‘I hear the noise about thy keel;I hear the bell struck in the night;I see the cabin-window bright;I see the sailor at the wheel.‘Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,And travelled men from foreign lands;And letters unto trembling hands;And thy dark freight, a vanished life.‘So bring him: we have idle dreams:This look of quiet flatters thusOur home-bred fancies; O, to us,The fools of habit, sweeter seems‘To rest beneath the clover sod,That takes the sunshine and the rains,Or where the kneeling hamlet drainsThe chalice of the grapes of God,‘Than if with thee the roaring wellsShould gulf him fathom deep in brine;And hands so often clasped in mineShould toss with tangle and with shells.’[25]
‘I hear the noise about thy keel;I hear the bell struck in the night;I see the cabin-window bright;I see the sailor at the wheel.‘Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,And travelled men from foreign lands;And letters unto trembling hands;And thy dark freight, a vanished life.‘So bring him: we have idle dreams:This look of quiet flatters thusOur home-bred fancies; O, to us,The fools of habit, sweeter seems‘To rest beneath the clover sod,That takes the sunshine and the rains,Or where the kneeling hamlet drainsThe chalice of the grapes of God,‘Than if with thee the roaring wellsShould gulf him fathom deep in brine;And hands so often clasped in mineShould toss with tangle and with shells.’[25]
Doubtless many of the processes adopted by blind affection and superstitious homage, to rescue the poor human casket from destruction, are grotesque and undesirable. Had Segato, the discoverer of a chemical method of petrifying flesh, survived to publish the secret, it would be chiefly for anatomical purposes that we should appreciate his invention; there is something revolting in the artificial conservation of what, by the law of Nature, should undergo elemental dissolution; and it is but a senseless homage to cling to the shattered chrysalis when the winged embryo has soared away:
‘All’ ombra de’ cipressi e dentro l’urneConfortate di pianto, è forse il sonnoDelia morte men duro?’[26]
‘All’ ombra de’ cipressi e dentro l’urneConfortate di pianto, è forse il sonnoDelia morte men duro?’[26]
Nature sometimes is a conservative mother even of mortal lineaments; in glacier or tarn, intuffoand limestone fossils, she keeps for ages the entire relics of humanity. The fantastic array of human bones in the Capuchin cells at Palermo and Rome; the eyeless, shrunken face of Carlo Borromeo embedded in crystal, jewels, and silk, beneath the Milan cathedral; the fleshless figure of old Jeremy Bentham in the raiment of this working-day world; the thousand spicy wrappings which enfold the exhumedmummy whose exhibition provoked Horace Smith’s facetious rhymes,—these, and such as these, poor attempts to do vain honour to our clay, are not less repugnant to the sentiment of death, in its religious and enlightened manifestation, than the promiscuous and careless putting out of sight of the dead after battle and in the reign of pestilence, or the brutal and irreverent disposal of the bodies of the poor in the diurnal pits of the Naples Campo Santo. More accordant with our sense of respect to what once enshrined an immortal spirit, and stood erect and free, even in barbaric manhood, is the adjuration of the bard:—
‘Gather him to his grave again,And solemnly and softly lay,Beneath the verdure of the plain,The warrior’s scattered bones away;The soul hath quickened every part,—That remnant of a martial brow,Those ribs that held the mighty heart,That strong arm,—strong no longer now!Spare them, each mouldering relic spare,Of God’s own image; let them rest,Till not a trace shall speak of whereThe awful likeness was impressed.’
‘Gather him to his grave again,And solemnly and softly lay,Beneath the verdure of the plain,The warrior’s scattered bones away;The soul hath quickened every part,—That remnant of a martial brow,Those ribs that held the mighty heart,That strong arm,—strong no longer now!Spare them, each mouldering relic spare,Of God’s own image; let them rest,Till not a trace shall speak of whereThe awful likeness was impressed.’
Yet there are many and judicious reasons for preferring cremation to inhumation; the prejudice against the former having doubtless originated among the early Christians, in their respect for patriarchal entombment, practised by the Jews, and their natural horror at any custom which savoured of heathenism. But there is actually no religious obstacle, and, under proper arrangement, no public inconvenience, in the burning of the dead. It is, too, a process which singularly attracts those who would save the remains of those they love from the possibility of desecration, and anticipate the ultimate fate of the mortal coil ‘to mix for ever with the elements;’ at all events, there can be no rational objection to the exercise of private taste, and the gratification ofpersonal feeling on this point. ‘I bequeath my soul to God,’ said Michael Angelo, in his terse will, ‘my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest kin;’—and this right to dispose of one’s mortal remains appears to be instinctive; though the indignation excited by any departure from custom would indicate that, in popular apprehension, the privilege so rarely exercised is illegally usurped.
The outcry in a Western town, a few years ago, when cremation was resorted to, at the earnest desire of a deceased wife; and the offence taken and expressed in an Eastern city, when it became known that a distinguished surgeon, from respect to science, had bequeathed his skeleton to a medical college; evidence how little, among us, is recognized the right of the living to dispose of their remains, and the extent to which popular ignorance and individual prejudice are allowed to interfere in what good sense and good feeling declare an especial matter of private concern. Yet that other than the ordinary modes of disposing of human relics are not absolutely repugnant to endearing associations, may be inferred from the poetic interest which sanctions to the imagination the obsequies of Shelley. Although it was from convenience that the body of that ideal bard, so misunderstood, so humane, so ‘cradled into poesy by wrong,’ was burned, yet the lover of his spiritual muse beholds in that lonely pyre, blazing on the shores of the Mediterranean, an elemental destruction of the material shrine of a lofty and loving soul, accordant with his aspiring, isolated, and imaginative career.[27]
Vain, indeed, have proved the studious precautions of Egyptians to conserve from decay and sacrilege the relics of their dead. Not only has ‘mummy become merchandise,’ in the limited sense of the English moralist; the traffic of the Jews in their gums and spices, the distribution of their exhumed forms in museums, and the use of their cases for fuel, is now superseded by commerce in their cerements for the manufacture of paper; and it is a startling evidence of that human vicissitude from which even the shrouds of ancient kings are not exempt, that recently, in one of the new towns of this continent, a newspaper was printed on sheets made from the imported rags of Egyptian mummies.
Of primitive and casual landmarks, encountered on solitary moors and hills, the cairn and the Alpine cross affect the imagination with a sense alike of mortality and tributary sentiment, even more vividly than the elaborate mausoleum, from the rude expedients and the solemn isolation; while the beauty of cathedral architecture ishallowed by ancestral monuments. Of all Scott’s characters, the one that most deeply enlists our sympathies, through that quaint pathos whereby the Past is made eloquent both to fancy and affection, is Old Mortality renewing the half-obliterated inscriptions on the gravestones of the Covenanters, his white hair fluttering in the wind as he stoops to his melancholy task, and his aged pony feeding on the grassy mounds. Even our practical Franklin seized the first leisure from patriotic duties, on his visit to England, in order to examine the sepulchral tablets which bear the names of his progenitors.
A cursory glance at the most cherished trophies of literature indicates how deeply the sentiment of death is wrought into the mind and imagination,—how it invests with awe, love, pity, and hope, thoughtful and gifted spirits, inspires their art, elevates their conceptions, and casts over life and consciousness a sacred mystery. The most finished and suggestive piece of modern English verse is elegiac,—its theme a country churchyard, and so instinct are its melancholy numbers with pathos and reflection, embalmed in rhythmical music, that its lines have passed into household words. Our national poet, who has sung of Nature in all her characteristic phases on this continent, next to those ever-renewed glories of the universe has found his chief inspiration in the same reverent contemplation:Thanatopsiswas his first grand offering to the Muses, andThe Disinterred Warrior, theHymn to Death, andThe Old Man’s Funeral, are but pious variations of a strain worthy to be chanted in the temple of humanity. Shakspeare in no instance comes nearer what is highest in our common nature and miraculous in our experience, than when he makes the philosophic Dane question his soul and confront mortality. The once popular and ever-memorableNight Thoughtsof Young elaborate kindred ideas in the light of Christian truth; the most quaintly eloquent of early speculative writings in English prose is Sir Thomas Browne’streatise on Urn-Burial. The most thoughtful and earnest of modern Italian poems is Foscolo’sSepolchri; the Monody on Sir John Moore, Shelley’s Elegy on Keats, Tickell’s on Addison, Byron’s on Sheridan, and Tennyson’sIn Memoriam, contain the most sincere and harmonious utterances of their authors. Not the least affecting pages ofThe Sketch Bookare those which describe the ‘Village Funeral’ and the ‘Widow’s Son;’ and the endeared author has marked his own sense of the local sanctity of the grave by selecting that of his family in ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ in the midst of scenes endeared by his abode and his fame. Halleck has given lyrical immortality to the warrior’s death in the cause of freedom; and Wordsworth, in perhaps his most quoted ballad, has recorded with exquisite simplicity childhood’s unconsciousness of death; even the most analytical of French novelists found, in the laws and ceremonial of a Parisian interment, material for his keenest diagnosis of the scenes of life in that marvellous capital. Hope’s best descriptive powers were enlisted in his sketch of burial-places near Constantinople, so pensively contrasting with the more adventurous chapters of Anastasius. If in popular literature this sentiment is so constantly appealed to, and so enshrined in the poet’s dream and the philosopher’s speculation, classic and Hebrew authors have inscribed its memorials in outlines of majestic and graceful import; around it the picturesque and the moralizing, the vivacious and the grandly simple expressions of the Roman, the Greek, and the Jewish writers seem to hover with the significant plaint—heroism or faith—which invokes us, with the voice of ages, to
‘Pay the deep reverence taught of old,The homage of man’s heart to death;Nor dare to trifle with the mouldOnce hallowed by the Almighty’s breath.’
‘Pay the deep reverence taught of old,The homage of man’s heart to death;Nor dare to trifle with the mouldOnce hallowed by the Almighty’s breath.’
Perhaps there is no instance of this vague and awfulinterest more memorable to the American than when he reads, on some ancient tablet in the Old World, the burial record of his ancestors.
The monitory and reminiscent influence of the churchyard, apart from all personal associations, cannot, indeed, be over-estimated; doubtless in a spirit of propriety and good taste, it is now more frequently suburban, made attractive by trees, flowers, a wide landscape, and rural peace, and rendered comparatively safe from desecration by distance from the so-called march of improvement which annually changes the aspect of our growing towns. Yet, wherever situated, the homes of the dead, when made eloquent by art, and kept fresh by reverent care, breathe a chastening and holy lesson, perhaps the more impressive when uttered beside the teeming camp of life. To the traveller in Europe it is a pathetic sight to watch the Norwegian peasants strew flowers, every Sabbath, on the graves of their kindred, and gives a living interest to the memorials of Scandinavian antiquity gathered in the museums, whereby, through the weapons and drinking-cups of stone, bronze, and iron, exhumed from graves, he traces the origin and growth of that remote civilization. And when time has softened the most acute and bitter memories of the War for the Union, what monument to individual prowess, what trophy of patriotic self-sacrifice will compare, in solemn and elevating pathos, with the impression derived from the ‘national cemeteries’ of the battle-field and the hospital? As Lincoln said of Gettysburg,—‘they will dedicate us afresh to our country, to humanity, and to God.’
When the traveller gazes on the marble effigy of the warrior at Ravenna, and then treads the plain where Gaston de Foix fell in battle, the fixed lineaments and obsolete armour bring home to his mind the very life of the middle ages, solemnized by youthful heroism and early death; when he scans the vast city beneath its smoky veil—thickwith roofs and dotted with spires,—from an elevated point of Père la Chaise, the humble and garlanded cross, and the chiselled names of the wise and brave that surround him, cause the parallel and inwoven mysteries of life and death to stir the fountains of his heart with awe, and make his lips tremble into prayer; and, familiar as is the spectacle, the more thoughtful of the throng in New York’s bustling thoroughfare will sometimes pause and cast a salutary glance from the hurrying crowd to the monuments of the heroic Lawrence, the eloquent Emmet, the gallant Montgomery, and the patriotic Hamilton. Those associations which form at once the culture and the romance of travel are identified with the same eternal sentiment. Next in interest to the monuments of genius and character are those of death; or rather, the inspiration of the former are everywhere consecrated by the latter.
‘Take the wingsOf morning, and the Barcan desert pierce,Or lose thyself in the continuous woodsWhere rolls the Oregon, and hears no soundSave his own dashings,—yet the dead are there!’
‘Take the wingsOf morning, and the Barcan desert pierce,Or lose thyself in the continuous woodsWhere rolls the Oregon, and hears no soundSave his own dashings,—yet the dead are there!’
Nero dug his own grave, lest he should be denied burial, and Shakspeare guarded his own ashes by an imprecatory epitaph; David praises the men of Jabesh Gilead who rescue the bones of their king from the enemy. It is a sweet custom,—that of making little excavations in sepulchral slabs to catch the rain, that birds may be lured thither to drink and sing. The Chinese sell themselves in order to obtain means to bury their parents.
We enter a city of antiquity—memorable Syracuse or disinterred Pompeii—through a street of tombs; the majestic relics of Egyptian civilization are the cenotaphs of kings; the Escurial is Spain’s architectural elegy; Abelard’s philosophy is superseded, but his love and death live daily to the vision of the mourners who go from the gay capital of France, to place chaplets on the graves of departedfriends;[28]the grandeurs of Westminster Abbey are sublimated by the effigies of bards and statesmen, and the rare music of St. George’s choir made solemn by the dust of royalty; deserted Ravenna is peopled with intense life by the creations of Dante which haunt his sepulchre; Arqua is the shrine of affectionate pilgrims; the radiant hues and graceful shapes of Titian and Canova become ethereal to the fancy, when viewed beside their monuments; St. Peter’s is but a magnificent apostolic tomb; and the shadow of mortality is incarnated in Lorenzo’s brooding figure in the jewelled temple of the dead Medici. Even the dim, half-explored catacombs of Rome yield significant testimony to the Christian’s heart to-day. ‘The works of painting found within them,’ well says a recent writer, ‘their construction, the inscriptions on the graves,—all unite in bearing witness to the simplicity of the faith, the purity of the doctrine, the strength of the feeling, the change in the lives of the vast mass of the members of the early church of Christ.’[29]
What resorts are Santa Croce, Mount Vernon, Saint Paul’s, and Saint Onofrio! What a goal, through ages, the Holy Sepulchre! How the dim escutcheons sanctify cathedrals, and sunken headstones the rural cemetery! How sacred the mystery of the Campagna hid in that ‘stern round tower of other days,’ which bears the name of a Roman matron! The beautiful sarcophagus of Scipio, the feudal crypt of Theodric, the silent soldier of the Invalides, the mossy cone of Caius Cæstus, in whose shadow two English poets[30]yet speak in graceful epitaphs,Thorwaldsen’s grand mausoleum at Copenhagen, composed of his own trophies,—what objects are these to win the mind back into the lapsing ages, and upward with ‘immortal longings!’ We turn from brilliant thoroughfares, alive with creatures of a day, to catacombs obscure with the impalpable dust of bygone generations; we pass from the vociferous piazza to the hushed and frescoed cloister, and walk on mural tablets whose inscriptions are worn by the feet of vanished multitudes; we steal from the cheerful highway to the field of mounds, where a shaft, a cross, or a garland breathes of surviving tenderness; we handle the cloudy lachrymal, quaint depository of long-evaporated tears, or admire the sculptured urn, the casket of what was unutterably precious, even in mortality; and thereby life is solemnized, consciousness deepened, and we feel, above the tyrannous present, and through the casual occupation of the hour, the ‘electric chain wherewith we’re darkly bound.’ ‘When I look upon the tombs of the great,’ says Addison, ‘every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow. When I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I readthe several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.’ Thus perpetual is the hymn of death, thus ubiquitous its memorials—attesting not only an inevitable destiny, but a universal sentiment; under whatever name,—God’s Acre, Pantheon, Campo Santo, Valhalla, Potter’s Field, Greenwood, or Mount Auburn,—the last resting-place of the body, the last earthly shrine of human love, fame, and sorrow, claims—by the pious instinct which originates, the holy rites which consecrate, the blessed hopes which glorify it—respect, protection, and sanctity.
There is, indeed, no spot of earth so hallowed to the contemplative as that which holds the ashes of an intellectual benefactor. What a grateful tribute does the trans-atlantic pilgrim instinctively offer at the sepulchre of Roscoe at Liverpool, of Lafayette in France, of Berkeley at Oxford, of Burns at Alloway Kirk, and of Keats and Goldsmith,—of all the bards, philosophers, and reformers whose conceptions warmed and exalted his dawning intelligence, and became thereby sacred to his memory for ever! How fruitful the hours—snatched from less serene pleasure—devoted to Stratford, Melrose, and the Abbey! To realize the value of these opportunities, the spirit of humanity enshrined in such ‘Meccas of the mind,’ we must fancy the barrenness of earth stripped of these landmarks of the gifted and the lost. How denuded of its most tender light would be Olney, Stoke Pogis, the vale of Florence, the cypress groves of Rome, and the park at Weimar, unconsecrated by the sepulchres of Cowper and Gray, Michael Angelo, Tasso, and Schiller, whose sweet and lofty remembrance links meadow and stream, mountain and sunset, with the thought of all that is most pensive, beautiful, and sublime in genius and in woe.
‘All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.’Jacques.
‘All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.’Jacques.
Dramatictalent is far more common than is usually believed. In every family where decided traits of character prevail, it is spontaneously exhibited; and no intimate circle of friends in which a perfect mutual understanding and entire frankness exist, can often meet without an instinctive development of a propensity and a gift innate in all intelligent and genial minds; either in the play of humour, in graphic narrative, in skilful imitation, or the accidental turn of conversation, the dramatic appears, and we have only to look and listen objectively, to find the scene and the dialogue ‘as good as a play.’ Almost every community has its self-elected buffoons, its volunteer harlequins, and its involuntary actors, who, carried away by the spur of vanity or the overflow of enthusiasm, vividly represent either the ludicrous, the characteristic, or the impassioned in human nature. To the imaginative, observant, and susceptible, ‘all the world’s a stage,’ and men and women ‘merely players;’ or, rather, there are times when the aspects of society thus impress us. There is, too, a dramatic instinct in the very consciousness of imaginative and impassioned natures, who, to use the words of a woman of genius, yield to ‘un besoin inné qu’elles éprouvent de dramatiser leur existence à leurspropres yeux.’ A national dramatic language has ever been recognized in the responsive vivacity of the Italian manners, the theatrical bearing of the French, and the proud reticence of the Spaniard; these traits are infinitely modified to the eye of scientific observation; and are the direct and significant language of temperament, race, and character. It is, perhaps, because the elements of the dramatic art are thus universal, that its professors are so little esteemed, unless of the very highest order. It is certainly true of most of the celebrated performers that they have been unhappy, and averse to their children adopting the vocation.
To appreciate the significance of elocutionary art, we have but to consider that all poetry and rhetoric need interpretation. To the multitude, in its printed or written form, the word of genius is often as much a sealed book as the notes of a fine musical composition to one uninitiated as to the meaning of those occult signs of harmony. Wordsworth gained many converts to his poetical theory by the impressive manner in which he recited his verses, who would have remained insensible to their worth if only the force of reasoning had been used. The popularity of many English lyrics and dramatic scenes is owing to the emphasis given them, in the memory, by felicitous declaimers. How different is the Church Service, an old ballad, an oration, the sentiment of Tennyson, the chivalry of Campbell, or the ardent gloom of Byron, when melodiously and intelligently uttered: only those who really feel the sense or pathos of a poem, win others adequately to receive it; and there now lie neglected heaps of noble verse, the latent music of which has not been vocally eliminated. In this view, the requisite combination of voice, sensibility, and intelligence, that constitute a good elocutionist, is an endowment of inestimable value. Lee, the dramatist, used to read his plays so effectively that it discouraged the actors from undertaking them; and the crowds that listen attentively to an able reader ofShakspeare, indicate the extent of public taste for this unappreciated and rarely cultivated accomplishment. Kean gave ‘a local habitation,’ in the minds of thousands, to Shaksperian inspiration; his surviving auditors are yet haunted by his tones; his inflections and emphasis sculptured, as it were, with a breath, upon memory, words that had previously left only a transient impression. Had we, in our Western civilization, a profession analogous to the improvisatore of the South, or the story-teller of the East, to make familiar and impressive the utterance of our poets, they need not fear comparison with the ancient bards of the people. Tasso and Ariosto are read to this day, in squares and on quays in Italy, to swarthy and tattered groups, who applaud a good line as if it were a new candidate for fame; and, notwithstanding the aversion of the highly intellectual to the theatre, Shakspeare became domesticated in the English mind through the interpretation of histrionic genius. It is on account of this vital connection between literature and elocution, this absolute need of a popular exposition of what otherwise would never penetrate the common mind, that the decadence of the Stage is to be regretted, and the recognition of elocution as a high, graceful, and useful art is desirable. We have an abundance of critics; we need expositors, artists to embody in clear, emphatic, and justly-modulated tones, the graces and the thoughts which minstrel and philosopher have elaborated; this would awaken moral sympathy, give a social interest to the pleasures of literature, and wing words of truth and beauty over the world. It is in view of such an office that the actor rises to dignity; and that such a ‘great simple being’ as Mrs. Siddons was consoled, when insulted by an audience, for her ‘consciousness of a humiliating vocation;’ and that Kean, wayward and dissolute, recklessly leaping the barrier of civilization, like Freneau’s Indian boy who ran from college to the woods, reappears to the fancy as a genuine minister at the altar of humanity. Talma’s life was coincidentwith some of the greatest events of the century; and his social position is a noble vindication of histrionic genius in alliance with superior character. Associated with the literary men of his country, and befriended by her statesmen, his reminiscences are quite as interesting as his professional triumphs. Intimate with Chenier, David, and Danton, he was admired and cherished by Napoleon. Like Kean his earliest attempts failed, and like Garrick he was a reformer in his art. The philosophy of dramatic personation as regarded by such a man has a peculiar interest. ‘Acting,’ he said, ‘is a complete paradox; we must possess the power of strong feeling, or we could never command and carry with us the sympathy of a mixed audience in a crowded theatre; but we must, at the same time, control our sensations on the stage, for their indulgence would enfeeble execution. The skilful actor calculates his effects beforehand; the voice, gesture, and look which pass for inspiration, have been rehearsed a hundred times. On the other hand, a dull, composed, phlegmatic nature can never make a great actor.’ Talma’s introduction of Kemble’s toga in the Roman plays, his teaching Bonaparte to play king, according to the famouson-dit, his matchless dignity and elocution, his English affinities, his charming talk, his select circle of friends, his prosperous style of living, and the new rank he gave his vocation, combine to endear and elevate his memory.
In an historical view the relation of actors to society, art, letters, and religion, offers many curious problems:protégésof the State in the palmy days of Greece, with the purely secular interest attached to the stage under the Romans it degenerated; yet Cicero profited by the instructions of Roscius, and gained for him an important suit; and while Augustus decreed that ‘players were exempt from stripes,’ later edicts declared ‘that no senators should enter the houses of pantomimes, and that Roman knights should not attend them in the streets.’ Excommunicated by theChurch of Rome in the middle ages, they gave vital scope and character to Spanish literature by evoking the rich and national materials of that extraordinary drama of which Calderon and Lope de Vega are the permanent expositors. Its history shows how, from religious comedies to historical and social plays, the representatives of the stage in Spain fostered her intellectual development and only popular culture, ‘until there was hardly a village that did not possess some kind of a theatre.’ The actors at Madrid ‘constituted no less than forty companies,’ and ‘secular comedies of a very equivocal complexion were represented in some of the principal monasteries of the kingdom.’ The conduct of the Spanish actors, however, according to the same testimony,[31]‘did more than anything else to endanger the privileges of the drama.’ Their personal lot seems to have been as hard as the worst of their successors; ‘slaves in Algiers were better off.’ In France, political, social, and literary life and labour are often so related to or influenced by the renownedartistesof the stage, that they figure as an inevitable element in popular memoirs; nowhere is the influence of the profession so direct and absolute; and while the rise of German literature and liberalism is identified with the advent of dramatic genius and the national revival of the theatre, in England the most distinctive and pervading glory of her intellectual character and fame is the offspring of this form of letters and this phase of social recreative art. The biographies of the most celebrated and endeared authors, from Alfieri to Irving, and from Goëthe to Wilson, indicate that dramatic entertainments, whether Italian opera or the English stage in its prime, court-plays at Weimar, or Terry at Edinburgh, are to them the most available recuperative and inspiring of pastimes.
It is alike instructive and amusing to trace the dramatic element, so instinctive and versatile, from the naturallanguage of races and individuals, through social manners to its organized culmination in art; and thus to realize its historical significance. The Greek drama has afforded philosophical scholars the most inspiring theme whereby to illustrate the culture of classic antiquity. In the mellifluous verses of Metastasio, the stern emphasis of Alfieri, and the comedies of Goldoni, we have a perfect reflection of the lyrical taste, the free aspiration, and the colloquial geniality of the Italians. From Molière to Scribe, what vivid and true pictures of human life and nature as modified by French character; while the essential facts of the origin and development of the British stage, so fully recorded by Dr. Doran, brings it into intimate and sympathetic contact with all the phases and crises of literature, society, and politics. In the days of the first Charles the stage ‘suffered with the throne and the church.’ Around Blackfriars, Whitefriars, the Globe, the Rose, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, crystallize the most salient associations of court and authorship; on this vantage-ground Puritan and Cavalier alternately triumphed; and the genius of England bore its consummate flower in Shakspeare. Now denounced and now cherished, to-day patronized by kings, and to-morrow denounced by clergy, the memoirs and annals of each epoch include the fortunes and the fame of the drama as one of the most suggestive tests of social transitions. Queen Henrietta was ‘well-affected towards plays,’ while South vigorously assailed, and Bossuet consigned their personators to the infernal regions. The playhouses, declared a public nuisance by the Middlesex grand jury of 1700, at an earlier and later period were shrines of fashion, nurseries of talent, and haunts of courtiers. The representative men and women of the day were dramatic authors, actors, and actresses; each succeeding generation of poets essayed in this arena, so that a familiar designation of the ages is borrowed from their leading playwrights, whose works faithfully mirror the moral tone, the social spirit, and the publictaste. In Alphra Behn’sOronooko, Mrs. Centlivres’Busybody, Addison’sCato, Steele’sTender Husband, Dr. Young’sRevenge, Gay’sBeggar’s Opera, Sheridan’sSchool for Scandal, Goldsmith’sShe Stoops to Conquer, Rowe’sJane Shore, Farquhar’sBeaux’ Stratagem, and many other popular plays, we have, as it were, the living voice of ideas, passions, and sentiments which agitated or charmed the town; and the robust, earnest individuality of the English race for ever lives in the profound, impassioned utterance of the old dramatists, as its emasculated tone is embodied in the comic muse of the Restoration. How vivid the glimpses of stage influence in the memoirs and correspondence of each era, in the art and the annals of the nation. Evelyn and Pepys note Betterton’s triumphs; Tillotson learned from him his effective elocution; Kneller painted, and Pope loved him. TheTatlercomments on ‘haughty George Powell;’ Jack Lacy still lives in his portrait at Hampton Court. ‘The great Mrs. Barry’ is buried in Westminster cloisters; and Mrs. Pritchard’s bust looms up from among those of poets and statesmen in the Abbey, and recalls Churchill’s metrical tribute. Burke, Johnson, Walpole, and Chesterfield, expatiate on Garrick with critical zest or personal sympathy. Each great performer creates an epoch of taste or fashion, feeling or fame. Betterton, Quin, Barry, Foote, Cibber, Garrick, Kemble, Cooke, and Kean, are names whose mention brings to mind not a transient histrionic reputation, but a reign,—a social, literary, or national period, crowded with interesting characters, remarkable achievements, or special traits of life and manners. Each theatre has its memorable traditions; each school its great illustrators; audiences, criticisms, the court, the coffee-house, the journal, derive from and impart to the theatre a specific influence. The gallantry, the wit, the local manners, the style of writing, the fashion, that prevail at a given period, are associated with the stage, the annals whereof, whether in Paris, London, or Vienna, are therefore invaluable as a reference tohistorian, novelist, and artist. ‘The Garrick fever,’ we are told, ‘extended to St. Petersburg;’ ‘a dissenting, one-eyed jeweller,’ inGeorge Barnwell, brought the domestic drama into vogue; theBeggar’s Opera‘made highwaymen fashionable;’ and Ross is still remembered in Edinburgh ‘as the founder of the legal stage.’
There is this great difference between the British and the French stage, that while the former has achieved the grandest triumphs of tragic genius, both literary and histrionic, the comedy of the latter has proved a permanent school of manners, of language, and of art. The patronage of the government, and the most strict artistic methods and discipline, have established a standard of acting through the Théâtre Français. Accordingly, instead of one superlatively clever and a score of inefficient performers, all the French actors and actresses work together for a harmonious result; unity of art and of effect, exquisite finish, scientific aptitude, graces of manner, of utterance, and of expression, often combine to make the modern French drama the perfection of artificial triumphs.
The lyric drama has greatly diminished the influence and modified the character of the stage; and its personal records and associations abound in romantic and artistic triumphs. The rare and delicate gift of a voice adapted to this sphere, the temperament, talent, and beauty of the queens of song, the individuality and power of musical composition, the vast expense and varied attractions of the Italian opera, its fashionable sway, and the genius and social interest identified with its history, all combine to throw a special and significant charm around its votaries and its record. What a world of emotional and artistic meaning the very names of Purcell, Pergolesi, Bach, Cherubini, Mozart, and Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Beethoven, Mercandante, and other eminent composers, awakens; and how the memory of their great interpreters haunts the imagination! Perhaps, in our material age, there is no sphere where fancy andfeeling have found such scope. From the memoirs of Alfieri to those of our own Irving, it is evident that the most available of inspiring recreations, for men of thought and sensibility, is the lyric drama; and from the days of Metastasio at the court of Vienna to those of Felice Romani’s libretto ofLa Norma, words and melody have reproduced, in vivid and vital grace, the tragic and the naïve in history, sentiment, and life. Even around imperial careers flit the vocal victors of the hour. Joseph of Austria, the great Frederic, and the first Napoleon, had their authoritative or conciliatory skirmishes with aprima donna, or animpresario; operatic alternate with diplomatic episodes. Nor is the social charm andprestigeof the lyric drama less apparent in the annals of kindred genius. At Sophia Arnould’ssalonthe illustrious writers and statesmen of Paris gladly convened. Goëthe celebrated in verse the eighty-third birthday of Mara. Sir Joshua painted Mrs. Billington as St. Cecilia; and Catalani made English tars, rowing her to a frigate, weep as she warbled the national anthem. The amours, rivalries, luxury, disasters, adventures, courtly favour, social influence, conjugal quarrels, noble charities, and artistic triumphs of vocalists, add a new and marvellous chapter to the annals of dramatic character and fortunes. Lavinia Fanton’s ‘Polly Peachum’ secured the triumph of Gay’sBeggar’s Opera, and the heart of a duke; of kindred significance is that scene, so exceptional in English conventional life, and well described by Dr. Burney, where Anastasia Robinson was acknowledged by Lord Peterborough as his wife. A cardinal and a cook were the parents of Gabrielli; Pasta’sMedeawas an epoch in histrionic art; Malibran’s brief and brilliant career revealed the most versatile woman, as well as originalcantatriceof her day; Sontag’s death was a public calamity; Catalani’s marvellous vocalization lacked pathos, because ‘she had not suffered;’ while Mrs. Woods gained the same quality from a contrary experience. Madame Devrient was called the Siddons of Germany; Jenny Lind’snaïvesongwon thousands for the indigent; and Braham’s triumphant tones in singing the triumphs of Israel, made the audience appear to Lamb as Egyptians over whose necks the Hebrew chanter rode.
From the time Burbage was lessee of the Globe Theatre, and Shakspeare performed in his own characters, the morality of an actor’s profession and the stage have been discussed; but that there is no inevitable degradation in the theatre, is evident from the late wholly successful though temporary revival of its glory under the auspices of Macready. By magnificent and complete scenic arrangements, the restoration of mutilated Shakspearian dramas, efficient companies, the reformation of the house itself, and especially by combining with the best dramatic authors of the day, and rigidly maintaining his own self-respect as a member of society, Macready once more brought together the scattered elements upon which the character and utility of the stage is based, invested it with the highest interest, and raised it above the cavils both of severe intellectual taste and of pure morality. For a brief period it was the centre of graceful ministries, a high school of art, the handmaid of literature, and the means of elevating public sentiment and refreshing the most toilsome minds; works of real dramatic genius were elicited; latent artistic resources suggested; and the noblest drama in the world adequately represented. Financial difficulties, incident to the monopoly enjoyed by patentees, soon put a stop to the laudable enterprise; but the experiment is as memorable as it was satisfactory. Ronzi shed tears of pleasure when she found herself the only guest at a nobleman’s villa near Florence, to which she had been invited to afêtesumptuously and tastefully arranged; it was so rare an exception to the rule of making professional vocalists contribute to, instead of receiving private entertainment; and it is a curious fact in the social history of theatrical characters that the English, notwithstanding their prudery and exclusiveness, first recognized actors andactresses of merit as companions. Miss Farren is not the only performer married to one of the nobility. The Earl of Craven espoused Miss Bromton; Lord Peterborough, Anastasia Robinson; a nephew of Lord Thurlow, Miss Bolton; and Sir William Becher, Miss O’Neil. One can readily understand how an intellectual bachelor like James Smith, accustomed to solace himself for domestic privations by cultivating a sympathy for the heroines of the mimic world, should lament, as he did, in apt verse, their appropriation even by noble lovers. He closes a pathetic record of the kind with this allusion to the union between his prime favourite, Miss Stevens, and Lord Essex, who seems to have acted on the advice of the author ofMatrimonial Maxims, who says, ‘If you marry an actress, the singing-girls are the best:’
‘Last of the dear, delightful list,Most followed, wonder’d at, and miss’dIn Hymen’s odds and evens;—Old Essex caged our nightingale,And finished thy dramatic tale,Enchanting Kitty Stevens!’
‘Last of the dear, delightful list,Most followed, wonder’d at, and miss’dIn Hymen’s odds and evens;—Old Essex caged our nightingale,And finished thy dramatic tale,Enchanting Kitty Stevens!’
Boswell’s reason for his partiality to players and soldiers was that they excelled ‘in animation and relish of existence.’ There is a striking illustration of the personal sympathy awakened by the profession in conflict with the judgment that condemns it, as a career, in the life of Scott. On one of the last days of Sir Walter’s life, when, in a bath-chair at Abbotsford, he was wheeled to a shady place by Lockhart and Laidlaw, he asked the former to read him something from Crabbe. Lockhart read the description of the arrival of the Players at the Borough. Sir Walter cried, ‘Capital!’ at the poet’s sarcasms on that way of life; but asked penitently, ‘How will poor Terry endure those cuts?’ and when Lockhart reached the summing up—
‘Sad, happy race! soon raised and soon depressed,Your days all past in jeopardy and jest;Poor without prudence, with afflictions, vain,Nor warned by misery, nor enriched by gain——’
‘Sad, happy race! soon raised and soon depressed,Your days all past in jeopardy and jest;Poor without prudence, with afflictions, vain,Nor warned by misery, nor enriched by gain——’
‘Shut the book,’ said Scott; ‘I can’t stand more of this: it will touch Terry to the quick.’ A different but significant tribute to the actual personal worth of the profession occurs in one of those genial ‘imaginary conversations,’ vital with reality of reminiscence and rhapsody, wherein Christopher North and the Ettrick Shepherd discourse so memorably. The conduct of Kean in appearing on the stage immediately after a scandalous intrigue had become public, is reprobated by ‘Tickler’ as ‘an insult to humanity.’ To which the Shepherd replies: ‘What can ye expec’ frae a playactor?’ ‘What can I expect, James?’ is the reply; ‘why, look at Terry, Young, Matthews, Charles Kemble, and your friend Vandenhoff; and then I say that you expect good players to be good men as men go, and likewise gentlemen.’
This sympathy with the profession, and vivid interest in some phase or period of the drama, is an almost universal fact in the experience of intelligent and sensitive persons. Thackeray’s picture of Pendennis enamoured of an actress in boyhood, is typical of a common episode of youth; if not in this form, it takes the shape of enthusiasm for a certain actor or class of plays, or a mania defined as the condition of being ‘stage-struck;’ while to the philosophical as well as sympathetic of these early votaries the literature of the drama is a perennial storehouse of psychological data, and the most vital connecting link between written lore and actual life—the source of the highest poetry and the most universal human truth.
In literary biography, the accounts of the manner in which the plays of Goldsmith, Sheridan, Byron, Mrs. Hemans, Joanna Baillie, Procter, Talfourd, Hunt, Lamb, and other poets, were brought on the stage,—the reciprocal good offices of actors and authors, mutually acknowledged,—the array of intellectual friends convened to grace the occasion, and the anecdotes and criticism thence resulting,—form some of the most agreeable episodes in literary biography. Farquhar, Holcraft, Mrs. Inchbald, Knowles, and others,combined the author and actor; and it was a genial and noble custom for distinguished writers to contribute prologues and epilogues;—the interchange of such kindly offices gave, as we have said, a wide and elevated social interest to the theatre, which had, in a great measure, passed away before the advent of Kean. Besides the comparative indifference of the public, he was obliged to contend against both the prejudices and the refinements of taste—the one opposing all innovation as to style, and the other repudiating the intensity and boldness of his conceptions.
The Spagnoletto style of Sandford, and the ‘cordage’ visible in old Macklin’s face, are traditional. The inimitable pathos of Miss O’Neil, the tragic beauty of Pasta, the heroic manner of Siddons, the irresistible humour of Matthews, and Liston’s comic genius, had each their distinctive character; they respectively individualized the art, and, if we range over the entire gallery of histrionic celebrities, we shall find their fame based upon as peculiar traits of excellence as that of renowned authors and painters; and their genius consisting in some quality emphatically their own—where imitation and art became subservient to, or illustrative of, an idiosyncrasy.
Impulsive genius seldom receives the credit of artistic study, and its most effective points are often ascribed to chance inspiration. This is an error of frequent occurrence in judging of actors; and it is one almost perversely indulged by the bigoted opponents of the romantic or natural school. The most effective touches, however, in Garrick, Kean, and other eminent performers, are easily traced to careful observation or a personal idiosyncrasy or association. In the very first instruction the latter received in his art, recourse was had to natural sympathy in order to perfect his imitative skill. The pathetic intonation with which, even as a boy, he exclaimed, ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ inHamlet, was derived from the manner in which he habitually spokeof an unfortunate relative who constantly excited his commiseration; he was instructed to transfer the tone awakened by real, to the expression of imaginary grief: his manner of falling on his face was derived from the figure on Abercrombie’s monument, and his fighting with a weaponless arm in Richard was borrowed from the death-scene of an officer in Spain. The play ofBertram, by Maturin, he is said to have rendered memorable by a single touching benison: all who once heard his ‘God bless the child!’ recall it with emotion; it was a favourite mode of uttering his paternal tenderness at home; hence its reality. Garrick made a study of an old crazy friend of his in order to enactLearwith truth to nature; and when Kean was playing in New York, he accompanied his physician to Bloomingdale asylum for the express purpose of obtaining hints for the same part, from the manner and expression of the insane patients. Indeed, those most intimate with Kean, in his best days, unite in the opinion that he was never surpassed for the intense and original study of his characters; he brooded over them in the quiet fields, observed life and nature, conversed with discerning men, and acutely examined books and his own consciousness, for the purpose of attaining an harmonious and artistic conception; he tried experiments in elocution before his wife, and was in the habit of rehearsing, for hours, without any auditor. So elaborate were his studies, that, having once decided on a course, he never modified it without great self-dissatisfaction; and on one occasion, when he yielded his judgment on a special point, to please Mrs. Garrick, the inharmonious effect was obvious to all.
‘What the bank is to the credit of the nation,’ said Steele, ‘the playhouse is to its politeness and good manners.’ And although this maxim is scarcely applicable now, the instinct and the sympathy by virtue of which the stage instructs and refines for ever obtain in humanity. Among recent illustrations, is the genial influence of dramatic pastimes upon theisolated and dark sojourn of ice-bound Arctic voyagers, as described by the intrepid and philosophic Kane and his predecessors. The gallery of human portraits, conserved even by the minor English drama, are among the most genuine illustrations of life and character; Sir Peter Teazle and Joseph Surface, Sir Pertinax and Tony Lumpkin, Sylvester Daggerwood and Mawworm, are emphatic types with which we could ill dispense. One of the remarkable intellectual phenomena of the age in which we live, however, is the gradual encroachment of literature upon dramatic art. The best modern characters which genius has created exist in masterpieces of fiction and poetry; in a measure they have superseded in popular favour dramatic ideals, except the highest and most endeared. Scott, Dickens, and their contemporaries or successors, have given the world a new gallery of living portraits such as of old were only to be found in the drama. Well said Wilson, in theNoctes: ‘I think the good novels that are published come in place of new dramas.’ The Italian opera has, by its affluent artistic attractions, overshadowed, and in a great measure superseded, the ‘legitimate drama.’ Even in Italy the opportunity is comparatively rare to enjoy fine acting apart from music and the ballet; yet there is no better lesson for the novice in that ‘soft bastard Latin’ that Byron loved, than to listen to one of Goldoni’s old-fashioned colloquial plays, as, clearly and with admirable emphasis, recited by such a company as that of which Internari was so long the ornament; by melodious emphasis alone commonplace maxims seemed to attain the sparkle of wit, and the mere tone of voice is fraught with infectious merriment. From Arlechino’s broad jokes to Ristori’s majestic pathos, the natural dramatic instinct and endowments of the Italians awaken every shade and subtlety of sympathetic feeling.
Philosophically examined, the stage will be found a compensatory institution, and its actual relation to societyintimate or conventional, according to the predominance of real or ideal satisfaction. Thus the free enterprise and speculative range in America make it merely recreative; the best Italian dramatist wrote when his country’s civic life was paralyzed. The sentiment, checked by caste and absolutism in Elizabeth’s day, burst forth in the old dramatists, and culminated, for all time, in Shakspeare; while the memoirs of Goëthe, Schiller, and Korner indicate how near and dear to the popular heart of their country was the art, in all its phases and forms, wherein baffled aspirations found scope. The histrionic artists of Germany, and the actresses of Paris, are or have been a vital element of the social economy, impracticable and almost inconceivable to English and Americans.Wilhelm Meisteris the legitimate romance of its country and era. ‘L’ artiste aimée du public,’ says Madame Dudevant, ‘est comme un enfant a qui l’ univers est la famille;’ while the affinity of the dramatic instinct with literary culture and capability is not only evident in the friendships between authors and actors, but in the facility with which the former become amateur performers. Montaigne says, ‘I played the chief part in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente, and Moret, that were acted in our college of Guienne.’ Dickens is a capital actor and dramatic reader of his own stories; and Washington Irving, when sojourning at Dresden, delectably enacted, in a genial family circle, Sir Charles Rackett.
One proof of the essential individuality of histrionic genius is, that in every celebrated part each renowned actor seems to have excelled in a different phrase. Garrick’s Hamlet was inimitable in the words, ‘I have that within that passeth show;’ while the most affecting touch of the elder Wallack was, ‘That undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns.’ Kean’s first soliloquy inRichard the Thirdis perhaps the best preserved traditional recitation of the English stage; and the power of contrasted intonation inthe expression of feeling, never forgotten by those who listened, was evinced in the memorable passage inOthello—