"—— wake the soul by tender strokes of art."
The gradual approach, also, of this period to our own times, which are more critical in costume, and the pictures left to us of favourite performers in Hamlet and Hermione, dressed in wigs and hoop petticoats, render those outrages upon propriety still stranger to one's imagination. They set tragedy in a mock-heroical light. Cato wore a long peruke; Alexander the Great a wig and jack-boots; and it was customary, down to Garrick's time, to dress Macbeth and other tragic general-officers in a suit of brick-dust. "Booth enters," says Pope:—
—— "Hark, the universal peal!
But has he spoken? Not a syllable.
What shook the stage and made the people stare?
Cato's long wig, flowered gown, and lackered chair."
The stare was not that of ridicule, but of admiration. All this makes the comedy of that period shine out the more as the only truth extant. Cherry, and Archer, and Sir Harry Wildair, and Sir John Brute, and my Lady Betty Modish, were like the age, and like the performers.
To return to these. Wilks was the fine gentleman of that period. He was a friend of Farquhar's, and came to London with him from Dublin. Cibber, though he wrote a good comedy, would appear, by some accounts of him, to have been little more on the stage than a mimic of past actors. Steele, however, has a criticism on him and Wilks, in which he speaks of them both as perfect actors in their kinds.
"Wilks," he tells us, "has a singular talent in representing the graces of nature; Cibber the deformity in the affectation of them. Were I a writer of plays, I should never employ either of them in parts which had not their bents this way. This is seen in the inimitable strain and run of good humour which is kept up in the character of Wildair, and in the nice and delicate abuse of understanding in that of Sir Novelty. Cibber, in another light, hits exquisitely the flat civility of an affected gentleman usher, and Wilks the easy frankness of a gentleman.... To beseech gracefully, to approach respectfully, to pity, to mourn, to love, are the places wherein Wilks may be made to shine with the utmost beauty. To rally pleasantly, to scorn artfully, to flatter, to ridicule, and to neglect, are what Cibber would perform with no less excellence."[259]
This criticism produced a letter to Steele from two inferior actors of that time, Bullock and Penkethman, who, rather than not be noticed at all, were willing to be bantered. They knew it would be done good-naturedly. Accordingly the "Tatler" says,