It gives us infinite regret to be compelled, just as we put our foot upon the threshold of the critic’s office, to animadvert upon some errors and defects in pronunciation, of which we could not have imagined the persons concerned to be capable. Our purpose is to persuade the people to encourage the stage upon principles honourable to it; not as a place of mere barren pastime; but as a school of improvement. But how shall we be able to bring the public mind to that habitual respect for the stage without which it must lose all useful effect, if the actors show themselves unfit for conveying instruction. Were this to be the case, and were mere pastime the object of theatres, Astley’s horse-riders, the tumblers and rope-dancers of Sadlers-Wells, nay, the Punch of a puppet-show, would be as useful and respectable as Garrick, Barry, Cooke, or Kemble, and the circus might successfully batter its head against the walls of that building in Chesnut-street which the sculptor has enriched with the wooden proxies of Melpomene and Thalia. But criticism will not allow this. For the sake of the stage it will exert all its might to support the actors—and for the sake of the stage it will hold them in admonition. If the established principles of literature be violated by the actors, the very ground upon which the critic would support them, is blown up by a mine of their own construction, and not only they must sink, but the critic must, for the maintenance of a just cause, put his hand to their heads and give them a lanch. The theatre is a school for elocution or it is nothing. In Great Britain it has time immemorial been attended to, not as authority for innovations, but as an organ of conveyance of the authorised pronunciation, to which the growing youth of the country were to look for accurate information of what was correct, as settled and considered by their superiors, that is, by high learned men and statesmen. If the actors, therefore, run counter to authority, and thereby endanger the cause which they are presumed to aid, the mischief is too general and extensive in its operation to be neglected or endured. There is nothing belonging to the stage which demands such strict discipline as its orthoepy, because there is none in which it can so immediately and powerfully affect the public. On this point therefore we are determined to sacrifice nothing to ceremony; being convinced that debasing the language is essentially as injurious, though legally not so punishable, as defacing the current coin of a country.
Without pointing to individuals by name, we request the ladies and gentlemen of the green-room to consult all the acknowledged authorities for the pronunciation of the words: true, rude, brute, shrewd, rule, in which the u is by some of them sounded very improperly; true so as to rhyme to few, new, &c. rule as if it were to rhyme to mule, and so on; whereas true ought to be pronounced as if it were spelled troo, and rhymed to do; rule as if spelled rool, and so on; and thus they will find them in the dictionaries of acknowledged authority.
Since we are on the subject we will now advert to some other words which are often most lamentably mispronounced, not only contrary to the pronunciation established by all learned men and orators in Great Britain, but exactly in that way in which skilful actors often pronounce them in Europe when they wish to mimic the most low and ignorant classes of society. Of this description is the pronunciation of the word “sacrifice.” For these words we refer all whom it may concern to the dictionaries of the best orthoepists, by which they will be instructed that it is not pronounced say-crifice but sac-rifize. If the former be really the pronunciation, the old ladies who smoke short pipes in the chimney corners of English and Irish cottages, are right, and Burke, Fox, Pitt, Windham, Curran, Grattan, Sheridan, and in short every man who speaks in a public assembly in England or Ireland, are wrong. We are not sure whether Mr. Kemble, who, as an excellent critic has observed, is always seeking for novelty and always running into error, may not lately have added that patch to his motley garb of new readings; but his authority is disallowed. Even Garrick, whose claims were of a very superior kind, when he attempted to render the English language, already too unstable, more so, by his innovations, was repelled with helpless contempt.
This is a point to which it is the manager’s duty to attend, because it is not a matter of doubt, nor subject to discretionary opinion. What must that part of our youth who attend to these things from a laudable desire for improvement, think, when they hear the same word differently pronounced in the same scene by different actors. Upon one night particularly, Mr. M‘Kenzie several times returned the mispronounced word, pronounced as it should be, with an emphasis which could not be misunderstood: yet the mispronunciation was persisted in.
Before we drop this subject we must observe that the pronunciation of the last syllable of the word sacrifice is sometimes as erroneously pronounced as the first, indeed worse, as the sound given to it approximates to one which conveys an offensive idea. Properly pronounced it rhymes to the verbs advise, rise, and not to mice, spice, &c.
Having brought our critical journal up to the appearance of that phenomenon of the stage of this new world, Master Payne, we find ourselves constrained, by the limits of this number, to postpone our observations upon the plays in which that extraordinary boy, for so many nights, astonished and delighted crowded houses, and far beyond our expectations, made good his title to the partiality of every city in which he has performed.
[ CRITICISM.]
THE FOUNDLING OF THE FOREST—A PLAY.
This production which we have annexed to our first number, not on account of its superior merit, but because it was the most recently published of any that has yet come to our hands, will, on the most superficial reading, be discerned to be of the true German cast. The old trick of grouping the characters at the end of a scene, and dropping the curtain upon them, by way of leaving it to the general conception of the audience to guess the rest, as is done in the Stranger, and all others of that breed, is here twice put in practice. Those who like such drugs mixed up with a quantum sufficit of horror, and all the tenterhook interest, hair-breadth escapes, and incident so forced as to stagger belief, which make up the hotchpotch romances whether narrative or dramatic of the present day, will like this. Mr. Dimond has in this piece certainly shown great skill in working up that kind of materials to the production of stage effect; since to those who can be interested or affected by the marvellous and mysterious, and who love to step for amusement out of the precincts of nature, and the conduct of “the folks of the world” the Foundling of the Forest will be interesting and affecting. Viewing it with a strict critical eye, not only the plot is faulty, but the composition is in many places extremely bad. If the production of original character was the author’s design, he has succeeded to his heart’s content in that of Florian, which we believe has never had a prototype in this world. In this hero who is sometimes as bombastical as ancient Pistol, and sometimes as ridiculous as a buffoon, the author attempts to be droll, and