STREETS OF LONDON.
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In few places are the “lights and shadows” of life
more strongly and vividly contrasted than in the
streets of a great metropolis; where bloated wealth
and hollow-eyed poverty trudge side by side, and
gay, fluttering vanity and squalid wretchedness
gaze strangely at each other. It is dramatic, but
unpleasant; at least until custom has produced
the callousness of heart requisite to enable a man
to look philosophically on all human sorrow, save
his own peculiar portion. Before he has arrived at
this state, however, a stroll through the streets of a
crowded city is apt to be uncommonly beneficial.
It generates a series of practical sermons, for which
every poor distressed object furnishes an eloquent
text, tending to inculcate gratitude for his own station,
charity for the miseries, and toleration for the
frailties of others. A back street in London shows
a man a few of the realities of life. To use a
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pugilistic phrase, “it takes the conceit out of him.”
I am sometimes sorrier for my own disappointments
than for any person's; and occasionally pity and indulge
in the tenderest and most delicate sympathy
imaginable towards myself, on account of any trivial
inconvenience or privation to which I may
happen to be subjected; but I have never entered
a London by-lane in this frame of mind without
walking out “a wiser and a sadder man” at the
other end.” There is a vast deal of difference between
fanciful or poetical unhappiness and harsh
prose misery—plain, unvarnished, substantial misery,
arising from tangible wants and physical sufferings.
It is too much the fashion of the world
to exaggerate and swell into undue importance
half real and half imaginary mental woes, and to
sneer at and undervalue common bodily evils.
Your young poets and lady poetesses (heaven bless
them!) and indeed all persons of genteel sensibilities,
are continually plunging into the extreme
depths of desolation on what would appear to a
common-sense man rather insufficient grounds.
But going arithmetically to work, it will be a tolerably-sized
grief which produces as much pain as a
prolonged, stinging tooth-ache; and six-and-thirty
hours, or upwards, without victuals, must be almost
as bad to bear as slighted love, notwithstanding the
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assertions of sensitive young ladies (who have
chicken at command) to the contrary. Indeed, it
has always struck me that going without a dinner
must be provocative of a vast deal of pathos; and
that it is rather unfair to make such an outcry
about “woes that rend the breast,” while the pangs
and twinges of the contiguous parts of the body, on
a descending scale, are never taken into consideration
by those who have never felt them. If this
view of things be correct—and it is correct—how
much intense suffering does the blessed sun look
down upon every day! Ah! who that has seen
the gaunt, shrivelled frame—the sharpened features—
the bloodless, compressed lips, and sunken
greedy eye which famine produces, but has felt sick
at heart, and inwardly prayed to be preserved,
above all things, from inanition. The omission
of even such commonplace things as victuals,
will, in an astonishingly short time, convince the
most wretchedly romantic youth that ever fell in
love, folded his arms, and turned his face moonwards,
of the excellent properties, moral and physical,
of a beef-steak.
The afflictions which poverty brings with it in
the country are as nothing to the infinity of evils
in which it enmeshes those who are cooped up in
cities. In the country, though the beds of the poor
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be hard, and their food coarse, and their raiment
ragged, they have at least the free fresh air of heaven
to blow upon them, and they enjoy the changes
and delights which the ever-varying seasons bring
around, in common with the wealthiest. The odor
of the flower is as grateful to their sense—the warble
of the bird as pleasant to their ear—and the
velvet turf as soft and elastic to their tread as to
that of the man of many acres. With only the
cost of a little care, liberal nature clusters the briery
rose about their lowly windows, and twines the
graceful woodbine around their humble doors; and
not unfrequently in the prime of summer, the mean
clay walls of their cottages are completely buried
from the view beneath a mass of vegetative beauty
and fragrance. The village school gives their children
at least glimmerings of knowledge, and the
bell of each returning sabbath calls them (seldom
in vain) to their simple village church. They have
many, very many hardships and difficulties to wrestle
with, but they have at least a chance afforded
them of being hardy, healthy men and women;
and, in the calm of evening (despite of partial and
exaggerated statements to the contrary) there are
still hundreds of poor peasants that can stand at
their cottage doors and feel that content and happiness
are not merely empty sounds. But, alas! for
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the “city's pale abortions;”—alas! for the child
born amid sin and gin in a confined, filthy London
court or alley, down which not even a straggling
breath of pure air, by any accident, ever found its
way. What a place for infancy—for the gleesome
sports of childhood! But such have no infancy—
they never are children (except in stature). The
springs of life are poisoned in the outset, and the
mind, as it gradually unfolds, is as gradually soiled
and tainted by all the urchin sees, and hears, and
learns. It never has the undoubting confidence
and frankness of a child, but becomes at once a
premature adult in head and heart; and is almost
as knowing, lynx-eyed, artful and suspicious as the
fully-developed sinners by whom it is surrounded.
Where is the wonder if a few more years fulfil its
destiny, and bring it to the convict ship or the gallows?
The greatest miracle is, that the lowest of
the low in London—surrounded as they hourly are
by debasing influences—retain so many human
sympathies and kindly feelings as they do, and as
they frequently evince towards each other.[1]
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Poor wretches! Virtue should have lenity on
one hand and toleration on the other, when she
overlooks their accounts, and take especial note of
the few blossoms of good that spring up in such a
wilderness of evil. She ought to act upon the principle
I heard laid down by a bloated hackney
coachman, as I passed him one cold frosty morning.
“Now I likes a man as can make allowances,”
said he, to an ascetic-looking gentleman,
who had hired his vehicle, and was apparently endeavoring
to dissuade him from swallowing a glass
of gin which he had purchased to settle his nerves,
preparatory to starting. “It may all be true what
you says, sir, but it's uncommon hard on a poor fellow
like me.—Now I likes a man as can make
allowances!” and without further interlocution he
raised the cordial with trembling eagerness to his
lips. By the position of the glass he might have
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half emptied it, when a miserable half-clad female,
shivering with cold, crawled by, and as she passed
looked wistfully in his face. The look was understood.
It touched a sympathetic chord in the gindrinker's
heart, and he made a full pause—“I say
ma'am, you're welcome to a drop this cold morning;
it will do you good;”—and with something
of natural politeness he handed her the glass. The
poor creature curtsied, sighed, thanked him, drank
it, and went on. There was delirium—there might
be poison in the draught, but it was given with the
kindliest feelings, and the offering, whether for good
or evil, was at least accompanied by the merit of a
self-sacrifice of no trifling magnitude. The man
was evidently a drunkard—he might be a blackguard—
and, I dare say, was altogether unfitted for
universal suffrage; but still he had “an eye for
pity,” and when, poor fellow! he has succeeded in
drinking himself into some obscure grave, I trust
he will then experience the benefit of his maxim of
“making allowances.”
Often when tired of walking the noble thorough-fares
of London, surrounded by wealth and affluence
in every direction, I have turned from them, and
taking some lofty church, or other prominent landmark,
for a guide, rambled carelessly towards it. I
will never forget the melancholy streets I have
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repeatedly passed through in these heedless peregrinations.
Some solely set apart for the most abandoned,
inconceivable profligacy; others of good reputation,
but in which starving economy was evidently
engaged in an unceasing warfare with utter
want and destitution. This is the sort of streets
where the bankrupt tradesman, the unemployed
lawyer or physician, the rejected author, and the
slighted artist herd together. Alas! how many
“good men and true” have perished in these dreary
precincts, unnoticed and unknown? How many
of “nature's gentlemen,” with their fine, high spirits
and inborn love of pleasure, but lacking the
means of honorably gratifying their social propensities,
have sunk, step by step, into the mire of degradation
and debasement, until they became the companions
of sharpers, or the oracles of pot-houses?
How many a gifted spirit, whose strong integrity
poverty could not shake, has worn himself away,
“contending with low wants and lofty will”—has
sickened, perchance of the struggle, yet still borne
on for the sake of others, until some slight addition
has been forced upon the already intolerable burden,
and heart and hope have at once given way,
and he has dropped “unhonour'd and unsung,”
into the common place of repose “where bailiffs
cease from troubling, and debtors are at rest.”—
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Such like blue-devilish reflections have ofttimes
forced themselves upon me while roaming amid
these dreary dwellings; and I have always felt
relieved when on unexpectedly emerging from their
dim confines, I have found myself in the vicinity
of the open parks, or other fashionable promenades,
where vinegar-visaged adversity dared not show
her face, and all was life, animation, and enjoyment,
and the brilliant butterflies of fashion (with
some admixture of loggerheads) were disporting in
the sunshine, pranked out in the newest vanities.
It was, to say the least, a pleasant dramatic contrast,
with a material improvement in the dresses
and decorations.
Among their other attractions, the streets of London
are rife with human curiosities; and an ardent
zoologist must find it very pleasant employment
going about comparing the various specimens of
the species, assembled from all parts of the globe.
The slim, swarthy-featured Lascar or Malay animals
(imported in the East India Company's ships),
with their malicious countenances and small rattlesnake
eyes, in vivid relief to the hippopotamus-looking
Bavarian or Dutch “broom girls;” with faces
strikingly similar in form and expression to those
of the well-fed cherubs to be met with on gravestones
or above altar-pieces; then there are the
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juvenile countrymen of William Tell, who have
come all the way from the borders of “Geneva's
blue waters,” or alpine heights where the eagle
builds in safety, to the streets of London, to grind
away, with cruel perseverance, on a disorganized
barrel organ; or vainly endeavor, with unrelenting
assiduity, to extract music from the still more distressing
hurdy-gurdy. Wandering Savoyards too,
with their monkeys, and Scotch bagpipers with
their appropriate instruments of torture. Of all the
heterogeneous mass, however, the most pitiable are
the poor image boys—the offspring of old Rome!—
with their lank, sallow cheeks, and large lustrous
eyes, pleading, as they best may, in our harsh northern
tongue, for the custom of the descendants of
the barbarian subjects of their forefathers! I have
often been struck with the helpless, desolate look
of these poor fragile Italians, wanderers from their
own delicious land to a country where they stand
all day shivering in the very sunshine, and then
creep at night into holes where it were a pity for a
dog to lie down and die.
But of all the mendicant classes, which go vagabondizing
about, setting equally at defiance old,
impotent acts of parliament and the vigilant new
police, by far the sturdiest and most numerous are
those natives of the metropolis who have devoted
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their time and talents to the study of music for the
public benefit. They have, as may be surmised,
no regular engagements or fixed salaries, but roam
about impregnating the air with strange noises in
every direction. Unlike the Provençal troubadours
of old, they are not distinguishable by any particular
costume, but rather affect a diversified style of dress.
Their capabilities are wonderful. They do not,
like Braham, Phillips, Sinclair, or other professionals,
confine themselves to any particular style,
but range at will through all the subtle varieties of
musical composition, from Mozart to Alexander Lee
inclusive. If they fall short of vocalists of greater
pretensions in some particulars, they have the advantage
of them in others. They are never taken
suddenly ill—no man sins his soul by making
apologies for them, and they sing equally with a
hoarseness as without it. In one thing they strikingly
resemble their brethren of the stage, namely,
in the infallible tact and nicety of judgment displayed
in introducing airs in appropriate situations;
and it is pleasant, amid the rattling of carriages,
the rumbling of carts, the heavy rolling of wagons,
and the multifarious cries of oysters, hot rolls, and
old clothes, to hear a fellow bawling—
“Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me!”
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or a waddling old woman, with a strictly feline organ,
squalling in the vicinity of Billingsgate,
“Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,
Or like a fairy trip upon the green!”
At first this class might be confounded with an
inferior species in the provinces, commonly called
ballad-singers; but their habits are essentially different.
The primitive race that used to chronicle
the deeds of “Jack Monroe,” or narrate how “All
in the good ship Rover,” they had “sailed the
world around,” are now nearly extinct in the me
tropolis. The present “minstrelsy” of London, seem
to execute no other than the newest and most fashionable
pieces; and the contrast is, at times; both
laughable and melancholy, in returning from the
theatre where Vestris, or some of the other sirens
of the stage, have been floating before you in an
atmosphere of pleasure, and warbling their arch or
joyous ditties to delighted ears, to hear some poor
homeless wretch, trembling in the heavy dews of
midnight, howling the self-same strains to heedless
passengers as they hurry past him with a quickened
step to their comfortable beds. You scarcely
know which to be sorriest for—the air or the performer.
The contrast too, between the words of
the lively, pathetic or bacchanalian melodies which
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they have ever in their mouths, and their own
mean and miserable appearance, is continually giving
rise to the most ludicrous associations. It
rather makes a man smile to hear a poor hatless,
coatless, shoeless wanderer, lugubriously laboring
away at “Oh there's nothing in life can sadden
us,” bleating out “The young May-moon is beaming,
love,” or dolefully asseverating
“My heart my heart is breaking,
For the love of Alice Gray.”
“Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”
It must be so; or how these people, exposed to
nearly every ill that flesh is heir to, (unless indeed
they have become inured to starvation, or else have
got into a mechanical habit of living on from day
to day, and do not like to give it over,) continue to
keep up their hearts and still face existence, is more
than I can possibly conjecture.
eaf091v2.n1[1] “None are all evil,” says Byron. A poor street-walker, remarkable
for the kindness and gentleness of her disposition, and who was
generally known amongst her class by the appellation of “handsome
Polly,” lately, in a fit of despair, finished her career by throwing herself
into one of the canals. Her body was handed over to the civil
authorities. The frail sisterhood of her district clubbed their mites
together, and raised a sum sufficient to bury her, as the saying is, “decently;”
but on waiting on the magistrate for the body, they were
informed that it had to be handed over for dissection as a warning to
others how they committed suicide! and they were thus prevented
from carrying into execution perchance the only good action they had
attempted for years.
“He whom the sword of state doth hear,
Should be as holy as severe.”
It is to be hoped the worthy magistrate is so; but I very much question
both the moral and legal justice of his decision.
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CHRISTMAS.
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Heap on more wood!—the wind blows chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our christmas merry still.
—Scott.
“A merry christmas and a happy new-year!”—
How many million times will this good-natured salutation
be interchanged, wherever the English language
is spoken, before the present and following
weeks pass over. It is, to be sure, a mere matter of
course, a compliment of the season: but yet, methinks
there is more right-good will in the delivery
of it than in the generality of compliments: the
hearty and jovial animation of the countenance, the
frank and cheerful tone of the voice, and the rough
and friendly pressure of the hand, go along with
the words as a commentary, the obvious import of
which is, contrary to the ordinary practice of society,
“I mean what I say.” There is less selfishness
at christmas than at any other time. Men appear
to pay more attention to that much-neglected
scriptural injunction, “love thy neighbor as
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thyself,” and the cares and schemes of those who struggle
for existence in great cities, are suffered to lie
dormant for a brief space. The stomach is more
thought of than the purse; and when a man thinks
seriously of his stomach, with a fair prospect of having
his visions realized, his natural disposition dies
within him, and he becomes a generous, meek, and
equitable animal. Whatever is thought of the poetry
there may be reasonable doubts entertained of
the policy of Lear's advice,
“Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just;”
for it is exactly at the time when a man feels
most uncomfortable himself, that he thinks least of
the discomforts of others; and many a one, who,
before breakfast on a cold morning, with no prospect
of the fire burning, would not give sixpence to
save half the human race from starvation, will, after
a satisfactory dinner, talk with unction of the
miseries of the poor, and subscribe his dollar without
thinking himself guilty of an extravagance.
When he is cold and comfortless himself, he is a
piece of concentrated selfishness—his sympathies
are as frozen as his fingers, and he has no superflux
benevolence; but as his stomach becomes literally
closed his heart is figuratively opened, and he parts
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with his money with fewer pangs than naturally
accompany that disagreeable operation.
There is one essential difference between the
christmas of the present times and those of a few
years ago, namely the weather. The fine, clear,
cold weather formerly characteristic of this season,
is now so no longer; and in its place have come mild,
sickly, drizzly days, that properly belong to no particular
season. It is a pity that fog and civilization
should go hand in hand, and that the clearing
away of the immense forests of the west should be
one main cause why this pestiferous weather is substituted
for the healthy, hardy frosts of former times.
It is a great drawback; for with what face can any
one wish his friend joy, when he can scarcely discern
his lineaments through the fog; or ask him to be
merry, when saturated through and through with
villanous vapor? And then the women! What a
pleasant sight it was, on a clear, frosty christmas
morning, with the snow crackling beneath your
feet, and the sleigh-bells tinkling merrily in your
ears, to see some comfortably-clad and comfortable-looking
damsel tripping cheerfully yet carefully over
the slippery side-walk, with cheeks into which the
cold and exercise had sent a glow more deep and
rich than the most brilliant carnation!—with eyes
sparkling and dancing in liquid splendor, and her
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warm breath playing back upon her face, seeking,
as it were, shelter from the sharp air amid her clustering
curls—smiling and laughing, she knew not
why, and cared not wherefore. Now, the scene is
changed—they “walk in silk attire,” with artificial
flowers on their heads, and soleless shoes on their
feet; picking their steps among the multitudinous
small pools which the street-inspector leaves for the
accommodation of pedestrians, with faces of a neutral
tint, alike different from the ruddy glow of winter
and the sunny bloom of summer. But even
this change, like every other, bad as it is upon the
whole, is not without its advantages:
“There is a soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out,”
and those who are admirers of, and connoisseurs in
delicately turned ankles, have now a better opportunity
for more particular and impartial observation.
Poultry is the only thing which does not seem to
share in the general joy on the approach of this
happy period; and all who have entered deeply into
the study of the science of ornithology in general,
and domestic fowlology in particular, must have observed
in the eyes of turkeys more especially, a sort
of melancholy presentiment, as if “coming events”
had actually “cast their shadows before,” and chickens
look as if they already beheld the delicate pies, of
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which they are to form a part. The goose, that
most incorrigible bird, it is true, is a goose to the last,
turning up a lack-lustre eye at the hand preparing
to twist its neck about, and it never occurs to it to
flap its wings or offer any resistance until the head
is detatched from the body, which, according to
the immutable laws of nature, is a little too late.
These speculations may seem fanciful, but many
ingenious theories have been constructed on as slim
a foundation.
How many good things have been said and sung
of christmas, from the old poets in Elizabeth's time
down to Washington Irving. Indeed, for mirth and
music—friendship and flummery—love and liquor
poetry and poultry—gaiety and gormandizing—
dancing and dinner-parties, there is no time like
christmas. A spirit of enjoyment—an universal freedom
from restraint prevails; the most prudent relax,
the most frigid melt; even that anomalous class
of bipeds denominated “serious young men,” are
guilty of merriment, and sip their wine and lisp
their jokes with impunity. A jovial farewell is taken
of the parting year, and a jovial welcome given to its
successor. No man attends to his business, unless
he be a publican or a pastry cook; and all sorts
of profitable employments are looked on as nuisances.
Merchant meets merchant, and the price
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of stocks is not inquired after—tradesman meets
tradesman, and the shop is unthought of. Friend
dines with friend, old intimacies are renewed, differences
forgotten, and a spirit of good-will and
kindly feeling, well befitting the season, “reigns in
all bosoms.”
“Merry christmas!” even now thy influence, like
a charm, is over all. Now are parties projected in
the parlor, while through the kitchen rings the din
of merciless preparation—now do black cooks rise
ten per cent. in the scale of creation, and those who
can withstand a hot fire are not to be treated with
coolness—now do serenaders take their stand in the
damp streets, and, like frogs in a fog, their voices
are heard through the thick atmosphere, croaking
of love and music, in imitation of Spain and Italy,
while the noise of neighboring taverns mingles
with their melody; and now do young ladies throw
open the windows to testify their grateful acceptance
of the homage of those weather-contemning
swains, and many catch quinsies by this sacrifice of
prudence to passion—now do superlatively witty
jokes pass between young ladies and gentlemen concerning
their prospects of matrimony before another
christmas—now do men eat more than is deemed
necessary for the support of nature; apoplexies
are prevalent, and the heirs of fat old men look
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forward with pleasing anticipations—now is the air of
bar rooms laden with monotonous yet pleasing interrogations
of “What will you take to drink?” and
no answers are heard in the negative—now, as the
glass circulates quickly round, friendships become
stronger as brains become weaker, and more promises
are made than will be kept—now are several
men seen reposing in the streets, with the
pavement for a bed and the curb-stone for a pillow.
Peacefully do they slumber! having that within
them which makes their flinty couch “soft as the
thrice-driven down”—and now do the —of—
editors sharpen their pens, and prepare
to narrate manifold instances of the “fatal effects of
intemperance,” in their very best style—now do inveterate
moralists indite long essays, stating that there
have been many changes in the year that is past,
and likewise the probability that there will be many
more in the year that is to come—now do the respectable
members of the “calliothumpian band”
prepare to disturb the peace and quiet of the republic,
and the New-York Dogberries hold consultation
concerning the powers vested in them by the constitution;
and now, also, is the constabulatory force
of the city held in less respect by the juvenile citizens
than is due to constituted authorities—now do
young aspirants to “Tom and Jerry” fame get well
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kicked, bruised, beaten, and carried to the watch-house,
all which they term “sport,” and sober, sensible
people begin to entertain doubts concerning the
meaning of the word—now do many more things
take place than are “dreamt of in philosophy,”—
and now do I put a period to the apprehensions of
the reader by prudently coming to a conclusion.
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THE DRAMA AS IT IS.
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The drama is a poetry which, in its legitimate scope, must be addressed
to all ranks of society—must wear the common garb and speak
the common language of all. It is the forum where all ranks meet and
are but equal; where the base of mankind unlearn their ferocity and
divest themselves of their callousness; and where, likewise, the noble
and gentle must dispense with artificial feelings, and know, whatever
be the shell, the kernel is at best but a man.
—Anon.
There are few subjects, if any, that have elicited
a greater flow of words, than what is termed the
“decline of the legitimate drama.” It is one of the
most approved and enduring themes extant for
small declamation, and has consequently become
the almost exclusive property of “smart young men”
and unfledged scribblers, who think it looks well to
lament the non-enactment of Shakspeare, and to
indulge in little frothy vituperations against the bad
taste of the public, and the intellectual depravity of
the managers, actors, and modern authors. They
discuss in the most flippant aad self-satisfied manner
a question involving the most vexing and perplexing
difficulties, and pass their silly censures and give
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their witless advice upon a subject of which they
are profoundly ignorant. When a satirist, like Lord
Byron or Mr. Charles Sprague, or any man of talent,
undertakes to lash the vices of the stage, the
lack of practical knowledge is overlooked in the
display of poetic power; they present us with a forcible
picture of what is bad, but without pointing
out the efficient means of making that bad better;
they dwell much upon the faults and follies of the
system, because faults and follies are the food of the
satirist; and they will even, at times, give very fine
advice, which has only the fault of not being practcable.
They ought to bear in mind what Portia
truly and sensibly says, “If to do were as easy as
to know what were good to do, chapels had been
churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.
It is a good divine that follows his own instructions.”
Lord Byron, when he dipped his pen in gall, and
wrote his “English bards and Scotch reviewers,”
denounced the stage among other existing follies;
but when he actually became concerned in the
management of Drury-lane, he found it a great deal
easier to censure than amend. And yet now the
A. and B. newspaper critics prate about the offence
given to their delicate tastes, when a profitable piece
of nonsense happens to be enacted, instead of Shakspeare
or the “sterling English comedies!” But the
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best of the joke is, that most of this kind of persons,
whom we have had the misfortune to become acquainted
with, in reality know no more of the sterling
English comedies (except a few of the most
popular) than they do of Homer in the original;
and as for Shakspeare, their knowledge of him is
confined to his Macbeth, Othello, Richard the Third,
and a few more of his acting plays; while his more
imaginative ones, his Tempest and Midsummer
Night's Dream, are so much heathen Greek to them;
may, one whom we knew, that pretended a most
overweening admiration for the immortal bard, actually
did not know that he had written either songs
or sonnets; and upon being told that the popular
song of “Bid me discourse,” was one of his, resented
the information as an impudent attempt to undervalue
his understanding and impose upon his
credulity! Yet this is, for the most part, the sort
of people that affect a stately supremacy, and talk
about managers “dazzling the eyes of the ignorant
vulgar,” and “catering for the vitiated taste of the
public.”
Now we are by no means going so far as to contend
that the “drama as it is,” is any thing like
the “drama as it ought to be:” but we do mean to
say, that there is an “infinite deal of nothing,” or,
at least, nothing but unmingled cant, preached
-- 029 --
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upon this very subject. Even at the present day,
Shakspeare is played ten times to any other author's
once, and would, if the public attended, be enacted
still more frequently; and for this simple and satisfactory
reason, that his drama has not one half the
expense of modern pieces, for they have the beauty
that
“Needs not the foreign aid of ornament;”
consequently, the cost of “scenery, machinery, dresses,
and decorations,” is all saved; and to those who,
for want of a genuine admiration of that truly immortal
man, counterfeit an ardent longing for his
more frequent presentation on the stage, we would
say—or rather we will tell them an anecdote which,
though old, is good and applicable, and may be
more to the purpose than argument.
A certain king of France had a very pretty queen
whom he loved “passing well,” at least, considering
that he was a Frenchman and she was his wife, but
still not with such exclusive devotion as to prevent
“His spirit hunting after new fancies.”
A worthy ecclesiastic about the court perceiving this,
undertook to lecture his majesty upon the subject,
and expressed his surprise that he could slight so
beauteous a lady for others evidently her inferior.
-- 030 --
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The king, instead of answering the question, asked
the priest what dish he was most partial to. “Partridges,”
answered the friar, in an emphatic tone,
while his eyes glistened and his lips moved involuntarily
at the ideas which the mention of has favorite
repast called forth—“partridges, your majesty.”
The next morning the worthy clergyman
was lodged in prison, and for fourteen days, morning,
noon and night—breakfast, dinner, and supper—
partridges and partridges only were set before
him, until the gastric juices of the worthy ecclesiastic
could no longer endure this horrible monotony,
and he exclaimed, in an agony of feeling, that
“they might imprison him as long as they liked, if
they would only give him something else to eat!”
Upon this the king sent for him. “How is this,”
said his majesty, “that you complain of your favorite
fare?” “Partridges are excellent,” quoth
the friar, “but always partridges!” “The queen
is excellent,” retorted his majesty, “but always the
queen!” and so the king had his joke, and the priest
a change of diet. Now we hope that no person whose
imagination particularly qualifies him for finding out
a bad moral, will infer from this, that we mean to applaud
his majesty's very improper and naughty behaviour;
all that is meant to be deduced from the
story is, that Shakspeare, always Shakspeare, would
-- 031 --
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be neither profitable to the managers, nor pleasing
to the public.
The mind of man requires a variety of intellectual
food, just as the stomach requires a variety of
animal nutriment; and that mind is perhaps the
healthiest, and that stomach the strongest, which
can enjoy themselves off whatever is set before
them: what they lose in extreme delicacy, they
make up in vigour. With some people, as the saying
is, “all is fish that comes to their net;” if they
can get a good tragedy or comedy, so much the better;
if not, an opera will do as well; if that is not
to be had, why then a broad farce, or a broader melo-drama;
or in default of these, even an extravaganza
or a pantomime; always provided, that the
thing be tolerably good of its kind; and the man
who on one night laughs heartily at the extravagance
of Hilson, or the extravagant extravagance
of Barnes, in some of their “broad-grin” parts, is
more likely on the next to relish the passion and
pathos, the exquisite poetry and divine philosophy
of Shakspeare, than one of those squeamish and
pedantic personages, whose
“Visages do cream and mantle like a standing pool,”
who dare not be caught enjoying themselves
with any thing save what is of acknowledged
-- 032 --
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excellence, and who turn up their good-for-nothing noses
at the efforts of every author or actor who has not
as yet received the stamp of public approbation. It is
really amusing at times to sit in a theatre and witness
the behaviour of one of these gentry—to see
the air of critical primness which he assumes on
the entrance of a celebrated actor, or to observe the
smile of supercilious pity which he casts upon some
poor wretch beside him, who is thrown into ecstacies
by a comic song, a bad joke, Barnes's wig coming
off, or any other interesting incident which “Sir
Oracle” esteems frivolous. And when two of them
get together, the way in which they reflect each
other's folly—the looks of deep significance that
pass between them—and the air of conscious superiority
with which they survey the ordinary mortals
around them, is as instructing and amusing as the
play, let it be what it may.
In theatrical matters we must confess that our
own taste is by no means particularly fastidious,
but is capable of embracing all the different species
(not individuals) of the dramatic family, even the
tribe most vilified of all, known by the appellation
of melo dramas; and though, certainly, this class
owns many members too bad for human endurance,
yet there are others capable of interesting and exciting
the feelings in no common degree. Though
-- 033 --
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there are bad melo-dramas without number, yet a
good melo-drama is not so bad a thing. It is a sort
of skeleton tragedy, without the stateliness and
poetry, where the murders are committed in simple
prose, and the villanies carried on without the aid
of blank verse. It is the sketch and outline of a
tragedy where actions are represented rather than
characters delineated, and where every thing is
broad and general, coarse and rough, but which
when well enacted and kept within the moderate
bounds of probability, sometimes excite the feelings
to a pitch that prevents sleep during the more interesting
scenes. Nay, so very unrefined is our taste,
that we cannot join in the prevailing hue and cry
against gaudy spectacles and splendid scenery, thinking
them very good in their place, and even feeling
an unbecoming interest in the “dresses and decorations,”
particularly of the ladies, for a well-dressed
woman is at any time pleasanter to look upon
than a dull play. There are, however, some things
occasionally exhibited which there is no getting
over, to wit, dogs, horses, elephants, and the brute
creation in general—real fire and real water, wonderful
ascensions from the stage to the gallery, impressive
ceremonies of shooting deserters—jugglers,
rope-dancers and little children—these are unalloyed,
unmitigated evils.
-- 034 --
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But though gaud and show, and spectacles and
melo-dramas are pleasant enough occasionally and
in their place, it is the interest and duty of every
one who values sound rational dramatic representations
to raise his voice against them when they are
too frequently introduced, and assume an undue
importance in the evening's entertainment. They
are well enough as a dessert after more solid and
substantial aliment, but if furnished as the principal
intellectual food for the theatre-going public, the
inevitable consequence will be depravity of taste,
and attenuation of intellect. Let a good tragedy or
comedy; which in itself contains enough poetry and
passion, wit and sense for any reasonable man for
one evening, be first enacted, and then let any
popular nonsense most in vogue occasionally follow,
by which arrangement all parties will be satisfied.
Though the public cannot justly be charged with
indifference in respect to Shakspeare, yet it is to be
regretted that they certainly do display an apathy
towards the genuine old comedies, (ah! they know
not the treasures which they pass unheeded by!) yet
this, in a great measure, arises from their not being
familiar with their merits. Managers ought to endeavour
to create a taste for the more correct appreciation
of the genuine excellencies of the old dramatic
authors. Let them not be discouraged by a
-- 035 --
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few indifferent houses, but persevere. If they were
to set apart a particular night in each week for the
production of a sterling comedy, this would amount
to between forty and fifty pieces of real merit in the
course of the season—an immense acquisition.
And if the newspapers and literary journals were
to make a point of especially noticing and commenting
on that evening's performance, there is little
doubt that in a short time it would not only be creditable
and profitable to the managers, but creditaand
profitable to the public.
-- 036 -- p091-291
THE MAN OF THE FLY-MARKET FERRY.
[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]
An indefinite number of years ago I boarded in the
Bowery. Our accommodations were, in those days,
looked upon as something superior; it being an established
rule of the house for not more than six
gentlemen to sleep in one room, which to me, who
was a stranger to the customs of New-York, appeared
in the hot summer nights, a sufficiency. The
boarders were principally young men, most of them
clerks in drygood stores, and the conversation generally
turned upon the quantity of sales they had
severally effected in the course of the day, the particulars
of which they narrated with an appearance
of intense interest, bordering on enthusiasm. I was
always of a speculative rather than a practical turn
of mind, and I confess those counter and countinghouse
reminiscences did not powerfully affect me,
though I listened to them in a devotedly decorous
manner. One individual alone attracted my attention.
He was a middle-aged man, about the
-- 037 --
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middle height, and neither very corpulent nor otherwise,
and at first sight there appeared nothing about
him to distinguish him from the ordinary run of
mortals. He was, however, a singular individual,
and had some strange peculiarities. Melancholy
had “marked him for her own;”—he was evidently
a man of many sorrows, and a deep and settled
grief seemed to pervade his every action. His appetite
was uncommonly good, and he ate more and
talked less than any man I ever saw.
He was an inoffensive being; and yet, for some
unascertained cause, the landlady “looked loweringly”
upon him.—As I entered the house rather abruptly
one evening, I perceived the middle-aged gentleman
and the lady of the mansion in deep and earnest
conversation. The tones of her voice were sharp
and decided—her action was energetic in the extreme—
her face had lost much of the mild expression
and winning softness which characterize her
sex, and I distinctly heard her pronounce the impressive
words—“I have been put off long enough,
and I'll be put off no longer!” The middle-aged
gentleman sighed profoundly; he was evidently
much affected, and without saying a word, he took
up his candle, and retired to his bed. Heaven only
knows what were his reflections!
Next morning, notwithstanding the severe
-- 038 --
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mental struggle of the preceding evening, not a trace of
passion was visible on his countenance. He was
calm, though by no means collected, for instead of
taking his place next the landlady, as was his wont,
he obliviously seated himself opposite a dish of pickled
salmon, a fish for which he had always manifested
a decided predilection. His mind was in a
high state of abstraction—the world around was to
him as nothing—and he helped himself four times
from the savoury fish alluded to, without in the least
noticing the inflamed and ominous looks of the
hostess. He continued to eat, as it appeared to me,
mechanically, long after the other boarders had
arisen from the table, until looking around and perceiving
that he was seated alone with the lady, who
was apparently preparing to open a conversation,
with more agility than I had previously seen him
manifest, he started from his chair—seized by mistake
a new hat instead of his old one from the pile
in the passage, and rushed out of the house. He
came not to dinner, and at tea he was not visible!
“Next morn we miss'd him at his 'customed seat,
“Along the side, nor at the foot was he:
“Another came—”
but not so did the middle-aged gentleman, and from
that time forward he was seen among us no more.
-- 039 --
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At the expiration of twenty-four hours, the landlady
overcame her natural feelings of delicacy, and
proceeded to break open his clothes chest, in order
to elicit some compensation for sundry pecuniary
obligations which she alleged he had omitted to discharge.
I was present at the operation: the lock
was forced—the lid was anxiously raised—but alas!
an extensive vacuum presented itself. No integuments
were there, excepting a few “shreds and
patches” at the bottom of the chest in the shape of
ancient shirts and fractions of neck and pocket
handkerchiefs. This was all that the repository of
the middle-aged gentleman contained, setting aside
a few sheets of paper which the landlady threw
away as rubbish, and which I instinctively secured.
On one of them was written the following “Legend,”
which illustrates in a high degree the morbid sensibility
of the amiable writer. Connected as it is
with local circumstances calculated to render it peculiarly
interesting to the feelings of every New-Yorker,
and breathing as it does a tone of the purest
morality, I feel it my bounden duty to give it
without alteration or addition to the public. The
catastrophe is singularly impressive and strikingly
applicable to the present high-pressure times.
Though I cannot say that I myself recollect the
events here recorded, there is strong reason to
-- 040 --
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
believe they are not apochryphal, and doubtless live
in the memories of many worthy inhabitants of
this city. The following is the
MANUSCRIPT.
“I am a miserable individual; my brightest hopes
have been blighted and my finest feelings exceedingly
lacerated. All my life an unfortunate constitutional
temperament has disinclined me from following
any useful or profitable employment; and as I
inherited nothing from the author of my lamented
existence, excepting a good constitution and somewhat
of an epicurean taste, I have consequently
been subjected to the mercenary importunities of
mankind in every city, town, and village where I
have resided for any length of time. Even when
totally destitute of money, and without the most
distant prospect of ever possessing any, they have
ruthlessly pressed their claims upon me, until disgusted
with their heartless importunities, I have
frequently, without vouchsafing a parting word,
quitted their domiciles, and wandered no one knew
whither. In the course of my shifting, strolling life,
I have, as might be expected, met with strange incidents
and scarcely to be credited adventures, but
among them all I know of none which more powerfully
affected me than one which accurred in this
-- 041 --
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very city of New-York, early in the nineteenth
century.
“It was on a Sunday morning in the beginning
of May, that I opened the door of a house which had
become hateful to me, and sallied out into the street.
Unconscious of what direction I was taking, chance
conducted me into Maiden-lane, and I sauntered
down until my further progress was impeded by
the East River. It was one of those delicious
May mornings when spring, as if mad with joy at
effecting her escape from the dominion of winter,
had infused an exuberance of life and animation
into all creation. The waves were glancing and
dancing in the sunshine across the beautiful bay
of New-York, and the fresh breeze came sweeping
over the waters. The denizens of the city were
thronging across to Long Island to
“Gulp their weekly air,”
and many aspiring young men were seated aloft
in their buggies, sulkies, and other vehicles with
names of equal euphony, awaiting the arrival of
the boat. A friend of mine, who happened to be
going that way, entreated me to accompany him,
and as he satisfied all pecuniary demands, I entered
the gate, and took my station by the toll-gatherer,
with whose appearance and manners I was very
-- 042 --
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much struck in passing, particularly his slow and
solemn way of receiving the money tendered him,
and, notwithstanding the agitation and impatience
of the passengers, his deliberate manner of returning
the change. He was a man apparently about
forty-five; his person was round, fat, oily, and somewhat
loose and swampy; the original hue of his
face was gone, and it was now a combination of
many colors, in which red and purple predominated;
its prominent protuberance was truly Bardolphian—
large, bulbous, and succulent; on it
“Brandy had done its worst!
Nor gin, nor rum, nor any spirituous liquor,
Could touch it further.”
“The bell had rung for the last time, and the
gate was slowly closing, when a long black column,
which on nearer approach assumed a little the appearance
of a human being, was seen making its
way, with all possible expedition, down Maidenlane,
in order to catch the boat, but whether it would
succeed or not was a very dubious point. One thing
was against it; the wind was blowing freshly up
the street, and though the body, from its thin, hatchet-like
appearance, was well adapted for cutting
through an opposing current of air, yet the pressure
upon the whole surface was evidently too much,
-- 043 --
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for at every squall the long attenuated legs kept
plunging in the wind, but without making any
progress. It was like a boat pulled against a strong
tide, which the rowers prevent from receding, but
with all their exertions are unable to advance an
inch. Fortunately, however, just as the small bell
had rung to put on the steam, the breeze slackened,
and the attenuation was enabled to reach the gates
of the ferry. It proved to be an interesting and
somewhat dyspeptic-looking young man, or rather
the “sketch and outline of a man,” for he was evidently
as yet only a design. Like an onion run to
seed, his altitude was uncommon, but his circumference
a mere joke; and what added to the length
and diminished the breadth was, that he had encased
himself in a long-waisted black coat, which
it was his pleasure to button tightly around him,
and bestowed his nether extremities in a pair of
fashionable pantaloons, familiarly denominated
“tights,” of the same sombre hue. I must take
upon myself to say that this latter act was extremely
injudicious, because the young man's legs were
not particularly straight—they came in contact at
the knees, but instead of descending perpendicularly,
branched off so as to form the figure which
geometricians call an isosceles triangle, and which
is commonly defined by the term “knock-kneed.”
-- 044 --
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His face was pale, thin, and uncomfortable looking,
and he had altogether the appearance of having
been dieted on vegetables and water during the
winter months. He was such a being as Falstaff
meant when he talked about a “forked radish;” or
like what pretty Perdita had in her mind's eye
when she exclaims—
“Out alas!
You'd be so lean, the blasts of January
Would blow you through and through.”
How he had contrived to weather the blasts of
January, and attain the month of May, is one of
those inscrutable mysteries of nature, which the
more weak blinded man attempts to solve, the further
he goes astray, until reason is swallowed up in
conjecture, and “nothing is but what is not.” I can
only vouch for the fact, that the month was May,
and he was still a sentient being.
“When the thin young man presented himself at
the gate of the ferry (which was done in less time
than it has taken me to describe him,) the contrast
between him and the fiery-faced ferryman was most
marked and striking. The latter looked at him
as if he thought he was shortly bound for another
world, and I myself was partly of the same opinion;
be that as it might, he still evinced a laudable
-- 045 --
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interest in the pecuniary concerns of this, for notwithstanding
the larboard chain of the boat had been
unloosed, and they were preparing to do the same
with the starboard, he presented the man of the Fly-market
ferry with a five dollar bill of the Catawaba
bank in Alabama, by which procedure he calculated
not only to secure his passage gratis, but have the
bill discounted at a cheaper rate than it would cost
in the regular way of business. But alas! how
short-sighted are the schemes of mortals, as will be
made apparent hereafter. The man of the Fly-market
ferry was seemingly prepared for all contingencies
of this kind, for drawing from his side-pocket
a large greasy-looking roll of bills, he slowly
and deliberately proceeded to select the most suspicious
and unbrokerable banks. Just as he had
accomplished this to his satisfaction, and given back
four dollars, and ninety-six cents, the starboard
chain was unloosed, and the boat proceeded on her
way. The young man first saw that the change
was all right, and then rushed precipitately forward,
and I verily believe would have succeeded in reaching
the boat, had it not been decreed otherwise;
but just as he had got half-way down the gang-way
his foot slipped, and he fell prostrate: his bones
rattled violently in his skin, and the hand which contained
the change came in forcible contact with the
-- 046 --
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ground—its powers of tension relaxed—and the
valuable contents were precipitated into the water!
“I have lived long—I have wandered over a
great part of the habitable globe, and I have seen
human misery and suffering in every variety of
shape and degree, but such another picture of unqualified
wretchedness as the thin young man presented
when he found his cash was “buried in the
briny tide,” and that he had lost the boat, I have not
seen. (Owing to the absorbing interest of this melancholy
affair, I myself had lost my passage, but not
being in any particular hurry, this was a small consideration.)
The stranger collected his limbs together
and rose slowly from the ground, and in doing
so a ray of sunshine glimmered through the
gloom of his unparalleled situation, for he perceived
a solitary sixpence, that had escaped the fate of
its companions, lying glittering on the edge of the
dock; he stooped to pick it up, but before his agitated
hand could grasp this fraction of the metallic
currency, a young, dirty, ragged, embryo-state-prison
varlet, who was lounging about, pounced upon
it, and transferred it to his own pocket. The young
man naturally enough demanded the restitution of
his property, but this sprout of original sin, in the
most solemn manner, and with every appearance of
truth, sturdily denied all knowledge of the
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
transaction. “This was the unkindest cut of all,” and the
young man gave way under it. Stunned by the
heavy and quick-succeeding blows of fate, he staggered
he knew not whither, and most unfortunately
through the gates of the ferry, which instantly closed
upon him. This immediately recalled him to a
sense of his situation, and he attempted to return
through the door-way, but such a proceeding encountered
the decided opposition of the man of the
ferry. The stranger was eloquent, and he poured
forth a fervid torrent of words—he implored the
ferryman by every tie, divine and human,—by all
that links society together—by the confidence of
man in man, to take his word that he had already
paid his passage, and let him pass; this the man of
the ferry undoubtedly remembered, but he was not
legally bound to do so, and moreover, he also remembered
the Catawaba bank bill, and peremptorily
refused all re-admittance without a preliminary
fourpence. The stranger finding words of no avail
grew frantic, and attempted to force the passage vi
et armis, but the man of the ferry pushed him back,
at the same time unfeelingly exclaiming, “No you
don't!” His cup of bitterness was now full to the
brim and one drop over, but tears at length came
to the relief of the sufferer, and he wept! The
ferryman
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
“beheld the dew-drops start,—
They didn't touch his iron heart,”
and the unfortunate finding all was of no use, dashed
the tear from his eye, turned his back on the
scene of his misery, and bent his way up Maiden-lane.
One consolation was left him amid all his
wretchedness—the wind was now in his favor, and
he proceeded without difficulty. On coming to the
corner of Pearl-street he turned along, and the interesting,
dyspeptic, thin young man was lost to my
sight, perchance for ever.
“My tale draws fast to its tragical conclusion. I
went over in the next boat, remained in Brooklyn
that night, and returned the following morning.
On arriving at the dock, I perceived that many people
were congregated together, and also that another
individual gathered in the fourpences. On inquiry
I learnt that during the short interval of my
absence, the man of the ferry—the author of so
much misery, had been summoned to another world.
The manner of his death was simply thus. After
the boat had stopped running on the preceding
evening, he wended his way, as was his wont, to a
neighboring tavern, where he proceeded to “pour
huge draughts of aqua-vitæ down,” in a way that
would have petrified any unsophisticated man to
-- 049 --
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
behold. In this course he persevered for some time,
and then to crown the whole, undertook, for a trifling
wager, to swallow a pint of fourth-proof brandy
at a draught. It was rather too much for him,
but he had a thirst for distinction in that line; he
attempted the feat and succeeded, though he immediately
sunk upon the floor in a state of insensibility.
The next morning when he awoke, he felt dry
and feverish, and a pitcher of cold water happening
unluckily to stand near, he proceeded to deluge his
inward man with its contents. The result was
such as might naturally have been expected under
such circumstances. His inside being heated like
a furnace, and no sooner had the cold water come in
contact with it, than an immense quantity of steam
was instantly generated; there being no safetyvalve,
the unfortunate man, like an overcharged
boiler, instantly exploded, and the animated mass,
which, but a few short hours before, I had left full
of fire and spirits, was shattered into a thousand
pieces, and scattered over the floor of the porter-house.
Fortunately no lives, excepting his own,
were lost by the explosion. A coroner's inquest
was held on the body, and a verdict brought in
that “the deceased came by his death in consequence
of his ignorance of the power of steam.”
-- 050 --
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The moral to be deduced from this event is obvious.
Let no one who has had a predilection for
ardent spirits—and there are but too many who
have such predilections—drink copiously or incautiously
of cold water, lest the result be similar, and
they too share the fate of the MAN OF THE FLY-MARKET
FERRY.
-- 051 -- p091-306
EVILS OF EARLY RISING.
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
It seems to be the laudable endeavor of a great
portion of the present generation to prove their forefathers
fools; this being the way in which they
choose to evince their gratitude for the benefits they
have derived from the labors of those who have
gone before them. Accordingly, from the author
of Devereux downwards, they are employed in running
full tilt at what it is their pleasure to term
“popular fallacies.” Now, notwithstanding we
can travel ten miles an hour quicker than those
who lived before us, I, for one, cannot help thinking
that our ancestors knew something; and am
therefore particularly cautious of impugning, or
even entertaining doubts of the soundness of any
good old maxim that may seem to have received
the sanction of wiser heads than I ever expect mine
to become, even in these ready-made-knowledgedays.
But there is one thing which has been much
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
advocated by doctors and moralists, (not, I suspect,
without sinister motives on the part of the former,)
namely, “early rising,” which I never could see
the utility of, and which has only to be placed in a
proper light to show at once its folly and impropriety.
Let the merits of the case be examined. It is
the custom of those who defend this baneful practice
to appeal rather to the fancy than the reason,
and to sketch a highly romantic and altogether
ideal picture of the pleasures of early rural walks,
&c. They talk of green fields, purling streams,
warbling birds, and healthful breezes, invariably
winding up with a florid description of the glories
of the rising sun. Now I myself, from dear-bought
experience, happen to know something of these
matters; for though, with one exception, I have
not seen the sun rise for many years, yet in early
life, when I “thought as a child and acted as a
child,” I was seduced by empty rhodomontade, to
adopt the pernicious practice of early rising, until a
heavy cold, caught by roaming about the fields at
an unseasonable hour in search of health and
mushrooms, settled upon my lungs, and came
pretty near making my early rising a prelude to an
early grave.—But suppose a man up and dressed
before the sun, (and here I will not dwell upon the
-- 053 --
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soft, delicious slumbers that have been broken and
frighted away by his harsh and unnatural conduct,)
suppose him up, dressed, out of the house
and away to the fields. When he gets there, these
fields are, to be sure, green enough—rankly green,
but the dares not venture into one of them; or if he
does, especially should the grass be luxuriant, he
might just as well go a bathing with his nether
garments on: he dares not pluck a wild flower
from the hedge-side, for on approaching he finds
that
“Black snails and white,
Blue snails and gray,”
are pursuing their slimy peregrinations in every
direction; the birds do not warble at that early
hour, but on leaving their warm nests, flit uneasily
from bush to bush, shaking their plumage, and
twittering in a way certainly not calculated to raise
his feelings to any ecstatic pitch. Even the cows,
whose slumbers he has disturbed, arise slowly and
sullenly from their damp couch, look grimly at the
worshipper of nature, and proceed, in a discontented
manner, to slake their thirst by nibbling the grass.
These discomforts probably rather damp his feelings,
and he proceeds forthwith to select a dry spot
on the turnpike-road, where he stands, with his
-- 054 --
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hands in his pocket, gaping at the sun getting up,
and fancying himself very much delighted; though
everybody knows, that for richness and beauty one
sunset is worth a dozen sunrises. After this he
makes it a point of duty to walk and lounge about
for three or four hours, leaning over some farmer's
gate-way watching the chickens, with their eyes
half open, picking up stray worms, or the ducks
gobbling houseless snails, when he goes home
wet and weary, and finds the sensible part of the
family enjoying themselves with toast and coffee.
As all foolish persons dislike to confess their folly,
he proceeds to state that he has had “such a charming
walk!” thereby not only sinning his miserable
soul before breakfast, and giving the father of lies
a decided advantage for the rest of the day, but
inducing other unsuspicious victims to follow his
scandalous example.
There is more truth than poetry in this plain
statement of the case, which will be found correct
nine times out of ten, even in the most favorable
season of the year—summer; what then must an
early morning's walk be through the chills and
drizzle of spring or the substantial fogs of autumn?
As for winter, the idea of a man leaving his warm
bed, and wading through ice and snow without the
prospect of any thing but a frost-bitten nose, is so
-- 055 --
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abhorrent to the natural and common feelings of
humanity, that it may well be doubted whether
any one but an hypochondriac or a lunatic could
execute or conceive such a measure.
Can any thing be more preposterous than the
advice not unfrequently given, to “go to bed with
the sun and get up with the sun?” It is clearly
contrary to the visible intentions of Providence.
Before the sun rises, the night dews lie heavy on
field and forest. Nature is drenched: and the sun
is kindly sent forth, as it were, to mop up the world,
and make the earth dry and comfortable before it
is necessary for its tenant, man, to come abroad.
With his warm beams he proceeds in the work of
exsuction, and draws up all the raw and unhealthy
vapors out of our way: and any man who unnecessarily
intrudes himself into his presence when
thus transacting his morning's business, well deserves
what he generally gets, a chilly reception and
an inflammation of the lungs. Yet people will
punish themselves in this way, and bear it all as
if they were suffering in a good cause! If you
remonstrate with them on their folly, they will take
pen, ink, and paper, and prove to you, by the rules
of arithmetic, how many years of active existence
a man adds to his natural life by getting up regularly
four hours before the rest of his fellow-mortals,
-- 056 --
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only forgetting to deduct the four hours he loses by
going to bed that much sooner, in order to indulge
his strange, out-of-the-way propensities.
If a cause is to be judged by its advocates, few, I
believe, would stand worse than early rising. You
never meet with what is called “a good fellow”
among early risers. It is either your old bachelor,
who is, to be sure, more excusable than any other
class of men; or your morose worldly husband,
who prides himself on his domestic virtues, because
he sleeps over the fire after supper, and goes to bed
at nine o'clock; or your thin, bilious, poetical and
dyspeptic youth, who fancies he is an admirer of
nature, and therefore comes abroad to see her in
her most disagreeable forms, and also to beget an
appetite for an extra egg or an additional muffin at
breakfast. But the most amusing thing is, the
credit such people take to themselves for these departures
from the ordinary regulations of society.
They invariably narrate the history of their morning
exploits to one who loves his bed with an air
of conscious rectitude, and with that
“sort of satisfaction,
Men feel when they have done a virtuous action,”
though wherein consists the virtue of one man putting
on his clothes three or four hours before
-- 057 --
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another, I am utterly unable to conjecture. But so it
is, and they pride themselves upon it, as if it were
one of the cardinal virtues, and like charity, covered
a multitude of sins.
My prejudices against this habit were greatly
augmented by the shock my feelings received from
witnessing it carried into effect on a highly improper
occasion. I was, a summer or two ago, invited
to a wedding, a few miles in the country, having
an off-hand acquaintance with both bride and bridegroom.
The former was very pretty and agreeable,
the latter very pedantic and disagreeable.
Many people thought him a genius, and he himself
inclined to that opinion. He was busy with
an epic poem, was an inflexible early riser, and invariably
ate dyspepsia crackers at breakfast. His
conversation always turned upon one subject, which
was himself. This subject he divided into two parts,
one of which was an unsparing narrative of his
literary labors, and the other, a particular account
of the state of his stomach. How he had contrived
to steer between these two divisions, and carry on
“his whole course of wooing,” I cannot comprehend.
Be that as it might, a set of joyous spirits
were congregated together at the wedding party.
The wine circled gaily, and the song and jest passed
merrily round. At a reasonable hour the ladies
-- 058 --
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and junior and senior gentlemen retired, leaving
about a dozen of us too well contented with things
as they were to think of leaving them so soon.
Time flew unheeded by, and the bright sun and
four o'clock in the morning found us singing in
full chorus,
“Fly not yet, 'tis just the hour!”
when happening to cast my eye into the garden,
judge of my surprise at beholding our friend the
“gay bridegroom,” perambulating the gravel walk
a little way from the house. Struck with astonishment,
I spoke not a word, but rushed from the
room and made towards him, filled with fearful
forebodings of some dire mishap. On my anxiously
inquiring what was the matter, he seemed surprised
at the question, and civilly stated “that nothing
was the matter—that four o'clock was his usual
time for getting up—that he found it conducive to
health—that he had eaten three quarters of an
ounce too much at supper—that the rising sun was
a glorious spectacle, and that nothing aided the
digestive powers so much as an early walk.” As
he proceeded I looked in the reptile's inanimate
face—there was not a spark of fire in his dull gray
eye, his turned-up conceited-looking nose was tipped
with blue, and I thought of the truth of what
-- 059 --
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the scripture says, “we are but clay.” I remonstrated
with him on the brutality and cruelty of his
conduct; but he seemed to have no notion of endangering
his health for the satisfaction of any
created being; and I left the animal, or rather vegetable,
sticking among the cabbages, admiring the
beauties of nature, while I betook myself to my
alas! solitary pillow.
In the course of time two events occurred, one of
which did not surprise me—the other did. My
friend, the bridegroom's wife, insisted on a separate
maintenance, and my friend, the bridegroom, published
a volume of poems, which, upon opening, to
my utter amazement, I found were almost all on
amatory subjects. He discoursed of “love and
dove,” and “kiss and bliss,” and strolls by moonlight,
(he always went to bed at ten,) and ardent
hopes and fiery passions, in a way that would have
outdone Catullus and Thomas Moore, only that his
were merely words without ideas, which certainly
improved the innocence of the poems, however it
might destroy their effect. There were also two or
three bacchanalian songs, concerning “circling
cups” and “rosy wine,” (he always drank cinnamon
cordial diluted with water,) &c. &c. At the
time of receiving this, I was busy with “an essay
attempting to form a judgment of the characters of
-- 060 --
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authors from their works.” I read half a dozen of
my friend's poems, after which I folded up my manuscript,
laid it on the fire, and said nothing more
about the matter. Ever since that time I have
entertained a decided abhorrence of early rising in
every shape, and never contract an intimacy with
any man who gets up before six in summer and
seven in winter.
-- 061 -- p091-316
SUMMER.
[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]
The sultry summer days are come, the hottest of the year.
Of lemonade, and iced cream, and spruce and ginger beer;
Heaped in the wooden tea-gardens[2] the thirsty cits they drink,
Then from their pockets draw their hands and slowly pay their chink.
The cooling evening breeze comes not when the scorching sun has set.
And fat men wipe their face and cry
—“the warmest day as yet!”
It was clearly shown by Hone, on his trial for parodying
St. Athanasius's creed, that parodying any
thing did not necessarily infer disrespect towards
the thing parodied, and it is upon this ground that
I take the above liberty with the beautiful lines
of one of America's sweetest bards. Well, after a
long, dull, hot and cold, equivocal spring—summer,
fervid summer, has come in earnest. The
minds of the citizens area at length relieved from the
-- 062 --
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uncertainty which for two months pervaded them,
namely, whether to fling the windows open, or
order fire to be put into the grate; and the last
slight lingering tinge of morning or evening chill
has vanished away. Phœbus, for half the day now
glares fiercely and intensely upon Broadway, and
the hot flag-stones, retaining and reflecting his
beams, burn the soles and crack the upper-leathers
of the many boots and shoes that pass over them.
The tide of emigration has set strongly in from the
south, and sultry-looking planters are obliged to
walk in the vicinity of dandy negroes, which by
no means tends to cool their tempers. As the year
rolls on, things good and bad come mingled together—
fruit and flowers and drouth and dust—
cloudless days and sleepless nights—scorching suns
and southern breezes—musquitoes and Clara Fisher.
A given quantity of prose and poetry, setting forth
the good and bad qualities of spring, summer, autumn,
and winter, is as periodical as the seasons.
Spring seems to be the favorite of the poets, who
themselves, for the most part, live upon hopes and
promises, rather than substantialities, and have
therefore a very natural sympathy with this very
promising season. There certainly is something
delightful in the general awakening of nature from
the long dead sleep of winter; and the first
-- 063 --
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blossoming of the flowers, the first warbling of the
birds, and the genial warmth and freshness of the
first spring days bear an inexpressible charm along
with them; but to a worldly and unromantic disposition,
partial to palpable realities, the taste of
fruit is more acceptable than the scent of flowers,
and a promise of a good thing not so good as the
good thing itself. In so far summer is better than
spring; but, in truth, despite of a calm temper and
a thin jacket, the weather is horribly, I may say,
awfully hot. Ladies are seen gliding down Broad-way
clad in garments of “woven winds,” and gentlemen
go perspiring and glistening along in white
jean. Now are thick tufts of hair upon the cheeks
found to be a serious inconvenience, and lo, the
whiskerless rejoice! Now is the mercury in the
sun at a fearful altitude, and the corporation are
above fever-heat in the shade. Now are the citizens
bent upon imparting useful information, and,
as they meet, each “shakes his fellow by the
hand,” and says unto him—“this is hot weather,”
to which the other responds—“it is so!” and they
pass on their way. Now do people, contrary to all
custom, wish for “cold comfort,” desiring, like King
John, to be “comforted with cold.” Now do the
engine-men on board of steam-boats think lightly
of the feats of Monsieur Chabert, the fire-king,
-- 064 --
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wistfully do they gaze upon the river; and if a hissing,
fizzing, whizzing sound is heard in the water, the
captain cries out, “a man overboard!” Now do
stout gentlemen, after a hearty dinner, look as if
they were going through the process of distillation,
“larding the lean earth as they walk along.” And
now three impertinent questions in succession from
any man is a legitimate excuse for assassination.
Now are all kinds of fiery, passionate writing in
disrepute, and Captain Parry's “Narrative of an
Expedition to the North Pole” meets with a ready
sale; and now do worthy editors unfeelingly request
their correspondents to put pen to paper and draw
forth the fevered thoughts of their fermenting
brains. Now may all people, who persist in drinking
unmixed brandy or Irish whiskey, be given up
by the “Temperance Society.” Now are those
who talk wrathful politics kicked out of society,
and tragedy is eschewed as tending to heat the
blood. Now do people prefer broiling at the springs
to broiling in the city, and travel post-haste to keep
themselves cool and comfortable, though, at the
same time, an account in the newspapers of a man
having voluntarily run a mile in ten minutes would
be regarded as apocryphal. Now do editors cease
to threaten to horsewhip each other, and a sedate
drowsiness pervades their columns. And now
-- 065 --
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young ladies who are obliged to behave decorously,
and mind their p's and q's in the presence of old
withered maiden aunts on whom heat makes no
more impression than on an Arab of the desert, are
in a very uncomfortable situation. Now are long
stories unlistened to and cayenne pepper disused.
Now do cooks blaspheme, and dealers in fish and
other perishable commodities are troubled in spirit.
And now, in short, do nearly all the ills that heat
can engender, afflict the perspiring inhabitants of
this republic. My advice to them is—be patient
and winter will come; or, what is equally to the
purpose, though better expressed by some great
moralist or other—“be virtuous, and you will be
happy!”
eaf091v2.n2[2] The term “wooden tea-gardens” may not be understood by some,
but there are several such places in this city. The garden is composed
of a number of small wooden boxes, in which all kinds of beverages
are drunk excepting tea.
-- 066 -- p091-321
THE EPICUREAN: A GASTRONOMIC TALE, INTERSPERSED WITH SUTTABLE REFLECTIONS.
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
The qualms or raptures of your blood
Rise in proportion to your food;
And if you would improve your thought,
You must be fed as well as taught.
—Prior
It was on the evening of a dull, damp, dreary,
weary, melancholy, miserable day, towards the
latter end of November, when Titus Dodds, esq.,
of Cornhill, merchant, closed his counting-house
door, and proceeded homeward to his residence, No.
42 Brooke-street, High Holborn, in quest of palatable
nutriment. The prospect before him was any
thing but alluring. All surrounding substances,
animate and inanimate, wore a most wretched and
wo-begone aspect. The streets were greasy and
slippery, the half-washed houses looked lonely and
cheerless, while the Bank, the Mansion House, the
Exchange, and other awkward and well-smoked
-- 067 --
[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]
edifices, as seen by the equivocal light of four
o'clock, presented a peculiarly grim and repulsive
appearance. The chilly, drizzly atmosphere penetrated
to the very marrow of the shivering citizens
as they crawled along to their respective domiciles,
causing the most unpleasant alterations in the “human
face divine;” cheeks and noses exchanged
their appropriate tints; and many well-meaning,
inoffensive people, whom their worst enemies could
not charge with literary propensities, looked intensely
blue. The shopmen sat behind their deserted
counters, buried in profound meditation;
street minstrels, vocal and instrumental, suspended
their unfeeling persecutions; the starved, gaunt,
miserable hackney and stage horses, from whose
spavined limbs the “speed of thought” had long
since departed, stood trembling, and ruminating
doubtless on the “flowery fields and pastures
green” of their infancy; while their red-visaged
proprietors clustered together in small groups around
the doors of the adjacent gin-shops, in impatient
expectation of a customer.
“A coach, sir, a coach!” cried a dozen voices,
as Mr. Dodds approached; but he strode onward
without deigning a reply, followed by the bitter
maledictions of his disappointed fellow-creatures.
But it is time some explanation was entered into
-- 068 --
[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]
of the character and habits of the hero of this history.
Mr. Titus Dodds was a plain, honest, kind-hearted,
sensible-enough sort of man. When a
census of the population of the metropolis was
taken, he counted one; but excepting on those occasions,
never attempted to cut a figure in the
world. If one asked his opinion respecting the domestic
and foreign policy of the cabinet, he used to
reply, that he was no politician; if another requested
his views upon controversial points of religion,
he would answer, that he was no theologian; and
if any one desired to know his opinion concerning
the probability of finding a passage round the North
Pole, he would say, he thought it likely it might be
discovered some time or other, adding, however, by
way of qualification, that it was a great chance if
it ever were. Holding these inoffensive tenets respecting
law, divinity, politics, and science, and
professing a total ignorance of poetry and the fine
arts, he managed to get through the world with
considerable ease and comfort to himself, and little
or no inconvenience to his neighbors. As he was
provided with an heiress to his small property, he
was not troubled with the civilities and delicate attentions
of friends and relatives; and as he made
it a rule to keep out of debt, few people, of course,
felt an interest in his fate.
-- 069 --
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Such was the appearance which Mr. Dodds presented
to the superficial observer; and such indeed
was his real character, as far as it went; but beneath
all this placidity and quiescence lurked strong
passions—ardent desires—unconquerable longings.
It seemed as if all the sharp points of his character
had flown off and concentrated themselves under
one particular head. The fact is, Mr. Dodds liked
his dinner; so much so, indeed, that were I inclined
“to waver in my faith
And hold opinion with Pythagoras,”
I should surmise that the soul of the famous Parisian
gourmand, the Abbe C.[3] after quitting the body
of that dignitary, had crossed the channel, made
the best of its way to Brooke-street, High Holborn,
and taken up its residence, for the time being, in the
-- 070 --
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
person of Mr. Titus Dodds. He was none of your
showy, superficial fellows, that dilate with counterfeit
rapture upon the pleasures of the table merely
to gain credit for superior discrimination and delicacy
of palate; he was none of your gastronomic
puppies, that prate everlastingly of the impropriety
and horrid vulgarity of brown meats and white
wines—of the indelicacy of cheese, and the enormity
of malted liquors. No—he was a man who
had a real, simple, and sincere love for the birds of
the air, the beasts of the field and the forest, and
the fish of the seas, rivers, lakes, and fresh-water
streams; and one gifted at the same time by nature,
with an eminently lively sense of the pleasing
essences and grateful flavors which are capable of
being extracted therefrom. He did not like or dislike—
or admire or abhor, according to the caprices
or mutabilities of fashion. His tastes were formed
by long experience, aided by much patient, minute,
and subtle, though quiet and unobtrusive analyzation
and investigation; and provided his dinner
was to his liking, he cared little of what metallic
substances those modern substitutes for fingers,
yclept forks, were composed, or whether the number
of their prongs corresponded with the prevalent
notions of propriety on that subject. In fact, he
was that rare thing—an independent man, without
-- 071 --
[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]
the slightest taint of obstinacy or stubbornness.
Though not above learning from, he was no slave
to the dogmas of cookery books; he honored their
authors—he respected the labor and research displayed
in their pages; but their most specious or
authoritative doctrines were alike insufficient to
shake his principles or unsettle his ideas of right
and wrong. Like a wise man, he ate what he
liked best, cooked as he liked it best, without the
slightest reference to what the world in general, or
his friends in particular, might say about the
matter.
To a philanthropist—to a man with an enlarged
love for the human species, a Howard or a Shelly,
it would have been a pleasing sight to see Mr. Titus
Dodds, after the honorable fatigues of the day, sit
down to what he most worshipped—ducks stuffed
or impregnated with onions. To have marked the
smile of calm though intense satisfaction which
overspread the countenance of the good, middle-aged
man, as he gazed upon them;—to have noticed
the waters of pleasure involuntarily overflowing
his eyes and trickling down his cheeks, as the
delicious though pungent odors emitted from his
favorites, steamed round his head and proceeded
up his olfactory department to his brain;—to have
listened to the long-drawn sigh (certainly not of
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
sorrow,) with which he eased his o'erfraught breast,
as he drew himself up to carve;—to have observed
the slowness, or additional emphasis, with which
he masticated the choice morsels—all this, I say,
would have done their hearts good, and would have
convinced even the veriest misanthrope, that the
world was not altogether the huge den of misery
which he took it to be; but that even the most
humble and unknown individuals have often
sources of pleasure within themselves, of some sort
or other, which enable them to bear the burden of
life with resignation, and lay it down at last, like
the misanthrope himself, with reluctance.
Titus Dodds (as has been previously mentioned,)
was a man in easy circumstances, yet he had not
often ducks for dinner. If any are curious to know
the reason, it will be a sufficient reply—at least to
the matrimonial portion of the querists—to state
that Mr. Dodds was a married man. Mrs. Dodds
was by no means a contradictious or contumacious
helpmate; but still she had a will of her own; and
in addition to this, notions had been infused into
her by Mrs. Alderman Scales, the butcher's wife,
regarding the extreme vulgarity of such a dish;
and though Mrs. Dodds was a woman under the
middle stature, she perfectly detested any thing low.
Touching the onions, she was peculiarly pathetic
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
in her remonstrances, inasmuch as they frequently
brought tears to her eyes; but Titus was firm, and
occasionally carried his point. He had succeeded
in doing so on the day on which our story commences
(and ends,) and the last words that ran
along the passage, as he closed the door after him
in the morning, were—“precisely at five.”
But to return to Mr. Dodds, whom we left just
entering Cheapside. Scarcely had he proceeded as
far as Bow Church, when the dense fog, which had
been brooding over the city for the last twelve
hours, and resting itself on the tops of the more
elevated buildings, came tumbling down all at
once, bringing with it the whole of that day's
smoke, which had been vainly endeavoring, since
the first fire was lighted in the morning, to ascend
to its usual station in the atmosphere. As soon as
this immense funereal pall was spread over the city,
things fell, as was naturally to be expected, into
immediate and irremediable confusion. Pedestrian
bore violently down upon pedestrian, and equestrian
came in still more forcible contact with equestrian.
Cart overturned cart—coach ran against coach—
shafts were broken—wheels torn off—windows
stove in; passengers shouted and screamed, and
the language of the drivers, though copious and
flowing, became characterized rather by energy
-- 074 --
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than elegance. But a London fog cannot be described.
To be appreciated it must be seen, or
rather felt; for it is altogether impossible to be clear
and lucid on such a subject. It is the only thing
which gives you an idea of what Milton meant
when he talked of “darkness visible.” There is a
kind of light, to be sure, but it only serves as a medium
for a series of optical delusions; and for all
useful purposes of vision, the deepest darkness that
ever fell from the heavens is infinitely preferable. A
man perceives a coach a dozen yards off, and a
single stride brings him among the horses' feet,—
he sees a gas-light faintly glimmering (as he thinks)
at a distance, but scarcely has he advanced a step
or two towards it, when he becomes convinced of
its actual station by finding his head rattling against
the post; and as for attempting, if you get once
mystified, to distinguish one street from another, it
is ridiculous to think of such a thing.
At the end of Cheapside there was a grand concussion
of wheeled vehicles, and Mr. Dodds found
some difficulty in preserving that intimate connexion
which had so long satisfactorily subsisted between
his mortal and immortal parts. The danger
of being jostled, overturned, and trodden under foot,
confused, unsettled, and perturbed his local ideas
considerably, so that, instead of holding his way
-- 075 --
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along Newgate-street, in a westerly direction, he
pointed his nose due north, (up Aldersgate-street)
and followed it according to the best of his ability.
“They will be overdone!” soliloquized Titus;
and he groped vigorously forward, until, as the
clock struck the appointed hour of five, he found
himself at the Angel at Islington, just about as far
from his domicile as when he left his counting-house.
There are limits to the power of language,
and therefore I shall leave Mr. Dodds's state of
mind, on making this singular discovery, to the
imagination of the reader. But there was no time
to be lost. He struck his ratan on the pavement,
wiped the perspiration from his forehead, inquired
out, as his nearest way, St. John's-street Road, and
plunged at once into its mysterious recesses. 'Twere
painful and vain to tell of his dismal and dubious
wanderings in those complex regions which lie
between the aforesaid road and Gray's Inn; suffice
it to say, that he at length succeeded in reaching
the latter, and began once more to entertain
hopes of seeing his home again, when he became
aware of something in his path, and a voice from
the mist thus broke upon his ear:—
“Heaven bless your honour! poor Pat O'Connor,
Ploughing on the sea,
Lost his precious sight, by lightning in the night!
Poor Pat O'Connor begs for charity!
Ah! give him one poor halfpenny!”
-- 076 --
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Mr. Dodds was a patriotic man; in his way; and
a disabled prop of the naval power of his country
seldom appealed to him in vain, but, on this occasion,
he passed on, and the man with no eyes
paused in his strain to bestow a passing benediction
on those of Mr. Dodds.
“For the love of mercy spare a trifle to a poor
widow with seven small children,” said a miserable
object seated on a door-step. Mr. Dodds was a charitable
man, but he delayed not.
“Mind that are puddle, sir, and valk over this
'ere plank,” vociferated a little scrub-headed urchin,
the proprietor of a frail deal board, which he had
placed across “the meeting of the waters” from two
or three street-ends, to benefit travelers, and serve
his own pecuniary purposes. Titus did so, and
passed over the confluence of the kennels dry-shod.
“Remember the accommodation plank, sir,” bawled
the boy, half-imploringly, half-indignantly, as he
perceived Mr. Dodds's body in motion on the opposite
side. Dodds was far from being an ungrateful
man, but he sought not for copper. At length,
panting, wearied, worried, and worn out, he found
himself, as the clock struck six, at Middle Row,
Holborn, a full quarter of a mile from his habitation.
A skilful portraiture of human suffering, up to a
certain point, is far from unpleasing, and rather
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beneficial, arousing, as it does, the hidden sympathies
of our nature which might otherwise remain
dormant; but when it passes this point, when it
becomes of agonizing intenseness, minute description
is then shocking and repulsive. We will, therefore,
quit Mr. Dodds for the present, and shift the
scene to his residence.
The accumulated wisdom of ages has recorded
that there is nothing so deceitful as appearances.
The chilliness and serenity of the outside of Mount
Etna give not the slightest hint of the volcanic fires
roaring and raging within; and as little did the
demure, quiet appearance of 42 Brooke-street, High
Holborn, betoken the agitation which prevailed
therein. The causes of this agitation were threefold.
Mr. Dodds, as has been before stated, ordered
dinner precisely at five, and as his wife, clock, and
cook, were tolerably well regulated, there was a reasonable
prospect of his saying grace about that time.
But wives are not infallible—clocks are not chronometers—
cooks are not impeccable. Mrs. D. had
been flatteringly invited to give her opinion upon
some new purchases of Flander's lace, made by her
neighbor Mrs. Blenkinsopp. Where lives the woman
that can tear herself from lace? The consequence
was, that Mrs. Dodds was half an hour
past her time in issuing her orders to the cook; the
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cook was discussing the benefits derivable from triennial
parliaments with the aforesaid Mrs. Blenkinsopp's
housemaid, who was a septennialist, and a
quarter of an hour more was lost without settling
the question after all. To crown the whole, the
clock, which had heretofore conducted itself in a
commendable manner, thought proper to come to
a full stop, and ten minutes elapsed before the cook
was aware of the resolution it had taken. As soon
as Mrs. Dodds became fully conscious of this unfortunate
concurrence of circumstances, the house, as
the saying is, “was hardly large enough to hold
her,” although it contained many apartments of
respectable proportions.
What a short-sighted creature is man! He knows
not what is best for him. Had Mr. Dodds only been
aware of these seeming misfortunes, how would he
have felicitated himself on this eventful evening.
Seven minutes had now elapsed since the authoritative
voice of St. Giles's had bawled out to the
surrounding districts, “six o'clock,” and Mrs. Dodds
began to be seriously alarmed at the most unaccountable
absence of Mr. Dodds; so much so, indeed,
that faint visions of the unbecomingness of
widow's caps kept involuntarily flitting across her
imagination. Being a notable, prudent personage,
she placed her smelling-bottle on the table, laid her
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white muslin-cambric handkerchief beside it, and
arranged the easy armchair at a convenient distance
so that she might not be found altogether
unprepared, in case it was announced to her that
she was a desolate woman. Just at this juncture,
however, the street-door opened, and a heated, flurried,
perspiring piece of animated nature, bearing a
striking resemblance to Mr. Dodds, rushed in, and
made the best of its way to the drawing-room,
but nothing (at least to the purpose) met its eager
glance.
“They can never have eaten them,” exclaimed
Dodds, (for it was he)—“Oh no, no, no!—they
could not, would not, durst not!”—and, without
tarrying for the slow medium of servants, in order
to effect a communication with Mrs. Dodds, away
he sallied, in order to know the worst at once, in
quest of his stray lamb—or, to speak with greater
agricultural precision, his ewe, for she was long past
the flowery days of lambhood.
“Titus Dodds!” cried Mrs. Dodds, (she called
him “Titus” in her loving or juvenile moods;
“Dodds,” when she wished to be familiar; “Mr.
Dodds,” when she was ill-tempered or imperious,
and “Titus Dodds,” when she aimed at being singularly
impressive,) “Titus Dodds, where have you
been?”
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“It matters not,” replied Titus, in a tremulous
voice, “it matters not! I suppose all is over, and
there is nothing but cold meat in the house—well,
well!”
Far be it from me to violate the sanctity of domestic
privacy, by detailing the conversation which
ensued. It is sufficient to say that a mutual and
satisfactory explanation took place—the ducks were
finally served up, done to a turn, and Titus Dodds
was indeed a happy gentleman. The partner of
his past life contemplated the subdued rapture depicted
in the countenance of the man of her choice,
as if she were very well satisfied with the turn
affairs had taken; while their pretty daughter
Bessy, a lively girl, with an amazing relish for a
piece of snug humor, paused in the midst of a cut
off the breast, took in the pleasantry of the scene
at a glance, and then went on with her occupation.
It was, as I said before, a scene that a philanthropist
would, indeed, have gloried in contemplating.
“Oh happiness! our being's end and aim!”
how strangely and incongruously dost thou mix
thyself up with the fabric of things! Wealth and
power, and glory, ofttimes give thee not, and yet thou
may'st be extracted (as has been shown) from even
the commonest commodities. Independent
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creature!—the high and mighty magnates of the earth
command thee to their footstools, but thou turnest
up thy nose, and strayest away unto some peasant's
homely hearth; and, when it so pleaseth thee, thou
leavest the emperor on his throne, the peer in his
palace, the beauty in the ball room, and takest up
thy abode in uninviting habitations, amid the nameless
children of obscurity. Democratic divinity! I
gratefully worship thee, for I am even now sensible
of thy presence; and it may be, that thou hast, this
very night, deserted the luscious soups and fragrant
wines of some luxurious alderman, to hover over the
simple mutton-chop and sparkling bottled ale, that
await my acceptance, as soon as I have attached
my brief and insignificant signature to this humble
tale, destitute of a plot and unprotected by a moral.
eaf091v2.n3[3] The Abbe C. doated on asparagus cooked with oil; the Abbe D.
doated on asparagus cooked with butter. The Abbe D. called to dine
with the Abbe C. when he had only a limited quantity of asparagus in
the house, and no more was to be procured. They had been companions
and friends from boyhood, and might be said, (figuratively) to
have but one heart. What was to be done? The Abbe C. with more
than Roman magnanimity, ordered half the asparagus to be cooked
with oil—half with butter. Scarcely was the mandate issued, when
the Abbe D. who was an apoplectic subject, took a fit and instantly expired
in the sight of his agonized brother. What did the Abbe C. do
in this case? With admirable presence of mind he flew to the head of
the stairs and bawled to the cook—“do it all in oil—do it all in oil!”
-- 082 -- p091-337
TOBACCO.
[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]
In all countries, Christian, Mahomedan, Jewish and
Pagan, some foolish abomination or other has, in
the dark ages, sprung up amongst the people, no
one knows how, and been perpetuated, no one knows
why. It is not my intention to illustrate the art of
spinning-out in writing, and impose upon the public
by entering into minute details, and citing grave
authorities from cyclopædias, to show how the followers
of the prophet first came to eat opium, the
inhabitants of Cochin China whang-te, or any other
parallel case, but confine myself closely to the subject
more immediately under consideration—a subject
which, it may be said, is in every man's mouth,
and “comes home to the bosom and business of
all.”
It is strange what a strong propensity nature
has implanted in the human species, from infancy
to old age, to convey all sorts of substances into
-- 083 --
[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]
that orifice which serves as a port of entry for the
stomach. Even the small weeping and wailing
babe, no sooner grasps with its tiny and unsteady
hand any thing eatable, than its cries are stilled, and
it carries it instinctively to its mouth; while, beyond
all question, a mother's most infallible recipe for assuaging
the grief of the hardy urchins around her,
is a substantial slice of bread and butter. It is pleasant
to note the sudden transition from grief, or
rather mechanical crying, to joy, which takes place
in a little fellow as soon as a pacifying piece of victuals
is placed in his hand. How his face lightens
up, and his bright eyes sparkle and glisten through
the moisture which overflows them, while ever and
anon the “big round tears” unconsciously leave his
silken eyelashes, and
“Course one another down his innocent nose.”
It is a pretty study for a painter. The capacities
for eating possessed by young children at a tender
age are immense—many of the young rouges will
continue stuffing from the rising to the going
down of the sun, with a gusto calculated to excite
the astonishment of an epicure and the horror of a
valetudinarian. The swallowing capabilities of a
man, however, are by no means so great, though
his early objections to letting his jaw-bones remain
-- 084 --
[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]
in a quiescent state continue equally strong; he has,
therefore, adopted various ways of indulging this
propensity without danger to himself, and among
these, masticating tobacco stands strikingly conspicuous
in this section of the globe. To such an
extent is this carried, that not only are thousands of
acres of fertile land devoted to the purpose of raising
it, but ships are fitted out and sent across
the ocean; and men, esteemed by statesmen and
philosophers of an inferior order on account of their
color, are torn from their home and wives and children,
in order to cultivate a weed for other men of
another color to put into their mouths and then take
out again!
To me tobacco appears a very unodoriferous and
anti-poetical substance. To rebut the latter charge
it may be urged that Byron, the greatest poet of
the age, was partial to it; but it must be remembered
that Byron used it only as a medicine—
an antidote to rotundity—in small round balls,
in order to allay the pangs of hunger when his
lordship chose to fast, to prevent his growing,
like Falstaff, “out of all compass—out of all reasonable
compass.” No—tobacco is death to poetry
and poetical associations wherever it comes in
contact with them. Fancy, for an instant, a fine
clear sabbath morn in some of the snug sheltered
-- 085 --
[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]
villages on the Connecticut river, the bell from
the simple spire summoning the hardy yeomanry,
far and near, to the house of prayer. Fancy a venerable
old man trudging along the narrow pathway
that runs winding through the sweet-scented meadows
which lie betwixt his home and the spot consecrated
to the service of his Maker, with his smiling
happy family tripping gaily at his heels. He feels
the benign influence of nature in the balmy air,
and is glad, though he almost deems cheerfulness
a sin at such a time, while the rising generation
find their hearts leaping with frolic glee as the
delicious southern breeze, laden with the merry
music of birds and the breath of flowers, comes
sweeping over the bold hills and beautiful valleys.
There is poetry, deep and pure, in such a sight.
But suppose, for an instant, the old man, or any
part of the male progeny, “chew”—faugh! what
a jar it gives the feelings—it is like a discord in a
strain of music, or a blot from a sign-painter's brush
on one of Turner's landscapes. It brings you at
once from the poetry of life to the harsh prose—
the scurvy reality—and you see nothing but an old
farmer and his tobacco-munching sons lounging
along, employed in transferring large quantities of
that detestable weed from one side of their mouths
to the other, and ever and anon staining the bright
-- 086 --
[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]
young grass and pretty wild-flowers with their impure
squirtations as they pass on their way.
Much is said of the influence which females exercise
in this country, but it is, we fear, over-rated.
Powerful as may be their commands and entreaties,
and strong as may be their charms; it is
reasonable to suppose that the charms of tobacco
are still stronger, or they would doubtless have
banished it from civilized society long ere this. It is
shocking to think of a delicate creature with lips
“like two young rose-leaves torn,” having them at
any time come in contact with those attached to
what out of courtesy is called the mouth of a man,
but which, in reality, is nothing better than a damp
tobacco-box. Yet there is much kissing going on
in the world for all this.
It is curious what strange and childish notions
will perpetuate an evil. Drinking, gambling, &c.
are enticing in the first instance, but all agree that
the use of tobacco is dreadfuly disagreeable to the
young beginner; yet boys will imitate the actions
of men; unfortunately it is considered manly to
swear, drink mint juleps, eat tobacco, and smoke
cigars; and thousands of beardless, puny creatures
are led away by the desire to appear older than they
are. Poor children! Why do not their parents
whip them and put them to bed early for doing
-- 087 --
[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]
such naughty, filthy tricks? Solomon says, “he that
spareth the rod spoileth the child;” and it would be
better for themselves and their offspring, if the worthy
inhabitants of this city would pay a little more respect
to Solomon's sayings; though, alas, with
what consistency can a man correct his son for the
very abominations he himself indulges in? It must
be left to that indefinite power of education which
it is the fashion of the hour to set forth as a remedy
for all disorders and irregularities. One thing is
clear; so much expectoration must be highly injurious
to half-grown boys, and many of them, with
wasp waists and the mere outlines of a face, look
as if the liquor they are so fond of extracting
had mingled with the current of their young blood,
and was the cause of tobacco-colored complexions.
We are very sorry for Messrs. Lorillard, but, as small
political editors with seventeen bad subscribers say—
“our duty to the public imperatively commands
us to speak out.”
-- 088 -- p091-343
BOY-MEN AND GIRL-WOMEN.
[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]
These are two species of the human family not
yet distinctly classed or named by naturalists, and
must, therefore, be designated by compounds. The
individuals which compose them, are hovering between
the last stages of boy and girlhood, and the
first dawnings of a more mature state of existence
full-grown children, or incipient men and women.
They are the unfinished portions of humanity
which poets and sentimentalists have, from time
immemorial, sung and said so much about, though
for what especial reason is more than many worldly
people are able to discover. Poets are fine fellows;
but a love of truth, or a desire to represent things
as they really are, is not to be found in the list of
their good qualities. They warp and twist their
materials, to suit their own purposes, more than a
theological disputant or a petty sessions lawyer, and
build a towering structure on a slighter foundation
-- 089 --
[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]
than a purblind antiquary. They are much given
to the use of hypotheses; and after they have once
supposed that a thing can be so, they immediately
set it down that it is so. Exaggeration is another
of their foibles:—with them a glimpse of goodness
signifies perfection, and a glimmering of sin the
essence of iniquity; and it is in consequence of this
that they come to make such delightful and diabolical
pictures out of nothing at all. Some of the
cleverest of them have, at one period or other of
their lives, met with two or three charming young
girls, just “bursting into womanhood,” or a few intelligent
boys, and, being great generalizers, they
have taken it for granted that all were so; and
thus it has come to pass in English poetry, that
this is celebrated as the most delectable stage of
existence. It is a state that may or may not be
pleasant enough to those who are passing through
it, but it is by no means productive of much pleasure
and gratification to those with whom they come
in contact; and whatever prose or poetry may say
to the contrary, I think worldly experience will bear
me out in upholding that boy-men and girl-women,
are neither more nor less than bores of very considerable
magnitude.
The girl-woman is generally a rather pretty creature,
dressed in something between a frock and a
-- 090 --
[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]
gown, made of white muslin, with a pink sash
round her waist. Her face has lost the free and
unembarrassed expression of childhood, without
having obtained the self-possession and dignity of
woman. The graces of her person are as yet but
half developed; her shoulders are sharp and angular,
and her arms long and unpleasantly slender.
She is too mature to wear her hair in a crop, and
too childish to have it piled in towers of curls and
combs on the top of her head. Indeed, let her
dress be what it may, it appears alike unfit for the
stage through which she has just passed, or the one
on which she is about to enter. Her intellectual
faculties and conversation are in an equally uncertain
state; and the person who addresses her is sorely
puzzled how to hit the right medium between
juvenility and maturity. She has not made up her
mind whether she likes Byron or skipping-rope best;
but decidedly prefers Mrs. Opie to the author of
Waverley. If you talk of school, you offend her;
and yet she knows not how to discourse about any
thing else—so that all the conversation consists of
an abrupt observation and an embarrassed rejoinder.
If she can be prevailed upon to venture more than
six syllables at a time, she has a bad habit of speaking
unpleasant truths, and afterwards looking distressingly
conscious, not exactly knowing whether
-- 091 --
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
she has done right or wrong. She sits on her chair,
holding in one hand a white pocket-handkerchief,
and not a little perplexed what to do with the other;
with an eternal simper hanging around her mouth,
ready to be aggravated into a laugh upon the most
trivial occasion. If any body tells a joke with a
grave face, she looks grave too; but is mightily tickled
with the hymeneal allusions and matrimonial
witticisms of which the more mature part of the
company are delivered. She does not understand
or appreciate worldly knowledge, yet she has school
learning enough to find you out if you talk foolishly.
In short, she is altogether in a very unsettled state,
filled with childish reminiscences and womanly aspirations,
and is, when a man feels grave or low-spirited,
one of the most unendurable annoyances with
which he can well be afflicted.
But if your girl-woman is an undesirable individual,
your boy-man is one of the greatest nuisances
in civilized society. There is something
charming about the female sex at almost every period
of their existence; and even in town a very
young lady, though certainly a subject for apprehension,
has some redeeming points; while in the
country, after a scamper in the fields, or a chase
after a bird or butterfly, with her eyes filled with
fire and animation, her cheeks glowing with health
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
and exercise, her clustering curls dancing in the
wind, and her pretty bonnet hanging loosely and
carelessly on the back part of her head, she is a
truly beautiful and poetical object. But your boy-man
is a monster wherever you meet with him.
In the country he is an “unlicked cub,” a lout, a
bumpkin; in town, a half made up coxcomb, an
unfinished puppy, a thing with nearly all the vices
and follies of a man, without his sense or passions.
It is his oath that rings loudest in the tavern, and
his tongue that is most clamorous in its demands
for strong drink to destroy his puny constitution,
merely because he thinks it looks manly. He is
altogether a foolish and contemptible creature; for
even his vicious habits do not afford him pleasure.
He does not, like the real voluptuary, “roll sin like
a sweet morsel under his tongue;” but he counterfeits
bad habits, and will drink and smoke, though both
be unpleasant to him and make him sick, merely
because older people do so; and this it is which
prevents him from ever becoming what it is the
height of his ambition to appear—a man. Then the
swearing of these grown children is perfectly disgusting.
From a man, borne away by passion, or from
an old sailor, to whom it has become a trick of
custom, and who, moreover, seems a sort of perperson
privileged to wish his eyes no good, a few
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
anathemas do not come with so bad a grace; but
to hear these would-be men repeating, like parrots,
all the vulgar oaths that low blackguardism has invented
and perpetuated, merely because they have
arrived at the dignity of shaving, is very nauseous.
These too are the small fry that swarm about billiard-rooms
and theatre-lobbies; that open box-doors
and stand in the doorways adjusting their ringlets,
much to the discomfort of shivering ladies and rheumatic
old gentlemen, imagining all the time that
the eyes of the whole audience are turned to the
particular spot which they occupy. They are, indeed,
take them altogether, simply the most empty,
impudent, noisy, impertinent, obtrusive set of varlets
that can be imagined, and are not ashamed of
any thing—except having no whiskers.
-- 094 -- p091-349
OLD ENGLISH COMEDIES.
[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]
“Comedy is a graceful ornament to the civil order; the Corinthian
capital of polished society. Like the mirrors which have been added
to the sides of one of our theatres, it reflects the images of grace, of
gaiety, and of pleasure double, and completes the perspective of human
life.”
The above sentence, it is presumed, was written
with reference to the comedies that held possession
of the stage in the days of our unenlightened ancestors,
some century and a half ago; for, if applied
to the three and five-act farces which modern manufacturers
impudently baptize by the name of
“comedies,” and which the present generation are
well contented to receive as such, instead of a graceful
truth, it becomes a piece of caustic irony, from
the pointed severity of which neither the public nor
the playwrights of the year eighteen hundred and
twenty-nine have wherewithal to shield themselves.
Without at all canting about the “good old times,”
it must be conceded on all hands, that whatever
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
may have been the faults and deficiencies of our
ancestors, and however well assured the present
self-sufficient race of mortals may feel, of their general
superiority, they are at present at an immeasurable
distance behind them in every department of
dramatic literature, but more particularly in comedy.
Formerly a comedy was a work of genius—
a green leaf added to the literary coronal of the
land; it was then composed of sparkling wit and
rare invention—of characters rich and racy, yet natural;
and of incidents gay and sprightly, yet probable;
and was, indeed, a mirror to show “the very
age and body of the time, its form and pressure.”
Now, what is a comedy? Messrs. Morton, Peake,
and Poole can best answer that question. “Ay,
tell us that, and unyoke.” It is a thing where the
broad and coarse extravagancies of farce are jumbled
together with mawkish and lachrymose sentimentality,
where the characters are caricatures
vilely executed, and the incidents precisely such as
could not by any possibility ever have taken place—
where the dialogue consists of puns, slang, stray jests,
and flowers of rhetoric from the circulating libraries,
with a copious infusion of ordinary slip-slop conversation—
where the jokes are all practical, and stumbling
over a chair, or drawing out a ragged pockethandkerchief,
are among the happiest inventions of
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
the author; and though, at times, a few gleams of
humor may shine athwart the gloom, yet wit, who
is a little more aristocratical and choice in his company,
absents himself altogether. And what is it
that makes this farrago of abominations escape the
fate decreed against all sinful transgressions? It is
stage effect. To this every thing is sacrificed—
this the authors have studied, and this they understand,
and hence the secret of their disgraceful
success.
It is not meant, however, to be said, that this and
this alone strictly applies to the three gentlemen
mentioned above, though any one who will take
the trouble of reading their works, (particularly
Morton's) will find that a great part may be truly
applied to most of their productions. They are
mentioned by name because they are the three
best of the numerous herd of stage writers of the
present day; and Poole, in his Paul Pry, has even
given us a glimpse of better things. True, the dialogue
in that piece is meagre enough, but there is
a good deal of broad humor and no sentiment; the
situations are extremely laughable, and the character
of the inquisitive Mr. Pry himself very cleverly
sketched. It would be well if we had more
pieces like this, instead of such plays as “Town and
Country,” which Kean honored and brought into
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
notice by personating the mouthing and melancholy
hero, and which example many clever actors have
since inconsiderately followed.
But, alas! for the dashing gallants and wits that
glitter in the pages of Wycherly, Congreve, Vanburgh,
and Farquhar. Their day, it would seem,
is gone for ever; and what have we in their
place? Look at modern comedy, and in nine cases
out of ten you will find a variety of the “Tom and
Jerry” species for its hero;—some heedless spendthrift,
worthless but not witty enough for a rake;
who commits all sorts of folly with impunity through
the space of five acts, and then ends by laying his
five fingers on his bosom, and informing the dramatis
personæ in general, and the young lady in
white, whose hand he of course receives, in particular,
that “though his head may have erred, his
heart is still in the right place!” What the deuce
have the audience to do with his heart? It is from
his head that they expect entertainment, and if they
are disappointed in that, what satisfaction to them,
after the infliction of his slang and impertinence in
the place of genuine wit and spirit, is the information
that he intends to reform and live decently and
soberly with his wife?
But objections, and in some instances, on good
grounds, have been raised to the representation of
-- 098 --
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
the older dramatists, on the score of indelicacy;
though it is one which might easily be obviated
by judicious pruning; and, after all, the gay and
polished libertinism of some of the old comedies is
not half so indelicate, and not one quarter so
disgusting, as the vulgar liberties so frequently
taken with modern would-be fastidious audiences,
and which they not only suffer, but chuckle over
with evident satisfaction. But the old comedies
have a bad character on this account, and we all
know the force of the proverb “give a dog a bad
name,” &c. There is too much truth in what a
clever writer has said, that “the cant of delicacy
has done thrice the injury to the drama that sheer
downright fanaticism has ever done; and shallow
refinement is ten times more hopelessly inaccessible
than the prejudices of the narrowest bigotry.” Even
George Colman the younger, who ought to have
known better, and who in his younger days was by
no means fastidious, has joined in the pestilential
cry, that has been one great cause of driving the gay
and sparkling Thalia from the stage, and substituting
a Merry Andrew in her place.
-- 099 -- p091-354
IMITATION.
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All men are of opinion that they have a will of
their own, and nothing vexes them more than any
assertion to the contrary. The great majority are
“led by the nose as easy as asses are;” yet as they
trot along in the wake of some shrewd fellow, who
is in turn led by some still shrewder than himself,
they actually imagine themselves free agents, that
their opinions are their own, and that their actions
are the result of those opinions. This delusion is
universal and very complete, and, (heaven knows
the reason,) it appears to be the most provoking
thing in the world to awaken any one from it.
Tell a man that he is a sad profligate, and he is
proud of the appellation; but tell him he is an honest
well meaning gentleman, though somewhat
liable to be guided by the example of others rather
than his own judgment, and he gets into a perfect
fury, and asks you what you take him for? A monkey
is an imitative animal, but nothing to a man,
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who is at once the most servile copyist in creation,
and a sturdy asserter of his moral independence—
a being who tells you it is his pleasure to do so and
so, because “every body does so.” He sacrifices
his ease and convenience, to do as other people do;
and eats, drinks, and sleeps, not when it suits himself,
but when it pleases others. The fashion of the
hour is a moral despotism, whose omnipotent decrees
he dares not dispute, however curious a figure he may
cut in obeying its mandates. The effect of this is
often singular in consequence of the inappropriateness
of the fashion to the individual, or the unhappy
attempts of the individual to assimilate with
the fashion. In dress, for instance, it is strikingly
so. Some lady and gentleman of sufficient notoriety
to entitle them to “set the fashion” for the season,
array themselves in such garments as they think
best adapted to their figure and complexion, and
such as will give prominency to their beauties, and
throw into the shade their defects. As soon as they
have arranged this to their satisfaction, it becomes
“the mode;” and the whole tribe of bipeds, great
and small, thick and thin, short and tall, judiciously
follow their example without any reference to the
shape or color heaven has given them. You will
see a brunette blackening her complexion by bringing
it in violent contrast with straw-color and lilac,
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because it is the fashion; and a blonde, looking
sickly and consumptive, by having glaring orange,
purple, or dark green, in the vicinity of her delicate
skin:—you will see a long column of humanity, of
no thickness at all, with a broad-brimmed beaver
on his head, and a sporting-jacket on his back;
and a short, pursy, corpulent individual waddling
along in a swallow-tailed coat and steeple-crowned
hat, all because it is the fashion! Yet these people
imagine they have a will of their own.
In literature the imitative principle has been, and
is, in full operation, though it is perhaps half intentional
and half unconscious. A master-spirit starts
from the crowd of men, strikes out some new course,
ranges through unexplored and unthought of regions,
and there reigns an object of wonder and
admiration. Immediately a whole troop of pigmies
attempt to tread in his giant footsteps, imitate his
faults, exaggerate his defects, and imagine, before
they advance one step up the hill of fame, that they
are nearly at its summit. It will be in the remembrance
of all, when Byron was in the zenith of his
glory, what an immense quantity of second-hand
misanthropy was afloat among the poetasters; how
they all set to work to draw their own portraits for
the amusement of the public, and what a precious
set of good-for-nothing vagabonds they made
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themselves out to be. They were all, according to their
own story, made up of splendid errors and useless
virtues, and were unanimously unhappy. It was for
a time a most ludicrous evil; for nothing can be more
ridiculous than to see a small mind playing the
egotist, and describing the agony of its feelings at
the same time that it is hunting for a rhyme, and
seeing that the line contains the requisite number
of syllables. This folly has in a great measure past
away; and the Waverley imitation fever, which succeeded,
has been much more rational in its motives,
and creditable in its results. True, historical novels
have become almost as much a drug in the market
as fashionable ones. The public is beginning to get
tired of the portraits of defunct kings, queens, and
courtiers; and the number of great men that have
been resuscitated and made to speak in the first person
singular, has become alarming. Indeed, our
novelists are perfect literary resurrection-men. Many
persons, because the great magician, Walter Scott,
can raise the spirits of the past, and make them act
and speak as they were wont, think they can do
the same—but the public do not. It is far from
pleasant to see these liberties taken with the mighty
dead, except by one as mighty as any of them,
Shakspeare excepted. Still there has been much
talent, learning, and research displayed in works of
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this description, by Horace Smith, Mr. James, and
others, which might have gained for their authors
great credit with posterity, as they have already with
the present generation, had not their merits been
overshadowed by those of their immortal prototype.
As it is, they will as surely go to the “oblivious
cooks” as every word of this essay will be forgotten
next week by the people who read it. For our
own poor taste, after Sir Walter Scott, in the present
age, give us Washington Irving's portraits of
great dead men. His Wouter Von Twiller, William
Klieft, and Peter Stuyvesant, are three as
finished pictures in the fine, quiet, rich old Dutch
school as any one need wish to look upon.
But the greatest field for imitation is theatricals,
and here it is of the very worst species. The beauties
of a great actor are never attempted to be copied;
they are too difficult; but any unfortunate peculiarity
or bad and vicious habit is seized upon
with avidity and fondly cherished. Because John
Kemble was troubled with an asthmatic complaint,
all the Rollas, Catos, and Hamlets that came for
some time after him were likewise troubled with
asthma, and a short dry cough; with Macready
came the almost ridiculous stateliness of gesture
and fastidious arrangement of the garments, without
any of his fine qualities; and Kean's fame has
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been the means of introducing many a young man
on the stage, who could do nothing but imitate
those little Keanisms and physical defects which
occasionally disfigured his beautiful intellectual acting.
A would-be vocalist, with the voice of a raven,
thinks himself a good deal like Braham, because
in singing he can hold his hat precisely as he does,
and has succeeded in catching a few of that gentleman's
peculiarly awkward gestures. Talking of
singing—is the prevailing admiration of Italian
music and performances counterfeit or real, or a little
of both? Is it in imitation of the English who
imitate the French in this respect, or is it a genuine
indigenous feeling? The Italian is a noble school
of music, and it would be gratifying to perceive a
gradual relish for it; but it is apt to create mistrust
to see the exuberance of admiration expressed for it
all of a sudden by a large party of people, nineteentwentieths
of whom are neither familiar with the
music nor the language; and we are afraid there is
some truth in the anecdote now whispered round
the city, of a party of musical cognoscenti having
been thrown into a fit of enthusiasm by what they
supposed to be an Italian gentleman's manner of
giving a composition of Cimarosa's, but which,
words and air, eventually turned out to be a genuine
Welch ditty, howled out by one Taffy ap
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Shenkin, of Glamorganshire! Certain it is, that many
things pass off with great eclat when sung in a
foreign language by signors, signoras, or signorinas,
which would sound viley from the mouth of
plain Mr. Jobson, Mrs. Brown, or Miss Dobbs. The
blunt tradesman had really some reason to be astonished
when on inquiring if “signorina” did not
literally mean in Italian “great singer,” he was
given to understand that it was merely equivalent
to the simple English word “Miss.” We recollect
a gentleman of the name of Comer, formerly of this
city, who used to sing an Italian air with American
words to it—“When the banners of freedom are
waving”—without producing any marked effects;
but no sooner did the same gentleman replace the
Italian words, “Non piu andrai,” than it was instantly
recognised as something extremely fine, and
vociferously encored. Now, without meaning to
undervalue worthy foreigners who reach these
shores, it is probable that there is no small quantity
of affectation in the admiration expressed for them,
and that the majority applaud without having any
definite idea on the subject, in imitation of the few
who are supposed to know. Such foreigners are,
at the same time, both overrated and not sufficiently
appreciated—overrated as a whole, and not appreciated
in detail, for what is really meritorious. Our
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harsh northern dialect may not be so well adapted
to musical composition as that of the “sweet south,”
but it does not follow that every Italian composition
and singer must of necessity be superlatively fine;
and allowing our general inferiority, a song in a
language which a man understands, will always,
affectation aside, be more grateful to his ear than
the mere tinkle of soft sounds. The one, indeed,
goes no further than the ear, while the other, through
the medium of the understanding, reaches the heart,
and any song that does so is worth twenty others
that do not. If people would take the trouble to
consult their own judgments, feelings, and common
sense on such subjects, instead of being carried
away by vague ideas and learned-looking words,
they would find it to their interest; as it is, they let
others inoculate them with opinions which in time
they come to believe their own.
-- 107 -- p091-362
AN EVENING AT THE THEATRE.
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It is a pleasant thing for any one who is fond of
plays and players, after the cares and business of
the day are satisfactorily over, to find himself snugly
ensconced in a quiet and comfortable corner of
a box five minutes previous to the rising of the curtain,
with a fair prospect of three or four hours' rational
amusement before him. An evening so spent
is good for the health, spirits, and understanding,
and leaves the morals just about where it found
them, neither much better nor worse. The stage,
like every thing that has been made much the subject
of controversy, has been greatly overrated, both
for good and for evil, especially in regard to the impression
it makes upon a gentleman's virtue. Its opponents
have accused it of clearing a man's morals
out of him in the most wholesale and expeditious
manner; while its advocates, in the opposite extreme,
contend that it possesses the singular property
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of filling a person with as much morality as he
can well hold; and rather more, indeed, than he
can decently and profitably get along with, as this
world is constituted, without injuring his wife and
family, and being obliged to “eat his mutton cold.”
The truth is, that both parties have written more
nonsense about the matter, than is wholesome to
read; and both have volunteered much solemn
foolishness and ill-tempered declamation in their
zeal to serve the cause of truth. The one will
gravely cite as an argument, and a case in point,
that “the three young men who lately robbed their
employers to a considerable amount, were very frequently
in the habit of attending the theatre;” to
which they might, with equal propriety and sagacity,
have added, that these three young men were
regularly in the habit of eating their dinner, and
that the greatest depredator had long evinced a
strange and suspicious partiality for roast pig; the
one being as logical a deduction of effects from
causes as the other. Then the Solomons, on the
opposite tack, balance this by quoting certain cases,
where
“Guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;”
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as if a chance word spoken in a church or a tavern,
a hay-field or a fish-market, might not just as easily
have touched the tender point, and awakened
“That power within the guilty breast
Oft vanquish'd, never quite suppressed,
That unsubdued and lurking lies,
To take the felon by surprise,
And force him, as by magic spell,
In his despite his guilt to tell.”
Another favorite argument with those who denounce
the stage is, that vice is often not sufficiently
punished or virtue rewarded. But does this never
happen in real life? and who is then to blame? It
certainly does, and much more frequently off the
stage than on; for dramatic authors in general,
make no scruple of sacrificing both probability and
possibility in their zeal to mete out poetical justice
to the misbehaved persons of the drama. That
man's principles must be very weak and wavering
who can be swayed either one way or the other by
a few words, and the passing of a picture before his
eyes; and he must have a strong natural bias towards
roguery, who finds his virtue giving way on
seeing a vicious gentleman now and then get off
scot-free on the stage. Such a one is not a whit
safer in witnessing the proceedings of a court of
justice; because, though nineteen rogues out of
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twenty be condemned, the twentieth may hold out
a temptation to iniquity, by escaping in consequence
of a flaw in the indictment. For my own part, I
am well content to spend a few hours pleasantly at
the theatre, without fretting about whether there
has been any visible addition to my small stock of
virtue, provided it does not suffer diminution. Men's
morals are not like coal fires, requiring to be constantly
stirred up and trimmed, to prevent their dying
away or going out entirely.
But let who will argue or declaim, it is, as we
said at first, a pleasant thing, after a day spent in
harassing and jangling pursuits, to pass an evening
at the theatre, and is as refreshing to the mind as a
warm bath to the body, clearing away the little petty
cares and vexations that business is so apt to
engender and leave behind. Like the bath, it is
only relaxing and enervating when immoderately
indulged. There are more important things than
plays—even the best of them—in the world, and it
is by no means a good sign to see a young man
lounging about a theatre. His education ought to
be completed, and his mind stored with dry though
necessary facts and useful information, before he
takes an unlimited range into that region of passion
and imagination, else, in the voyage of life he will
be as a light bark with more canvas than ballast, on
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a stormy sea, liable to be upset by every squall that
blows.
But to a tolerably well regulated mind, what
mines of inexhaustible and invaluable wealth are
concealed behind that green curtain. Beyond that
the bloody Richard and gallant Percy, the wronged
Othello, the moralizing Jaques, the monster Caliban,
the mediatative Hamlet, honest Jack Falstaff
and ancient Pistol—merry Rosalind, the pretty Perdita,
the gentle Desdemona, and how many other
thousands of pure and base, and great and glorious
spirits having a living visible existence! There the
spirit-stirring passages gleaned from records of antiquity
are treasured up, and the warriors and sages
of old again live and breathe, in the picture of the
poet. The curtain rises, and lo! spare Cassius and
gentle Brutus again walk the streets of Rome. The
centuries that have elapsed are as nothing, and the
spectator is present at the fall of “mighty Cæsar.”
Or a drum is heard, and the thane of Cawdor once
more treads the “blasted heath,” to be met by the
prophetic greetings of the weird sisters. Now if a
man be not very wise, and altogether above being
instructed by Shakspeare and other worthies, there
is certainly something to be learnt from this, and
such as this. The drama is, in truth, a stupendous
creation; and let its decriers say what they may, it
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will ever remain amongst the proudest and mightiest
works of civilized man. True, all is not gold
that glitters, and with the pure ore of Shakspeare,
and the brilliant sparkling gems of Congreve and
Sheridan, are mixed up the tinsel of Reynolds and
the brass of Morton; but they are easily separated
by those who are not afflicted with a total mental
blindness, and to those who are, the one is just as
good as the other.
But, independently of the stage, what ample scope
for study and observation does the audience afford
to any one who takes the trouble to observe his species!
What a field for the painter, the physiognomist,
and the caricaturist! What faces are to be
seen—how rich and broad is their expression when
those who own them once get fairly interested in
the business of the scene, and become unconscious
of all else beside. A countryman's, for instance,
when a comic song is sung, or a juggling trick
played, how he sits, his head jerked forward like a
crane's, as if to get it as near the scene of action as
possible, his shoulders up to his ears, his distended
mouth dividing his face into two portions, and his
eyes as convex as a lobster's; then when the affair
reaches the climax, the monstrous twistings and
contortions of his visage, and the convulsions of his
body rolling to and fro under an uncontrollable
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storm of laughter, are more amusing than any thing
on the boards. Again, where is there a more charming
picture than that of a fine girl watching, with
intense interest, the escapes or sufferings of the hero
or heroine of the piece; her graceful neck inclined
forward, her small delicate hand unconsciously
grasping the front of the box, her sweet lips
slightly parted, and her beaming eyes fixed with
tender earnestness on what is passing before them.
This the artist may copy, but he cannot go on and
pencil down the various shades of sorrow and joy,
anxiety and hope, that flit tremulously over her
beautiful face. In this world of cold and ceremonious
observance it is a treat to see such a girl; she
is unsophisticated; and the chances are, that her
understanding is better, and her feelings warmer and
purer than those who evince more coldness and circumspection.
Then there are the coquettes, with
their pretty, and the fops with their ridiculous affectation;
the solemn gravity of many at a joke, and
the merriment of some at a murder; while others
are troubled with the most strange and unfortunate
peculiarities. There is one individual in the habit
of attending the Park, that is afflicted with a hissing
Natty Bumpo laugh, which is heard both loudly and
distinctly: this places the owner somewhat in the
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predicament of the fiends in Paradise Lost, who,
when desirous of giving applause, found they could
only send forth hisses. Whenever any thing very
laughable takes place, or an actor plays exceeding
well, and the house is in a roar, a loud venomous
hiss is heard, and the people all turn indignantly
around towards the place from whence the sound
proceeds; but the involuntary culprit is never suspected,
for he appears, and really is, enjoying himself
as much as any of them.
But, of all the persons who come to a theatre, the
most to be dreaded and avoided are those that are
possessed with a talking demon; such as Ophelia
characterizes as being “as good as a chorus.”
Though a curse to all, they generally bring their
particular victim along with them—some simple
friend—to whom, during the progress of the play,
they detail the whole history of the plot—what has
been done in the last scene, and what is to be done
in the next—what the several characters have just
said, and what they are going to say—remarks on
the author—off-hand criticisms on the actors, accompanied
with short biographical notices of both, together
with a running commentary on different
parts of the audience, and their own private opinion
on affairs in general—and all this miscellaneous
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gabble conveyed in that most abhorrent of all sounds,
a quick buzzing uninterrupted whisper. Any man
who wishes to hear the play, and can sit patiently
beside one of those annoyances, has more meekness
than Moses, more patience than Job, more forbearance
than Socrates, and no nerves at all.
-- 116 -- p091-371
A VOYAGE TO EUROPE.
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Washington Irving crossed the Atlantic, and
wrote a beautiful piece thereupon, entitled “The
Voyage,” which delighted every one. The natural
consequences ensued. All the gentlemen who
crossed the Atlantic afterwards, concluded to do as
Washington Irving had done, and delight every
one likewise, so that in the course of a short time
there was no scarcity of marine narratives; and
the dwellers in great cities, on both sides, had very
particular information afforded them of the perils
of such as “went down to the sea in ships” during
the summer months. These adventurous men and
predestined authors kept a regular diary of the days
on which they ate lamb, and the days on which
they ate chicken, and the days on which the pecuniary
concerns of the captain were benefited by
the disorganized state of their system, and they
subsisted on rice-water and hope: they severally
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furnished a description of the ocean in a calm, and
a description of the ocean in a storm, for which latter
purpose the ocean was afflicted with more storms
from May to September than sailors ever heard tell
of. They stated, for the first time, that the sea was
the “symbol of immensity”—that the water was
green on soundings, and “cerulean blue” off; and
added their testimony, founded upon actual observation,
to the mass of evidence already before the
world, that it contained many whales, sharks, porpoises,
and other fishes, to which were appended
brief touches of natural history as they went along,
and invariably a piece of fine writing concerning
“sunset on the ocean,” giving an account how that
every-day luminary “goes down behind the wilderness
of waters.” They moreover let the reader have
a minute insight into the state of their feelings, the
workings of their bosoms, &c. as they leaned over
the ship's side, gazed upon the vasty deep, and
thought of the friends and home they had left behind
them; and also their vague and very extraordinary
speculations concerning the land that lay
before them—all which, is it not to be found expanded
over an infinite number of pages in the
infinite number of “Letters from Europe,” which
quietly repose on the back shelves of the
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establishments of Messrs. Bliss and Carvill, Broadway, and
other incautious booksellers?
Such being the state of things, it would ill become
an humble individual to affect singularity by
breaking through an established rule; and the subscriber,
therefore, under the impression that it is a
debt due to decorum and mankind, proceeds to inform
the human race of what he saw and suffered.
If I am not as interestingly minute as some of
my predecessors, it must be attributed to the unfortunate
fact of having lost a valuable “daily journal”
overboard, in which the most trivial circumstances
were carefully noted down, with appropriate
moral reflections attached to each, and the following
are therefore merely general recollections thrown
together without order or discrimination.
In the first place, I hate the sea as much as Satan
is said, in catholic countries, to hate holy water;
and, notwithstanding all the fine poetry that has
been written about it, think it, in every respect, the
greatest bore in creation. To me, to be
“Once more upon the waters, yet once more,”
brings a miserable feeling of lassitude and confinement,
rather than of freedom and exultation. It
is the most weary, dull, monotonous, unsociable
place upon which human beings, with any
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kindly warmth in their hearts or blood, can sojourn.
There is not any thing with which the imprisoned
spirit can sympathize. On land, though that land
be as sterile and barren as the banks of the river
Jordan, or the most unfertile parts about Cape Cod,
there is still some inanimate object or other to which
the heart can attach itself—a rock, a tree, a bubbling
spring, which, after familiarity hath made it
pleasant to the eye, we are loth to leave behind and
glad to see again. Sterne hath beautifully, and no
less beautifully than truly said, that man must love
one thing or another, and that for his own part,
were he in a desert he would love some cypress; but
his affections would be sadly puzzled on what to
fix themselves in the watery deserts which separate
country from country. The dark waves keep
tumbling over and over each other, for ever changing
yet still the same, till the fatigued eye turns
sickeningly away from this very blue prospect.
You even feel sorry for the sullen, noiseless birds
that keep eternally wheeling and floating above the
curling billows, and regret the doom allotted them
figuratively to seek “their bread upon the waters,”
or, what is pretty much the same thing to them—
their fish. With all their exemption from the murderous
sports of man, how unenviable seems their
fate, compared with that of the land birds. They
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have no constant mate expecting them at evening
time—no home—no warm nest into which they
may creep and fold their weary wings and be at
rest; but when the close of day puts an end to their
piscatory pursuits, they squat themselves down upon
the cheerless waters with but small assurance of
being a live bird in the morning, should some shark
or other fowl-loving fish pass that way before they
are awake and on the wing. Well; there is retribution
in the deed—why should not the destroyer
be destroyed? they have preyed upon fish, why not
fish prey upon them?
To all who rave and make poetry about the
beauty and delights of a summer sea, I especially
recommend the middle of the Atlantic during what
is appropriately enough termed “a dead calm”—
the ship rolling lazily and heavily from side to side,
the sails flapping drowsily against the masts, and a
burning, blistering sun sucking the melted pitch
and rosin out of the seams of the deck. Of all the
suicidal situations in which man can be placed, I
think this decidedly the most tempting; and believe,
if life could be ended by a wish, few of the
unhappy passengers would see the shore again; but
fortunately it requires some little energy—some
slight exertion to drown yourself, and really you
are so very listless—so completely unstrung, that a
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man cannot be at the trouble of tumbling himself
overboard. But then, cries the landsman, what a
delightful resource must books be in such a situation.
Alas! alas! your mind is as debilitated as
your body, and just as incapable of bending its faculties
to a salutary purpose. Shakspeare, Milton,
Byron, or any thing nervous or exciting, is not to
be borne; and about the strongest mental food that
the mind can digest in this predicament is a diluted
love-story in an “Annual.” I, for one, am
very fond of reading, but I could not do it here: I
laid myself down on the deck, ate almonds and raisins,
and thought of Job.
Some people prefer a strom to a calm; but their
demerits are so equally balanced, that, like the
Frenchman who had to choose between hanging
and drowning. I cannot make up my mind to give
the preference to either. True, the roaring of the
wind, the tearing and splitting of the sails, the violent
evolutions of the vessel, and the unique blasphemies
which strike the ear from various quarters,
with the probability of speedily being among
the fishes, tend to arouse the spirit, and stir up, as
counsellor Phillips might say, “the green and stagnant
waters of the soul;” while the yesty ocean,
ever and anon dashing over the ship and wetting
you to the skin, is unquestionably sublime; but
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some how or other I never could relish the sublime
much when it interfered materially with my personal
comforts; and am unromantic enough to own
that I would rather be seated snugly in a decent
inn at the foot of a Swiss mountain than identify
myself with the icicles at the top of it; so, in a storm
I hold it to be a better thing to go below, doff your
drenched garments, fix your berth so that you cannot
roll an inch either one way or the other, and
quietly betake yourself to the arms of Morpheus,
rather than stand gaping at the unceremonious
ocean, who repays your sincere admiration in a
very unhandsome manner by throwing cold water
in your face.
No—the sea, whether in storm or calm, or enveloped
in fog, or in its most favorable state curled
with a fresh fair breeze, has few attractions to those
who spend more than six hours upon it at a time.
Our captain, an old sailor, declared that every
day he passed there he considered a blank in
his existence. What is there in this be-praised
element to give pleasure? In crossing the Atlantic
all your amusements are not such as are connected
with the sea, but such as serve to draw your attention
from it. Chess or drafts, backgammon or
cards, are the resources called in to while away the
tedious hours; for after you have seen one of
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mother Carey's chickens, a shoal of porpoises, a shark,
and a whale, you have seen about all that is to be
seen. At first, like other landsmen, I was very desirous
to “see a whale;” but I soon found that,
according to the laws of optics, a porpoise alongside
of the ship was just as large and as good a sight as
a whale half a mile off, which is about as near as
they generally venture; while all you mostly see
of the rascally sharks is a fin, or the ridge of a
brown back peeping above the water. The eye
tires of even the finest prospect; but here you are
compelled to gaze day after day on water and
sky, and all that can be said of the latter is, that
it is very blue and that there is a great quantity
of it.
It may be thought from this that I am no friend
or admirer of the sea; but few like it more than I
do on the land, the only place, I believe, where people
really fall in love with it. Nothing can be finer
than to live in a highly cultivated tract of country
merely separated from the sea-coast by a high range
of sand-hills. The change in the scenery is so instantaneous,
and so complete—so very different, yet
both so surpassingly beautiful, for few things can
excel, in picturesque effect, a bold and animated
line of coast. How freshening it is in the summer
time, after roaming through orchards, meadows,
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and cornfields, to cross the barren sand-hills and
find yourself on the lone sea-beach, with no human
being within sight or hearing. How pleasant to
roam to some favorite spot and there lie and
watch the clear sparkling tide come rolling in over
the smooth sand, forcing its way swiftly up a hundred
tiny channels—to dream over again all the
wild legends of the mighty element before you—
the storm the battle and the wreck, and the hair-breadth
escapes of those who have been cast away
upon it—to be lulled to slumber by the murmur of
the slight waves breaking upon the shore, and making
most sweet yet drowsy music in your ear—this
is delightful; and I have even enough of the hardi-hood
of boyhood to love it in its rougher moods—
on a raw and gusty November day, when the seagull
comes screaming to the cliffs for shelter, when
the wave bursts in thunder at your feet, and the
thick fog is whirled from the water like smoke by
the tempest—on such a day there is something far
from unpleasant in standing on terra firma and
watching its manœuvres. Besides, it is such a
glorious preparative for a warm, comfortable fire-side
and a hearty supper—but from passing any
length of time on it in ships, or other smaller vessels
called, for unknown reasons, pleasure-boats,
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heaven preserve me and my posterity, (should I
have any.)
I have by no means drawn a jaundiced picture,
discolored through the agency of disturbed bile, for
though occasionally visited by that most horrible of
afflictions, sea-sickness, I am better off in that respect
than nineteen out of twenty. What must be
the state of those wretched individuals who add enduring
sickness or continual qualmishness to their
other stock of sea comforts, I cannot even venture
to conjecture. Persons thoroughly in this state will
receive any intimation of the ship's going down
with perfect unconcern—they do not set their life
at a “pin's fee.” Some Athenian said, when he
found the comfortless way in which the Spartans
lived, that he no longer wondered at their fearing
death so little; and it is only on this principle that
I can account for the unnatural tranquillity with
which men hear of the chance of running foul of
an iceberg, or any other agreeable casualty; while
half the peril, when on land quietly enjoying the
good things of the world, would perturb their spirits
considerably, and cause many retrospective glances
towards their past state of existence, and great dubiosity
touching their future prospects.
Land ho! we have just come in sight of the
southern point of Ireland—a few more hours will
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bring us into the English channel, and the unbounded
joy of all on board is the best commentary
on the pleasures of the sea. Ah! land, land! we
all gaze upon the country of turf and potatoes as
wistfully as if it were one of the “islands of the
blest;” and the snuffing of the cow in the long
boat, as she scents the green herbage afar off, approximates
towards the borders of the pathetic. I
am circumspect in the choice of my company, and
it is consequently seldom that I have any thing to
say to the “heavenly nine” or they to me; but on
the present occasion I felt something unusual the
matter with my brain, and as soon as the evening
shades fell, and I could see land no longer, it relieved
itself by the following effervescence:
LINES ON COMING IN SIGHT OF LAND.
“Land, land ahead!” the seamen cries,
“Land, land!” re-echoes round:
And happy smiles and glistening eyes
Repay that joyful sound.
The dull and cheerless sea is past—
The warm earth meets our view at last,
With summer's glories crown'd.
Now ill beshrew the twilight gray,
That shrouds it from my sight away!
Well, let it fade, as fades the light
Along the sullen sea;
Yet through the watches of the night
My thoughts will turn to thee.
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The fresh green fields—the swelling hills—
The music of the gushing rills—
The humming of the bee:
And scenes and sounds to memory dear,
Are in mine eye and in mine ear.
The carol of the merry lark
Rings through the morning air;
The honest sheep dog's wary bark
Guarding with watchful care
His flocks upon the green hill side:
The milkmaid too, with modest pride
And pretty anklet bare,
Tripping along the dewy green,
Is no unpleasant sight, I ween.
These, and ten thousand scenes like these,
Are passing o'er thy breast.
Oh for the wave of thy green trees
To shade my noontide rest!
The pleasant rustling of the leaves,
The warbling of the bird, that weaves
Above me its trim nest—
While cooling breezes float along
Laden with fragrance and with song.
And glorious autumn's golden fruits,
And summer's lingering flowers,
And the sweet woodbine's graceful shoots
Twining round rustic bowers;
And friends long loved through absent years—
And kind eyes sparkling mid their tears,
Like April's sun and showers—
Await me there. Cease, heart, to swell!
Thou salt and bitter sea, farewell!”
-- 128 -- p091-383
LONDON THEATRES.
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Drury-Lane and Covent-garden are two magnificent
temples for the representation of the legitimate
drama. Taste and elegance are conspicuous in
whatever appertains to them; and though both
houses are richly ornamented, the most fastidious
critic would be puzzled to point out any thing gaudy,
glaring, or obtrusive. The contrast between the
chaste simplicity of their common scenery, and the
glittering coarseness of that of the minor theatres
is very striking. The greatest fault of both is their
size; great physical powers being absolutely requisite
to make the singing and acting effective in the
more remote parts of the house. The interior of
each being in the shape of a horse-shoe, the stage is
consequently much smaller in proportion to the audience-part
than that of the Park theatre, which is
semicircular. The saloons and lobbies are uncommonly
spacious and splendid. The principal saloon
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at Drury-lane is one large mirror, the walls being
entirely covered with glass. Next in reputation to
these stands the Haymarket, nearly the size of the
Bowery, and bearing about the same relation to
Drury-lane and Covent-garden, that the Chatham in
its best days did to the Park. The English Opera-house—
lately burned and now rebuilding—its name
sufficiently indicates the purposes to which it is appropriated.
The Italian Opera-house is not yet
open for the season, but is, I understand, by far the
largest and most splendid theatrical establishment
in London. Then there is Astley's in the quadruped
line, where dramas written by asses are played
by horses—where the business of the scene is transacted
en croupe, and ladies are courted and tyrants
are slaughtered at a three-quarter pace or a full gallop.
Sadler's Wells, once famous for heroic actions
and real water, swearing and tobacco. Here ships
were nightly wrecked and long-boats overturned;
and sailors continually employed in jumping over-board
to save beauty and innocence, in wet white
garments from a watery grave. The performers
were a species of amphibious animals, and passed
half their time in fluids; and the best swimmer was,
next to a Newfoundland dog, the most important
personage in the establishment. Here it was that
the “Courageous Coral Diver, or the Shark of the
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Gulph of California,” had such a successful run.
The “Humane Society for the recovery of drowned
persons” allowed, I believe, their drag-nets, warm
flannels, stomach-pumps, and other apparatus to be
kept in readiness at this theatre, in case of accident;
but still they could not prevent the coughs, colds,
catarrhs, and pulmonary complaints incident to
such an otter-like state of existence—the real water
was therefore discontinued—the sea was sunk, and
the ocean is now made of carpets and painted sail-cloth,
as in other establishments.
Besides these, there is an infinite number of minor
theatres, with the names of half of which I am
unacquainted. Some of the major-minors are highly
respectable, and not unfrequently have first-rate
talent on their boards; but the minor-minors are,
from stage to gallery, an unmixed mass of ignorance
and vulgarity. Here is performed that species
of “national drama,” which was wont to be enacted
at the Lafayette and Mount Pitt circus before
they were purified by fire; and which is still to be
seen at the Park and Bowery, much to their credit,
on holiday nights, where the several parties have it
all their own way; and the most glorious and decisive
victories are obtained by the tremendous carnage
of one half of the supernumeraries, and the
craven cowardice of the other; and where the
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enemies of valiant Englishmen and courageous Americans
are humbled into the dust before them, much
to the credit of the very patriotic and enlightened
audiences. Here, as on your side of the water, instances
of almost incredible prowess are as common
as can be; and an enemy's first-rate is frequently
boarded and taken by a single midshipman, or a
young officer alone cuts a whole detachment to
pieces, except that the curtain falls amid shouts of
“England for ever!” instead of “Hurrah for Jackson!”
I had been so long accustomed to hear all
the love and liberty and heroism and bombast proceed
out of the mouths of gentlemen in blue jackets,
that it at first seemed strange to hear gentlemen
in red declaiming in precisely the self-same strain.
However, it must be said for the Londoners, that
these direct national puffs are not tolerated at decent
theatres. The victories of his majesty's forces
are almost entirely confined to places patronized for
the most part by butcher's boys, dustmen, draymen,
and coal-heavers.
The principal source of profit, however, to nearly
all the minor theatres, is the “supernatural business,”
or representation of demoniacal dramas.
But here no narrow national feelings prevail—justice
is equally dealt out to all; and in the last scene
the devil has his due, let the culprit be what
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countryman he may. The mythologies of all ages and
nations have been raked up, and the evil spirits
with which they abound re-produced upon the
stage. It is really fearful to look upon a dead wall,
covered with play-bills, and read the dreadful announcements
for the evening's amusements, rendered
terribly distinct by ominous red and sombre
black type of gigantic stature. Some of the managers
ground their claims to public patronage
and support on the immense expense they have
been at in order to do justice to the views of the interior
of the infernal regions; and one spirited lessee
has actually constructed a false or double stage,
which, at the termination of the piece, sinks down
with the particular fiend and victim of the evening,
amid cataracts of flame spouting forth from the
side-wings. The enacting of demons has become
a regular branch of theatrical business; and Mr. O.
Smith, a man with an unamiable countenance, and
a voice horrifically hoarse, is as distinguished in
this line as Kean in tragedy, or Liston in comedy.
“The prince of darkness is a gentleman,” says
Shakspeare, but two-thirds of his representatives in
London make him out little better than an illiterate
scoundrel. It is rather too bad on the most serious
occasions, to hear the father of all evil transposing
his v's and w's, and leaving out his h's, in the true
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cockney style, unable even to pronounce his own
proper place of residence in a correct manner.
The public appetite for gloomy horrors is at present
perfectly ravenous. I know not how to account for
this, except by attributing it to the alarming increase
in the consumption of pork which has taken place in
the metropolis within these few years. This species
of animal nutriment is the favorite food of the lower
orders, and I am inclined to think, generates more
diabolical tastes and propensities than “flesh of
muttons, beeves, or goats.” How is it possible that a
person who banquets off pork sausages and heavy
porter, and then swallows two or three drams of
spirits of turpentine, miscalled gin, can have his
sensibilities aroused by such slight provocations as
wit and humor? Is he a man to be tickled with a
straw? What is a joke or a scrap of sentiment,
or a lively conceit to him? You might as well give
a glass of delicately flavored wine to an habitual
bibber of fourth-proof brandy. Take him to see
“Much ado about nothing,” and he thinks the play
well named—or “As you like it,” and he likes it
not. No—he pays his money and goes to witness
“The Infernal Compact; or, the Fiend, the Victim,
and the Murderer!”—he puts his hands in his
pockets, and criticizes the vagaries of Mr. Smith,
in his favorite character of the “Demon of the
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Valley of Skulls,” (as performed by him fifty-seven
successive nights, with distinguished approbation!)
These monstrosities have been of gradual growth.
First came “Cherries and Fair Stars,” “Visions of
the Sun,” and similar tales of enchantment; but
these were soon found to be mere moonshine, and
a class of melo-dramas was got up where “murders
were done too terrible for the ear.” The Newgate
calendar was regularly dramatized, and a most
atrocious state of things prevailed for some time;
but, as the anti-temperance man goes on regularly
to increase the strength of the dose, as his acuteness
of taste decreases, so the managers, after blunting
the feelings and perceptions of the public, were
obliged to resort to still stronger stimulants, and
hence the present sulphureous state of the stage.
But even this is beginning to fail. Notwithstanding
the “infernal abysses,” by the help of chemical
substances, which throw on the stage a strong glare
of red, blue, or yellow light, are rendered, as the
term is, “highly effective,” insomuch, indeed, as to
produce a strong impression on any person unused
to such exhibitions, the cockney surveys the whole
with critical coolness, until a superabundant quantity
of flame elicits some such exclamation of admiration
as—“I say, Bill, vot do you think of that
'ere? My eyes!” delivered in a tone of voice which
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evidently shows that the view of the place of punishment
before him has not made any impression on
the mind of the speaker in regard to his own ulterior
prospects. If the stage at present actually
shows “the very age and body of the time, its form
and pressure,” the millenium is much further off
than many people suppose.
-- 136 -- p091-391
EDITORIAL COURTESIES.
[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]
“I must speak in a passion, and I will do it in King Cymbyses'
vein.”
—Shakspeare.
If Socrates, or any other sensible ancient, could be
resuscitated, and have half-a-dozen flaming rhapsodies
on the benefits and blessings of the “press,”
put into his hands, what a glorious and mighty
change would he suppose had taken place in the
ordering of public affairs, since the time when the
Athenian rabble were led by the nose by every
noisy demagogue who chose to spout nonsense to
them in their market-places. How the good man's
heart would be filled with rejoicing as he read glowing
descriptions of the tremendous capabilities of
this mighty engine, wielded solely for the benefit
of mankind, and of its unwearied exertions to disseminate
useful information and correct knowledge
of political events to the meanest citizen of the
state! He would suppose, that with this almost
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omnipotent power arrayed on the side of virtue, and
watching with untiring vigilance over the true interests
of all, that this wicked world must have been
transformed into a sort of Utopia since his time—a
place from which all prejudice, venality, corruption,
and sycophancy were swept away, and where the
governors and the governed would emulate each
other in their exertions for the common weal. But
if, after perusing the aforesaid rhapsodies, the said
Socrates could have a quantity of newspapers taken
indiscriminately from different parts of the country
placed before him, there is strong reason to believe
that an attentive perusal of their elegant contents
would materially change his opinion. He
would find the gentlemen presiding over one half
of the press stating that the other portion of their
editorial brethren were, without exception, the
greatest set of rascals, scoundrels, rogues, thieves,
and vagabonds that ever existed on the face of the
earth; and that they were the most vile, the most
degraded, the most contemptible miscreants that
could, by any possibility, disgrace humanity. On
the other hand, he would find the party accused in
these gentle terms, asserting that their assailants
were well known to be such infamous liars, so totally
destitute of every spark of honesty, so stained
with infamy, so branded with convicted falsehoods,
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as to render any thing they might say unworthy
of the slightest notice. Poor Socrates would be
sadly puzzled, and think there was more in this
than he ever “dreamt of in his philosophy,” and
that truth still kept her ancient station at the bottom
of a well. He would find these virtuous vehicles
of knowledge and information made up of
quack advertisements, dreadful murders, dreadful
poetry, Joe-Miller jests, and editorial personalities;
in the latter of which he would see all the coarseness
of his old enemy Aristophanes ten times trebled,
without a single redeeming sprinkling of his
wit and humor; and he would be lost in utter
amazement to find that the very worst and most
ignorant portion of the people (according to their
own showing) had been, by some strange fatality,
elevated to instruct and amuse the rest.
There are some subjects which it is necessary to
aid by a slight stretch of the fancy, or a little exaggeration
of language, in order to give them point
and effect; but to describe, just as it is, the manner
in which editorial warfare is carried on in the country
papers of the United States, other words than
are to be found in Walker or Webster must be
sought for; they are too tame, too weak to convey
any idea of these Billingsgate personalities.
-- 139 --
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—“A beggar in his drink,
Would not bestow such terms upon his callet,”
as the worthy conductors of the press think proper
to bestow upon each other. Wherein the utility—
the advantage of all this to the public, or what is
more, to themselves, consists, it is not easy to discover.
If they are what they say they are, would it
not be their policy to agree and keep it concealed,
and not blazon forth each other's infamy to the
world? And what has that world to do with their
disreputable quarrels and low abuse, farther than to
laugh at and despise them for it? the public of this
day, as of yore,
—“care not a toss up
Whether Mossop kick Barry or Barry kick Mossop;”
and after looking on for some time, and amusing
itself with the noise and sputter of the enraged belligerents,
come to the conclusion that they are both
contemptible creatures, and pay no further attention
to the matter. In fact, nine-tenths of the papers
have, by this degrading conduct, in a great measure
lost the power of affecting character either by
praise or censure: there are many who pay no sort
of attention either to what they say of public men
or of each other; and if there are still those who,
making a deduction of ninety-nine per cent., think
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“there must be some truth in what the fellow says,”
their number is fast diminishing. A paper is at
present lying before us, from which better things
might have been expected, as it is published in a
decent neighborhood, and contains some good reading
matter, in which, amid two-thirds of a column
of abuse, one of the most moderate sentences is,
that his opponent is “a liar by nature and a thief
by profession.” After going on for some time with
unabated spirit in this strain of unmitigated abuse,
he winds up with the following magnificent piece
of composition. “If the river Amazon were made
to run through his (his opponent's) soul, more time
would be taken up in cleansing it of its depravity
and filthiness, than was required by the ancient
river to cleanse the celebrated stables, wherein a
thousand oxen had been stalled for almost as many
years!” This appears to be only one of a series of
articles on the subject! and the offence, as far as
we can make it out, for which all these hard words
are let loose, seems to have been the copying a paragraph
without due credit, or something of the
kind of equally vital importance to the community.
We have not seen the replication to this choice morceau,
but presume it will be in the same style of
impassioned and elegant invective.
Now is not this and such as this abominable?
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and hundreds of instances could be pointed out of
still greater magnitude, in which the personal appearance
and family connexions of a man are ridiculed—
charges of not having paid his tailor's bill,
or any thing else, no matter what, that depravity
can invent or blackguardism utter, are put forth.
Opprobrious epithets from such sources, when applied
to those who have been long before the public,
and whose characters are well and favorably
known, can do but comparatively little harm; they
may exclaim with Brutus,
“I am armed so strong in honesty
That they pass by me as the idle wind,
Which I regard not;”
but suppose an honorable and sensitive man, just
commencing his career, attacked by one of those
literary scavengers, what exquisite pain must it
give him to find himself dragged forward and slandered
in this manner. And he has no redress; he
cannot reply, or at all events if he does, it will be a
most unequal match, for he will be temperate in
his language, and anxious not to assert any thing
but what is strictly true. It would be like a gentleman
neatly dressed in light-colored unmentionables
and white kid gloves, engaged in a combat
of throwing mud from a kennel with a ragged and
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tattered miscreant; his adversary, from being well
practised at the game, throws ten handsfull of dirt
for his one, and quickly bespatters him all over,
while the few additional pieces that he could send,
would never be discerned on his opponent's already
soiled and filthy garments. The best way certainly
for those who are well enough known to afford
it, is to pass all such attacks over in absolute silence.
Blackwood's Magazine, whose personality has at
least always prostituted humor and ability to make
it go off, has never been so enraged by any of the
retorts of its adversaries as by the real or affected
contempt of the Edinburgh Review. Notwithstanding
the virulent abuse that has from time to
time been bestowed upon it, the Edinburgh has
never, since the commencement of Blackwood, let
it appear that it was conscious there was such a
journal in existence.
We are not very sanguine in anticipations of any
speedy and effectual change for the better in this
world of ours; but we do think the time is fast
coming when, with a few exceptions, this custom
of the present race of public journals in the United
States will be regarded with unqualified contempt.
There are already symptoms of better things. Most
of the city papers in New-York, and indeed in all
large towns, have lately amended their ways
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considerably in this respect, though they were never
one quarter so bad as their rural brethren; and
there are several journals that are respectable and
entertaining repositories of news, knowledge, literature,
and fashion, while their trifling disputes are
conducted in a pleasant and gentlemanly spirit.
Clashing interests and party views will always preserve
some portion of personality in the world; but
it would be more agreeable to all concerned to settle
their little affairs of the pen by good-natured raillery,
light repartees, and polished sarcasms, such as
pass in decent society, in preference to vulgar slang
and porter-house figures of rhetoric. Let such contests
be carried on like two gentlemen engaged in
a bout at foils, in which both exert their utmost
skill and ingenuity, in a friendly temper; and
when a “palpable hit” is given on either side, let
it be courteously acknowledged, and then try it
again; and not like a couple of ragamuffins in the
street, who fight and tear themselves to pieces for
the amusement of the spectators.
-- 144 -- p091-399
MR. LISTON.
[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]
“Curse that incorrigible face of yours; though you never suffer a
smile to mantle it, yet it is a figure of fun for all the rest of the world.”
Of all the actors I have ever seen, Kean and Liston
appear to me to be the greatest, and to have
the least in common with others of their species.
Of the two, perhaps Liston is the most original. He
is the Hogarth of actors; and like that great painter,
has been more highly than justly appreciated. Not
that either have been too highly thought of—“I
hold the thing to be impossible”—but the broad,
rich humor, which is the distinguishing characteristic
of both, has, from its prominence, thrown their
minor good properties onto the shade. Hogarth, to
the qualities peculiarly his own, added the rare
merit of being a chaste and skilful colorist, (the
most difficult thing to be attained in painting, considering
it purely as an art,) and was, moreover—
however generally such an opinion may be entertained—
not the least of a carcaturist. Neither is
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[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]
Liston, notwithstanding it pleases certain pragmatical
persons, who, I humbly apprehend, know nothing
about the matter, to assert the contrary.
There are now, as in the days of William Shakspeare,
those who discountenance all cachinnatory
movements as unbecoming; regarding gravity as
the only outward and visible type of that great
inward accumulation of wisdom, which generally
lies too deep to be ever discovered. These
people think because Mr. Liston occasionally plays
coarse and foolish parts in coarse and foolish
farces, that Mr. Liston is, consequently, a coarse
and foolish fellow, and only fit to amuse the uneducated
vulgar; and as “grimace” and “buffoonery”
are the two standing words used in abusing
comedians, let their faults be what they may,
they have not unfrequently been applied to Liston.
Now if any one be free from what is meant by
these two words, as set down in many dictionaries,
it is this actor. The merits of his unparalleled
countenance are passive, not active; and distortion
would only render that countenance common-place,
which in a state of blank repose, is intensely ridiculous.
The great merit of Liston is his earnestness.
Kean does not appear more earnest in Othello than
does Liston at the loss of a pocket-handkerchief, or
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[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]
being overcharged a shilling in a tavern-bill. His
whole soul seems to be absorbed in an affair of this
kind. He does not bustle about or put himself in
a passion in order to make the audience laugh at
the ridiculous nature of the circumstances, as other
actors do; but all the faculties of the man's mind
seem concentrated to endeavor to convince or persuade,
as the case may require, solely to save the
said shilling, or regain the said handkerchief; and
it is the contrast between the disproportion of the
exercise employed and the importance of the object
to be attained—like the wars of the Lilliputians and
the Blefuscudians—that is so supremely ridiculous.
Fools may say that this is merely admirable foolery—
it is a great deal more. It is a shrewd satire
upon humanity, turning into burlesque the lofty
pretensions—the power and knowledge and wit
and wisdom of mankind, and presents a stronger
and truer picture of the littleness of man and his
pursuits than a thousand homilies. Even Heraclitus,
could he look at Liston, would laugh to see
the “noble reason” and “infinite faculties” of one
of the “paragon of animals” utterly prostrated by
the loss of an inside place in a stage-coach; and he
would indeed exclaim with the poet, though in a
very different sense, “what a piece of work is man!”
I think I never saw or read a more forcible
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exemplification of the importance a man's feelings and
actions are to himself, and the less than the shadow
of a shade they are to the rest of the world, than is to
be witnessed in a farce where Liston alights from a
coach top, and is followed on to the stage by the
driver for the customary gratuity. Those who
have traveled in England may have remarked the
manner in which the coachmen receive what the
traveler may be pleased to give them. While he
is getting the money from his pocket Jehu is all attention;
but the moment he has received it, his
business is over—he turns upon his heel, and all
traces of the giver pass from his mind for ever.
Liston detains the coachman, (and you can see in
his countenance the vital importance he attaches to
what he is about,) in order to draw the distinction
and durably impress it upon his mind that his (Liston's)
giving him a sixpence was by no means a
compulsory measure, but a pure and spontaneous
emanation of generosity, or, to use his own phraseology,
“hentirely hoptional.” A person standing
on the brink of a running stream on a cold day,
seriously employed in “writing his name in water,”
would be accounted insane—the attempt to write
munificence and generosity on the coachman's
mind, is equally futile; yet how many in the
world make these and similar efforts who are not
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accounted crazy, and whose last will and testament
stands good in law.
There has been much said about the ugliness of
Liston's physiognomy. I do not think it such as
can be fairly termed ugly; yet it is a face that a
sensitive sculptor would faint to look upon—a large
mass of inanimate flesh, with only an every-day
mouth, a most insignificant nose, both as to size
and shape, and a pair of lack-lustre eyes to diversify
the blank and extensive prospect, but the word
“ugly” gives no more definite idea of it than the
word “beauty.” It is a paradoxical face, most expressive
in expressing the absence of all expression;
yet at times combining the expression of the most
inveterate stupidity with concentrated conceit and
supreme self-satisfaction, in a way that has never
been equalled. There are many who, by the common
play of the muscles or contortion of the features,
can counterfeit stupidity and conceit, in a
greater or less degree, at separate times; but not
one who, like Liston, can at the same time make
you feel perfectly assured not only that the personage
he is representing has not an idea, but also,
that all attempts to make him sensible of that fact,
or to inoculate him with one, would be altogether
hopeless. His voice is as unique as his face; and
the deep sepulchral croak, in which he narrates
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petty grievances, leaves you no choice whether to
laugh or let it alone. There is a farce, entitled
“Comfortable Lodgings,” in which he enacts the
part of a rich and hypochondriacal Englishman,
traveling to get clear of an unaccountable melancholy,
and to learn to enjoy himself like other people,
and describes one of his peculiarities with good
effect. In answer to his servant's inquiry of “Lord,
sir, why can't you laugh, and do as other people
do?” “Laugh!” he exclaims in a tone from the
bottom of his chest, and with the bitter emphasis of
a misanthrope—“laugh! I cannot laugh! I cannot
do as other people do! When I look around
me (looking at the pit with a dull stare) I see every
one laughing and merry, (a fact,) while my face
remains as immoveable as a face carved on a brass
knocker!” “Do as other people do?” he continues—
“I can't do as other people do. Even in the
packet-boat, when all the passengers were as passengers
who had never been at sea before usually
are, I tried to be like them! but I could not! I
looked on a disappointed man!”
Incomparable Liston! Thou hast been a benefit
and a luxury unto the melancholy inhabitants
of this great city for many a day! Thou hast refuted
the trite axiom that “money will not purchase
pleasure;” for what man in London town,
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for the last twenty years, who could put his hand
into his breeches pocket, and find therein three
shillings and sixpence, but could say unto himself,
“Liston plays—I will hie me unto the theatre and
forget my cares—lo! I will laugh!” And if laughing
promoteth (as physicians affirm) the healthy
action of the biliary organs, from what floods of
acrimony and ill-will hast thou cleared the livers
of men! Even exquisites, as they looked at thee,
have been awakened from their state of graceful
torpor, and the corset laces of fair ladies have been
cracked in twain. Thou hast pleased alike the
well-judging, the ill-judging, and those who take
not the trouble of judging at all. As the Persian
saith—“may thy shadow never be less!”
-- 151 -- p091-406
FANNY KEMBLE.
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The rising hope and promise of the drama—the
bud—the blossom—the half-blown “rose and expectancy”
of the theatrical world—the pledge to the
rising generation, that, in their time, at least, Juliet
shall not lie buried in the tomb of the Capulets, or
Belvidera's sorrows be entrusted entirely to regularly
broken-in, thorough-paced, tragedy hacks. I
am well nigh tired of the mechanical woes and
shallow agonies of every-day tragedy—of picturesque
and passionless attitudinizing—of storms of
grief, according to the stage directions—“cross to
R. H. and burst into tears;” of violent beating of
the cold and insensible breast, and knocking of the
clenched hand upon the empty head. I am tired
of the mere pantomime of the art, without feeling
or common sense—tired of vehemence and impetuosity,
instead of passion; and particularly tired
of hearing such easy work characterized as the
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“flashes and outbreakings of genius.” To me,
gross and habitual exaggeration seems to pervade
nearly all the tragic exhibitions on the stage; and
if this be so, it is sufficient evidence of the absence
of feeling. Genuine feeling never exaggerates.
Those who are really touched by the parts they
assume, may, from that very cause, be so little master
of themselves as to fail in giving a finished portrait
of the character they have undertaken to represent;
but they never, by any chance, fall into
the opposite fault of “o'erstepping the modesty of
nature,” and becoming more violent than the hero
or heroine of the scene would have been in reality.
There is generally, however, an instinctive propriety
about true passion, which leads those under its influence
to do neither more nor less than they ought
to do; whilst the less easily excited feelings of others
wait upon the judgment, and it becomes a matter
of calculation how much grief or energy must be
used on certain occasions. But it is invariably your
hacknied, cold-blooded actors, without either passion
or judgment, and who off the stage laugh at
any thing like enthusiasm in their art as ridiculous,
that “out-herod Herod,” and affect a superabundance
of feeling to conceal their utter want of it;
just as ladies of questionable character make
an over parade of delicacy; or, indeed, as
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pretension of any and every sort seeks to conceal the absence
of what it has not by an ostentatious display
of the semblance of the quality it would be thought
to possess.
Now Miss Kemble does not exaggerate. I have
watched her closely, and have never, according to
my notions of things, seen, either in look, voice,
or action, the slightest attempt to impose upon the
audience by extravagance—to extract, as it were,
their sympathies by force, and storm them into approval.
She is not yet, in some respects, so “effective”
an actress as others of infinitely less ability—
that is, she does not so well understand how to produce
a sensation by “points” and “situations.”
She has yet much to learn and something to unlearn;
but she has that within her which cannot be
taught, though, parrot-like, it may be imitated—genuine
passion, delicacy, and feeling! and all that is
necessary for her to do to become a great actress is, in
acquiring the necessary business and technicalities of
the stage, to preserve pure and undefiled those rare
qualities. This is no easy task. Acting is an art in
which the noblest results have to be effected by the
most unromantic means. Bombastes Furioso itself
is not so much of a burlesque as the rehearsal of a
tragedy. To say nothing of Macbeths and Othellos
in surtout coats and pepper-and-salt pantaloons,
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and Lady Macbeths and Desdemonas in fitch tippets
and Leghorn flats, the continual recurrence of
trivial directions in the midst of agonizing speeches—
“when I do so, mind you do so”—the familiar
and unseasonable colloquialisms, the everlasting appeals
to and from the stage manager, the scoldings
and the squabblings, are apt to fritter away all enthusiasm
in people of ordinary minds, until they
become a kind of speaking and attitudinizing machines—
mere actors and actresses, who occasionally
produce an effect by the beauty of the language
they deliver, or from the situations in which they
are placed; but who are, for the most part, incapable
of duly appreciating either the one or the other.
It is only those whose feelings lie too deep beneath
the surface to be ruffled or worn away by the habits
and jargon of their profession, and who, when
the curtain rises, step upon the stage creatures of
another element, that really become great actors.
There are plenty of anecdotes of Kean afloat,
weighty enough of themselves to apparently controvert
this assertion; but however that wonderful
creature may now have become hardened by habit,
he must have been at one time terribly in earnest,
and the effect which he still creates is produced by
a faithful recollection and copy of the feelings which
originally agitated him. It is to be hoped that Miss
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Kemble will become a great actress, and that the
artificial education, of which she has yet much to
receive, will not destroy the natural beauty and
freshness of her mind. At present her personations
are rather distinguished by feminine sweetness and
delicacy, and quick and violent transitions of passion,
than by sustained force and grandeur; but
there is something occasionally in the tone of her
voice—in her dark expressive eye and fine forehead,
that speaks of the future Queen Katherine and wife
of Macbeth. Her Juliet, with some faults, is a delightful,
affectionate, warm-hearted piece of acting;
and she is decidedly the least mawkish and most
truly loving and loveable Belvidera I have ever seen.
The closing scene of madness, where others fail, is
her greatest triumph. The tones of her voice, when
playfully threatening Jaffier, might almost touch the
heart of a money-scrivener. She is the only Belvidera
I have beheld play this scene twice. They
all contrive to make it either excessively repulsive
or ridiculous, and somehow or other manage to
bring to mind a very vivid picture of Tilburina
in the Critic; while their invariably going home in
the midst of their distresses, and after a partial
touch of insanity, to put off their black velvets and
put on their white muslins to go completely mad
in, because, as that lady says, “it is a rule,” by no
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means tends to do away with this unfortunate association
of ideas. Miss Kemble is at present the sole
hope of the English public in tragedy. She must
not disappoint them, for, if she does, there is no one
else on whom they can turn their eyes. But when
it is considered that this is only her second season—
that she is yet but a girl of eighteen or nineteen,
it may be fairly said that she has already done sufficient
to justify the most sanguine expectations.
-- 157 -- p091-412
MADAME VESTRIS.
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Arch, easy, impudent, pert, sprightly, and agreeable,
with a handsome face, a delicious person, a rich,
musical voice, and an inexhaustible fund of self-possession,
this vivacious lady has pleased, and continues
to please on every stage, and in every department
of the drama in which she appears. She suits
all tastes. It is impossible for any one to dislike her;
and just as impossible, I should think, for any to
become enthusiastically fond of her acting. There
is no depth, nor power, nor sensibility about her.
Neither is there the aping or affectation of these
things. She is, emphatically, a clever actress, which
stands in about the same relation to a great actress
as an epigrammatist to a poet; or a shrewd, worldly
man to a wise one; and her being a more universal
favorite than others of a higher order of merit, is
only another proof of what has been proved some
thousand times since the world began—that success
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is a very fallacious test of ability, for the simple
reason, that the more the kind of merit is upon a
level with the intellects of the majority of the judges,
the more likely it is to be appreciated. The lady's
talent is purely executional, and has nothing to do
with the higher province of conception—indeed the
characters in which she generally appears are not
conceptions but copies, or copies of copies of the
ephemeral whims and vagaries of the passing hour—
trifling and agreeable, and well suited to the prevailing
light and superficial taste in theatrical matters;
for, without cant, it is light and superficial.
I have been told that she plays Rosalind. I should
like to see her do so for curiosity's sake; for I cannot
imagine a more pleasant and amusing performance,
and at the same time more decidedly different from
what it ought to be, than Madame Vestris's Rosalind.
She will be the arch, lively, free-spoken, wellbred
lady of the French court to the life; but any
thing rather than the wild, daring, susceptible, romantic
Rosalind.
Two-thirds of Madame Vestris's notoriety has
arisen from the facility with which she can un-sex
herself, and the confident boldness with which she
makes her bow to the audience in breeches. It is
all very well that she does so—half measures are
very perplexing and disagreeable; and if a lady
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makes up her mind to wear this article of apparel,
either in public or private, the more decidedly and
gracefully she does it the better; but still there must
be some affectation in the raptures of the town at
witnessing the same. To be sure, no one buttons a
coat, adjusts a cravat, wears a hat, handles a cane, or
draws a pair of gloves on in the true spirit of knowing
and irresistible coxcombry equal to Madame
Vestris; and it is really pleasant to sit and see those
manly airs and graces played of by a woman,
affording, as it does, conclusive evidence that such
deep-laid schemes to ensnare the admiration of the
fair sex do not always escape detection; yet still
the skill and observation requisite to do this may be
rated too highly. But Madame Vestris has better,
though perhaps weaker claims than this, on the
public favor. She has the ability to make wearisome
common-place passable, frivolity agreeable,
and sprightliness fascinating—a never-flagging joyousness
of spirit, and an almost promethean power
of imparting a portion of her exuberance of life and
animation to the walking, talking, mechanical blocks
by which she is occasionally surrounded. To use a
striking, technical phrase, she “keeps the stage
alive.” Her motions are graceful in the extreme,
and like a greyhound or a thorough-bred racer, she
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cannot put herself in an awkward attitude. Her
chambermaids have an archness inexpressible; and,
if it be a merit, (a stage one it certainly is,) no one
equals her in a certain quiet and unutterable mode
of giving a double entendre. As a singer, Madame
Vestris is deservedly admired. There is a hearty,
sensible, straight-forwardness in her manner, and
an absence of quackery and pretension in her style
that is extremely agreeable. She is a good enough
tactician to know exactly what she can do, and
though a spoiled favorite, discreet enough seldom to
attempt more than she can, with credit and safety
go through with—a rare merit. Her voice is none
of your common, thin, clear, unsubstantial organs,
but of a full, round, rich, satisfying quality; her
manner of giving the arch, and what may be called
dashing songs, she is in the habit of singing, is
charming, and the effect of the whole—voice, look,
and action—delightful.
There is another particular in which Vestris is
unrivalled, though, from the extraordinary notions
of delicacy prevalent in the western hemisphere,
wherein you are located, I almost despair of making
myself understood. I mean as regards the symetry
of those portions of the human frame which are
situated between the knees and ankles, but which
it is the custom of the country never to name by
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the right name, except when attached to the bodies
of inferior animals, such as dogs and horses; though
wherein consists the harm, even when speaking of
a lady, of plainly using the monosyllable beginning
with an l and ending with a g, with an intermediate
vowel, I cannot say, but leave it to people much
better acquainted with delicacy and metaphysics,
than I pretend to be, to determine. But this I can
say, that after having repeatedly looked upon those
two unmentionable pieces of humanity belonging
to Madame Vestris in the most critical manner, I
think them, as far as my judgment goes, perfect
in every point. Madame Vestris is also highly
accomplished in other matters, being mistress of
both French and Italian.
-- 162 -- p091-417
PASTA, TAGLIONI, ETC.
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Who has not heard of Pasta? The “glorious Pasta”—
the “divine Pasta”—the “immortal Pasta”—the
Pasta whose fame has reached every part of Europe
where a musician lives or an opera-house exists;
and who, despite of professional rivalries and jealousies,
is allowed by universal acclamation—by
competent and incompetent judges—to have “touched
the topmost point of greatness” in her profession?
After an absence of three years from England,
she made her appearance at the King's theatre,
upon which occasion nearly all the beauty and
fashion of the metropolis assembled to welcome her
return; together with a few individuals, like your
humble servant, neither particularly beautiful nor
fashionable. I cannot say but that I attended rather
to appease my feelings of awakened curiosity than
from any sanguine anticipations of pleasure, because
I thought that my ignorance of the Italian language
-- 163 --
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would be a drawback, not to be counterbalanced by
the talents of the actress, or a bald English translation
of the opera; but, without any affectation, I
can safely say I came away as much gratified as
astonished, and as much astonished as a person of
an equable temperament can well be. Pasta is certainly
sui generis. There have been many good
actors and many good singers, but such an union
of musical excellence and Siddonian power, passion,
grace, and majesty does not, never did, and it may
be, never will exist again in the same person. She
stands alone: no comparison between her and any
other will hold good—though not so much on the
score of inferiority as dissimilarity. The piece selected
for her debut was Mayer's grand serious opera
of Medea, a part with which Madame Pasta has
become identified, and of which she holds undisputed
possession. All who have the slightest smattering
of classicality are familiar with the history
of Jason and the Golden Fleece: his desertion of
his lawful spouse Medea, his subsequent bigamious
conduct in espousing the Princess Creusa, and the
fearful retaliation of his ex-wife. The dramatist
has followed the old story or fable very closely; and
the predominating passions are consequently love,
jealousy, rage, and revenge, with a suitable climax
of horror. I have seen many fine performances,
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but I never saw one in which the actor appeared
more terrifically in earnest than in this instance.
She was a complete whirlwind of the passions: a
southern vehemence pervaded every look and gesture;
yet, for all that, there was not any thing in
her acting in the slightest degree overstrained or
artificial, or which the most phlegmatic spectator
could point out as not justified by her situation in
the scene. In the first act, when endeavoring to
prevent Jason's marriage, she is merely a sublime
termagant; and it is only in the second, after all her
efforts prove fruitless, and she resolves upon revenge,
that her real triumph commences. Certainly nothing
could be finer or more touching than the irresolution
with which she regards her children when
meditating their murder—her alternate fierceness
and tenderness—her unavailing wish that she could
only kill the father's part in them—the deadly
hatred with which she regards them as Jason's offspring,
and the love and pity into which she relapses
as she feels that they are likewise her own.
Despair was never more truly or beautifully personified,
than, when about to strike the fatal blow,
she suddenly feels a mother's fondness tugging at
her heart-strings—her uplifted arm falls powerless
by her side, her head sinks upon her bosom, and
she stands a few seconds as in a trance—helpless
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and desolate. The voice of Jason, heard in pursuit
of her, rouses and lashes her into fury, bordering on
insanity, and the unnatural murder is at length
consummated. I have somewhat of an Indian contempt
for gesticulation on ordinary occasions, holding
it to be Frenchified, frivolous, and ridiculous;
and all kinds of attitudinizing are my especial abhorrence.
If ever I be executed for murder, it will be
for discharging a pistol from the pit of the theatre
at some fellow who, at the sight of a ghost or an injured
friend, has thrown his legs and arms into
what he conceives a beautiful position, and loth to
give the audience too little of a good thing, continues
them in it, until the applause his evolution
has excited subsides, to the entire destruction of the
illusion of the scene. But action, when there is
heart and soul in it, and when every movement is
apparently the result of the feeling of the moment,
is an universal language; and it is extraordinary
what a sensation may at times be produced by the
sweeping of an arm or the pointing of a finger.
Pasta is continually in motion. I do not know
whether she wants repose in other parts—in Medea
the violence of the passions called into play will not
admit of it—but there is a grace, variety, and fiery
vehemence in her gestures and manner, the very
opposite of theatrical calculation and display. Some
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of her attitudes are the very essence of the “sublime
and beautiful.” She appears to have something
else to think about than how the extremities of her
person are conducting themselves. The closing
scene, when, after the murder of her children, she
confronts Janson, throws the dagger reeking with
their blood towards him, exclaiming, as he turns
away with horror, “Ha! traitor—dost thou shun
me?” is perfectly appalling. Of Pasta's astonishing
voice it may be said that its claims to pre-eminence
rest rather upon its enormous power than its
quality—not that it is deficient in the latter respect,
but the former is its distinguishing characteristic;
the manner in which it fills and rings through
the immense opera-house is wonderful. It is, in
the lower tones, what is termed a “veiled” voice—
that is, in plain English, rather husky; but this,
which to others would be a serious disadvantage, is,
on many occasions, of signal service to Pasta, particularly
in depicting the stronger passions, such as
despair or horror; the upper tones are remarkably
full and clear, and all that can be desired. Upon
the whole, she is one of the wonders of the age,
whose merits have not been overrated; and, if ever
she cross the Atlantic, I am not afraid that what I
have ventured to say in her behalf, will appear at
all exaggerated.
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London is certainly a pleasant place in many
respects—you can have the very best of every thing
if you desire it, and merely for paying extravagantly
for it. As soon as the first singer in the
world, in her line, had withdrawn her claims to
public attention for the evening, the first dancer in
the world, to wit, Taglioni, put in hers. Do not be
afraid! My enthusiasm about her was only transitory,
and I am not going to be eloquent or tedious
(as the discriminating or foolish reader may think
me) in her praise to any alarming extent. Besides,
there is nothing astonishing about Taglioni—at
least according to the common acceptation of the
word—nothing to gape and wonder at; and in any
of the minor theatres in London, or elsewhere, I
have no doubt she would be accounted immensely
inferior to Mademoiselles Celeste, Constance, Heloise,
and other spinners around on one leg, who unblushingly
call themselves dancers. Her style is
rather distinguished by ease, grace, and elegance,
than energy and spirit. She has not the fire or
nimbleness of Ronzi Vestris, but her manner is
more refined; and she has less of the trickery of
the art than even that polished danseuse. Perhaps
there are as many points of resemblance between
Taglioni and Mrs. Austin as can possibly exist between
two accomplished mistresses of such widely
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different arts. (Every thing now-a-days, dancing,
tailoring, and cookery comes under the comprehensive
head of “arts and sciences.”) Both exhibit
the same heedlessness of mere effect, and appear to
have about an equal contempt for what the French
term a tour de force. A degree of languor, almost
amounting to indifference, seems to pervade both,
and both achieve the most difficult triumphs in their
art with so little effort that the uninitiated spectator
remains almost unconscious that any thing uncommon
has been accomplished. Both, in short, belong
to that scarce and valuable class of public characters
who seek rather to delight than astonish—who appeal
rather to the good sense and good taste of the
few than the “ignorant wonder” of the many.
-- 169 -- p091-424
PLACIDE.
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Doubtless three as good actors as Hilson, Barnes,
and Placide, are to be found; but it would be extremely
difficult to get three together with qualities
so finely balanced—so excellent, yet so dissimilar,
that in whatever requisites one is comparatively
poor, another is proportionably rich—three who
will play with equal spirit and effect in the same
piece, and appear as frequently together without
jostling each other. There is something pleasing,
and to those who know any thing of the everlasting
feuds and jealousies of a green-room, something
astonishing in the uninterrupted harmony with
which, season after season, these gentlemen, “labor
in their vocation.” They are a worthy triumvirate—
three public benefactors, to whom the citizens
ought to be grateful; for their talents have
often given them pleasure in exchange for care;
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and many a merry hour and joyous laugh has been
the result of their exertions.
Four or five years ago, Placide's abilities were
but little known. He had risen from the lowest
walks of the drama, and, as is common in such
cases, the admiration of the audience did not keep
pace with his increasing merit. They were slow
to believe that one whom they had long been in
the habit of regarding as not above mediocrity,
could ever attain excellence, and strangers were
often astonished at the slight estimation in which
he was held. This is human nature: we are unwilling
to give up early impressions, or retract expressed
opinions. Had a strange actor of equal
merits and some reputation, appeared before the
same audience, he would instantly have become an
object of unmingled admiration. This, however,
could not last, and the unequivocal ability displayed
by Placide in some parts commanded praise—
praise attracted attention, and that was all that was
wanted. Since that time he has steadily and rapidly
advanced in public estimation—he has never
once receded, and his course is still onward.
To speak of Placide apart from the character he
represents, is difficult. We know that there are a
string of set phrases going the rounds of the press,
concerning actors “identifying themselves with the
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part they play,” and “losing themselves in the character
they represent,” &c. and, in some sense, this
is true, seeing that they frequently lose themselves,
the character, the author, and the audience; but
in reality, there is not one man in a thousand who
possesses the gift of making the audience forget the
actor in the part. Even in Kean it was sometimes
wanting. It is the highest kind of praise; and as
it appears to be fast becoming a settled rule, that
all praise, to be worth the having, must be in the
superlative, a quality that is peculiar to the few,
has been awarded without scruple to the million.
Indeed, so very loosely and indiscriminately are
these phrases applied, that we should not be surprised
to see one of them tacked to a commendation
of Barnes, who seldom or never “identifies”
himself with any thing, but simply plays Barnes,
let him appear in what he will; and so amusing
and successful is he in that character, that he cannot
do better than stick to it.—But Placide has in
truth the faculty of appearing to be the character
he assumes; and we would instance as a strong
proof of the soundness of this assertion, that of all
the imitations of celebrated actors that have been
given in this city, not one has been attempted of
Placide. And why is this? For the simple reason
that he has no peculiarities common to all his
-- 172 --
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characters, and the imitation would not be recognized
unless the audience had seen him in the part
imitated. Not so with many—Barnes, for instance.
Let a good imitation of him be given in any character,
and though nine-tenths of the audience have
never seen him in that peculiar character, the general
resemblance will be instantly appreciated.
In articles like the present, which must of necessity
be brief, it would be impossible to enter into a
minute examination of the various excellencies of
Mr. Placide, in the wide range of parts in which he
appears. There are three distinct classes in which
he is without an equal, namely, old men, or rather
middle-aged gentlemen, drunken servants, and kind-hearted,
simple country lads. As a sample of the
three we would instance the Marquis in the Cabinet,
Antonio in the Marriage of Figaro, and Zekiel
Homespun in the Heir at Law. In the last he
would probably be successful either at Drury Lane
or Covent Garden. Upon the whole, he is a fine—
almost a faultless actor, with a rich natural vein
of humor, free from the alloy of buffoonery.
-- 173 -- p091-428
BARNES.
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It will not be easy for us to forget the first time we
saw this actor. Going into the Park theatre one
evening after the performance had commenced, we
perceived a person on the boards conducting himself
in what appeared to us a very extraordinary
manner; though it is not easy to find words clearly
to explain what that manner was. He was moving
his body across the boards in a most eccentric
fashion, throwing his limbs into all sorts of unimaginable
positions, ogling, squinting, puffing out his
cheeks, and alternately elongating and contracting
the muscles of the thin and narrow face of which
he was the owner, with the most ridiculous and ludicrous
rapidity. The business of the stage was at
a stand, and the other actors appeared to wait with
exemplary patience for the termination of those curious
proceedings; and then they, and this person
in particular, played out the rest of the scene in a
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discreet and proper manner. The people around
seemed to take all in good part; while we were lost
in astonishment, and knew not which to wonder at
most, the impudence of the actor, or the passiveness
of the audience. Hinting as much to a gentleman
in the vicinity, he smilingly replied that “it was
Barnes;” the announcement of which piece of information
he seemed to consider as a perfectly satisfactory
explanation of what had taken place or of
whatever might take place.
Verily, there is much truth in the saying, that
“custom is second nature.” When Clara Fisher
first appeared in this country, every one noticed
and talked about the slight lisp which it was then
averred she had, though now, nine-tenths of her
admirers will deny that any such peculiarity does,
or ever did exist. So, though in a greater degree,
with Barnes. Custom has so reconciled us to his
ways, that we can at present sit and see the manoeuvres
with which he intersperses his part, played
off, scarcely conscious that they are the same which
formerly excited our unmingled astonishment; and
if asked to speak of him as we now see him, we
should say, that he is one of the most amusing,
extravagant, and extraordinary actors we have
ever beheld. In the main, he is undoubtedly a
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man possessed of real sterling comic talent, though
not of the most polished kind. He has all the spirit,
drollery, and coarseness of one of Cruickshank's caricatures.
His buffooneries (if for the lack of another
term, so harsh a word may be applied,) are
the best species of that bad genus, inimitable of
their kind, and less offensive than those of any
other actor; and he has so intermixed them with
every thing he does, that there is no separating the
good from the bad, the wheat from the tares, so
that his best efforts are sprinkled with defects, and
his worst marked with many redeeming qualities.
No man takes a liberty with his audience so frequently
as Barnes, and no man does it so well,
Others stop half way, as if conscious that they were
doing wrong, and fail; Barnes, on the contrary,
treats the audience like an old friend—places unlimited
confidence in their good nature, and succeeds;
for they seem to feel that it would be unkind
to repay this confidence with any thing else
than a laugh at his good, bad, or indifferent jokes.
It would be folly to say that Mr. Barnes was any
thing like a faultless performer, but he is a great
deal better than many who approach nearer that
character. He is an original, and one whom you
like sometimes, even in spite of your judgment:
-- 176 --
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and, let him play what he will, his appearance is
always welcome.
There are two classes of persons who form an
undue estimate of Barnes. First, the vulgar, who
admire prodigiously and applaud vociferously, the
contortions and distortions of his visage, and are,
for the most part, incapable of admiring any thing
else; and, secondly, the over fastidious, who, pretending
to an extraordinary purity of taste, judge
him by his defects rather than by his merits, and,
for a few unseemly excrescences, condemn a man
of first-rate talents as merely a low actor. This is
injustice in the highest degree. In nearly the
whole of the extensive range of characters he sustains,
the sterling ore is in the proportion of ten to
one to the alloy; and in all the shades of old men,
he may be pronounced uniformly good. There is
a truth in his conception, and even a minute delicacy
of finish in his representation of the lowest
and most degraded stages of humanity—of extreme
dotage and drivelling imbecility, that are superlatively
fine. In old misers too,—rascals clinging
with desperate inveteracy to this world and its concerns,
yet fearful and anxious about the future—
trembling at eternity and grasping at a guinea—
such as Nicholas, in Secrets Worth Knowing, or
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Silky, in the Road to Ruin, he is altogether unequalled:—
the tottering step—the greedy, ghastly,
and suspicious look—and the sharp, broken, and
querulous voice, form an impressive and pitiable
picture of human nature; and yet Mr. Barnes's
reputation is founded less on these than on far
inferior efforts, such as Mawworm, &c. There
is another class of old men, of a vigorous, passionate,
and self-willed temperament, such as Restive
in Turn Out, and Col. Hardy, in Paul Pry,
in which he is nearly if not equally happy.
Upon the whole there is a very great deal to admire
in Barnes, with scarcely any thing, when
once familiar with him, that is really offensive.
And his faults too are not altogether his own, but
are in some measure continued, if not created, by
the public. For instance, when, as Sir Peter Teazle,
in the screen scene, he relates the unkindness
of his wife, and is moved to tears, the audience
invariably catch at the application of the
handkerchief to his eyes as an infallible one for
them to laugh, thinking that the griefs of Barnes
must of necessity be ludicrous; and, do all he can,
he cannot make them comprehend that it is possible
for him to enact a part where it is necessary to
go through a little decorous sorrow, and affect to
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shed tears in earnest. As it is very hard for a man
to have his griefs laughed at, Barnes in turn
laughs at grief; and a dose of him in the evening,
taken the last thing before going to bed, is as
good an antidote for the spleen as Colman's “Broad
Grins.”
-- 179 -- p091-434
HILSON.
[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]
We now come to the last, though assuredly not the
least, of the comic trio, whose efforts, as much as
any thing else, have gained for the Park that high
character which it at present enjoys; for it is not
the half-dozen appearances of an eminent performer
that give an enduring reputation to a theatre, but
the combined and well-directed efforts of a fixed
company. There is a strange way of acquiring histrionic
fame in this land, by a curious process denominated
“starring,” which is carried into effect
somewhat in this manner: a man, after cogitating
upon the subject, becomes impregnated with a high
opinion of his own very moderate abilities, and determines
forthwith to enlarge his sphere of action;
he packs up his baggage and goes forth, scouring
over the country in all directions, and becoming at
intervals visible, for a few nights, first at one city
and then at another; this continues for some time,
when the gentleman returns, invested with all the
-- 180 --
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privileges and immunities of a star, and impudently
“lords it o'er his betters,” though by what claim of
metaphysical reasoning a man becomes more ably
qualified to play Shakspeare or Sheridan by travelling
a few hundred miles in a steamboat, is not exactly
apparent. But so it is, and these luminaries
at present abound. Stars, forsooth! (the use of
this slang term is very disagreeable, but there is no
helping it;) why nine-tenths of them are no better
than tallow candles—rush-lights—who emit a
feeble, twinkling ray, till they come in contact with
some slight change in the breath of public favor,
when they disappear on the instant, and nothing but
smoke remains. They ought to be snuffed out by
the dozen.
We have wandered away from the subject more
immediately in hand, being filled with virtuous
indignation against those theatrical pedlers, in whose
behalf a great portion of the public sneer at their
more modest and stationary brethren;—as if locomotion
were a virtue and a change of intellect was
the consequence of a change of air.—Mr. Hilson is
no star, and the New-York people ought to be
thankful for it; or what would they have done for
their Nipperkins, Numpos, Figaros, Paul Prys, Drs.
Ollapod and Pangloss, and a whole host of worthies
that nobody else can play; together with a
-- 181 --
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hundred parts that might be mentioned in which he is
unrivalled!—Hilson's humor is not of the sly, quiet,
and unconscious kind, like Placide's—nor of the
broad and familiar, like Barnes'—it is of a more bustling
and vivacious quality, and in parts full of gaiety
and motion, shifts and stratagems—such as intriguing
footmen or lying valets—he is in his element.
No man has a finer or quicker eye for the
ridiculous: there are a number of things which
take place in the business of the scene that do not
admit of previous study, and Hilson sees in a moment
where a look or motion will add effect to an
accident, or heighten the absurdity of a situation.
This is of great advantage to him at all times, but
more particularly in characters of a burlesque description,
such as Bombastes Furioso and Abrahamides,
which he performs to admiration.
But there is another ground on which Mr. Hilson
may be taken, and on which he possesses an
immense advantage over his two comic brethren,
Barnes and Placide, namely, in the exhibition of
strong deep feeling, and rough violent passions; and
this is, perhaps, his most perfect line, being altogether
free from the follies before noticed. What effect
he gives to the dead-weight character of Rolamo in
Clari! and in stern, blunt and unfortunate veterans,
of every description, he has the field all to himself
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—there is no competitor to contend with him. Who
is there that has seen his Robert Tyke, and forgotten
it? Unfortunately we never beheld the late
John Emery in this, his favorite part, though we
have Rayner, his successor at Covent Garden, and
a number of others, but not one of them is to be
compared with Hilson. This character is, perhaps,
the best of Morton's crude conceptions. Tyke is
a malefactor and a low and reckless vagabond,
though still with some remnants of better feeling
hanging about him; and, when his remorse is
awakened by circumstances, it requires a person of
no common mind to depict the passions and sufferings
of the uneducated villain.—There are plenty
who appear in it that can display a superabundance
of bodily exertion, and do very well if you will accept
gesticulation for feeling—that can rant and
foam at the mouth—that can look like ruffians, act
like ruffians, and gabble bad Yorkshire;—but all
that is not playing Tyke. Very little is hazarded
in saying, that, in the United States, there is but one
man who can do justice to Robert Tyke, and that
man is Thomas Hilson.
-- 183 -- p091-438
CLARA FISHER
[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]
When nature quits the even tenor of her way to
form a prodigy, and manufactures clay out of the
ordinary routine of business, to which long habit
has accustomed her, she generally does herself no
credit, but instead of a beauty spot, drops a blot upon
the fair face of creation—a wart—an excrescence.
Her commonest freaks in this way are—giants
and dwarfs—learned pigs—calves with two heads,
which those with only one throng to see—or calculating
youths, like famous Master Bidder, who go
through the arithmetic without flogging, and know
by intuition that two and two make four. But of
all her prodigies, the precocious theatrical prodigy is
the most to be dreaded and avoided. It is in general
a pert little creature, which has been taught to
repeat certain words like a parrot, and drilled to
imitate certain actions like a monkey, and is then
stuck upon the stage for “children of a larger
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growth” to gape and wonder at, and applaud for no
better reason than because it is six years old and
two feet odd inches high, as if all man and womankind
had not been, at one period of their lives, just
as old and as high. To sit and witness the abortive
attempts of such animalcules, when there are
full grown men and women in the world, is about
as sensible as to eat green fruit when one can get
ripe. We always eschewed these small evils; and
though having numerous opportunities, could never
be prevailed upon, same few years back, to go and
see the then little Miss Clara Fisher represent Gloster,
“that bloody and devouring boar;” Hamlet, Shylock,
or any other appropriate character; and hearing
that she was on her way to this country, we
thought Mr. Simpson had done a very foolish thing,
and made many wise predictions to the effect that
she would be found altogether worthless and good
for nothing.—Perhaps no one ever entered a theatre
more full of prejudice than we did against the young
and blooming girl, just bursting into womanhood,
who at that moment came forward upon the stage,
and dropped one of the most graceful curtsies that
ever woman made, to the admiring audience. We
expected to see something small, impertinent, and
disagreeable; but instead, here was a sight of all
others most grateful to the eye—a beautiful female
-- 185 --
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exerting herself to please, and a load of unkindly
feelings was at once swept away. The first three
acts of the piece (The Will) exhibited some agreeable
acting, though nothing extraordinary; but
when, in the fourth, she gave “The Bonnets of
Blue,” with all the fire and enthusiasm of a devoted
follower of “Charlie the chief o' the clan,” an instantaneous
and total renunciation of all preconceived
opinions took place; and before she had
finished her personation of the four Mowbrays, we
were thoroughly convinced that Clara Fisher was
one of the most natural, charming, clever, sensible,
sprightly actresses that ever bewitched an audience,
and to that opinion we ever have since firmly adhered.
In form and feature Clara Fisher is neither dignified
nor beautiful, but she is irresistibly fascinating,
and that is better than all the dignity and
beauty in the world. Her form is finely proportioned—
smoothly and gracefully rounded, with
more of the Hebe than the sylph about it, and when
in motion most flexible and waving. Her face, as
was said of Mrs. Jordan's, “is all expression, without
being all beauty.” There is no word that will
exactly characterize it: “pretty,” is unmeaning,
and it does not strictly come up to the idea conveyed
by the word “handsome.” It is at all times,
-- 186 --
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however, a very charming face, even when in a state
of calm repose; but when the passion of the
scene stirs the mind within, and that mind is reflected
in the countenance—when the eloquent
eye is lighted up by feeling, and the smooth
cheeks clustered with smiles and dimples, then
that face is indeed lovely.—In appropriate gesture
and action she is most “express and admirable.”
This is, in fact, one of her most prominent
characteristics; and if we were asked in what particular
Clara Fisher was superior to any other
actress, we should answer, in the perfect grace and
freedom of her motions. In this respect she is a
little English Vestris; and if any one doubts it, let
him pay particular attention to the singularly appropriate
beauty of her action in singing the spirited
Scotch ballad before alluded to: the toss of her
head which accompanies the utterance of the word
“hurrah,” is precisely the one thing that Matthews
cannot imitate.
She is one of nature's actresses. Perhaps no one
ever so completely possessed the faculty of mobility,
or entered with more keen enjoyment into the spirit
of the part represented. Her whole soul appears to
be in every thing she does, and we believe it is not
only so in seeming, but in reality. From the infinite
variety of characters in which she appears, it
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would exceed all reasonable bounds to enter into an
analysis of them. The days of her Richard and
Shylock are, it is to be hoped, over for ever, though
there were many sensible things in both these parts—
correct conceptions and original and spirited readings,
which older heads might adopt with advantage;
but it was vexing to see a young and beautiful
girl in such a part as Shylock, and the better she
played it, the more provoking it was. In comedy
there is a glorious and boundless prospect before her,
and it is there she appears most perfectly at home.
To the high-flown fashionable dames of genteel
comedy she cannot as yet do justice, though the
time may come when she will do so. One thing is
against her. In the lady of high life there is much
that is artificial. Now Miss Fisher is too natural
for such characters; her spirits are too wild and untameable
to be “cabin'd, cribbed, confined, bound
in,” by the ordinances of a highly polished state of
society. Her fine ladies are consequently full of
brilliant points—excellent in detached scenes and
sentences, but not in keeping as a whole. In parts
where nature has fair play, such as Peggy in the
Country Girl, or Phebe in Paul Pry, “none but
herself can be her parallel.” How different from
these, yet how delightful in itself, was her Viola in
Twelfth Night. We were never before so conscious
-- 188 --
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of the extreme sweetness of her “small, delicate
voice,” as when giving utterance to the exquisite
poetry which Shakspeare has put into the mouth of
“brown Viola.” It was in truth “most musical,
most melancholy.”
The reputation of Clara Fisher has, in a great
measure, been built on her representation of the
more eccentric parts of the drama, such as the
Mowbrays, Little Pickles, &c. and of their kind
they are perfect specimens of dramatic excellence.
Some may think these are at the best but trifling
affairs; we do not. A delineation true to nature is
a rare thing, and well worth looking after in whatever
shape it is to be found. Miss Fisher has rather
a penchant for male attire, which is not to be wondered
at, for it becomes her well: all other women
whom we have seen wear the inexpressibles in public,
cannot forget their sex, but betray throughout a
smirking consciousness that they are feminine, and
are of course for the most part awkward and embarrassed;
she appears to forget her dress and all
other minor considerations in the character she is
representing.
Before coming to a conclusion, a few words about
her singing. Perhaps no one with such limited
powers of voice, ever equalled Miss Fisher
in the effect which she gives to a song. She
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not only sings it, but acts it in the most arch and
spirited or tender and impressive manner. Her face
is a mirror where every sentiment of humor or
feeling expressed in the verse is reflected. What a
delightful piece of pleasantry is her “Fall not in
love;” and how tame and vapid any of her little
simple ballads sound when sung afterwards by
vocalists of superior pretensions. But there is no
end to her varied qualifications, and there seems to
be scarcely any limit to her powers.
-- 190 -- p091-445
RONZI VESTRIS.
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— When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o'the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still—still so, and own
No other function
—Shakspeare.
We were born upon a spot of earth where feet are
used for prosaic rather than poetical purposes, and
where they are looked upon merely as appendages
which it would be singular and inconvenient to be
without. Independent of the ordinary business of
life, walking and running matches, leaping, or any
other hardy and vigorous exercises, were the affairs
in which their services were commonly required;
though, to be sure, the people did at times assemble,
and voluntarily undergo and perform a violent and
eccentric motion, by them termed dancing; but, as
regarded all the graceful uses to which feet, and the
limbs to which they are more immediately attached,
might be brought by scientific cultivation, not an
idea was entertained, and not a glimmering of light
-- 191 --
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had been diffused on the subject. Dancing was
there in a primitive state, or rather, it was worse—
like the Russians, hovering between barbarism and
civilization, with all the bad properties of both, and
little of the good of either. The freedom and untaught
grace of nature were gone, without any of
the beautiful combinations and surprising achievements
of art being substituted in their place. To
a spectator, it seemed as if the parties engaged (the
men at least) were, without any perceivable reason,
subjecting themselves to a rough and somewhat
disagreeable exercise. By a violent exertion of the
muscles, the body was forced bolt-upright into the
air, whence, as soon as the impetus had ceased,
it returned as speedily as possible to the floor, which
it no sooner touched, than another desperate effort
again propelled it upward, and so on, until nature
was exhausted. We had indeed at times misgivings
if this could really be dancing; an art that
was said to consist of a series of the most skilful
and picturesque movements; and as we read of the
Asiatic girls, the Greeks, Herodias, Mercandotti,
Deshays, and others eminent in that line, we marvel
exceedingly; but any expressed opinion on the
subject was instantly put down by a reference to the
high professional character of the two gentlemen
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[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]
who had the superintendence of the heels of the
springing generation in that portion of the globe.
In the course of time we beheld many professional
artists (English ones) at theatres and other
public places, and always felt relieved when they
got through their work; and the performance of
the Winnebago Indians nearly convinced us
that dancing in all nations, whether savage or
civilized, was a foolish abomination. The appearance,
however, of Hutin, and the French corps de
ballet, threw some light upon the subject. The
dancers of a nation of dancers were brought to the
American shores to expound the mysteries of the
Academie de la Musique. The essence, the quintessence
of dancing, was what was expected, and
had Vestris never appeared, it might still have passed
for such. Here, at least, was some approach
to an union of grace and agility; while the boldness
and novelty of the spectacle threw the audience
into a state of most undignified surprise. They did
not know exactly what to make of it, but took it for
granted that it must be superlatively fine, and consequently
counterfeited an exuberance of admiration;
but when, in the pas seul of “I've been
roaming,” Hutin came bounding like a stag from
the top to the bottom of the stage in about three
springs, the connoisseurs in the pit were really
-- 193 --
[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]
amazed; they looked into each other's faces for information,
but not finding any, grinned a smile of
approbation; and many were heard to give utterance
to the oracular exclamation of “no mistake!” a
term by which no small portion of the inhabitants
of this city intimate their sense of excellence in
any shape.
But Vestris, the exquisite Vestris appeared, and
all that had gone before seemed poor in comparison.
With a form cast in nature's happiest
mould, and a face to match; with
“Motions graceful as a bird's in air;”
with a step as free as fancy, agile as an antelope,
and elastic as a bow, who was to be compared with
her? When contrasted with her, the movements of
all the rest were sharp and angular. Their performance
was a collection of brilliant points—hers
one uninterrupted piece of perfection. We did not
want to see her dance, only to behold her in motion.
She could even do that hardest of all things—violate
nature gracefully; for it must be owned that
some of her attitudes are such as nature never dreamt
of, though this is a fault, perhaps, inseparable from
the French school. Of the faults of that school
she has less than any of the rest, especially the
practice of twirling rapidly round on one foot to
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[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]
please the vicious taste, and gain the good-for-nothing
applause of those whose ignorant wonder is excited
by this vulgar and marvelously ungraceful trick.
In the slow parts of some of the dances her action
is in reality the very “poetry of motion:”—the swell
and fall of the summer sea—the waving grace
of the rich meadow when the breeze passes gently
over it—the peculiar sweep of the branches of the
willow, which, even at their largest growth, seem
constructed of the most delicate fibres—or, indeed,
any thing that is most beautiful in motion, is, at
times, not more beautiful than Vestris. And, as the
music takes a quicker and bolder measure, with what
nerve and confidence she spurns the boards and
throws herself in air! When we think of it, we
look at the pedestals on which our own trunk is
supported, and “inly ruminate” what quantity of
cultivation would be necessary to enable them to
accomplish such feats!
There is another advantage in seeing Vestris,
particularly to persons whose ideas, like our own,
are involved in more than Egyptian darkness concerning
pirouettes, entrechats, &c. and who might
expose their ignorance and get into an awkward
dilemma by asserting that Estelle was better than
Ravenot, or Ravenot better than Estelle. When
Vestris is before them they are safe. They can
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[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]
lean back at their ease—assume a knowing and
intelligent look—nod complacently at the execution
of any surprising manæuvre, and indulge in the
most sweeping eulogiums without fear of committing
themselves; for she is
— “such a dancer
Where men have eyes and feelings she must answer.”
-- -- p091-451
RICHINGS.
[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]
Notwithstanding the manifold dramatic sins
and improprieties of this great man and multifarious
actor, he is by no means a disagreeable or unentertaining
personage. Some of his efforts are
highly amusing; and at all times he at least never
fails in securing his own most decided approbation,
as is quite evident from the everlasting smile of selfcomplacency
which irradiates his very good-looking
countenance; and, be it remarked, that in these
captious, fault-finding, universal-diffusion-of-knowledge
times, when every one who turns over an
author or looks at an actor or picture, feels in duty
bound to furnish forth his mite of carping criticism,
in order to make manifest the preternatural acuteness
it has pleased heaven to invest him with, a
confirmed habit of self-approval is by no means an
uncomfortable quality. It is really a pleasure to
any man who delights in witnessing the happiness
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[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]
of his fellow-creatures, to see Mr. Richings make
his entry on the stage in a character which requires
that he should be arrayed in goodly apparel.
How happy, how exuberantly happy he is! Joy
sparkles in his eyes, and his physiognomy is radiant
with smiles! Perhaps the individual in the
play whom he undertakes to represent, is some
poor unfortunate, afflicted with debt or other dire
distress. But what of that? Is any person so unreasonable
as to expect Mr. Richings will for that
hang his nether lip, and look dolorously at the audience?
No—his face is an index of his mind—
gladness reigns there, and the sorrows of the personage
whose name and situation he assumes, are
far too remote and abstracted to counterbalance the
inspiriting feelings produced by a well-fitting fashionable
coat and an unimpeachable pair of inexpressibles.
And who will say that this is copying
nature abominably? Copying nature! why it is
nature itself, as may be seen exemplified in a hundred
instances, with a few slight modifications, any
fine day on the shady side of Broadway.—Yet, for
all this, the stage-manager at the Park will sometimes
set this gentleman—this very Mr. Richings,
to play tragedy. Misjudging Mr. Barry! Search
for some lean bilious wretch, to speak blank verse
and administer arsenic. Is this a man to “move
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the waters,” or awake the tender feelings by dabbling
in the pathetic, and rehearsing his griefs and
sorrows? His griefs and sorrows! why the audience
would look in his well-conditioned frontispiece,
and see at once that it was a palpable untruth—a
barefaced attempt to impose upon their sympathies.
Still, he is at times compelled to do this, which perturbs
his spirit very much, and causes him to grow
furious, and then he does so “roar, that it would
do any man's heart good to hear him;”—and it
does do the hearts of many good—and the ears of
many good, who delight in, and are excited by,
loud sounds; and they pronounce it “great,” and
clap their hands, as much as to say, “let him roar
again, let him roar again.'
As a vocalist Mr. Richings is rather distinguished
by force than sweetness; and as a comedian, many
of his efforts, like Cumberland's comedies, are not
to be laughed at. There is a fine balance of mental
and physical qualifications in him: if at times his
sentences are badly put together, and his periods
inelegantly turned, his shoulders might furnish
hints to a statuary in both those respects; and
though his conceptions be ever so faulty, a more
faultless leg cannot be conceived. Indeed, in personal
appearance, he is model of a man. In the mental
department he has sundry objectionable
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properties, the greatest of which is an over-abundance of
facetiousness, which finds vent in the shape of manufactured
pieces of pleasantry that are ever and
anon thrown in the face of the audience; some
of those extempore coruscations at times elicit a
laugh from a few choice spirits, who are particularly
quick at catching any thing that sounds like
a joke, though the majority are generally at a loss
to discover in what the jest consists; and this practice
has the unfortunate tendency of occasionally
leading to the belief that Mr. Richings, like Sir
Andrew Aguecheek, has, at times, “no more wit
than a christian or an ordinary man.” Like that
immortal knight too, he looks as if he were “a
great eater of beef,” and perchance that “does harm
to his wit.”
Altogether, however, Mr. R. is a useful performer,
and evidently strives to please. From a very miserable
actor he has already become quite a respectable
one, and in some parts has really evinced considerable
comic talents. Besides, he has been a
long time at the Park threatre, and all who have
been there for any considerable period, even the
worst (amongst whom we are far from classing
Mr. R.) acquire from the good company that surrounds
them and the audience before which they
appear, a certain look and manner of conducting
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themselves, that give them the appearance of gentlemen,
at least comparatively speaking. When
Mr. Richings transported himself to the regions of
the La Fayette, he actually moved like a demi-god
among the scum and refuse that latterly congregated
there. It is to be hoped he will not again
migrate from his present quarters. We should be
sorry to miss his good-humoured, good-looking face,
and his unique manner of doing some things. Besides,
he is an improving actor, and may he long
continue so.
-- 201 -- p091-456
MRS. WHEATLEY.
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The clever and facetious author of “Sayings and
Doings,” in one of his admirable tales, makes a
country manager remark, that “in the theatrical
profession heroines and sentimental young ladies
are as plentiful as blackberries, but that a good old
woman is invaluable; and all who are tolerably
conversant with the affairs of the stage, very well
know, that in one respect, at least, the order of nature
is reversed, and that a fine old woman is more
desirable than a young one. It is not difficult to
account for this. We think the observation may
be hazarded that females, generally speaking, prefer
dimples to wrinkles; and so the young ladies very
naturally refuse to anticipate the time when nature
will compel them to appear as old ones, and the old
ladies, whose ideas and reminiscences are juvenile,
as pertinaciously object to personate any thing but
young ones, thinking, doubtless, it would be folly
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to surrender into the hands of youth and inexperience,
those parts which time and practice has so
well enabled them to perform. Bent on charming
to the last, we have seen, with fear and trembling,
a very fat old woman of fifty as Juliet, lolling over
the frail and creaking balcony, while a short, pursy,
and somewhat asthmatic Romeo came waddling to
his love, puffing out—
“How softly sweet sound lover's tongues by night!”
The truth is, that the personation of old women
is a very thankless branch of theatrical business,
and the same quantity of ability which, employed
in it, meets with comparative neglect, would, in a
more enticing line of character, draw down thunders
of applause. This may in some degree acccount
for the meagre and scanty mention which is
made of Mrs. Wheatley by the press of this city.
She is seldom noticed, and when she is, it is generally
in one of those unmeaning commendations
which are at intervals dealt out to every worthless
appendage of a green-room, such as she “was quite
at home,” or “went through her part with spirit,” or
any other ready-coined phrase. For our own part,
we have the highest opinion of Mrs Wheatley, and
think there is little ventured in saying, that she is
not only the best actress in her line on this
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continent, but the best beyond all comparison; and in
all the theatres in which, in various parts, we have
occasionally been present, out of London we have
never seen her equal. Where is there another
Mrs. Malaprop in this country? Or indeed, in all
the range of ridiculous old ladies, who, like her,
can give the height of absurdity without the taint
of vulgarity? There is all the difference in the
world between making such a character as Mrs.
Malaprop a coarse, ignorant old woman, and a
foolish old lady. And herein lies the excellence of
Mrs. Wheatley; however her “nice derangement
of epithets” may betray her ignorance, her appearance
and manners show she is not one of the canaille,
but familiar at least with the forms and
manners of a drawing-room. In the composition
of her dress too, from “top to toe” there is not a
vulgar curl or color. But it is not in this line alone
that Mrs. W. can lay claims to distinction. Her
talents are as versatile as they are excellent, and
her chambermaids, if not marked by the same evident
superiority, have a pertness and spirit about
them that are always amusing. There is one
character that she plays, (a very disagreeable one)
which in her hands is one of the most perfect efforts
we have witnessed on the boards of a theatre, viz.
Mrs. Subtle in Paul Pry. Every expression of
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her countenance, and every modulation of her
voice, are imbued with the spirit of art and demure
hypocrisy.
There is another thing worthy of remark. Mrs.
Wheatley, though the representative of age, is herself
in the prime of life and full vigor of intellect.
This is an advantage as great as it is rare; for the
line of character in which she appears, is generally
used as a dernier resort by actresses, who are themselves
too old to appear in any thing else, and who
bring to their task confirmed habits, and jaded and
worn out powers of mind and body. According
to the common course of nature, it will be long
before the public will have to regret this as
being the case with Mrs. Wheatley; and even
when time shall have laid his unsparing hand
upon her, her excellence in the execution of those
parts, will have become so much a matter of habit,
that only the physical force and energy will be
wanting.
The faults of this lady are so few, that it is
scarcely worth while pointing them out. The
greatest is, that she is not always proof against the
applause of the more noisy part of the audience;
so that when she does any thing particularly well,
and a clapping of hands ensues, she wishes to do
more, and is in the habit of spreading out the folds
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of her ample and antique garments, and flouncing
about the stage more than is exactly necessary. As
long, however, as Mr. Simpson retains the services
of Mrs. Wheatley in the Park company, that theatre
will be possessed of an attraction which no other
establishment can, at present, or is likely to equal.
-- 206 -- p091-461
BARRY AND WOODHULL.
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These two performers are as opposite as the antipodes,
and we place them together for the sake of
contrast. Their style of acting is as dissimilar as
may be. Woodhull is as unbending as iron—
Barry as yielding as wax. In the expression of passion,
Woodhull, like a flint, must be struck sharply
before he emits a spark of fire—while Barry, like a
rocket, is off in a blaze, at the slightest touch. The
one is as hard as granite—the other as flexible as
silk; and if, by any process, the qualities of the two
could be compounded together, a fine actor would
be the result. In melo-dramas, where murders
have to be committed, or any other unlawful transaction
carried on, they mostly hunt in couples.
Both are generally scoundrels, but scoundrels with
a difference. Woodhull is the stanch, obdurate
villain—Barry the weak and wavering sinner. The
one has “no compunctious visitings of nature”—
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the other is “too full o' the milk of human kindness,
to catch the nearest way.” Barry murders
like a novice, while Woodhull does his work with
the easy self-possession of a professional gentleman.
In the end, too, when poetical justice comes to be
awarded, they consistently die in character—the
one marches to the gallows as “cool as a cucumber,”
while the other in some fit of repentance,
cheats the law by bursting a blood-vessel, or going
off in a fit of apoplexy. For the truth of all
this we appeal to nine-tenths of the melo-dramas
that have been or may be enacted at the Park
theatre, in which these gentlemen have heretofore
appeared or may hereafter appear.
Mr. Barry is an actor with many faults, but still
one that may safely be called a good actor—a title
which, when fairly deserved, a man may be proud
of, for it implies the possession of much and varied
ability. He is a good actor, and there is nothing
to prevent his being a better. Nature has given
him a handsome face, a graceful person, and a full
and mellow voice. Added to these advantages, his
conception of his part is generally correct, and his
execution spirited. The great fault of Mr. Barry
is exaggeration—exaggeration in every variety of
shape; but principally exaggeration in action, and
this pervades, more or less, every thing he does.
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When he should be out of temper, he is in a passion,
and when he should be in a passion, he is in
a frenzy; when he should tremble for a moment,
he shakes for a minute; and when flourishing a
sword or any thing else, where once would do, he
invariably does it twice; and so on, even to the
veriest trifle, the same spirit exists. In some parts
he is a complete fever and ague; and in characters
where he has to look upon a spectre, an injured
friend, or any thing of that sort, he daubs his face—
particularly under the eyes—with some vile
composition which gives him the appearance of an
animated corpse: a new way, we presume of painting
the passions. When Mr. Barry has a mind, he
can do what not one in a hundred can, that is,
read poetry properly. He pronounces distinctly,
minds his stops, accentuates his words with judgment,
and modulates the tones of his voice with
good effect; but let any of the dramatis personæ
put this same Mr. Barry in a passion, and off he
goes, laying, without discretion, a most astounding
emphasis on every second or third word, which
makes the dialogue jolt along like a hard-trotting
horse; a proceeding which gains him a good deal
of applause and no credit.
We have now found all the fault we can consistently
with truth, with Mr. Barry, and have dwelt
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so much the longer on what we consider his failings,
because he has good qualities enough to make
it well worth while to tell him of his bad ones; and
moreover, because those bad ones are of such a nature
as could be easily amended. With “all his
imperfections on his head,” he has few equals, and
no superior here as a melo-dramatic actor; and
there are parts of a higher grade where his besetting
sins are kept under by the nature of the character;
such as the Duke Aranza, in the Honey
Moon, which, we think he plays better than any
man in the country. There is also a species of
genteel comedy in which he is very agreeable.
We have but little space left for remarks on that
much-enduring man, Mr. Woodhull. And what
can be said of him, more than that he is one of the
most useful and ill-used actors that ever trod the
boards of a theatre! Who can particularize Mr.
Woodhull's line of character? It is enough to
make the head ache to think of what he has to go
through in a single month. A few weeks ago we
hinted at his blood-thirsty propensities on the stage,
and he still goes on adding to his dramatic crimes;
qut this is only a single branch of his extensive
business. He plays old misers and young spendthrifts,
greybeards and lovers, walking gentlemen
and half-pay officers, soldiers, sailors, Irishmen,
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Scotchmen, Dutchmen, Jews, Gentiles, French
tailors and Indian savages; and all this work is
done without offence; and most of it with satisfaction
to the audience. What incalculable quantities
of trash have to pass through his unfortunate brain
and be impressed upon his memory! What floods
of nonsense have to issue from his mouth! Night
after night, week after week, month after month,
and year after year—in play, in interlude, and in
farce, there is Mr. Woodhull! and yet, notwithstanding
the wear and tear that his intellect must
have suffered from such courses, his brain appears
untouched—his sense continues perfect, and he yet
goes through his multifarious business with more
propriety and rationality than many a wouldbe
star.
-- 211 -- p091-466
MRS. HILSON.
[figure description] Page 211.[end figure description]
There is no actress who has run the risk of injuring
a well-earned reputation more than this lady.
She plays all and every thing; and though we
should be the last to advocate the whims and airs
of actors, in refusing parts which they consider beneath
them, or unsuited to their abilities, yet there
is no reason why any of them should absolutely
sacrifice themselves in the cause of the theatre.
We have seen Mrs. Hilson, in a short space of time,
play Ophelia, Dolly Bull, and Lady Macbeth, together
with various other incongruities; yet, in our
estimation, Mrs. Hilson is by no means a lady of versatile
abilities. She has not the faculty of mobility,
and, except in a limited degree, is not at home
either in comedy, tragedy, or farce;—and yet there
are a hundred parts in which she is far superior to
any one else. When we remark that Mrs. Hilson is
not at home either in comedy, tragedy, or farce, we
mean in the broad and extreme parts of each.
Nature has denied her the physical requisites for
such efforts, and the exhibition of violent passions
or emotions of any kind is not her forte; but in
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beings like Desdemona, she is unequalled in this
country. We have never seen her Imogen in
Cymbeline, but have heard it highly spoken of;
and a woman that can do justice to such characters
as Desdemona and Imogen, ought not to care about
excelling in any thing else.
Her Ophelia is beautiful, and she performs even
Lady Macbeth better than a host of others—with
more propriety than Mrs. Sloman, (who by the way,
does it very badly,) though perhaps not so effectively;
yet she can no more make it what it ought
to be, than her husband can do justice to the
“worthy thane of Cawdor.” She has not strength
and energy for tragedy—she can portray tenderness,
but not agony—grief, but not despair. In comedy
she is happier, but still not quite at home, and appears
to us constitutionally unfitted for it; her temperament
is too melancholy to enter into the irrepressible
buoyancy of comedy; and though, having
an abundance of common sense, a thing a good
deal in request upon the boards, she does all she
undertakes very well, yet her gaiety, like Clara
Fisher's efforts in the pathetic, is only put on;—it
does not come from or go directly to the heart—
both of them appear warring against their nature.
Mrs. Hilson cannot assume the dashing airs and
affectation of a lady of quality, or the pertness and
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volubility of a chambermaid, but in such parts as
Mary in John Bull, as Lady Amaranth in Wild
Oats, and hundreds of a similar cast—in the Emily
Worthingtons and Julia Faulkners of the drama,
she is far, very far superior to any actress on this
side of the Atlantic. Her heroines do not smack
of the stage; the loud protestation and exaggerated
action are not there: on the contrary, the quiet
grace in every movement, and the sweet and simple
earnestness with which the sentiments are delivered,
render such personations perfect, and leave
her without a rival in this class of character. We
never saw what we could call a wrong conception
on the part of Mrs. Hilson; and she has always
given more pleasure and less dissatisfaction than
any one who ever appeared in such a number of
characters. There is one thing, for which indeed
she ought not to be praised, because it is no more
than the performance of a simple duty, but which
at least deserves mention in consequence of the flagrant
neglect of others, and that is, she always
takes the trouble of committing her part to memory,
and gives the words of the author instead of thrusting
forward foolish impertinencies on the spur of
the moment.
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MISS KELLY.
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This popular actress—for popular she undoubtedly
is, though why she became so, passes our comprehension—
has attained considerable celebrity in a
class of characters hitherto very inefficiently represented
on this side of the Atlantic, namely, the
fashionable ladies of genteel comedy. That Miss
Kelly's admirers may be in the right and we in
the wrong, is very possible, but we do not think so;
and there is more plain dealing than presumption
in saying this, because every one, whatever deference
or humility he may profess, will secretly prefer
his individual opinion to that of the rest of the
world. Miss Kelly may play a dashing, dissipated
woman or a vixen to admiration, but she does not
play a lady. Do females in high life perambulate
their drawing-rooms in the fashion that Miss Kelly
does the stage? or when they cannot have exactly
their own way, do they traverse their apartments
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with the Bobadil strides with which she tramples
over the shrinking boards? We always thought,
that whatever might be said of the morals of fashionable
females, their manners were more polished
and fascinating than those of any other of
heaven's creatures. Is it so with those of this lady?
Her warmest admirers will probably hesitate to answer
in the affirmative?—That Miss Kelly frequently
conceives correctly and executes forcibly, no
one will deny; and there is a heedless gaiety and unceasing
flow of animal spirits about her representations
which carry her triumphantly over many
faults and difficulties. But, in general, her portraitures
are exaggerated and overdone; instead of
a delicately finished picture, you see a broad caricature—
the colours are laid on with a trowel instead
of a pencil—and a perpetual striving after
effect is the predominating trait in all.
Of Miss Kelly's Beatrice, though it be heresy to
say so, we do not think highly. The spirit which
pervades it belongs more to the character of the
shrewish Catharine than the lively Beatrice; and
the gross violation of the text and meaning of the
author—and that author Shakspeare—at the conclusion
of the scene where she desires Benedict to
“kill Claudio”—gives him her hand to kiss—
giggles, and bids him kiss it again—runs to the
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side wing and gallops back, telling him to “kiss it
again,” and to be sure and “kill Claudio—dead”—
all which proceedings and language Shakspeare
never dreamt of, is an awful and sacrilegious piece
of business; and the thunders of applause which it
generally brings down, indicate that the house contains
a great number of very discriminating people.
But whatever diversity of opinion may exist concerning
this lady's acting, we should think there
could be none about what, out of courtesy we suppose,
must be called her singing. She doubtless receives
great applause at the conclusion, and with
some reason, for we dare say all are thankful that
it is well over; but unfortunately some of the citizens,
transported beyond the bounds of sober discretion
at their emancipation, are so uproariously
grateful, that it is mistaken for an encore;—the
lady re-enters—curtsies gracefully, and poor Mr.
De Luce, as in duty bound, gives the ominous tap
which preludes another infliction upon the horrorstricken,
bewildered, rash, but well-meaning audience.
Then may be heard a rush—an opening
of box doors—and gentlemen are seen precipitating
themselves with heedless violence into the
lobbies to speak with a friend, buy oranges, absorb
spirituous liquids, or any thing else, for the space of
ten minutes. There is a pithy proverb which
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intimates that “a burnt child dreads the fire,” and the
audience will in time doubtless become more wary.
Miss Kelly is very fond of the Mermaid Song; if
she would take the trouble of listening once to Mrs.
Austin's delightful manner of giving it, it might
have the beneficial effect of stopping any further
operations on that piece of music.
We have spoken plainly of this lady for two
reasons: first, because she is as popular as ever,
and therefore need not shrink from having her
merits canvassed; had she been declining in the
public estimation, we should have been the last to
say any thing about her, but she still claims to
rank as a star, and one of the first magnitude too,
and therefore of course lays herself the more open
to remark; she enjoys all the privileges and immunities
of that station, probably receiving a more
liberal remuneration for half a dozen evenings than
is awarded to actresses of what we consider decidedly
superior abilities, such as Mrs. Hilson and
Mrs. Wheatley, for months of unremitting exertion,
and with these substantial advantages she ought at
least to take the slight disadvantages of such a
station. In the second place, Miss Kelly, from appearances,
is a woman of spirit, and one not likely
to be popped off by a paragraph like John Keats
the poet, who, in coroner's language, “came by his
death in consequence of a criticism.”
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MRS. SHARPE.
[figure description] Page 218.[end figure description]
This lady, though a favorite with the public,
scarcely holds that place in their estimation which
might be expected from her varied and manifold
qualifications. The parts, to be sure, in which she
generally appears, do not admit of any brilliant
display of talent, and therefore Mrs. Sharpe's sensible
and spirited manner of performing them only
elicits a moderate share of approbation, though the
aggregate pleasure derived from her performances
is probably greater than from those of many who
claim a loftier station in the profession. She is the
Mrs. Woodhull of the Park theatre—that is, she
holds the same rank in the feminine department,
which that worthy gentleman does in the masculine,
and is, like him, endowed in a high degree,
with the yankee faculty of turning her hand to any
thing. She is a very fair singer, an excellent
“walking lady,” and a capital comedian. Besides,
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she has somewhat of a “genius for the tragic,” or
rather, a tolerable knack at declamation, and scolds
in blank verse “with good emphasis and discretion.”
The necessities of the theatre, we presume,
caused her to appear once or twice as Elvira during
the past season; and although it is a character altogether
out of her line, she performed it better than
any woman we have seen attempt it on these
boards. She looked well as the haughty Spanish
beauty—“disdain and scorn rode sparkling in her
eyes”—and in the fourth act she rated Pizarro in
good round terms. This, however, is not the department
in which Mrs. S. must hope to attain excellence.
In comedy she is always happy, and
divides the chambermaid business with the inimitable
Mrs. Wheatley, without losing much by the
comparison. She also takes charge of the characters
of nearly all the young and middle-aged ladies.
Now, there are plenty of actresses who undertake
to do the same thing, but unfortunately they cannot
change their manners with their dress, and
continue just as vulgar in silk as they were in
calico; being evidently nothing better than dressedup
chambermaids. This is not the case with Mrs.
Sharpe, she can scold, lie, and flirt like a waitingwoman,
and look, speak, and act like a lady—she can be
boisterous in the kitchen, and stately in the hall—
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and can jilt a footman or reject a knight with equal
skill and dexterity. By the way, she has an uncommonly
picturesque manner of repulsing improper
overtures; when playing an innocent maid,
wife, or widow, and any of the stage libertines go
down on their knees and unfold their wicked intentions,
she has a style of curling her lip, flashing
her eye, folding her arms, and drawing up her person
with an air of insulted virtue, which must produce
a prodigious moral effect upon the kneeling
sinner and the attentive audience. In parts, likewise,
where an union of good acting and tolerable
singing is required, such as Georgette Clairville or
Donna Anna, in Don Giovanni, it would be difficult
to find her equal.
-- 221 -- p091-476
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE.
[figure description] Page 221.[end figure description]
“Summer has flown on swallow's wings,
And earth has buried all her flowers;
No more the lark—the linnet sings—
But silence sits in faded bowers.”
Spring has ripened into summer, summer has
mellowed into autumn, autumn has withered into
winter, and now that old vagabond, eighteen hundred
and thirty-two (who took away Sir Walter
Scott, and spared the emperor Nicholas) has but a
few more hours to linger before father Time ejects
him out of existence, and hands him over to oblivion
for peaceable interment. Well, let him go. The
hearty, vigorous eighteen hundred and thirty-three
will soon be of age, and come into possession of his
estate, this snug, cozy little earth, on which we get
our dínners, and perform other pleasurable functions,
but at which some people of bad tastes and superfine
imaginations pretend to turn up their
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ungrateful noses, without knowing exactly why. To tell
the truth, it is time the property changed hands.
There can be no doubt that of late months it has
somewhat deteriorated; for, though the old gentleman,
who is shortly about to mingle with the shadows
of the past, introduced some salutary reforms
into certain small portions of his estate, causing divers
peculating and unrighteous stewards to resign
their trusts; yet a malignant imp, named Cholera,
gave him such a fright in the early part of his career,
that he never did good afterwards; his nerves tumbled
to pieces, he became light-headed, and committed
the oddest vagaries imaginable, so that all things
went to wreck and ruin; his land remained untilled,
his ships lay rotting in his harbors, and none of his
tenants prospered excepting doctors, sextons, gravediggers,
apothecaries, and undertakers. It is to be
hoped that the young heir will bestir himself vigorously,
and put things to rights; that he will drown
the cholera in the Pacific, “deeper than did ever
plummet sound;” chain up the ferocious and insatiable
northern bear in his own appropriate regions
of darkness and desolation; allow those pugnacious
animals, the Dutch and Belgians, to knock their
heads together until they find out what they are
quarrelling about; or else hand their rulers Homer's
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“battle of the frogs and mice,” for their especial edification;
and take strong measures generally, to
prevent his larger tenants from eternally falling out
amongst themselves, and pulling to pieces and destroying
each other.
The weather is appropriate. Old eighteen hundred
and thirty-two, thou hast lived amid a peck of
troubles, and art about to expire in storm and tempest.
The stern north wind—child of the pole—
has rushed from his “regions of thick-ribbed ice,”
and is roaring and yelling around my domicile, like
some infuriated demon: as the “spirit of the storm”
occasionally loosens a tile from the roof, or a slate
from the chimney, and precipitates it with inconsiderate
violence into the street, the important truth
is forcibly impressed upon my mind for future guidance,
that, “on such a night as this,” the middle
of the pavement is indubitably to be preferred to the
otherwise more eligible footwalk, by such as are in
favor of prolonged vitality. Ever and anon, too,
the blusterer sinks from his high tone into a low,
lengthened wail, and then sweeping suddenly round
some abrupt angle, rises in a succession of whirling
eddies, emitting a scream as of one in pain, which
is not only highly poetical, but strikingly dramatic—
only it makes the chimney smoke, and causes
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the unfortunate writer to sit ruminating in an atmosphere
of uncomfortable density.
It is newyear eve! a season that I, for one,
always felt an especial delight in. There is about
it a mixture of mirth and sadness, of joyous anticipation
and melancholy regret, that suits one of
my temperament. It is a fitting time, too, for cogitation,
and the birth of important and solemn
thoughts. A great change is taking place. One
year more from our slender stock is on the point of
rolling away, to “join the past eternity.” Time is
about to close another volume of his works, in which
our good and bad deeds are registered, and to lay it
quietly by amid the records of what has been, until
it is wanted for final inspection. It is “iron-clasped
and iron-bound,” and can no more be opened by us.
What is written there can never be erased—the
slurs and blotches must all go—and that word never
ought to make us pause before we stain with foul
thoughts, or unmeet actions, the fair clear page of
the daybook, which to-morrow will be laid before
us.
Newyear eve! It is a season for calm, melancholy
retrospection—for nearly all retrospection is
melancholy—the mind naturally reverts to the past,
and images of things that have almost faded away
and become forgotten dreams, amid the bustle and
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hurry of business, and the small cares and meannesses
of life crowd vividly back upon the memory.
“The eyes that shone,
Now dimm'd and gone,”
beam on us again through the long vista of departed
years, though even with a kinder and mellower
lustre than of old; and the good hearts and true,
that the cold green grass grows silently over, are
again beside us. They, the dead, welcomed in
many a newyear with us once, were glad and joyous,
and passed the bottle and the jest, and they are
gone! The songs they used to sing, and the tones
and inflections of their voice, all their little whims
and peculiarities, become again clear and distinct.
Yet they to whom those things appertained, fine,
hearty pieces of flesh and blood, with whom we
were hand and glove, and from whom we could
not live apart, are really gone—dead and gone!
and, alas! for human nature that it should be so,
unless at seasons like the present, when a gush of
better feeling calls them back, almost forgotten!
Among the genial and good old customs prevalent
about this time, one, of friends gathering together
on a newyear eve, to take their farewell of
the departing and welcome the coming year, it is
to be hoped will not speedily pass out of fashion.
There is more refinement about the conviviality on
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such an occasion than is common at other seasons;
and recollections of the changes and mutations that
have taken place since last they met to chant old
ditties to “the year that is gone and awa',” have the
effect of softening down the otherwise too boisterous
hilarity prevalent at festive meetings. And what
an expansion of the heart, what an influx of kindly
feelings takes place; what old and delightful reminiscences
are awakened! With what joyous warmth
one good fellow pledges another, and with what a
depth of feeling is the common toast, “to absent
friends,” given, as each man yearningly thinks, as
he slowly raises the glass to his lips, of the dear
and distant. Such a scene may not, indeed, be
exactly to the taste of the stern and unflinching
moralist, the retailer of terse aphorisms and sage
prudential saws and maxims,
“One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling,
Nor form nor feeling, great or small;
A reasoning, self-sufficient thing,
An intellectual all-in-all.”
But for all that, it is a scene at which wisdom need
not frown, and where virtue and cheerfulness might
with great propriety take a glass together.
The newyear day itself. Who will say that
happiness is not good for man; and who will say
that there is not a greater quantity to be had at a
cheaper rate on this day than on almost any other?
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The atmosphere seems impregnated with the delicious
essence. Men smile instinctively as they pass
along the streets; and if the ice thereon happens
to play them a slippery trick, and they tumble, they
complacently gather themselves together again, and
go on their way rejoicing; it is newyear-day, and
they are not to be put out of humor. Fires blaze
brighter in the parlor—so do ladies' eyes; and
kitchens emit odors to which those of “Araby the
blest,” are faint and powerless; inasmuch as they
are not only delicious in themselves, but furnish
hints of a higher state of felicity, which “the coming
on of time,” (dinner-time,) will probably perfect.
I know not any place where this day is more liberally,
pleasantly, and judiciously “kept up,” than in
New-York. I admire, in an especial degree, the
custom of the fair damosels of Manahatta arraying
themselves in their most inviting habiliments, and
staying at home to dispense unto their several male
acquaintances, as they call, generous, exhilarating
cordials, or coffee and other sobrieties, as may suit
their respective inclinations. It is, however, a trying
day for the gentlemen, who have to effuse all
the good things they can invent, borrow, or steal,
in order to keep up their character for sprightliness,
so that there is often a much greater expenditure of
wit, than many of the parties can prudently afford.
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And yet, despite all this, I am afraid that newyear-day,
and other old-fashioned celebrations of
the sort, are rather getting into disrepute. They
are regarded by many as fragments of ancient barbarism—
musty relics—remnants of the absurdities
of the dark ages, which ought and must, (to quote
the slang of the day,) give way before the rapidly
increasing spread of intelligence and civilization.
And really, the world is getting so very wise, and
polished, and polite, that in a little time there will
be no such thing as fun or feeling left in it. It
may be proper enough that such things should be
expunged from our well-behaved and scientific
planet, but I doubt it mightily; and I would just
hint, that there is a species of civilization prevalent
which affects manners rather than morals—forms
rather than feelings, which might, by some, be termed
superficial; a civilization totally independent of
true refinement, but which so smooths and polishes
its disciples, that they counterfeit taste, knowledge,
and feeling, and pass muster in society very tolerably,
excepting when some little trait—some trivial
action—some heedless phrase or expression, lays
bare the barrenness of their thoughts, and the
primeval meanness of their souls. Such folks are
incapable of any thing but decorum and commonplace.
Newyear-day is nothing to them—they
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have no sociability; and have besides, a glimmering
idea, that it displays a kind of magnanimous
and out-of-the-way elevation of mind, to sneer at
and decry whatever gives pleasure to the many.
But, worse than this, besides being rated as a
piece of foolish antiquity, it is made a serious charge
against poor newyear day, that, as celebrated at
present, it is a vehicle for drunkenness and dissipation,
and ought, therefore, to be abolished. I object
to such a conclusion, drawn from such premises. Is
it any good and sufficient reason, that the sound
and well-ordered portion of the community should
be deprived of the cheerful pleasures and innocent
gaieties, which the recurrence of this and similar
days invariably produces, because certain inconsiderate
portions of the population, think proper to
swallow an indiscreet quantity of anti-rational compounds?
Am I to experience a painful degree of
aridity, because others choose to swamp themselves
with manifold abominations? But it does not signify
talking;—man and beast, and all other animals,
will follow their natural bent. Asses would
still eat thistles, even though grapes grew on every
bush—swine would leave the verdant turf, bespangled
with the pale primrose and the spring violet,
to roll and wallow in congenial mire; and the brutal
in mind and coarse in taste have ever made, and will
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continue to make any departure from the ordinary
routine of life a pretext for indulging in their rank
and filthy propensities. But what is that to plain,
well-meaning people like myself, who do not pretend
to know any thing about that most abstract of all
the virtues—universal philanthropy?—nothing.
And are those who advocate the abolition of newyear-day
on the ground of immorality, prepared,
at the same time, to insist upon the utility of all
festivities and celebrations whatever, sharing a similar
fate? If they are not, for consistency's sake
they ought to be, for all have one tendency—the
encouragement of a greater degree of relaxation
and latitude than is ordinarily permitted. Alas!
the world is already too mechanical; but were such
people to succeed, it would, indeed, be one huge
workshop, in which we would toil and moil unceasingly,
until death hinted to us that we had been
long enough employed. We are already a plodding,
mercenary generation; but then we would be regular
mill-horses, treading, evermore, the same unvarying
round, and all for grist, grist, still grist, until we
were in reality as blind and stupid as that most
monotonous of quadrupeds. There might be more
decorum under such a system—perchance less vice,
but assuredly less virtue; and what there was,
would be of the most insipid kind. For my own
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part, I regret the gradual disuse of many of the old
festivities and holidays of our ancestors, which were
ever and anon recurring to diversify the dullness of
existence, by an occasional glimpse of the picturesque.
They added to the enjoyment of all classes,
particularly of that which stands most in need of
added enjoyments. They invigorated the heart,
refreshed the feelings, and formed a little episode in
the poor man's year, that was looked forward to
with gladness, and remembered with satisfaction;
besides forwarding the great purpose of creation, by
bringing the juvenile of both sexes together in a
pleasurable mood, thereby laying a train for an innumerable
quantity of matrimonial experiments.
But one by one they have withered away before
the steady advance of business, and a higher state
of civilization—real and counterfeit. Easter and
Whitsuntide are now little more than names; and
that most delightful of ruralities, dancing round the
maypole, and choosing the “queen of May” from
the prettiest lass of the village, has become nearly
obsolete. Let us, therefore, hold fast by the bright
days left us, which periodically encourage innocent
gaiety and lightness of heart. Let us still preserve
a few green, shady lanes, branching off from the
great macadamized turnpike of human life, down
which we may stroll for a brief season, and refresh
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ourselves, by exchanging dust for verdure, flintstones
for flowers, and the eternal jangling and bartering
of business, for the melody of birds and the
murmuring of brooks; even though we lose what
the worldly and would-be-wise tell us can never be
regained—time and money.
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SIR WALTER SCOTT.
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“Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore
Who danced our infancy upon their knee,
And told our marvelling boyhood legend's store
Of their strange ventures, happ'd by land or sea,
How they are blotted from the things that be!
How few, all weak and wither'd of their force,
Wait on the verge of dread eternity,
Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse,
To sweep them from our sight!”
Time does indeed “roll his ceaseless course,” and
Sir Walter Scott is at length “blotted from the
things that be!” The great leveller, death, has
achieved one of his mightiest triumphs. Yet even
now, when turning over the fresh and glowing
pages of him who is no more, it is difficult to bring
the truth home to the mind that the “author of
Waverley” is really mouldering away amid the withered
leaves of winter in Dryburgh kirk-yard! and
that the dullest brain in Europe is now more prolific
than that which called Meg Merrilies and Marmion,
Rob Roy and Roderick Dhu, and hundreds,
thousands of the finest creations since Shakspeare,
into life and action. Truly, never was the equalization
of the grave made more manifest. Long as
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this mournful event had been anticipated, it still
startled men to hear that all was over. They
paused, and looked aghast, and then strode silently
away to marvel how such a thing could be; and
since the death of Byron, no single event has created
such an overpowering—such an enduring
sensation among those who think and feel. Both
these great characters died as became them, calmly
and bravely; and the circumstances connected with
their respective deaths, are not a little characteristic
of the men. Byron perished as he had lived, lonely
and deserted, on a foreign shore, in a fruitless attempt
to right the wrongs of that land whose glories
and sufferings he has embalmed in his undying
numbers; while the death of Scott was probably
accelerated by his unquenchable desire to gaze once
more upon “the scenes he loved and sung,” and to
make his final resting-place in “his own, his native
land!” This feeling seems to have amounted to a
passion. The garden of the world displayed her
charms for him; but he gazed with a dull and filmy
eye on the luxuriant beauties of nature, and the
magnificent triumphs of art, ennobled, too, by association
with all that was grand and mighty in a bypast
age. How would all this have stirred his spirit
at another period! But the time was past. The
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hand of the destroyer was upon him; the blood was
fast curdling around his noble heart, and the soft
and balmy odors of a southern clime came all too
late to infuse health and vigor into his decaying
frame. He turned sickeningly away, yearning
once again
“To feel the breeze down Ettricke break,
Though it might chill his withered cheek:”
and on his return, the nearer he approached his
country, the stronger this desire became, until, on
his arrival in London, he would scarcely brook the
necessary—the indispensable delays which his situation
required. His only thought and cry was to
reach Scotland; thus giving his dying testimony to
the truth of that fine apostrophe written in his
prime, showing the deep and rooted feelings of the
man, as well as the inspiration of the poet:
“O Caledonia! stern and wild!
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!”
Mankind owes Scott a debt of gratitude which it
can never liquidate. The untiring admiration of
succeeding generations may cancel the interest, but
he must ever remain creditor for the principal until
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the language in which he has written shall have
become a forgotten tongue. I would fain pay a
portion of my tribute of thankfulness for the many,
many hours of pure pleasure his works have afforded
me, in a few scattered remarks, though it almost
looks like presumption to do so. Criticism, is out of
the question. Criticism, as far as Scott is concerned,
should now, methinks, go to sleep, at least for a
while. Eulogies—rhapsodies, (absurd or otherwise,)
may be tolerated; but formal, frigid criticism, especially
from those “whose names are written on the
roll of common men,” now that the manes of the
great magician are scarcely cold, would be little
better than sacrilege.
I shall never forget the first time I read Marmion.
I was just then emerging from Jack-the-giant-killerism,
and similar juvenile portions of the belles-letters—
a mere lad, with an “ogre-like appetite” for
books of all descriptions, which I despatched with
most uncritical precipitancy. Marmion came in my
way one summer evening. I read it half through,
thought and dreamed of it the rest of the night, and
finished it before leaving my bed the next morning.
This was certainly devouring a six-canto poem with
a most unsophisticated appetite, and without the
slighest attempt to make an epicurean selection of
tit-bits; good and bad, faults and beauties, were
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then swallowed indiscriminately in the vulgar excitement
caused by an interesting narrative, which
some mature people have had the hardihood to assert,
is, after all, the main excellence of Scott's poetical
compositions. I can only judge for myself. I
have read Marmion many and many a time since
then, (certainly not for the story,) and the flavor
has not yet departed from its pages. Though the
opinion has of late years been rather unfashionable,
I cannot help regarding it as a noble, spirited,
and perfectly original poem—a sort of irregular border
epic, abounding in beauties of the highest order.
It is its misfortune rather than its fault, (like the
rest of Scott's productions,) to have a story of such
intense interest as to absorb, in an undue degree,
the attention of the reader, diverting his mind from
the more unobtrusive beauties of the work. He is so
hurried away by the constant shifting of the scenes
and the rapid introduction of character, that he has
but scant time to note the simple wild-flowers scattered
in his path. The whole poem is a succession
of bold, vivid sketches, rather than of elaborately
finished pictures; all thrown off with an air of
careless freedom that somewhat tempts the reader
to rein in his admiration of what is obviously effected
with so little trouble. Yet it would be difficult to
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point out, even in the most deep-wrought efforts of
our best poets, any thing superior or equal to the
trial and condemnation of Constance de Beverley,
the quarrel between Marmion and Douglas, the
battle of Flodden, and the death of Marmion;
though, in fact, it is nonsensical to make such a
challenge, inasmuch as no similar passages are to
be found in any other author, ancient or modern.
They are unique, and must be judged by themselves
alone.
It is characteristic of genius to strike out some
distinctly new path of its own, and for talent to follow
after as it best may. There was no model for
Paradise Lost, or Childe Harold, or Christabel, or
the Lyrical Ballads, or the Lady of the Lake, or the
Waverley novels. All are sui generis; and the
next great poem or work, now engendering in the
womb of time, when it bursts upon the world, will
probably be found as widely different from all these
as they are from each other. Neither have the spiritual
emanations of those who indeed possessed the
“faculty divine,” ever been successfully imitated.
Some, indeed, tempted by the dashing, off-hand, animated
descriptions of Scott, and by the facilities for
composition which his style afforded, have adventured
into the lists, and sung of tilts and tournaments
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and gatherings and forays and onslaughts—but it
would not do. Like all imitators, they had caught
the points, the peculiarities, the striking phrases, or
particular modes of expression—in short, the mechanical
tricks of the thing; but the superior and characteristic
touches, which impart life and reality to the
whole, were not to be learnt. The soul was wanting;
and the contests of their plumed knights and
mailed warriors were like those of so many automatons
worked by very palpable and ill-conditioned
machinery. In fact, but for good Sir Walter, the
present race of English and Scotch would have
known but little of their doughty forefathers, or of
the times when it was no derogation for a baron to
pilfer bullocks, or gentlemen of unblemished integrity
to go a sheep-stealing. He has illuminated
history, and made that knowledge as “broad and
general as the casing air,” which was formerly
“cabin'd, cribb'd, con&longs;ined” in the dusky closet of
the antiquary. And what a charm has he spread
over these larcenious periods! With what unscrupulous
earnestness and self-approving consciences do
his heroes appropriate their neighbors' goods and
chattels to their own individual uses and comforts!
There is no whining, or sentiment, or petty attempts
at self-justification; they are the men of the times,
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as they then thought and spoke and acted; and as
different as may be from all other delicate freebooters
from Conrad the Corsair down to Paul Clifford, who,
as has been wittily observed, “have every virtue
under heaven excepting common honesty;” and
we pardon their moral obliquities the more readily,
seeing that they do not insult us by any pretensions
to ultra-refinement at the time they are picking
their neighbors' pockets. But if they lack the high
polish and glitter of sentiment which adorn the
superfine rascals of the Bulwer school, they have
all some redeeming qualities to recommend them,
which possess, at the same time, the slight merit of
not being totally at variance with their actions and
character—glimpses of rude but honorable feeling
which make us love the rogues. Witness, for example,
the graphic sketch of that most accomplished
appropriator, “Sir Walter of Deloraine, good at
need,” and his lament over his fallen enemy.
How felicitously are we occasionally let into the
springs of action of the men, and the manners of
the age, by a single phrase—Sir William never
shed blood “except, as was meet, for deadly feud.”
These few words present us at once with a clearer
and more distinct picture of the matter-of-course
ferocity of the times than could have been drawn
in pages by an inferior hand.
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Scott has become as deservedly celebrated for
his battle pieces as Wouvermans. They possess
all the freedom, force, and energy of that great
master; while the irregular structure of his metre,
owning or submitting to no check but the ear, is
singularly well adapted to portray the varied fortunes
of a changeful fight. Some may have equalled
him in depicting “battle's magnificently stern
array:” some may have surpassed him in painting
the wreck and desolation war leaves in its track;
but for the fight itself—for placing vividly before
you all the alternations between defeat and victory
in a hard fought field—for hurrying the reader
breathlessly along with the current of events, so
that he fancies himself a spectator of, almost an
actor in the scene, and feels a personal interest in
the fate of the several combatants—for seizing instinctively
on the strongest and most picturesque
points of the combat—for placing fair in view the
wheeling, advancing, and retreating of the several
squadrons and bodies of troops—the dread closing
and deadly strife of the mortal foes—the charge,
the rally, the rout, the flight, and the pursuit—in
all of these Scott has never been approached. Verily
his muse had no sinecure when his spirit was
once fairly up in arms, and he sung of Flodden
Field or Bannockburn. It is curious and
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interesting to observe the marked difference between the
master minds of Scott and Byron, when employed
upon a similar subject—the advance of soldiers to
the field of battle—
“Ere yet the bands met Marmion's eye,
Fitz-Eustace shouted loud and high—
Hark! hark! my lord, an English drum!
And see, ascending squadrons come
Between Tweed's river and the hill,
Foot, horse, and eannon:—hap what hap,
My basnet to a 'prentice cap,
Lord Surry's o'er the Till!
Yet more! yet more!—how fair arrayed
They file from out the hawthorn shade,
And sweep so gallant hy!
With all their banners bravely spread,
And all their armor flashing high,
Saint George might waken from the dead,
To see fair England's banners fly.”'
What a fine contrast to this most animating
description are the following surprisingly beautiful
lines of Byron. They come full and round upon
the ear, like the distant and solemn tones of the
organ after the shrill and spirit-stirring clangor of the
trumpet—
“And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,
Dewy with nature's tear-drops, as they pass,
Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves,
Over the unreturning brave—alas!
Ere evening to be trodden like the grass
Which now beneath them, but above shall grow
In its neat verdure, when this fiery mass
Of living valor, rolling on the foe,
And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.”
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But Scott's claims to admiration rest not, even in
a principal degree, on fiery description or impetuous
narrative. His sketches of scenery have a truth and
vividness, and, above all, a healthy cheerfulness
about them, that is especially delightful, and which
ought to annihilate (by contrast) at once and for
ever, the morbid, bilious, and dyspeptic school of
poetry, of which Byron is most falsely assumed to
be the head and founder; as if the grand and
melancholy solemnity of his strains had any thing
in common with the puling complaints and sickly
fancies of those who obscure the sun, and divest
nature of her glory, because they happen to be
troubled with debt or indigestion; or because their
lady-love may have judiciously responded in the
negative to their connubial overtures. Here is one
of a hundred similar pictures—
“The summer dawn's reflected hue
To purple changed Loch Katrine blue;
Mildly and soft the western breeze
Just kissed the lake, just stirred the trees;
And the pleased lake, like maiden eoy,
Trembled, but dimpled not for joy;
The mountain shadows on her breast
Were neither broken nor at rest;
In bright uncertainty they lie
Like future joys to Fancy's eye,
The water-lily to the light
Her chalice reared of silver bright;
The doe awoke, and to the lawn,
Begemmed with dew-drops led her fawn;
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The gray mist left the mountain side,
The torrent showed its glistening pride;
Invisible in flecked sky,
The lark sent down her revelry;
The blackbird and the speckled thrush
Good-morrow gave from brake and bush;
In answer cooed the cushat dove,
Her notes of peace and rest and love.”
There are few things more agreeable than to
peruse passages similar to this in Scott, after reading
some of Moore's rich and luxurious descriptions
of Persian scenery. Both are true poets—both
delightful in their way—but the effect caused by
their different manner of handling nature, is something
like walking from a highly perfumed chamber
into the pure air of heaven, impregnated with
the fainter but more healthful odor of the thousand
common wild-flowers that are for ever mingling
their essences with its freshening currents.
In creative power, too—in the formation and
delineation of character, (judging him by his poems
alone,) Scott is perfectly wonderful; and in this
essential attribute of genius, double-distances all his
contemporaries. The excellence of his poetical
compositions in this particular, was acknowledged
at the time of their appearance; but he has since
rendered the world rather oblivious on this point by
his splendid series of creations and resuscitations in
the Waverley novels. The Waverley novels! What
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a host of pleasurable recollections throng upon the
mind at the mere mention of their name! It would
be folly here to attempt to enter upon their merits.
The analysis of a single romance would, of itself,
suffice for the covering of many pages; but when
the mind glances in rapid succession from Waverley
to Guy Mannering—from Guy Mannering to
the Antiquary—thence to Rob Roy, Old Mortality,
Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and the long succeeding trail
of glories, it is perfectly astounded at the immensity
of intellect therein displayed. Fielding, Smollett,
Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Godwin, hide their
diminished heads; and as for the present race of
novelists—what the middling or indifferent amongst
them may fancy is not easily to be imagined,
(for there is no limit to ignorant vanity,) but
surely the best would feel sorrowful and ashamed
to see their claims, for a moment, irreverently
placed in comparison with those of Walter Scott.
Long after their effusions have been literary curiosities,
the Waverley novels will be regarded as the
grand portrait gallery into which the successive generations
who tread upon our graves will look for
the kings, queens, courtiers, knights, chieftains, and
freebooters proper to the times of old! and when
the exact sciences have perfected a more systematic,
methodical, and, it may be, more decent and
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respectable state of existence, they will remain almost the
only records of a bloder, stormier, and more picturesque
state of society that has gradually faded
away into the dim and misty past. It is not anticipating
too high a destiny for them to say that
they will bring a tear to the eye, and the smile to
the cheek, and infuse the germs of knowledge and
feeling into the minds of millions and millions yet
unborn. How many sick-beds will they cheer! and
what stores of innocent pleasure and quiet enjoyment
will be gleaned from their pages throughout
the far-stretching future! This is to have lived.
This is fame, to which that of the mightiest conqueror
that ever reigned and destroyed is but a drop
of water to the illimitable ocean; and this fame is
Walter Scott's.
“Harp of the north! farewell!”
THE END.
Back matter
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Fay, Theodore S. (Theodore Sedgwick), 1807-1898 [1833], Crayon sketches [ed.]. Volume 2 (Conner and Cooke, New York) [word count] [eaf091v2].
