We have few idols, and those few we do not like to lose. But the warmth of our idolatry of Miss O’Neill will be brought to a much lower temperature if she goes on playing comedy at this rate. We cannot form any compromise in our imagination between Belvidera and the Widow Cheerly. To speak our minds plainly, Miss O’Neill is by far the best tragic actress we ever saw, with one great exception, and she is the worst comic actress we remember, without any exception at all. Her comedy is cast in lead, and sad doleful dumps she makes of it. It is tragedy in low-heeled shoes. Her spirit is boisterousness; her playfulness languid affectation; her familiarity oppressive; her gaiety lamentable. There never was such labour in vain. A smile trickles down her cheek like a tear, and her voice whines through a repartee in as many winding bouts of mawkish insinuation as through the most pathetic address. We cannot bear all this evident condescension; it overpowers us. In one scene she was very much applauded: it is that in which the Widow Cheerly gives a characteristic description of her former husband’s introduction of her to his bottle-companions: ‘This is my wife,’ etc. Now it cannot be denied that she mimicked the airs and manner of the fox-hunting squire very well, and her voice fairly gave the house a box on the ear. But we do not wish to see Miss O’Neill in the part of Squire Western. We conceive that this delightful actress cannot descend lower than the soldier’s daughter, except by playing the sailor’s daughter, and giving the word of command in a striped blue jacket and trowsers instead of a striped green gown. In these tom-boy hectoring heroines Mrs. Charles Kemble, whom, to the best of our belief, she imitates, beats her out and out; and Mrs. Mardyn, besides being taller and handsomer, has really more of the vis comica. But we will have done with this ungrateful subject. The comedy itself, of The Soldier’s Daughter, is the beau ideal of modern comedy. It contains the whole theory and practice of sentimentality, of which a bank-note offered and declined is the circulating medium, and a white cambric pocket-handkerchief, that catches the crystal tear in the eye of sensibility ere it falls, the visible emblem. Mr. and Mrs. Melford are an amiable young couple in lodgings and in great distress, but you do not learn how they got into one any more than the other. They utter their complaints, but are too delicate to touch upon the cause, and you sympathise with their sorrows, not with their misfortunes. They have a little girl, who has a little doll, which she christens ‘Miss Good Gentleman,’ after a person whose name she does not know. This is a very palpable hit, and tells amazingly. The unknown benefactor of these unfortunates incognito is a young Mr. Heartall, a wild, giddy character, that is, in the modern sense, a person who never stands still on the stage—who is always running into scrapes, which he walks out of without leaving any apology or account behind him. Then there is the Widow Cheerly, in the same house with the Melfords, whose heart and whose ridicule are ever open to the distressed, and who makes a match with Young Heartall, because he makes her an offer, it not being consistent with the gallantry of a soldier’s daughter to decline a challenge of that sort. Then there is Old Heartall, uncle to Young Heartall, and an East Indian Governor, who says one thing and does another; calls his nephew a scoundrel, and throws his arms round his neck. He is not a character, but a contradiction. Then there is a Mr. Ferret, who commits all sorts of unaccountable villainies through the piece, without any ostensible motives, and at the end of it you find that he has acted upon an abstract principle of avarice.
‘If,’ he says, ‘there had been no such thing as avarice, I had not been a villain.’ This is a very edifying confession of faith; and so not finding this principle answer, he repents upon an abstract principle of repentance, and also at the instigation of his old benefactor, (just arrived from the East and accordingly a great moralist), who reads him a great moral lecture, and advises him to give up his ill-gotten gains. As Mr. Ferret submits to his advice backed by the law, Old Heartall is prevailed on to forgive his designs upon the lives, characters, and fortunes of his acquaintance, from an amiable weakness of heart, and because the Widow Cheerly, who intercedes for him, ‘has roguish eyes.’ Mr. Liston plays a foolish servant in the Heartall family, whose name is Timothy. The name of Timothy is one of the jokes of this part: Mr. Liston’s face is the other, and the best of the two.
The whole tone of this play reminded us strongly of a very excellent criticism which we had read a short time before on the cant of Modern Comedy, in one of the notes to Mr. Lamb’s Specimens of Early Dramatic Poetry:—
‘The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iteratively inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd and unnatural) is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which a writer may be supplied, without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour—to be judiciously valiant—to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth—to esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering—to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately—to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a common-place against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now a days in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.’
PENELOPE AND THE DANSOMANIE.
| The Examiner.] | [January 19, 1817. |
King’s Theatre.
This theatre was opened for the present season under very favourable auspices; and we congratulate the public on the prospect of the continuance of this addition to the stock of elegant amusement. Though the opera is not among the ordinary resources of the lovers of the drama, it is a splendid object in the vista of a winter’s evening, and we should be sorry to see it mouldering into decay, its graceful columns and Corinthian capitals fallen, and its glory buried in Chancery. We rejoice when the Muses escape out of the fangs of the law, nor do we like to see the Graces arrested—in a pas de trois. We do not ‘like to see the unmerited fall of what has long flourished in splendour; any void produced in the imagination; any ruin on the face of Art.’ At present we hope better things from the known tastes and talents of the gentleman who is understood to have undertaken the management of the principal department, and from what we have seen of the performances with which the company have commenced their career. The pieces on Saturday and Tuesday were the Opera of Penelope by Cimarosa, and the inimitable comic Ballet, The Dansomanie. The first is, what it professes to be, a Grand Serious Opera: but it is somewhat heavy and monotonous. It introduced to the English Stage several actors of considerable eminence abroad. The principal were Mad. Camporese as Penelope, Madame Pasta as Telemachus, and Signor Crivelli as Ulysses. The last of these appears to be as good an actor as a singer. His gestures have considerable appropriateness and expression, besides having that sustained dignity and studied grace, which are essential to the harmony of the Opera; and his tones in singing are full, clear, and so articulate, that any one at all imbued with the Italian language can follow the words with ease. Madame Camporese performed Penelope, and drew down the frequent plaudits of the house by the sweetness of her voice, and the flexibility of execution which she manifested in some of the most difficult and impassioned passages. If we were to express our opinion honestly, we should say that we received most pleasure from Madame Pasta’s Telemachus. There is a natural eloquence about her singing which we feel, and therefore understand. Her dress and figure also answered to the classical idea we have of the youthful Telemachus. Her voice is good, her action is good: she has a handsome face, and very handsome legs. The ladies, we know, think otherwise: this is the only subject on which we think ourselves better judges than they.—Of the Dansomanie we will say nothing, lest we should be supposed to have caught the madness which it ridicules so sportively and gracefully. The whole is excellent, but the Minuet de la Cour is sublime: and the Gavot which succeeds it, is as good. Madame Leon was exquisite, and she had a partner worthy of her.
‘Such were the joys of our dancing days.’
Really when we see these dances, and hear the music, which our old fantastical dancing master used to scrape upon his kit, played in full orchestra, we do not know what to make of it; we wish we were old dancing-masters, or learning to dance; or that we had lived in the time of Henry IV. The tears do not come in our eyes; that source is dry: but we exclaim with the Son of Fingal,