OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
THE HISS AND ITS HISTORY.
"I warrant thee, if I do not act it, they will hiss me."—Merry Wives of Windsor.
Hissing is a custom of great antiquity. Cicero, in his Paradoxes, says that "if an actor lose the measure of a passage in the slightest degree, or make the line he utters a syllable too short or too long by his declamation, he is instantly hissed off the stage." Nor was hissing confined to the theatre, for in one of his letters Cicero refers to Hortensius as an orator who attained old age without once incurring the disgrace of being hissed. Pliny notes that some of the lawyers of his day had paid applauders in court, who greeted the points of their patron's speech with an ululatus, or shrill yell. This Roman manner of denoting approval seems akin to the practice of the Japanese, who give a wild shriek as a sign of approbation, and hoot and howl to show their displeasure. But the sound of the goose—the simple hiss—is the most frequently-employed symbol of dissent. "Goose" is, in theatrical parlance, to hiss; and Dutton Cook, in his entertaining Book of the Play, remarks that the bird which saved the Capitol has ruined many a drama.
The dramatist is of all creative artists the most unfortunate. He can never present himself directly to his critics; he must be seen through a medium over which he has but slight control; he must depend wholly on the actors of his play, and too often he is leaning on a reed. Colman accused John Kemble of having been the cause of the original failure of The Iron Chest, and Ben Jonson published his New Inn as a comedy "never acted, but most negligently played by some of the king's servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the king's subjects, 1629; and now, at last, set at liberty to the readers, His Majesty's servants and subjects, to be judged of, 1631."
Nor are Colman and Jonson alone in their tribulations. Sheridan was hissed, and so were Goldsmith and Fielding and Coleridge and Godwin and Beaumarchais and About and Victor Hugo and Scribe and Sardou, and many another, including Charles Lamb, who cheerfully hissed his own Mr. H.
The operatic composer is even more unfortunate than the dramatist, for he is dependent not only on the acting but on the singing of his characters; and he is also at the mercy of the orchestra. Wagner's Tannhäuser led a stormy life at the Paris opera for a very few evenings, and its failure the composer has never been willing to let the world forget. Rossini was more philosophical. On its first performance the Barber of Seville, like the comedy of Beaumarchais, whence its libretto is taken, was a failure; and when the curtain fell, Rossini, who had led the orchestra, turned to the audience and calmly clapped his hands. The anger at this openly-expressed contempt for public opinion did not prevent the opera from gradually gaining ground, until by the end of the week it was a marked success. Had it been a failure, the composer would have borne it easily: Mr. Edwards informs us that when Rossini's Sigismondo was violently hissed at Venice he sent a letter to his mother with a picture of a large fiasco (bottle). His Torvaldo e Dorliska, which was brought out soon afterward, was also hissed, but not so much. This time Rossini sent his mother a picture of a fiaschetto (little bottle).
Nor is it, in modern times, authors or actors alone who are subject to the hiss. The orator may provoke it by a bold speech in support of an unpopular measure or an unpopular man. But here the hisser is not so safe, nor the hissee—to coin a convenient word—so defenceless. The orator is not hampered by the studied words of a written part: he has the right of free speech, and he may retort upon his sibilant surrounders. Macready records that on one occasion, when Sheil was hissed, he "extorted the applause of his assailants by observing to them, 'You may hiss, but you cannot sting.'" Even finer was the retort of Coleridge under similar circumstances: "When a cold stream of truth is poured on red-hot prejudices, no wonder they hiss."
Sir William Knighton declares that George II. never entered a theatre save in fear and trembling from dread of hearing a single hiss, which, though it were at once drowned in tumultuous applause, he would lie awake all night thinking about, entirely forgetful of the enthusiasm it had evoked. He must have felt as Charles Lamb did, who wrote: "A hundred hisses (hang the word! I write it like kisses—how different!)—a hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. The former come more directly from the heart." It is hard to entirely agree with Lamb here. Hissing seems to me to proceed for the most part from ill-temper, or at least from the dissatisfaction of the head. Applause is often the outburst of the heart, the gush of a feeling, an enthusiasm incapable of restraint. No wonder that the retired actor longs for a sniff of the footlights and for the echo of the reverberating plaudits to the accompaniment of which he formerly bowed himself off.
Indeed, applause is the breath of an actor's nostrils. Without it good acting is almost impossible. Actors, like other artists, need encouragement. Applause gives heart, and, as Mrs. Siddons said, "better still—breath." Mrs. Siddons's niece has put on record her views, as valuable as her famous relative's: "'Tis amazing how much an audience loses by this species of hanging back, even when the silence proceeds from unwillingness to interrupt a good performance: though in reality it is the greatest compliment an actor can receive, yet he is deprived by that very stillness of half his power. Excitement is reciprocal between the performer and the audience: he creates it in them, and receives it back again from them."