Dr. Doran

“ The duchess, who in early life was, in delicacy of form, like one of the Graces, became, in her more mature years, fatter than if the whole three had been rolled into one in her person. With obesity came ‘an exposition to sleep,’ as Bottom has it. At ‘drawing-rooms’ she no sooner sank on a sofa than she was deep in slumber; but while she was awake she would make jokes that were laughed at and censured the next day all over London. Her Grace would sit at a window in Covent Garden, and be hail fellow well met with every one of a mob of tipsy and not too cleanly-spoken electors. ”

“ A young actress who hoped to live by such salary as her brains alone could bring her, and who would presume to wear sham jewellery or machine-made lace, was looked upon as a poor creature who would never have a reputation—that is, such a reputation as her gorgeously attired sisters, who did not particularly care to have any but that for which the most of them dressed themselves. ”

“ When the mob were on the point of resorting to extreme violence, Miss Betty Penruddock expressed her astonishment to the ugly leader of the band that ‘such a good-looking man as he should be captain of such an ill-favoured band of robbers. Never again will I trust to good looks!’ cried the old lady, whose flattery so touched the vanity of ‘Swing’ that he prevailed on his followers to desist. ”

“ If we look with interest at a mere wall which screens from sight the stage of some glorious or some terrible act, it is not for the sake of the wall or its builders: our interest is in the drama and its actors. Who cares, in speaking of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to know the name of the stage carpenter at the Globe or the Blackfriars? ”

“ Macready must have made 64 Frith Street, Soho, re-echo with joyous feelings and ebullitions of fury, to suit the temper of the night, when in 1816 he made his bow to a London audience as Orestes in the ‘Distressed Mother,’ and when the curtain rose grasped Abbot almost convulsively by the hand, and dashed upon the stage, exclaiming as in a transport of the highest joy, ‘Oh, Pylades! what’s life without a friend?’ The Orestes was a success; but it was never a favourite character with the public, as Talma’s was with the French. ”

“ Like Barton Booth, he would play to a man in the pit. ‘It was always my rule,’ he says, ‘to make the best out of a bad house, and before the most meagre audiences ever assembled it has been my invariable practice to strive my best, using the opportunity as a lesson; and I am conscious of having derived great benefit from the rule. I used to call it acting to myself.’ Macready had another rule which is worth mentioning. Some of the old French tragedy queens used to keep themselves all day in the temper of the characters they were to represent in the evening. ”

“ At four o’clock in the morning a splendid supper brought all the guests together, after which dancing was resumed till seven. The festival terminated by the serving of a soupe à l’oignon à la paysanne; this stirrup-cup of rustic onion soup was presented in little bowls, with a wooden spoon in each! The sun had been up a very long time before the last of the dancers, loth to depart, had entered their carriages on their way home.
Such is the newest form in which theatrical celebrities get up and enjoy costume-balls after their fashion. ”

“ Those heavy lines, long speeches, dull movement of dull plot, stirred now and then by a rant or a roar, require a great deal more than cleverness to make them endurable. No human being could live out five acts of such stuff if genius did not uphold the stuff itself. It was exquisite Mrs. Cibber who gave ‘Zara’ life when she made her début on the stage, when the tragedy was first played in 1736. Spranger Barry added fresh vigour to that life when he acted Osman in 1751. Garrick’s genius in Lusignan galvanised the dead heap into living beauty, never more so than in his last performance in 1776 ”

“ Indeed, in the closing letters addressed to the present Lady Pollock, there are circumstances of his early career not previously recorded. The record of the home-life is full of interest, and we sympathise with the old actor, who, as the fire of temperament died out, appeared purified and chastened by the process.
Macready, throughout his long life, had no ‘flexibility of spine’ for men of wealth or title, but he had, if he describes himself truly, perfect reverence for true genius, wheresoever found. ”

“ He became the master of La Champmeslé, and taught her how to play the heroines of the dramas which he wrote expressly for her. She, in her turn, became the mistress of her tutor. Of his teaching indeed she stood in little need, except to learn from him his ideas and object, as author of the play. She was not only sublime, but La Champmeslé was the first sublime actress that had hitherto appeared on the French stage. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter:—
La Champmeslé is something so extraordinary that you have never seen anything like it in all your life. ”

“ There must be an innocent young lady among the wicked people, and the lady (the [Pg 204] ingénue) and her ingenuousness must be respected. One fly may taint a score of carcases and make a whole pot of ointment stink, but one ingénue keeps a French piece of nastiness comparatively pure, and the public taste for the impure is satisfied with this little bit of sentimentality. The subjects which many French authors have brought on the stage do not, it is to be hoped, hold a true mirror up to French nature. If so, concubinage, adultery, and murder reign supreme. ”

“ There was no shamming on the part of the indefatigable Roman ladies, who, it is said, sometimes added a unit to the audience and a new member to the roll of Roman citizens, before they could be got away. And, when a man ran from the theatre, dropped from the walls of the town, and took to his heels across country, he must have been even more disgusted with the great amateur than you are, my dear reader, with, let us say, your favourite worst actor on any stage. Exit Nero, histrio et imperator.
Some one has said that the Italians had not the necessary genius for acting. ”

“ There was the unheard-of sum of four hundred pounds in that old Crow Street Theatre on that November night. The university students in the gallery, who generally made it rattle with their wit, were silent as soon as the curtain rose. The Dublin audience was by no means an audience easy to please, or one that would befool itself by passing mediocrity with the stamp of genius upon it. ‘Douglas,’ too, is a tragedy that must be attentively listened to, to be enjoyed, and enjoyment is [Pg 34] out of the question if the poetry of the piece be a lost beauty to the deliverer of the lines. ”

“ It is now an area of stalls; the old price for admission is doubled, and the entertainment is not worth an eighth of what charged for it compared with that of the olden time, when for an eight-and-sixpenny pit ticket you had Grisi, Mario, Lablache, and Tamburini, with minor vocalists, thorough artists, in the same opera. What a spectacle was the grand old house! The old aristocracy had their boxes for the season, as they had their town and country houses. You got intimate with them by sight; it was a pleasure to note how the beautiful young daughters of each family grew in gracefulness. ”

“ Siddons never went on the stage at any time without something of the same sensation. We should think little of any actor or actress who should avow that they ever ‘went on,’ in a great part, without some hesitation lest the attempt might fall short of what it was their determination to achieve, and what they felt themselves qualified to accomplish. Vanity and timidity? All true artists are conscious of both—ought to possess both; just as they ought to possess not only impulse but judgment ”

“ His early life led him into many temptations; he had, as he confesses, many loves in his time, real and imaginary; but the first true and ever-abiding one was that which ended in his marriage with a young actress, Miss Atkins. The whole story is touchingly told. We feel the joys and the sorrows of the April time of that love. We share in the triumph of the lovers; and throughout the record of their union Macready inspires us with as much respectful affection for that true wife as in other pages he stirs us to honour the memory of his mother. ”

“ At another passage, ‘There comes a time when baffled truths are affirmed by thunder-claps!’ the audience tried to encore the phrase. M. Got was too well-trained an actor to be guilty of obeying, but the house shouted, ‘Vivent les coups de tonnerre!’ ‘Thunder-claps for ever!’ and the passive Cæsar looked cold and unmoved across that turbulent pit.
The French public is cruel to its idols whose powers have passed away. ”

“ The dignity of the departed actor was his attribute, which in his busy days atoned for such faults as cannot be erased from his record. How he supported the dignity of the drama, and, we may say, of its patrons, may be seen in the registry of the noble dramas he produced, and in his purification of the audience side of the house. No person born since his time can have any idea of the horrible uncleanness that presented itself in the two patent theatres in the days before Macready’s management commenced. ”

“ Not even all men. Men with a regard for ‘becomingness’ are warned by indignant French critics. The dramatic critic of the ‘France’ thus vigorously speaks to the point: ‘We say it with regret, with sadness, in no other country, no other civilised city, in no other theatre of Europe, would the new piece of M. Dumas fils be possible, and we doubt whether there could be found elsewhere than in Paris a public who would applaud it even by mistake. ”

“ There’s Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t’other day, he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar.’ Hogarth undoubtedly qualified his sense with some nonsense: ‘Talk of sense, and study, and all that; why, it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not painted better.’
It was at one of Reynolds’s suppers in the square that an incident took place which aroused the wit-power of Johnson. The rather plain sister of the artist had been called upon by the company, after supper, as the custom was, to give a toast. ”

“ Charles Young, after passing a restless novitiate in a merchant’s office (the more restless, probably, as he thought of two personages—the bright, gipsy-looking boy who had acted in his father’s dining-room, and the Volumnia of Mrs. Siddons, as she triumphed in the tragedy of Coriolanus) , went upon the stage, triumphed in his turn, and assumed the sole guardianship and support of the mother he loved.
Young’s father was a remarkably detestable person. He never seems to have forgiven his sons for the affection which they manifested towards their mother. ”

“ Who does not know Colbert—the pupil of Mazarin, the astute politician, the sharp finance-minister, the patron—nay, the pilot—of the arts and sciences in France? The builder of the French Royal Observatory, and the founder of the Academies of Painting and Sculpture and of the Sciences in France, was just the man to pay the first visit to the Royal Society. Leicester House was nobly tenanted by Colbert, and nobly frequented by the [Pg 243] men of taste and of talent whom he gathered about him beneath its splendid roof. ”

“ Eleven years ago, however, the manuscript of the comedy, [Pg 116] in Voltaire’s handwriting, was discovered, and ‘Le Comte de Boursoufle’ was produced at the Odéon. M. Jules Janin and all the French theatrical critics were in a flutter of convulsive delight at the recovery of this comedy. Some persons there were who asked if there was any doubt on the matter, or was the piece by any other clever Frenchman. They were laughed to scorn. The comedy was so full of wit and satire that it could only be the work of the wittiest and most satirical of Frenchmen. ”

“ In 1717 she burst upon Paris, and in one month she enchanted the city by her acting in Monimia, Electra, and Bérénice, and had been named one of the king’s company for the first parts in tragedy and comedy. Adrienne’s magic lay in her natural simplicity. She spoke as the character she represented might be expected to speak. This natural style had been suggested by Molière, and had been attempted by Baron, but unsuccessfully. It was given to the silver-tongued Adrienne to subdue her audience by this exquisite simplicity of nature. The play-going world was enthusiastic. ”

“ His taste for the French theatre became fortified, and he tells us, ‘that taste has perhaps abated my idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated in our infancy as the first duty of Englishmen.’ This is wonderful to read, and almost impossible to believe. We may give more credit to the assertion that ‘the wit and philosophy of Voltaire, his table and theatre, refined in a visible degree the manners of Lausanne.’ It is worthy of note that a tragedy of Voltaire’s is now rarely, if ever, acted. ”