In this imperfect sketch of some of the leading French theatres and actors, we have taken little opportunity of censure. We could notice but a few, and have selected from the most worthy. In Paris, as elsewhere, pumps, to use a green-room term, are plentiful. But in the higher class of theatres they are in the minority; and moreover there is a neatness and tact in the performance of French actors, which, in the less prominent characters, at least, goes some way to atone for the absence of decided talent. A French comedian may be tame, he may be incorrect in the conception of his part; he is rarely vulgar or ridiculous. We refer, of course, to the actors allowed to figure on the boards of the half-score good theatres in Paris. There is no lack of inferior ones, where the laugh is more often at the performer than at the performance. But most even of these will repay a visit, if not for the sake of the actors, for that of the audience. Despised by the fashionable and pleasure-seeking, they afford a rich field to the observant man. He must not, it is true, be squeamish, and fear to let the unsavoury reek of tabac-de-caporal, or the odours of potato brandy and logwood wine come betwixt the wind and his nobility. Neither must he dread contact with the mechanic's blouse, with the cotton gown of the grisette, or the velveteen vest of the titi of the Boulevards; he must even make up his mind to see his neighbour, dispensing with his upper garment, exhibit his brawny arms in shirt sleeves of questionable purity. If he dare encounter these little imaginary contaminations, he will find entertainment in the humours of the Boulevard du Temple; in the pantomimes of the Funambules—once the scene of poor Debureau's triumphs—and in the ten-franc vaudevilles of the Petit Lazari.
THE REIGN OF GEORGE THE SECOND.[16]
Walpole, in giving his history to the world, renounces the title of an historian. He proclaims himself simply a compiler; his volumes, Memoires Pour Servir; and his chief purpose, simply, to give his own recollections, day by day, of the men and things passing before his eyes. Yet what historian has ever told his story with more spirit, ever sketched his characters with more living truth, or led our curiosity onward through the labyrinth of political intrigue, parliamentary struggle, and national vicissitude, with so light, and yet so leading a hand? A part of this charm arises from the interest which he himself took in his performance. He evidently delighted in the revival of those scenes in which he had once figured, and the powerful portraiture which, in his study, realized the characters of the eminent men whom he had seen successively depart from the political world. In this lies the spell which makes Walpole the favourite of all the higher order of readers in our age, and will make him popular to the last hour of the English language.
We read Gibbon like a task. We are astonished at his learned opulence, his indefatigable labour, and his flood of rich and high-wrought conception; but we grow as weary of him, as if we walked through an Indian treasury, and rested the eye only on heaps of gold. With all our great historical writers, the mind feels a sense of their toil, and, however it may be endured for the sake of its knowledge, our toil, too, is inevitable, and the crop must be raised only by the sweat of our own brow.
But the pages of Walpole give us the knowledge without the toil, and, instead of bending to the tillage, we pluck the fruit from the tree as we pass along. When he, too, is heavy, his failure arises simply from his attempting to assume the style of his contemporaries. He is not made for their harness, however it may be plated and embroidered. He cannot move in their stately and measured pace. His genius is volatile and vivid; he moves by bounds: and his display is always the most effective when, abandoning the beaten tracks of authorship, he speeds his light way across the field, and exhibits at once the agility of his powers and the caprice of his will.
What infinite gratification have we lost, by the want of such a writer in the days of classical antiquity! With what interest would the living world follow a Greek or a Roman Walpole! With what delight should we contemplate a Greek Council, with Pericles for its president, sketched by the hand of a spectator, and shown in the brilliant contests, intellectual intrigue, and ardent ambition of these sons of soul! What a scene would such a writer make of Cicero confronting Catiline, with the supremacy of Rome trembling in the scale, and the crowded senate-house preparing to hear the sentence of life or death! We might have wanted the strong historic phraseology of Sallust; or, in a subsequent age, the gloomy grandeur of Tacitus, that Caravaggio of ancient Rome; we might have lost some of the classic beauty, and all the theatric drapery, but we should have had a clearer, more emphatic, and more faithful picture, than in the severe energy of the one, or the picturesque mysticism of the other. We should have known the characters as they were known to the patrician and the populace of two thousand years ago; we should have seen them as they threw out all their stately and muscular strength; we should have been able to recover them from the tomb, make them move before us "in their armour, as they lived," and gather from their lips the language of times and things, now past away from man.
Still, we must acknowledge that Walpole's chief excellence is in his letters. His sportive spleen, his polished sarcasm, and his keen insight into the ways of men, place him at the head of all epistolary authorship. He has had but two competitors for this fame,—it is remarkable that they were both women,—De Sevigne in France, and Lady Wortley Montague in England; yet, how utterly inferior are De Sevigne's feeble sketches of court life, and vapid panegyrics on the "adorable Grignan;" or the Englishwoman's rambling details of travels and tribulations, to the pungent pleasantry and substantial vigour of Walpole! The Frenchwoman's sketches are like her artificial flowers, to the freshness of the true. Lady Mary's slipshod sentences and coarse voluptuousness are equally inferior to the accurate finish and fashionable animation of the man who combined the critic with the courtier, and was the philosopher even more than he was the man of fashion.
Walpole is now an English classic. It is striking, to see a man of talent thus vindicating his genius in the grave, making a posthumous defence of his character, and compelling posterity to acknowledge the distinctions of which he was defrauded by the petulance of his time. His example and his success administer a moral which ought not to be thrown away. There are many individuals in our own time, who might thus nobly avenge themselves on the injustice of their age. The Frenchman's maxim, Il n'y a que bonheur, et malheur, is unanswerably true; and not only men of the finest faculties are often ill used by fortune, but they are often the worst used. Their conscious superiority renders them fastidious of the lower arts of success; their sense of honour disqualifies them for all those services which require flexibility of conscience; and their sensibility to injustice makes them retort public injury, by disdainfully abandoning the struggle, and retiring from the vulgar bustle of the world.