Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o’er-inform’d the tenement of clay.’
Mr. Kemble’s manner, on the contrary, had always something dry, hard, and pedantic in it. ‘You shall relish him more in the scholar than the soldier:’ but his monotony did not fatigue, his formality did not displease; because there was always sense and meaning in what he did. The fineness of Mr. Kemble’s figure may be supposed to have led to that statue-like appearance, which his acting was sometimes too apt to assume: as the diminutiveness of Mr. Kean’s person has probably compelled him to bustle about too much, and to attempt to make up for the want of dignity of form, by the violence and contrast of his attitudes. If Mr. Kemble were to remain in the same posture for half an hour, his figure would only excite admiration: if Mr. Kean were to stand still only for a moment, the contrary effect would be apparent. One of the happiest and most spirited of all Mr. Kemble’s performances, and in which even his defects were blended with his excellences to produce a perfect whole, was his Pierre. The dissolute indifference assumed by this character, to cover the darkness of his designs, and the fierceness of his revenge, accorded admirably with Mr. Kemble’s natural manner; and the tone of morbid rancorous raillery, in which Pierre delights to indulge, was in unison with the actor’s reluctant, contemptuous personifications of gaiety, with the scornful spirit of his Comic Muse, which always laboured—invita Minerva—against the grain. Cato was another of those parts for which Mr. Kemble was peculiarly fitted by his physical advantages. There was nothing for him to do in this character, but to appear in it. It had all the dignity of still-life. It was a studied piece of classical costume—a conscious exhibition of elegantly disposed drapery, that was all: yet, as a mere display of personal and artificial grace, it was inimitable.
It has been suggested that Mr. Kemble chiefly excelled in his Roman characters, and among others in Brutus. If it be meant, that he excelled in those which imply a certain stoicism of feeling and energy of will, this we have already granted; but Brutus is not a character of this kind, and Mr. Kemble failed in it for that reason. Brutus is not a stoic, but a humane enthusiast. There is a tenderness of nature under the garb of assumed severity; an inward current of generous feelings, which burst out, in spite of circumstances, with bleeding freshness; a secret struggle of mind, and disagreement between his situation and his intentions; a lofty inflexibility of purpose, mingled with an effeminate abstractedness of thought, which Mr. Kemble did not give.
In short, we think the distinguishing excellence of his acting may be summed up in one word—intensity; in the seizing upon some one feeling or idea, in insisting upon it, in never letting it go, and in working it up, with a certain graceful consistency, and conscious grandeur of conception, to a very high degree of pathos or sublimity. If he had not the unexpected bursts of nature and genius, he had all the regularity of art; if he did not display the tumult and conflict of opposite passions in the soul, he gave the deepest and most permanent interest to the uninterrupted progress of individual feeling; and in embodying a high idea of certain characters, which belong rather to sentiment than passion, to energy of will, than to loftiness or to originality of imagination, he was the most excellent actor of his time. This praise of him is not exaggerated: the blame we have mixed with it is not invidious. We have only to add to both, the expression of our grateful remembrances and best wishes—Hail, and farewell!
End of A View of the English Stage.
ESSAYS ON THE ACTED DRAMA IN LONDON
CONTRIBUTED TO
THE LONDON MAGAZINE (1820)
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
These essays, contributed to The London Magazine in 1820, have never been republished in their original form. A great part of them was included in the so-called ‘second edition’ of A View of the English Stage (see the bibliographical note to that work, ante, p. 170), but the essays were cut up and re-arranged, and many passages were left out altogether. In the present edition, all the essays are printed verbatim from The London Magazine, except that a part of Essay No. VI. and the whole of Essay No. X., being plainly the work of another hand, have been omitted.
ESSAYS ON THE DRAMA