Chapter 4
In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance, the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully in the general effect. They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be. Then there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's Theatre, Dorset Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by Gibbons--graceful, naive, dainty, like the work of a very refined Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in the already crowded city on the Thames side.
[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage, like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle stolid. Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with a face of perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the fancy of Shakespeare's age. Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to whom they belonged. That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect; the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into play. Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for sentiment,--Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man; while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice young people. On the other hand, the tail-pieces, chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study. Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John, Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times, when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole, actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Moliere was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog. Very different was the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:--
"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new kid gloves. In this dress the deceased actress received such honour as actress never received before, nor has ever received since. The lady lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber. Had she been really a queen the public could not have thronged more eagerly to the spectacle; and after the lying in state there was a funeral of as much ceremony as has been observed at the obsequies of many a queen. There were anthems and prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when all was over, to a few particular friends, and with some equivocation, as it seems to me, that he 'buried her very willingly, and with much satisfaction.'"
Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors. "Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only property they have to depend on." Wit, indeed, with the other gifts that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too often little to the benefit of the gifted persons. Theatrical society, rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we see them in these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic.
If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like; one might collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a blood-horse, remarked, "There goes Warburton on Shakespeare!" When he heard that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to death and at its wits' end, he exclaimed that it could not have been the length of the journey which had tired it. Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party, told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced [81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than I." Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great liberties with authors and audience. He made Settle half mad and the house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it, "died," according to the direction of the acting copy. Quaint enough, but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a French translation of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim only, but accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odeon, in 1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire recently discovered. The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in this as in the last century."
Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to note:--that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically useful patron." We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a difficult time at the popularity of Richard the Second:--"The deposition and death of King Richard the [82] Second." "Tongues whisper to the Queen that this play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder kings." It is perhaps not generally known that Charles Shakespeare, William's brother, survived till the Restoration.
Oldys says, a propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:--
"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance, more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his brother could relate of him. But he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he could give them but little light into their inquiries; and all that could be recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was the faint, general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen him act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song."
[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It. Many are the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time a struggle to maintain itself. James Howard, in Pepys's day--
"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double denouement--one serious, the other hilarious. If your heart were too sensitive to bear the deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured domestic felicity."
In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius as "Jack Puddins."
Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young [84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices. Who the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional actress is not known, but her part was Desdemona. And yet it was long after that--
"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712). He lies buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. If not the greatest actor of his day, Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.' So exalted was his reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the audience as he.'"
In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of admission to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act. Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond the time limited. Hence much noisy contention, to the great discomfort even of Royalty. The brawling, drinking habits of the time were even more discomforting. An angry word, passed one April evening of 1682 between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young [85] Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited fury on the part of the combatants. The mingling of the public with the players was a practice which so annoyed the haughty French actor, Baron, that to suggest to the audience the absurdity of it, he would turn his back on them for a whole act, and play to the audience on the stage. Sometimes the noise was so loud that an actor's voice would scarcely be heard. It was about 1710 that the word encore was introduced at the operatic performances in the Haymarket, and very much objected to by plain-going Englishmen. It was also the custom of some who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra volta! Altra volta!
Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and affords many unexpected lights on historical characters. Oliver Cromwell, though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at, and with, men of less dignity than actors. Buffoonery was not entirely expelled [86] from his otherwise grave court. Oxford and Drury Lane itself dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where a mean house is still pointed out as the first home of this mother of a line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to occupy the neighbouring palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her burial in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached the sermon. When this was subsequently made the ground of exposing him to the reproof of Queen Mary, she remarked that the good doctor, no doubt, had said nothing but what the facts authorized.
"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people of fashion, that have sense?" And, in truth, the seventeenth century gave many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of them. Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which she would utter one single expression in a play. Dr. Doran gives some curious instances from later actors. "What mean my grieving subjects?" uttered in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested by her with such emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation [87] which swelled into thunders of applause. Her noble head is here engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent visionary man.
Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have them before us? Should we find them too different from our accent of thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which are of the essence of all three? Dr. Doran's long and interesting records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the doubt. Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere, bears no very distinct figure. One hardly sees the wood for the trees. On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of English actors," is delightfully fresh. That intimate friend of Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his career brings out the best elements in stage life. The stage in these volumes presents itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and characters of the players. Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
27th June 1888
VI. WORDSWORTH
The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. With an Introduction by John Morley. Macmillans.
The Recluse. By William Wordsworth. Macmillans.
Selections from Wordsworth. By William Knight and other Members of the Wordsworth Society. With Preface and Notes. Kegan Paul.
[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth, of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of an excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is increasing among us. Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter the faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to thought and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at the present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself. In the collected edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can be ascertained, in the order of their composition--an arrangement which has indisputable recommendations for the student of Wordsworth's genius; though the former method of distributing his work into large groups of subject had its value, as throwing light upon his poetic motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation--a calm, irresistible, well-being--almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless [93] connected with physical conditions. Long ago De Quincey noted it as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career, pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the material side of life. The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good deal to do with that. What a store of good fortune, what a goodly contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament; especially, in the case of a poet--a great poet--who will, of course, have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet.
Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the imagination. Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one, with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work. It was Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. For though what may be called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a value in all that remains of him--could read anything he wrote, "even the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and Julia,'"--yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very obvious difference of level in his poetic work.
This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination. It begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect. Wordsworth meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination. To follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry. Critics of literary history have again [96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist poets. As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney. Of this new landscape sense the poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet. Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world. His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most human beings, count for incidents. His flight from the active world, so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence. His life's changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have very little to tell. What it really most resembles, different as its superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it. This placid life developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents:--
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze, On some grey rock: The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, And the bleak music from that old stone wall:-- In the meadows and the lower ground, Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:-- And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or colour. He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions, silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular folding of the hills.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a companionship with man, full of fine intimacies. An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. That he awakened "a sort of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in Wordsworth's poetry.
It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life. For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.