The courtier meantime lands with the child upon the coast of Bohemia, and there leaves it: a bear pursues him across the stage, to the great delight of the audience, and eats him out of their sight; which is doubtless to their great disappointment. The ship is lost with all on board in a storm, and thus no clue is left for discovering the princess. Sixteen years are now supposed to elapse between the third and fourth acts: the lost child, Perdita, has grown up a beautiful shepherdess, and the son of Polixenes has promised marriage to her. He proceeds to espouse her at a sheep-shearing feast; where a pedlar, who picks pockets, excites much merriment. Polixenes, and Camillo the old courtier who had preserved his life, are present in disguise and prevent the contract. Camillo, longing to return to his own country, persuades the prince to fly with his beloved to Sicily: he then goes with the king in pursuit of them. The old shepherd, who has brought up Perdita as his own child, goes in company with her; he produces the things which he had found with her; she is thus discovered to be the lost daughter of Leontes, and the oracle is accomplished. But the greatest wonder is yet to come. As Leontes still continues to bewail the loss of his wife, Paulina, the queen’s woman, promises to show him a statue of her, painted to the life, the work of Julio Romano, that painter having flourished in the days when Bohemia was a maritime country, and when the kings thereof were used to consult the oracle of Apollo, being idolaters. This statue proves to be the queen herself, who begins to move to slow music, and comes down to her husband. And then to conclude the play, as it was the husband of this woman who has been eaten by the bear, old Camillo is given her that she may be no loser.
Far be it from me to judge of Shakespeare by these absurdities, which are all that I can understand of the play. While, however, the English tolerate such, and are pleased not merely in spite of them, but with them, it would become their travellers not to speak with quite so much contempt of the Spanish theatre. That Shakespeare was a great dramatist, notwithstanding his Winter’s Tale, I believe; just as I know Cervantes to have been a great man, though he wrote El Rufián Dichoso.
But you cannot imagine any thing more impressive than the finer parts of this representation; the workings of the king’s jealousy, the dignified grief and resentment of the queen, tempered with compassion for her husband’s phrensy; and the last scene in particular, which surpassed whatever I could have conceived of theatrical effect. The actress who personated the queen is acknowledged lo be perfect in her art: she stood leaning upon a pedestal with one arm, the other hanging down—the best Grecian sculptor could not have adjusted her drapery with more grace, nor have improved the attitude; and when she began to move, though this was what the spectators were impatiently expecting, it gave every person such a start of delight, as the dramatist himself would have wished, though the whole merit must be ascribed to the actress.
The regular entertainments on the English stage consist of a play of three or five acts, and an afterpiece of two; interludes are added only on benefit nights. The afterpiece this evening was Don Juan, our old story of the reprobate cavalier and the statue, here represented wholly in pantomime. Nothing could be more insipid than all the former part of this drama, nothing more dreadful, and indeed unfit for scenic representation, than the catastrophe: but either the furies of Æschylus were more terrible than European devils, or our Christian ladies are less easily frightened than the women of Greece, for this is a favourite spectacle everywhere. I know not whether the invention be originally ours or the Italians; be it whose it may, the story of the Statue is in a high style of fancy, truly fine and terrific. The sound of his marble footsteps upon the stage struck a dead silence through the house. It is to this machinery that the popularity of the piece is owing; and in spite of the dulness which precedes this incident, and the horror which follows it, I do not wonder that it is popular. Still it would be decorous in English writers to speak with a little less disrespect of the Spanish stage, and of the taste of a Spanish audience, while their own countrymen continue to represent and to delight in one of the most monstrous of all our dramas.
The representation began at seven; and the meals in London are so late, that even this is complained of as inconveniently early. We did not reach home till after midnight.
LETTER XIX.
English Church Service.—Banns of Marriage.—Inconvenience of having the Sermon a regular Part.—Sermons an Article of Trade.—Popular Preachers.—Private Chapels.
The ceremonies of the English Church Service are soon described. Imagine a church with one altar covered with crimson velvet, the Creed and the Decalogue over it in golden letters, over these the Hebrew name of God, or the I.H.S. at the pleasure of the painter, and half a dozen winged heads about it, clumsily painted, or more clumsily carved: the nakedness of the other walls concealed by a gallery; an organ over the door, and below it, immediately fronting the priest, a clock. Here also in some conspicuous place is a tablet to record in what year the church was repaired or beautified, and to perpetuate the names of the church-wardens at that time in letters of gold. Another tablet enumerates, but in faded lettering, and less conspicuous situation, all the benefactors to the parish; that is, all who have left alms to the poor, or fees to the minister for an anniversary sermon. The gallery and the area of the church are divided into pews, as they are called, by handsome mahogany partitions, within which the rich sit on cushioned seats, and kneel on hassocks, while the poor stand in the aisle, and kneel upon the stones. These pews are usually freehold, attached to houses in the parish. In towns a rent is exacted for them; and in private chapels, of which I shall speak hereafter, the whole income is derived from them, as in a theatre. The reading-desk of the priest is under the pulpit, and under it that of the clerk; there are no other assistants except the sexton and his wife, who open the pews, and expect a fee for accommodating a stranger with a seat. The priest wears a surplice; the clerk is no otherwise distinguished from the laity than as he has a stronger voice than usual, reads worse than other people, that is, more like a boy at a village school, and more frequently speaks through the nose. The catholic church has no corresponding office; he is to the congregation what the leader of the band is to an orchestra.
Some part of the service is repeated by the clerk and the people after the priest; with others, as the psalms, and all the hymns, they proceed alternately verse by verse; the priest reads the scripture lessons and many of the prayers alone; he also reads the Litany, and the clerk and congregation make the petition at the end of every clause. There is nothing in the Liturgy to which a Catholic must necessarily object, except the absolution; and with respect to that, his objection would be to the sense in which it is taken, not to that which it was intended to convey. After the first lesson the organist relieves the priest by playing a tune, good or bad according to his own fancy. This is an interlude of modern interpolation, which would have shocked the Protestants in those days when their priests were more zealous and longer-winded. At the end of what is properly called the morning service, though on the Sunday it is but the first part of three, a portion of the Psalms in vile verse, is given out by the clerk, and sung by the whole congregation: the organ seems to have been introduced in all opulent churches to hide the hideous discord of so many untuned and unmusical voices, and overpower it by a louder strain. A second part follows, which is usually performed beside the altar, but this is at the option of the officiating priest; in this the congregation and their leader have little more to do than to cry Amen, except that they repeat the Nicene Creed; this part also is terminated by psalm-singing, during which the priest exchanges his white vestment for a black one, and ascends the pulpit. He begins with a short prayer, of which the form is left to himself; then proceeds to the sermon. In old times the sermon was a serious thing, both for the preacher and the hearers; the more, the better, was the maxim in the days of fanaticism, and when the sands of one hour were run out the people heard with pleasure the invitation of the preacher to take another glass with him. But times are changed; the hour-glass has disappeared, the patience of a congregation is now understood to last twenty minutes, and in this instance short measure is preferred. Immediately after the valediction the organ strikes up a loud peal, with much propriety, as it drowns the greetings and salutations which pass from one person to another. The Litany and the whole of the second part are omitted in the evening service.