ANNE OLDFIELD
‘Mrs. Oldfield,the celebrated comedian,’ is the title inscribed by a contemporary—who knew how the lady should be spoken of—upon the copper which Edward Fisher engraved in mezzotint from the picture by Richardson. A photogravure reproduction from this rare, desirable print—which shows the lissome grace and flexible charm of a young woman who enchanted the town, and who was the delight of Mr. Mainwaring before she was the delight of General Churchill—forms the frontispiece to the slight and gossipy and unscientific, but by no means disagreeable volume which Mr. Robins has compiled—we cannot say written—about the actress whom he dubs familiarly ‘Nance.’ A cheaper reproduction of another portrait of her—the original also by Richardson—is to be found upon a later page. In both portraits she is representedin propria persona, of which we need not complain, but which it is expedient to chronicle, inasmuch as such portraiturethrows no direct illumination upon the achievements of her art. Deprived of any such assistance as might well have been given, at all events had the compiler of the volume been dealing with a comedian of later time—with Garrick, say, whose Abel Drugger is known to us by the canvas of Zoffany; with Siddons, who not only as the ‘Tragic Muse’ reveals the characteristics of her power; or even with Mrs. Abington, whose performance as Miss Prue inLove for Lovewe seem to witness by dint of familiarity with Sir Joshua’s picture—we are thrown back entirely, for our acquaintance with Mrs. Oldfield, upon the written records produced for our survey.
These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating woman much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the actress there is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of opinion,’ but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in theSpectatordiscuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic epilogue to a tragic play—for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to act Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that the management should ‘give such things to Porter’—and a few other contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day was before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professionalor not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making her a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the world cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs. Knipp and of Nell Gwynne—‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I thought’—was deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial over the personal grace of Mrs. Oldfield.
Accordingly, we receive from an industrious American a volume written ‘round’ Mrs. Oldfield, rather than actually about her. We cannot altogether blame him for it. We do blame him for once or twice slinking away, as it were, from the evidence of his own, perhaps unavoidable, ignorance, under cover of propriety and a regard for the conventionalities. Of this nature is his exceedingly slight treatment of the possible existence of a daughter of the actress; but he had already brought himself to chronicle some particulars of two sons—and this was perhaps as much as we could expect. Mrs. Oldfield was never married. Her time looked leniently upon such freedom as she took in love affairs; and the transference of her affection was neither frequent nor brutal. She was a woman of impulse and of sensibility and of magnetic charm. Men who ‘dinedwith Walpole’ passed on without a trace of consciousness of inferiority in her companionship to the agreeable converse of Oldfield. She was as kind as she was pleasant. She relieved Savage, who rose to excellence in the verses penned by him on her demise. She was endowed with common sense, which is frequently possessed, though not invariably exercised, by people of genius. She was nice to the humblest, and she walked with Royalty on the slopes of Windsor. Brought up in a third-rate street in Westminster and in a tavern in St. James’s Market, she died at her house in Grosvenor Street, in only middle age, and left a comfortable fortune to the two youths born of her connection with distinguished and superior men. Such, briefly, was the woman—mercurial, gay, and charming; bringing tears, bringing laughter, never bringing regret. Would that it were possible to write even as definitely as that of the actress and of the method of her art!
Mr. Robins, who has filled his pages with the stories of the plot of a few of her pieces and with extracts from two or three comedies in which she was presumably most brilliant, would have made his book perhaps not more generally engaging, but more instructive, had he printed from Mr. JosephKnight’s scholarly record in theDictionary of National Biographythe immense list of herrôles. He does, of course, speak incidentally at least of the actress’s range; but nothing convinces one of it quite so surely as the scanning of that record of her honourable labour. So far as one can tell, she must have been about at her best inThe Provoked Husband; but, did she play Andromache or even Sophonisba, she got from each the maximum of its effect. Though poor originally, she was of gentle blood, and perhaps she played best, with her poetic realism, the parts of ladies of her day. Over a spell of twenty years, her art—like Ellen Terry’s and Mrs. Kendal’s in our own time—knew no decay. Like Aimée Desclée, she acted at the last in presence of great physical suffering. When she died the Town grieved ‘sincerely’; and though, with curious English compromise, she was refused a monument, she was not forbidden to be buried in the great grey Abbey whose walls rise cliff-like over against the street in which she passed her childhood. It is a pity that her story has been told by Mr. Robins with so naïve an absence of anything approaching style. She was a theme for a writer. But the amiable book-maker and genuinely interested student of her craft and period who is responsiblefor the various prolixity of this volume must be forgiven much because he has loved much. He tells us, it is true, by way of permissible yet not wholly praiseworthy padding, much more about her contemporaries in her palmy days, and in her days not palmy, than about herself. Mrs. Oldfield meanders, like a thin stream, through a meadow of Queen Anne and early Georgian gossip. We do not resent the gossip. If it is not authentic information, it is readable chatter. Would only that it were easier to disengage from the mass of it the delightful and enlivening and kindling personality of Mrs. Oldfield!
(Literature, 22nd October 1898.)