"What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?"
—and yet even those who have not witnessed and may never witness Miss Kemble's performance, to whom her name alone can be borne through long intervals of space and time, will not regard these little sketches without curiosity and interest. If any one had thought of transferring to paper a connected series of some of the awe-commanding gestures of Mrs. Siddons in one of her great parts; or caught (flying) some of the inimitable graces of movement and attitude, and sparkling effects of manner, with which Mrs. Charles Kemble once enchanted the world, with what avidity would they now be sought!—they would have served as studies for their successors in art to the end of time.
All the fine arts, poetry excepted, possess a limited range of power. Painting and sculpture can convey none of the graces that belong to movement and sound: music can suggest vague sentiments and feelings, but it cannot express incident, or situation, or form, or colour. Poetry alone grasps an unlimited sceptre, rules over the whole visible and intellectual universe, and knows no bounds but those of human genius. And it is here that tragic acting, considered in its perfection, and in its relation to the fine arts, is allied to poetry, or rather is itself living, breathing poetry; made sensible in a degree to the hardest and dullest minds, seizing on the dormant sympathies of our nature, and dismissing us again to the cares of this "working-day world," if not very much wiser, or better, or happier, at least enabled to digest with less bitterness the mixture of our good and evil days.
But in the midst of the just enthusiasm which a great actor or actress excites, so long as they exist to minister to our delight;—in the midst of that atmosphere of light and life they shed around them, it is a common subject of repining that such glory should be so transient; that an art requiring in its perfection such a rare combination of mental and external qualities, can leave behind no permanent monument of its own excellence, but must depend on the other fine arts for all it can claim of immortality: that Garrick, for instance, has become a name—no more—his fame the echo of an echo! that Mrs. Siddons herself has bequeathed to posterity only a pictured semblance;—that when the voice of Pasta is heard no longer upon earth, the utmost pomp of words can only attest her powers! The painter and the poet, struggling through obscurity to the heights of fame, and consuming a life in the pursuit of (perhaps) posthumous celebrity, may say to the sublime actress,—"Thou in thy generation hast had thy meed; we have waited patiently for ours: thou art vanished like a lost star from the firmament, into the 'uncomfortable night of nothing'; we have left the light of our souls behind us, and survive to 'blessings and eternal praise!'" And why should it not be so? Were it otherwise, the even-handed distribution of the best gifts of Heaven among favoured mortals might with reason be impugned. Shall the young spirit "dampt by the necessity of oblivion" disdain what is attainable because it cannot grasp all? Conceive for a moment the situation of a woman, in the prime and bloom of existence, with all her youthful enthusiasm, her unworn feelings fresh about her, privileged to step forth for a short space out of the bounds of common life, without o'erstepping the modesty of her feminine nature, permitted to cast off for a while, unreproved and unrestrained, the conventional trammels of form and manner; and called upon to realise in her own presence and person the divinest dreams of poetry and romance; to send forth in a word—a glance,—the electric flash which is felt through a thousand bosoms at once, till every heart beats the same measure with her own! Is there nothing in all this to countervail the dangers, the evils, and the vicissitudes attendant on this splendid and public exercise of talent? It may possibly become, in time, a thing of habitude; it may be degraded into a mere besoin de l'amour propre—a necessary, yet palling excitement: but in its outset it is surely a triumph far beyond the mere intoxication of personal vanity; and to the very last, it must be deemed a magnificent and an enviable power.
It was difficult to select for graphic delineation any particular points from Miss Kemble's representation of Juliet. These drawings may not, perhaps, justify the enthusiasm she excited: but it ought to add to their value rather than detract from it, that the causes of their imperfection comprehend the very foundation on which the present and future celebrity of this young actress may be said to rest. In the first place, the power by which she seized at once on public admiration and sympathy, was not derived from any thing external. It was not founded in the splendour of her hereditary pretensions, though in them there was much to fascinate: nor in the departed or fading glories of her race: nor in the remembrance of her mother—once the young Euphrosyne of our stage: nor in the name and high talent of her father, with whom, it was once feared the poetical and classical school of acting was destined to perish from the scene: nor in any mere personal advantages, for in these she has been excelled,—
"Though on her eyelids many graces sit
Under the shadow of those even brows:"
nor in her extreme youth, and delicacy of figure, which tell so beautifully in the character of Juliet: nor in the acclaim of public favour—