And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.’

So the actor’s eye (if truly inspired) comprehends more than is set down for him, starts at hidden fancies that only pale passion sees; and his voice is the trembling echo and the broken instrument of thoughts and of an agony that lie too deep for mere words to express. This licence, that is, this truth of nature is, with our accomplished and more thorough-bred neighbours, entirely out of the question. Their art, whether in poetry, acting, painting, is well-drilled regimental art:—it is art in uniform and on parade. Thus tragic poetry cannot, in its dumb despair, call on all nature to supply it with an appropriate language, that places what it feels in palpable and lofty imagery before the reader: it must, on the contrary, have its rhetorical and didactic flourishes all ready for the occasion—these may be as tedious, as pompous, as bombastic as you please, but to pass or allude to anything beyond them, is vile and Gothic indeed. The actor may mouth, rant, and whine as much as he pleases, so that he does it in measured time, and seems in perfect health and spirits all the while; but if he is once thrown off his guard, and loses sight of himself and the audience in the sufferings of his hero, it is all over with him. Again, an actor’s face ‘should be as a book where one may read strange matters.’ This would be an inexpiable offence in France, where there is nothing strange, and where all must appear upon the surface or be kept quite out of sight, on the score of decency and good manners. As the poet must introduce no image or sentiment for which there is not a prescribed formula, so the tragedian must give no shade or inflection of feeling which the entire audience were not prepared complacently to anticipate. The self-love of the pit would rise in open rebellion if he did. In France it is a rule that no person is wiser than another: you cannot be beforehand with their conceit and infinite superiority in impertinence. So they themselves tell the story of a man who, hearing of the assassination of the Duke of Berri, and not willing to allow that his informant had the start of him on so interesting a topic, made answer—‘Yes, I knew it!’ We are not therefore surprised that the Parisians find fault with the only actor of much genius we possess: he must puzzle them almost as much as the Hetman Platoff; and this assuredly they cannot forgive, as in the present case their rank cowardice cannot get the better of their consummate vanity. It is ludicrous too that they should charge us with extravagance and fustian—they, who have their Pensions de l’Univers and Diligences de l’Univers[[43]] stuck on every pillar and post! As we know what the most refined people in the universe do not like, we are also happy in learning what they do like. For others to despise what we admire, is always to assume an attitude of seeming superiority over us: to admire what we do not think much of, is to give us our revenge again. Fastidiousness is here, as in many other cases, the effect not of an excess of refinement, but of a want of conception. When Voltaire called Shakespear a barbarian, we were a little staggered in our previous opinion, as we could not tell what lofty models of excellence he contemplated in his own mind; but when he pronounced Addison’s Cato to be a perfect tragedy, we knew what to think of him and ourselves. He might as well have pronounced a marble slab to be a perfect statue. In like manner, it might ‘give us pause’ that such competent critics are dissatisfied with Mr. Kean, if we did not learn in the same breath that they are in raptures with Mr. C. Kemble, Mr. Macready, and Miss Smithson; not that we disapprove of the last, but that being our own country people, we beg leave to judge of their relative merits better than foreigners. If they scouted our pretentions altogether, we might despond; but as they laud us in the wrong place, we may smile in our turn. The contradiction between us is not owing to an inferiority of nature, but to a difference of opinion. We can understand why, with reason, they admire Macready: he declaims well, and so far resembles good French actors. Mr. C. Kemble is not only an excellent actor, but a very good-looking man; and good looks are a letter of recommendation, whether among the Laplanders or Hottentots, at Zenith or the Pole. Miss Smithson is tall; and the French admire tall women. All these come under a class, and meet with obvious sympathy and approbation. Mr. Kean, on the other hand, stands alone,—is merely an original; and the French hate originality: it seems to imply that there is some possible excellence or talent that they are without! Beside it appears that they expected him to be a giant. Mon Dieu qu’il est petit!—as if this was an insuperable bar to his bestriding the theatric world like a Colossus. He is diminutive, it is true: so was the Little Corporal: but since the latter disappeared from the stage, they have ceased to be the Great Nation. They stir up our bile by their arrogance and narrow-mindedness, and we cannot help its overflowing in some degree of ill-humour and petulance. We were heartily glad to find that Mr. Knowles’s tragedy of Virginius is well received in Paris—(we would always rather agree with, than differ from them, for we know their subtlety and double edge)—but this is to be attributed to the inherent and classical excellence of the composition. Its scenes present a series of elegant bas-reliefs, and are equally enchanting to the eye and to the ear.

We have received a letter from a Correspondent, praying us to put down the large poke-bonnets which ladies at present take with them to the theatre, and often persist in keeping on, as a female privilege. We confess, we do not see the custom in that amiable light: it appears to us the privilege of annoying others without any object. He says, that on applying to a gentleman in the gallery of the King’s Theatre, to know if a lady with him would have any objection to take off her bonnet, which, with her involuntary movements from side to side, prevented three persons behind her from seeing or enjoying the Opera, her friend answered, ‘You see she is in the same situation with yourself,’ pointing to another lady just before her. So that the evil being doubled was an argument for it. At this rate, people might go to the play with umbrellas, and hold them open the whole time,—or ladies with their parasols, if we must have a more light and portable nuisance,—and by thus setting up a screen to the performance, and making the absurdity truly English and complete, put an end to it by common consent of those who are only bent on incommoding others, when they think they are in some degree singular in doing it. We expect some novelty (of which we have had a dreary dearth of late) on the opening of the Haymarket Theatre next week, and a treat, which we greatly long for, in little Bartolozzi. But we must not count upon our good fortune too soon.

MUNDEN’S SIR PETER TEAZLE

The Times.][September 8, 1817.

Drury-Lane Theatre.

This theatre opened on Saturday with The School for Scandal and Past Ten O’clock. The chief novelty in the former was Munden’s Sir Peter Teazle. We cannot speak very favourably of it. He did not feel at home in the part, which is indeed quite out of his way. His lengthened visage and abrupt tones did not suit the character or sentiments of Sir Peter. Sir Peter is a common every-day sort of character, a tetchy amorous old bachelor, who has married a young wife, with an uneasy consciousness of his own infirmities, and placed in situations to make those infirmities more ridiculous. But still he is a classical character, and not a grotesque; and, therefore, the actor’s peculiar talents were thrown away upon him, or rather were judiciously kept as much as possible in the back-ground, and hardly dared to show themselves once the whole evening. Mr. Munden went through the part with laudable gravity and decorum, without making any hole in his manners; nor did he purposely play the clown or pantomime in any of the scenes. Yet the negation of farce is not comedy. Sir Peter was a knight newly dubbed as well as married, a gentleman on his good behaviour both with his mistress and the public. We missed the irresistible expansion of his broad, shining face; and reckoned up a number of suppressed shrugs, and embryo grimaces, that shrunk from the glare of the new gas lights. His eyebrows were not lifted up with wonder; his lips were not moistened with jests as with marmalade; nor did his chin drop down once its whole length as with a total dislocation of his ideas. In the scene of the discovery in the fourth act, where his wife as ‘the little French Milliner’ is concealed behind the screen, he took a greater license, but from the mechanical restraint to which he had been subjected, there was something even here dolorous and petrified in his manner. If, however, Mr. Munden did penance in Sir Peter, it was a holyday-time with him, high carnival in Old Nosy in the farce, where he made himself and the audience amends for all the temptations he had resisted to indulge his natural genius, and let out his whole faculties of face, voice, and gesture. In his character, as an old steward, he is reeling-ripe from the beginning to the end of the piece; and he produces a dizziness in the heads of the audience as unavoidable, though more pleasant than that which overtakes the passengers in a Margate hoy. The School for Scandal was, in the other characters, cast much as usual, and as well as the strength of the company in genteel comedy would permit. Mrs. Davison’s Lady Teazle, though not without spirit, is too coarse and hoydening. Wallack’s Joseph Surface wanted dignity and plausibility. Not to compare him with old Jack Palmer, he does not hit off the officious condescending solemnity of the character so well as Young. He seems sulky and reserved, instead of being self-complacent and ostentatious; to shrink into a cautious contemplation of his own designs and villainy, instead of protecting others under the shadow of his assumed virtues, and covering their failings and defects with a veil of pompous sentiment. It was said of Garrick, that he played the footman too like the fine gentleman; Mr. Wallack, on the other hand, plays the fine gentleman too much like the footman. When dressed to most advantage, he puts us in mind of a valet out of livery. Mr. Rae’s Charles Surface was without any thing to recommend it, but the wit, gaiety, and magnanimity of the author. His mode of speaking is more harsh and untuneable in comedy than in regular declamation, which in some measure hides its habitual defects. It is a brogue in full gallop suddenly stopped short by the turnpike gate of criticism. Harley’s Sir Benjamin Backbite was inoffensive from its insipidity; and Knight as old Crabtree had painted his eyebrows very naturally. The house was not very crowded. The curtain drew up punctually at seven, without any previous expression of impatience; and the play was over before ten: but the rapidity with which the acts followed one another, and the almost immediate interruption of the music between the acts as soon as it had struck up, produced on us an unpleasant effect. It was like going a journey in the mail-coach, where they do not allow you time for your meals. A good play, like a hearty dinner, requires some time for digestion: the music in the orchestra acts upon the imagination, like wine upon the stomach; and habit makes it as ungrateful to us to be disappointed of the one as to be deprived of the other.