Chapter XXVI: Preface (17)

The Manager of the English Opera House, however, does not stand
alone in his difficulties. The theatres in general seem to totter,
and feel the hand of decay. Even the King’s Theatre, we understand,
has manifested signs of decrepitude, and ‘palsied eld,’ and
stopped,—we do not say its payments, but its performances. Of all
the theatres, we should feel the least compassion for the deserted
saloons and tattered hangings of the Italian Opera. We should rather
indeed see it flourish, as it has long flourished, in splendour and
in honour: we do not like ‘to see a void made in the Drama: any ruin
on the face of the land.’ But this would touch us the least. We
might be disposed to write its epitaph, not its elegy.

L.

No. XI

_[December, 1820._

‘At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new.’

Why was not this No. XII. instead of No. XI. of the Acted Drama in
London? Had we but seen No. XII. at the head of our article for
December, we had been happy, ‘as broad and casing as the general
air, whole as the marble, founded as the rock,’ but now we are
‘cooped and cabined in by saucy doubts and fears.’ Had No. XI. been
ready in time, we should have been irreproachable ‘in act and
complement extern,’ which is with us every thing. Punctuality is
‘the immediate jewel of our souls.’ We leave it to others to be
shrewd, ingenious, witty and wise; to think deeply, and write
finely; it is enough for us to be exactly dull. The categories of
_number_ and _quantity_ are what we chiefly delight in; for on these
depend (by arithmetical computation) the pounds, shillings, and
pence. We suspect that those writers only trouble their heads about
fame, who cannot get any thing more substantial for what they write;
and are in fact equally at a loss for ‘solid pudding or for empty
praise.’ That is not the case with us. We have money in our purse,
and reputation—to spare. Nothing troubles us but that our article on
the drama was wanting for November—on this point we are
inconsolable. No more delight in regularity—no more undisturbed
complacency in the sense of arduous duty conscientiously
discharged—no more confidence in meeting our Editors—no more
implicit expectation of our monthly decisions on the part of the
public! As the Italian poet for one error of the press, in a poem
presented to the Pope, died of chagrin, so we for one deficiency in
this series of Dramatic Criticisms (complete but for that) must
resign! We have no other way left to appease our scrupulous sense of
critical punctilio. That there was but one link wanting, is no
matter—

‘Tenth or ten thousandth break the chain alike.’

There was one Number (the eleventh) of the LONDON MAGAZINE, of which
the curious reader turned over the pages with eager haste, and found
no Drama—a thing never to be remedied! It was no fault of ours that
it was so. A friend hath done this. The author of the Calendar of
Nature (a pleasing and punctual performance) has spoiled our
Calendar of Art, and robbed us of that golden rigol of periodical
praise, that we had in fancy ‘bound our brows withal.’ With the
month our contribution to the stock of literary amusement and
scientific intelligence returned without fail. In January, we gave
an account of all the actors we had ever seen or heard of. In
February, we confined ourselves to Miss O’Neill. In March, we
expatiated at large on the Minor Theatres, and took great delight in
the three Miss Dennetts. In April (being at Ilminster, a pretty town
in the Vale of Taunton, and thence passing on to the Lamb at Hindon,
a dreary spot), we proved at these two places, sitting in an
arm-chair by a sea-coal fire, very satisfactorily, and without fear
of contradiction,—neither Mr. Maturin, Mr. Shiel, nor Mr. Milman
being present,—that no modern author could write a tragedy. In May,
we wrote an article which filled the proper number of columns,
though we forget what it was about. In June, we had to show that a
modern author had written a tragedy (Virginius)—an opinion, which,
though it overset our theory, we are by no means desirous to
retract. We still say, that that play is better than Bertram, though
Mr. Maturin, in the Preface to Melmoth, says it is not. As in June
we were not dry, neither in July were we droughty. We found
something to say in this and the following month without being much
indebted to the actors or actresses, though, if Miss Tree came out
in either of those months, we ought to recollect it, and mark the
event with _a white stone_. We had rather hear her sing in ordinary
cases than Miss Stephens, though not in extraordinary ones. By the
bye, when will that little pouting[46] slut, with crystalline eyes
and voice, return to us from the sister island? The Dublin critics
hardly pretend to keep her to themselves, on the ground that they
(like the Edinburgh wags) are better judges and patrons of merit,
than we of famous London town.—The Irish are impudent: but they are
not so impudent as the Scotch. This is a digression. To proceed.—In
August, we had a skirmish with the facetious and biting Janus, of
versatile memory, on his assumed superiority in dramatic taste and
skill, when we corrected him for his contempt of court—and the Miss
Dennetts, our wards in criticism. In September, we got an able
article written for us; for we flatter ourselves, that we not only
say good things ourselves, but are the cause of them in others. In
October, we called Mr. Elliston to task for taking, in his vocation
of manager, improper liberties with the public. But in November,
(may that dark month stand aye accursed in the Calendar!) we failed,
and failed, as how? Our friend, the ingenious writer aforesaid (one
of the most ingenious and sharp-witted men of his age, but not so
remarkable for the virtue of _reliability_ as Mr. Coleridge’s
friend, the poet-laureate), was to take a mutton-chop with us, and
afterwards we were to go to the play, and club our forces in a
criticism—but he never came, _we_ never went to the play (The
Stranger with Charles Kemble as the hero, and a new Mrs. Haller),
and the criticism was never written. The Drama of the LONDON
MAGAZINE for that month is left a blank!—We were in hopes that our
other contributors might have been proportionably on the alert; but,
on the contrary, we were sorry to hear it remarked by more than one
person, that the Magazine for November was, on the whole, dull.
There was no TABLE-TALK, for instance, an article which we take up
immediately after we have perused our own, and seldom lay it down
till we get to the end of it, though we think the papers too long.
We are glad to see the notice from the redoubtable LION’S HEAD of
No. V. for the present Number, for we understand that a Cockney, in
clandestine correspondence with Blackwood, on looking for it in the
last, and finding it _missing_, had sent off instant word, that the
writer ‘was expelled’ from the LONDON MAGAZINE. We are sure we
should be sorry for that.

If theatrical criticisms were only written when there is something
worth writing about, it would be hard upon us who live by them. Are
we not to receive our quarter’s salary (like Mr. Croker in the
piping time of peace) because Mrs. Siddons has left the stage, and
‘has not left her peer;’ or because John Kemble will not return to
it with renewed health and vigour, to prop a falling house, and
falling art; or because Mr. Kean has gone to America; or because Mr.
Wallack has arrived from that country? No; the duller the stage
grows, the gayer and more edifying must we become in ourselves: the
less we have to say about that, the more room we have to talk about
other things. Now would be the time for Mr. Coleridge to turn his
talents to account, and write for the stage, when there is no topic
to confine his pen, or, ‘constrain his genius by mastery.’ ‘With
mighty wings outspread, his imagination might brood over the void
and make it pregnant.’ Under the assumed head of the Drama, he might
unfold the whole mysteries of Swedenborg, or ascend the third heaven
of invention with Jacob Behmen: he might write a treatise on all the
unknown sciences, and finish the Encyclopedia Metropolitana in a
pocket form:—nay, he might bring to a satisfactory close his own
dissertation on the difference between the Imagination and the
Fancy,[47] before, in all probability, another great actor appears,
or another tragedy or comedy is written. He is the man of all others
to swim on empty bladders in a sea, without shore or soundings: to
drive an empty stage-coach without passengers or lading, and arrive
behind his time; to write marginal notes without a text; to look
into a millstone to foster the rising genius of the age; to ‘see
merit in the chaos of its elements, and discern perfection in the
great obscurity of nothing,’ as his most favourite author, Sir
Thomas Brown, has it on another occasion. Alas! we have no such
creative talents: we cannot amplify, expand, raise our flimsy
discourse, as the gaseous matter fills and lifts the round,
glittering, slow-sailing balloon, to ‘the up-turned eyes of
wondering mortals.’ Here is our bill of fare for the month, our list
of memoranda—_The French dancers_—_Farren’s Deaf Lover_—_Macready’s
Zanga_—_Mr. Cooper’s Romeo_. _A new farce, not acted a second
time—Wallace, a tragedy,—_and_ Mr. Wallack’s Hamlet._ Who can make
any thing of such a beggarly account as this? Not we. Yet as poets
at a pinch invoke the Muse, so we, for once, will invoke Mr.
Coleridge’s better genius, and thus we hear him talk, diverting our
attention from the players and the play.

‘The French, my dear H——,’ would he begin, ‘are not a people of
imagination. They have so little, that you cannot persuade them to
conceive it possible that they have none. They have no poetry, no
such thing as genius, from the age of Louis XIV. It was that, their
boasted Augustan age, which stamped them French, which put the seal
upon their character, and from that time nothing has grown up
original or luxuriant, or spontaneous among them; the whole has been
cast in a mould, and that a bad one. Montaigne and Rabelais (their
two greatest men, the one for thought, and the other for imaginative
humour,—for the distinction between imagination and fancy holds in
ludicrous as well as serious composition) I consider as Franks
rather than Frenchmen, for in their time the national literature was
not _set_, was neither mounted on stilts, nor buckramed in stays.
Wit they had too, if I could persuade myself that Moliere was a
genuine Frenchman, but I cannot help suspecting that his mother
played his reputed father false, and that an Englishman begot him. I
am sure his genius is English; and his wit not of the Parisian cut.
As a proof of this, see how his most extravagant farces, the
Mock-doctor, Barnaby Brittle, &c. take with us. What can be more to
the taste of our _bourgeoisie_, more adapted to our native tooth,
than his Country Wife, which Wycherly did little else than translate
into English? What success a translator of Racine into our
vernacular tongue would meet with, I leave you to guess. His
tragedies are not poetry, are not passion, are not imagination: they
are a parcel of set speeches, of epigrammatic conceits, of
declamatory phrases, without any of the glow, and glancing rapidity,
and principle of fusion in the mind of the poet, to agglomerate them
into grandeur, or blend them into harmony. The principle of the
imagination resembles the emblem of the serpent, by which the
ancients typified wisdom and the universe, with undulating folds,
for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself,—circular, and
without beginning or end. The definite, the fixed, is death: the
principle of life is the indefinite, the growing, the moving, the
continuous. But every thing in French poetry is cut up into shreds
and patches, little flowers of poetry, with tickets and labels to
them, as when the daughters of Jason minced and hacked their old
father into collops—we have the _disjecta membra poetæ_—not the
entire and living man. The spirit of genuine poetry should inform
the whole work, should breathe through, and move, and agitate the
complete mass, as the soul informs and moves the limbs of a man, or
as the vital principle (whatever it be) permeates the veins of the
loftiest trees, building up the trunk, and extending the branches to
the sun and winds of heaven, and shooting out into fruit and
flowers. This is the progress of nature and of genius. This is the
true poetic faculty; or that which the Greeks literally called
ποιησις. But a French play (I think it is Schlegel, who somewhere
makes the comparison, though I had myself, before I ever read
Schlegel, made the same remark) is like a child’s garden set with
slips of branches and flowers, stuck in the ground, not growing in
it. We may weave a gaudy garland in this manner, but it withers in
an hour: while the products of genius and nature give out their
odours to the gale, and spread their tints in the sun’s eye, age
after age—

“Outlast a thousand storms, a thousand winters,
Free from the Sirian star, free from the thunder stroke,”

and flourish in immortal youth and beauty. Every thing French is, in
the way of it, frittered into parts: every thing is therefore dead
and ineffective. French poetry is just like chopped logic: nothing
comes of it. There is no life of mind: neither the birth nor
generation of knowledge. It is all patch-work, all sharp points and
angles, all superficial. They receive, and give out sensation, too
readily for it ever to amount to a sentiment. They cannot even
dance, as you may see. There is, I am sure you will agree, no
expression, no grace in their dancing. Littleness, point, is what
damns them in all they do. With all their vivacity, and animal
spirits, they dance not like men and women under the impression of
certain emotions, but like puppets; they twirl round like
_tourniquets_. Not to feel, and not to think, is all they know of
this art or any other. You might swear that a nation that danced in
that manner would never produce a true poet or philosopher. They
have it not in them. There is not the principle of cause and effect.
They make a sudden turn because there is no reason for it: they stop
short, or move fast, only because you expect something else. Their
style of dancing is difficult: would it were impossible.’[48] (By
this time several persons in the pit had turned round to listen to
this uninterrupted discourse, and our eloquent friend went on,
rather raising his voice with a _Paulo majora canamus_.) ‘Look at
that Mademoiselle Milanie with “the foot of fire,” as she is called.
You might contrive a paste-board figure, with the help of strings or
wires, to do all, and more, than she does—to point the toe, to raise
the leg, to jerk the body, to run like wild-fire. Antics are not
grace: to dance is not to move against time. My dear H——, if you
could see a dance by some Italian peasant-girls in the Campagna of
Rome, as I have, I am sure your good taste and good sense would
approve it. They came forward slow and smiling, but as if their
limbs were steeped in luxury, and every motion seemed an echo of the
music, and the heavens looked on serener as they trod. You are right
about the Miss Dennetts, though you have all the cant-phrases
against you. It is true, they break down in some of their steps, but
it is like “the lily drooping on its stalk green,” or like “the
flowers Proserpina let fall from Dis’s waggon.” Those who cannot see
grace in the youth and inexperience of these charming girls, would
see no beauty in a cluster of hyacinths, bent with the morning dew.
To shew at once what is, and is not French, there is Mademoiselle
Hullin, she is Dutch. Nay, she is just like a Dutch doll, as
round-faced, as rosy, and looks for all the world as if her limbs
were made of wax-work, and would take in pieces, but not as if she
could move them of her own accord. Alas, poor tender thing! As to
the men, I confess’ (this was said to me in an audible whisper, lest
it might be construed into a breach of confidence) ‘I should like,
as Southey says, to have them _hamstrung_!’—(At this moment Monsieur
Hullin _Pere_ looked as if this charitable operation was about to be
performed on him by an extra-official warrant from the
poet-laureate.)

‘Pray, H——, have you seen Macready’s Zanga?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what do you think of it?’

‘I did not like it much.’

‘Nor I.—Macready has talents and a magnificent voice, but he is, I
fear, too improving an actor to be a man of genius. That little
ill-looking vagabond Kean never improved in any thing. In some
things he could not, and in others he would not. The only parts of
M.’s Zanga that I liked (which of course I only half-liked) were
some things in imitation of the _extremely natural manner_ of Kean,
and his address to Alonzo, urging him, as the greatest triumph of
his self-denial, to sacrifice

“A wife, a bride, a mistress unenjoyed—”

where his voice rose exulting on the sentiment, like the thunder
that clothes the neck of the war-horse. The person that pleased me
most in this play was Mrs. Sterling: she did justice to her part—a
thing not easy to do. I like Macready’s Wallace better than his
Zanga, though the play is not a good one, and it is difficult for
the actor to find out the author’s meaning. I would not judge
harshly of a first attempt, but the faults of youthful genius are
exuberance, and a continual desire of novelty: now the faults of
this play are tameness, common-place, and clap-traps. It is said to
be written by young Walker, the son of the Westminster orator. If
so, his friend, Mr. Cobbett, will probably write a Theatrical
Examiner of it in his next week’s Political Register. What, I would
ask, can be worse, more out of character and costume, than to make
Wallace drop his sword to have his throat cut by Menteith, merely
because the latter has proved himself (what he suspected) a traitor
and a villain, and then console himself for this voluntary martyrdom
by a sentimental farewell to the rocks and mountains of his native
country! This effeminate softness and wretched cant did not belong
to the age, the country, or the hero. In this scene, however, Mr.
Macready shone much; and in the attitude in which he stood after
letting his sword fall, he displayed extreme grace and feeling. It
was as if he had let his best friend, his trusty sword, drop like a
serpent from his hand. Macready’s figure is awkward, but his
attitudes are graceful and well composed.—Don’t you think so?’—

I answered, yes; and he then ran on in his usual manner, by
inquiring into the metaphysical distinction between the grace of
form, and the grace that arises from motion (as for instance, you
may move a square form in a circular or waving line), and
illustrated this subtle observation at great length and with much
happiness. He asked me how it was, that Mr. Farren in the farce of
the Deaf Lover, played the old gentleman so well, and failed so
entirely in the young gallant. I said I could not tell. He then
tried at a solution himself, in which I could not follow him so as
to give the precise point of his argument. He afterwards defined to
me, and those about us, the merits of Mr. Cooper and Mr. Wallack,
classing the first as a respectable, and the last as a second-rate
actor; with large grounds and learned definitions of his meaning on
both points; and, as the lights were by this time nearly out, and
the audience (except his immediate auditors) going away, he
reluctantly ‘ended,’

‘But in Adam’s ear so pleasing left his voice,’

that I quite forgot I had to write my article on the Drama the next
day; nor without his imaginary aid should I have been able to wind
up my accounts for the year, as Mr. Matthews gets through his AT
HOME by the help of a little awkward ventriloquism.

W. H.

_November 21, 1820._

NOTES

LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH COMIC WRITERS

These Lectures were delivered at the Surrey Institution, in
Blackfriars Road, in 1818, after the completion of the course on the
English Poets (see vol. V.). Some particulars as to their delivery
will be found in Talfourd’s edition of Lamb’s _Letters_ (see Mr. W.
C. Hazlitt’s reprint, Bohn, i. 38 _et seq._), and in Patmore’s _My
Friends and Acquaintance_. See also Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Four
Generations of a Literary Family_ (vol. I. pp. 121-2), where the
opinions of Beckford and Thackeray are referred to. In the third
edition of the Lectures (see Bibliographical Note) several passages
‘collected by the author, apparently with a view to a reprint of the
volume,’ were interpolated. Two of these passages are taken from a
long letter (published in full in the Appendix to these notes) which
Hazlitt contributed to _The Morning Chronicle_, Oct. 15, 1813. The
rest are taken from prefatory notices which he contributed to
William Oxberry’s _The New English Drama_ (20 vols. 1818-1825), and
are printed in the following notes.

LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY

PAGE

8. _The Tale of Slaukenbergius._ _Tristram Shandy_, vol. IV.

9. ‘_There is something in the misfortunes_,’ _etc._
Rochefoucault, _Maximes et Réflexions Morales_, CCXLI.

‘_They were talking_,’ _etc._ Farquhar’s _Beaux’ Stratagem_,