William Robson, in his “Old Play-Goer,” says of Edmund Kean, “His person and carriage are mean and contemptible, his judgment poor, his pathos weak, his passion extravagant and unnatural;” and then sums up his estimate of the immortal histrionist in these remarkable words: “He is nothing but a little vixenish black girl in short petticoats!” On the first appearance of Kean in Philadelphia some critics there, who were great admirers of Cooke, called him “a quack, a mountebank, a vulgar impostor.” William B. Wood said of Kean, when he had just finished a rehearsal and gone out, “He is a mere mummer.” Joseph Jefferson, great-grandfather of the Joseph Jefferson of Rip Van Winkle fame,—a beautiful and noble old man, afterwards characterized by Forrest in loving memory as “one of the purest men that ever lived, sad, sweet, lofty, thoughtful, generous,”—overheard the remark, and replied, with a quiet indignation in his tone, “Ah, Wood, you would give all the riches you ever dreamed of amassing in this world to be another just such a mummer.” The “London Spectator,” in 1836, said, “Bunn in his drowning desperation catches at any straw. He has just put forward Booth, the shadow and foil of Kean in bygone days. Booth’s Richard seems to have been a wretched failure.” At the same time another English journal used the following expressive language, in which the writer evidently does justice to himself whatever he endeavors to do to the actors he names: “Since the retirement of Young and the death of Kean, the very name of tragedy has passed away from us. We have had to submit to the presumptuous and uninspired feelings of Mr. Bell-wether Kemble, or to the melodramatic jerks and pumpings of Mr. Macready.”
An American critic wrote thus of the Nancy Sykes of Charlotte Cushman: “Miss Cushman’s performance is of the Anatomical Museum style. Her effects are thrilling and vulgar. Her poses are awkward, and her pictures unfinished and coarse in outline. She has an unpleasantly pre-raphaelite death scene, and is dragged off, stiff and stark, when all the characters express their internal satisfaction at the circumstance by smiling, shaking hands, and joining in a feeble chorus. The secret of her attraction is vigor. The masses like vigor. If they can have a little art with it, very well. But vigor they must have.” Of late it has been the fashion to extol Miss Cushman as the queenly mistress of all the dignities and refinements of the dramatic profession; but the foregoing notice is exactly of a piece with the treatment visited upon Forrest for many years by the vulgar coteries of criticism, whose aim was not justice and usefulness but effect upon the prejudiced and the careless. Even the quiet and gentlemanly Edwin Booth has been as unsparingly assailed as he has been lavishly praised. An insidious article on him, entitled “The Machine-Actor,” called him a “self-acting dramatic machine warranted;” and while admitting, with great generosity, that “he was not wholly destitute of dramatic ability,” attributed his success and reputation chiefly to extraneous conditions, in especial the shrewdness of “his managing agent, who judiciously prepared his houses for him, and pecuniarily and personally appreciated the power of the press and conciliated the critics.” The two following notices of Mr. Booth’s Melnotte—the first obviously by a critic who had, the second by one who had not, been “conciliated”—are quite as absurd in their contradiction as those so often composed on Forrest:
“On Monday evening last we enjoyed the first opportunity of seeing Mr. Edwin Booth in the character of Claude Melnotte, in the ‘Lady of Lyons.’ Our impressions of Mr. Booth in the part may be briefly summed up in saying that he is one of the very best Claudes we have ever seen,—scholarly, sustained, and forcibly reticent at all points,—not so youthful in his make-up as to suggest the enthusiastic boy of Bulwer’s drama, but in all other regards the very ideal of the character. His marvellously melodious voice sounds to peculiar advantage in the rich prose-poetry of the more sentimental passages, and in the passages of sterner interest the latent strength of the tragedian comes nobly into play. Booth’s Claude is an unqualified success, and its first rendering was witnessed by an audience brilliant in number and intelligence and markedly enthusiastic in their reception of the best points.”
“Mr. Booth’s Claude Melnotte was a failure. It was neither serious nor sentimental, comic nor tragic. The best that can be said of it is that it came near being an effective burlesque. When he first came on to the stage, I almost thought it was his intention to make it so. His carriage and general make-up were those of one of Teniers’ Dutch boors, even to the extent of yellow hair combed straight down the forehead and clipped square across from temple to temple. His action consisted mainly in a series of shrugs. I don’t remember a natural movement of body or expression of countenance, from the beginning of the piece to the end; nor a natural tone of voice.”
Still later we have seen different representatives of the press, both in America and in England, alternately describing the wonderful Othello of Salvini as “the electrifying impersonation of a demi-god” and as “an exhibition of disgusting brutality.”
The class of examples of which these are a few specimens show how little worthy the ordinary newspaper dramatic criticism is to be considered authoritative. No branch of journalism, allowing for notable individual exceptions, is more incompetent or more corrupt, because no other set of writers have so difficult a task or are so beset by vicious influences. Their vanity, prejudice, and interest worked upon, their sympathies appealed to by the artist and his friends, their antipathies by his rivals and foes, harassed and hurried with work, moved by promises of money and patronage, no wonder they often turn from the exactions of conscientious labor and study to something so much easier. The unsophisticated portion of the public, who are too much influenced by what they read in the papers, and who fancy that applause is a good proof of merit and censure a sure evidence of fault, ought to know how full of fraud and injustice the world of histrionic ambition and criticism is, and to learn to give little weight to verdicts not ascertained to come from competent and honest judges. The husband of Madame Linguet, a favorite actress at the Italian Theatre in Paris, hired a party to hiss every other actress, but to applaud her to the echo. A ludicrous mistake let out the secret. Linguet told his men one night to hiss the first actress who appeared and applaud the second. The play was changed, and in the substituted piece Madame Linguet came forward first, and was overpowered with hisses. Sir John Hill asked Peg Woffington if she had seen in the paper his praise of her performance the previous evening in the part of Calista. She thanked him for his kindness, but added that the play was changed and she had acted the character of Lady Townley. In a New York paper, in 1863, this notice appeared: “Mr. Forrest repeated, by special request, his great character of Spartacus last evening, before one of the most brilliant and enthusiastic audiences of the season. His acting was grand throughout, and at the end of the last act he received a perfect ovation from the audience.” Appended to this, in his own handwriting, pasted in one of his scrap-books, were found these words: “Mr. Forrest on the night above referred to was in Philadelphia, and did not act at all, having been called home by the death of his sister.”
After going over the mass of ignorant, capricious, and contradictory criticism bestowed on Forrest,—criticism destitute of fundamental principles or ultimate insight,—the reader may well feel at a loss to know how he is to regulate his judgment upon the subject and form a just estimate of the actor and his performances. The critics, instead of aiding, bewilder him, because themselves appear to be wildly adrift. To work our way through the chaos it is necessary for us to understand distinctly what the dramatic art is in its nature and object, and what are the materials and methods with which it aims to accomplish its purpose. The answers to these inquiries will clear away confusion, lay bare the elements of the art, and put us in possession of those laws of expression which constitute the only final standard for justly criticising the efforts of the player.
Considered in its full scope, the drama is the practical science of human nature exemplified in the revelation of its varieties of character and conduct. It aims to uncover and illustrate man in the secret springs of his action and suffering and destiny, by representing the whole range and diversity of his experience in living evolution. The drama is the reflection of human life in the idealizing mirror of art. In what does this reflection consist? In the correct exhibition of the different modes of behavior that belong to the different types of humanity in the various exigencies of their fortunes. The critic, therefore, in order to be able to say whether histrionic performances are true or false, consistent or inconsistent, noble or base, refined or vulgar, artistically elaborated and complete or absurdly exaggerated and defective, must understand the contents of human nature in all its grades of development, and know how the representatives of those grades naturally deport themselves under given conditions of inward consciousness and of exterior situation. That is to say, a man to be thoroughly equipped for the task of dramatic criticism must have mastered these three provinces of knowledge; first, the characters of men in their vast variety; second, the modes of manifestation whereby those characters reveal their inward states through outward signs; third, the manner in which those characters and those modes of manifestation are affected by changes of consciousness or of situation, how they are modified by the reflex play of their own experience.
Every man has three types of character, in all of which he must be studied before he can be adequately represented. First he has his inherited constitutional or temperamental character, his fixed native character, in which the collective experience and qualities of his progenitors are consolidated, stamped, and transmitted. Next he has his peculiar fugitive or passional character, which is the modification of his stable average character under the influence of exciting impulses, temporary exaltations of instinct or sentiment. And then he has his acquired habitual character, gradually formed in him by the moulding power of his occupation and associations, as expressed in the familiar proverb, “Habit is a second nature.” The first type reveals his ancestral or organic rank, what he is in the fatal line of his parentage. The second shows his moral or personal rank, what he has become through his own experience and discipline, self-indulgence and self-denial. The third betrays his social rank, what he has been made by his employment and caste. The original estimate or value assigned to the man by nature is indicated in his constitutional form, the geometrical proportions and dynamic furnishing of his organs, his physical and mental make-up. The estimate he puts on himself, in himself and in his relations with others, his egotistical value, is seen in the transitive modifications of his form by movements made under the stimulus of passions. The conventional estimate or social value awarded him is suggested through the permanent modifications wrought in his organs and bearing by his customary actions and relations with his fellows. Thus the triple type of character possessed by every man is to be studied by means of an analysis of the forms of his organs in repose and of his movements in passion or habit.
The classes of constitutional character are as numerous as the human temperaments which mark the great vernacular distinctions of our nature according to the preponderant development of some portion of the organism. There is the osseous temperament, in which the bones and ligaments are most developed; the lymphatic temperament, in which the adipose and mucous membrane preponderate; the sanguine temperament, in which the heart and arteries give the chief emphasis; the melancholic temperament, in which the liver and the veins oversway; the executive temperament, in which the capillaries and the nerves take the lead; the mental temperament, in which the brain is enthroned; the visceral temperament, in which the vital appetites reign; the spiritual temperament, in which there is a fine harmony of the whole. The enumeration might be greatly varied and extended, but this is enough for our purpose. Each head of the classification denotes a distinct style of character, distinguished by definite modes of manifesting itself, the principal sign of every character, the key-note from which all its expressions are modulated, being the quality and rate of movement or the nervous rhythm of the organism in which it is embodied.