Part 14 (2/2)
I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's-- nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's--comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Sweden-borgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?--The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land--what shall I call it?-of cuckoldry--the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays--the few exceptions only are mistakes--is alike essentially vain and worthless.
The great art of Congreve is specially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes--some little generosities in the part of Angelica [Footnote: In _Love for Love_] perhaps excepted--not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his _Way of the World_ in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing--for you neither hate nor love his personages--and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.
Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced, in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages.
No reverend inst.i.tutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained--for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong,--grat.i.tude or its opposite,--claim or duty,--paternity or sons.h.i.+p. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children?
The whole is a pa.s.sing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice.
But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme out of which our c.o.xcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.
Amidst the mortifying circ.u.mstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the _School for Scandal_ in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now _acted_, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice--to express it in a word--the downright _acted_ villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,--the hypocritical a.s.sumption of hypocrisy,--which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are pa.s.sages,--like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation,--incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other--but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.
The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.
A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating.
He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Churchyard memory--(an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,--and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be despised,--so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod,--taking it in like honey and b.u.t.ter,--with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon.
What flesh, like loving gra.s.s, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower?
John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady.
You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips.
His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fict.i.tious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it.
What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry--or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Oth.e.l.lo and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has pa.s.sed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle _King_, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have pa.s.sed current in our day. We must love or hate--acquit or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable c.o.xcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain--no compromise--his first appearance must shock and give horror--his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion.
Charles (the real canting person of the scene--for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in down right self-satisfaction) must be _loved_ and Joseph _hated_. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,--he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury--a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged--the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life--must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour or old friend.
The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin--those poor snakes that live but in the suns.h.i.+ne of your mirth--must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. Candour--O! frightful!--become a hooded serpent. Oh! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd--the wasp and b.u.t.terfly of the _School for Scandal_--in those two characters; and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentle woman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in the latter part--would forego the true scenic delight--the escape from life--the oblivion of consequences--the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection--those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world--to sit instead at one of our modern plays--to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals--dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be--and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing?
No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this _manager's comedy_. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fas.h.i.+on to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly.
Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a pa.s.sport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour.
He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-because none understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in _Love for Love_, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic pa.s.sion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue.
The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard--disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy--politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance,--the ”lidless dragon eyes”, of present fas.h.i.+onable tragedy.
VII.--ON WEBSTER'S _d.u.c.h.eSS OF MALFI_.
All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the d.u.c.h.ess's death is ushered in, are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to bring upon their victims is beyond the imagination of ordinary poets. As they are not like inflictions _of this life_, so her language seems _not of this world_. She has lived among horrors till she is become ”native and endowed unto that element”. She speaks the dialect of despair, her tongue has a s.n.a.t.c.h of Tartarus and the souls in bale.--What are ”Luke's iron crown”, the brazen bull of Perillus, Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification by degrees! To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit--this only a Webster can do. Writers of an inferior genius may ”upon horror's head horrors acc.u.mulate”, but they cannot do this. They mistake quant.i.ty for quality, they ”terrify babes with painted devils”, but they know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.
VIII.--ON FORD'S _BROKEN HEART_.
I do not know where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as this. This is indeed, according to Milton, to ”describe high pa.s.sions and high actions”. The fort.i.tude of the Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha with a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering; these torments
On the purest spirits prey As on entrails, joints, and limbs, With answerable pains, but more intense.
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