Man’s life is cheap as beast’s;’
yet, surely, less general profusion, with more charity and some self-denial, which the luxurious might well practise as the parent of fresh enjoyment, would become our Christian profession, and our present state. All are embarked on a stormy sea: the winds whistle in our shrouds, the sky wears an ominous aspect, and whether we can or cannot avoid the rocks that surround us, let us at least treat our fellow-passengers with kindness, and mitigate the sufferings we are not yet called on to endure.
June, 1822.—Among the many consolations, most of which fail to console, a few, I think, have been overlooked, which may, at least for a few moments, lighten the chain of years, that chain to which every revolution of the sun adds a new link, some painful and heavy, others brilliant and elastic. The treasures of recollection—that best cabinet of curiosities, better than diamonds, or gems, or Alduses, or Caxtons, or visiting-tickets, or even franks, all of which have been sought by indefatigable collectors—the treasures of recollection can only be obtained from the hand of time.
To have been presented at a Drawing room to the late King and Queen, is a recollection worth having. To have encountered in the benignant eye of majesty that of the best husband and best father in his dominions—to have received, perhaps, his cordial approbation—to have seen the monarch softened to the mind’s eye by viewing him as a sharer in the same affectionate ties which tame the pride of greatness, not alone by the tenderness they infuse, but by making it vulnerable at so many points. A Drawing room in the last reign seemed an epitome of the country. All was quietly cheerful; and an air of freedom, a something which reminded one of a land of liberty, was blended with the whole arrangement. The King and Queen were as parents surrounded by their children. They kept no state. They circulated about the room, as anxious to speak to all as each individual was to be addressed by them. Their state was in the minds of their subjects, and their guards in their hearts’ affections.
Is it not worth something to have seen Mrs. Siddons in her days of magnificence—Mrs. Siddons, who has lent to the very syllables of her name an elevation and a charm so strong that no effort of mind could now effect their separation—so strong that none who saw her in the splendour of her meridian ever pronounced that name without a tone and a manner more softened and raised than their habitual discourse.
She sometimes gave vitality to a line which stamped it for ever, while all surrounding recollections have faded away. I remember her saying to a servant who had betrayed her, in some play no longer acted—
‘There’s gold for thee; but see my face no more.’
I am sorry that this is the moment in which she comes most strongly on my recollection. I wish it had been in one of Shakespeare’s plays; but so it is. There is no giving an adequate impression of the might, the majesty of grace she possessed, nor of the effect on a young heart of the deep and mysterious tones of her voice. Kemble as Coriolanus, when she was Volumnia, equalled the highest hopes of acting.
And is it not also much to recollect Kemble, when he, too, was after the high Roman fashion, and the last of the Romans? Some persons begin now to praise him for his classical and erudite performance of certain characters, as though he had been denied the power of touching the tenderer sympathies of our nature; but who has seen him in The Stranger or Penruddock, and not shed tears from the deepest sources? His tenderly putting away the son of his treacherous friend and inconstant, but unhappy, mistress, examining his countenance, and then exclaiming, with a voice which developed a thousand mysterious feelings, ‘You are very like your mother,’ was sufficient to stamp his excellence in the pathetic line of acting. But in this respect Mrs. Siddons was a disadvantage to him. I enter into no comparison between their merits; but it would have been fair to remember that the sorrows of a woman formed to be admired and revered, are in general more touching, more softening, than those of a warrior, a philosopher, or a statesman; and because Kemble did not make us weep and wail, like his incomparable sister, we did not do justice to his powers of moving the passions. I always saw him with pain descend to the Stranger. It was like the Genius in the Arabian tale going into the vase. First, it seemed so unlikely he should meet with such an affront, and this injured the probability of the piece; and next, the Stranger is never really dignified, and one is always in pain for him, poor gentleman! And though the character is at times highly pathetic, in the next five minutes there is something so glaringly introduced for stage effect as to produce an unpleasant interruption of the current of feeling.