——Juvat, aut impellit ad iram,
Aut ad humum mœrore gravi deducit, et angit.
One of the most difficult things in acting is the player’s concealing himself behind the character he assumes: The instant the spectator gets a peep of him, the whole illusion vanishes, and the pleasure is succeeded by disgust. In Oedipus, Mahomet, and Orosmane, I have always detected Le Kain; but I have seen the English Roscius represent Hamlet, Lear, Richard, without recollecting that there was such a person as David Garrick in the world.
The French tragedians are apt in my opinion to overstep the modesty of nature. Nature is not the criterion by which their merit is to be tried.—The audience measures them by a more sublime standard, and if they come not up to that, they cannot pass muster.
Natural action, and a natural elocution, they seem to think incompatible with dignity, and imagine that the hero must announce the greatness of his soul by supercilious looks, haughty gestures, and a hollow sounding voice. Such easy familiar dialogue as Hamlet holds with his old school-fellow Horatio, appears to them low, vulgar, and inconsistent with the dignity of tragedy.
But if simplicity of manners be not inconsistent in real life, with genius, and the most exalted greatness of mind, I do not see why the actor who represents a hero, should assume gestures which we have no reason to think were ever in use in any age, or among any rank of men.
Simplicity of manners, however, is so far from being inconsistent with magnanimity, that the one for the most part accompanies the other. The French have some reason to lean to this opinion; for two of the greatest men their nation ever produced were remarkable for the simplicity of their manners. Henry IV. and Maréchal Turenne were distinguished by that, as well as by their magnanimity and other heroic virtues.
How infinitely superior in real greatness and intrinsic merit, were those men to the strutting ostentatious Lewis, who was always affecting a greatness he never possessed,—till misfortune humbled his mind to the standard of humanity? Then indeed, throwing away his pageantry and bluster, he assumed true dignity, and for the first time obtained the admiration of the judicious. In the correspondence with de Torcy, Lewis’s letters, which it is now certain were written and composed by himself, prove this, and display a soundness of judgement and real greatness of mind which seldom appeared in the meridian of what they call his glory.