Chapter XXII: Preface (13)

It is no insignificant epoch in one’s life the first time that
odd-looking thing, a play-bill, is left at our door in a little
market-town in the country (say W—m in S——shire). The Manager,
somewhat fatter and more erect, ‘as Manager beseems,’ than the
rest of his Company, with more of the man of business, and not
less of the coxcomb, in his strut and manner, knocks at the door
with the end of a walking cane (a badge of office!) and a bundle
of papers under his arm; presents one of them printed in large
capitals, with a respectful bow and a familiar shrug; hopes to
give satisfaction in the town; hints at the liberal encouragement
they received at W——ch, the last place they stopped at; had every
possible facility afforded by the Magistrates; supped one evening
with the Rev. Mr. J——s, a dissenting clergyman, and really a very
well-informed, agreeable, sensible man, full of anecdote—no
illiberal prejudices against the profession:—then talks of the
strength of his company, with a careless mention of his own
favourite line—his benefit fixed for an early day, but would do
himself the honour to leave farther particulars at a future
opportunity—speaks of the stage as an elegant amusement, that most
agreeably enlivened a spare evening or two in the week, and, under
proper management (to which he himself paid the most assiduous
attention) might be made of the greatest assistance to the cause
of virtue and humanity—had seen Mr. Garrick act the last night but
one before his retiring from the stage—had himself had offers from
the London boards, and indeed could not say he had given up all
thoughts of one day surprising them—as it was, had no reason to
repine—Mrs. F—— tolerably advanced in life—his eldest son a
prodigious turn for the higher walks of tragedy—had said perhaps
too much of himself—had given universal satisfaction—hoped that
the young gentleman and lady, at least, would attend on the
following evening, when the West-Indian would be performed at the
market-hall, with the farce of No Song No Supper—and so having
played his part, withdraws in the full persuasion of having made a
favourable impression, and of meeting with every encouragement the
place affords! Thus he passes from house to house, and goes
through the routine of topic after topic, with that sort of modest
assurance, which is indispensable in the manager of a country
theatre. This fellow, who floats over the troubles of life as the
froth above the idle wave, with all his little expedients and
disappointments, with pawned paste-buckles, mortgaged scenery,
empty exchequer, and rebellious orchestra, is not of all men the
most miserable:—he is little less happy than a king, though not
much better off than a beggar. He has little to think of, much to
do, more to say; and is accompanied, in his incessant daily round
of trifling occupations, with a never-failing sense of authority
and self-importance, the one thing needful (above all others) to
the heart of man. This however is their man of business in the
company; he is a sort of fixture in their little state; like
Nebuchadnezzar’s image, but half of earth and half of finer metal:
he is not ‘of imagination all compact:’ he is not, like the rest
of his aspiring crew, a feeder upon air, a drinker of applause,
tricked out in vanity and in nothing else; he is not quite mad,
nor quite happy. The whining Romeo, who goes supperless to bed,
and on his pallet of straw dreams of a crown of laurel, of waving
handkerchiefs, of bright eyes, and billet-doux breathing boundless
love: the ranting Richard, whose infuriate execrations are drowned
in the shouts of the all-ruling pit; he who, without a coat to his
back, or a groat in his purse, snatches at Cato’s robe, and binds
the diadem of Cæsar on his brow;—these are the men that Fancy has
chosen for herself, and placed above the reach of fortune, and
almost of fate. They take no thought for the morrow. What is it to
them what they shall eat, or what they shall drink, or how they
shall be clothed? ‘Their mind to them a kingdom is.’—It is not a
poor ten shillings a week, their share in the profits of the
theatre, with which they have to pay for bed, board, and lodging,
that bounds their wealth. They share (and not unequally) in all
the wealth, the pomp, and pleasures of the world. They wield
sceptres, conquer kingdoms, court princesses, are clothed in
purple, and fare sumptuously every night. They taste, in
imagination, ‘of all earth’s bliss, both living and loving:’
whatever has been most the admiration or most the envy of mankind,
they, for a moment, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others,
become. The poet fancies others to be this or that; the player
fancies himself to be all that the poet but describes. A little
rouge makes him a lover, a plume of feathers a hero, a brazen
crown an emperor. Where will you buy rank, office, supreme
delights, so cheap as at his shop of fancy? Is it nothing to dream
whenever we please, and _seem_ whatever we desire? Is real
greatness, is real prosperity, more than what it seems? Where
shall we find, or where shall the votary of the stage find,
Fortunatus’s Wishing Cap, but in the wardrobe which we laugh at:
or borrow the philosopher’s stone but from the _property-man_ of
the theatre? He has discovered the true Elixir of Life, which is
freedom from care: he quaffs the pure _aurum potabile_, which is
popular applause. He who is smit with the love of this _ideal_
existence, cannot be weaned from it. Hoot him from the stage, and
he will stay to sweep the lobbies or shift the scenes. Offer him
twice the salary to go into a counting-house, or stand behind a
counter, and he will return to poverty, steeped in contempt, but
eked out with fancy, at the end of a week. Make a laughing-stock
of an actress, lower her salary, tell her she is too tall,
awkward, stupid, and ugly; try to get rid of her all you can—she
will remain, only to hear herself courted, to listen to the echo
of her borrowed name, to live but one short minute in the lap of
vanity and tinsel shew. Will you give a man an additional ten
shillings a week, and ask him to resign the fancied wealth of the
world, which he ‘by his so potent art’ can conjure up, and glad
his eyes, and fill his heart with it? When a little change of
dress, and the muttering a few talismanic words, make all the
difference between the vagabond and the hero, what signifies the
interval so easily passed? Would you not yourself consent to be
alternately a beggar and a king, but that you have not the secret
skill to be so? The player has that ‘happy alchemy of mind:’—why
then would you reduce him to an equality with yourself?—The moral
of this reasoning is known and felt, though it may be gainsayed.
Wherever the players come, they send a welcome before them, and
leave an air in the place behind them.[41] They shed a light upon
the day, that does not very soon pass off. See how they glitter
along the street, wandering, not where business but the bent of
pleasure takes them, like mealy-coated butterflies, or insects
flitting in the sun. They seem another, happier, idler race of
mortals, prolonging the carelessness of childhood to old age,
floating down the stream of life, or wafted by the wanton breeze
to their final place of rest. We remember one (we must make the
reader acquainted with him) who once overtook us loitering by
‘Severn’s sedgy side,’ on a fine May morning, with a score of
play-bills streaming from his pockets, for the use of the
neighbouring villages, and a music-score in his hand, which he
sung blithe and clear, advancing with light step and a loud voice!
With a sprightly _bon jour_, he passed on, carolling to the echo
of the babbling stream, brisk as a bird, gay as a mote, swift as
an arrow from a twanging bow, heart-whole, and with shining face
that shot back the sun’s broad rays!—What is become of this
favourite of mirth and song? Has care touched him? Has death
tripped up his heels? Has an indigestion imprisoned him, and all
his gaiety, in a living dungeon? Or is he himself lost and buried
amidst the rubbish of one of our larger, or else of one of our
Minor Theatres?

——‘Alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!’

But as this was no doubt the height of his ambition, why should we
wish to debar him of it?

This brings us back, after our intended digression, to the subject
from whence we set out,—the smaller theatres of the metropolis;
which we visited lately, in hopes to find in them a romantic
contrast to the presumptuous and exclusive pretensions of the
legitimate drama, and to revive some of the associations of our
youth above described.—The first attempt we made was at the
Cobourg, and we were completely baulked. Judge of our
disappointment. This was not owing, we protest, to any fault or
perversity of our own; to the crust and scales of formality which
had grown over us; to the panoply of criticism in which we go
armed, and which made us inaccessible to ‘pleasure’s finest
point;’ or to the _cheveux-de-fris_ of objections, which cut us
off from all cordial participation in what was going forward on
the stage. No such thing. We went not only willing, but determined
to be pleased. We had laid aside the pedantry of rules, the
petulance of sarcasm, and had hoped to open once more, by stealth,
the source of sacred tears, of bubbling laughter, and concealed
sighs. We were not formidable. On the contrary, we were ‘made of
penetrable stuff.’ Stooping from our pride of place, we were ready
to be equally delighted with a clown in a pantomime, or a
lord-mayor in a tragedy. We were all attention, simplicity, and
enthusiasm. But we saw neither attention, simplicity, nor
enthusiasm in any body else; and our whole scheme of voluntary
delusion and social enjoyment was cut up by the roots. The play
was indifferent, but that was nothing. The acting was bad, but
that was nothing. The audience were low, but that was nothing. It
was the heartless indifference and hearty contempt shown by the
performers for their parts, and by the audience for the players
and the play, that disgusted us with all of them. Instead of the
rude, naked, undisguised expression of curiosity and wonder, of
overflowing vanity and unbridled egotism, there was nothing but an
exhibition of the most petulant cockneyism and vulgar slang. All
our former notions and theories were turned topsy-turvy. The
genius of St. George’s Fields prevailed, and you felt yourself in
a bridewell, or a brothel, amidst Jew-boys, pickpockets,
prostitutes, and mountebanks, instead of being in the precincts of
Mount Parnassus, or in the company of the Muses. The object was
not to admire or to excel, but to vilify and degrade every thing.
The audience did not hiss the actors (that would have implied a
serious feeling of disapprobation, and something like a
disappointed wish to be pleased) but they laughed, hooted at,
nick-named, pelted them with oranges and witticisms, to show their
unruly contempt for them and their art; while the performers, to
be even with the audience, evidently slurred their parts, as if
ashamed to be thought to take any interest in them, laughed in one
another’s faces, and in that of their friends in the pit, and most
effectually marred the process of theatrical illusion, by turning
the whole into a most unprincipled burlesque. We cannot help
thinking that some part of this indecency and licentiousness is to
be traced to the diminutive size of these theatres, and to the
close contact into which these unmannerly censors come with the
objects of their ignorant and unfeeling scorn. Familiarity breeds
contempt. By too narrow an inspection, you take away that fine,
hazy medium of abstraction, by which (in moderation) a play is
best set off: you are, as it were, admitted behind the scenes;
‘see the puppets dallying;’ shake hands, across the orchestra,
with an actor whom you know, or take one you do not like by the
beard, with equal impropriety:—you distinguish the paint, the
individual features, the texture of the dresses, the patch-work
and machinery by which the whole is made up; and this in some
measure destroys the effect, distracts attention, suspends the
interest, and makes you disposed to quarrel with the actors as
impostors, and ‘not the men you took them for.’ You here see Mr.
Booth, in Brutus, with every motion of his face _articulated_,
with his under-jaws grinding out sentences, and his upper-lip
twitching at words and syllables, as if a needle and thread had
been passed through each corner of it, and the _gude wife_ still
continued sewing at her work:—you perceive the contortion and
barrenness of his expression (in which there is only one form of
bent brows, and close pent-up mouth for all occasions) the
parsimony of his figure is exposed, and the refuse tones of his
voice fall with undiminished vulgarity on the pained ear:—you have
Mr. Higman as Prior Aymer in Ivanhoe, who used to play the Gipsey
so well at Covent-garden in Guy Mannering, and who certainly is an
admirable bass singer: you have Mr. Stanley, from the
Theatre-Royal, Bath, and whom we thought an interesting actor
there (such as poor Wilson might have been who trod the same
boards, and with whom our readers will remember that Miss Lydia
Melford, in Humphrey Clinker, fell in love):—you have Mr.
Barrymore, that old and deserving favourite with the public in the
best days of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble, superintending, we
believe, the whole, from a little oval window in a stage-box, like
Mr. Bentham eying the hopeful circle of delinquents in his
Panopticon:—and, to sum up all in one word, you have here Mr. H.
Kemble, whose hereditary gravity is put to the last test, by the
yells and grins of the remorseless rabble.

‘My soul turn from them!’—‘Turn we to survey’ where the Miss
Dennetts, at the Adelphi Theatre, (which should once more from them
be called the _Sans Pareil_) weave the airy, the harmonious, liquid
dance. Of each of them it might be said, and we believe has been
said—

‘Her, lovely Venus at a birth
With two Sister Graces more
To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore.’

Such figures, no doubt, gave rise to the fables of ancient
mythology, and might be worshipped. They revive the ideas of classic
grace, life, and joy. They do not seem like taught dancers,
Columbines, and figurantes on an artificial stage; but come bounding
forward like nymphs in vales of Arcady, or, like Italian
shepherdesses, join in a lovely group of easy gracefulness, while
‘vernal airs attune the trembling leaves’ to their soft motions. If
they were nothing in themselves, they would be complete in one
another. Each owes a double grace, youth, and beauty, to her
reflection in the other two. It is the principle of proportion or
harmony personified. To deny their merit or criticise their style,
is to be blind and dead to the felicities of art and nature. Not to
feel the force of their united charms (united, yet divided,
different, and yet the same), is not to see the beauty of ‘three red
roses on a stalk,’—or of the mingled hues of the rainbow, or of the
halcyon’s breast, reflected in the stream,—or ‘the witchery of the
soft blue sky,’ or grace in the waving of the branch of a tree, or
tenderness in the bending of a flower, or liveliness in the motion
of a wave of the sea. We shall not try to defend them against the
dancing-school critics; there is another school, different from that
of the _pied a plomb_ and _pirouette_ cant, the school of taste and
nature. In this school, the Miss Dennetts are (to say the least)
delicious novices. Theirs is the only performance on the stage (we
include the Opera) that gives the uninitiated spectator an idea that
dancing can be an emanation of instinctive gaiety, or express the
language of sentiment. We might shew them to the Count Stendhal, who
speaks so feelingly of the beauties of a dance by Italian peasant
girls, as our three English Graces; and we might add, as a farther
proof of national liberality and public taste, that they had been
discarded from one of our larger, to take refuge in one of our petty
theatres, on a disagreement about a pound a week in their joint
salaries. Yet we suppose if these young ladies were to marry, and
not volunteer to put ten thousand pounds in the pockets of some
liberally disposed manager, we should hear a very pitiful story of
their ingratitude to their patrons and the public. It is the way of
the world. There is a Mr. Reeve at this theatre (the Adelphi in the
Strand) of whom report had spoken highly in his particular
department as a mimic, and in whom we were considerably
disappointed. He is not so good as Matthews, who, after all, is by
no means a _fac-simile_ of those he pretends to represent. We knew
most of Mr. Reeve’s likenesses, and that is the utmost we can say in
their praise; for we thought them very bad ones. They were very
slight, and yet contrived to be very disagreeable. Farren was the
most amusing, from a certain oddity of voice and manner in the
ingenious and eccentric original. Harley, again, was not at all the
thing. There was something of the external dress and deportment, but
none of the spirit, the frothy essence. He made him out a great
burly swaggering ruffian, instead of being what he is—a pleasant,
fidgetty person, pert as a jack-daw, light as a grasshopper. In
short, from having seen Mr. Reeve, no one would wish to see Mr.
Harley, though there is no one who has seen him but wishes to see
him again; and, though mimicry has the privilege of turning into
ridicule the loftier pretensions of tragic heroes, we believe it
always endeavours to set off the livelier peculiarities of comic
ones in the most agreeable light. Mr. Kean was bad enough. It might
have been coarse and repulsive enough, and yet like; but it wanted
point and energy, and this was inexcusable. We have heard much of
ludicrous and admirable imitations of Mr. Kean’s acting. But the
only person who ever caricatures Mr. Kean well, or from whose
exaggerations he has any thing to fear, is himself. There are
several other actors at the Adelphi who are, and must continue to
be, nameless. There are also some better known to the town, as Mr.
Wilkinson, Mrs. Alsop, etc. This lady has lost none of her exuberant
and piquant vivacity by her change of situation. She also looks much
the same: and as you see her near, this circumstance is by no means
to her advantage. The truth is, that there are not good actors or
agreeable actresses enough in town to make one really good company
(by which we mean a company able to get up any one really good play
throughout) and of course there are not a sufficient number (unless
by a miracle) to divide into eight or ten different establishments.

Of the Haymarket and Lyceum, which come more properly under the head
of _Summer Theatres_, it is not at present ‘our hint to speak’; but
we may shortly take a peep into the Surrey and East London
Theatres,[42] and enlarge upon them as we see cause. Of the latter
it is sufficient to observe, that Mr. Rae is the principal tragic
actor there, and Mr. Peter Moore the chief manager. After this, is
it to be wondered at that Covent-garden is almost deserted, and that
Mr. Elliston cannot yet afford to give up the practice of puffing at
the bottom of his play-bills!

The larger, as well as the smaller, theatres have been closed during
the greater part of the last month. There has been one new piece,
the _Antiquary_, brought out at Covent-garden, since our last
report. It is founded, as our readers will suppose, on the admirable
novel of that name by the author of Waverley, but it is only a
slight sketch of the story and characters, and not, we think, equal
to the former popular melo-drames taken from the same prolific
source. The characters in general were not very intelligibly brought
out, nor very strikingly cast. Liston made but an indifferent Mr.
Jonathan Oldbuck. He was dressed in a snuff-coloured coat and plain
bob-wig, and that was all. It was quaint and dry, and accordingly
inefficient, and quite unlike his admirable portrait of Dominie
Sampson, which is one of the finest pieces of acting on the stage,
both for humour and feeling, invention and expression. The little
odd ways and antiquarian whims and crochets of Mr. Oldbuck, even
were they as well managed in the drama as they are exquisitely hit
off in the novel, would hardly tell in Liston’s hands. Emery made an
impressive Edie Ochiltree; but he was somewhat too powerful a
preacher, and too sturdy a beggar. Mr. Abbott personated the
haughty, petulant Captain MacIntire to a great nicety of
resemblance. Mr. Duruset as young Lovell ‘warbled’ in a manner that
Jacques would not have found fault with. Miss Stephens sang one or
two airs very sweetly, and was complimented at the end very
rapturously and unexpectedly by the _ungallant_ Mr. Oldbuck. The
scene on the sea-shore, where she is in danger of being overtaken by
the tide, with her father and old Edie, had an admirable effect, as
far as the imitation of the rolling of the waves of the sea on a
London stage could produce admiration. The part of old Elspith of
Craigie Burn Wood was strikingly performed by Mrs. Fawcett, who,
indeed, acts whatever she undertakes well; and the scene with Lord
Glenallan, in which she unfolds to him the dreadful story of his
life, was given at much length and with considerable effect. But
what can come up to the sublime, heartbreaking pathos, the terrific
painting of the original work? The story of this unhappy feudal lord
is the most harrowing in all these novels (rich as they are in the
materials of nature and passion): and the description of the old
woman, who had been a principal subordinate instrument in the
tragedy, is done with a more masterly and withering hand than any
other. Her death-like appearance, her strange existence, like one
hovering between this world and the next, or like a speaking corpse;
her fixed attitude, her complete forgetfulness of every thing but
the one subject that loads her thoughts, her preternatural
self-possession on that, her prophetic and awful denunciations, her
clay-cold and shrivelled body, consumed and kept alive by a wasting
fire within, are all given with a subtlety, a truth, a boldness and
originality of conception, that were never, perhaps, surpassed. But
the author does not want our praise; nor can we withhold from him
our admiration.

Mr. Kean, the week before we saw him in Coriolanus, played Othello;
and as we would always prefer bearing testimony to his genius, to
recording his comparative failures, we will here express our opinion
of his performance of this character in the words of a contemporary
journal, a short time back:—

Mr. Kean’s Othello is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in
the world. It is impossible either to describe or praise it
adequately. We have never seen any actor so wrought upon, so
‘perplexed in the extreme.’ The energy of passion, as it
expresses itself in action, is not the most terrific part: it is
the agony of his soul, showing itself in looks and tones of
voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the
fiend-like insinuations of Iago, he presented the very face, the
marble aspect of Dante’s Count Ugolino. On his fixed eye-lids,
‘horror sat plumed.’ In another part, where a gleam of hope or
of tenderness returns to subdue the tumult of his passions, his
voice broke in faltering accents from his over-charged breast.
His lips might be said less to utter words, than to distil drops
of blood, gushing from his heart. An instance of this was in his
pronunciation of the line, ‘of one that loved not wisely but too
well.’ The whole of this last speech was indeed given with
exquisite force and beauty. We only object to the virulence with
which he delivers the last line, and with which he stabs
himself—a virulence which Othello would neither feel against
himself at the moment, nor against the ‘turbaned Turk’ (whom he
had slain) at such a distance at time. His exclamation on seeing
his wife, ‘I cannot think but Desdemona’s honest,’ was, ‘the
glorious triumph of exceeding love’; a thought flashing
conviction on his mind, and irradiating his countenance with
joy, like sudden sunshine. In fact, almost every scene or
sentence in this extraordinary exhibition is a master-piece of
natural passion. The convulsed motion of the hands, and the
involuntary swelling of the veins in the forehead in some of the
most painful situations, should not only suggest topics of
critical panegyric, but might furnish studies to the painter or
anatomist.

No. IV

[_April, 1820._

The age we live in is critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic, but
it is not dramatic. This, if any, is its weak side: it is there that
modern literature does not run on all fours, nor triumph over the
periods that are past; it halts on one leg; and is fairly distanced
by long-acknowledged excellence, as well as by long-forgotten
efforts of the same kind. Our ancestors could write a tragedy two
hundred years ago; they could write a comedy one hundred years ago;
why cannot we do the same now? It is hard to say; but so it is. When
we give it as our opinion, that this is not ‘the high and palmy
state’ of the productions of the stage, we would be understood to
signify, that there has hardly been a good tragedy or a good comedy
written within the last fifty years, that is, since the time of
Home’s Douglas, and Sheridan’s School for Scandal; and when we speak
of a good tragedy or comedy, we mean one that will be thought so
fifty years hence. Not that we would have it supposed, that a work,
to be worth any thing, must last always: what we have said above of
works that have fallen into unmerited decay, through the lapse of
time, and mutation of circumstances, would show the contrary: but we
think that a play that only runs its one-and-twenty nights, that
does not reach beyond the life of an actor, or the fashion of a
single generation, may be fairly set down as good for nothing, to
any purposes of criticism, or serious admiration. Time seems to have
its circle as well as the globe we inhabit; the loftiest eminences,
by degrees, sink beneath the horizon; the greatest works are lost
sight of in the end, and cannot be restored; but those that
disappear at the first step we take, or are hidden by the first
object that intervenes, can, in either case, be of no real magnitude
or importance. We have never seen the highest range of mountains in
the world; nor are the longest-lived works intelligible to us (from
the difference both of language and manners) at this day: but the
name of the Andes, like that of old, blind Homer, serves us on this
side of the globe, and at the lag-end of time, to repeat and wonder
at; and that we have ever heard of either is alone sufficient proof
of the vastness of the one, and of the sublimity of the other!
Without waiting for the final award, or gradual oblivion of
slow-revolving ages, we may be bold to say of our writers for the
stage, during the last twenty or thirty years, as Pope is reported
to have said of Ben Jonson’s, somewhat unadvisedly, ‘What trash are
_their_ works, taken altogether!’ We would not deny or depreciate
merit, wherever we find it, in individuals, or in classes: for
instance, we grant that all the pantomimes are good in which Mr.
Grimaldi plays the clown; and that the melodrames have been
excellent, when Mr. Farley had a hand in them; and that the farces
could not be damned if Munden showed his face in them; and that
O’Keeffe’s could not fail with an audience that had a mind to laugh:
but having mentioned these, and added a few more to our private list
(for it might be invidious to specify particularly No Song no
Supper, the Prize, Goldfinch, Robert Tyke, or Lubin Log, &c. &c.),
we really are at a loss to proceed with the more legitimate and
higher productions of the modern drama. Are there not then Mr.
Coleridge’s Remorse, Mr. Maturin’s Bertram, Mr. Milman’s Fazio, and
many others? There are; but we do not know that they make any
difference in the question. The poverty indeed of our present
dramatic genius cannot be made appear more fully than by this, that
whatever it has to show of _profound_, is of German taste and
origin; and that what little it can boast of _elegant_, though light
and vain, is taken from _petite_ pieces of Parisian mould.

We have been long trying to find out the meaning of all this, and at
last we think we have succeeded. The cause of the evil complained
of, like the root of so many other grievances and complaints, lies
in the French revolution. That event has rivetted all eyes, and
distracted all hearts; and, like people staring at a comet, in the
panic and confusion in which we have been huddled together, we have
not had time to laugh at one another’s defects, or to condole over
one another’s misfortunes. We have become a nation of politicians
and newsmongers; our inquiries in the streets are no less than after
the health of Europe; and in men’s faces, we may see strange matters
written,—the rise of stocks, the loss of battles, the fall of
kingdoms, and the death of kings. The Muse, meanwhile, droops in
bye-corners of the mind, and is forced to take up with the refuse of
our thoughts. Our attention has been turned, by the current of
events, to the general nature of men and things; and we cannot call
it heartily back to individual caprices, or head-strong passions,
which are the nerves and sinews of Comedy and Tragedy. What is an
individual man to a nation? Or what is a nation to an abstract
principle? The affairs of the world are spread out before us, as in
a map; we sit with the newspaper, and a pair of compasses in our
hand, to measure out provinces, and to dispose of thrones; we ‘look
abroad into universality,’ feel in circles of latitude and
longitude, and cannot contract the grasp of our minds to scan with
nice scrutiny particular foibles, or to be engrossed by any single
suffering. What we gain in extent, we lose in force and depth. A
general and speculative interest absorbs the corroding poison, and
takes out the sting of our more circumscribed and fiercer passions.
We are become public creatures; ‘are embowelled of our natural
entrails, and stuffed,’ as Mr. Burke has it in his high-flown
phrase, ‘with paltry blurred sheets of paper about the rights of
man,’ or the rights of legitimacy. We break our sleep to argue a
question; a piece of news spoils our appetite for dinner. We are not
so solicitous after our own success as the success of a cause. Our
thoughts, feelings, distresses, are about what no way concerns us,
more than it concerns any body else, like those of the Upholsterer,
ridiculed as a new species of character in the Tatler: but we are
become a nation of upholsterers. We participate in the general
progress of intellect, and the large vicissitudes of human affairs;
but the hugest private sorrow looks dwarfish and puerile. In the
sovereignty of our minds, we make mankind our quarry; and, in the
scope of our ambitious thoughts, hunt for prey through the four
quarters of the world. In a word, literature and civilization have
abstracted man from himself so far, that his existence is no longer
_dramatic_; and the press has been the ruin of the stage, unless we
are greatly deceived.

If a bias to abstraction is evidently, then, the reigning spirit of
the age, dramatic poetry must be allowed to be most irreconcileable
with this spirit; it is essentially individual and concrete, both in
form and in power. It is the closest imitation of nature; it has a
body of truth; it is ‘a counterfeit presentment’ of reality; for it
brings forward certain characters to act and speak for themselves,
in the most trying and singular circumstances. It is not enough for
them to declaim on certain general topics, however forcibly or
learnedly—this is merely oratory, and this any other characters
might do as well, in any other circumstances: nor is it sufficient
for the poet to furnish the colours and forms of style and fancy out
of his own store, however inexhaustible; for if he merely makes them
express his own feelings, and the idle effusions of his own breast,
he had better speak in his own person, without any of those
troublesome ‘interlocutions between Lucius and Caius.’ The tragic
poet (to be truly such) can only deliver the sentiments of given
persons, placed in given circumstances; and in order to make what so
proceeds from their mouths, at once proper to them and interesting
to the audience, their characters must be powerfully marked: their
passions, which are the subject-matter of which they treat, must be
worked up to the highest pitch of intensity; and the circumstances
which give force and direction to them must be stamped with the
utmost distinctness and vividness in every line. Within the circle
of dramatic character and natural passion, each individual is to
feel as keenly, as profoundly, as rapidly as possible, but he is not
to feel beyond it, for others or for the whole. Each character, on
the contrary, must be a kind of centre of repulsion to the rest; and
it is their hostile interests, brought into collision, that must tug
at their heart-strings, and call forth every faculty of thought, of
speech, and action. They must not be represented like a set of
profiles, looking all the same way, nor with their faces turned
round to the audience; but in dire contention with each other: their
words, like their swords, must strike fire from one another,—must
inflict the wound, and pour in the poison. The poet, to do justice
to his undertaking, must not only identify himself with each, but
must take part with all by turns, ‘to relish all as sharply,
passioned as they;’—must feel scorn, pity, love, hate, anger,
remorse, revenge, ambition, in their most sudden and fierce
extremes,—must not only have these passions rooted in his mind, but
must be alive to every circumstance affecting them, to every
accident of which advantage can be taken to gratify or exasperate
them; a word must kindle the dormant spark into a flame; an
unforeseen event must overturn his whole being _in conceipt_; it is
from the excess of passion that he must borrow the activity of his
imagination; he must mould the sound of his verse to its
fluctuations and caprices, and build up the whole superstructure of
his fable on the deep and strict foundations of nature. But surely
it is hardly to be thought that the poet should feel for others in
this way, when they have ceased almost to feel for themselves; when
the mind is turned habitually out of itself to general, speculative
truth, and possibilities of good, and when, in fact, the processes
of the understanding, analytical distinctions, and verbal disputes,
have superseded all personal and local attachments and antipathies,
and have, in a manner, put a stop to the pulsation of the
heart—quenched the fever in the blood—the madness in the brain;—when
we are more in love with a theory than a mistress, and would only
crush to atoms those who are of an opposite party to ourselves in
taste, philosophy, or politics. The folds of self-love, arising out
of natural instincts, connections, and circumstances, have not wound
themselves exclusively and unconsciously enough round the human mind
to furnish the matter of impassioned poetry in real life: much less
are we to expect the poet, without observation of its effects on
others, or experience of them in himself, to supply the imaginary
form out of vague topics, general reflections, far-fetched tropes,
affected sentiments, and fine writing. To move the world, he must
have a place to fix the levers of invention upon. The poet (let his
genius be what it will) can only act by sympathy with the public
mind and manners of his age; but these are, at present, not in
sympathy, but in opposition to dramatic poetry. Therefore, we have
no dramatic poets. It would be strange indeed (under favour be it
spoken) if in the same period of time that produced the Political
Justice or the Edinburgh Review, there should be found such an
‘unfeathered, two-legged thing’ as a real tragedy poet.

But it may be answered, that the author of the Enquiry concerning
Political Justice, is himself a writer of romances, and the author
of Caleb Williams. We hearken to the suggestion, and will take this
and one or two other eminent examples, to show how far we fall short
of the goal we aim at. ‘You may wear your bays with a difference.’
Mr. Godwin has written an admirable and almost unrivalled novel
(nay, more than one)—he has also written two tragedies, and failed.
We can hardly think it would have been possible for him to have
failed, but on the principle here stated; viz. that it was
impossible for him to succeed. His genius is wholly adverse to the
stage. As an author, as a novel writer, he may be considered as a
philosophical recluse, a closet-hero. He cannot be denied to possess
the _constructive_ organ, to have originality and invention in an
extraordinary degree: but he does not construct according to nature;
his invention is not dramatic. He takes a character or a passion,
and works it out to the utmost possible extravagance, and palliates
or urges it on by every resource of the understanding, or by every
species of plausible sophistry; but in doing this, he may be said to
be only spinning a subtle theory, to be maintaining a wild paradox,
as much as when he extends a philosophical and abstract principle
into all its ramifications, and builds an entire and exclusive
system of feeling and action on a single daring view of human
nature. ‘He sits in the centre’ of his web, and ‘enjoys’ not ‘bright
day,’ but a kind of gloomy grandeur. His characters stand alone,
self-created, and self-supported, without communication with, or
reaction upon, any other (except in the single instance of Caleb
Williams himself):—the passions are not excited, qualified, or
irritated by circumstances, but moulded by the will of the writer,
like clay in the hands of the potter. Mr. Godwin’s imagination works
like the power of steam, with inconceivable and incessant expansive
force; but it is all in one direction, mechanical and uniform. By
its help, he weaves gigantic figures, and unfolds terrific
situations; but they are like the cloudy pageantry that hangs over
the edge of day, and the prodigious offspring of his brain have
neither fellow nor competitor in the scene of his imagination. They
require a clear stage to themselves. They do not enter the lists
with other men: nor are actuated by the ordinary wheels, pulleys,
and machinery of society: they are at issue with themselves, and at
war with the nature of things. Falkland, St. Leon, Mandeville, are
studies for us to contemplate, not men that we can sympathise with.
They move in an orbit of their own, urged on by restless thought and
morbid sentiment, on which the antagonist powers of sense, habit,
circumstances, and opinion have no influence whatever. The arguments
addressed to them are idle and ineffectual. You might as well argue
with a madman, or talk to the winds. But this is not the nature of
dramatic writing. Mr. Godwin, to succeed in tragedy, should compose
it almost entirely of long and repeated soliloquies, like the
Prometheus of Æschylus; and his dialogues, properly translated,
would turn out to be monologues, as we see in the Iron Chest.[43]

The same, or similar, remarks would apply to Mr. Wordsworth’s
hankering after the drama. We understand, that, like Mr. Godwin, the
author of the Lyric Ballads formerly made the attempt, and did not
receive encouragement to proceed. We cannot say positively: but we
much suspect that the writer would be for having all the talk to
himself. His moody sensibility would eat into the plot like a
cancer, and bespeak both sides of the dialogue for its own share.
Mr. Wordsworth (we are satisfied with him, be it remembered, as he
is), is not a man to go out of himself into the feelings of any one
else; much less, to act the part of a variety of characters. He is
not, like Bottom, ready to play the lady, the lover, and the lion.
His poetry is a virtual proscription passed upon the promiscuous
nature of the drama. He sees nothing but himself in the universe: or
if he leans with a kindly feeling to any thing else, he would impart
to the most uninteresting things the fulness of his own sentiments,
and elevate the most insignificant characters into the foremost
rank,—before kings, or heroes, or lords, or wits,—because they do
not interfere with his own sense of self-importance. He has none of
the bye-play, the varying points of view, the venturous magnanimity
of dramatic fiction. He thinks the opening of the leaves of a daisy,
or the perfume of a hedge (not of a garden) rose, matters of
consequence enough for him to notice them; but he thinks the ‘daily
intercourse of all this unintelligible world,’ its cares, its
crimes, its noise, love, war, ambition, (what else?) mere vanity and
vexation of spirit, with which a great poet cannot condescend to
disturb the bright, serene, and solemn current of his thoughts. This
lofty indifference and contempt for his _dramatis personæ_ would not
be the most likely means to make them interesting to the audience.
We fear Mr. Wordsworth’s poetical egotism would prevent his writing
a tragedy. Yet we have above made the dissipation and rarefaction of
this spirit in society, the bar to dramatic excellence. Egotism is
of different sorts; and he would not compliment the literary and
artificial state of manners so much, as to suppose it quite free
from this principle. But it is not allied at present to imagination
or passion. It is sordid, servile, inert, a compound of dulness,
vanity, and interest. That which is the source of dramatic
excellence, is like a mountain spring, full of life and impetuosity,
sparkling with light, thundering down precipices, winding along
narrow defiles; or

‘Like a wild overflow, that sweeps before him
A golden stack, and with it shakes down bridges,
Cracks the strong hearts of pines, whose cable roots
Held out a thousand storms, a thousand thunders,
And so, made mightier, takes whole villages
Upon his back, and, in that heat of pride,
Charges strong towns, towers, castles, palaces,
And lays them desolate.’

The other sort is a stagnant, gilded puddle. Mr. Wordsworth has
measured it from side to side. ‘’Tis three feet long and two feet
wide.’—Lord Byron’s patrician haughtiness and monastic seclusion
are, we think, no less hostile than the levelling spirit of Mr.
Wordsworth’s Muse, to the endless gradations, variety, and
complicated ideas or _mixed modes_ of this sort of composition. Yet
we have read Manfred.

But what shall we say of Mr. Coleridge, who is the author not
only of a successful but a meritorious tragedy? We may say of
him what he has said of Mr. Maturin, that he is of the
transcendental German school. He is a florid poet, and an
ingenious metaphysician, who mistakes scholastic speculations
for the intricate windings of the passions, and assigns possible
reasons instead of actual motives for the excesses of his
characters. He gives us studied special-pleadings for
involuntary bursts of feeling, and the needless strain of
tinkling sentiments for the point-blank language of nature. His
Remorse is a spurious tragedy. Take the following passage, and
then ask, whether the charge of sophistry and paradox, and
dangerous morality, to startle the audience, in lieu of more
legitimate methods of exciting their sympathy, which he brings
against the author of Bertram, may not be retorted on his own
head. Ordonio is made to defend the project of murdering his
brother by such arguments as the following:—

‘What? if one reptile sting another reptile,
Where is the crime? The goodly face of nature
Hath one disfeaturing stain the less upon it.
Are we not all predestined Transiency,
And cold Dishonour? Grant it, that this hand
_Had_ given a morsel to the hungry worms
Somewhat too early—where’s the crime of this?
That this must needs bring on the idiotcy
Of moist-eyed Penitence—’tis like a dream!
Say, I had lay’d a body in the sun!
Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse
A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings
In place of that one man. Say, I had _killed_ him!
Yet who shall tell me that each one and all
Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy,
As that one life, which, being push’d aside,
Made room for these unnumber’d!’

This is a way in which no one ever justified a murder to his own
mind. No one will suspect Mr. Southey of writing a tragedy, nor Mr.
Moore either. His Muse is light. Walter Scott excels in the
grotesque and the romantic. He gives us that which has been
preserved of ancient manners and customs, and barbarous times and
characters, and which strikes and staggers the mind the more, by the
contrast it affords to the present artificial and effeminate state
of society. But we do not know that he could write a tragedy: what
he has engrafted of his own in this way upon the actual stock and
floating materials of history is, we think, inferior to the general
texture of his work. See, for instance, the conclusion of the Black
Dwarf, where the situation of the parties is as dramatic as
possible, and the effect is none at all. It is not a sound
inference, that, because parts of a novel are dramatic, the author
could write a play. The novelist is dramatic only where he can, and
where he pleases; the other must be so. The first is a _ride and
tye_ business, like a gentleman leading his horse, or walking by the
side of a gig down a hill. We shall not, however, insist farther on
this topic, because we are not convinced that the author of Waverley
could not write a first-rate tragedy, as well as so many first-rate
novels. If he can, we wish that he would; and not leave it to others
to mar what he has sketched so admirably as a ground-work for that
purpose.