WILLIAM HAZLITT
I was, perhaps rather naïvely, surprised the other day to hear an actor asking for Hazlitt’s “View of the English Stage.” Actors in general, whether correctly or incorrectly I cannot say, are reputed to be not enthusiastically given to reading. On the face of it, the thing seems likely enough. Their business is to be men of action and talk and the busy world—not sedentary contemplative, cloistered students. Your bookworm is as a rule a shy, retiring solitary; the very opposite of your actor who must not only boldly show himself but take a pride in being stared at. Logically, then, I ought not to have been as shocked as I was when the late Henry Neville some years ago roundly declared to me that an actor “should never read.” Yet the thought of a life without literature seemed so appalling! It is possible, however, to be a reader, and a voracious reader, yet not to read Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. The epoch is gone. Kean is long since dead. Our theatrical interests to-day are widely different from those of our ancestors a century ago. And Hazlitt’s criticisms have not the loose, discursive, impressionistic, personal, intimate charm of his otheressays, his “Table Talk,” his “Round Table,” or his “Plain Speaker.” They simply show him in the “dry light” of the specialist, the closet-student turned playgoer, but these give a warm, coloured, speaking likeness of the whole man. I was surprised, then, to hear my friend the actor asking for Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. I venture to inquire what, particularly, he wanted them for. “Oh,” he said, “I like to read about Kean.”
And certainly if you want to read about Kean, Hazlitt is your man. It has been said, over and over again, that it was good luck for both actor and critic that Hazlitt had just begun his theatrical work on theMorning Chroniclewhen Kean made his first appearance as Shylock at Drury Lane. Hazlitt helped to make Kean’s reputation and Kean’s acting was an invaluable stimulant to Hazlitt’s critical faculties. It is said, by the way, that Kean was originally recommended to Hazlitt’s notice by his editor, Perry. Things of this sort may have happened in that weird time of a century ago, but the age of miracles is passed. Editors of daily newspapers in our time are not on the look-out for unrevealed histrionic genius. They have other fish to fry. But Perry seems to have been a most interfering editor. He plagued his critic with his own critical opinions. Hazlitt’s first “notice” in theChroniclewas about Miss Stephens as Polly inThe Beggar’s Opera. “When I got back, after the play” (note that he had meditated in advance his “nextday’s criticism, trying to do all the justice I could to so interesting a subject. I was not a little proud of it by anticipation”—happy Hazlitt!) “Perry called out, with his cordial, grating voice, ‘Well, how did she do?’ and on my speaking in high terms, answered that ‘he had been to dine with his friend the Duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject, he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the truesostenutostyle; but as I had written the article’ (holding my peroration onThe Beggar’s Operacarelessly in his hand), ‘it might pass.’... I had the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens coming out of the Editor’s room, who had been to thank him for his very flattering account of her.” That “carelessly” is a delicious touch, which will come home to every scribbler. But Perry and his friend the Duke and that glimpse of a petticoat whisking out of the editor’s room! What a queer, delightful, vanished newspaper-world! There were, however, even in those days, editors who did not interfere. Hazlitt was, for a brief period, dramatic critic ofThe Times(his most notable contribution was his notice of Kemble’s retirement inCoriolanus, June 25th, 1817), and was evidently well treated, for in his preface to the “View” (1818) he advises “any one who has an ambition to write, and to writehis bestin the periodical Press, to get, if he can, a position inThe Timesnewspaper, the editor of which is a man of business and not a man of letters. He may writethere as long and as good articles as he can, without being turned out for it.” One can only account for Hazlitt’s singular ideal of an editor as Johnson accounted for an obscure passage in Pope, “Depend upon it, Sir, he wished to vex somebody.” Hazlitt only wanted to be disagreeable to Perry.
Nevertheless, theChroniclehad had the best of Hazlitt’s stage criticisms, his papers on Kean. Kean’s acting, as I have said, was invaluable to Hazlitt as a stimulus. It stimulated him to a sort of rivalry in Shakespearian interpretation, the actor fairly setting his own conception of the part against the actor’s rendering of it, giving him magnificent praise when the two agreed, and often finding carefully pondered reasons for disagreement. Hazlitt might have said of Kean what Johnson said of Burke: “This fellow calls forth all my powers.” The result is twofold. You get vivid descriptions of Kean’s acting, his voice, his figure, his gestures, his perpetual passionateness, in season and out of season (misrepresenting—e.g., Shakespeare’s Richard II., as Hazlitt said, as a character of passion instead of as a character of pathos). And at the same time you get the “psychology” (an inevitablecliché, cast since Hazlitt’s day) of the chief Shakespearian tragic characters, carefully “documented” by the text and elaborated and coloured by Hazlitt’s sympathetic vision. You see the same process at work in the criticisms of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons and Macready, but (remember the great Sarah had hadher day before Hazlitt began to write) with a milder stimulant there was a milder response. In any case it was a gallery of portraits—a series of full-length figures partly from life and partly from the Shakespearean text. There was little background or atmosphere.
That is what makes Hazlitt’s criticism so unlike any modern sort. He wrote in an age of great histrionics, great interpretative art, but no drama, no creative art. His elaborate studies of dead-and-gone players have (except as illustrating Shakespeare) often a merely antiquarian interest. It is a curious detail that Kean’s Richard III. in early performances “stood with his hands stretched out, after his sword was taken from him,” and later “actually fought with his doubled fists like some helpless infant.” So it is a curious detail that Napoleon I. wore a green coat and clasped his hands behind his back. But compare this dwelling on theminutiæof an actor’s business or, to take a fairer example, compare Hazlitt’s analysis of the character of Iago (as a test of Kean’s presentation)—one of his acutest things—with the range and variety and philosophic depth of a criticism by Jules Lemaître. You are in a different world. Instead of the niggling details of how this man raised his arm at a given moment or delivered a classic speech in a certain way you get a criticism of life, all life,quicquid agunt homines. It is interesting, mildly interesting, to know that Kean’s Richard was (for Hazlitt) toograve and his Iago too gay, but after all we cannot be perpetually contemplating these particular personages of Shakespeare. We need fresh ideas, fresh creations, new views of society, anything for a change, so long as it is a thing “to break our minds upon,” We have no “great” Shakespearean actors now, but even if we had, should we care to devote to them the minute, elaborate attention paid by Hazlitt? One thinks of that time, a hundred years ago, of the great tragedy kings and queens as rather a stuffy world. Playgoing must have been a formidable enterprise ... but yet, you never can tell. There were frolicsome compensations. You might come back from the play to the office to learn your editor had been dining with a duke. And with luck next morning you might find a pretty actress at his door.