the dialogues between young and old Mirable, their nice sense of decency would have been less shocked, and they might have found themselves repaid by some of the most pointed, witty, and pithy writing in English dramatic literature. I am much obliged to such of my friends as lamented that I had to personate Farquhar's impertinent heroine; for my own good part, I would as lief be such a one, as either Jane Shore, Mrs. Haller, Lady Macbeth, or the wild woman Bianca. I know that great crimes have a species of evil grandeur in them; they spring only from a powerful soil, they are in their very magnitude respectable. I know that mighty passions have in their very excess a frightful majesty, that asserts the vigour of the natures from which they rise; and there is as little similarity between them, and the base, degraded, selfish, cowardly tribe of petty larceny vices with which human societies abound, as there is between the caterpillar blight, that crawls over a fertile district, gnawing it away inch-meal, and the thunderbolt that scathes, or the earthquake that swallows the same region, in its awful mission of destruction. But I maintain that freedom of expression and manner is by no means an indication of laxity of morals, and again repeat that Bizarre is free in her words, but not in her principles. The authoress of the most graceful and true analysis of Shakspeare's female characters has offered a better vindication of their manners than I could write; I can only say, I pity sincerely all those who, passing over the exquisite purity, delicacy, and loveliness of their conception, dwell only upon modes of expression which belong to the times in which their great creator lived. With respect to the manner in which audiences are affected by what they hear on the stage, I cannot but think that gentlemen, who wish their wives and daughters to hear no language of an exceptionable nature, had better make themselves acquainted with what they take them to see, or, at all events, avoid, when in the theatre, attracting their attention to expressions which their disapprobation serves only to bring into notice, and which had much better escape unheard, or at least unheeded. Voluminous as this note has become, I cannot but add one word with respect to the members of the profession to which I have belonged. Many actresses that I have known, in the performance of unvirtuous or unlovely characters (I cannot, however, help remembering that they were also secondary parts), have thought fit to impress the audience with the wide difference between their assumed and real disposition, by acting as ill, and looking as cross as they possibly could, which could not but be a great satisfaction to any moral audience. I have seen this done by that fine part in Milman's Fazio, Aldabella, repeatedly, and not unfrequently by the Queen in Hamlet, Margarita in Rule a Wife and have a Wife (I scarcely wonder at that, though), and even by poor Shakspeare's Lady Falconbridge. I think this is a mistake: the audience, I believe, never forget that the actress is not indeed the wicked woman she seems. In one instance that might have been the case, perhaps. I speak of a great artist, whose efforts I never witnessed, but whose private excellence I have a near right to rejoice in, and who was as true in her performance of the wretch Millwood, as in her personifications of Shakspeare's grandest creations.

[22] The Russians and Danes are rich in the possession of an original and most touching national music; Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, are alike favoured with the most exquisite native melodies, probably, in the world. France, though more barren in the wealth of sweet sounds, has a few fine old airs, that redeem her from the charge of utter sterility. Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland, each claim a thousand beautiful and characteristic mountain songs; Italy is the very palace of music, Germany its temple; Spain resounds with wild and martial strains, and the thick groves of Portugal with native music, of a softer and sadder kind. All the nations of Europe, I presume all those of all the world, possess some kind of national music, and are blessed by Heaven with some measure of perception as to the loveliness of harmonious sounds. England alone, England and her descendant America, seems to have been denied a sense, to want a capacity, to have been stinted of a faculty, to the possession of which she vainly aspires. The rich spirit of Italian music, the solemn soul of German melody, the wild free Euterpe of the Cantons, have in vain been summoned by turns to teach her how to listen; 'tis all in vain—she does listen painfully; she has learnt by dint of time, and much endurance, the technicalities of musical science; she pays regally her instructors in the divine pleasure, but all in vain: the spirit of melody is not in her; and in spite of hosts of foreign musicians, in spite of the King's Theatre, in spite of Pasta, in spite of music-masters paid like ministers of state, in spite of singing and playing young ladies, and criticising young gentlemen, England, to the last day of her life, will be a dunce in music, for she hath it not in her; neither, if I am not much mistaken, hath her daughter.

[23] It is but justice to state, that this house has passed into other hands, and is much improved in every respect. Strangers, particularly Englishmen, will find a great convenience in the five o'clock ordinary, now established there, which is, I am told, excellently conducted and appointed.

[24] The whole of this passage is in fact a succession of small bays, forming a continuation to the grand bay of New York, and dividing Staten Island from the mainland of New Jersey; the Raritan river does not properly begin till Amboy, where it empties itself into a bay of its own name.

[25] I had always heard that the face of nature was gigantic in America; and truly we found the wrinkles such for so young a country. The ruts were absolute abysses.

[26] The southern, western, and eastern states of North America have each their strong peculiarities of enunciation, which render them easy of recognition. The Virginian and New England accents appear to me the most striking; Pennsylvania and New York have much less brogue; but through all their various tones and pronunciations a very strong nasal inflection preserves their universal brotherhood. They all speak through their noses, and at the top of their voices. Of dialects, properly so called, there are none; though a few expressions, peculiar to particular states, which generally serve to identify their citizens; but these are not numerous, and a jargon approaching in obscurity that of many of our counties is not to be met with. The language used in society generally is unrefined, inelegant, and often ungrammatically vulgar; but it is more vulgar than unintelligible by far.

[27] This appears to me to be a most frequent ailment among the American ladies: they must have particularly bilious constitutions. I never remember travelling in a steam-boat, on the smoothest water, without seeing sundry "afflicted fair ones," who complained bitterly of sea-sickness in the river.

[28] In spite of its beauty, or rather on that very account, an American autumn is to me particularly sad. It presents a union of beauty and decay, that for ever reminds me of that loveliest disguise death puts on, when the cheek is covered with roses, and the eyes are like stars, and the life is perishing away; even so appear the gorgeous colours of the withering American woods. 'Tis a whole forest dying of consumption.

[29] The magnolia and azalia are two of these; and earlier in the summer, the whole country looks like fairy-land, with the profuse and lovely blossoms of the wild laurel, an evergreen shrub unequalled for its beauty, and which absolutely overruns every patch of uncultivated ground. I wonder none of our parks have yet been adorned with it: it is a hardy plant, and I should think would thrive admirably in England.

[30] In the opening chapter of that popular work, Eugene Aram, are the following words:—"It has been observed, and there is a world of homely, ay, and of legislative knowledge in the observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a bird-cage at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better and wiser than their neighbours." The truth of this observation is indisputable. But for such "humble tokens of attention to something beyond the sterile labour of life" you look in vain during a progress through this country. In New England alone, neatness and a certain endeavour at rustic elegance and adornment, in the cottages and country residences, recall those of their fatherland; and the pleasure of the traveller is immeasurably heightened by this circumstance. If the wild beauties of uncultivated nature lead our contemplations to our great Maker, these lowly witnesses of the industry and natural refinement of the laborious cultivator of the soil warm our heart with sympathy for our kind, and the cheering conviction that, however improved by cultivation, the sense of beauty, and the love of what is lovely, have been alike bestowed upon all our race; 'tis a wholesome conviction, which the artificial divisions of society too often cause us to lose sight of. The labourer, who, after "sweating in the eye of Phœbus" all the day, at evening trains the fragrant jasmine round his lowly door, is the very same man who, in other circumstances, would have been the refined and liberal patron of those arts which reflect the beauty of nature.