Lady Macbeth (2nd of February to the 10th of May)

Desdemona

Elfrida (Mason's Elfrida)

Rosalind (at the season's close)

CHARACTERS OF HER FORMER SEASONS

The list which is before us claims a few remarks. Dr. Franklin, and Aaron Hill, and Mason, and even Massinger, came and passed away like shadows, however informed with the pathos or the reason or the grandeur of the actress.

Cumberland had combined, along with Mrs. Siddons, Smith, Palmer, and Kemble; and a quite new tragedy, that did not look very unlike an old one, was repeated during the season twelve times, and gave its melancholy interest to very respectable audiences. But it was reserved for Shakespeare's prodigy of woman, Lady Macbeth, to be repeated thirteen times, and become, for the remainder of the actress's life, the most powerful of all her attractions.

Of the early characters, the lowest in the scale was Calista, a part of great force, and acted by Mrs. Siddons with even transcendent effect. The play, too, possessing one of those scenes of altercation which are the delight of our taste, and a bier and the slain Lothario to amuse the gaping vulgar.

CHAPTER XVI

THE preceding chapter will have demonstrated the prodigious attraction of Mrs. Siddons. For three seasons together she had delighted the town by the repetition of a limited number of our tragedies, of which, to say the truth, she was not only the first, but the sole moving principle. It should also be remembered, not in the estimate of her attraction, but her utility, that all her success had been attended with no expense to the theatre. Scenery, dress, decoration of every kind were reserved for Christmas prodigalities; and the legitimate drama in those days, it was thought, might be kept alive by the pathos or the humour of the performer. The comic strength of the Drury Lane company was unquestionably at this time as complete and perfect a force as could be formed by skill, or kept together by kindness; but the great receipts of the season were constantly numbered by the nights of Mrs. Siddons and tragedy.

When so much is thus attributed to Mrs. Siddons, it should be stated that the time was not arrived to give her the best aid of her brother, Mr. Kemble. That great

actor had appeared when the fires of a proud idolatry blazed brightly upon the altars erected to the genius of Garrick; he had to make way for a style of acting essentially original, striking, and learned, but bearing the marks of labour too sensibly in its early exertions. Smith held the first rank in the theatre, and, having a host of powerful friends, retained, even in tragedy, every character which he had been accustomed to play. In the lovers of tragedy Brereton, by much bustle, and a greater show of emotion, was commonly thought no mean successor of the persuasive Barry. The very studies of Kemble were objected to him as defects,

and even a scholar could assail him in diurnal trash like the following:

'As to Mr. Kemble, he has so much knowledge, we are afraid to encounter him; but if we, in our ignorance, may offer him a little advice, it would be that he should pack up all his learning, his superior judgment, his punctuations, his quips and his quiddities, his gesticulations and his graceful attitudes, and fairly trundle them off the boards of old Drury; and if he can pick up in lieu of them a little nature, we will venture to assert it will not be the worse for him.

'Brereton recovers his health, and will recover his acting; but he must not relax his attention against the powers that would devour him.'

This generous fable was signed 'Esop.'

The few plays of Mrs. Siddons's first season had now, however, sensibly abated of their attraction. Not from any doubt of their excellence, but from their almost endless repetition. The English are slaves only to novelty. With us there is little of that salutary prejudice in favour of the classics of the country that keeps a national theatre devoted to the performance of its chefs-d'œuvre, and admits with the greatest caution any accessions to the established repertory. It is in Paris only that we find this grand predilection encouraged in every possible way, and the Government itself supplying funds to raise, renew, and perpetuate the literary glories of the stage.

A commercial speculation must be profitable, or it must close. In the hands of adventurers Shadwell may be of more value than Shakespeare. It is a compliment to which all managers are not entitled, that they would prefer the poet to the buffoon, if the one were even as profitable as the other. Give the usurper the ascendency as to attraction and the reign of genius is at an end. What then can bring about his restoration? Nothing but the accident of talent congenial with his own, which must find adequate materials for the display of its proper powers. The poet revives in the player. I cannot talk of dividing the laurels of Shakespeare even with Garrick; they are not to be divided; they sprung up by the side of his cradle, and

spread in endless luxuriance around his tomb. The student of his immortal labours knows how imperfect the greatest efforts of the actor will always be to unfold the amazing subtilty of his conceptions. The hurry of public utterance, the casual interruptions among a vast crowd of spectators, the failure of the ear itself, all forbid even the full enjoyment of the power which he has; shades of meaning have an exility that baffles the nicest articulation, the finest eye.

The bulk of mankind have neither leisure nor faculties for very accurate study; they must be content with the interpretations of actors, not the most attentive readers of poetry, nor even very minute observers of life itself; they must take the prescriptive manner of the profession, the habit of doing what had been done before; the show of thought rather than thinking; the mimicry of emotion, not very scrupulous as to its source or its effects; a look that merely bespeaks our sympathy; a tone that long experience has demonstrated to be the note of sorrow, and affecting us independent of particular ideas.

A genius in acting must, however, be a profound observer of life. He secretly revolves all the folds of his own heart; he mixes much abroad with the world of character, and all its indications are set down in his 'tablets' as the materials with which he is to work. The poet's science is how man thinks and feels in all the relative conditions of his nature the actor's how he speaks, and looks, and moves. The inward and the outward man may be the best as well as briefest indications of their different provinces. When the author is himself an actor (an immense advantage, ceteris paribus), he will sometimes trace out both, and display not only what is to do, but how it is to be done.

'Macb. I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

Sey.

The time has been my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir

As life were in 't: I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaught'rous thoughts,
Cannot once start me. Wherefore was that cry?
The queen, my lord, is dead.

Macb. She should have died hereafter.'

If the reader ever saw anything like this frigid despair

upon the stage, the remembrance of original nature in the death of all her living signs, the bearing about in our anatomy this petrifaction of the heart, he has seen what it has not been my fortune to behold. The actors all mimic the lost emotions, and show Macbeth mistaken.

Such hints are few even among our early writers. When, therefore, the great actor has fully imbibed the poet's design, he then reverts to the stores of his own observation, and accidents in real life become lessons which enable him to throw the truth of imitation upon the character which is under his study. Garrick's Lear is no doubt truly said to have benefited by the dreadful spectacle of a father who let his child escape from his arms while fondling it at an open window. He became fixed in a distraction which perpetually beheld the accident renewed, and displayed for ever the original agonies of the father. The reader will see the places in which it suggested to the greatest of actors the recurrences, so frequent in Lear, to the cruelty of his daughters.

Such studies are absolutely essential to the actor, for whom the closet alone will do little. Without this actual experience of life he will certainly be unfaithful to the poet, and deliver his text in the usual style of meagre declamation. Where does the painter study expression, in the historian or the poet? O, no; his eye is everywhere; he is the undetected spy upon his species, and watches for it unsophisticated and unprepared. Countenances are made up, manners are the children of discipline. Nature dressed is art, and clumsy art, until use has polished it into a second nature; a peasant child, alone, playing upon a bank of flowers, may be a model of the graceful and the expressive. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to shudder at the notion of a little miss before her dancing-master. I have seen in Mrs. Siddons hundreds of touches caught by herself from the real world

'She is a great observer, and she looks
Quite through the deeds of men.

It is commonly deemed no slight ordeal to have her steady gaze bent upon you, as she sits, too willingly, silent a long time in society. Nor is this the result of prudence