Part 7

Macready’s testimony to Kean’s marvellous powers is nearly always highly favourable. Macready saw the great master act Richard III. at Drury Lane in his first season, 1814. ‘When,’ he tells us, ‘a little keenly-visaged man rapidly bustled across the stage, I felt there was meaning in the alertness of his manner and the quickness of his step.’ The progress of the play increased the admiration of the young actor in his box, who was studying the other young actor on the stage. He found mind of no common order in Edmund Kean. ‘In his angry complaining of Nature’s injustice to his bodily imperfections, as he uttered the line, “To shrink my arm up like a withered shrub,” Kean remained looking on the limb for some moments with a sort of bitter discontent, and then struck it back in angry disgust.’ To his father’s whisper, ‘It’s very poor,’ the son replied readily, ‘Oh, no! it is no common thing.’ Macready praises the scene with Lady Anne, and that in which Richard tempts Buckingham to the murder of the young princes. In the latter, he found Kean’s interpretation ‘consistent with his conception, proposing their death as a political necessity, and sharply requiring it as a business to be done.’ Cooke interpreted the scene in another way. In Cooke’s Richard, ‘the source of the crime was apparent in the gloomy hesitation with which he gave reluctant utterance to the deed of blood.’ If Cooke was more effective than Kean on one or two solitary points, Kean was superior in the general portraiture. As Macready remarks, Kean ‘hurried you along in his resolute course with a spirit that brooked no delay. In inflexibility of will and sudden grasp of expedients he suggested the idea of a feudal Napoleon.’

With respect to the characters enacted by the greatest actor of the present century, Macready’s testimony of Kean is that in none of Kean’s personations did he display more masterly elocution than in the third act of ‘Richard III.’ In Sir Edward Mortimer, Kean was unapproachable, and Master Betty (whom Macready praises highly) next to him, though far off. In Sir Edward, Kean ‘subjected his style to the restraint of the severest taste. Throughout the play the actor held absolute sway over his hearers; and there is no survivor of those hearers who will not enjoy a description which enables them to live over again moments of a bygone delight which the present stage cannot afford. There are, perhaps, not so few who remember Kean’s Sir Edward Mortimer as of those who remember his ‘Oroonoko.’ Those who do will endorse all that Macready says of that masterly representation of the African Prince in slavery, where Kean, with a calm submission to his fate, still preserved all his princely demeanour. There was one passage which was ‘never to be forgotten’--the prayer for his Imoinda. After replying to Blandford, ‘No, there is nothing to be done for me,’ he remained, says Macready, ‘for a few moments in apparent abstraction; then, with a concentration of feeling that gave emphasis to every word, clasping his hands together, in tones most tender, distinct, and melodious, he poured out, as if from the very depths of his heart, his earnest supplication:--

Thou God ador’d, thou ever-glorious Sun! If she be yet on earth, send me a beam Of thy all-seeing power to light me to her! Or if thy sister-goddess has preferr’d Her beauty to the skies, to be a star, Oh, tell me where she shines, that I may stand Whole nights, and gaze upon her!’

We may refer to another passage, in ‘Othello,’ in which the tenderness, distinctness, and mournful melodiousness of Edmund Kean’s voice used to affect the whole house to hushed and rapt admiration; namely, the passage beginning with, ‘Farewell, the plumed troop!’ and ending with, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’ It was like some magic instrument, which laid all hearts submissive to its irresistible enchantment.

While Macready allows that flashes of genius were rarely wanting in Kean’s least successful performances, he does not forget to note that when he played Iago to Kean’s Othello, he observed that the latter was playing not at all like to his old self. It is to be remembered that this was in 1832, when Kean was on the brink of the grave, broken in constitution, and with no power to answer to his will. But Macready justly recognised the power when it existed, and set the world mad with a new delight. Others were not so just, nor so generous. ‘Many of the Kemble school,’ he says, ‘resisted conviction of Kean’s merits, but the fact that he made me feel was an argument to enrol me with the majority on the indisputable genius he displayed.’ Some of the Kemble family were as reluctant to be convinced as many of the Kemble school were, but we must except the lady whom we all prefer to call ‘Fanny Kemble.’ She, in her ‘Journal,’ speaks without bias, not always accurately, but still justly and generously. To her, the great master was apparent, and she truly says that when Kean died there died with him Richard, Shylock, and Othello.

Before quitting Kean for the Kembles, we must permit ourselves to extract the account given by Macready of a supper after Richard III. had been played:--

We retired to the hotel as soon as the curtain fell, and were soon joined by Kean, accompanied, or rather attended, by Pope. I need not say with what intense scrutiny I regarded him as we shook hands on our mutual introduction. The mild and modest expression of his Italian features, and his unassuming manner, which I might perhaps justly describe as partaking in some degree of shyness, took me by surprise, and I remarked with special interest the indifference with which he endured the fulsome flatteries of Pope. He was very sparing of words during, and for some time after, supper; but about one o’clock, when the glass had circulated pretty freely, he became animated, fluent, and communicative. His anecdotes were related with a lively sense of the ridiculous; in the melodies he sang there was a touching grace, and his powers of mimicry were most humorously or happily exerted in an admirable imitation of Braham; and in a story of Incledon acting Steady the Quaker at Rochester without any rehearsal, where, in singing the favourite air, ‘When the lads of the village so merrily, oh!’ he heard himself to his dismay and consternation accompanied by a single bassoon; the music of his voice, his perplexity at each recurring sound of the bassoon, his undertone maledictions on the self-satisfied musician, the peculiarity of his habits, all were hit off with a humour and an exactness that equalled the best display Mathews ever made, and almost convulsed us with laughter. It was a memorable evening, the first and last I ever spent in private with this extraordinary man.

Macready’s estimation of Kemble and the Kemble school is not at all highly pitched, save in the case of Mrs. Siddons; but he notes how she outlived her powers, and returned a few times to the stage when her figure had enlarged and her genius had diminished. When John Kemble took leave of the Dublin stage, in 1816, Macready was present; he records that ‘the house was about half full.’ Kemble acted Othello (which, at that time, Kean had made his own). ‘A more august presence could hardly be imagined.’ He was received with hearty applause, ‘but the slight bow with which he acknowledged the compliment spoke rather dissatisfaction at the occasional vacant spaces before him than recognition of the respectful feeling manifested by those present. I must suppose he was out of humour, for, to my exceeding regret, he literally walked through the part.’ The London audiences, as Kemble’s career was drawing to a close, were not more sympathetic. At Kemble’s Cato, ‘The house was moderately filled; there was sitting room in the pit, and the dress circle was not at all crowded.’ To the dignity of the representation Macready renders homage of admiration; but he says that Cato was not in strict Roman attire, and that with only one effort, the ‘I am satisfied,’ when he heard that Marcius ‘greatly fell,’ Kemble’s husky voice and laboured articulation could not enliven the monotony of a tragedy which was felt to be a tax on the patience of the audience. The want of variety and relief rendered it uninteresting, and those at least who were not classical antiquaries found the whole thing uncommonly tedious.

It is unquestionably among the unaccountable things connected with ‘the stage’ that Kemble’s farewell performances in London, 1817, were as a whole unproductive. Those closing nights, not answering the manager’s expectations of their attraction, were given for benefits to those performers who chose to pay the extra price. Macready was not present on the closing night of all, when Kemble nobly played his peerless Coriolanus; but he witnessed several other representations, and he dwells especially on the last performance of ‘Macbeth,’ when Mrs. Siddons acted the Lady to her brother’s Macbeth. Macready was disappointed with both. Mrs. Siddons was no longer the enchantress of old: ‘years had done their work, and those who had seen in her impersonations the highest glories of her art, now felt regret that she had been prevailed on to leave her honoured retirement, and force a comparison between the grandeur of the past and the feeble present. It was not a performance, but a mere repetition of the poet’s text; no flash, no sign of her pristine, all-subduing genius.’ Kemble, as Macbeth, was ‘correct, tame, and ineffective,’ through the first four acts of the play, which moved heavily on; but he was roused to action in the fifth act. With action there was pathos; and ‘all at once, he seemed carried away by the genius of the scene.’ Macready brings the

## scene itself before his readers, ending with the words: ‘His shrinking

from Macduff, when the charm on which his life hung was broken, by the declaration that his antagonist “was not of woman born,” was a masterly stroke of art. His subsequent defiance was most heroic; and, at his death, Charles Kemble received him in his arms and laid him gently on the ground, his physical powers being unequal to further effort.’

Of persons non-dramatic, many pass before the mind’s eye of the reader. Lord Nelson visited the Birmingham Theatre, and Macready noted his pale and interesting face, and listened so eagerly to all he uttered that for months after he used to be called upon to repeat ‘what Lord Nelson said to your father,’ which was to the effect that the esteem in which the elder Macready was held by the town made it ‘a pleasure and a duty’ for Lord Nelson to visit the theatre. With the placid and mournful-looking Admiral was Lady Hamilton, who laughed loud and long, clapped her uplifted hands with all her heart, and kicked her heels against the foot-board of her seat, as some verses were sung in honour of her and England’s hero.

There was a time when Macklin ceased to belong to the drama, when he was out of the world, in his old age, and his old Covent Garden house. One of the most characteristic of incidents is one told of Macklin in his dotage, when prejudice had survived all sense. Macready’s father called on the aged actor with lack-lustre eye, who was seated in an arm-chair, unconscious of anyone being present. Mrs. Macklin drew his attention to the visitor: ‘My dear, here is Mr. Macready come to see you.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Mr. Macready, my dear.’ ‘Ah! who is he?’ ‘Mr. Macready, you know, who went to Dublin, to play for your benefit.’ ‘Ha! my benefit! what was it? what did he act?’ ‘I acted Egerton, sir,’ replied Mr. Macready, ‘in your own play.’ ‘Ha! my play! what was it?’ ‘The “Man of the World,” sir.’ ‘Ha! “Man of the World!” devilish good title! who wrote it?’ ‘You did, sir.’ ‘Did I? well, what was it about?’ ‘Why, sir, there was a Scotchman’--‘Ah! damn them!’ Macklin’s hatred of the Scotch was vigorous after all other feeling was dead within him.

Equally good as a bit of character-painting is the full length of Mrs. Piozzi, whom William Charles Macready met at Bath, in the house of Dr. Gibbs. She struck the actor as something like one of Reynolds’s portraits walking out of its frame: ‘a little old lady dressed _point devise_ in black satin, with dark glossy ringlets under her neat black hat, highly rouged, not the end of a ribbon or lace out of its place,’ and entering the room with unfaltering step. She was the idol of the hour, and Macready, specially introduced to her, was charmed with her vivacity and good humour. The little old lady read, by request, some passages from Milton, a task she delighted in, and for doing which effectively she considered herself well qualified. She chose the description of the lazar-house, from the 11th Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and dwelt with emphatic distinctness on the various ills to which mortality is exposed. ‘The finger on the dial-plate of the _pendule_ was just approaching the hour of ten, when, with a Cinderella-like abruptness, she rose and took her leave, evidently as much gratified by contributing to our entertainment as we were by the opportunity of making her acquaintance.’ According to Dr. Gibbs, the vivacious old Cinderella never stayed after ten was about to strike. Circumstances might indeed prompt the sensitive lady to depart earlier. Mr. Macready subsequently met the lively little lioness at the Twisses. The company was mixed, old and young; the conversation was general, or people talked the young with the young, the old among themselves. Mrs. Piozzi was not the oracle on whose out-speakings all hearers reverentially waited. Consequently, ‘long before her accustomed hour,’ Mrs. Piozzi started up, and coldly wishing Mr. and Mrs. Twiss ‘good night,’ she left the room. To the general inquiries, by look or word, the hostess simply remarked, ‘She is very much displeased.’ The really gifted old lady’s vanity was wounded; lack of homage sent her home in a huff. Some of the best sketches in the book are of scenes of Macready’s holiday travel. On one occasion, in a corner of an Italian garden, near a church, he caught a priest kissing a young girl whom he had just confessed. Nothing could be merrier or better-humoured than Macready’s description of this pretty incident. The young Father, or brother, was quite in order; Rome claims absolute rule over faith--and morals.

We close this chronicle of so many varied hues with reluctance. That which belongs to the retired life of the actor is fully as interesting as the detail of the times when he was in harness. Indeed, in the closing letters addressed to the present Lady Pollock, there are circumstances of his early career not previously recorded. The record of the home-life is full of interest, and we sympathise with the old actor, who, as the fire of temperament died out, appeared purified and chastened by the process.

Macready, throughout his long life, had no ‘flexibility of spine’ for men of wealth or title, but he had, if he describes himself truly, perfect reverence for true genius, wheresoever found. He was oppressed with his own comparative littleness and his seeming inability to cope with men better endowed, intellectually, than himself. And yet, we find him, when he must have felt that he was great, was assured he was so by his most intimate admirers, and counted amongst them some of the foremost literary men and critics of the day--we find him, we say, moodily complaining that he was not sought for by ‘society,’ and not invited into it. There was no real ground for the complaint. He who made it was an honour to the society of which he was a part. Every page of this record, not least so those inscribed with confession of his faults, will raise him in the esteem of all its readers. He went to his rest in 1873, and he is fortunate in the friend to whom he confided the task of writing his life. The work, edited with modesty and judgment, is a permanent addition to our dramatic literature.

_PRIVATE THEATRICALS._

As in Greece a man suffered no disparagement by being an actor there was no disposition to do in private what was not forbidden in public. The whole profession was ennobled when an actor so accomplished as Aristodemus was honoured with the office of ambassador.

In Rome a man was dishonoured by being a player. Accordingly noble Roman youths loved to act in private, excusing themselves on the ground that no professional actor polluted their private stage. Roman youths, however, had imperial example and noble justification when a Roman emperor made his first appearance on the public stage, and succeeded, as a matter of course.

Nero and Louis XIV. were the two sublime monarchs who were most addicted to private theatricals; but the Roman outdid the Frenchman. We know that persons of the Senatorial and Equestrian orders, and of both sexes, played the parts, but we do not know how they liked or disliked what they dared not decline. One can fancy, however, the figure and feelings of the Roman knight when he began to practise riding on an elephant that trotted swiftly along a rope. What strong expletives he must have muttered to himself!--any one of which, uttered audibly, would have cost him his head as a fine levied by his imperial manager. As to Nero’s riding, and racing, and wrestling, and charioteering, as an amateur, among professionals who always took care to be beaten by him, these things were nothing compared with his ardour as a private player, and especially as what would now be called an opera singer. After all, Nero was more like an amateur actor who plays in public occasionally than an actor in strictly private theatricals. There is no doubt of his having been fond of music; he was well instructed in the art and a skilful proficient. His first great enjoyment after becoming emperor was in sitting up night after night playing with or listening to Terpnus the harper. Nero practised the harp as if his livelihood depended on it; and he went through a discipline of diet, medicine, exercise, and rest, for the benefit of his voice and its preservation, such as, it is to be hoped, no vocalist of the present day would submit himself to. Nero’s first appearance on any stage was made at Naples. The _débutant_ was not at all nervous, for, though an earthquake made the house shake while he was singing, he never ceased till he had finished his song. Had any of the audience fled at the earthquake, they probably would have been massacred for attending more to the natural than the imperial phenomenon. But we can fancy that, when some terrified Drusus got home and his Drusilla asked him about the voice of the _illustrissimo_ Signor Nerone, Drusus looked at her and answered, ‘Never heard such a shake in all my life!’

What an affable fellow that otherwise terrible personage was! How gracious he must have seemed as he dined in the theatre and told those who reverently looked on that by-and-by he would sing clearer and deeper! Our respect for this august actor is a little diminished by the fact that he not only invented the _claque_, but taught his hired applauders how they were to manifest approbation. He divided them into three classes, constituting several hundreds of individuals. The _bombi_ had to hum approval, the more noisy _imbrices_ were to shower applause like heavy rain upon the tiles, and the _testas_ were to culminate the effect by clapping as if their hands were a couple of bricks. And, with reputation thus curiously made at Naples, he reached Rome to find the city mad to hear him. As the army added their sweet voices of urgency, Nero modestly yielded. He enrolled his name on the list of public singers, but so far kept his imperial identity as to have his harp carried for him by the captain of his Prætorian Guard, and to be half surrounded by friends and followers--the not too exemplary Colonel Jacks and Lord Toms of that early time.

Just as Bottom the weaver would have played, not only Pyramus, but Thisbe and the Lion to boot, so Nero had appetite for every part, and made the most of whatever he had. Suetonius says that, when Nero sang the story of Niobe, ‘he held it out till the tenth hour of the day;’ but Suetonius omits to tell us at what hour the imperial actor first opened his mouth. ‘The Emperor did not scruple,’ says a quaint translation of Suetonius’s ‘Lives of the Twelve Cæsars,’ ‘done into English by several hands, A.D. 1692,’ ‘in private Spectacles to Act his Part among the Common Players, and to accept of a present of a Million of Sesterces from one of the Prætors. He also sang several tragedies in disguise, the Visors and Masks of the Heroes and the Gods, as also of the Heroesses and the Goddesses, being so shap’d as to represent his own Countenance or the Ladies for whom he had the most Affection. Among other things he sang “Canace in Travail,” “Orestes killing his Mother,” “Œdipus struck blind,” and “Hercules raging mad.” At what time it is reported that a young Soldier, being placed sentinel at the Door, seeing him drest up and bound, as the Subject of the Play required, ran in to his Assistance as if the thing had been done in good earnest.’ (Here we have the origin of all those soldiers who have stood at the wings of French and English stages, and who have interfered with the

## action of the play, or even have fainted away in order to flatter some

## particular player). Nero certainly had his amateur-actor weaknesses.

He provided beforehand all the bouquets that were to be spontaneously flung to him, or awarded as prizes in the shape of garlands. French actresses are said to do the same thing, and this pretty weakness is satirised in the duet between Hortense, the actress, and Brillant, the fine gentleman, in the pretty vaudeville of ‘Le Juif’ (by A. Rousseau, Désaugiers, and Mesnard), brought out at the Porte St.-Martin fifty odd years ago. Hortense is about to appear at Orleans, and she says, or sings:

Je suis l’idole dont on raffole. Après demain mon triomphe est certain!

‘Oui,’ rejoins Brillant,

Oui! de tous les points de la salle, Je prédis que sur votre front, Trente couronnes tomberont.

And Hortense replies confidentially:

Elles sont dans ma malle!

This is a custom, therefore, which French actresses derive from no less a person than Nero. This gentleman, moreover, invariably spoke well of every other actor to that actor’s face, but never at any other time. If this custom has survived--which is, of course, hardly possible--he who practises it can justify himself, if he pleases, by this Neronic example.