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 Journal of a London playgoer from 1851-1 
 
 3 1924 026 122 618 
 
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 9 Library 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 9240261 2261 8 
 
BOOKS And papers 
 
 BV 
 
 HENRY iMORLEY 
 
 1851—1866 
 
 11 
 
THE JOURNAL 
 
 LONDON PLAYGOER 
 
 From 185 i to 1866 
 
 HENRY MORLEY, LL.D., 
 
 EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGEj 
 LONDON 
 
 LONDON 
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Limited 
 
 Broadway, Ludgate Hill 
 GLASGOW, MANCHESTER, AND NEW YORK 
 
PROLOGUE. 
 
 The writer who first taught Englishmen to look for prin- 
 ciples worth study in the common use of speech, expecting 
 censure for choice of a topic without dignity, excused him- 
 self with this tale out of Aristotle. When Heraclitus lived, 
 a famous Greek, there were some persons, led by curiosity 
 to see him, who found him warming himself in his kitchen, 
 and paused at the threshold because of the meanness of the 
 place. But the philosopher said to them, " Enter boldly, 
 for here too there are Gods". " The Gods" in the play- 
 house are, indeed, those who receive outside its walls least 
 honour among men, and they have a present right to be its 
 Gods, I fear, not only because they are throned aloft, but 
 also because theirs is the mind that regulates the action of 
 the mimic world below. They rule, and why ? Is not the 
 educated man himself to blame when he turns with a shrug 
 from the too often humiliating list of an evening's perform- 
 ances at all the theatres, to say lightly that the stage is 
 ruined, and thereupon make merit of withdrawing all atten- 
 tion from the players ? The better the stage the better the 
 town. If the stage were what it ought to be, and what good 
 actors heartily desire to make it, it would teach the public 
 to appreciate what is most worthy also in the sister arts, 
 while its own influence would be very strong for good. The 
 great want of the stage in our day is an educated public 
 that will care for its successes, honestly inquire into its 
 failures, and make managers and actors feel that they are 
 not dependent for appreciation of their efforts on the verdict 
 
6 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 that comes of the one mind divided into fragments between 
 Mr. Dapperwit in the stalls, Lord Froth in the side-boxes, 
 and Pompey Doodle in the gallery. The playgoer who 
 would find in our London theatres a dramatic literature, in 
 which England is rich beyond all other nations, fitly housed, 
 may be indignant at much that he sees in them. But what 
 if Doodle, Dapperwit, and Froth do clap their hands at 
 pieces which are all leg and no brains ; in which the male 
 actor's highest ambition is to caper, slide, and stamp with 
 the energy of a street-boy on a cellar-flap, the actress shows 
 plenty of thigh, and the dialogue, running entirely on the 
 sound of words, hardly admits that they have any use at all 
 as signs of thought ? Whose fault is it that the applauders 
 of these dismal antics sit so frequently as umpires in the 
 judgment of dramatic literature ? 
 
 Take, for example, that notorious burlesque of Ixion, in 
 which the brother of a Viscount not long ago made his 
 debut as an actor, and was thus advertised : " Great success 
 of the Hon. Lewis Wingfield as Minerva. Other characters 
 by the loveliest women in England." That burlesque of 
 Ixiojt has no story to develop, or only as much plot as can 
 be told in a sentence. Ixion, scouted by his wife and 
 people, is invited to dinner by Jove, accepts the invitation, 
 goes, flirts with Venus, leaves her for Juno, and is doomed 
 by Jove to lead off the speaking of a tag to the audience 
 from behind a wheel. The whole success of the piece was 
 made by dressing up good-looking girls as immortals lavish 
 in display of leg, and setting them to sing and dance, or 
 rather kick wretched burlesque capers, for the recreation of 
 fast blockheads. If Miss Pelham only knew how she looks 
 in the eyes of the better half of any audience when she 
 comes forward with sandy beard and moustaches disfiguring 
 her face, and with long pink legs wriggling her body into 
 the ungainly gestures of burlesque toeing and heeling, the 
 woman in her would rise in rebellion against the miserable 
 
Prologue. 7 
 
 vulgarity of the display. As for the Hon. Lewis Wingfield, 
 who dressed his thin figure in petticoats and spoke falsetto 
 as Minerva — every man to his taste ! His great success 
 was an idiotic dance in petticoats that might stand for 
 something in competitive examination for admission into 
 the Earlswood Asylum, but as a gentleman's first bid for 
 the honours of the English stage was a distressing sight to 
 see. 
 
 They who care for the past literature of their country, 
 and look for the right maintaining of its honour by the 
 writers to whose hands it is committed in our day, must 
 blame themselves in part for the too frequent perversion of 
 the stage into an agent for the ruin of the written drama. 
 They turn back from the threshold of the playhouse, flinch- 
 ing from the present meanness of the place, and in vain the 
 actor who desires fit company would bid them enter boldly, 
 and help his desire to reverence the gods they seek. 
 
 Most of us who have been often to the play have seen 
 the occasional flashing of undeveloped power even from 
 actors who are esteemed third-rate, when they have some- 
 thing to do which plucks well at their energies. Good parts 
 would breed in a few years many good players ; and we, who 
 have in our literature the finest drama in the world, stay at 
 home and scold at the players whom we never see, or go 
 abroad only to be entertained or depressed by them with 
 prosy and ill-written melodramas, or with the bright scenery 
 of bad burlesques. 
 
 It is not quite so true now as it was but a few years ago 
 — for there has sprung up during the last three or four years 
 in several of our journals a healthy little breeze of public 
 criticism — but it is still too commonly the case, that the 
 mistaken kindness of his friends by indiscriminate praise 
 robs, the player of his best encouragement to strive to a high 
 mark, win definite appreciation for himself, and honour for 
 his calling. The best actor exercising his delightful art 
 
8 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 upon material that will bring all the subtlest powers into 
 use — although, indeed, it is his ill-fortune to work in the 
 most transient material, that cannot survive, except in 
 memory, the moment of its full expression — is not the less 
 as true an artist as the poet or the painter or the sculptor, 
 and even more worthy than these are of immediate repute, 
 since that alone is his reward. The sculptor, painter, poet, 
 misunderstood in his own time, leaves his work to do him 
 right. The actor's labour is for ever lost if it miss instant 
 recognition. The public owes, therefore, for its own sake, 
 and in common justice, generous attention to the stage. 
 There has been too much of the disdainful inattentive 
 generosity that shames an honourable profession, and drives 
 many a good actor almost to despair by confounding good 
 and bad under the same cant form of empty, supercilious 
 praise. 
 
 The London playgoer who in this book adds up the sum 
 of his experience has found much to attack, and thinks it 
 worth attacking seriously, because he has a firm faith in the 
 future of the English stage. 
 
 Some ways of writing come in and go out with the 
 fashions, but the Drama is too natural a part of us to be 
 cast off. It may be an ailing limb of the great body of our 
 Literature, but it is a limb, and a main limb. Sense of 
 dramatic action appears in the year-old infant, and enlivens 
 almost every form of child's play. The maturest acts and 
 busiest scenes of life, in proportion as a community is 
 vigorous and has high motives for its energy, quicken the 
 sense that all the world 's a stage. In the chief city of such 
 a community — in London — where every man lives in active 
 daily perception of the characters and humours and rela- 
 tions to each other of the persons about him, if there be 
 any literary life at all, there is dramatic power. 
 
 We have a rich soil that grows weeds because we disdain 
 tillage. In the field of our Drama we need never want 
 
Prologue. 9 
 
 good wheat; but we must not flinch when the ploughshare 
 is tearing through the thistledown and poppies. There will 
 be no want of good plays when they have room to come 
 up, and are not choked by the bad burlesques and French 
 translations that now occupy the ground. Nor will there 
 be any want of good actors when good acting shall be 
 honestly appreciated, instead of being thoughdessly con- 
 founded with the bad by undue exaltation of pretenders, or 
 by slight of indiscriminate applause. As it is, we have 
 among our playwrights clever writers, and upon the stage 
 good actors and actresses, to whom this book pays honour. 
 The actor has not now fair play, and will not have it till the 
 educated public honestly comes forward to take the patron- 
 age of the English drama out of the hands of Doodle, 
 Dapperwit, and Froth. 
 
 The main purpose of this volume is to show the need 
 and use of such an intervention. During the last fourteen 
 or fifteen years, while studying our literature, I have been 
 in professional attendance at the bedside of our modern 
 Drama, seeing nearly every piece produced, with or without 
 music, at the chief London theatres. At first now and then as 
 a supernumerary clinical clerk, and afterwards more-regularly, 
 I have furnished the Examiner with notes from my case-book 
 upon the succession of symptoms. A warm interest in the 
 patient never affected the determination to set down precisely 
 what I took for truth. .Always, also, I have watched the case 
 from the same point of view ; desiring to see our Drama, 
 with a clean tongue and a steady pulse, able to resume its 
 place in society as a chief form of Literature, with a stage 
 fitly interpreting its thoughts and in wide honour as one of 
 the strongest of all secular aids towards the intellectual re- 
 finement of the people. From the occasional notes thus 
 made, I have wished to collect into this volume only as 
 much as will sketch faithfully an individual impression of 
 our stage as it now is, the indications of health in it and the 
 
lo Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 remedies for its disease. Small things will be chronicled 
 sometimes, where they may aid in producing a right general 
 idea. Sometimes, also, important incidents will be passed 
 over, perhaps because the current notes of them were fur- 
 nished by another hand. But although such notes as were 
 of my own taking are but a tithe of all there might have 
 been, to reprint the whole even of these would be, as the 
 stage now is, to emulate the learned gendeman who wrote 
 six volumes on a dot. Starting, then, far enough back to 
 show that suggestions in the later pages of this little book, 
 if wrong, were at any rate not made until after more than a 
 seven years' apprenticeship to critical playgoing, I shall 
 endeavour to connect together only such comments, and 
 fragments of comment, as may stand for a fair speaking of 
 one mind upon the present condition of the English stage. Of 
 some of the best acting it has had to show during the last 
 fourteen or fifteen years, Jittle as it may be, I wish to give 
 what definite account I can, both for its own sake, and as 
 the best way of saying what qualities appear to me most 
 worthy of appreciation in an actor. To secure material 
 enough for criticism of this kind, I shall look also to sonie 
 of the best foreign actors who have played in London. 
 
 As far as lies in me, I shall wish to enforce the argument 
 of this book by a cordial appreciation of every sign of a 
 regard for the true credit of the acted drama. The players 
 who uphold most worthily the honour of their living art 
 should suffer by no grudging estimate of their desert. They 
 should be used as Shakespeare himself, through Hamlet, 
 bade us use them. We, indeed, of the present generation 
 see no perfect acting of a part demanding all the highest 
 powers of an artist for its full realisation. But we do now 
 and then find an actor by whom much of the poetical inten- 
 tion of a dramatist has been felt rightly, and not unworthily 
 expressed. Wherever that is so, it is to the best interest of 
 our drama that the actor's reward shall not be chilled with 
 
Prolos'ue. 1 1 
 
 "S 
 
 censure for his falling short of an ideal standard. The 
 actors who are dead and gone are only names to us. They 
 have carried their art with them, and can do nothing for us 
 if memory of their worth do not inspire the present with an 
 active emulation. Better for us at least that they had never 
 been, than that their names should be used as part of a 
 grim superstition for the quelling of all faith and hope in 
 efforts yet to come. The actor's future reputation depends 
 wholly upon the opinion of his day. When he is gone no 
 after time is able to supply omissions in the record, or revise 
 a careless judgment. And that judgment may be a careless 
 one which shall seem strict and true, when it notes chiefly 
 those defects of manner which may be, in some cases, more 
 obvious than the delicacies of true art expressed through an 
 imperfect instrument. Mr. Phelps, for example, plays his 
 parts with various degrees of merit, and impairs the force of 
 almost all by an undue slowness of delivery. This he ac- 
 quired, probably, at Sadler's Wells, when he was training a 
 rude audience to the enjoyment of dramatic poetry, and 
 endeavoured to assure life in slow minds to every word by 
 dwelling upon each with a slight excess of the weight in 
 utterance which, within certain limits, is required of all who 
 would give value to the reading of good poetry. In course 
 of time the deliberately measured pace of speech has 
 hardened into mannerism ; and, considering its origin, the 
 blemish is like that of a scar won in honourable war. But it 
 is still a blemish, the more conspicuous when it is seen also 
 that something of the impulse of young blood has gone, 
 here and there, out of the acting of familiar parts. But 
 such obvious and accidental qualities as these in a true actor, 
 or as the French accent of Mr. Fechter, when they have 
 been once mentioned, I prefer to put aside. It is little to 
 say that reference to them should not supersede, it ought 
 hardly to intrude upon, apt estimation of the actor's mind 
 employed upon the reading of his part. Let but the con- 
 
12 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 temporary praise earned by good acting be definitely just, 
 and lack of ifs and buts will mislead nobody; the critics 
 will be free and competent hundreds of years hence to form, 
 from the character of the praise earned, a right estimate of 
 the relative worth of actors appraised by successive critics 
 in successive generations. A vague exaggeration of applause 
 discourages true effort, and tends to defraud good actors of 
 their chance of lasting fame. 
 
 But this little book will not fulfil its purpose if it do not 
 include also a few definite censures. There are mistakes of 
 policy behind the foot-lights and misjudgments by the public 
 that lead only to the degradation of the stage, which means 
 the loss to English literature of an acted drama. I shall 
 erase from this record many a sharp censure spoken when 
 it was deserved, of which the repetition might give pain 
 without serving a useful purpose. The reader accustomed 
 to dramatic criticism in great lakes of milk and honey may 
 think mine but a bitter streamlet, water of Mara flowing 
 through a desert, with an oasis here and there, where the 
 critical mirage had suggested universal Paradise. A little 
 bitterness of flavour my small stream must needs take from 
 the soil through which it flows; but I do know that too much 
 of that quality would take away its wholesomeness. 
 
 I wish also to avoid laying undue stress on my own 
 judgment, as that of one playgoer, upon any one player or 
 playwright. There is an Itahan proverb, "Tutto il cervello 
 non fe in una testa." All the brains are not in one head. 
 Every man is bound to do whatever it may lie in him to do 
 with all his might, and be a firm centre to his own small 
 circle of experience and thought. But he is not called 
 upon to think himself the axis of the Cosmos. He knows 
 nothing, and is able to learn nothing, who has not learnt 
 that upon many points he may be wrong. Yet one is not 
 the less bound to uphold every cause that he thinks right, 
 if it fall within the proper scheme of his life's work to do 
 
Prologue. 1 3 
 
 active battle for it. I trust, therefore, that the readers of 
 this book will allow throughout for the underlying reserva- 
 tion of respect to differing opinions, even in those passages 
 which may contain firmest expression of my own belief 
 The strongest individual conviction ought not to be incon- 
 sistent with a power of applying to oneself the law that is 
 applicable to all other men. We see every day men whom 
 we think none the less wrong because they are positive ; 
 and we ought to admit, each for himself, the difference 
 between a personal conviction and an abstract truth. 
 
 A critic to whom I look up holds Mr. Phelps to be no 
 actor. A veteran man of letters, who has a clear judgment, 
 has astonished me with glowing admiration of the Juliet 
 of Miss Bateman. Intellectual men have accredited Mr. 
 Charles Kean, in his most honourable career as a manager 
 and actor, with poetic insight that I fail to recognise. It is 
 well for the world, and for every section of work done in it, 
 that opinions thus differ. Without such difference there 
 would be no scouting of rash assertions, no constant 
 shaking to and fro of the great sieve of argument, no 
 exercising of the thews of a man's intellect, no divine 
 energy at work in men, who labour well only when labour- 
 ing in concert with their fellows, and only with their help 
 can rise, by studying in the endless uses and graces of life 
 the pattern of true wisdom in the will of the Creator. 
 
 The mind that does not shut itself out from the world, 
 or hold itself the universal arbiter, will find in all that 
 breathes a spark of the Divine. God, who gave to the 
 moth his dainty wings, and to the violet a scent whose use 
 is but the creation of pleasure, gave to man, with the 
 delights of speech, faculties that weave them by the subtlest 
 of his arts into a flower-world of intellect and feeling. At 
 the playhouse-door, then, we may say to the doubting, 
 Enter boldly, for here, too, there are gods. 
 
 There are in London twenty-five theatres. Her Majesty's 
 
14 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 Theatre will hold 3,000 persons; the Pavilion, in White- 
 chapel, holds even 3,500 ; the Marylebone, 2,000; the new 
 Adelphi, 1,400; and others in proportion. Except during 
 the autumn holidays, and after all allowance for thin houses, 
 and houses occasionally closed, the London public must 
 be going in daily detachments averaging at least 15,000 
 persons to the play for recreation ; and the audiences 
 are changed every night. What is accounted in London 
 good entertainment is adopted by provincial and colonial 
 theatres. Add all their audiences to such an estimate, and 
 we shall hardly ask again. Why care for what it is that the 
 stage offers to the daily renewed army of playgoers ? Our 
 theatre is able to maintain in health a noble branch of 
 English literature, and the literature is able in return to 
 make the stage partaker of its health. We may owe to the 
 stage a leavening of the intelligence of thousands who, while 
 thoroughly amused, are imbued with some fit sense of art ; 
 or it may be, as it seems, content with all its mischievous 
 defects. Wherever the English language is spoken, here or 
 at the other side of the world, theatres there will always be, 
 with daily thousands looking to them for amusement. In 
 our provinces and colonies the form of entertainment will 
 be, as it now is, mainly determined by the example of the 
 eight or nine theatres in or near the West-end of London, 
 of which I hold the performances to be worth serious 
 attention. If they who wish well to English literature 
 disdain to stretch out a hand in friendship to the players, 
 and will make no effort at all to recover the old wholesome 
 alliance between good wit and good acting, they not only 
 assent to the ruin of what has hitherto been, in this country 
 at least, one of the chief strongholds of good wit, but their 
 neglect snaps one of the surest bonds of union between 
 true literature and the main body of the people. Plays that 
 address the eye for sensual appreciation, and reduce their 
 dialogue and action to the meanest level of an unformed 
 
Prologue. 1 5 
 
 taste, will even damage for those who are entertained by 
 them the power of appreciating thought in books. 
 
 But let this prologue include a recognition of the fact 
 that, in speaking of the theatres,, we may be liable to over- 
 estimate the real extent of our ground of complaint. In 
 comment on shortcomings of the stage, let us remember 
 that in its best and in its worst days it has been equally 
 abused. In 1597, when Shakespeare himself was a player 
 —it was the very year in which his success as a dramatist 
 enabled him to buy one of the best houses in his native 
 town — Joseph Hall, afterwards a bishop, published his 
 satires ; and therein, while he condemned the dramatist's 
 big sounding sentences and words of state, he was yet more 
 grieved that on our stage russet and royal state had equal 
 place, and ended one satire by crying — 
 
 " Shame that the Muses should be bought and sold. 
 For every peasant's brass, on.each scaffold." 
 
 Joseph Hall, -who had at least read Chaucer and Skelton, 
 reckoned himself to be the first English satirist, upon no 
 other ground than that he was the first who imitated 
 Juvenal. Good literature, in his eyes, was for the educated 
 courtier, and was discredited when it was brought home to 
 "each base clown". The glory of the drama was for him 
 its shame. That bowl of small-change taken at the play- 
 house-door gave a more sure support to men of genius 
 who earned their share from it, than Royal favour and the 
 being in high fashion among courtiers. 
 
 It was dependence upon courtly favour that destroyed in 
 the stage of the Restoration its old national character. But 
 whether the stage were good or bad— though it were 
 adorned by Shakespeare or by Garrick — the tide of com- 
 plaint flowed on, and did not owe its whole strength to the 
 protests of the Puritans. Ben Jonson, in revolt from 
 tyranny of the bad taste before the curtain, vigorously con- 
 
l6 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 demned "the loathed stage". Pope in his day decried 
 excesses of the scene in which 
 
 " Hell rises, Heaven descends, and dance on Earth 
 Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, 
 A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball. 
 Till One wide conflagration swallow all," — 
 
 and that was in the days of Gibber, Wilkes, and Booth. 
 Then Garrick came, of whom Quin said, that, " if the young 
 fellow was right, he and the rest of the players had been all 
 wrong." When Garrick was at his brightest, even Churchill 
 said, in scorn of authors who would wait on actors : 
 
 " Bow down, ye slaves ! before these idols fall ; 
 Let genius stoop to them who've none at all." 
 
 Yet Churchill was in truth the strong maintainer of the 
 actors' honour, as the keenest and best critic they have ever 
 had. The fame, in his own day, of Garrick, as of those 
 who came before and those who followed him, was blemished 
 by the unfailing custom of exalting actors who are gone. 
 Quin claimed supremacy, as of the school of Betterton and 
 Booth. 
 
 " For how should moderns, mushrooms of the day, 
 Who ne'er those masters knew, know how to play?" 
 
 Churchill opposed to the 
 
 " Greybearded veterans, who, with partial tongue. 
 Extol the times when they themselves were young ; 
 Who, having lost all relish for the stage. 
 See not their own defects, but lash the age," 
 
 emphatic recognition of the genius of Garrick. One says 
 he is too short, 
 
 " Another can't forgive the paltry arts 
 By which he makes his way to shallow hearts ; 
 Mere pieces of finesse, traps for applause. — 
 ' Avaunt, unnatural start — affected pause !'" 
 
Prologue. 1 7 
 
 But of the starts and pauses condemned by the veterans 
 ■who thus had lost their reUsh for the stage, Churchill said 
 for his own time, 
 
 " When in the features all the soul's portrayed. 
 And passions such as Garrick's'are displayed, 
 To me they seem from quickest feelings caught : 
 Each start, is nature ; and each pause, is thought." 
 
 As it was said in Garrick's day that there were no more 
 J Booths and Bettertons, so in our day it may be said that 
 
 there are no more Kembles, no more Listens and Farrens, 
 no more of any of the actors who have become traditions of 
 perfection since they were no more. This strain of lamenta- 
 tion I have no wish to take up. In John Kemble, the last 
 of the great bygone actors, even the highest eulogy of his 
 acting in such a part as Coriolanus would be blended, while 
 he was. yet on the stage, with the observation that he was 
 inapt for comedy ; that his face, capable of depicting power- 
 ful emotion, could not represent by play of feature delicacies 
 of expression, so that his acting might be as well appreciated 
 from the gallery as from the front row of the pit ; that his 
 tone of voice was too sepulchral ; that his study led to the 
 substituting of an ostentatious style of acting for a natural 
 one. A glance at bygone censure should suffice to warn us 
 against taking a hopeless view of our own matters of com- 
 plaint. 
 
 In one respect considerable advance has been made 
 ' during the last few years. The growth of civilisation has 
 brought even into the homes of the poor comforts unknown 
 to the rich in the days of Elizabeth. The million, who then 
 could only satisfy their mental appetite by taking good 
 thought through their ears from stage or pulpit, may now sit 
 at ease by their own fireside and read what they will. In 
 perfect rest of body they may feast their fancies upon tales 
 rich in dramatic incident and speech of men — dramas, in 
 fact, wherein well-written description takes the place of 
 
 2 
 
1 8 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 scenery, and the author's own way of analysis supplants the 
 actor's power of interpreting the humours and the passions 
 of the scene. The best of these novels are more original in 
 their construction, paint character with more skill, and have 
 a better dialogue than may be found in any of the new 
 plays acted on the stage. The play, if, after its kind, as 
 good as the novel and well acted, gives a greater pleasure. 
 But is it a pleasure so much greater as to tempt people 
 away from their home comforts after the labours of the day, 
 induce them to submit to the trouble of a journey to and 
 from the theatre, and sit there during four, or sometimes 
 five hours, bound to one allotted seat ? The changes to 
 which this question points have almost all been recognised 
 during the last fifteen years, and for even so much progress 
 we have reason to be thankful. One theatre after another 
 has lost its old aspect of discomfort before the curtain ; and 
 petty exactions that interfere with perfect rest of mind are 
 gradually disappearing, though they are not yet altogether 
 gone. The payment for a seat should be made to secure, 
 within the theatre, every service necessary to the right 
 enjoyment of it. Not only the seats but the approaches to 
 them should be easy. Seats in the pit should be cushioned, 
 backed, and not overcrowded ; in the boxes and stalls, 
 always comfortable chairs. Desire to reap quickly the fruit 
 ■of every success still tempts nearly all managers to crowd 
 their seats together, and grudge lines of open space for 
 .novement to and fro. They crowd, if they can, with extra 
 chairs, or sell as " standing-room" even the few narrow path- 
 ways which they are compelled unwillingly to leave. In 
 this they are not just to their public, and I believe also that 
 they are less kind to themselves than the state of their 
 treasury on any single night might lead them to suppose. 
 First catch your customer, then truss him, and stew him four 
 hours in a hot closet, is a recipe that involves some risk of 
 at least not catching your rational customer a second time. 
 
Prologue. 19 
 
 Having received company pleasantly, and suppressed all 
 levies of blackmail within the theatre ; having also placed 
 every one at ease on seats which rest the body, and are so 
 arranged that even a lady may without much trouble relieve 
 the weariness of long fixture in one position by a little 
 movement from her chair- during some interval between the 
 acts; having recognised thoroughly all natural requirements 
 of his audience, even down to the fact that footstools are a 
 necessary compensation for the difference of height in male 
 and female; having done all that can be done to secure 
 ventilation and to keep out draughts ; and having made it a 
 fixed rule never, except on occasion of some incident that 
 will not be repeated, to admit into the house more persons 
 than it will comfortably hold; what next is the model 
 manager to do ? 
 
 He is next, I think, to have faith in his patrons, not to 
 look down on them and treat them as if he fancied that a 
 witless man about town could be taken for their standard of 
 capacity. There is a large half-intelligent population now 
 in London that by bold puffing can be got into a theatre. 
 It numbers golden lads and lasses as well as chimney-sweeps. 
 The population is, indeed, so large that it takes many nights 
 to pass it through a theatre, each night's theatre-full being as 
 a bucket-full dipped out of a big stagnant pond. Any 
 manager may, if he will, set his face against intelligent 
 opinion, and, falling back upon the half-intelligent, go the 
 right way to that pond, bale patiently, and send nearly the 
 whole of it through his house. But its credit will not be 
 the cleaner for that process, though it may secure the specu- 
 lator against loss by misplaced costliness of scenery, and 
 may enable him to set against the condemnation of his 
 piece by every educated man the advertisement that 
 Duchesses and Viscounts have been to see it, and that it 
 is being acted for its milHonth night. That is not being a 
 model manager. 
 
 B 2 
 
20 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 But if this mythical being ought not to accept too low a 
 standard of the public taste, and should remember that a 
 good piece will answer as well as a bad one for drawing the 
 untaught crowd, who will freely follow a good lead, it does 
 not therefore follow that he should see a standard of the 
 public taste in any section of those critical highflyers who 
 affect the sort of fastidiousness over which Ben Jonson 
 justly broke the seven vials of his wrath — 
 " Let their fastidious, vain 
 Commission of the brain 
 Run on and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn ; 
 They were not made for thee, less thou for them.'' 
 
 In the theatre let our escape be complete from every sort of 
 pedantry. Our model manager should take for standard of 
 the people he would please an honest Englishman of the 
 educated middle-class, akin to all that is human, trained 
 not only in school and college, but in daily active stir of 
 life, to interest in all true thinking and true feeling, to 
 habitual notice of varieties of character, and to a habit of 
 noting its depths in real life. He may take its sound- 
 ings more or less inaccurately, but at any rate he has so 
 constantly endeavoured to map out the depths and shoals 
 of character in definite cases that he is bred to a keen 
 relish of those suggestions of yet subtler exploration which 
 should be among the highest charms of a good drama. Let 
 the model manager give to his public of every kind of true 
 dramatic entertainment that which is most thorough. The 
 practical jokes of the short farce, devised to satisfy a homely 
 relish of that kind of fun, are in their place as legitimate 
 as the soliloquies of Hamlet. Let us still have our melo- 
 dramas blending jest with earnest, and let no manager per- 
 mit the tragic Muse to be robbed of her dagger and bowl. 
 Let our playwrights still be free to take any good story which 
 they can put into a good dramatic form, and adapt modern 
 French plays if they can do no better — only I am sure they 
 
Prologue. 2 1 
 
 might do better. But, whatever they do, let it be something 
 real, not like burlesque, vacuity of thought giving itself all 
 the airs of wit, and most dependent for success on a dis- 
 play of women's legs and servile copies of the humour of 
 the music-halls. Let the playgoer, when he has settled 
 himself down in his easy seat, have reason to respect his 
 entertainers. He cannot do that if he has been brought 
 into his place within the theatre by bills and advertisements 
 that trumpeted as real what he finds to be either a forced 
 success or no success at all. He cannot do so if he finds 
 that the " original play" he has come out to see, the original 
 play with an English writer's name placed in unmodified 
 connection with it, is the French play that he saw when he 
 was last in Paris. It does not lessen the general, though it 
 will remove particular, occasion for complaint, if this form 
 of untruth has been carried so far that, when a dramatist 
 is honestly original, nine playgoers out of ten suppose that 
 he, too, bought the chief part of his wit and invention for 
 a shilling in the Burlington Arcade. Whenever a French 
 piece has been adapted for use in an English theatre, there 
 should be honest, definite acknowledgment — the name of 
 the French piece and its author being given in the bills, 
 with some indication of the greater or less degree of 
 manipulation to which it has been subjected; one, say, 
 "translated", another "adapted", another "freely altered", 
 from the Pomme Pourrie of MM. P^ch^ and Bonbon. 
 
 The poor thought and unreal sentiment of these transla- 
 tions from French plays arise from the fact that they are 
 based not even on a true study of French life, but only upon 
 a shrewd perception of the French varieties of stage-effect 
 and of stage-character. In the best days of our drama plays 
 were founded on perception of essentials of character ac- 
 quired from a direct study of life itself, and for this reason 
 the elements of an unfading interest are to be found in very 
 many of our pieces. With less pains than are spent by 
 
22 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 a clever English adapter on the flashy stage-effects of a 
 French drama of the present day, such plays of ours could 
 have the rust rubbed off, the points of discord with existing 
 ways of thought removed, and they might thus restore to us 
 the old enjoyment of sound wit or poetry spent on the paint- 
 ing of men's humours and passions. John Kemble, at the 
 beginning of our century, revised many a good English 
 play for modern acting : one of Beaumont and Fletcher's, 
 one of Massinger's, one of Wycherley's, two of Congreve's, 
 even a play of Mrs. Aphra Behn's, besides one of Rowe's, 
 two of Nat. Lee's, Young's Revenge, and plays by Holcroft, 
 Moore, and Murphy, were among his adaptations. They 
 were not all worth adapting ; and John Kemble's literary 
 skill was far beneath that of our best dramatic authors, who 
 are also skilled adapters of inferior material. I might cite 
 several, but for example dare venture to name Mr. Tom 
 Taylor and Mr. Oxenford as writers of our time who join a 
 true appreciation of good literature to a remarkable stage- 
 tact and some real dramatic genius. It might be said that 
 men with good reputations to lose would flinch justly from 
 the charge of a rash meddling with the works of any 
 standard English writer. But the works of our best 
 dramatists will remain untouched in all their editions, and 
 will certainly not be the less read for a free quarrying 
 among their treasures by those who can make the good old 
 names at home as they should be upon English playbills, 
 and their best passages of jest or earnest familiar again 
 in the mouths of our good actors. And, in fact, skilful 
 adapters would have less trouble in remodelling for present 
 use the best of our old English plays than they now fre- 
 quently take with modern French ones. In those old plays 
 of ours there is sometimes a conventional indelicacy which 
 comes only of honest recognition of the whole nature of 
 man, who has a body as well as a soul. In too many of 
 the new French plays adapted for us ther§ is a conventional 
 
Prologue. 23 
 
 delicacy to content the ear where the understanding can 
 find only rottenness to bite into. It would be easier as well 
 as wholesomer to pare the sound old English apple than to 
 scoop and cook and sugar those rotten French windfalls to 
 the English taste. 
 
 Our range of choice, too, in this matter is wider than the 
 sheepwalk of the latest fashions. We dare go back even to 
 Marlowe, whose Edward the Second needs but few touches 
 to make it a good acting play. Now that Faust is in the 
 ascendant, it might even be said that freedom of omission 
 in the comic scenes, with elsewhere two or three skilful 
 modifications, would give to our stage in Marlowe's Faustus 
 a grand part for a good actor. In Marlowe's _/«» of Malta, 
 that dark medieval painting of a man of a detested race, 
 there may be too much of nightmare ; but an English 
 audience still likes a play with plenty of good downright 
 villainy, and would be strongly impressed, even in our day, 
 by such figures as those of Barabas and Ithamore, set in . a 
 play without any fine shades of character-painting, yet full 
 of a grand strength of invention and of sounding lines that 
 are not sound alone. It is something, too, that the play is 
 capable of rich picturesque decoration, and would give to 
 the eye Spanish knights, magnificent Turks, slaves, monks, 
 nuns, Jews. It would admit, too, of effective acting in 
 some boldly-coloured parts; while a few easy changes in the 
 scenes with Bellamira, and omission from the other dialogue 
 of some half-dozen jests, would be all the alteration abso- 
 lutely necessary. In fact, I am speaking of plays that no 
 one hopes ever to see acted again in England, to show 
 how, even in cases apparently hopeless, when one comes to 
 look narrowly at the construction of one of these old masses 
 of dramatic energy, the work of adaptation to the modern 
 stage appears much easier than vague recollection of their 
 character might lead one to suppose. Of course, in the case 
 of a play like the/ew of Malta, questions of obsolete stage- 
 
24 Journal of a London Playgoer. 
 
 effect would here and there arise. In this play, for 
 example, Friar Barnardine might have to be strangled off the 
 stage, and the setting up of his dead body to be struck 
 down by Friar Jacomo could hardly be in the presence of 
 the people. But if we supposed it to be set up on the 
 other side of a central open door at the back of the stage, 
 not only might the whole incident remain, but every word 
 of the text with it. Friar Jacomo, standing in the doorway, 
 might even be seen to strike at the brother whom he 
 suspects of being there to intercept his going to the Jew. 
 When Barabas in the last scene dies in his own trap, it 
 would be but a light task for the scene-painter to find some 
 effective substitute for the hot caldron, in which he dies 
 cursing the Christians. As for the false-floor business, that 
 would be in precise accordance with the latest humour for 
 " sensation" plunges ; while the advantage on the side of 
 the old play would be that, from first to last, with incidents 
 even more highly spiced, there is the poet's energy of 
 thought supplanting the bald slipshod English of a modern 
 melodrama. Nay, taking a yet more extreme case, we may 
 go back even to the first English comedy, and find in 
 Ralph Roister Doister a prototype of Lord Dundreary. Were 
 that play skilfully condensed into three acts, and repre- 
 sented with all due vivacity by players who could make the 
 rhyme run merrily, we might have even Udall again setting 
 the house in a roar ; Mr. Sothern might be the vainglorious 
 suitor laying siege to the heart of Mistress Christian 
 Custance ; Mr. Compton might be the dry humourist 
 Matthew Merrygreek, who fools him and sponges upon 
 him. And there would be no want, at the same theatre, of 
 a comely Mistress Custance governing her garrison of 
 maids, and a drily sedate Gavin Goodluck to come over 
 the sea to her at pairing time, when the play ends. 
 
 I repeat that I am pointing here to some of those oldest 
 of our dramas which appear to be least promising, not for 
 
Prologue. 25 
 
 the sake of recommending these particular works for revival, 
 but for the sake of suggesting that, if even among those 
 beginnings of our great dramatic literature there is good 
 actable matter, how much more is to be said of the same 
 literature in its strength ! 
 
 Has Massinger written nothing but A New Way to Pay 
 Old Debts 1 Has Ben Jonson written only one play, Every 
 Man in his Humour 1 in which, by the way, Shakespeare 
 acted. Beaumont and Fletcher, too, who might give a good 
 theatre good matter to act for a dozen years together, why 
 are they to be shelved that we may poison our English 
 Thalia with a diet of translations of the works of MM. Pechd 
 and Bonbon ? Farquhar, Wycherley,andCongreve are cleaner 
 than the playwrights of modern France, and in comparison of 
 wit are as true salt to gravel. It is as easy to recast them to 
 the modern taste as to clean out French impurities from the 
 French dramas, and how much bright dramatic dialogue 
 should we recover to its proper use ! Good English thought 
 revived upon our stage would make itself at home again 
 among the English people. 
 
 Let all who can make a voice heard join in asking for it, 
 and the change may come. Whenever it does come we may 
 be sure that the blockheads of the town, whose taste is 
 catered for too much, will follow the new lead. They are 
 born to follow a bellwether. Let such a change come, and 
 actors with parts worth their best study will develop their 
 best skill, as they now simply cannot ; while audiences, trained 
 to some appreciation of the best dramatic writing, may re- 
 cover to the stage the service of true poets, and regain for 
 our dramatic literature its old place among the sunny pasture- 
 grounds of English wit. 
 
 Here ends the prologue, and the curtain rises on the 
 players. 
 
 May 1866. 
 
THE JOURNAL 
 
 OF 
 
 A LONDON PLAYGOER. 
 
 1851. August 30. — The discriminating Mr. Barnum has 
 had reason to think that the Enghsh taste turns very much 
 upon small things ; and he now challenges for two miniature 
 actors the success that attended his Tom Thumb. The 
 "Bateman children" are little girls respectively of eight and 
 six, who are both pretty and clever, but whose appearance 
 in an act of Richard the Third {zX the St. James's Theatre) 
 is a nuisance by no means proportioned to the size of its 
 perpetrators. No doubt there is talent shown in it; and 
 it is curious to hear such small imps of the nursery speak 
 so fluently, and, strutting about easily, repeat a well-taught 
 lesson with such wonderful aptitude. But this is the feehng 
 of a moment, and nothing is left but the wearisome 
 absurdity of such big words in such little mouths. 
 
 The comic French piece, The Young Couple (written for 
 the child Leontine Fay by M. Scribe), is another matter; 
 and here the little girls are thoroughly amusing. They play 
 a couple of children of the old French noblesse, married by 
 order of the Court, who, without knowing what love is, are 
 supposed to imitate in a pretty piquant childish way such of 
 its symptoms as they have had an opportunity of watching 
 in the case of their two grown-up cousins. The least of the 
 children, who had strutted and stamped in Richard, plays 
 the boy ; and to see her, in a bag-wig and knee-breeches, 
 and with a better sense of broad humour than she had 
 
28 Journal of 'a London Playgoer. [1851-2. 
 
 shown of tragedy, represent a boy attempting little freedoms 
 of the meaning of which he has not the remotest notion, 
 which on the other hand are accepted or flirted off with 
 equally innocent airs of determined coquetry by his small 
 shrew of a mistress, is no doubt irresistibly comical. Though 
 the younger actor has perhaps the more whimsical turn for 
 comic and farcical display, the elder seems to be the better 
 actress of the two. Her first scene (with the grown-up 
 cousin) showed not a few of the qualities of impulsive and 
 natural acting— even to the broad provinciaHsms of dialect 
 which had been scrupulously suppressed in the absurd 
 declamation of Richmond. 
 
 The audience enjoy the entertainment as far as it goes, 
 but it must be confessed that this is not very far ; and how 
 many pieces are there like this of M. Scribe's which have 
 been actually written for children ? It is quite certain that 
 repeated exhibitions such as that of the Richard tlie Third 
 ought to be too much for public patience. 
 
 1852. Jafiuary 17. — The readers of Mr. Dickens's 
 pleasant book about Italy can hardly have forgotten his 
 account of that famous company of Milanese puppets which 
 he saw at Genoa engaged in the representation of Napoleon 
 at St. Hele7ia. One of his remarks upon a member of the 
 company was particularly impressive. He is describing, as 
 a triumph of art, a heavy father with grey hair, whom he 
 saw sitting down on the regular conventional stage-bank 
 blessing his daughter in the regular conventional way, and 
 he observes that no one " would suppose it possible that 
 anything short of a real man could be so tedious". I have 
 sometimes wished to see that heavy father. 
 
 The secret of the pleasure derived from his exhibition of 
 tediousness was no doubt the absence of what the philo- 
 sopher calls sham. It was a stick passing for what it was ; 
 and not pretending to be anything else. Puppets have at 
 various times, therefore, and in various countries, had a 
 
The Bateman Children. — Marionettes. 29 
 
 larger following than one might have thought fairly due to the 
 merits of wooden actors in the abstract. Wooden actors in 
 the concrete (flesh and blood) have been so much worse. 
 The puppets were as popular in Paris when Le Sage wrote 
 for them, as in London when Addison and Steele 'wrote 
 about them ; and who has forgotten those London puppets 
 of a later date whom Burke and Goldsmith went to see at 
 Panton Street in the Haymarket, on that memorable night 
 when Goldsmith broke his shin after supper by attempting 
 to exhibit to his friends how much better he could jump 
 over a stick than the wooden actors ? 
 
 Puppets, then, have a certain classical association with us, 
 though living rivals in the histrionic art have of late years so 
 dispossessed them that even their English name has departed. 
 We must now call them Marionetti, and we are invited to 
 a Royal Marionette Theatre. This is all very good. The 
 only doubt is whether the selection for the opening per- 
 formance of a subject in itself burlesque, suchj.s Bombastes 
 Furioso, was quite judicious. The triumph of the whimsical 
 one would suppose to consist in a contrast of intense gravity 
 in the subject with helpless absurdity in the actor. Thus 
 when Mr. Dickens describes to us (in the Sir Hudson Lowe 
 drama) Buonaparte's boots so wonderfully beyond his con- 
 trol as to do marvellous things of their own accord — double 
 themselves up, get under tables, dangle in the air, and at 
 times even skate away with him out of all human knowledge 
 one source of the exquisite mirth inspired by these mis- 
 chances must surely have been that " settled melancholy'' 
 which he at the same time tells us was depicted in the face 
 of Napoleon. A burlesque subject does not admit of this. 
 Of course the " aspiring tendency" of the actors did not 
 escape our great observer in Genoa. ^Vhen Napoleon was 
 sick, he tells us, Doctor Antommarchi seemed to be hover- 
 ing about the couch like a vulture, and giving medical 
 opinions in the air. 
 
30 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 February 7. — There is this great advantage which dis- 
 poses one to notice the efforts of the artists at the Royal 
 Marionette Theatre, that they are not thin-skinned. We 
 may praise puppet A without falling into mortal dislike with 
 puppet B, and need not fear to censure quite as freely as 
 we praise. They don't even know their own merits. Yet 
 the ingenious little actors of the Adelaide Street Theatre 
 perform with surprising accuracy the quaint romance of 
 The Bottle Imp, and afterwards, with consummate skill, go 
 through the principal movements of the old Italian harle- 
 quinade. 
 
 February 14. — There is not a play of Shakespeare's which 
 more admits or justifies a magnificent arrangement of scene 
 than the chronicle-play of King John. Its worthy presenta- 
 tion in an English theatre was one of the triumphs of Mr. 
 Macready's direction of Drury Lane ten years ago, and 
 Mr. Charles Kean now follows that example in his revival 
 of the play at the Princess's with a devotion of care and 
 study as well as a lavish expenditure of scenic resource 
 which is entitled to the highest praise. 
 
 So mounted, we see in this play — what the great Marl- 
 borough saw nowhere else so satisfactorily — a solid frag- 
 ment of our English history. AVe see revived the rude 
 chivalric grandeur of the Middle Age, the woes and wars of 
 a half-barbarous time, in all its reckless splendour, selfish 
 cruelty, and gloomy suffering. In the latter features of the 
 pipture the play of John stands apart among Shakespeare's 
 regal chronicles. The heart heaves and throbs beneath its 
 coat of mail. It has a state greater than the state of kings, 
 and a throne on which sits a higher sovereign. None of 
 the characters of the tragedy are cast in an unyielding 
 mould. John shrinks appalled and self-abased from the 
 guilt he has designed, the heated iron falls from the hand of 
 Hubert, and even Falconbridge becomes amazed, and fear- 
 ful he should lose his way among the thorns and dangers of 
 
Charles Kean.—Emil Devrient. 31 
 
 this world. Mad world, mad kings, mad composition — yet, 
 with good and evil blended in all, the many-toned wisdom 
 of humanity vibrates through such history as this. 
 
 Mr. Kean plays John with an earnest resolve to make 
 apparent to the audience his mean and vacillating nature, 
 his allegiance to " that ■ smooth-faced gentleman, tickling 
 Commodity, Commodity, the Bias of the World", and the 
 absence of dignity in his suffering. Mrs. Kean throws all 
 her energy, and much true emotion, into Constance; and 
 in Falconbridge Mr. Wigan makes a more sensible advance 
 than we have yet had to record into the higher region of 
 chivalric comedy. There is a clever child, too, in Arthur, 
 a Miss Terry, and the minor parts are effectively presented. 
 
 June 5. — While a great French actress is filling the St. 
 James's Theatre from floor to roof with audiences eager to 
 see a good play for the sake of genius shown in the acting of 
 it, Mi;. Mitchell brings to the same theatre a German com- 
 pany to play for twelve nights on alternate evenings. The 
 Germans also must win favour by good acting, or not at 
 all, and they have Herr Emil Devrient for chief of their 
 company. 
 
 The play chosen for the opening night was Gothe's tragedy 
 oi Egmont, begun at the time when his mind expressed itself 
 through Werther and Gotz von Berlichingen, occasionally 
 continued, and finished in its first shape more than seven years 
 after it was begun ; but after another couple of years tho- 
 roughly revised and recast as a whole work of art, when Gothe 
 was in Italy in 1787. How different this sort of work from 
 the off-hand " adapting" of French plays that showed in their 
 first inventors only a tact in recombining certain stage-effects 
 and using surface-knowledge of society, while they give no 
 scope to the actor for the exercise of all his powers, and reduce 
 the practice of a noble art to a knack that can be acquired as 
 readily by the quick-witted trifler as by the artist who has 
 genius and will to work ! 
 
32 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 Egmont would perhaps scarcely pass muster as a tragedy 
 in England, where scenes are not accounted tragic if they do 
 not move the sensitive to tears. Nor does it fulfil a chief 
 condition of good tragedy : there is too little dramatic 
 action. The plot of the play is very simple. It is laid at 
 Brussels, in the time when the Netherlands, tainted with 
 heresy, were beginning to give trouble to their rulers at the 
 Court of Spain. Egmont, Prince of Gaure, a brave, free- 
 hearted chief of Netherlandish blood, is idolised by the 
 people, and, together with WiUjam of Orange and some 
 other chiefs, suspected by the Court. Philip the Second 
 finally resolves to send his bloodthirsty general, the Duke of 
 Alva, with an army into Brussels, whither the duke accord- 
 ingly betakes himself, and where, according to a preconcerted 
 plan, having superseded the regency of Margaret of Parma, 
 he invites Egmont and Orange to the palace with a 
 treacherous intent. Orange, with accustomed shrewdness, 
 had foreseen the plot against them, and warned Egmont 
 to withdraw himself in time. Egmont, frank and gener- 
 ous, refuses to mistrust his king, and will not think precau- 
 tion necessary. He therefore, of course, visits his enemy 
 when summoned, Orange prudently remaining absent. 
 Egmont, invited by Duke Alva to give counsel for the 
 pacification of the Netherlands, talks of the rights of the 
 people and the duty of respecting them. Meanwhile troops 
 are encircling the palace, and when he has spoken his 
 mind Egmont is carried to a dungeon, whence he goes out 
 the next day to be beheaded. But before his execution he 
 learns in a vision that his death will lead to the liberation of 
 the Netherlands. 
 
 With these public events is interwoven an amour between 
 Egmont and Cliirchen, a simple cottage girl, who dotes 
 upon the hero, falls into simple admiration over his embroi- 
 dery, raves in the street when he is imprisoned, and takes 
 poison on the morning of his death, being supported through 
 
Geinnan Plays: " Egmont" 33 
 
 the latter scenes by a discarded lover of her own station in 
 life. Clarchen is another version of the same ideal so 
 familiar to all in the Margaret of Faust. 
 
 The merit of the play itself — which was written in prose — 
 lies in its masterly depiction of character, in its terse energetic 
 writing, and in the wonderful skill with, which it reproduces 
 the results of a shrewd study of human society. The 
 ignorant and unstable multitude is represented in a series of 
 scenes which contain some of the best writing in the drama. 
 The groups in which the shopkeeper, the tailor, the carpen- 
 ter, andsoapboilerare prominent, form town-scenes elaborated 
 with the utmost care, and through the person of Vansen, a 
 decayed, dissipated clerk, and public agitator, Gothe repre- 
 sents the way in which men who have nothing to lose endea- 
 vour to stir up a tumult out of which there may be some- 
 thing to gain. The personation of this public agitator by 
 Herr Birnstill was full of humour. The decayed, dissipated, 
 jaunty air, the gold ring, probably mosaic, still upon the 
 finger, and the affectation of a cane — the glibness of 
 speech, the infinite variety and energy of action, which gave 
 to the whole man a sense of slipperiness, the absCTice of all 
 sensibility to shame, were harmonised into a bright and clear 
 dramatic study. The voiceless men in the crowd, each 
 listening to the orations of Vansen with feelings especially 
 his own, displayed an amount of intelligence in the perform- 
 ance of inferior parts which we are not used to see in English 
 theatres. Herr Denk, as Jetter the Tailor, entered with 
 very great unction into the humour of his part, and would 
 have shone as an especial star, had he not been surrounded 
 by a group of minor actors scarcely less efficient. One of 
 the especial facts to be noted in connection with this German 
 company is the efficiency of all its members, and the com- 
 plete and even representation which they consequently give 
 of the good play submitted to their treatment. 
 
 Complete, as far as they go ; but Egmonf, being a long 
 2 c 
 
34 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 drama, was shortened by omission of two characters. So 
 far as mere plot is Concerned, a quarter of the play suffices 
 to narrate it; but as a poem, though the play gains some- 
 thing of the required predominance of thought in action 
 which is the soul of a good drama, the original design is spoilt 
 by every curtailment. 
 
 A ferocious make-up according to approved tradition, the 
 impatient miUtary walk while giving orders, and all other 
 fitting accessories duly supplied, with a very good delivery of 
 all he had to say, made Herr Kiihn's Alva an extremely 
 satisfactory performance. The sordid, querulous old woman, 
 Clarchen's mother, was very well represented by Frau 
 Froitzheim. Clarchen herself seemed to be a character 
 in which Frau Stolte was not able to do perfect justice to her 
 powers. It was acted very well, and there was much pathos 
 in the street scene where Clarchen, after the arrest of 
 Egmont, is wildly endeavouring to excite the good tailor 
 and shopkeeper and carpenter to make some effort for the 
 rescue of their friend. Frau Stolte claimed a portion of the 
 honours of the night, but it seemed likely that she would 
 appear to much greater advantage in future characters. 
 
 The acting of Herr Emil Devrient as Egmont was the 
 great triumph of the evening, and established thoroughly in 
 London his title to the honours accorded to him on the 
 German stage. In his conception of the character of 
 Egmont there was more dignity and somewhat more reserve 
 than was designed by Gothe in his sketch of the free- 
 hearted Prince. This, doubtless, was meant to meet half- 
 way the objection of Schiller, that in Gothe's Egmont we 
 are told of the heroism but shown the weakness. As far 
 as the actor could, he sought to modify that character of 
 the dramatic poem which has been thought to impair its 
 interest as an acted play. Herr Devrient has, it should be 
 said, a handsome figure, which aids him in the personation 
 of a youthful hero. As Egmont he first appears upon 
 
German Plays: "Kabale und LiebeP 35 
 
 the stage during a tumult which his popularity enables him 
 to still, and in this very brief scene wholly assumed the 
 dignity of bearing which, as I have said, clashed with my 
 previous conceptions. His next scenes with his secretary 
 and with William of Orange modified and refined that 
 first impression. The love-scenes in EgJhont are exquisite 
 specimens of Gothe's manner of conceiving such affairs. 
 The scene between Alva and Egmont, at the end of 
 which Egmont is to be betrayed, contains fine opportuni- 
 ties for noble acting, of which Herr Devrient made ample 
 use. 
 
 June 12. — S)ch\[\er's Xabak und Liebe {Intngae and Love) 
 is one of his first three plays, and shares with The Robbers 
 a good deal of admiration for "Titanic" qualities. It was 
 written in the full ferment of youth, and the difference of 
 taste is vast between the mind of Schiller when it was ripen- 
 ing and the same mind when it was ripe. In Southey, who 
 resembled Schiller in the one respect that in his mature life 
 he was among the most pure-minded of poets, there was a 
 long literary interval between Wat Tyler and Roderick. In 
 Schiller there is an equal interval between such works as 
 The Robbers or Kabale und Liebe, and such works as Don 
 Karlos or Wallenstein. One must not be suspected, how- 
 ever, of a comparison between Wat Tyler and Schiller's 
 early plays. In this Kabale und Liebe, written wh'le smart- 
 ing under the sting of persecution, the young poet 
 declaimed in a way that would have made his work im- 
 mortal were it only as a sample of rude German energy. 
 
 Very German, in the worst as well as best sense of the 
 word ; abounding in absurdity and outrages on good taste, 
 from which nobody in later life removed himself more 
 utterly than Schiller — nevertheless, it is a play to go and 
 s6e. Except the coolness of some men who plot outrageous " 
 villainy (the heads of the " Intrigue"), there is not a scene 
 in the play that does not glow with red-hot passion. Every- 
 
 c 2 
 
36 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 body in every moment of every scene is in a most 
 enormously excited state of mind ; and here, in what 
 follows, is the gist of the domestic tale that is developed. 
 
 A terrible duke, in any grand duchy you please, robs, 
 burns, and plunders subjects, as a matter of course. He 
 does not appear tipon the scene. His prime minister, 
 President Von Walter, is the most heartless villain who 
 ever existed, with the single exception of his secretary, 
 Wurm. Wurm is not to be compared with men, he is a 
 devil. President Von Walter got his presidency by 
 murdering (if not something worse than murdering) his 
 predecessor, and by any number you like to suppose of 
 other crimes. Wurm (worm) helped him ; Kalb (calf), the 
 baron, had a hand in it ; the virtuous son knows all about 
 it. The very virtuous son, Ferdinand, is the handsomest, 
 the most generous, the most high-minded of creatures, with 
 the pardonable failing, if it be a failing, that he is furiously 
 hot, horribly enthusiastic. Love never equalled his devo- 
 tion to Louisa, the simple, artless, inexpressibly sentimental 
 and devoted daughter of that incarnation of rude virtue, 
 Miller the musician, and the good soul his wife. 
 
 Wurm wants Louisa, and Louisa, in white muslin, loves 
 the Major, and the good talkative soul of a wife causes 
 Wurm to know that the Major, Ferdinand, loves Louisa. 
 That furnishes the Love. AVurm goes to the Major's father, 
 and the Secretary and the President make the Intrigue. 
 The President tells his son to marry the Duke's mistress, 
 Lady Milford, and stirs up a hurricane of virtue. The son 
 goes to Lady Milford to abuse her, and finds that she is a 
 high British dame of the house of Howard, Joanna of 
 Norfolk, who, after the unhappy decapitation of her father, 
 was walking about, aged fourteen, in the streets of Holland, 
 when she met the wicked Grand Duke, who offered her 
 love, and she became his mistress, and her whole care has 
 been to keep him out of wickedness, and she loves 
 
German Plays : "Kabale und Liebe" 2i7 
 
 Ferdinand and means to marry him. Ferdinand runs 
 gasping to Louisa. To them comes his father, with Wurm, 
 to imprison or hang Miller and his wife, and put Louisa in 
 the pillory. The son foams at the father, the father sneers 
 at the son. Everybody is gunpowder, and they are all 
 going off together. The whole scene, though utterly absurd, 
 is magnificent in its effect, for the wild power with which it 
 is worked up. Finally the son, who has tried all means to 
 move his obdurate father in vain, closes the dispute by 
 coming to his ear and telling him in a voice agitated by the 
 intensest imaginable passion, that he may proceed, but that 
 he is going out to tell the world — how a president's place is 
 sometimes to be gained. 
 
 The manner in which Herr Emil Devrient uttered this 
 last threat, with which an act is closed, raised the whole 
 theatre to instantaneous enthusiasm. The curtain fell 
 before a greater tumult of applause than is often to be 
 heard within the walls of the St. James's Theatre. Herr 
 Devrient appeared, retired, and was immediately summoned 
 by fresh plaudits to appear again. Herr Devrient embodies 
 the ideal Ferdinand, full of passion in his tones and 
 gestures. Fraulein Schafer, young and pretty enough to 
 look like Schiller's own Louisa, acts with quiet intelligence, 
 and supplies all the sentiment and suffering required in an 
 extremely arduous part, which ends between the unhappy 
 lovers with a poisoning. Old Miller the musician, with his 
 warm heart and boiling temper, was excellently represented 
 by Herr Birnstill, the same who so well personated Vansen 
 in the Egmont. Herr Kiihn, late Duke of Alva, performed 
 Wurm with the care of an accomplished artist. His by-play 
 was all weighed with nicety, and was made to express so 
 perfectly the cold black - coated and white - neckclothed 
 Mephistopheles, that one looks forward with great 
 curiosity to his appearance as the Mephistopheles of 
 Gothe's Faust. A Herr Schrader, as the Baron von Kalb, 
 
38 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 represented the exquisite of a small German court with as 
 much obvious care and study as was to be noted in the 
 well-considered movements of Herr Kiihn ; but the effect 
 of the study was attained in a performance of the richest 
 comedy, scarcely a word or gesture from the Baron failing 
 to excite mirth. 
 
 A German comedy — Der Majoratserbe (the Heir-at-Law) 
 — by the Duchess Amelia of Saxony, is written with much 
 pleasant tact, in four acts, on a slender plot. The comedy 
 was written to display the powers of Herr Devrient, and is 
 an outline which it is left wholly to the actor to fill up. 
 Count Paul Scharfeneck, the hero, has been educated in 
 the country, and spoilt as an only son and heir. He has 
 come into possession of a large estate, and is plighted to a 
 certain Countess Bertha. 
 
 On a certain day, and at a certain hour, he is to appear 
 at the house of a lady whom he has not previously seen, 
 and offer marriage. Bertha starts forth for a ride upon the 
 morning of that day, and, being overtaken by a heavy 
 shower, comes into an inn for shelter. Here the play 
 opens. While Bertha is changing her wet riding-dress for 
 dry clothes belonging to the people of the inn. Count Paul, 
 with his cousin Otto, the next heir to Scharfeneck, make 
 their appearance, accompanied by Paul's favourite old ser- 
 vant, Barmann. Paul is restless, full of whims and humours, 
 demanding service of everyone ; and although behind the 
 time at which he was expected by his friends at the castle, 
 in no great hurry to proceed. Bertha, making her appear- 
 ance in a peasant's dress, soon finds herself called upon to 
 bestir herself in the service of the impatient Paul; who 
 treats her with so much fidgety rudeness, and talks with so 
 much indifference of his business at the castle, that she 
 vows to herself, when the act closes, that she will never 
 marry him. 
 
 In the next act, Paul and his cousin Otto are in the 
 
German Plays: "Der Majoratserbe." 39 
 
 dwelling of the lady, where' Count Lauerfeld, the papa, 
 suffers much at the hands of the respected heir. He is 
 kept politely standing because Paul forgets to sit. He is 
 tumbled over. He is requested to change his dinner-hour 
 because Paul is not hungry. Paul has been down into the 
 kitchen to exhort the cooks not to put onions in anything. 
 He has brought two great dogs from the country with him, 
 and they bark and bite in the courtyard. He has arranged 
 his room to his own humour, and to the horror of good 
 housekeepers. He practises duets upon the violin in his 
 bedroom with his dear old servant Barmann, and is always, 
 in his impatience, some quarter of an hour in advance as to 
 the time. And now Bertha receives Paul in the most 
 chilling way, and adds a sting to her reception by affecting 
 the most cordial manner to his cousin Otto, whom she had 
 met some seasons before at the baths, and with whom she 
 had flirted. 
 
 Up to this point Devrient's acting was a piece of unmixed 
 comedy. His spoilt nobleman was not a lout — he was a 
 nobleman in the midst of his ill manners. His movements 
 were all followed by laughter ; and it was not because he 
 made his Paul a person to be laughed at, but a man whose 
 whims and oddities were amusing ; he was what the Germans 
 commonly call launig, not ridiculous. But the coldness 
 of the lady, and the warmth of good-will awakened in him 
 by her presence, work a change in the Count's manner; 
 and when the father, having found that his daughter regards 
 her intended husband as " insufferable", warns him before 
 he leaves them together not yet to speak of marriage, Paul 
 wonders, and begins to manifest his sense that things are 
 not proceeding smoothly with him. He talks to the lady, 
 first of his cousin, with whom she had appeared to be so 
 agreeably intimate, and (for it is to be understood that Paul 
 is at heart a miracle of generosity and goodness) praises 
 Otto heartily — Otto, as the lady remembers, who had not 
 
40 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 long before been ridiculing ^him. The Count discourses 
 then of country pleasures, and dwells with good-humoured 
 gusto on the pleasures of the country in the winter; pictures, 
 in delicate words, Bertha with a husband looking out from 
 his castle window upon a country winter scene; so delicately, 
 however, as not to overstep the spirit of her father's warning. 
 Then he talks of his country rounds among the people ; 
 whereupon Bertha compares, disparagingly, the mad rounds 
 
 he would run, with the deed of a certain Count S who 
 
 had been talked about lately in all the papers for the risking 
 of his life to save a family. Paul irritates the lady by pro- 
 nouncing the whole story stupid nonsense ; she is loud in 
 
 praise of Count S ; till it presently appears that the S. 
 
 stood for Scharfeneck. Finally, Paul leaves the lady over- 
 come with a sense of his goodness, but by no means recon- 
 ciled to his odd ways ; and in leaving, he begs her to 
 remember what he said about the castle window in the 
 winter — that he has his reasons, etc. The parting words 
 are nothing in themselves, but the acting of Herr Devrient 
 converts them into phrases that imply and do not tell his 
 love. The exquisite delicacy with which the natural heart 
 speaks in this part of the story contrasts admirably with the 
 external rudeness which from the first was clearly marked 
 as an acquired way, and not as an expression of the charac- 
 ter. In the rest of the story, the troubles of Paul's course 
 of love, which I need not relate, give opportunity for 
 numerous diversities of light and shade. The movements 
 of a noble soul, and the true feelings of a generous and 
 good man, begin to be more and more perceptible through 
 the mere accidents of education. Paul is refused by Bertha, 
 though she loves him, on the ground that she would not 
 like to be his partner in society ; that, good as he is, " a 
 woman would rather be unhappy and envied, than happy 
 and laughed at by the world". He retires with manly 
 dignity, although in grief. Being made afterwards to 
 
Emit Devrient as Hamlet. 41 
 
 believe that the cause of his refusal is Bertha's love for 
 Otto, Paul pleads for his cousin with the old Count, who 
 swears that his daughter shall marry no one but the heir of 
 Scharfeneck. Paul then determines to give up his birth- 
 right and deprive himself of all, that he may not stand 
 between the happiness of the two. Of course, things do 
 not come to this ; for Bertha (who found a lively and agree- 
 able representative in Fraulein Stromeyer) decides joyfully 
 at last to get into the arms of a good husband, though in the 
 world's eyes he may be an oddity. 
 
 It will be seen from this sketch of the main business, 
 that in Count Paul the German actor is provided with a 
 part which none but a great actor could succeed in at all, 
 and which a great actor can create for himself into first-rate 
 importance. There is no single part in which Herr Devrient 
 has yet appeared affording him equal opportunity of dis- 
 playing in a few hours the wide range of his talent. 
 
 From the whimsical Paul Scharfeneck to Hamlet was a 
 great step. Herr Devrient's Hamlet differs in a great many 
 respects from the Hamlets of the English stage. He has. 
 applied his own genius to the play, and develops his part 
 according to his own conception. German acting does not 
 rely at all upon " points", and many passages which on our 
 own stage are especially made to stand out, of course fell 
 back into the ranks on Thursday night. Every line by 
 every actor is studied with an equal care. This conscien- 
 tious rendering makes it almost as difficult to extract from 
 the actor as from the author any one-sided theory of 
 Hamlet's character. Herr Devrient marked very strongly 
 Hamlet's natural affection for his mother. When being 
 instructed by his father's ghost of her part in the crime, he 
 expressed finely, with his cloak thrown over his face, the 
 climax of his horror. That this crime of his mother has 
 spread a blot over his faith in the whole world, was the 
 impression which his subsequent acting frequently con- 
 
42 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 veyed. For the crime of his mother, he lost faith in 
 woman's contjnence, and saw no virtue for Ophelia out of a 
 nunnery. In the scene with his mother after the play, his 
 passion was mingled with affection, and, after his father's 
 ghost had vanished from the chamber, his words to her were 
 all spoken with endearments and embraces. 
 
 Devrient's Hamlet was weakened by the inevitable dilu- 
 tion with German of that large number of terse lines which 
 have passed out of this play into common English speech. 
 The Hamlet of A. W. Schlegel is a wonderful translation, 
 but the terse philosophy of Shakespeare is not to be fully 
 translated. Again, there are some points of stage-business 
 familiar to the English, handed down by tradition from 
 actor to actor, which the Germans have not been able to 
 discover for themselves, which really are good points, and 
 which we miss. On the other hand, we have our bad tra- 
 ditions, and from these the Germans find it advantageous 
 to be free. As a whole, Devrient's performance of Hamlet 
 was most acceptable ; he was followed throughout with 
 hearty applause, in which many English actors and many of 
 his German fellow-actors, not occupied in the business of 
 the evening, warmly joined. He was recalled between 
 every act, and his countrymen present were proud of him, 
 as they had fair reason to be. "The man is in his part," 
 said one of them ; " I do not believe he knows that he is 
 acting." 
 
 The other characters in the play were filled with the even 
 excellence characteristic of the German company. The 
 Ophelia was well acted by Fraulein Schafer, but, as she 
 speaks the songs, singing only here and there a word or two, 
 she acted well in vain. 
 
 Herr Kiihn has appeared as the Master in Die Glocke — 
 Schiller's "Song of the Bell", snipped into a drama by being 
 apportioned to speakers, and illustrated by a scene repre- 
 senting the business of the foundry. Stage-furnaces and 
 
German Plays: Herr Kuhn. 43 
 
 painted bells rather retard than help the fancy ; and as we 
 are still looking at a canvas furnace while we should also 
 follow the fancy of the poet to homesteads, towns, burials, 
 and other scenes, the retardation is still more complete. 
 The scene was well managed, the grouping of the workmen 
 perfect, and the recitation admirable. But there was no 
 reason at all in art why it should be recited by more than 
 one person, or at most by two ; and there are half-a-dozen 
 reasons why it should not be divided among seven. Herr 
 Kiihn's " make-up'' as the Master was astounding. This 
 actor is a master of costume. When one sees him as the 
 founder of the Bell, and looks back upon his Duke of Alva 
 and his Wurm, it is difficult to conceive that these three 
 characteristic figures are all personated by one man. 
 
 June 26. — Last Saturday evening Herr Devrient performed 
 the insignificant part of Count Appiani in Emilia Galotti. 
 His Faust on Tuesday evening was as good a Faust as one 
 could wish to see, but Faust himself in Gothe's play is not 
 an effective dramatic character. The play, however, in its 
 compressed form acts well ; and is made to include in the 
 grouping the realisation of a good rriany of Retzsch's out- 
 lines. In Schiller's Robbers the part of Charles Moor was 
 transferred to Herr Wisthaler. The last week has been, 
 therefore, a week of special prominence for Herr Kiihn, 
 who has been personating three stage-demons, Marinelli, 
 Mephistopheles, and Francis Moor. Of the Marinelli I can 
 say nothing, because I did not see it. The Mephistopheles 
 more than made good the prediction which most people 
 ventured who saw the human Wurm represented by the 
 same actor in Kabale und Liebe. It is paying him a high 
 compliment to say that Herr Kiihn is possibly the greatest 
 villain on the European stage. For assuming a malignant 
 tone and face and gesture, for the most elaborate, artistic 
 painting of anything in the way of cold-blooded rascality, 
 and from thence up through all the passions of ferocious 
 
44 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 exultation or of hatred, agonies of cowardice or of despair, 
 there is no abler man than Herr Klihn in the range of 
 living English experience ; though, no doubt, he is in his 
 home a very mild and philosophic personage. 
 
 At any rate, he has thought calmly and philosophised 
 much over his Mephistopheles. One sees in him the fiend 
 who walks about and scarcely can abstain from gratifying his 
 desire to make a spring upon this victim or that, while there 
 is also abundant indication of the largeness which belongs 
 to any great conception of a demon. In the chamber of 
 Faust, one of Kiihn's most effective attitudes is to recline 
 carelessly, with his arm spread about a large terrestrial 
 globe. The ironical vein of humour in the evil spirit is at 
 the same time strongly marked. Mephistopheles will 
 doubtless be remembered as Herr Kiihn's greatest per- 
 formance on the London stage ; and the character, good in 
 itself — a mature poetical conception — is much better worth 
 elaborating than, for example, such a mere daub of pitch as 
 Francis Moor in The Robbers. 
 
 Schiller, writing at the age of about eighteen, out of a hot 
 youth, heaped one revolting thing upon another to make out 
 of Francis Moor a perfect villain. All Herr Kiihn's power 
 of depicting villainy was brought to bear upon this night- 
 mare character. The scene of terror and despair in which 
 Francis rushes in, in his night-dress, from a dream of the 
 Last Day, was sickening in its perfection. An atrocious 
 stage-alteration at this point drags out his tortures by not 
 suffering him to strangle himself at the end of the scene, as 
 in the printed play. He is carried alive to his brother, 
 crouches and shrieks before him in the insanity of despair, 
 and is buried alive in the tower to which he had consigned 
 his father. The acting of Herr Kiihn realised this revolting 
 scene only too well. Among other stage-alterations to which 
 the play is subject, the love-passages between Charles and 
 Amelia, and sundry parts which in the printed play mingle 
 
spectral Melodrama : ''The Vampire!' 45 
 
 some taste and delicacy with the wilder mass, have been 
 omitted. The repulsive features of the production being 
 thus at the same time exaggerated m the text and brought 
 into strong relief by the acting, the whole result is anything 
 but pleasant. 
 
 Herr Kiihn took occasion, when recalled before the last 
 act, to make a small speech to the London publio. That, 
 he said, was the last important part in which he could at 
 present appear before them, owing to the limited nature of 
 the repertoire during a short engagement. He regretted that 
 he had not been able to present some other of his favourite 
 characters, but the kind applause he had met with among us 
 would, he suggested, cause him to appear again upon the 
 stage of London at a future day. 
 
 Sustaining characters which exhibit an abundant versatility 
 of power, equally at home in Tragedy or Comedy, Herr 
 Emil Devrient has confirmed for himself easily, in England, 
 the reputation that he had acquired in Germany, Admirers 
 of spasms may not always appreciate his purity of taste, and 
 may miss some points because they are not prodded into 
 them. I do not know what characters remain behind in 
 Herr Kiihn's repertoire, but he has been seen during the last 
 month shining exclusively in characters of one especial 
 class. In these his study is elaborate, and his acting perfect 
 of its kind ; but his range may possibly be very limited. 
 
 June 19. — If there be truth in the old adage, that "when 
 things are at the worst they must mend", the bettering of 
 Spectral Melodrama is not distant ; for it has reached the 
 extreme point of inanity in the new piece which was produced 
 on Monday at the Princess's Theatre, under the attractive 
 title oi The Vampire. 
 
 Its plot is chiefly copied from a piece which some years 
 ago turned the Lyceum into a Chamber of Horrors ; but it 
 has been spun out into three parts, facetiously described as 
 "Three Dramas": the little period of a century has been in- 
 
46 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 terposed between each part ; and, in order that the outrage 
 on the possible shall be complete, the third part is projected 
 forward into the year that will be i860 ! By this ingenious 
 arrangement, the resuscitation of the original Vampire has 
 been enabled to supply the lovers of the revolting at the 
 Princess's with three acts of murder — that is, two consum- 
 mated, and one attempted ; but, as the delicate process of 
 vampirical killing is exactly after the same pattern in each 
 case, the horror is quite worn out before the career of the 
 creature terminates. Nothing but tedious trash remains. 
 
 To "an honest ghost" one has no objection ; but an ani- 
 mated corpse which goes about in Christian attire, and 
 although never known to eat, or drink, or shake hands, is 
 allowed to sit at good men's feasts ; which renews its odious 
 life every hundred years by sucking a young lady's blood, 
 after fascinating her by motions which resemble mesmerism 
 burlesqued ; and which, notwithstanding its well-purchased 
 longevity, is capable of being killed during its term in order 
 that it may be revived by moonbeams— such a ghost as this 
 passes all bounds of toleration. 
 
 The monster of absurdity was personated by its reviver, 
 Mr. Boucicault, with due paleness of visage, stealthiness 
 of pace, and solemnity of tone ; the scenery, especially a 
 moonlit ridge amidst the heights of Snowdon, was beautiful, 
 and the costumes were prettily diversified ; but the dreary 
 repetition of fantastical horror almost exhausted even the 
 patience which a benefit enjoins. Unfortunately, the mis- 
 chief of such a piece, produced at a respectable theatre, 
 does not end with the weariness of the spectators, who come 
 to shudder and remain to yawn ; for it is ijot only " beside 
 the purpose of playing", but directly contravenes it ; and 
 though it may be too dull to pervert the tastes of those who 
 witness its vapid extravagances, it has power to bring dis- 
 credit on the most genial of arts. 
 July 27. — Spohr's opera oi Faust, produced at the Royal 
 
Spohr's "Faust." — "Masks and Faces!' 47 
 
 Italian Opera on Thursday night, under the direction of 
 the composer, was one of the most perfect performances 
 ever seen even upon that carefully appointed stage. The opera 
 will live for all time as a classical work full of fine music 
 with a somewhat tedious general effect, and based upon a 
 version of the old legend of Dr. Faustus which must be 
 pronounced bad even for a libretto. Signor Ronconi was 
 Faust, Herr Formes Mephistopheles, Mdlle. Anna Zerr 
 Rosina, and Madame Castellan Cunegonda. Tamberlik 
 as Count Ugo, on his way to rescue his Cunegonda from 
 the power of the demon-in-human-flesh, Gulf, sang a spirited 
 air, " Ah non temer", set in a chorus of breastplated soldiers, 
 which produced a most vociferous encore, the only encore 
 of the evening. 
 
 At the end of the first act Dr. Spohr received a merited 
 ovation. The last half of the first act contains some of the 
 most effective music in the opera, but the extreme stupidity 
 of the libretto, and the solidity of Dr. Spohr's style, caused 
 the delight in some scenes of the work to be confined 
 entirely to musicians. The whole of the concerted music at 
 the end of the last act is very beautiful. 
 
 November 27. — The new play at the Haymarket wants 
 the scope and proportions of a regular English comedy, 
 being in outline and structure of a French cast; but in 
 character it is English, in sentiment thoroughly so, and its 
 language and expression, whether of seriousness or humour, 
 have the tone at once easy and earnest which truth gives to 
 scholarship and wit. 
 
 The acting, too, is unusually good. There is a poor 
 poet who doubles the scanty callings of painter and player, 
 and whom Goldsmith could not have better described, or 
 Leslie painted, than Mr. Webster acts him. The delicacy 
 and strength of this performance took us by surprise. The 
 humour and pathos closely neighbouring each other, smiles 
 playing about the tears, and the mirth always trembling into 
 
48 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1852. 
 
 sadness, belonged to most real art. And it was full of 
 minute touches which showed the discrimination of the actor. 
 For instance — that absurd air of helplessness which the 
 habit of incessant failure gives to a man. The poor starving 
 author cannot hold even a couple of his own rejected tra- 
 gedies in his hands without dropping one of them, nor pick 
 up the straggler till its companion has tumbled after it. 
 
 The title of the comedy is Masks and Faces, or Before and 
 Behind the Curtain. Its heroine is Garrick's favourite, Peg 
 Woifington ; whose attractive sprightliness, spirited inde- 
 pendence, good understanding, and thoroughly good nature, 
 distinguished her so favourably among the dames of the 
 English theatre in the old days of the Sir Harry \Mldairs 
 and Lady Betty Modishes, and while yet the Iphigenias wore 
 cherry-coloured silk over their large hoop petticoats. The 
 drift of the little comedy is to show the good heart of the 
 actress shining out through the disadvantage of her position 
 and her calling, and rebuking the better fortune of those 
 who have to struggle with no such temptations. There 
 appears to be just now a great run'upon such subjects with 
 our French neighbours. Shut out^by the censorship from 
 most topics that trench uponjthe real world, French play- 
 wrights have betaken themselves in despair to the world of 
 unreality, and now find their most popular subjects behind 
 the scenes. They have just invented a model English actor 
 at the Frangais, who by all sorts of nobility and propriety of 
 conduct breaks down the most inveterate prejudices of caste ; 
 and at the Varietds they have reproduced a scamp of an 
 actor of the infamous days of the Regency, who turns out 
 to be after all the most interesting and fine-hearted rogue 
 conceivable. In short, the Parisian spirit of the day, in these 
 matters, is pretty much, expressed in what one of our own 
 wits used to be fond of contrasting in the fortunes of the two 
 Duchesses of Bolton. The poor high-born lady, educated in 
 solitude with choice of all good books, with a saintlike 
 
"Masks and Faces" 49 
 
 governess, and fairly crammed with virtue — what did it all 
 come to ? her husband despised her and the pubhc laughed 
 at her. Whereas the frank and fearless Polly, bred in an 
 alehouse and produced on the stage, obtained not only 
 vt^ealth and title, but found the way to be esteemed, so that 
 her husband respected and loved her, as the public had done 
 before him. 
 
 The authors of Masks and Faces (for there are two, Mr. 
 Tom Taylor and Mr. Charles Reade) do not quite fall into 
 this vein, however. They rather follow the example of the 
 enthusiastic bishop, who, on hearing an actress of doubtful 
 reputation sing divinely at an oratorio, suddenly and loudly 
 cried out, "Woman, thy sins be forgiven thee!" They do 
 not suppress the sins of Mrs. Wofifington, in the act of 
 exhibiting what virtues as well as sorrows neighboured them ; 
 and, while they represent her with a touching sense of her own 
 degradation, they have yet the courage to show her accepted 
 for her virtues by the innocent and pure, and not disqualified 
 by her vices to put conventional morality to shame. In a 
 word, it is a very manly and right-minded little comedy; 
 with matter of just reflection in it, as well as much mirth 
 and amusement. 
 
 That is a charming scene where Peg visits the poor poet 
 in his garret, while his ailing wife and. starving children are 
 sadly interrupting the flow of its comic muse. Nothing here 
 was lost in Mr. Webster's hands— the angry fretfulness 
 followed by instant remorse, the efforts of self-restraint which 
 are but efforts in vain, the energy that fitfully breaks out and 
 then pitifully breaks down, and the final loss of hope, even 
 of faith in a better providence which is to set right all that 
 misery and wrong — the picture was complete, and set forth 
 with its immemorial Grub Street appendages of no shirt and 
 ragged but ample ruffles. An excellent touch, too, it was in 
 this scene, when the poor, patient, sickly wife, nicely looked 
 and played by Mrs. Leigh Murray, after rebuking her hus- 
 
5o Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S3- 
 
 band for his little outbreak of distrust in Providence, cannot 
 help showing her own little jealousies and fellow-actress's 
 distrust of Mrs. Wofifinglon. But Peg plays the part of 
 Providence in the miserable garret, and in doing it Mrs. 
 Stirling threw off all her too conscious airs and was really 
 hearty and delightful. She gave the pathetic passages with 
 genuine feeling, the mirthful with cordial enjoyment; and 
 several heightening touches in both marked the personal 
 sympathy and emotion with which the character appeared to 
 have affected her. 
 
 The critics introduced are poor enough, and this part of 
 the piece is here and there too long. Mr. Bland, moreover, 
 who played Quin, exaggerated a mistake for which the 
 writers had given him too much excuse, and made a mere 
 loud, coarse, vulgar epicure of him. Quin was a gentleman 
 and a man of wit. We remember him always as the patron 
 as well as friend of the poet Thomson, and as the author 
 of some of the very best things on record. Generally, how- 
 ever, the acting was very good. There was a little sketch of 
 old Colley Gibber, by Mr. Lambert, particularly worth men- 
 tion as observant and faithful. 
 
 On Monday, March 14th, 1853, Mr. Webster delivered 
 his farewell address as manager of the Haymarket Theatre, 
 which has since that time been under the management of 
 Mr. Buckstone, as the Adelphi has also since that time 
 been under Mr. Webster's management. The following 
 sentences from Mr. Webster's address contribute something 
 to the current history of the stage : — 
 
 "To authors I find I have paid nearly ^30,000, if not more. 
 'Tis said, 'Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown'; but far more 
 uneasiness has the head begirt with the tinsel crown of theatrical 
 sovereignty, where every popular favourite is a viceroy over him, 
 and where the ways and means are not compulsory, but solely 
 dependent on the will and pleasure of our sovereign the public. 
 However, if my labour in the cause of the drama, which has 
 
Benjamin Webster. — Robson. 51 
 
 been a labour of love, has met with the approval of you, my 
 tried and valued friends, it will not have been Lov^s Labour 
 Lost. Those who remember this theatre when I first took it, 
 sixteen years ago— of course I exclude the ladies from so long a 
 remembrance — must perceive the extensive alterations, and I 
 think I may venture to say improvements, that I have accom- 
 plished during my tenancy. Abrupt angles have given way to 
 curves, and my circles, especially from their present occupancy, 
 appear graceful in the extreme. I have backed the pit, and 
 could in another sense — for respectability — against any pit in 
 London. I have stalled off what was originally the orchestra, 
 sometimes discoursing sweet sounds, though sweeter music to 
 my ear has supplied its place in the audible approbations of my 
 exertions as, to quote the words of Triplet, 'author, manager, 
 and actor, too'. The proscenium I have widened eleven feet, 
 and entirely remodelled it, and introduced gas for the fee of 
 ^500 a year, and the presentation of the centre chandelier to 
 the proprietors ; and behind the curtain money has not been 
 spared to render the stage as perfect for dramatic representation 
 as its limited means will furnish ; in fact, I have expended, with 
 no ultimate advantage to myself, on this property over ^12,000 
 besides paying more than ^60,000 in rent." 
 
 July 9. — At the Olympic a new and very smart travestie 
 of The Merchant of Venice draws a crowded house every night. 
 The piece is full of undeniable cleverness, and also deserves 
 mention as giving scope to a new and remarkable burlesque 
 actor. Mr. F. Robson is a downright good actor — a new 
 performer who, notwithstanding the unpromising material he 
 at present works in, promises to be a solid acquisition to the 
 stage. And it is odd enough that, at a time when all serious 
 acting is tending to the burlesque and unreal, a burlesque 
 actor should start up with a real and very serious power in 
 him. The only regret in observing his execution of Mr. 
 Talfourd's Shylock is that he had not made trial of 
 Shakespeare's in preference. But there is no doubt that we 
 shall have other and higher things to report of a performer 
 who begins his career by showing himself really in earnest. 
 
 D 2 
 
52 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1853. 
 
 On the stage it is the secret of success in everything — even 
 burlesque. It does not do to play at acting. 
 
 October 22. — Mr. Alfred Wigan, in assuming the manage- 
 ment of the Olympic, has the good wishes of all who still 
 care for the better and more agreeable entertainments of 
 the stage, and who do not think that vulgarity and bad 
 taste have reached their millennium because they happen 
 to attract temporary crowds of barren spectators and noisy 
 applauders. Mr. Wigan has been for many years quietly 
 and steadily advancing in the public esteem as a careful 
 and conscientious actor, who understands the art to be an 
 intellectual one, and so pursues it ; we are glad to see an 
 artist of his quality take upon himself the direction of a 
 theatre to which it is proposed to attract favour by the 
 legitimate resources of good writing and good acting, as far 
 as these may yet be procurable. 
 
 Criticism of the '' occasional" piece or prologue. The Camp 
 at the Olympic, which opens the career of the new manage- 
 ment, would be out of place. It might have had greater 
 freshness in its design, but, being written by Mr. Planche, 
 of course it has its points of merit, its ready and fluent 
 verse, its jokes regulated by good taste, its happy allusions 
 to incidents of the day, and its pleasant parodies of popular 
 airs to which the beautiful voice of Miss P. Horton gave 
 singular spirit and charm. 
 
 The success of the night was undoubtedly the assumption 
 of a serious part by the burlesque actor, Mr. Robson. That 
 there would be other and higher things to report of a per- 
 former who, while other people were burlesquing reality, 
 could put such a startling reality into burlesque, was not to 
 be doubted. But one hardly expected it so soon. The 
 part he plays in Plot and Passion (a drama of which the 
 central figure is Fouchd, its characters being the agents or 
 objects of his villainy, and its catastrophe his disgrace) is 
 that of a mean, double-faced, fawning, cunning, treacherous 
 
Olympic: Alfred Wigan. — Robson. 53 
 
 tool, in whom the sordid passions have nevertheless not 
 wholly extinguished others that place him finally at the 
 mercy of his victims. Here the actor's opportunity is that 
 of a constant and quick transition within the limited range 
 of the emotions expressed ; and from meanness to malice, 
 from cringing humility to the most malignant hate, from a 
 •cat-like watchfulness to occasional bursts of passion that 
 seemed to defy control, Mr. Robson passed with a keen 
 power and ready self-possession that never missed the effect 
 intended to be produced. If this was not always natural, 
 the fault was more with the feehng to be expressed than 
 with the actor's mode of expressing it. In truth, the 
 character is greatly overstrained, and the mixing up of its 
 fiendish qualities with what was meant to be a strong and 
 self exalting emotion has the usual result of detracting from 
 both. 
 
 Mr. Robson's great quality is the downright earnestness 
 by which he makes others feel what he very evidently feels 
 himself. He has defects of voice and person of the gravest 
 kind, but some part of that which made "Pritchard genteel 
 and Garrick six feet high" has descended to him. The sort 
 of character in which he is likely to excel may always lie 
 within the narrowest range, but by the strength and intensity 
 he puts into it he will never fail to attract an audience. He 
 wants finish, refinement, relief — fifty things which will come 
 with experience and study, if he has a proper regard for his 
 calling and for himself; but already, with none of these 
 things, he is a genuine actor, and everyone feels it. The 
 drama had been but a short while opened on Monday night 
 when the general interest fixed itself on that ill-dressed, 
 meagre, dwarfish figure, and, whoever else might occupy 
 the scene, the eye still sought him out. For the present, 
 therefore, the little man is undoubtedly the great fact at 
 the Olympic. 
 
 Yet Mr. Wigan and Mrs. Stirling played also with 
 
54 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1853. 
 
 excellent feeling and truth in parts much the reverse 
 of attractive. Mr. Emery wanted delicacy and tact in 
 Fouche. 
 
 September 10. — Drury Lane has reopened, and Mr. 
 G. V. Brooke is for the present its chief attraction. It is 
 a pity that he should prefer to act Shakespeare — for which 
 he is as little qualified as the company engaged to support 
 him — rather than a good, ranting, roaring melodrama, which 
 he would play admirably. This would be infinitely better 
 than making a melodrama of Othello ; but in this as in 
 other things there is no accounting for tastes, and, to judge 
 by the noise they made, the taste of the crowds who filled 
 the theatre goes very decisively against our own. 
 
 October 29. — That "unparalleled tragedian, Mr. Brooke",* 
 having departed from Drury Lane, "Tom Barry, the death- 
 less and renowned clown", succeeds ; and there is no reason 
 why the ingenious lessee, declared on high authority to be 
 a mirror of managers, should not make the second B as 
 profitable as the first. " His name and fame are enough," 
 pursues the enthusiastic Mr. E. T. Smith ; backing him up 
 at the same time, like a wary tactician as he is, with " a 
 galaxy of equestrian talent never before assembled con- 
 junctively in even this the metropolis of nations." A galaxy 
 assembled individually might, perhaps, have been more 
 novel, but to so sagacious a manager as Mr. Smith the hint 
 is offered with much deference. Indeed, it particularly 
 
 * Mr. G. V. Brooke is said by all who knew him to have 
 been most amiable and generous. He was drowned in the 
 wreck of the London (Jan. 11, 1866), after distinguishing him- 
 self in the last hours of danger and despair by higher qualities 
 than actors have been often called upon to show. None 
 laboured more strenuously to avert the deadly issue ; which none 
 bore, when it became inevitable, with more tranquil fortitude 
 than he. Though he could not act Shakespeare, he must have 
 been a noble fellow. 
 
Mr. E. T. Smith at Drury Lane. 55 
 
 becomes the critic to handle with tenderness a conjunctive 
 galaxy of this sort, in which " not only has no expense been 
 spared, but, in making arrangements, a wise discretion, the 
 result of a deliberative council in science, has been observed". 
 Besides, is not Mr. E. T. Smith careful to add that "for- 
 tuitous but accidental circumstances have thrown" the 
 galaxy together " for a short season, but other American 
 and European engagements will prevent a continuance of 
 the exalted scientific- compact"? 
 
 In such fortuitous but accidental circumstances, then, 
 what better can either critic or playgoer do than seize the 
 opportunity of the minute, and catch ere they fly the 
 Cynthias of this exalted and scientific, but, alas ! too fleet- 
 ing compact? Though Mr. Smith has preferred a con- 
 junctive to an individual galaxy, he does his best to supply 
 even the latter want by presenting the youthful Hernandez 
 as " the very constellation in the hippodramatic hemi- 
 sphere". There also is Eaton Stone, " confronting in a 
 marvellous manner the wild horse of the prairies". James 
 Newsome is also there, " reflecting a glory on the sports of 
 Old England". And there is Madame Pauline Newsome, 
 whose two horses "stand unequalled in the Spanish and 
 cadenced steps, and will perform with wonderful precision 
 the same movements as if guided by the power of elec- 
 tricity". And there, for a climax, is the " champion vaulter 
 of all the world", Arthur Barnes, "who has accomphshed 
 the unprecedented feat of throwing ninety-one somersaults 
 in succession"; attended by "that renowned American 
 artiste", Mr. W. O. Dale, the thrower of eighty-one. From 
 the great American Dale, by four somersaults only, the 
 greater English Barnes snatched the crown ! It will surely 
 be worth the whole price of admission to see this American 
 hero, mighty even in defeat, by the side of his mightier 
 vanquisher, the- new Arthur of England. 
 
 Mr. E. T. Smith is not the first manager who has played 
 
56 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1853. 
 
 the part of his own critic, and he really tops the part so 
 magnificently that it would be a pity to take it from him. 
 But, absurdity apart, his company of horses and riders, of 
 vaulters and tumblers and &elf-sus>penders, of dancers on 
 decanters, balancers on poles, and tossers of tubs and 
 children, is not a bad one; and if he would but introduce a 
 few more of the lighter female graces, and stop the mouth 
 of the deathless Tom Barry, it would be a first-rate, enter- 
 tainment of its own very small kind. 
 
 October 15. — Every reader of Shakespeare is disposed to 
 regard the Midsummer Night's Dream as the most essentially 
 unactable of all his plays. It is a dramatic poem of the 
 utmost grace and delicacy; its characters are creatures of 
 the poet's fancy that no flesh and blood can properly pre- 
 sent — fairies who "creep into acorn-cups", or mortals who 
 are but dim abstractions, persons of a dream. The words 
 they speak are so completely spiritual that they are best felt 
 when they are not spoken. Their exquisite beauty is like 
 that of sunset colours which no mortal artist can interpret 
 faithfully. The device of the clowns in the play to present 
 Moonshine seems but a fair expression of the kind of success 
 that might be achieved by the best actors who should 
 attempt to present the Midsummer Night's Dream on the 
 stage. It was, therefore, properly avoided by managers as 
 lying beside and above their art; nor was there reason to 
 be disappointed when the play some years ago furnished 
 Madame Vestris with a spectacle that altogether wanted the 
 Shakespearean spirit. 
 
 In some measure there is reason for a different opinion 
 on these matters in the Alidsummer Night's Dream as pro- 
 duced at Sadler's "Wells by Mr. Phelps. Though stage- 
 fairies cannot ride on blue-bells, and the members of no 
 theatrical company now in existence can speak such poetry 
 as that of the Midsummer Night's Dream otherwise than 
 most imperfectly, yet it is proved that there remains in the 
 
Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells. 57 
 
 power of the manager who goes with pure taste and right 
 feehng to his work, enough for the establishment of this 
 play as a most charming entertainment of the stage- 
 Mr. Phelps has never for a minute lost sight of the main 
 idea which governs the whole play, and this is the great 
 secret of his success in the presentation of it. He knew 
 that he was to present merely shadows; that spectators, as 
 Puck reminds them in the epilogue, are to think they have 
 slumbered on their seats, and that what appeared before 
 them have been visions. Everything has been subdued as 
 far as possible at Sadler's Wells to this ruling idea. The 
 scenery is very beautiful, but wholly free from the meretricious 
 ghtter now in favour; it is not so remarkable for costliness 
 as for the pure taste in which it and all the stage-arrange- 
 ments have been planned. There is no ordinary scene- 
 shifting; but, as in dreams, one scene is made to glide 
 insensibly into another. We follow the lovers and the fairies 
 through the wood from glade to glade, now among trees, 
 now with a broad view of the sea and Athens in the distance, 
 carefully but not at all obtrusively set forth. And not only 
 do the scenes melt dream-Hke one into another, but over all 
 the fairy portion of the play there is a haze thrown by a 
 curtain of green gauze placed between the actors and the 
 audience, and maintained there during the whole of the 
 second, third, and fourth acts. This gauze curtain is so 
 well spread that there are very few parts of the house from 
 which its presence can be detected, but its influence is eveiy- 
 where felt; it subdues the flesh and blood of the actors into 
 something more nearly resembling dream-figures, and incor- 
 porates more completely the actors with the scenes, throwing 
 the same green fairy tinge, and the same mist over all. A 
 like idea has also dictated certain contrivances of dress, 
 especially in the case of the fairies. 
 
 Very good taste has been shown in the establishment of a 
 harmony between the scenery and the poem. The main 
 
58 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1853. 
 
 feature — the Midsummer Night— was marked by one scene 
 so elaborated as to impress it upon all as the central picture 
 of the group. The moon was just so much exaggerated as 
 to give it the required prominence. The change, again, of 
 this Midsummer Night into morning, when Theseus and 
 Hippolyta come to the wood with horn and hound, was 
 exquisitely presented. And in the last scene, when the 
 fairies, coming at night into the hall of Theseus, "each 
 several chamber bless", the Midsummer moon is again seen 
 shining on the palace as the curtains are drawn that admit 
 the fairy throng. Ten times as much money might have 
 been spent on a very much worse setting of the Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream. It is the poetical feeling prompting a judi- 
 cious but not extravagant outlay, by aid of which Mr. Phelps 
 has produced a stage-spectacle more refined and intellectual, 
 and far more absolutely satisfactory, than anything I can 
 remember to have seen since Mr. Macready was a manager. 
 That the flesh and blood presentments of the dream- 
 figures which constitute the persons of the play should be 
 always in harmony with this true feeling, was scarcely to be 
 expected. A great deal of the poetry is injured in the 
 speaking. Unless each actor were a man who combined 
 with elocutionary power a very high degree of sensibility and 
 genius, it could hardly be otherwise. Yet it cannot be said 
 even here that the poet's effects entirely failed. The Mid- 
 summer Nighfs Dream abounds in the most delicate pas- 
 sages of Shakespeare's verse; the Sadler's Wells pit has a 
 keen enjoyment for them; and pit and gallery were crowded 
 to the farthest wall on Saturday night with a most earnest 
 audience, among whom many a subdued hush arose, not 
 during but just before, the delivery of the most charming 
 passages. If the crowd at Drury Lane is a gross discredit 
 to the public taste, the crowd at Sadler's Wells more 
 than neutralises any ill opinion that may on that score be 
 formed of playgoers. The Sadler's Wells gallery, indeed. 
 
"A Midsummer Nighfs Dream." 59 
 
 appeared to be not wholly unconscious of the contrast, for, 
 when Bottom volunteered to roar high or roar low, a voice 
 from the gallery desired to know whether he could "roar 
 like Brooke''. Even the gallery at this theatre, however, 
 resents an interruption, and the unexpected sally was not 
 well received. 
 
 A remarkably quick-witted little boy, Master F. Artis, 
 plays Puck, and really plays it with faithfulness and spirit as 
 it has been conceived for him by Mr. Phelps. His training 
 has evidently been most elaborate. We see at once that 
 his acts and gestures are too perfect and mature to ^e his 
 own imaginings, but he has been quick-witted enough to 
 adopt them as his own, and give them not a little of the 
 charm of independent and spontaneous production. By 
 this thoughtfulness there is secured for the character on the 
 stage something of the same prominence that it has in the 
 mind of closet-readers of the play. 
 
 Of Miss Cooper's Helena we cannot honestly say very 
 much. In that as in most of the other characters the spirit 
 of the play was missed, because the arguing and quarrelling 
 and blundering that should have been playful, dreamlike, 
 and poetical, was much too loud and real. The men and 
 women could not fancy themselves shadows. Were it 
 possible so far to subdue the energy of the whole body of 
 actors as to soften the tones of the scenes between Theseus, 
 Hippolyta, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena, the 
 latter character even on the stage might surely have some- 
 thing of the effect intended by the poem. It is an exquisite 
 abstraction, a pitiful and moving picture of a gentle maid 
 forlorn, playfully developed as beseems the fantastic texture 
 of the poem, but not at all meant to excite mirth; and there 
 was a very great mistake made when the dream was so 
 worked out into hard literalness as to create constant 
 laughter during those scenes in which Helena, bewildered 
 by the change of mood among the lovers, shrinks and com- 
 
6o Journal of a London Playgoer. [i853- 
 
 plains, "Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born?" 
 The merriment which Shakespeare connected with those 
 scenes was- but a httle of the poet's sunhght meant to ghtter 
 among tears. 
 
 It remains for us only to speak of the success of Mr. 
 Phelps as Bottom, whom he presented from the first with 
 remarkable subtlety and spirit, as a man seen in a dream. 
 In his first scene, before we know what his conception is, 
 or in what spirit he means the whole play to be received, 
 we are puzzled by it. We miss the humour, and get a 
 strange, elaborate, and uncouth dream-figure, a clown rest- 
 less with vanity, marked by a score of little movements, and 
 speaking ponderously with the uncouth gesticulation of an 
 unreal thing, a grotesque nightmare character. But that, 
 we find, is precisely what the actor had intended to present, 
 and we soon perceive that he was right. Throughout the 
 fairy scenes there is a mist thrown over Bottom by 'the 
 actor's art. The violent gesticulation becomes stillness, and 
 the hands are fixed on the breast. They are busy with the 
 unperceived business of managing the movements of the 
 ass's head, but it is not for that reason they are so perfectly 
 still. The change of manner is a part of the conception. 
 The dream-figure is dreaming, there is dream within dream. 
 Bottom is quiet, his humour becomes more unctuous, but 
 Bottom is translated. He accepts all that happens, quietly 
 as dreamers do ; and the ass's head we also accept quietly, 
 for we too are in the middle of our dream, and it does not 
 create surprise. Not a touch of comedy was missed in this 
 capital piece of acting, yet Bottom was completely incor- 
 porated with the Alidsunimer Night's Dream, made an 
 essential part of it, as unsubstantial, as airy and refined as 
 iA\ the rest. Quite masterly was the delivery by Mr. Phelps 
 of the speech of Bottom on awakening. He was still a man 
 subdued, but subdued by the sudden plunge into a state of 
 unfathomable wonder. His dream clings about him, he 
 
Phelps as Bottom the Weaver. 61 
 
 cannot sever the real from the unreal, and still we are made 
 to feel that his reality itself is but a fiction. The pre- 
 occupation continues to be manifest during his next scene 
 with the players, and his parting " No more words ; away ; 
 go away", was in the tone of a man who had lived with 
 spirits and was not yet perfectly returned into the flesh. 
 Nor did the refinement of this conception, if we except the 
 first scene, abate a jot of the laughter that the character of 
 Bottom was intended to excite. The mock-play at the end 
 was intensely ludicrous in the presentment, yet nowhere 
 farcical. It was the dream. Bottom as Pyramus was more 
 perfectly a dream-figure than ever. The contrast between 
 the shadowy actor and his part, between Bottom and 
 Pyramus, was marked intensely ; and the result was as 
 quaint a phantom as could easily be figured by real flesh. 
 Mr. Ray's Quince was very good indeed, and all the other 
 clowns were reasonably well presented. 
 
 It is very doubtful whether the Midsummer Night's 
 Dream has yet, since it was first written, been put upon the 
 stage with so nice an interpretation of its meaning. It is 
 pleasant beyond measure to think that an entertainment so 
 refined can draw such a throng of playgoers as I saw last 
 Saturday sitting before it silent and reverent at Sadler's 
 Wells. 
 
 November 1 9. — At the Lyceum Mr. Tom Taylor has pro- 
 vided the clever manager -with a piece that may with 
 advantage to the general mirth retain its place upon the 
 stage as long as there can be found two actors so perfectly 
 able to support it as those upon whom its weight now rests. 
 Mr. Charles Mathews and Mr. Frank Matthews appear as 
 the heads of The Nice Firm. This is the firm of Moon and 
 Messiter, sohcitors, and is composed of Mr. Moon, who is 
 not a mere Midsummer moon, but is for ever mooning; and 
 of Mr. Messiter, who has for his planet not the moon but 
 Mercury, if it be Mercury that rules the admixture of quick- 
 
62 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1853. 
 
 silver with legal blood. The visitors to the Lyceum are 
 indulged with a peep at a day's " business'' perpetrated by 
 this highly respectable firm, of which the respectability 
 among clients out of doors is maintained by the quiet inter- 
 vention of a sensible chief-clerk. The clients know nothing 
 about that, but the whole anatomy of the office is now made 
 public and open to the ridicule of men and gods. The 
 story is contrived loosely enough, as the vehicle for display 
 of a very loose system of conducting business ; and the 
 rambling character of the work done by the two partners 
 while their head is out, though it keeps the house in- 
 cessantly alive with laughter, is just so much too true to 
 nature as to require rendering a little more compact. Mr. 
 Charles Mathews represented the mercurial attorney as 
 nobody else now can do it. Mr. Frank Matthews gave an 
 elaborate study of the mooning partner, finished in every 
 detail, and amazingly effective. Mrs. F. Matthews was a 
 female client competent to try the patience of much 
 stronger legal minds than those which she was doomed 
 to test. 
 
 At the Adelphi there has been a farce of the broadest 
 and most laughable school (in terse and expressive play- 
 bill language, an " Adelphi screamer"), in which Mr. Keeley 
 finding himself in a perpetual state of mystery and amaze- 
 ment, the audience as a matter of course are in a perpetual 
 roar. Certainly it would be difficult to name an actor, 
 from the stage past or present, whose comic efforts are so 
 natural and unstrained as those of Mr. Keeley. His touch 
 is so easy that under it extravagance itself loses the air of 
 unreality. He never grimaces, he never winks at the 
 audience, he never takes anybody but himself into his con- 
 fidence — yet what a never-tiring figure of fun he is, how 
 unconscious he seems of the laughter he provokes, and 
 what a solidity he appears to give to the most trivial expres- 
 sions ! Not, however, that the dialogue of this farce is 
 
Charles Mathews. — Keeley. — Mrs. Warner. 63 
 
 altogether trivial, for it is really above the average of things 
 of the kind ; and it introduced a new and promising actor, 
 Mr. Garden, to the always good-natured appreciation of the 
 audience at the Adelphi. 
 
 Another new piece at the Lyceum, being a clever and 
 well-constructed adaptation from the French, promises to 
 have a long and most successful run. It suits the com- 
 pany exactly, is excellently played by everyone engaged in it, 
 and not only gives scope for the best acting of Mr. Charles 
 Mathews in his ordinary manner, but carries him into 
 ground where he may establish fresh claims to the liking 
 of his audiences. The character is that of a young ruined 
 scapegrace and adventurer in whom a^ good heart has not 
 wholly been extinguished, and who, under an unexpected 
 temptation to do good, finds himself suddenly and very 
 heartily giving way to it, and rises into happiness and wins 
 esteem. The piece offers also to the public favour, in the 
 person of Miss F. Hughes, a very nice and clever little 
 dkbutante. 
 
 December 10. — One of the most distinguished and re- 
 spected of our actresses, who has for years maintained her 
 family by her exertions, was the other day subjected to the 
 distress of appearing, through her husband, in the Insolvent 
 Debtors' Court. It appeared that for some time she had 
 been afflicted by the growth of a most painful disease, in 
 spite of which, while strength remained, she laboured 
 actively in her profession. Compelled at last to desist, 
 the pains of poverty might have been felt not less sharply 
 than the pains of sickness, had not friends been at hand to 
 deprive them of their sting. The proceedings in the Debtors' 
 Court disclosed only truths that come home to us all. They 
 told us that an intellectual and high-spirited woman had 
 supported 'herself and her children by laborious exertion 
 in the highest department of dramatic art — that by the 
 rapid growth of a terrible disease she had been checked in 
 
64 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S3- 
 
 her career — and that this deprived her, as it would deprive 
 any one among the millions of her countrymen or country- 
 women, of the means of fulfilling the moderate and reason- 
 able engagements formed in days of health. All that it told 
 us more than that was of the human sympathies awakened 
 by the case. ^Ve cannot say of such a reverse that it 
 suggests charity, using the word in .its cold modern sense. 
 But it arouses sympathies, and it enables those who stand 
 about to claim a privilege of ministering by kind offices to a 
 most sacred grief. 
 
 Kind offices, thus done in secret, have, through the in- 
 vestigation in the Insolvent Court, been forced into pub- 
 licity. We should not speak of them, if we had not been 
 made to see that there was one gentle hand among those 
 ready to smooth the pillow of the sinking actress, which 
 Englishmen are always proud to recognise, and never yet 
 have found stretched out for any evil work. Not only have 
 fellow-artists gathered about Mrs. Warner, but some others 
 who, as the world knows, are never absent when a kind 
 word is to be said or a kindly act done, and by accident 
 the Queen's name slipped into the narrative. Among other 
 indications of the great respect in which the sick lady is 
 held, it appeared that her Majesty had not been content 
 with simply subscribing towards the support required by 
 Mrs. ^^'arner's fafliily, now that its prop fails — but that, 
 having learnt the importance of carriage-exercise to the 
 patient, with a woman's delicacy at once found the kindest 
 way to render service, by herself hiring a carriage which she 
 has caused, and causes still, to be placed daily at ISIrs. 
 Warner's disposal. 
 
 It is properly in the nature of acts like this to remain 
 unknown to the world, and it is with reserve and mis- 
 giving one gives to so graceful a private action more pub- 
 licity than it already has. Yet siirely gentle qualities which 
 no possessor would parade, we are boui-.d to recognise, and 
 
Albert Smith's " Mont Blanc:' 65 
 
 are entitled to admire, in one another. Her Majesty makes 
 few state visits to the English theatres. Chance has dis- 
 closed, however, how the actor's art may be more surely 
 honoured by a courtesy more womanly and quite as 
 royal. 
 
 December 17. — Mr. Albert Smith has for the present 
 season very much improved and amplified his entertainment. 
 The public now sits to be amused, if it will think so, among 
 the houses of a Swiss village, their fronts modelled of life- 
 size, flanking the central point, the stage, upon which 
 Switzerland appears through the scenes of Mr. Beverley. 
 Beside Switzerland stands London, in the person of Mr. 
 Albert Smith, a gentleman to whom justice will not be done 
 if, after the next European war and partition of territory, 
 Mont Blanc is not assigned to him as his just share. It is 
 of no special use to any other potentate, but to him it is a 
 little realm, and one, too, in which the financial condition, 
 as a necessary consequence of the first-rate character of his 
 budget, is in the finest order. The budget for this year is 
 better than ever, and is -developed in an address which it 
 would tax greatly the powers of Mr. Gladstone to deliver. 
 
 Soberly speaking, Mr. Smith has every faculty that is 
 required for the effective execution of an enterprise like 
 that in which he is engaged. He has great ability, a good 
 ready sense of fun, abundant power as a mimic, willingness 
 to spare no personal exertion on the perfecting of his enter- 
 tainment, and a great deal of the most serviceable tact. 
 He tells his stories always with good taste, obtruding none 
 of his jokes, good or bad, but leaving all to find their friends 
 out for themselves. He breaks off every song, and every 
 story, a full minute before there is any possibility of any- 
 one beginning to think that it is tedious. And he contrives 
 to fill two hours and a half with an entertainment, during 
 which he is incessantly before his audience, sometimes 
 grave, but chiefly provoking mirth, without leaving at the 
 
66 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1853. 
 
 end the recollection of one ill-humoured word, or of a 
 syllable that could be construed into undue egotism or 
 impertinence. Some of the new bits of character are among 
 the very best. The remarkably wise English engineer who 
 talks over his pipe, down in the engine-room of a boat on 
 the Lago Maggiore, is one of the best and truest reproduc- 
 tions of character that can be met with in our day. 
 
 Hearty praise of this entertainment should not close with- 
 out a reference to the great pains taken by Mr. Albert Smith 
 in the regulation of his room, and in the abolishing of every 
 usage that interferes in places of amusement with the good- 
 temper of the audience. There are no fees levied for any- 
 thing, and there is no unpunctuality. The lecture begins true 
 to " electric time", and the intervals between the parts are 
 confined to a most exact five minutes. 
 
 December 31. — In his Christmas fairy spectacle of Once 
 upon a Time there were Two Kings, Mr. Planche develops 
 one of the Countess d'Aunois' tales into a drama with 
 enough plot to amuse, and enough sparkle in the dialogue 
 to scintillate agreeably throughout the piece, without any 
 impertinent obtrusiveness. He has abstained almost wholly, 
 and might as well have abstained altogether, from political 
 allusions, for there is no connection between corn-laws, 
 foreign wars, cab-strikes, and fairy-land ; and it is quite right 
 that Mr. Planche should deny practically their existence. 
 Allusions to current events are the life of a pantomime ; but 
 they are the death of a fairy spectacle, presented in good, 
 earnest, fairy style. 
 
 How people dressed in the times of the fairies, even Mr. 
 Planch^ does not appear to know. He has therefore used 
 an excellent discretion in supposing that the characters of 
 his tale dressed as its first readers would suppose them 
 dressed, and accordingly we have shepherds with blue satin 
 body-suits, ruffs and crooks, kings, gentlemen, and ladies, in 
 the style proper to the days of Louis Quatorze. A very 
 
Planchfs " Once upon a Time." 6y 
 
 elegant effect is produced by the use of this quaint and 
 picturesque Louis Quatorze costume, and the actors do 
 their business with an air and grace that would have charmed 
 the great monarch himself and all his court. 
 
 Fairy stories never were more elegantly acted, ridiculous 
 things never were elevated with more grace and finish into 
 an ideal region, than when intrusted to the hands of the 
 Lyceum company. As for Mr. Beverley's scenery, our ad- 
 miration of it makes it difficult to describe. Perhaps it will 
 be enough to say that it is worthy of his reputation, and that 
 in the final scene of the piece a fairy effect has been created 
 of the completest kind, by lengthening the silver skirts of 
 damsels who appear to hover in the air, grouping them into 
 festoons, and giving to their beauty something of a fantastic 
 unearthly character. [Nowadays, 1866, one of the com- 
 monest forms of stage-decoration in a Christmas piece.] 
 This perhaps is the crowning triumph of the theatre so far as 
 mere spectacle is concerned. Madame Vestris appeared as 
 the wife of the shepherd-monarch, acting with consummate 
 ease and good-sense, as she always did and does, and sing- 
 ing with the beauty of voice and articulation which clings to 
 her still. 
 
 Though tolerably early in my visit to Drury Lane, I was 
 afraid, by the aspect of business on the stage, that the pan- 
 tomime was begun. There was a lady in black going 
 through a series of decidedly comical pantomimic gestures, 
 apparently directed to a gentleman in white trousers, with a 
 very broad black shining belt round an extremely narrow 
 waist, a Byron collar, a jacket almost indiscernible through 
 its crowd of glittering buttons, and, tumbling over the front 
 of the shining belt in the direction of his knees, an expanse 
 of shirt that in the streets would have been so alarming as to 
 call for the police to tuck it in. However, it appeared that 
 the lady was Mrs. Lewis as a heroine of domestic life, gone 
 mad in a colour which is against all the established rules, 
 
 E 2 
 
68 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854. 
 
 and that the gentleman was Mr. Belton in the character of 
 her lover and a true British tar. 
 
 The pantomime, which followed duly, seemed to give 
 great pleasure to all the eager young critics present, and this 
 of course is the merit of a pantomime. To the juvenile 
 world indeed the Drury Lane manager more peculiarly 
 addresses himself, the monarch of the introductory burlesque 
 being no other than an enormous humming-top, and his 
 kingdom the land of toys. There is a prince who suifers 
 from low-spirits, and he is restored to bliss by marbles, foot- 
 ball, hop-scotch, and other such youthful felicities. Of the 
 harlequinade I cannot reasonably say much, but there was 
 one good change ; there was plenty of thieving by the clown ; 
 there was some table-talking ; and there was a great deal of 
 very clever and not at all disagreeable posturing, by a family 
 called Ethair, which must be a corruption of I' th' air, for 
 this volatile family is evidently much more at home in the air 
 than on the ground. 
 
 1854, February 11. — Guy Mannering is very nicely pro- 
 duced at the Haymarket. The scenery is new, the grouping 
 is effective, the cast is tolerably good, and there is one piece 
 of acting in it of an excellent and very striking kind. Miss 
 Cushman's melodramatic Meg Merrilies has quite as indis- 
 putably the attributes of genius about it as any piece of 
 poetry or tragedy could have. Such is her power over the 
 intention and feehng of the part that the mere words of it be- 
 come a secondary matter. It is the figure, the gait, the look, 
 the gesture, the tone, by which she puts beauty and passion 
 into language the most indifferent. When these mere arti- 
 fices are continued through a series of scenes, a certain strain 
 becomes apparent, and the effect is not wholly agreeable. 
 Nevertheless it is something to see what the unassisted 
 resources of acting may achieve with the mere idea of a fine 
 part, stripped of fine language, unclothed as it were in words. 
 The human tenderness blending with that Eastern pictur- 
 
Miss Cushman. — "Two Loves and a Life." 6g 
 
 esqueness of gesture, the refined sentiment breaking out 
 from beneath that heavy feebleness and clumsiness of rude 
 old age, are wonderfully startling. Mr. Compton is a good 
 Dominie Sampson, and Miss Harland looks and sings very 
 pleasingly in Lucy Bertram. Mr. Howe is not enough of the 
 ruffian in Dirk Hatteraick. He looks rather an honest fellow; 
 and though he might have been as innocently fond of a 
 garden of tulips as Scott makes his Dutch smuggler, he 
 would not have plundered and murdered on all sides simply 
 to get at that source of natural enjoyment. 
 
 How quaint and pretty the introduction to the pantomime 
 at this theatre is, and what a nice little dancer and actress is 
 Miss Lydia Thompson, the heroine of the three bears, Little 
 Silver Hair ! She is a true heroine for a nursery-story, 
 dancing, and talking, and laughing, as if she meant never to 
 grow bigger, or more foolish, or less cheerful. 
 
 March 25. — At the Adelphi, Messrs. Tom Taylor and 
 Charles Reade, authors of Masks and Faces, have produced 
 another drama. Two Loves and a Life, which will much 
 confirm their credit as well-coupled no less than accom- 
 plished authors. There has not been for years a better 
 thing of its kind upon the stage than Masks and Faces, and 
 here we have another play which also of its kind is excel- 
 lent. Its kind is that which is best expressed to playgoers 
 by the phrase "Adelphi drama". It is the Adelphi drama 
 spirituaHsed, and in that sense a perfect study. The 
 authors have evidently determined that they would deprive 
 the Adelphi audience of not one of its usual delights. 
 There should be in their drama, mystery, villainy, comic 
 business, smugglers, caves, crossing of swords, firing of 
 guns, lost daughters, mysteriously recovered, shrieking 
 their way into their fathers' arms, hair-breadth perils, exe- 
 cutions, reprieves. Mr. O. Smith should be a villain ; Mr. 
 Keeley should have his comic genius, especially in the 
 depiction of mortal terror, well brought out ; Mr. Webster 
 
70 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i854- 
 
 should have a part to make a study of quite in his own 
 vein ; Mr. Leigh iVTurray should have a gentleman's part ; 
 Madame Celeste should have something melodramatic and 
 picturesque which would enable her to display all the great 
 power that is in her ; and Miss Woolgar should be enabled 
 also to bring into play nearly the whole range of her skill. 
 Other actors were to be equally well-fitted — and all this has 
 been done wonderfully. 
 
 There is the Adelphi audience fitted to perfection with 
 its play, and every actor fitted to perfection with his or her 
 - part ; yet, after all, nothing is displayed more perfectly than 
 the true power of the authors of the entertainment. We 
 may imagine how we are indebted, now to Mr. Reade's 
 power of expressing passion, now to Mr. Tom Taylor's 
 constructive skill, everywhere to the skill which both gentle- 
 men have as polished writers, and a quick sense both of 
 humour and of pathos. Thus it happens that we tiave 
 here all the vulgar elements of an Adelphi drama, lifted 
 far above the regions of vulgarity, the oldest tricks of the 
 stage being made new and striking by some touch which 
 sets the stamp of genius upon them. Old as the material 
 all is, this story of Jacobite plots and perils, and of two 
 village women rivalling each other in struggles to save the 
 life of him whom they both love — he is saved at last by 
 the one whose love he does not return — is constructed with 
 a plot so full of matter, and so artfully developed, that the 
 interest of the most practised playgoer is sustained firmly 
 to the end. It abounds in finely conceived situations, 
 which not only satisfy the intellect, but are (speaking in a 
 popular sense) of the most effective kind. Mr. Webster's 
 character of a Jesuit disguised, who is also a man disguised, 
 concealing tender feehngs and hot passion under a hard 
 and cold manner, was so personated as to form one of the 
 best pieces of acting that can now be seen. Madame 
 Celeste never displayed more energy and spirit, more power 
 
"Matilde di Shabran.'' yi 
 
 of depicting half-untutored passion, than in the part which 
 she here sustains. Mr. Keeley, as a meddUng school- 
 master, undergoes many troubles ; his part belonging wholly 
 to the story, for there is no under-plot. And when he is 
 ordered by a shaggy ruffian to walk twenty paces before a 
 loaded pistol in an unconcerned way, with the information 
 that he will be shot if he betrays any emotion, his attempt 
 to walk like a gentleman at ease is an absurdity that steps 
 across to the subUme. 
 
 April 2 2. — It is well that opera-frequenters should be 
 allowed an opportunity of hearing such a work as Matilde 
 di Shabran, ]ns,t revived at Covent Garden, for whoever 
 has heard it knows Rossini better than before. In a 
 greater effort, the master comes to us with the direct pur- 
 pose of compelling our respect and admiration ; in a piece 
 like this, recklessly dashed off as it was, in a few days, to 
 please the good-tempered public that enjoys itself over the 
 humours of the Carnival, the composer does not stand 
 upon his guard, and the familiar view we get of him thus 
 causes us to understand him as we understand a friend. 
 Perhaps a fourth part of this opera was written in bed — 
 Rossini, I think, wrote in bed sometimes — it is certainly not 
 composed ambitiously ; strains that had been used by him- 
 self in former operas were welcome to appear again, if they 
 recurred to him again ; and though the libretto was atro- 
 ciously absurd, that did not matter. The beauty Matilde 
 was to subdue the beast Corradino, and the beast's was to 
 be " a part to tear a cat in" Rossini has no taste for 
 tearing cats, and cared as little for the tremendous situations 
 furnished to his pen as the public, before so ridiculous a 
 story, could be supposed likely to care. He toned the plot 
 all down by his treatment of it to a conventional level, and 
 made out of the heaviest libretto in existence a light enter- 
 tainment full of airy strains of playfulness and delicacy. 
 
 To hear Matilde di Shabran is to hear Rossini at ease, 
 
72 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854. 
 
 making music as if for his own amusement, sometimes 
 starting a fresh strain, and sometimes remembering himself, 
 but always displaying naturally the most characteristic 
 features of his genius. It is an opera chiefly remarkable 
 for the number and great beauty of its concerted pieces for 
 from four to eight voices ; it also contains one or two 
 charming duets, not many solos. The pleasure of the 
 music is enlivened by the humours of one of those buffo 
 characters — a wandering improvisatore, a true carnival per- 
 sonage — for which none ever knew better than Rossini how 
 to provide hints in his music, and which no man knows 
 better than Rbnconi how to sing and act. 
 
 Matilde di Shabran was revived before a full house, 
 which at first listened coldly, but, as the business went 
 on, the force of a good company singing its best began 
 to tell upon the audience, the beauty of the concerted 
 pieces was felt, and long before the end of the first act 
 it had been warmed more than once to a complete enthu- 
 siasm. It enabled Mdlle. Bosio to achieve one of her 
 highest triumphs, and has, in one night, done more to make 
 the public acquainted with her merits than might other- 
 wise have been effected in a month or two. 
 
 This opera, sung and acted as it is, may prove more 
 attractive than its antecedent failures might induce us to 
 suppose. When it was last produced in London, and sup- 
 ported by Madame Persiani, by Rubini, Tamburini, and 
 Lablache, all that is best in the second act, including a 
 duet which is now one of the triumphs of the night, was 
 omitted, and a long scene was retained that spoiled by 
 ridiculous excess the comic part. This is now very judici- 
 ously cut out. In other respects, also, the opera, when it 
 was last produced, was altered in a way which must have 
 helped greatly to assure its failure. 
 
 April 29. — Two or three lines shall record a perform- 
 ance of L'Elisir d'Amore, in justice to Mdlle. Bosio, whose 
 
Ronconi. — Bosio. — Tamberlik. — Cruvelli. 73 
 
 growing success with the public calls for record. This is 
 the opera in which she first appeared before a London 
 audience, and the very great advance she has made is too 
 remarkable to pass unnoticed. As a singer in the pure 
 Italian style, and as both singer and actor in all parts that 
 require no more acting than the expression of natural grace, 
 and of the little charms that belong properly to a woman, 
 she bids fair to become perfect. Of Ronconi's Dulcamara 
 nothing remains to be said. 
 
 The event of the week at Covent Garden was the 
 appearance of Mdlle. Cruvelli in Otello. The lady was 
 nervous, and perhaps the opera was not well selected, for it 
 was one in which it might have been foretold that the chief 
 honours would be all carried off by Signer Tamberlik. The 
 one great enthusiasm that is excited by the performance 
 arises out of the scene between Ronconi and Tamberlik, 
 wound up with a duet which produces Signor Tamberlik's 
 wonderful chest-note. Mdlle. Cruvelli had a courteous but 
 not a genial reception. 
 
 May 6. — The best of operas, Beethoven's Fidelio, is now 
 assured a place on the Italian stage. Mdlle. Cruvelli has 
 of old shown occasional want of reverence for operas of 
 lower mark, which in her hands have suffered mutilation. 
 Her Leonora is not only the sole passable Leonora now to. 
 be had, but is a conscientious and most accurate perform- 
 ance. But, admirably as she sings her part, Mdlle. Cruvelli 
 does not act it. She appears on all occasions to perform 
 rather with all her head than with all her heart. The parts 
 assumed by her are always declaimed well, sometimes with, 
 great spirit and vivacity, but they are not, in any high sense 
 of the term, acted. 
 
 May 27. — Verdi's Rigoletto has attracted two full houses- 
 The music is tolerable, the melodrama which forms the 
 basis of the libretto, Victor Hugo's Le Roi s amuse, is 
 highly spiced and has many striking points, the stage- 
 
74 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854. 
 
 appointments are of the very best, the singing is good, and 
 the fool's tragedy is driven home to the heart by Ronconi's 
 acting as the ill-fated jester Rigoletto, that being his finest 
 tragic part. 
 
 The new drama of The Marble Heart, translated from the 
 French and played at the Adelphi Theatre on Monday 
 night, is chiefly to be noticed for a very striking piece of 
 acting by Mr. Leigh Murray. He plays a young sculptor 
 whom the seductions of a Parisian fine lady have enticed 
 from the labours of his studio and the enjoyments of his 
 home, and whose sensitive heart, after frenzied alternations 
 of hope, triumph, misgivings, and despair, is finally 
 shattered against the lady's heart of marble. There is a 
 scene in the fourth act where he learns his fate, struggles 
 against it, will not submit to it, tries every vain expedient 
 of indignation and reproach, and is by turns defiant to the 
 highest pitch and abject to the lowest and most pitiable, 
 ■while the lady sits all the while calm and unmoved against 
 the passion thus foaming and dashing itself against her, 
 which is as good a piece of natural tragic acting as has been 
 seen for a long time. 
 
 Its only defect marks strongly the defect of the whole 
 piece. It was too much prolonged. The scenes never 
 stopped where they ought to have stopped. In every case, 
 no matter how good the thing was, we had too much of the 
 good thing. The best passages in the fourth act were 
 twice as long as they should have been, and the whole of 
 the first and the whole of the fifth act might have been 
 spared altogether. The first was a kind of allegory or 
 dream, in which the actors, who afterwards figure in 
 modern Paris, present themselves as denizens of ancient 
 Greece — a poor labouring girl as a slave, a newspaper editor 
 as Diogenes, and so forth — but the drift of it all was not clear, 
 the performance not remarkable, and the connection with 
 the subsequent drama very imperfectly made out. The 
 
"The Marble Heart" — Mario. — Cruvelli. 75 
 
 last act, being entirely occupied by the death of the young 
 sculptor, had only the effect of weakening, to the full extent 
 of its continuance, the very tragical and affecting picture of 
 his despair. 
 
 June 3. — The uncertainty which has attached to Signor 
 Mario's voice, since what we suppose we may therefore call 
 his disastrous Russian campaign, was curiously exemphfied 
 on Tuesday night. His first air in the Puritani, A te 
 cara, was given beautifully, and all went well until towards 
 the conclusion of the act, when there was an evident abate- 
 ment of the rare sweetness of his tones. At last the voice 
 flickered and went out suddenly, as a gaslight, at the close 
 of the scene with Henrietta, during the somewhat trying 
 outburst of musical affection, Non parlar di lei. In the 
 second act Arturo does not appear, but the third depends 
 mainly upon him, and of the third therefore the audience 
 was disappointed. It was found necessary to substitute a 
 portion of another opera. 
 
 On Monday night Mdlle. Cruvelli made her last appear- 
 ance, and that was before the audience of an extra night. 
 Her services had been confined latterly to extra nights. It 
 was only by accident that she had been brought before 
 the subscribers on the previous Saturday, when, on account 
 of the illness of Signor Tagliafico, Don Giovanni was given 
 as a substitute for two acts of Masaniello and L'Elisir 
 d'Amore. The audience that went to hear Auber and 
 Donizetti absolutely grumbled to itself at being put off with 
 — Mozart ! In cold justice, a certain amount of admiration 
 will be always accorded to Mdlle. Cruvelli's powers; but while 
 she sings like a musical instrument endowed with locomo- 
 tion, and acts, even in her few energetic bursts, like an 
 ingenious automaton, she never will excite that sense of 
 personal sympathy, that idea of hearty mutual goodwill, 
 which, rightly or wrongly, an English audience always 
 wishes to establish with its entertainers. 
 
76 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S4- 
 
 June 17. — Three of Madame Grisi's farewell nights have 
 now been devoted to the performance of Lucrezia Borgia , 
 and the first three nights of Madame Viardot — who, to the 
 great joy of the public, reappears at length upon the stage 
 — have been occupied by the Prophete. Both operas have 
 drawn overflowing houses. 
 
 Apart from all appreciation of good acting, we might 
 wonder very much at the attractive power of the merely 
 pretty music — to be sure, the utmost he could furnish — with 
 which Donizetti has beset, in the case of the first- named 
 opera, an extremely powerful libretto ; but the truth is, that 
 Madame Grisi's Lucrezia Borgia cannot be thought of apart 
 from the fine acting by which she has created it into one of 
 her best personations. 
 
 Of the Prophhe, and of Madame Viardot's Fides, it is 
 enough to say that they have lost in this year's representa- 
 tion none of their old sterling value. Madame Viardot, the 
 most subtle and spiritual of our actress singers, is to Grisi 
 what Ronconi is to Lablache, not so much less or greater, 
 but in such manner differing. 
 
 July I. — Madame Viardot has materially strengthened 
 the cast of Don Giovanni by taking the part of Donna 
 Anna, which was intrusted in the earlier part of the season 
 to Mdlle. Cruvelli. Except in the one air Or sai chi 
 r onore, which had the benefit of all Mdlle. Cruvelli's 
 physical power, and was one of the few fine " bits" in her 
 acting, there is no part of the character in which comparison 
 can be instituted between the two performers that does not 
 make one heartily glad of the change. 
 
 The Prophete has been repeated, and Madame Grisi has 
 been singing in The Huguenots. The heroines of Meyer- 
 beer are unsuited to Madame Grisi's genius, and Valentine 
 is but the least unsuccessful of her personation of them. 
 Her scene with Raoul in the third act is indeed magnificent, 
 but it is reached only through two acts and a half of com- 
 
Grist. — Viardot. — Lablache. — Ronconi. 77 
 
 parative failure. I do not mean real failure, for that could 
 scarcely be ; but there are characters, and this is one of 
 them, in which the breadth of style and boldness of effect 
 which render Madame Grisi's performances perhaps the 
 most popular on the Italian stage, have not fair play. Just 
 in the same way there are other characters — such as Norma, 
 or Lucrezia Borgia — that would be represented ill by the 
 subtle play of light and shade, the accumulation of effects 
 minutely studied, in which lies the charm of Madame 
 Viardot's acting. Daguerreotype Madame Viardot sud- 
 denly at any moment during her personation of Fides, and, 
 though she may be only passing at that moment from one 
 gesture to another, you will fix upon the plate a picturesque 
 and expressive figure, which is moreover a figure indicating 
 in its face and in its attitude that precise feeling which be- 
 longed to the story at the moment chosen. A personation 
 of this kind is required for the perfection of the part of 
 Valentine, a part in which the special gifts of Madame Grisi 
 are only once or twice brought into use. 
 
 July 15. — Signor Lablache brings with him to Covent 
 Garden the means not only of greatly strengthening old 
 casts, but also of producing several operas to the success of 
 which he is indispensable. Almost a part of this artist's 
 personal and inalienable property is the character of the 
 maestro in the few merry scenes that are all man endures of 
 Gnecco's three-act Prova d'un Opera Seria. But the opera- 
 goer who enjoyed that musical farce, interlude, or afterpiece, 
 when Lablache made its whole glory in the Haymarket, now 
 finds the enjoyment of it trebled by the addition to his genial 
 humour of Ronconi's more than Buckstonian drolleries as the 
 poor poet, and of Madame Viardot's piquancy as the perverse 
 prima donna. On Tuesday evening this piece of fun was 
 performed after no more than a portion of an opera, in 
 order that Her Majesty might have an opportunity of seeing 
 it without waiting till midnight ; — denial to spectators of a 
 
78 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854. 
 
 decent hour of bedtime being the great drawback upon its 
 performance in the usual manner as an afterpiece. 
 
 August 12. — Le Comte Ory is wonderfully pretty, and if it 
 should fail to hold its place upon our stage it will fail only by 
 reason of its Ubretto, which is not merely stupid, but detest- 
 ably immoral. The count is a libidinous young scamp, who, 
 hearing of a castle full of ladies, plots to get among them 
 with his knights, and to do so uses the cloak of rehgion. 
 Twice an attempt is made to excite laughter by a comic use 
 of prayer. 
 
 That music so charming as that of Le Comte Ory should 
 be set to the most abominable of libretti is surely great pity. 
 Would it not be worth while to write another book for it ? 
 The task could not be difficult, and no wrong would be 
 done to Rossini, since the music was not originally written 
 for the book that is now used, and the notes therefore are 
 not by any means wedded to the incidents of the existing 
 story. 
 
 September 23. — At the Adelphi the revival of Air. Morris 
 Barnett's Monsieur Jacques for a few nights, coming in aid of 
 old Adelphi pieces, fills the house as it should. It is some 
 time since Monsieur Jacques with his darling opera, and his 
 monomania touching the return of Mariane, left the stage 
 in the person of Mr. Morris Barnett. That gentleman re- 
 appears now for twelve nights. 
 
 October 21. — Pericles, Prince of Tyre, that Eastern romance 
 upon which Shakespeare spent some master-touches as a 
 dramatist, and which he may have re-adapted to the stage 
 even while yet a prentice to his art, has been produced at' 
 Sadler's Wells by, Mr. Phelps, with the care due to a work 
 especially of interest to all students of Shakespeaie, and with 
 the splendour proper to an Eastern spectacle. 
 
 The story was an old one ; there is a version of it even in 
 Anglo-Saxon. Gower had made it the longest story in his 
 Confessio Amantis, and the one told with the greatest care • 
 
Sadlei^s Wells: "Pericles!' 79 
 
 and the dramatist in using it made use of Gower. The 
 story was a popular one of an Eastern prince whose Hfe is 
 spent upon a sea of trouble. Everywhere he is pursued by 
 misfortune. He seeks a beautiful wife at the risk of death, 
 through the good old Eastern plan of earning her by answer- 
 ing a riddle. She proves a miracle of lust. He flies from 
 her, and is pursued by the strong wrath of her father. To 
 avoid this he is forced to become an exile from his house and 
 people. He sails to Tharsus, where he brings liberal relief 
 to a great famine, and is hailed as a saviour ; but to Tharsus 
 he is pursued by warning of the coming wrath of his great 
 enemy. Again he becomes a fugitive a4cross the sea. The 
 sea is pitiless, and tosses him from coast to coast until it 
 throws him ashore, the only man saved from the wreck of his 
 vessel near Pentapolis. But in Pentapolis reigns a good king, 
 whose daughter — still inthetrue fashion of a story-book — is to 
 be courted by a tourney between rival princes. Pericleswould 
 take part in such ambition, and the sea casts him up a suit 
 of armour. He strives, and is victor. He excels all in the 
 tourney, in the song, and in the dance ; the king is generous 
 and the daughter kind. But the shadow of his evil fate is 
 still over Pericles. He distrusts a thing so strange as happy 
 fortune, and thinks of it only " 'tis the king's subtlety to 
 have my life". Fortune is, however, for once really on his 
 side. He marries the Princess Thaisa, and, being afterwards 
 informed that his great enemy is dead and that his own 
 subjcts rebel against his continued absence, he sets sail with 
 her from Tyre. 
 
 The good gifts seem, however, only to have been granted 
 by Fortune that she might increase his wretchedness tenfold 
 by taking them away. The sea again " washes heaven and 
 hell" when his ship is fairly launched upon it, and in a storm 
 
 so terrible that 
 
 " the seaman's whistle 
 Is as a whisper in the ears of death, 
 Unheard, 
 
So Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S4- 
 
 the nurse brings on deck to Pericles a new-born infant, with 
 the tidings that its mother Thaisa is dead. The sailors, 
 believing that a corpse on board maintains the storm about 
 the ship, demand that the dead queen be thrown into the 
 sea. Most wretched queen ! mourns the more wretched 
 prince, 
 
 " A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear ; 
 No light, no fire : the unfriendly elements 
 Forgot thee utterly ; nor have I time 
 To give thee hallowed to thy grave, but straight 
 Must cast thee, scarcely coffined, in the ooze ; 
 Where, for a monument upon thy bones, 
 And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale 
 And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse. 
 Lying with simple shells." 
 
 Being at this time near Tharsus, however, and remem- 
 bering that Tharsus owes to him a debt of gratitude, Pericles 
 makes for Tharsus, in order that he may place his infant with 
 the least possible delay upon sure ground and under tender 
 nursing. 
 
 The daughter there grows up under her father's evil star. 
 "This world to me", she says, " is like a lasting storm, whir- 
 ring me from my friends." The Queen of Tharsus becomes 
 jealous and resolves to murder her. It is by the sea-shore 
 that the deed is to be done. When Pericles comes for his 
 child her tomb is shown to him, and under his last woe his 
 mind breaks down. He puts to sea again with his wrecked 
 spirit, and, though the sea again afflicts him with its storms, 
 he rides them out. 
 
 I have not told the familiar story thus far for the sake of 
 telling it, but for the sake of showing in the most con- 
 venient way what is really the true spirit of the play. At 
 this point of the tale the fortune of Pericles suddenly 
 changes. A storm of unexpected happiness breaks with 
 immense force upon hira. The sea and the tomb seem to 
 
Sadler's Wells: "Pericles." 8i 
 
 give up their dead, and from the lowest depths of prostra- 
 tion the spirit of the prince is exalted to the topmost height, 
 in scenes which form most worthily the climax of the drama. 
 "O Helicanus," he then cries, 
 
 " O Helicanus, strike me, honoured sir ; 
 Give me a gash, put me to present pain ; 
 Lest this great sea of joys, rushing upon me, 
 O'erbear the shores of my mortality. 
 And drown me with their sweetness.'' 
 
 In telling such a story as this, Shakespeare felt — and young 
 as he may have been, his judgment decided rightly — that it 
 should be shown distinctly as a tale such as 
 
 " Hath been sung at festivals, 
 On Ember eves and holy ales" ; 
 
 and he therefore brought forward Gower himself very much 
 in the character of an Eastern story-teller to begin the narra- 
 tive and to carry it on to the end, subject to the large 
 interruption of five acts of dramatic illustration. A tale 
 was being told ; every person was to feel that, although 
 much of it would be told to the eye. But in the revival of 
 the play, Mr. Phelps was left to choose between two diffi- 
 culties. The omission of Gower would be a loss to the 
 play, in an artistic sense, yet the introduction of Gower 
 before every act would very probably endanger its effect in 
 a theatrical sense, unless the part were spoken by an actor 
 of unusual power. The former plan was taken ; and in 
 adding to certain scenes in the drama passages of his own 
 writing, strictly confined to the explanation of those parts of 
 the story which Shakespeare represents Gower as narrating 
 between the acts, Mr. Phelps may have used his best 
 judgment as a manager. Certainly, unless he could have 
 been himself the Gower as well as the Pericles of the piece, 
 the frequent introduction of a story-telling gentleman in a 
 long coat and long curls would have been an extremely 
 2 ^ 
 
82 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S4- 
 
 hazardous experiment, even before such an earnest audience 
 as that at Sadler's Wells. 
 
 The change did inevitably, to a certain extent, disturb 
 the poetical effect of the story ; but assuming its necessity, 
 it was effected modestly and well. The other changes also 
 were in no case superfluous, and were made with consider- 
 able judgment. The two scenes at Mitylene, which present 
 Marina pure as an ermine that no filth can touch, were 
 compressed into one ; and although the plot of the drama 
 was not compromised by a false delicacy, there remained not 
 a syllable at which true delicacy could have conceived 
 offence. The calling of Blount and his Mistress was 
 covered in the pure language of Marina with so hearty a 
 contempt, that the scene was really one in which the 
 purest minds might be those which would take the most 
 especial pleasure. 
 
 The conception of the character of Pericles by Mr. 
 Phelps seemed to accord exactly with the view just taken 
 of the play. He was the Prince pursued by evil fate. A 
 melancholy that could not be shaken off oppressed him 
 even in the midst of the gay court of King Simonides, and 
 the hand of Thaisa was received with only the rapture of a 
 love that dared not feel assured of its good fortune. Mr. 
 Phelps represented the Prince sinking gradually under the 
 successive blows of fate, with an unostentatious truthful- 
 ness ; but in that one scene which calls forth all the strength 
 of the artist,' the recognition of Marina and the sudden 
 lifting of the Prince's bruised and fallen spirit to an ecstasy 
 of joy, there was an opportunity for one of the most effec- 
 tive displays of the power of an actor that the stage, as it 
 now is, affords. With immense energy, yet with a true 
 feeling for the pathos of the situation that had the most 
 genuine effect, Mr. Phelps achieved in this passage a 
 triumph marked by plaudit after plaudit. They do not 
 
Sadler's Wells: "Pericles!' 83 
 
 applaud rant at Sadler's Wells. The scene was presented 
 truly by the actor and felt fully by his audience. 
 
 The youthful voice and person, and the quiet acting of 
 Miss Edith Heraud, who made her debut as Marina, greatly 
 helped to set forth the beauty of that scene. The other 
 parts had also been judiciously allotted, so that each actor 
 did what he or she was best able to do, and did it up to the 
 full measure of the ability of each. Miss Cooper gave 
 much effect to the scene of the recovery of Thaisa, which 
 was not less well felt by those who provided the appoint- 
 ments of the stage, and who marked that portion of the 
 drama by many delicacies of detail. 
 
 Of the scenery indeed it is to be said that so much 
 splendour of decoration is rarely governed by so pure a 
 taste. The play, of which the text is instability of fortune, 
 has its characteristic place of action on the sea. Pericles is 
 perpetually shown (literally as well as metaphorically) 
 tempest-tost, or in the immediate vicinity of the treacherous 
 water ; and this idea is most happily enforced at Sadler's 
 Wells by scene-painter and machinist. They reproduce 
 the rolling of the billows and the whistling of the winds 
 when Pericles lies senseless, a wrecked man on a shore. 
 When he is shown on board ship in the storm during the 
 birth of Marina, the ship tosses vigorously. When he sails 
 at last to the temple of Diana of the Ephesians, rowers take 
 their places on their banks, the vessel seems to glide along 
 the coast, an admirably-painted panorama slides before the 
 eye, and the whole theatre seems to be in the course of 
 actual transportation to the temple at Ephesus, which is the 
 crowning scenic glory of the play. The dresses, too, are 
 brilliant. As beseems an Eastern story, the events all pass 
 among princes. Now the spectator has a scene presented 
 to him occupied by characters who appear to have stepped 
 out of a Greek vase ; and presently he looks into an Assyrian 
 
84 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854, 
 
 palace and sees figures that have come to life and colour 
 from the stones of Nineveh. There are noble banquets 
 and glittering processions, and in the banquet-hall of King 
 Simonides there is a dance which is a marvel of glitter, 
 combinations of colour, and quaint picturesque effect. 
 There are splendid trains of courtiers, there are shining 
 rows of vestal virgins, and there is Diana herself in the sky. 
 
 We are told that the play of Pericles enjoyed, for its own 
 sake, when it first appeared, a run of popularity that excited 
 the surprise and envy of some playwrights, and became 
 almost proverbial. It ceased to be acted in the days of 
 Queen Anne ; and whether it would attract now as a mere 
 acted play, in spite of the slight put upon it by our fathers 
 and grandfathers, it is impossible to say, since the Pericles 
 of Sadler's Wells may be said to succeed only because it 
 is a spectacle. 
 
 October 28. — At the Olympic Theatre a new two-act 
 drama, called The Trustee, introduces Mr. A. Wigan in the 
 character of a high-minded old Frenchman, intrusted during 
 war-times with a large sum by a friend who falls in battle. 
 The care of the money in an unsettled district overrun by 
 plunderers, and one especial terror, having reduced the old 
 man to a state of great nervous prostration, he removes the 
 money to a new. hiding-place while in a state of somnam- 
 bulism, and afterwards forgets what he has done. The 
 consequence is that, when his daughter's bridegroom and 
 his friend's heir arrive on the same day, he beheves his 
 trust-money to be lost, and feels bound in honour to replace 
 it with the dowry that was to have secured his daughter's 
 happiness. All ends well, but in the course of the tale Mr. 
 Wigan has opportunities of expressing many shades of 
 character and changes of emotion, which he does with so 
 much fidelity to nature, as well as to the highest rules of 
 art, that he gives attractiveness to a little drama possessing 
 in itself but slender merit. 
 
Alfred Wigan. — Mark Lemon. 85 
 
 December 2. — The Adelphi is indebted to Mr. Mark 
 Lemon for another most successful farce, The Railway 
 Belle, which keeps the house ringing with laughter. Mr. 
 James Rogers, as a waiter desperately mad with love for 
 the belle of the refreshment station, distinguishes himself 
 greatly in this piece of genuine mirth ; Mr. Selby is also 
 very amusing ; and Miss Wyndham, who is the belle in dis- 
 pute between the waiter, the station-master, and Mr. Samuel 
 Greenhorne the passenger, forms a delightful centre of con- 
 fusion. 
 
 Three years ago Mr. Lemon had two pieces of mark in 
 course of performance at two theatres. At the Adelphi 
 Sea and Land, with a fine part for Mrs. Keeley, of a 
 generous nature half brutalised by ill-usage, slow of in- 
 tellect, and quick of feeling. When that was produced 
 there was being acted at the Haymarket a new play of 
 Mr. Lemon's, entitled Mind Your Own Business, a tale of 
 English life a hundred years ago, but embodying the 
 character and sentiment which belongs to every day. The 
 nominal hero was a good-natured meddler, whimsically 
 played by Mr. Buckstone, who involved the plot by attend- 
 ing to everybody's business but his own. The real hero 
 was a country squire, whose despair on finding himself re- 
 jected by the damsel upon whose consent he had too con- 
 fidently built, carried him to the dissipations of town life, 
 drinking and dicing, from which he was rescued by the 
 sister of the girl to .whom his addresses had been paid — 
 that sister to whom he found in the end that his devotion 
 was more properly due. This was a part in which Mr. 
 Webster shone. The change from buoyant eagerness, 
 tempered by a certain manly shyness, into a dull drunken 
 debasement, through which gleams of a better nature are 
 still strongly visible, was a piece of that true acting in which 
 transitions apparently the most extreme are kept within 
 probability and nature. Miss Reynolds' and Mrs Stirling 
 
86 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854. 
 
 gave interest to the two sisters. The underplot was chiefly 
 sustained by Mr. Keeley in the character of a lucky and 
 unlucky footman, happy in an eccentric nabob's Mrge 
 legacy, and miserable in having been married for it by a 
 vulgar widow, whose magnificent airs and fine company 
 he nevertheless sadly mortified by always unconsciously 
 resuming the plush in his speech, and at last more deliber- 
 ately reassuming it on his person. 
 
 December 9. — Mr. Charles Mathews has achieved fresh 
 success at the Lyceum, and again sustains the credit of his 
 theatre mainly by the force of his own talents. His last 
 farce-comedy, adapted from the French, and entitled 
 Aggravating Sam, is one of the merriest possible of those 
 pieces of absurdity in which the best acting is above all 
 things essential, and of which all the burthen therefore falls 
 on himself. Mr. Sam Naggins finds an exquisite delight in 
 aggravating all people with whom he comes in contact. For 
 the sore points in his fellow-creatures he seeks carefully, and 
 when he has found them rubs at them with an impish malice. 
 The farce contains many characters, of whom all and each are 
 brought into a high state of -excitement by the contrivances 
 of Aggravating Sam. It would be idle to tell the plot. Mr. 
 Charles Mathews, as the man with the propensity to mis- 
 chief, is the soul of it. He feels his way into every bright 
 scheme for the aggravation of a fellow-creature with a serious 
 carefulness, and a philosophical and curious forecasting of 
 results, which is wonderfully ludicrous. AVhen he has 
 carried out a plan of annoyance, he watches for its effect 
 with the rehsh of a scapegrace boy waiting the explosion of 
 a cracker tied to some unsuspecting creature's tail. Finally, 
 when the explosion does take place, he becomes radiant with 
 triumph at the consequences, and his success of course is 
 welcomed with incessant laughter. 
 
 December 16. — At the Adelphi a new drama has been 
 produced, of which Madame Dudevant is the author, and 
 
Charles Mathews. — "Pierre the Foundling!' 87 
 
 the adapter Mr. Boucicault. It is called Pierre the Found- 
 ling, and is, in fact, an idyllic representation of the rural life 
 of Brittany. Its story is unexaggerated and brief, being 
 employed only for the eliciting of a picture of manners. 
 Mr. Webster is a noble-minded Breton peasant, protected 
 in childhood by and devoted in youth to Madame Celeste, 
 a gentle widow, suffering much from the persecution of Miss 
 Cuthbert, a cruel dame, her neighbour, who for a long time 
 threatens her with a false claim by which she can be ruined. 
 Miss Woolgar is the widow's sister-in-law, a rustic coquette 
 of Brittany; Mr. Keeley is a right-hearted peasant, through 
 whose stupidity flash gleams of shrewdness; and Mrs. 
 Keeley is a sturdy, Breton serving-maid, devoted to the 
 fortunes of her mistress. 
 
 December 30. — What English author was it who, being in 
 a country town at which he had been a schoolboy, ordered 
 the host at his inn to get him some of the works of a certain 
 pieman that he had once thought exquisitely delicate ? The 
 pies were brought to table and disgusted him. It is not so 
 with us in keeping Christmas at the theatre. It is not so 
 with the pie in which four-and-twenty blackbirds were baked, 
 now being served up at Drury Lane. That remains a 
 pretty dish to set before a king, a judge, or a prime minister. 
 Nobody is dignified or wise enough to make a wry face at 
 it. One is disposed, indeed, to bring to book the author, 
 and on behalf of all children to request that he will show us 
 his authorities for considering the history of the four-and- 
 twenty blackbirds as a necessary sequel to the accidents of 
 Jack and Jill. No doubt he is justified by diligent research 
 among the nurseries of England in asserting that Jill was so 
 far wanting in domestic education as to be unable to make 
 a pie, that this was the cause of her misfortune, that the 
 making of a pie was its remedy, and that the pie she made 
 was the well-known pie of blackbirds mentioned in the 
 Song of Sixpence. But we must take all this for granted. 
 
88 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1854. 
 
 for the author has himself taken for granted whatever he 
 pleased, and whatever has pleased him must please us and 
 all spectators of his pantomime. We are busied among 
 visions of good things, jams of all sorts, sauces, spices, 
 pickles, and we are refreshed in a temple of salad; but we 
 do not know what we see, nor do we care to understand 
 anything more than that it is all reasonably good, that it 
 gratifies the eye, tickles the ear, and vivifies the fancy. The 
 Drury Lane pantomime is like one of the sauces repre- 
 sented in it, an inscrutable compound, but not witliout relish. 
 In the pantomime proper there is a profusion of harlequin- 
 ade, there are feats of strength by "the Italian brothers" 
 -and others, and the fun attempted is brisk enough. The 
 martial feelings of the nation are also effectively appealed 
 to at Drury Lane as at many other theatres. 
 
 The Adelphi, indeed, in its Christmas entertainment, 
 appeals almost exclusively to our interest in the Crimean 
 War. It is entitled Zigzag, or the Adventures of the Danube 
 and the Pruth in search of Truth, the rivers being imper- 
 sonated by Mrs. Keeley and Miss Woolgar. It has little 
 story, being chiefly a vehicle for the introduction of effective 
 scenery, views in the Baltic and Black Seas, in Wallachia, 
 Constantinople, St. Petersburg, etc., and of such effective 
 business as belongs to a dramatic enforcement of the 
 popular opinions about the Russians, and a putting of them 
 down, so far as it lies in the power of an enterprising play- 
 house manager to do it. The piece is received with full 
 applause, and a French dance. La Flotte, now extremely 
 popular in Paris, has been introduced with success. I can- 
 not say that I find much wit, and certainly I see no grace, 
 in the representation of a naval combat by the dancing of 
 ladies and gentlemen with ships on their heads. 
 
 At the Princess's Theatre there is also La Flotte intro- 
 duced into the pantomime, which is on the subject of Blue 
 
Christmas Pieces in War Time. 89 
 
 Beard, and is written by Mr. J. M. Morton, the author of 
 some of our funniest farces. His pantomime, however, so 
 far from being particularly funny, is remarkably dull, in its 
 introductory part ; neither is there anything at all striking in 
 the tricks or transformations of the harlequinade. The 
 most effective thing is a concluding scene that represents 
 the quarter-deck of a man-of-war (for here, too, we are 
 warriors as well as Christmas merrymakers) on the eve of 
 an action, and in action. The manoeuvres are cleverly gone 
 through by a group of children ; and the use of children to 
 represent the officers and sailors, providing a small scale of 
 comparison, magnifies the entire scene, and makes the 
 illusion excellent. 
 
 Little Bopeep who Lost her Sheep is the heroine of the 
 Haymarket pantomime, and the introductory burlesque is 
 a neat little story very elegantly put upon the stage, with 
 Arcadian shepherd scenery, and bursts' of fairy splendour. 
 The succeeding pantomime is not too lively, but it is care- 
 fully and handsomely got up, is well worked, and, without 
 omitting all allusion to the war, contains less reference to it 
 than occurs in many other houses, a reserve which perhaps 
 v/e owe to the mishap that befell a piece here called The 
 Sentinel of the Alma. Senora Perea Nena, the popular 
 Spanish dancer, who shakes her petticoats and observes 
 curiously the twinkhng of her swift, impatient toes, has left 
 us, and the manager of the Haymarket has brought back 
 the young lady who so delightfully imitated her at the 
 St. James's Theatre, Miss Lydia Thompson, the little 
 Silver-hair of last year's Haymarket pantomime. A better 
 representative of Little Bopeep could scarcely have been 
 found. The best performer in the harlequinade was the 
 pantaloon, Mr. Barnes, a name honoured of pantomime. 
 The scenery throughout was excellent, and one particular 
 transformation, of a party in a ball-room, with couches and 
 
90 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i85S- 
 
 chairs, into the same party accommodated with a coach and 
 horses, was the cleverest thing of its kind done at our 
 theatres in Christmas, 1854. 
 
 Mr. Planch^'s burlesque is to be found, not at the 
 Lyceum, but at the Olympic. The subject is The Yellow 
 Dwarf, a good story, followed throughout with that con- 
 scientious resolve to enter heart and soul into the spirit of 
 fairy-lore which makes this writer's Christmas pieces always 
 so delightful. The story has been chosen evidently with a 
 view to providing a character in which Mr. Robson might 
 display his rare power of combining tragic passion and real 
 hints of the terrible with ludicrous burlesque, and seldom 
 has that clever actor been so neatly fitted with a part. As a 
 piece — on the score of Hterary merit — Mr. Planche's Yellow 
 Dwarf is more complete than any other holiday perform- 
 ance, and Mr. Robson's Yellow Dwarf we should take to be 
 the best specimen now to be seen of burlesque acting. 
 
 January 20, 1855. — At the St. James's Theatre an 
 entertainment has been provided from one of the most 
 perfect and touching of Greek legends. Akestis is a lyrical 
 play, adapted by Mr. Henry Spicer from the French of 
 another adapter of Euripides, M. Hippolyte Lucas ; and set 
 off by a careful performance of some of the music which 
 Gliick wedded to the subject, and by the good classical 
 acting of Miss Vandenhoff The simple beauty of the 
 fable itself, breaking through all disguise, asserts itself to 
 every heart. It is a story for all time, typical of woman's 
 love and of man's friendship. Alcestis gives her own life 
 for her husband's, and the man, more selfish than the 
 woman, can accept the sacrifice. The husband's selfish- 
 ness, again, is the first motive of his grief, when he has lost 
 so noble a possession as a wife like this. The other part 
 of the fable touches on another of the best and simplest 
 feelings of humanity. The guest of Admetus, before whom 
 the grief of the heart must be concealed, and of whom 
 
"The Yellow Dwarf'.' — " Alcestis." 91 
 
 the pleasure must be set before our pain, comes more 
 than once in a lifetime to us all. It is not always a 
 Hercules. It may be the little child left to a widower, 
 whose smiles must be awakened, and whose laughter must 
 be echoed, even while a wound is bleeding in the father's 
 heart. It may be the chance friend who calls upon us at a 
 time when we are occupied by sorrow, before whom we 
 take care to come with dry eyes, and in whose presence we 
 put aside our griefs to do the courtesies belonging to fit 
 welcome. Such hospitalities, such acts of self-forgetfulness, 
 are, it is true, sacrifices far less difficult than was that of 
 Alcestis. Admetus, who could rise to one, could not rise 
 to the other. But they are honest sacrifices that by no 
 means ceased with the noble hne of Pherae. To the end 
 of time Admetus will have guests, though he may never 
 have another guest like Hercules, to bring him the Alcestis 
 that his heart desires. 
 
 Mainly, then, to the eternal truth and beauty of the fable 
 — to the perfectness of its appeal to every heart — is the 
 success of Alcestis at this theatre to be attributed. Such 
 good fortune is largely aided by the musical accompani- 
 ment, selected from Gliick's choruses, and arranged by Sir 
 Henry Bishop, who presides over the orchestra. But 
 neither plot nor music could have secured the success 
 desired had not the Alcestis of Miss Vandenhoff expressed 
 not unworthily both the classical form and the pathetic 
 reality of the story. The second act, which is by far the 
 best, comprises that scene of farewell between Alcestis, her 
 husband, and her children, upon which Euripides has dwelt 
 so largely. Little departure is here made from the Greek 
 text, and the sustained beauty of the situation becomes 
 irresistible. 
 
 February lo.^Miss Fanny Kemble's reading of the 
 Midsuin77ier Night's Dream, backed by a performance of 
 Mendelssohn's exquisite music to the play, has filled 
 
92 .Journal of a London Playgoer. [i855- 
 
 Exeter Hall. The great beauty of the reading is the 
 charm which Miss Kemble throws over the characters of 
 Hermia and Helena, the clearness with which she dis- 
 tinguishes between them, and the completeness of her 
 success in bringing out the character of Helena as some- 
 thing true and womanly. 
 
 There is a new drama by Mr. Boucicault at the Adelphl 
 It is a little too long, and its interest, which is very great, 
 is here and there too painful to pass under the name of 
 entertainment ; but it is unusually clever, and throughout 
 very original in treatment. The drama is entitled Jatiet 
 Pride, and is in five acts — two said to be acts of prologue, 
 three said to be acts of drama. The action all turns on the 
 sin and misery that follow an inveterate addiction to drink. 
 Richard Pride, unable to break himself of drunken habits, 
 becomes a forger, and escapes with a young wife to Paris, 
 where she suffers cruel deprivation, and her infant is perish- 
 ing. He steals for drink-money the means of buying 
 medicine, at the last moment when medicine can be of use; 
 and his starved wife totters with her dying infant to the 
 Foundling Hospital one winter's night, yields it up to the 
 hands of strangers, and perishes in the agony of that hard 
 sacrifice. She dies in the street, and there her drunken 
 husband finds her. The story from this point takes many 
 ingenious and interesting turns. 
 
 Richard, returned to England after many years under a 
 false name, lives in the family of an old French watchmaker 
 who had owed debts of gratitude to Richard's wife, and for 
 her sake had taken her child from the hospital to live in his 
 house as friend and housekeeper and manager (a very 
 bustling manager) of all affairs. This daughter, Janet, is, 
 of course, the heroine of the drama. How she, an innocent 
 girl, is brought to the dock of the Old Bailey for a crime 
 committed by her father, and how she is saved only by his 
 making the discovery in court that he was on the point of 
 
Fanny Kemble. — Boucicaulfs "Janet Pride:' 93 
 
 crushing his own daughter, as he had already crushed his 
 wife, the drama most effectively sets forth. 
 
 Madame Celeste performs with her best skill the part of 
 mother in the prologue, and of daughter in the play itself. 
 The drunken airs and variations in the temper — the half- 
 sober efforts to stare down suspicion and to hide fear when 
 in the presence of one who may detect a crime — the faint 
 strugglings of a naturally gentle heart, overpowered by the 
 curses that come in the train of drunkenness — are marked 
 by Mr. Webster in his part of Richard with peculiar refine- 
 ment. The simple-hearted old French watchmaker had 
 in Mr. Selby a most admirable representative ; and Mr. 
 Keeley, as the watchmaker's apprentice, spoiling clocks and 
 loving Janet with a devotion by far more pathetic than 
 ridiculous, enjoys not a merely ludicrous part, but a real 
 character in which his power as an actor is displayed to 
 excellent advantage. 
 
 The scenery, too, with which the stage is furnished for 
 this clever piece is of a striking kind. The scene which 
 shows the outside of the Foundling Hospital at Paris is 
 remarkably well ma,naged, and the reproduction in the last 
 act of the Central Criminal Court, with all the forms and 
 furnishings of an Old Bailey trial, wonderfully accurate as 
 it is, will be remembered among the dexterous feats of 
 stage-appointment for which our theatres in these days are 
 remarkable. 
 
 At the Marylebone our old friend the Man in the Iron 
 Mask is made the hero of a play by Mr. Bayle Bernard. Mr. 
 Bernard's Leon of the Iron Mask is written with the taste 
 and skill that might have been expected from so clever and 
 experienced a dramatist. The original story, and all tales 
 or dramas founded upon it, Mr. Bernard has used as much 
 or as little as he pleased, and he has produced out of them 
 a piece which takes with it the sympathies of its spectators. 
 The demand made by it on the powers of the leading actor, 
 
94 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i85S- 
 
 Mr. Wallack, is great, for its story extends over a long 
 period of time, and its hero is shown not only at different 
 periods of life, but also under circumstances of the most 
 contrasted kind. The demand thus made upon his skill 
 Mr. Wallack meets in a way that has added rnuch to his 
 credit, which Mrs. Wallack shares, too, as the heroine. At 
 the MarylebonEj as elsewhere, stage-appointments and 
 effects are studied carefully. The manager boasts that, 
 though his theatre is small, his stage is one of the longest 
 in the world, and to make the best possible use of this 
 advantage is always a problem for the decorator. Such use 
 is made in the play of Leon, where a capital scenic effect is 
 obtained in a representation of the interior of the Louvre. 
 
 March 17. — At the Haymarket Mr. Stirling Coyne has 
 taken the idea of a German play. The Secret Agent, and 
 worked it up into a brief half-farcical comedy. A young 
 prince whose government is infested by his mother and her 
 favourite ministers, Messrs. Buckstone and Compton, takes 
 a young lady's advice, and alarms his perplexers by 
 announcing the arrival of a secret agent who is at the 
 bottom of everything. Messrs. Buckstone and Compton, 
 who have snug places, are terrified out of their wits at the 
 mysterious scrutiny with which they are threatened, and out 
 of their perplexities the chief fun of the piece springs. The 
 merriment is the greater as they appear during a part of 
 the time at a masked ball, Mr. Buckstone with feminine 
 airs . as a lady, and the other as Mephistopheles, duly 
 diabolical. 
 
 At the Adelphi Mrs. Keeley is in force as Betty Martin, 
 the distressed maid of a choleric major. She has broken 
 the house-clock, and inflicts tortures on Major Mohawk not 
 only by her terrors at the catastrophe, but by her ingenious 
 efforts to prevent its discovery. The farce is adapted from a 
 piece by Madame Girardin, but as played at the Adelphi 
 it belongs entirely to Mrs. Keeley. 
 
Bayle Bernard. — Stirling Coyne. 95 
 
 Will the Fielding Club be engaged to fight a campaign in 
 the Crimea and retrieve the honour of Great Britain by 
 capturing Sebastopol ? Do we want a Ministry of un- 
 exampled power and aptitude for office ? Of gentlemen 
 who can on demand become the best of harlequins, clowns, 
 acrobats, and pantaloons, anything may henceforward be 
 suspected. Hitherto it has certainly been supposed that 
 the business of harlequin or clown was one that required 
 long and painful training from youth up, and a continual 
 devotion of all faculties to the achievement of the final 
 object of ambition. But perhaps society has been under a 
 delusion on this head. After one's experience of last Satur- 
 day, one will really not know of whom not to suspect that 
 he -is a gentleman addicted to flying about his house, and 
 taking leaps or turning summersaults in the retirement of 
 his study. 
 
 The affliction of a clever writer, the desire to assist 
 whom has already produced an admirable lecture from Mr. 
 Thackeray, produced last Saturday night an amateur per- 
 formance at the Olympic Theatre, which was witnessed 
 by an audience including no small part of all the aristocra- 
 cies we boast about in England. 
 
 The Fielding Club's conception of a pantomime — which 
 it is able perfectly to execute — aims at a height unattainable 
 by the most practised harlequins and clowns. It adds to 
 all the professional elasticity of body more than the pro- 
 fessional elasticity of mind ; it throws a glow of wit and 
 humour over the leaps and contortions of the scene ; and it 
 asserts in no ineffective way the dignity of nonsense. 
 
 Before the pantomime a prologue, written with much tact 
 and feeling by Mr. Tom Taylor, was delivered, and then 
 the curtain rose on Harlequin Guy Fawkes. Mr. Albert 
 Smith, as Catesby, opened the entertainment with one of 
 those wonderfully rapid songs with which he is continually 
 pleasing the town. Presendy Mr. Holmes, as Guy Fawkes, 
 
g6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1855. 
 
 made his bow to the audience, and in so doing dropped 
 his head between his feet, as though he had been without a 
 backbone. But Mr. Holmes did far more surprising things 
 than even this, and his burlesque singing was of the highest 
 order. We had also a " terrific combat" between this 
 gentleman and Mr. Albert Smith, which would have 
 doubled the receipts of any provincial or transpontine 
 manager. 
 
 The introductory burlesque was in one scene only, but 
 this was worth half-a-dozen of the ordinary sort ; and there- 
 after appeared Mr. Bidwell as an amateur harlequin, Mr. 
 Arthur Smith as an amateur pantaloon, Mr. J. Robins as an 
 amateur clown, and Mr. Edmund Yates as. a burlesque 
 lover ; the best, most sprightly, and most cheerful of colum- 
 bines. Miss Rosina Wright, giving her professional help to 
 the enterprises of these gentlemen. How Mr. Bidwell leapt, 
 how he leapt in his spangles, how he leapt as a danseuse 
 in expansive satins, how he disappeared through windows 
 as if all his life he had been doing nothing else ; how Mr. 
 Arthur Smith tumbled in slippery shoes, and Mr. Yates 
 used his eyeglass and performed on imaginary tight-ropes, 
 and Mr. Robins responded to the call for "Hot Codlins" ; 
 how Messrs. Ibbetson, Holmes, and Hallett convulsed the 
 audience with their performance as acrobats, in the scene of 
 Epsom Downs; how, in fact, the whole pantomime carried 
 one's thoughts back to the days of Grimaldi, and showed how 
 dead the art as an art is now, by letting us see what it is 
 like when life and strength are put into it by such amateurs 
 as these — and above all, we must add with much emphasis, 
 how curiously the grace and ease of the gentleman was 
 mixed, throughout and uniformly, with evolutions that 
 shirked nothing of the full measure of clown's, or panta- 
 loon's, or burlesquer's extravagance — they only can tell who 
 saw this wonderful performance. 
 
 An entertainment, entitled Illustrative Gatherings, was 
 
An Amateur Pantomime. 97 
 
 given last Monday at the St. Martin's Hall, by Miss P. 
 Horton. The lady who by this name is so widely known 
 as a public favourite is the wife of a skilful musician and 
 composer, Mr. T. German Reed, who assists in the enter- 
 tainment. Mainly it consists, however, of those character- 
 istic songs and personations by which Miss P. Horton won 
 her reputation on the stage. In one of the latter she admir- 
 ably represents a dialogue between two old women, being 
 differently dressed on either side so as to put each vividly 
 in turn before her audience. Another of her characters is 
 a singing, laughing dandy, in ringlets and moustache, whose 
 methode as a dandy singer is hit off with exquisite skill. And 
 throughout it is delightful to hear her fine voice, and observe 
 her free, cordial, unaffected manner. 
 
 April 28. — Mdlle. Jenny Ney has made her debut in 
 Fidelia, and lost none of the good report she brought with 
 her from Vienna. She has youth in her face and voice, 
 and, without appearing to be a great actress, is surely a good 
 one. She brought back to Fidelia much of the pathos that 
 Mdlle. Cruvelli so completely took away, and showed 
 throughout occupation with her part, and a delicate sense 
 of its feeling. 
 
 June 9. — Once upon a time — long ago — twenty or thirty 
 years, indeed, before the rising of the curtain, there was a 
 Spanish Count who had two infant sons. And as it fell 
 upon a day, there was an old gipsy, " an inauspicious and 
 ghastly woman", found in the morning by the cradle of the 
 second-born, who stated herself to be engaged about its 
 horoscope, but who was considered to be looking at it with 
 the evil-eye. The baby awoke screaming — " he arose with 
 piercing lamentation, the effect of incantation. The hideous 
 sorceress was then arrested, and doomed to perish in 
 tormenting fire." I quote from the libretto of the Trovatore. 
 
 The poor old gipsy may have visited the Count de Luna 
 only for his spoons ; at any rate, it was a cruel thing to burn 
 
 2 G 
 
98 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1855. 
 
 her, and so thought her daughter Azucena, a most sensitive 
 and loving woman, the young mother of an infant child. 
 She followed her own mother, child in arms, to the place 
 of execution, saw her pricked forward by the sword-points 
 of the soldiers, was tossed back when she would struggle 
 through them for a last embrace, and heard through their 
 jeers nothing but the old woman's wail, Mi vendica — " Be 
 ■my avenger." Directly afterwards she saw her mother burnt 
 alive, watched her tortures, and was filled by the sight with 
 a mad passion that ran through her after-life. The old 
 woman's wail. Mi vendica, never again died from her 
 ears, and her own voice learnt to repeat its boding note. 
 Of course she resolved on vengeance, and at once began it, 
 in true gipsy style, by stealing the child which her mother 
 had been burnt for looking at. She would burn that alive 
 on the place of her mother's execution : but when the fire 
 was lighted, and she took the child to thrown it in, its 
 infant cry touched all the woman in her. In a passion of 
 grief she put it aside, until, before long, the passion of grief 
 changed to another passion, as the scene of her mother's 
 execution rose upon her memory. With averted eyes she 
 completed the horrid purpose ; but no sooner began to look 
 at what she was about, than she found that she had not 
 burnt the right baby. She had destroyed her own \ and, 
 therefore, whether to satisfy her vengeance or her love I 
 cannot tell, adopted little Master Garzia de Luna for her 
 son Manrico. Now, Manrico is II Trovatore, or the 
 Troubadour. 
 
 The old dc Luna died. He had believed and not believed 
 in Garzia's death, when " of a young child, scattered 
 around, still stained with blood, the bones were found". 
 But he had a presentiment that the boy lived ; and dying, 
 he bequeathed to his eldest son the task of hunting for his 
 brother. So, he being dead, his eldest son was Count de 
 Luna in his stead, and grew to be a fine grandee of Spain, 
 
"// Trovatore." gg 
 
 while Garzia became known as Manrico, the proscribed 
 chief of a horde of gipsies in the mountains of Biscay, a man 
 with a decided taste for music. 
 
 Now there was a certain fair lady of whom nothing is 
 known beyond the fact that she was called Leonora, that 
 she lived in a good house with a great deal of attached 
 garden-ground, and that she is to be identified with Mdlle. 
 Jenny Ney. The Count de Luna loved this lady, and was 
 much annoyed at the attentions paid to her by II Trovatore, 
 a mysterious troubadour. This troubadour is Signer 
 Tamberlik, the proscribed gipsy, and the lady has been 
 won by his singing. The brothers, who do not know that 
 they are brothers, thus become rivals in love. As these 
 facts are developed very clumsily in the course of the 
 libretto, it is advisable that the audience should have dis- 
 covered them before the rising of the curtain. 
 
 In the first scene a bit of the preceding story is sung 
 by Signor Tagliafico, as Ferrando, the Count's confidential 
 friend, to a noisy chorus of domestics, early in the morning, 
 near his lordship's bedroom-door. The music, which is 
 meant to give the audience the horrors, is well executed, 
 but fails of its purpose. The next scene is by moonlight in 
 Leonora's garden. The Troubadour sings a love-song off 
 the stage. The lady is lured out by it, the Count (who is 
 the new singer, Signor Graziani) comes, cat-like, to the 
 garden courting, and the lady, perplexed by a cloudy night, 
 mistaking him for the Troubadour, is led to put her arm 
 about the neck of the wrong lover. Enter the other Tom, 
 who becomes wild at what a gleam of moonlight shows him. 
 The lady explains her mistake and corrects it, whereat the 
 Count in his turn becomes wild, and the two brothers, of 
 whom nobody knows that they are brothers, rush out with 
 drawn swords to fight a duel. 
 
 It is important for the audience now to understand that 
 a great battle is fought behind the curtain. The duel has 
 
 G 2 
 
100 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8SS- 
 
 expanded privately into the battle of Pellilla between the 
 troops of the Count and the gipsies under Manrico. In 
 the course of that battle the Count's life is in Manrico's 
 power, but a mysterious fraternal instinct stays his hand. 
 He is, nevertheless, defeated, scored with wounds upon the 
 bosom, and left for dead upon the battle-field. His gipsy 
 mother, Azucena, makes search for his body, finds life in it, 
 nurses him, and saves him from the grave. Only the 
 gipsies know that he is living. 
 
 The second act opens among the mountains of Biscay 
 with a rather effective gipsy chorus, which Madame Viardot, 
 as Azucena, interrupts with a wild Moorish chant, contain- 
 ing some part of the story of her mother's death. Now for 
 the first time the attention of the audience is fixed. The 
 genius of the great actress-singer puts a spell upon the 
 house. The very defects of Verdi's music are wrested to 
 the purpose of the artist, and serve to give dramatic colour 
 to the fitful spirit of the gipsy. The wailing echo of her 
 mother's cry. Mi vendica, the fierce hold taken upon 
 her imagination by the horrible spectacle of her mother's 
 execution, which she presently relates, the maddening horror 
 with which she reverts to her infant son, thrown by her own 
 hands alive into the fire, give opportunity to Madame 
 Viardot for displaying her powers in a dramatic scene of 
 the most effective kind. It is unluckily allowed to run into 
 an anti-climax. Enters a gipsy messenger, whose story 
 Azucena, though she is present, is bound by the necessities 
 of the story not to hear. Ruiz, a gipsy chief, has seized 
 the town of Castellor. Near the town is a nunnery, in 
 which Leonora, who believes Manrico to be dead, proposes 
 that same evening to take the veil. She must be carried 
 off before she does so. Manrico instantly demands a horse, 
 and departs, after a scene of wild expostulation from Azucena 
 — out of which Madame Viardot does her best in vain to 
 make something. He does not tell where he is going, and 
 
Madame Viardot. loi 
 
 her only fear is lest horse exercise may cause his recent 
 wounds to bleed afresh. The scene then changes to the 
 convent. The Count also has made up his mind to steal 
 the lady. He and his men are first upon the spot. When 
 he is about to achieve his purpose, Manrico appears suddenly 
 as from the grave. Afterwards the gipsies rush in, and, in 
 the midst of a good deal of noisy music, carry Leonora off, 
 a willing prisoner. 
 
 The third act opens in the camp of the Count de Luna, 
 who is besieging Castellor, determined to fetch Leonora 
 out of the same fortress. No time is supposed to have 
 elapsed, and it had better be supposed to be any distance 
 or no distance from Biscay to Castellor. Azucena, wander- 
 ing in search of her adopted son, has been caught prowling 
 round the Count de Luna's camp, seized, bound, and 
 dragged before him. There she learns into whose power 
 she has fallen, is recognised as the fiend who destroyed the 
 infant, and devoted to the stake. Her roving, melancholy, 
 gipsy spirit, and her abject crouching fear, bursting out 
 suddenly into a flash of wild defiance, are finely acted and 
 most expressively sung by Madame Viardot. She is dragged 
 off, and her adopted son Manrico is next shown to us 
 within the walls of Castellor, upon the point of leading his 
 bride to the altar. The martial chorus which succeeds the 
 interruption of the wedding by the news of Azucena's 
 capture brings the third act to a close with some effective 
 music. 
 
 By the omission of a weak scene between the Count and 
 Leonora, the fourth act, as presented now at Covent 
 Garden, will do more for Verdi's reputation than anything 
 of his that the English public has yet heard. Manrico, 
 who has been taken in an unsuccessful- sally, is shut up 
 with Azucena in a tower. Leonora, coming in search of 
 her Troubadour, hears his voice as she stands under the 
 window of the prison. Signer Tamberlik in his dungeon, 
 
102 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S5- 
 
 Mdlle. Jenny Ney upon the stage, backed by a chorus of 
 unseen priests chanting the Miserere for a parting soul, 
 give fine effect to the music of the first half of this act. 
 The last scene is within the dungeon. Azucena — who is 
 exhausted by her trials and her passions, and who shudders 
 at the dreadful image of the stake — after a good duet with 
 Manrico, falls asleep, with the desire to end her days in 
 peace among the mountains of Biscay, and a low melody 
 to this effect, murmured by her in her sleep, backs a passion- 
 ate interview between Manrico and Leonora. The lady 
 has given herself to the Count in return for the life of the 
 Troubadour, who spurns her for the purchase. It was 
 only her dead body that she meant to give, for she has 
 taken poison, and the Count enters in time to see her die 
 of the effect of it. He immediately orders the Troubadour 
 out to the scaffold. Then Azucena wakes, stumbles upon 
 the body of a woman, and asks for Manrico. The Count 
 draws a curtain from before an extensive grating, and shows 
 her the scene of execution, the headsman wiping his axe, 
 and Manrico in his coffin. Suddenly, then, she is awakened 
 from the first pang of despair by noticing that the cry of 
 her mother has been answered. She explains to the Count 
 that he has chopped off his lost brother's head, and falls 
 with the cry, Sei vendicata, o madre ! 
 
 And so the curtain falls upon // Trovatore. 
 
 June 30. — The accidents of a small cast, and of the sub- 
 sequent long survival of each member of it on the stage, 
 can concur in the case of few new operas. Possibly, there- 
 fore, the performance of Don Pasqiiale at Covent Garden 
 on Thursday night, by the same artists for whom it was 
 composed twelve years ago, is an accident far from likely to 
 occur hereafter in the case of any other work. Of the four 
 singers by whom Don Pasquale is performed, one, Signor 
 Mario, was — for that night at any rate — more than his old 
 self Signor Lablache was in his most farcical mood, and 
 
Lablache. — Mario. — Grist. — Tamburini. 1 03 
 
 in good voice. Madame Grisi proved herself, as she always 
 does in the part of Norina, a consummate actress, and gave 
 less reason than usual to regret the decadence of her voice. 
 Signor Tamburini's presence on the stage is at all times 
 agreeable, and if his voice were merely gone one might be 
 happy ; but it is not gone merely, a something has come in 
 the place of it which prompts unpleasant thoughts. After 
 the fossil opera had been produced there was a fossil ballet 
 to be seen, Cerito again in La Vivandilre. 
 
 July 14. — On Tuesday evening, at Campden House, 
 Kensington, the residence of Colonel Waugh, semi-private 
 theatricals were given, with a charitable purpose, and with 
 striking success, under the management of Mr. Charles 
 Dickens. 
 
 At Campden House fliere is a miniature theatre, complete 
 with pit and boxes, stage and footlights. For the benefit of 
 the funds of the Bournemouth Sanatorium for Consumptive 
 Patients, the amateurs performed in this little theatre, before 
 a crowded audience composed principally of ladies, a new 
 two-act play by Mr. Wilkie Collins, and a two-act farce. 
 The play was called The Lighthouse, and told a tale of 
 Eddystone in the old times. An exquisite picture (for such it 
 is, and not a mere ordinary scene) of Eddystone as it stood 
 in those days, from the pencil of Mr. Stanfield, was the drop- 
 scene, and the actors were exhibited throughout as shut up 
 in a little room within the lighthouse, also of Mr. Stanfield's 
 painting, which, from its nature, could with the best possible 
 effect be set up in a private drawing-room, or on a miniature 
 stage. Similar exigencies appear also to have been consulted 
 in the manner of developing the plot of the play; the crime, 
 the wreck, and all the events upon which hangs the passion 
 of the story, not being produced upon the scene, but break- 
 ing out from the narration of the actors. None of the leading 
 incidents are shown actually, but their workings on the minds 
 of the three lighthouse-men who are the chief performers, and 
 
104 Journal of a London Playgoer, [1855. 
 
 of the few other persons introduced into the story, contribute 
 interest enough to sustain an earnest attention throughout. 
 The little piece told upon the audience admirably. 
 
 But it had rare advantages. It was, in its principal parts, 
 acted by distinguished writers, with whose artistic skill upon 
 the stage the public has been for some time familiar. The 
 three lighthouse-men are at first shown cut off by a month's 
 storms from the mainland. They are an old man and his 
 son, together with the father of the young man's sweetheart. 
 The old man's memory is haunted by what he believes to 
 have been his passive consent to a most foul murder. 
 Weakened by starvation, his brain becomes wholly pos- 
 sessed by dread of this crime. The spectre of the supposed 
 murdered lady seems to stand at his bedside and bid him 
 speak. He does speak, and, possessed with a wild horror 
 at all he recollects, reveals to his son his shame. Upon the 
 acting of this character depends the whole force of the story, 
 as presented to the audience, and it is in the hands of a 
 master. He is a rough man, whose face has been familiar 
 for years with wind and spray, haggard and wild just now, 
 and something light-headed, oppressed not more by con- 
 science than by hunger. He tells his tale, and his son turns 
 from him, shrinks from his touch, struck down by horror 
 of the crime and the humiliation to himself involved in it. 
 Rehef comes to the party soon after this ; they are fed, and 
 the physical depression is removed. Eager then to regain 
 his son's esteem, and cancel the disclosure of his secret, the 
 old lighthouse-man changes in manner. By innumerable 
 master-touches on the part of the actor, we are shown what 
 his rugged ways have been of hiding up the knowledge that 
 stirs actively within his conscience ; but his effort to be bold 
 produces only nervous bluster, and his frantic desire to 
 recover his son's respect, though he may take him by the 
 throat to extort it from him, is still mixed up with a horrible 
 sense of blood-guiltiness, wonderfully expressed by Httle, 
 
Dickens's Acting in "The Lighthouse" 105 
 
 instinctive actions. I will not follow the story to its last 
 impressive moment of rough, nervous, seaman's prayer, in 
 which the old man stands erect, with his hands joined over 
 his head, overpowered by the sudden removal of the load 
 that has so long weighed upon his heart. But to the last that 
 piece of the truest acting was watched with minute attention 
 by the company assembled; and rarely has acting on a public 
 stage better rewarded scrutiny. 
 
 July 21. — The success of Meyerbeer's EEtoile du Nord, 
 properly produced for the first time in this country on 
 Thursday night under the personal direction of the com- 
 poser, who appeared before the curtain to receive the 
 plaudits of the English public, has been of course great. 
 
 The story of the opera, such as it is, can be told very 
 briefly. Giorgio Savoronsky and his sister Catterina (Mdlle. 
 Bosio) are orphans. Their mother was a gipsy of the Ukraine, 
 who said on her deathbed that her daughter's star shone with 
 a bright radiance over the North, and that some one coming 
 thence would blend with hers his mighty fortune. The 
 brother and sister came to settle at a village in the neigh- 
 bourhood of the docks at Wyborg, on the Gulf of Finland, 
 where George played the flute and Catterina sold wine to the 
 workmen. There the Czar Peter, disguised as a workman, fell 
 in love with Catterina. He played the flute with her brother 
 for the sake of being near her, received from her useful 
 advice against his habits of anger and hard drinking, and was 
 finally accepted as her suitor when she found that he had 
 been born at Moscow, on condition that he would become a 
 soldier, earn some glory, and so make good the prediction of 
 her mother. He agreed to that. At about the same time 
 a party of Calmucks, headed by a comic Calmuck Tartar 
 (Signor Lablache), entered the village. There was a con- 
 scription of young men, and Catterina's brother, in the very 
 hour appointed for his marriage with Prascovia, was to be 
 taken as a recruit if he. could not promptly find a substitute. 
 
io6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1855. 
 
 Catterina, because she pitied the bride, and was strong- 
 minded, and it had been given in charge to her to watch over 
 her brother, assured to Prascovia a substitute for fifteen days ; 
 and, while the Finland wedding ceremonies were proceed- 
 ing, set off in male attire, after a benediction of her brother, 
 from the jetty. The dying of her voice in the distance, as 
 the boat was supposed to row towards the ship, were the last 
 sweet notes of the voice of Mdlle. Bosio to which the drop- 
 scene fell upon the first act of the opera. 
 
 ■ In the second act we are introduced to the camp of Peter 
 the Great, adjoining the hostile Swedish army. There is a 
 revolt among the troops, which Peter, coming suddenly in 
 disguise, desires to quell. A tent is pitched for him, and 
 Catterina placed as one of the three sentinels outside. She 
 peeps, and recognises first his favourite, Danilowitz, formerly 
 a pastrycook at Wyborg, and then himself, supposing him to 
 be her Peter, rapidly become a captain. Peter gets drunk, and 
 scandalises Catterina by the liberties he takes with two vivan- 
 diferes. While irritated at what she is seeing, the comic 
 Calmuck, now a corporal of Grenadiers, comes to relieve the 
 guard. She will not be removed, and when he presses her 
 departure, boxes his ears. Hubbub arises, and a complaint is 
 brought before the drunken Czar, who orders the recruit to 
 be immediately shot. Catterina makes an effort to recall 
 Peter to his senses, and is dragged away. Her voice has, 
 however, penetrated through his drunkenness ; he sobers 
 himself by an effort, and demands that the prisoner shall be 
 brought back into his presence. While they are bringing her 
 she adroitly escapes, swims across a river, and is wounded in 
 the water by a musket-ball. The revolt then occupies the 
 scene. Peter quells it by his personal influence ; and the 
 Russian army prepares in a magnificent finale, magnificent 
 both as a piece of music and as a spectacle, for instant 
 engagement with the Swedes. 
 
 In the third and last act the Czar is unhappy in his palace. 
 
"L'Etoile du Nord."—Mdlle. Bosio. io7 
 
 Catterina has been found, maddened by her wound and by 
 grief. She is brought to the palace, where a vision of her 
 Finland village is constructed mechanically from the design 
 of Peter ; her fellow-villagers, who have been brought to 
 Moscow, repeat the songs of Finland ; and George and 
 Prascovia, who have come on foot from Finland to 
 Moscow in fifteen days, to relieve the substitute, are made 
 to enact over again the wedding scene, that Catterina may 
 be thus recalled to her old self Finally her lover Peter 
 plays his old tune on the flute. Her voice instinctively 
 keeps time to it, and the result of the device is a sudden 
 cure. She is at once dressed in Imperial robes, the Finland 
 village scenery gives place to the magnificence of the 
 Imperial court, and Catterina's star, that shone so brightly 
 over the North, is proved to have been no false prophet. 
 
 The part taken by Signer Lablache, though in the libretto 
 utterly silly, is in the opera of great importance. Some of 
 the finest music is connected with it, and not only did 
 Signor Lablache do perfect justice to this, but he contrived 
 also to lift the character a little out of the depth of absurdity 
 in which it was conceived. But the great vocal triumph of 
 the evening was that of Mdlle. Bosio, who sustained a long 
 and arduous part in a way that left no doubt on any mind 
 as to the position she means to take on the Italian lyric 
 stage. When, as Catterina, she emphatically taught her 
 friend Peter that to will is to do — voler e poter — it was im- 
 possible not to reflect that she herself had proved the 
 doctrine. She has willed perfection as a vocalist, and has 
 astonished the public by the rapidity of her advance towards 
 it. She is now also willing to herself a fair share of skill 
 as an actress — a thing of which she was at one time wholly 
 destitute — and is equally on the way towards that. Voler 
 e poter. 
 
 The ovation to M. Meyerbeer has not been the only 
 stirring incident during the past week within the walls of a 
 
lo8 Journal of a London Playgoer. [iSSS- 
 
 playhouse. On Monday evening Mr. Farren took leave of 
 the public at the Haymarket Theatre, the scene of, all his 
 later triumphs, supported by his friends and many veterans 
 of the profession, after having acted once more, and for the 
 last time, a short scene from The Clandestine Marriage. 
 Every living actor seems to have been anxious to do 
 something on the occasion, and by performing fragments 
 room was made for the loving help of a great many ; even a 
 corner was made for Mr. Albert Smith, who sangone of his 
 songs. The unrestrained cordiality with which Farewell was 
 said by the public to one of the most finished actors by whom 
 the stage has been adorned during the present century, could 
 not fail to excite emotion even in bystanders, and how much 
 more in the person of the artist towards whom all that warm 
 feeling was expressed. Mr. Farren was unable to speak his 
 own good-bye. All had to be felt, and there was nothing 
 to be said. 
 
 August 4. — Mdlle. Rachel, on her way to America, gives 
 sudden life to playgoers in London by appearing at this 
 theatre in four of her greatest characters. At one time 
 The Examiner stood almost alone in the endeavour to 
 describe in detail these remarkable performances. Over 
 and over again have we expressed our wonder and admira- 
 tion of the sublimity and beauty infused into the old French 
 drama by the genius of this great actress.* Before she 
 taught us how they might be filled with every passion, 
 how a life of woe might find expression in a sentence, we 
 were apt to weary over the cold heroics of those famous 
 French tragedies. But presented by her, they amaze us 
 with grand conceptions. Awe, pity, terror, are awakened as 
 we look and listen, and nothing remains for our self-respect 
 as critics but to attribute half the poetry and passion, as 
 
 * The criticisms of Rachel in The Examiner were from a 
 better hand than mine. 
 
Farren's Farewell. — Rachel. 109 
 
 well as all the expression they receive, to the actress her- 
 self. 
 
 October 13. — The great Egyptian spectacle, Nitocris, 
 turns out to be a spectacle and nothing more, the literary 
 part of the work having been found incompatible with the 
 magnificence and show tacked on to it. The result is one 
 upon which the manager did not exactly calculate, though 
 it might have been easily enough foreseen. The success of 
 spectacle in these days is no doubt an obvious fact, but 
 successful spectacles, it is not less certain, have generally 
 been associated with some matter that the public thought 
 worth hearing. To connect spectacle with one of Shake- 
 speare's plays ensures a certain degree of success. Even to 
 connect it with a telling melodrama, whicli, though it 
 appeals to a low taste, still appeals to a taste quite apart 
 from the mere dazzling of the eye, will always prevent 
 any downright failure. But though, when allied to Mr. 
 Planch^'s wit, few things have been more successful than 
 the Lyceum spectacles, others at the same theatre have 
 had a different fate ; and the best scenery, as Mr. Charles 
 Mathews might have warned the Drury Lane manager, 
 will not draw houses in connection with a play which con- 
 tains nothing to interest the public. In spite, then, of a 
 great outlay, of a striking stage-effect, representing the rush 
 of the Nile into a grotto and the drowning of conspirators, 
 in spite of all the gods of Egypt carried in procession 
 through the length of a whole act, the gods of Drury Lane 
 inexorably hissed, and Nitocris has fallen to the level of an 
 afterpiece. It would be a kindness to Miss Glyn, fitted 
 with a part so much below her powers, to convert the 
 spectacle into pantomime, by getting rid entirely of the 
 spoken words. 
 
 December 29. — Of one of the pantomimes of this year, by 
 a system of puffery little short of the marvellous, the highest 
 expectation had been raised. The greater the expectation, 
 
no Journal of a London Playgoer. [1855. 
 
 the greater the disappointment. It is but too likely that 
 the public will soon have to settle down to the conviction 
 that the Covent Garden pantomime, " The pantomime of 
 1855-6", as it is modestly called, is the dullest that has any- 
 where been seen in Londpn for a good many seasons past. 
 On the first night the audience was highly discontented, 
 but the fault was laid upon the fact that it was a first night, 
 and things were to go better afterwards. It was my lot to 
 suffer the infliction of it on the second night, and the sole 
 relief to its weariness was the sense of indignation begotten 
 among respectable visitors at the monstrous system of 
 puffery by which they had been brought together. There 
 is a contempt of the public intellect implied in the coarse- 
 ness of the stimulants to curiosity thus employed, and in 
 the midst of it all a personal obtrusion that appears 
 singularly distasteful. When the public applauds the one 
 scene of this pantomime by Mr. Beverley, which is sup- 
 posed to be a justification for the announcement that the 
 scenery is " by Mr. Beverley and numerous assistants", the 
 "Wizard" comes forward upon the stage to take the 
 plaudits. Upon the harlequinade a scene is foisted, of 
 which the " Wizard" is the hero, in which a colossal plaster 
 bust of "the Professor" is brought forward, and out of 
 which a miniature " Professor" steps. When all is done, the 
 same wizard or professor comes forward arm-in-arm with the 
 clown to share even his honours, and in so doing flirts like 
 a prima donna over the acceptance of a solitary nosegay. 
 All this might be tolerated if in other respects faith were 
 kept, and the public had no reason to consider itself fooled. 
 But it has only too much reason for discontent. Let us 
 take one illustration of the whole. A vast posting-bill upon 
 the hoardings, addressed "to tall young women", had been 
 prepared to stimulate public attention, by requiring " two 
 hundred young women, none under the height of six feet 
 two, for the pantomime at Covent Garden". This results 
 
The " Wizard's" Pantomime. in 
 
 in the appearance in the burlesque introduction of four 
 masks as chambermaids, with high clogs and caps, who are 
 styled Normandy peasants " six feet two in their clogs", 
 and who perform some exceedingly stupid business with 
 warming-pans. The " dioramas" are two small and bad 
 transparencies. The great tournament after Holbein is a 
 lump or two of armour upon hobbyhorses. There are, in 
 fact, only two or three good scenes. 
 
 To the pantomime itself it can hardly be a reproach that 
 the tricks often worked badly, for they were so pointless 
 that they were not worth working well. They were poor 
 in design, and destitute of any power to awaken mirth. 
 The best clown and the best pantaloon in London, Mr. 
 Flexmore and Mr. Barnes, with a graceful columbine. Miss 
 Emma Home, laboured, indeed, not always in vain to ex- 
 tract mirth and pleasure out of the most unpromising 
 materials ; but, work as they might, the general desire 
 among the audience seemed to be to get at the last scene, and 
 be put of their pain as soon as possible. The last display 
 was pretty, but not in any degree remarkable for splendour. 
 The best transformation (and that really a very striking one) 
 was the fall of the scene representing the wizard's laboratory 
 on the heads of the actors, as if by a mishap, resulting in a 
 complete change of the stage, and the spreading out of a 
 cornfield before the palace of Balmoral. 
 
 Let me not pass from the Covent Garden pantomime 
 without commenting also upon the bad taste of the curtain 
 provided for it, which is not in the least intended for the 
 pleasure of the public eye, but is a mass of advertisements 
 collected from Moses and Son and other well-known adver- 
 tisers. This, in a place meant for refreshment and amuse- 
 ment, pains the eye with a reproduction of the nuisance of 
 a hoarding, or of a ticket-bedaubed second-class carriage on 
 the railway. 
 January 19, 1856. — War has broken out between the 
 
,112 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 powers that rule over Drury Lane and Covent Garden. 
 A pleasant quiz upon the conjurings and claptraps of the 
 "Wizard of the North", in a piece called The Great Gun 
 Tricky written for Mr. Charles Mathews, also late of the 
 Lyceum and Wizard of the South-South-West-by-East, has 
 for the last week or two preceded the pantomime at Drury 
 Lane ; and as the caricature upon the conjuring threatens 
 to prove a little more amusing than the conjuring itself, 
 the Covent Garden Wizard is in arms. Hitherto he has 
 carried on the war by meatus of posters, or cartels, but a 
 direct attack is now threatened in the shape of a farce 
 courteously entitled Twenty Minutes with an Impudent 
 Puppy. Meanwhile the smallest theatre in London, the 
 SxRAisTD, laughs at the two largest, in a farce called A Plague 
 on Both your Houses. 
 
 The pantomime at Drury Lane has maintained its 
 attractions, and indeed all the theatres are prospering with 
 their Christmas entertainments. At Covent Garden the 
 Wizard is doing his best to cast his former conjuring 
 into the shade by drawing audiences to Rob Roy as 
 acted without a morsel of curtailment, with himself for a 
 vociferous hero. He explodes his asides defiantly into the 
 faces of the people who are not to hear them, and " looks", 
 says the critic of the Times., "as if he could thrash the 
 other dramatis persona all round without any fatigue to his 
 muscles". 
 
 February 16. — The pantomimes at all the theatres have 
 had a surprising success, still maintain their ground, and 
 are to this day to be seen in full force and enjoyment. At 
 Drury Lane, Mr. Charles Mathews still makes merry as 
 the Wizard of the South-South- West-by-East; and at Covent 
 Garden, the Wizard of the North has given up the attempt 
 to retaliate with a small squib that would not go off satis- 
 factorily. The public threw so much cold water on it, that 
 after a litde hissing it went out; and the great Professor 
 
Burning of Covent Garden. 113 
 
 resumed the career of actor upon which he had entered. 
 Having enacted Rob Roy, he appears now as Black-eyed 
 Susan — no, as William in that drama — and other novelties 
 are in preparation. There are still three characters in 
 which I trust that the Professor will not forget to appear — ■ 
 Juliet, King I>ear, and Timour the Tartar. [Mr. Anderson's 
 management ended w'th the burning down of the theatre at 
 the close of a bal masquk on the morning of Wednesday the 
 6th of March.] 
 
 April 19. — The burnt-out sjngers have made a home of 
 the Lyceum, which theatre, having been throughout cleaned 
 and retouched, reminds one again of the days when Madame 
 Vestris made its elegance so notable. The delayed season 
 opened on Tuesday last, before Queen,' Court, and a bril- 
 liant little audience, with Verdi's Trovaiore. As the opera 
 is noisy, it at once put to the severest test the question of 
 a change of house, as it affected the performances. The 
 result was a strong impression of the skill with which actors 
 and orchestra were able to accommodate themselves to 
 altered circumstances ; but the opera itself, apart entirely 
 from all question of performance, did not come altogether 
 well out of the ordeal. Without the most extensive adven- 
 titious help, and, above all, without the acting of Viardot to 
 add to its musical attraction, Verdi's best opera cannot be 
 said to be relished keenly by the public. 
 
 May 17. — A new drama called Retribution, put together, 
 it is understood, by so many hands that there is somebody 
 in town who calls it Contribution, has been offered this 
 week to the public, and — to a certain extent only — thank- 
 fully received. The plot is stupid enough, but the writing 
 is throughout clever, and the acting of Mr. Wigan as one of 
 those demoniacal avengers, cold without and hot within, 
 familiar to the readers of French novels — a sphnter of iced 
 fire, impossible to find though startling to conceive — the 
 acting of Mr. Wigan in this character of Count Priuli is so 
 
 H 
 
114 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 good, that the piece will probably have a successful run by 
 reason of it. In the drama there appears also a debutante. 
 Miss Herbert, who achieves no mean success. 
 
 May 3 1 . — Mdlle. Piccolomini proves to be an artist young 
 and spiritual, after the manner of Madame Viardot or 
 Signor Ronconi. As an actress on the lyric stage she may 
 live to display rare perfection ; and her voice is at least 
 sufficient for her purpose. It is good inasmuch as it is sub- 
 servient to her genius, and sufficient to maintain her due 
 position in an opera, but, as in the case of the two artists 
 just named, it is rather from a peculiarity of genius than of 
 throat that the supremacy arises. We have now, in Signor 
 Ronconi, Madame Viardot, and Mdlle. Piccolomini, three 
 fine dramatic artists upon the Italian lyric stage. Madame 
 Grisi I assume to have retired, and moreover should reckon 
 as an artist rather bold than fine ; her acting was marked in 
 each part by certain broad effects, obvious to every capacity 
 and admirable in the eyes of all ; but much more rarely by 
 that refined subtlety of conception, which gives meaning to 
 every glance, every posture, every tone, every stirring of a 
 finger. Mdlle. Piccolomini is an actress of the latter class ; 
 and her reception at Her Majesty's Theatre, which has 
 been most enthusiastic, she happens to have earned as an 
 actress almost solely. 
 
 For of La Traviata, the opera with which she has con- 
 nected her success, I must say candidly that it is the worst 
 opera by Verdi that has found its way to England, while bis 
 very best is, on its own score, barely tolerable to the ears of 
 any well-trained London audience. Generally, too, in each 
 of Verdi's operas there is some one thing that, if not good, 
 may pass for good among the many ; there is the Donna e 
 Mobile in Rigoktto, the Balen del sua sorriso in the 
 Trovatore, or the Ernani involami in Ernani. In the 
 Traviata there is absolutely nothing. Grant a decent 
 prettiness to the brindisi, Libiamo, and the utmost has been 
 
"La Traviata!' — Mdlle. Piccoloinini. 115 
 
 said for an opera very far inferior in value to the worst of 
 Mr. Balfe's. Where the voice of the singer is forced into 
 discords of the composer's making, and the ear is tortured 
 throughout by sounds which the wise man will struggle not 
 to hear, it is obviously impossible to judge fairly of the vocal 
 powers of the prima donna. 
 
 In spite of bad music, and in spite of a detestable libretto 
 which suggests positions for her scarcely calculated to 
 awaken honest sympathy, in spite of the necessity of labour- 
 ing with actors who, as actors, can make — and no wonder — 
 nothing at all genuine out of their parts, Mdlle. Piccolomini 
 creates and obtains the strongest interest for a Traviata of 
 her own. Out of impurity she produces something exqui- 
 sitely pure, and out of absurdity a pathos irresistible. We 
 see her labouring through her most touching scenes, absorb- 
 ing all attention as an actress, and drawing tears, while she 
 is being acted up to by a gentleman who sings well and can 
 act tolerably when he sees his way, but, as the heavy father 
 of the piecCj falls throughout into the richest burlesque 
 manner of Mr. Paul Bedford, except once when he runs off 
 the stage after the manner of Mr. Wright in Paul Pry. It 
 does not matter. Mdlle. Piccolomini is the beginning, 
 middle, and end of the opera, and it is her Traviata that the 
 public goes to see. Her Traviata conquers the libretto to 
 itself; and to a wonderful degree succeeds also in conquer- 
 ing the music, and in impressing its own stamp on very 
 much of it. 
 
 Of the libretto I need say little. It consists of three acts. 
 In the first act the Traviata, the lost one, the girl gone 
 astray, otherwise the Parisian lorette, is shown holding an 
 after midnight revel, and attracted by the offer of a some- 
 thing like true love from one of her adorers. In the second 
 act she has carried this adorer to a country house, and 
 lavishes her wealth upon him there as a kept man ; but she 
 gives him up at the request of a virtuous father for a virtu- 
 
 H 2 
 
Ii6 Journal of a Londoii Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 ous daughter's sake, and even leads him to suppose her tired 
 of him, as the sole way of ending the connection. The 
 consequence of this proceeding is, that at J;he end of the 
 second act she is insulted by him at a ball given by another 
 lorette, and in the third act she dies elaborately of the insult, 
 and of a consumptive disease — the consequence of young 
 imprudences — which had been growing upon her from the 
 first. Of course she does not die without a sentimental 
 parting from her friend. This is the form of the libretto 
 founded upon the immoral drama La Dame aux Camelias. 
 Far different is the heroine for whom Mdlle. Piccolomini 
 engages all our sympathies." Her Traviata is a girl fallen 
 into the nets of pleasure, and, with the hand of death upon 
 her, listening to the promptings of a pure and deep love; 
 lifted up by it out of all sin, developing all that is noblest in 
 woman, and repulsed by the rude hand of an unforgiving 
 world ; but, though repulsed and tortured, and overcome by 
 mental anguish and her bodily disease, still dying at last 
 true to the high nature which had been once developed in 
 her. She has a rare power of emotional utterances in song ; 
 and in her power of expressing much by a few words and 
 their attendant gesture — as by the cry and the eager hurry 
 of her soul to meet the lover who returns to her too late, 
 the hurry of a soul that cannot drag the dying body after it 
 — she now and then reminds us of the special powers of 
 Rachel. 
 
 That Mdlle. Piccolomini is versatile, the range of emotion 
 taken by her Traviata, from a reckless joyousness to the 
 most sacred sorrow, fully testifies. It is manifest also in her 
 mere aspect, which is in a remarkable degree indicative of a 
 quick nervous power. 
 
 June 7.— At Her Majesty's Theatre Madame Alboni 
 is singing the part of the gipsy Azucena. Simply to hear 
 Madame Alboni's voice is a pleasure, for it has to an un- 
 usual degree a rich musical flow and a complete reliableness. 
 
The Two Opera Houses. wj 
 
 She has, what Madame Viardot has not, that rare gift of a 
 natural quality of tone which skill alone can never reach; 
 and there can be no doubt that the music of Azucena, 
 which by chance is not a part to tear a cat in, never was so 
 well sung in London as it is being now sung at Her 
 Majesty's Theatre. Madame Alboni's acting also is 
 much better than might have been expected from her, 
 though in this respect she has in no degree approached the 
 excellence of Madame Viardot. 
 
 In the midst of the din of Verdi — Traviata and Tr ova- 
 tore at the one house, Rigoktto at the other— the promise 
 of a performance of Mozart's chef-d'ceuvre broke upon the 
 ear like the ripple of a spring in the desert. Don Giovanni 
 was at one time announced for Thursday last, but we are 
 not to have it yet. The opera which broke on Thursday 
 last the reign of Verdi was the very familiar and weak result 
 achieved by the Donizetti who would be a Meyerbeer, La 
 Favorita. Why is it that English opera-goers are so much 
 plagued by constant repetition of the worst and weakest 
 music, when some of the best works of the best composers 
 are within the repertoire of either house? No doubt La 
 Traviata must draw crowds, because of the acting of Mdlle. 
 Piccolomini; and Rigoletto must do the same, because of 
 the acting of Signor Ronconi; and Signor Mario and 
 Madame Grisi act and sing the last act of Lm Favorita in a 
 way that makes it worth while to endure the others for the 
 sake of it; but surely none of these artists are bound to 
 persist in the connection of their talents rather with the 
 poor operas than with the good ones. 
 
 June 14. — A charity has been benefited, and .a large 
 audience gratified, with a repetition of the display of talent 
 by the clowns and harlequins of private life, who would have 
 died and made no sign had not that great thought of the 
 age, an Amateur Pantomime, come to maturity in our time. 
 
 The new harlequin proved himself even a more sur- 
 
ii8 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 prising jumper and dancer than his predecessor; and it is 
 now therefore demonstrated that we are Hable to meet in 
 private life two gentlemen under whose broadcloth is a skin 
 tattooed with spangles, and who may leap in at our windows 
 nobody shall say why, when, or which end foremost. The 
 clown and pantaloon were on Monday, as last year, Mr. 
 Joseph Robins and Mr. Arthur Smith, both excellent. We 
 had again also the surprising acrobats, and two gentlemen 
 who very literally stooped to the presentment of a pair of 
 dancing dogs. 
 
 June 21. — Mdlle. Johanna Wagner's voice is marvellously 
 good, her figure is tall and shapely, her movements are 
 graceful, her gestures and attitudes are in the highest degree 
 picturesque, her acting is most carefully studied. 
 
 She has in the Capuletti ed i Montecchi a good acting- 
 part, the libretto is not bad, and the notion of representing 
 Romeo as a bit of a fire-eater as well as a lover was unques- 
 tionably good for lyric purposes. The music is, however, 
 curiously poor. Bellini's mature works have a distinct place 
 of their own in art, and have undoubtedly a soul of music 
 in them ; but this, his first crude effort, scarcely contained 
 the promise of his future. It is less worth hearing than even 
 La Traviata, and its dulness is exaggerated by division into 
 four short acts, which implies the loss of some three-quarters 
 of an hour's time in addition to that sacrificed over the 
 music. Mdlle. ^\'agner's manner of acting rather aggra- 
 vates than reheves the sense of tedium. It is clever, but 
 very laboured; it is all the result of manifest and most 
 praiseworthy care and pains. We see and admire the pas- 
 sage from one gesture to another; but we never for one 
 instant forget that an actress is declaiming skilfully, or lose 
 Mdlle. Johanna Wagner in her Romeo. She clothes her- 
 self too carefully, in fact, with her artist nature; it seems to 
 be on her, and not in her, always. 
 
Johanna Wagner. — Mdlle. Piccolomini. 1 19 
 
 July 5. — Mdlle. Piccolomini's Figlia del Reggimento ex- 
 hilarates the audience. Last Thursday night I believe 
 there was not one person in the crowded pit and stalls who 
 did not rise to cheer the actress-singer. No doubt a great 
 many who so applauded thought it was exquisite comic 
 acting by which they had been stirred to much enthusiasm ; 
 but the charm of the performance was something nobler 
 and better. Mdlle. Piccolomini's Maria is not a comic 
 character at all, and is not a pathetic character. It is 
 essentially the character of a girl inspired by two of the 
 best sentiments belonging to humanity, enjoyment of liberty 
 and of love. She is the petted daughter of the regiment, 
 no doubt, and the actress gives with exquisite piquancy all 
 the little military ways of the vivandiere , but these lie only 
 on the surface of the character, as she appears to have 
 conceived it. Nursed under the roll of drum and sound of 
 trumpet, these sounds have stirred her to high aspiration ; 
 she has acquired not merely the free ways of the camp, but 
 the whole spirit of freedom. Her gestures all point upward ; 
 and throughout nearly the whole first act she makes herself 
 felt in so high a sense as an impersonation of the Genius of 
 Liberty, the chords she touches while she makes us merry 
 music are so absolutely grave, that the conventional comic 
 by-play of the soldiers (all very good and right) seems 
 almost impertinent. The other sentiment is lovej and 
 I do not know whether the most exquisite part of her whole 
 performance as an actress be the sudden radiance that 
 shines out of her when first the lover comes upon the 
 scene, or the noble burst of patriotism in those lines which 
 are the key to her peculiar reading of the entire character : 
 
 " Evviva r Italia ! 
 E i prodi guerrier ; 
 Son dessi mia gioia, 
 Mio solo pensier. 
 
120 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 Ad essi soltanto 
 Aspira il mio cor ; 
 Con essi ritrovo 
 La gloria, Pamor." 
 
 The two passions of the new Figlia del Reggimento, then, 
 are glory in the highest earthly sense, and love. All the 
 other features in the representation are no more than the 
 pleasant little accidents of sex and situation under which 
 they lie. The episodical scene of practice in fine singing, 
 which opens the second act, detaches itself from the rest of 
 the performance as the one bit of pure and simple comedy 
 in the whole opera, and that is delicate and merry. Every- 
 thing else is exhilarating. There is no stirring of laughter, 
 no stirring of tears, but a stirring of the spirit as by roll of 
 drum and trumpet-call. 
 
 As a singer of this part, Mdlle. Piccolomini is very far 
 inferior to Madame Jenny Lind or Madame Sontag. The 
 actual musical resources of her voice are small ; but her 
 voice is yet good enough to sustain her well in her position 
 as a lyric actress, and for its shortcomings her quick instinct 
 makes ample amends. Few singers have excelled her in 
 the rare power of quickening with thought the sounds she 
 utters ; and, as I have before observed, she seems to be 
 one of those people who know what they cannot do, and 
 take care never to attempt anything, however small, which 
 lies beyond their compass. 
 
 The Rosmunda of Alfieri is a play worth seeing upon the 
 stage for its own sake, and that on more accounts than one. 
 In the first place, it is, I believe, the first of Alfieri's plays 
 which has been represented in this country, and, although 
 not one of the best works of that true poet, is a fair average 
 example of his dramas. He was in his maturity when it 
 was written, and it is designed according to the plan which 
 he pretty uniformly followed. It exhibits that regard for 
 the classical unities which was his invariable rule, yet at the 
 
Italian Plays : " Rosmunda!' 1 2 1 
 
 same time it differs essentially— and much for the better — 
 from that modification of the classic drama which was 
 found most germane to the genius of France. There is 
 more tragic passion and less explanation of passion. There 
 are no confidential friends and waiting-maids through whom 
 the public receives from the hero or the heroine miscel- 
 laneous information in a prosy and didactic form. More 
 of a magnificent gloom, more tragic passion, more of the 
 vague suggestion of great thoughts, more energy of concep- 
 tion, more intensity of expression, appeal to us in Alfierj, 
 than in Racine or Corneille. It is enough for an Italian 
 actress — to speak now only of actresses— to express worthily 
 the language of Alfieri ; but the French actress, to be tragical, 
 has mainly to express herself through the language of 
 Racine. 
 
 Without stopping to tell the plot, let us take the idea of 
 Rosmunda. It is a story of the savage days, when wild 
 Huns were abroad, and when kings' daughters, their fathers 
 being slain, became part of the spoil of the conqueror, and 
 might be called upon to drink out of their fathers' skulls. 
 Such a captive had Rosmunda been to Alboin, a savage to 
 whom she was wife and victim, who drove her spirit out into 
 a wild sea of hate, and made a wreck of it. A thirst for 
 vengeance, wild and unruly as the times in which it was 
 excited, becomes her torment. She has raised up an assassin 
 for Alboin. She has made a husband of the man who was a 
 traitor to his king, and, as a partner in crime, regarding him 
 as the only person with whom she can have a common tie of 
 love, she loves him — but the love, as Madame Ristori inter- 
 prets it, has little root. Yet, when the man who had been 
 false to his king proves false to his wife also, the fury in 
 her, craving to work mischief, breaks out against him 
 into a wild and cruel jealousy. Him alone, until then, the 
 storms within her did not cover ; but against him, then, she 
 cries : 
 
122 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 " Tu sola 
 Riedi, o vendetta, riedi ; e me riempi 
 Tutta di tutto '1 nume tuo ; s' io sempre 
 Per prima e sola deitk mal t' ebbi." 
 
 She is driven upon action. Words will not satisfy the tem- 
 pest in her heart. She does not know whither the passions 
 broken loose will drive her. R'omilda, Alboin's daughter 
 and her step-daughter, is her victim. She hates her because 
 she is of the blood of Alboin, and she will marry her to the 
 fierce Alaric, who has already killed two wives, that Alboin's 
 daughter may experience such wedlock as fell to the share of 
 Alboin's captive wife. She suspects at first, and finally dis- 
 covers, that the partner of her throne and guilt, Almachilde, 
 pursues Romilda with a guilty passion ; but with a brave 
 soldier, Ildovaldo, young Romilda has exchanged honest 
 affection, and when the Queen finds this she is content 
 that they shall marry — although not even then content that 
 Alboin's daughter shall be happy. She consents to the 
 marriage simply because her career of vengeance has been 
 suddenly diverted towards Almachilde, and Ildovaldo is to 
 rise against him to destroy him. But he thinks of his 
 love, when she would have him think only of her vengeance: 
 and the fury turns again. Romilda might have been his ; 
 she could not tell — she knew not whither all was tending, 
 except that there was before her blood, and only blood. 
 
 " Al ciel quai voti 
 Forgo ? '. . Nol so. . . So che finor son tutti 
 Di sangue i voti miei ; n^ sangue io veggo 
 Che ad appagarmi basti. . ." 
 
 While Almachilde and Ildovaldo should be battling, she 
 grasps Romilda, and the issue of this struggle decides her 
 fate. Ildovaldo is content with having simply sent his 
 soldiers against Almachilde, and is only eager to satisfy his 
 love, having failed to satisfy Rosmunda's hate. Almachilde 
 afterwards enters victorious, whereupon Romilda dies by her 
 
" Rosmunda." — Madame Ristori. 123 
 
 stepmother s hand, and Ildovaldo kills himself. The wretched 
 man and wife remain, and the curtain falls upon them. Two 
 victims more, foes to the death, are left Still treading their 
 path of guilt, and the last word of each is a tremendous vow 
 of vengeance on the other. Thus the play ends, after the 
 dying cry of Ildovaldo to the king : 
 
 " O tu, che resti . . . 
 Fanne vendetta . . . 
 Almachilde. lo vendicarla giuro. 
 
 Rosmunda. Ho il ferro ancor ; trema-: or principia appena 
 La vendetta, che compiere in te giuro." 
 
 The conception of this close is, I think, one of the grandest 
 features of the tragedy. 
 
 Now the play of which this is the main thought is, as to 
 its action, carried out entirely by the four characters imme- 
 diately concerned, and certainly three of the four demand 
 high qualifications in the actor. Ildovaldo is not much 
 more than a chivalrous young lover, but the king, Alma- 
 childe, and Alboin's daughter are characters developed 
 with as much elaboration, and on which there has been 
 lavished as much noble writing, as we find in that of 
 Rosmunda. Almachilde is depicted as a man stout in 
 bodily courage, but of a mean soul, yet there is good mixed 
 with the baseness of his suit to Romilda ; and out of 
 his very, fear for Rosmunda comes the violence of his 
 defiance of her, when he does come to defy. Romilda, too, 
 is not a mere victim, but has the soul of a king's daughter, 
 gentle and maidenly as she is. She dares to maintain her 
 dignity in presence of her stepmother, and she royally 
 maintains the bearing which is fit towards the assassin of 
 her father. The tragedy demands imperatively four good 
 actors, and it suffers much at the Lyceum— and no doubt 
 also in Italy as well — from being sustained only by one. 
 Mdlle. Picchiottino is indeed a pleasant inoffensive actress. 
 
124 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 but the representatives of the two male characters have not 
 even the good-sense to be quiet ; they will act, and by 
 their misspent energies they mar the effect of the play. 
 The spectator must — in justice to Alfieri — remember that 
 when he sees Rosmicnda at the Lyceum he sees only a 
 fourth part of a four-character play ; but for that fourth 
 part's sake he may fairly be counselled to endure the rest. 
 
 Madame Ristori is a genuine actress. Her declamation 
 is good, and in the early acts there is an effect of grandeur 
 in the calm of her Rosmunda, disturbed only by flashes of 
 that fire within which in the last act becomes irrepressible. 
 Her way of coiling round the person of Romilda when the 
 dagger has been drawn, terrible and graceful as a serpent 
 that prepares to strike, is perfectly conceived. As an excep- 
 tion to this, we may say in England, that the usual Italian 
 way of acting, not with the hands only, but even with the 
 fingers, fails of effect; and even seems — not that it therefore 
 is — ungraceful to a London audience. Like Madame 
 Rachel, Madame Ristori creates out of certain lines, by 
 unexpected gestures and tones, striking effects, but they are 
 not so intense in expression, so subtle in conception, as the 
 corresponding efforts of Madame Rachel. 
 
 July 19. — I have seen more of Mdlle. Wagner. But her 
 Lucrezia more than confirms the impression made by her 
 Romeo. The acting, although showy and much studied, 
 wants the instinct of genius to make it good. For example, 
 at the end of the prologue (or first act), the Lucrezia of this 
 artist does not in a wild passion of rage and terror seek to 
 fly from the insulting crowd of enemies who are abasing 
 her before her son. The enemies depart and she remains, 
 scornful, defiant. As the stage becomes cleared the curtain 
 falls on Mdlle. Johanna Wagner striking an attitude. The 
 second act ends with an attitude still less artistic in concep- 
 tion, though effective if taken apart from any sense. The 
 close of the last act is marred by another attitude, which 
 
Madame Ristori. — Mdlle. Wagner. 125 
 
 strangely interrupts the course of feeling just before Lucrezia's 
 last interview with her dying son. The result of this kind 
 of performance is that it leaves the audience half-satisfied 
 and cold. 
 
 Madame Ristori's performance of Goldoni's La Locandiera 
 supplies proof, if it were still needed, of the reality of her 
 genius for tragedy. It is inevitable that whoever has the 
 qualities essential to the genuine presentment of a tragic 
 part should be able to present also true comedy ; the 
 greater contains the less. Mere keenness of every-day 
 observation may make a comedian, but the quick percep- 
 tion, the rare power of depicting all emotion, which belongs 
 to the best tragic acting, must belong to comedy as well, 
 and the tragedian is also in the best sense a comedian if his 
 art be not merely a trick. 
 
 July 26. — Mdlle. Wagner takes leave of the London 
 public as Tancredi. She does not act the part, and, con- 
 sidered as impersonation of a character, the errors are so 
 manifest that probably no impersonation was intended. But 
 the part is brilliantly dressed, after the child's beau ideal of 
 a knight, the posturing is graceful and not once extravagant ; 
 and the singing is her best. 
 
 August 9. — Mdlle. Piccolomini's Norina is very charming, 
 but unsatisfactory. There is no deeper thought to be 
 reached by genius of any sort than lies on the surface of 
 Don Pasquale ; it is a farce opera with impossible incidents, 
 and is best acted with farcical exaggeration. Signor 
 Lablache, after all, is right in his way of performing it ; 
 and Madame Grisi, the best of Norinas, is right also in the 
 exaggerations she adopts, as in the interminable rising and 
 bowing in the modesty scene before marriage. At Her 
 Majesty's Theatre the Pasquale is Signor Rossi, who 
 had shown before, as Don Magnifico in Cenerentola, that he 
 can sing well and act with great humour and unction. His 
 Pasquale is admirable, and its sole defect is very creditable 
 
126 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 to him. He acts it too well, as if the part were one of 
 comedy and not of farce. That is the fault also inseparable 
 from Mdlle. Piccolomini's Norina. She treats the whole 
 plot as the romp of a quick-witted and light-hearted girl — a 
 person perfectly answering to that description of herself 
 which is the first thing Norina sings. The instant catching 
 at the suggestion of a frolic, the impatience at being told 
 details she has jumped at, her glee at the mischief, and her 
 impatience to begin, are, in the Norina of this artist, as 
 delightful a bit of comedy as anyone could hope to see. 
 The trick once in hand, is carried through from first to last 
 in a light spirit of happy fun ; but there is nothing in the 
 plot to grasp. Don Pasquale being no more than a broad 
 farce set to pleasant music, there is no true character to be 
 eliminated out of it, no sentiment expressed through it ; 
 and therefore the opera displays very much less perfectly 
 than either of the others in which she has sung to us, Mdlle. 
 Piccolomini's peculiar genius. 
 
 That in the two houses it should only have been possible 
 for Londoners to hear Mozart twice, Rossini at most 
 a dozen times — that they have been permitted to hear 
 nothing whatever but the works of Bellini, Donizetti, and 
 Verdi, and that the powers of Madame Ristori as an actress, 
 such as they are, should have been expended chiefly upon 
 worthless plays, Medea, Camma, and the like — all this is a 
 marvel. 
 
 I am very glad to see that strong objection is now being 
 urged against La Traviata, if we are to hope that it is the 
 beginning of a stand against immoral opera libretti. It is 
 not only upon La Traviata that we must found our com- 
 plaint. Immorality in opera libretti is rather the rule than 
 the exception. Rossini's Comte Ory is charming music, but 
 the libretto is not only more licentious in its plot than La 
 Traviata, but it is, moreover, in one or two parts, grossly 
 profane. Let me not be misunderstood. I have no sym- 
 
Mdlle. Piccolomini. — Farquhar's "Inconstant." 127 
 
 pathy with artificial decencies such as those which have 
 substituted for the words of Beethoven's sublime Mount of 
 Olives the words of Engedt ; but it would be easy to n^me 
 half-a-dozen of our best operas of which the interest and 
 value on the stage could be increased largely if a really able 
 man were asked to alter the libretto. There are not a few 
 which would gain, rather than suffer, if they were now linked 
 to something like true poetry in word and story. In the 
 essence of things it must be easier for a poet to set words to 
 music than for a musician to set music to words ; and there 
 is no reason why we should not have a revolution among 
 opera libretti. As literature, are there ten good enough to 
 save the entire class from condemnation ? 
 
 September 27. — Mr. Murdoch is a new actor at the 
 Haymapket who has Come to us from the United States. 
 He begins his career in London as Young Mirabel, in a 
 discreetly-compressed version of Farquhar's comedy. The 
 Inconstant ; a comedy that for its wit's sake it is a joy to hear. 
 The London stage is at this time plagued with much bad 
 writing. There is Kotzebue's Pizarro at the Princess's; a 
 melodrama at the Lyceum with an ill-written burlesque ; an 
 ill-written burlesque at Drury Lane ; one of the most insane 
 dramas as to writing (though worth seeing for an actor's 
 sake) ever produced yet at the Adelphi : in the midst of all 
 this it is a great refreshment to hear one of Farquhar's come- 
 dies condensed into three acts of rapid incident and brilHant 
 dialogue. The Inconstant has by the adapter to the modern 
 stage been made quite fit not only for ears polite, but for pure 
 minds as well. It is free not only from irtimorality of speech, 
 but also from immorality of spirit. The Old and Young 
 Mirabel are both enacted by Americans. Mr. Chippendale 
 came over a year or two ago, and has seldom appeared to 
 more advantage than he now does as Old Mirabel. The 
 Young Mirabel is the new actor, Mr. Murdoch. Vigorous 
 without excess, lively and manly, his acting abounds in 
 
128 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 shrewd and well-considered by-play. When he talks Bisarre 
 down with Latin, it is with a genial rudeness that quite 
 justifies the admiration of him joined to her vexation ; and it 
 is without any exaggerated sentiment, but in a right honest 
 way, that he expresses those twinges of emotion and repent- 
 ance, at first short-lived and at last fixed, that show the 
 sound heart in the midst of all his levity. 
 
 There are yet two more American actors to be named, Mr. 
 and Mrs. Barney Wilhams, who have achieved a success that 
 seems to have established them for a long time to come as 
 favourites at the Adelphi. Their sphere is farce. Mr. 
 Barney Williams shines most as an American notion of an 
 Irishman, and Mrs. Barney Williams delights London with 
 the humours of the Yankee Girl. They have brought with 
 them a wretchedly bad piece, called The Middleman, which 
 has been performed with applause in America for several 
 hundred nights, and which is having a run in London, solely 
 because the new-comers act in it very cleverly, and dance in 
 it, to the unbounded delight of every night's audience, an 
 Irish jig. In farces suited to their humour these artists 
 excel, and they have the rare merit of a complete absence of 
 vulgarity. They know how to act broad farce with refine- 
 ment. Of the two actors, the lady, as is fit, appears to be the 
 better artist, and her whimsical songs, which are of a kind 
 that any lady might sing who had but enough power of 
 ludicrous expression, have already found their way into 
 the London streets. 
 
 October 4. — The Belphegor of Mr. Charles Dillon merits 
 distinct and emphatic commendation. It is much to win 
 attention from the town in a part that has been made 
 familiar in its perfection to one class of playgoers by the 
 acting of Lemaitre, and to another by a long run of the 
 play at the Adelphi. M. Frederick Lemaitre, with a light 
 French touch, depicted the vagabondage of the hero, and 
 the pathos of the situations in which he is placed. Mr. 
 
" Belphegor" : Charles Dillon. 129 
 
 Dillon brings out all the pathos solidly and earnestly ; he 
 makes it tell upon his audiences, but he is throughout so 
 substantially earnest in his rendering, that the play now and 
 then breaks down under him. We may compare the drama 
 to bad ice, over which a light and rapid skater may pass, 
 giving no one reason to suspect its unsafe condition, but 
 which cracks at once under a man who treads with manifest 
 deliberation. This criticism affects, certainly, the play 
 rather than the actor. Mr. Charles Dillon displays in 
 Belphegor powers of a high order as an English actor, and 
 has achieved success before the London public. 
 
 October 18. — Timon of Athens has been reproduced again 
 by Mr. Phelps, with even more pains than were bestowed 
 upon his former revival of that play, which, when he first 
 produced it, had been acted but a few times since the days 
 of Shakespeare. As now performed it is exceedingly effec- 
 tive. 
 
 A main cause of the success of Mr. Phelps in his Shake- 
 spearean revivals is, that he shows in his author above all 
 things the poet. Shakespeare's plays are always poems, as 
 performed at Sadler's Wells. The scenery is always 
 beautiful, -but it is not allowed to draw attention from the 
 poet, with whose whole conception it is made to blend in 
 the most perfect harmony. The actors are content also to 
 be subordinated to the play, learn doubtless at rehearsals 
 how to subdue excesses of expression that by giving undue 
 force to one part would destroy the balance of the whole, 
 and blend their work in such a way as to produce every- 
 where the right emphasis. If Mr. Phelps takes upon 
 himself the character which needs the most elaborate 
 development, however carefully and perfectly he may pro- 
 duce his own impression of his part, he never by his acting 
 drags it out of its place in the drama. He takes heed that 
 every part, even the meanest, shall have in the acting as 
 much prominence as Shakespeare gave it in his plan, and 
 
I30 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 it is for this reascn that with actors, many of whom are 
 anything but " stars", the result most to be desired is really 
 obtained. Shakespeare appears in his integrity, and his 
 plays are found to affect audiences less as dramas in a com- 
 mon sense than as great poems. 
 
 This is the case especially with Timon. It may be that 
 one cause of its long neglect, as potent as the complaint 
 that it excites no interest by female characters, is the large 
 number of dramatis persona., to whom are assigned what 
 many actors might consider parts of which they can make 
 nothing, and who, being presented in a slovenly way, by a 
 number of inferior performers, would leave only one part 
 in the drama, and take all the power out of that. Such an 
 objection has not, however, any weight at Sadler's Wells, 
 where every member of the company is taught to regard 
 the poetry he speaks according to its nature rather than its 
 quantity. The personators of the poet and the painter in 
 the first scene of the Timon, as now acted, manifestly say 
 what Shakespeare has assigned to them to say with as mu^h 
 care, and as much certainty that it will be listened to with 
 due respect, as if they were themselves Timons, Hamlets, 
 or Macbeths. Nobody rants — it becomes his part that 
 Alcibiades should be a little blustery — nothing is slurred ; 
 a servant who has anything to say says it in earnest, making 
 his words heard and their meaning felt ; and so it is that, 
 although only in one or two cases we may have observed at 
 Sadler's Wells originality of genius in the actor, we have 
 nevertheless perceived something like the entire sense of 
 one of Shakespeare's plays, and have been raised above 
 ourselves by the perception. 
 
 It is not because of anything peculiar in the air of 
 Islington, or because an audience at Pentonville is made of 
 men differing in nature from those who would form an 
 audience in the Strand, that Shakespeare is listened to at 
 S.^dler's Wells with reverence not shown elsewhere. What 
 
Sadler's Wells: "Timon of Athens!' 1 31 
 
 has been done at Islington could, if the same means were 
 employed, be done at Drury Lane. But Shakespeare is not 
 fairly heard when he is made to speak from behind masses 
 of theatrical upholstery, or when it is assumed that there is 
 but one character in any of his plays, and that the others 
 may be acted as incompetent performers please. If The 
 Messiah were performed at Exeter Hall, with special 
 care to intrust some of the chief solos to a good bass or con- 
 tralto, the rest being left to chance, and members of the 
 chorus allowed liberty to sing together in all keys, we should 
 enjoy Handel much as we are sometimes asked to enjoy 
 Shakespeare on the London stage. What Signer Costa 
 will do for an orchestra, the manager must do for his com- 
 pany, if he would present a work of genius in such a way 
 as to procure for it a full appreciation. 
 
 Such thoughts are suggested by the effect which Timon of 
 Athens is producing on the audiences at Sadler's Wells. 
 The play is a poem to them. The false friends, of whom 
 one declares, " The swallow follows not summer more willing 
 than we your lordship", and upon whom Timon retorts, "Nor 
 more wiUingly leaves winter," are as old as the institution 
 of society. Since men had commerce first together to the 
 present time the cry has been, " Such summer birds are 
 men". The rush of a generous impulsive nature from one 
 rash extreme into the other, the excesses of the. man who 
 never knew " the middle of humanity", is but another com- 
 mon form of life ; and when have men not hung — the poets, 
 the philosophers, the lovers, the economists, men of all habits 
 — over a contemplation of the contrast between that soft 
 town-life represented by the luxury of Athens in its wealth and 
 its effeminacy, and the life of a man who, like Timon before 
 his cave's mouth, turns from gold because it is not eatable, 
 and digs in the wood for roots ? With a bold hand Shake- 
 speare grasped the old fable of Timon, and moulded it into 
 a form that expresses much of the perplexity and yearning 
 
 I 2 
 
132 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 of our nature. He takes up Timon, a free-handed and 
 large-hearted lord, who, though " to Lacedaemon did his 
 lands extend", found them too little to content his restless 
 wish to pour himself all out in kindness to his fellows. He 
 leaves him dead by the shore of the mysterious eternal sea. 
 
 I do not dwell upon the play itself, for here the purpose 
 only is to show in what way it can be made, when fitly 
 represented — and is made at Sadler's Wells — to stir the 
 spirit as a poem. Mr. Phelps in his own acting of Timon 
 treats the character as an ideal, as the central figure in a 
 mystery. As the liberal Athenian lord, his gestures are large, 
 his movements free— out of himself everything pours, towards 
 himself he will draw nothing. As the disappointed Timon, 
 whoge love of his kind is turned to hate, he sits on the 
 ground self-contained, but miserable in the isolation, from 
 first to last contrasting with Apemantus, whom "fortune's 
 tender arm never with favour clasped", who is a churl by the 
 original sourness of his nature, hugs himself in his own 
 ragged robe, and worships himself for his own ill manners. 
 Mr. Marston's Apemantus is well acted, and helps much to 
 secure a right understanding of the entire play. 
 
 October 25. — The beautiful mounting of the Midsummer 
 Night's Dream at the Princess's Theatre attracts and 
 will attract for a long time crowded audiences. The words 
 of the play are spoken agreeably, some of the sweetest 
 passages charmingly, and much of Shakespeare's delicate 
 pleasantry is made to tell with good effect upon its hearers. 
 The Midsummer Night's Dream is full of passages that have 
 only to be reasonably well uttered to be enjoyed even by the 
 dull; and with so fair a Hermia as Miss Bufton, so whim- 
 sical a Bottom as Mr. Harley, who seems to have no 
 particular conception of the part, but nevertheless makes it 
 highly amusing — with a generally good delivery of words 
 and songs — the play speaks for itself in a great measure. 
 
 The one defect in the mounting of the Midsummer 
 
Princess's: "Midsummer Nighfs Dream" 133 
 
 NigMs Dream is that which has lessened the value of many 
 former efforts made at this house to produce Shakespeare 
 with every accessory of scenic decoration. I do not think 
 money ill spent upon stage-furniture, and certainly can only 
 admire the exquisite scenery of the play now being presented 
 at the Princess's; but there may be a defect of taste that 
 mars the effect of the richest ornament, as can best be shown 
 by one or two examples. 
 
 Shakespeare's direction for the opening scene of the 
 Midsu7nmer Night's Dream is: "Athens, a Room in the 
 Palace of Theseus." For this, is read at the Princess's 
 Theatre: "A Terrace adjoining the Palace of Theseus, 
 overlooking the City of Athens''; and there is presented an 
 elaborate and undoubtedly most beautiful bird's-eye view of 
 Athens as it was in the time of Pericles. A great scenic 
 effect is obtained, but it is, as far as it goes, damaging to the 
 poem: Shakespeare took for his mortals people of heroic 
 times, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, and it suited his 
 romance to call them Athenians; but the feeling of the play 
 is marred when out of this suggestion of the antique mingled 
 with the fairy world the scene-painter finds opportunity to 
 bring into hard and jarring contrast the Athens of Pericles 
 and our own world of Robin Goodfellow and all the wood- 
 land elves. "A Room in the House of Theseus", left that 
 question of the where or when of the whole story to be 
 touched as lightly as a poet might desire; the poetry was 
 missed entirely by the painting of the scene, beautiful as it 
 is, which illustrates the first act of the Midsummer Nighfs 
 Dream at the Princess's. 
 
 In the second act there is a dream-like moving of the 
 wood, beautifully managed, and spoilt in effect by a trifling 
 mistake easily corrected, Oberon stands before the scene 
 waving his wand, as if he were exhibitor of the diorama, or 
 a fairy conjurer causing the rocks and trees to move. 
 Nobody, I believe, ever attributed to fairies any power of 
 
134 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 that sort. Oberon should either be off the stage or on it 
 still as death, and it should be left for the spectators to feel 
 the dreamy influence of wood and water slipping by their 
 eyes unhindered and undi&tracted. This change leads to 
 the disclosure of a fairy ring, a beautiful scenic effect, and 
 what is called in large letters upon the play-bills, "Titania's 
 Shadow Dance''. Of all things in the world, a shadow 
 dance of fairies ! If anything in the way of an effect of light 
 was especially desirable, it would have -been such an arrange- 
 ment as would have made the fairies appear to be dancing 
 in a light so managed as to cast no shadow, and give them 
 the true spiritual attribute. Elaborately to produce and 
 present, as an especial attraction, fairies of large size, casting 
 shadows made as black and distinct as possible, and offer- 
 ing in dance to pick them up, as if even they also were solid, 
 is as great a sacrifice of Shakespeare to the purposes of the 
 ballet-master, as the view of Athens in its glory was a sacri- 
 fice of poetry to the scene-painter. Enough has been said 
 to show the direction in which improvement is necessary to 
 make the stage-ornament at the Princess's Theatre as 
 perfect as it is beautiful. The Puck is a pretty httle girl, 
 belted and garlanded with flowers ! From the third act we 
 miss a portion of the poem most essential to its right effect 
 — the quarrel between Hermia and Helena ; but we get, at 
 the end, a ballet of fairies round a maypole that shoots up 
 out of an aloe, after the way of a transformation in a panto- 
 mime, and rains down garlands. Fairies, not airy beings of 
 the colour of the greenwood, or the sk)', or robed in misty 
 white, but glittering in the most brilUant dresses, with a 
 crust of bullion about their legs, cause the curtain to fall on 
 a splendid ballet; and it is evidence enough of the depraved 
 taste of the audience to say that the ballet is encored. 
 
 I make these comments in no censorious mood. It is a 
 pleasure to see Shakespeare enjoyed by the large number of 
 persons who are attracted to the Princess's Theatre by 
 
"Still Waters Run Deep."— " Medea." 135 
 
 the splendours for which it is famous. I do not wish the 
 splendour less, or its attraction less, but only ask for more 
 heed to the securing of a perfect harmony between the con- 
 ceptions of the decorator and those of the poet. 
 
 At the Olympic Theatre a new drama, Still Waters 
 Run Deep, has been produced. Its author, Mr. Tom 
 Taylor, has obtained his plot from a French novel. The 
 writing, which is easy and natural, and the dramatic con- 
 struction of the piece, which has a somewhat lame conclu- 
 sion, are his own. The still waters run deep in the person 
 of a quiet husband, Mr. Wigan, who is taken for a fool by 
 his wife and by others, but who contrives quietly to put 
 down a swindling, rakish captain — acted by Mr. Vining — 
 to protect his family from wrong and loss, and to assert his 
 authority at home. The husband, Mr. Mildmay, affords Mr. 
 Wigan an opportunity for his talent in a- new character, 
 which will rank with his most complete successes. Mr. 
 Emery plays and makes up very effectively as an old man. 
 
 November i. — At the Olympic, Mr. Robson, after a season 
 of illness, has reappeared, and there, following two little 
 comedies perfectly well acted, may be seen again his wonder- 
 ful burlesque of Medea, wherein he seems to have reached 
 the chmax of success in personating jealousy by a wild 
 mingling of the terrible with the grotesque. 
 
 December 6. — The " Induction" to the Taming of the 
 Shrew enables Mr. Phelps to represent, in Christopher Sly, 
 Shakespeare's sketch of a man purely sensual and animal, 
 brutish in appetite, and with a mind unleavened by fancy. 
 Such a presentment would not suit the uses of the poet ; it 
 could excite only disgust ; if it were not throughout as 
 humorous as faithful. Mr. Phelps knows this ; and perhaps 
 the most interesting point to be noted in his Christopher 
 Sly is that the uncompromising truth of his portraiture of 
 the man buried and lost in his animal nature is throughout, 
 by subtle touches easy to appreciate but hard to follow. 
 
136 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1856. 
 
 made subservient to the laws of art, and the sketch, too, 
 is clearly the more accurate for being humorous : through- 
 out we laugh and understand. 
 
 Hamlet and Christopher Sly are at the two ends of 
 Shakespeare's list of characters, and, with a singular skill, 
 Mr. Phelps, who is the best Hamlet now upon the stage, 
 banishes from his face every spark of intelligence while 
 representing Sly. Partly he effects this by keeping the eyes 
 out of court as witnesses of intelligence. The lids are 
 drooped in the heavy slumberousness of a stupid nature; 
 there is no such thing as a glance of intelligence allowed 
 to escape from under them ; the eyes are hidden almost 
 entirely when they are not widely exposed in a stupid stare. 
 The acting of this little sketch is, indeed, throughout most 
 careful and elaborate. There is, as we have said, no 
 flinching from the perfect and emphatical expression of the 
 broader lights and shadows of the character. Christopher 
 is, at first, sensually drunk ; and when, after his awakening 
 in the lord's house, the page is introduced to him as his 
 lady-wife, another chord of sensuality is touched, the brute 
 hugs, and becomes amorous. Of the imagination that, 
 even when there are offered to the sensual body new 
 delights of the appetite, is yet unable to soar beyond the 
 reach already attained, Mr. Phelps, in the details of his act- 
 ing, gives a variety of well-conceived suggestions. Thus, 
 to the invitation, " Will 't please your mightiness to wash 
 your hands ?" Christopher, when he has grasped the fact 
 that a basin is being held before him in which he must wash, 
 enters upon such a wash as sooty hands of tinkers only can 
 require, and, having made an end of washing and bespatter- 
 ing, lifts up instinctively the corner of his velvet robe to dry 
 his hands upon. 
 
 The stupidity of Sly causes his disappearance from the 
 stage in the most natural way after the play itself has 
 warmed into full action. He has, of course, no fancy for 
 
Samuel Phelps. — F. Rob sen. 137 
 
 it, is unable to follow it, stares at it, and falls asleep over it. 
 The sport of imagination acts upon him as a sleeping- 
 draught, and at the end of the first act he is so fast asleep 
 that it becomes matter of course to carry him away. The 
 Induction thus insensibly fades into the play, and all trace 
 of it is lost by the time that a lively interest in the comedy 
 itself has been excited. 
 
 December 13. — At the Olympic, Mrs. Inchbald's Wives 
 as they were, and Maids as they are, is a five-act play, which, 
 being acted with vivacity, slips by as if it were a two-act 
 comedietta. The' play does not awaken any sort of violent 
 emotion, but the audience is insensibly amused throughout, 
 and quietly forgets the flight of time. In Jones the Avenger, 
 which is a whimsical farce, adapted from the French, not 
 very good in itself, Mr. Robson has one or two fine oppor- 
 tunities of burlesquing tragic passion. His terror in the 
 thought that he has at last caused the death of his appointed 
 victim by tempting him to swim over a canal with a heavy 
 clock tied round his neck, and his fear of being ever more 
 haunted by a ghost with a skeleton clock, are expressed in 
 a soliloquy that awakens laughter, by combining ludicrous 
 ideas with the display of a passion real as that in 
 Macbeth's 
 
 " Thou canst not say, I did it : never shake 
 Thy gory locks at me." 
 
 ■L?><-j^ , January 24. — For the past fortnight the four nights 
 a week dedicated at Sadler's Wells to Shakespeare have 
 been occupied by performances of Twelfth Night — last 
 acted here five years ago — in which comedy the part of 
 Malvolio is that sustained by Mr. Phelps. When but half- 
 a-dozen more of these plays shall have been produced, it 
 will become a subject of just pride to the manager of 
 Sadler's Wells that he will have mounted on his httle 
 stage all the dramatic works of our great poet ; that — apart 
 
138 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S7- 
 
 from his own personations — he will have gathered round 
 him a small company of actors, zealous to perform them all 
 with a true sense of what they are about; and will have 
 taught an audience mainly composed of hard-working men, 
 who crowd a sixpenny gallery and shilling pit, heartily to 
 enjoy the sweetest and the noblest verse man ever wrote. 
 
 The aspect and behaviour of the pit and gallery at 
 Sadler's Wells during the performance of one of Shake- 
 speare's plays cannot fail to impress most strongly every 
 visitor who is unaccustomed to the place. There sit our 
 working-classes in a happy crowd, as orderly and reverent 
 as if they were at church, and yet as unrestrained in their 
 enjoyment as if listening to stories told them by their own 
 firesides. Shakespeare spoke home to the heart of the 
 natural man, even in the same words that supply matter for 
 nice judgment by the intellect ; he was as a cook, who, by 
 the same meat that feeds abundantly the hungry, tickles 
 with an exquisite delight the palate of the epicure. It is 
 hard to say how much men who have had few advantages 
 of education must in their minds and characters be 
 strengthened and refined when they are made accustomed 
 to this kind of entertainment. 
 
 Upon a stage thus managed Mr. Phelps has of late years 
 been the personator of about thirty of the characters of 
 Shakespeare. Great men or small, heroes or cowards, 
 sages or simpletons, sensual or spiritual men, he has taken 
 all as characters that Shakespeare painted, studied them 
 minutely, and embodied each in what he thinks to be a 
 true Sl:i<ikespearean form. Bottom the "\A'eaver, Brutus, 
 Falstaff, Macbeth, Christopher Sly, are characters assumed 
 by the same man, not to display some special power in the 
 actor, but the range of power in the poet to whose illustra- 
 tion he devotes himself. Good tragedian as he is, we sup- 
 pose that it is in a sort of comedy, vaguely to be defined as 
 dry and intellectual, but in his hands always most diverting, 
 
Phelps as Malvolio. 139 
 
 that Mr. Phelps finds the bent of his genius as an actor to 
 be most favoured. Thus in Malvoho he would appear to 
 have a part pretty exactly suited to his humour, none the 
 less so because there is perhaps no character in which he 
 is himself lost sight of so completely ; substance vanishes, 
 and shadow lives. 
 
 Malvolio lives at Sadler's Wells in bearing and attire 
 modelled upon the fashion of the Spaniard, as impassive in 
 his manner as a Spanish king should be. In one of the first 
 sentences addressed to him we are told his character : " O, 
 you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste things with a 
 distempered appetite.'' Such a man is the Malvolio we 
 see. When in his tasting of Maria's letter he betiays his 
 distempered appetite for greatness, we are not allowed to 
 suppose for a moment that he loves his mistress. Seeing 
 that, as Maria says, "it is his ground of faith that all that 
 look on him love him", he accepts easily the hope of great- 
 ness thrust upon him, and his rejoicing is in the love of 
 Olivia, not in the way of sympathy, but as a way to "sitting 
 in his state, calling his officers about him in his branched 
 velvet gown". Such a man, as Mr. Phelps represents him, 
 walks not with a smirk and a light comic strut, but in the 
 heaviness of grandeur, with a face grave through very empti- 
 ness of all expression. This Malvolio stalks blind about 
 the world ; his eyes are very nearly covered with their heavy 
 lids, for there is nothing in the world without that is worth 
 noticing, it is enough for him to contemplate the excellence 
 within ; walled up in his own temple of the flesh, he is his 
 own adorer. If his ears are assailed with irreverences by 
 the fool, he counts the fool as naught, and is moved there- 
 fore but to the expression of a passing shade of pity for his 
 ignorance. Upon the debasement of Sir Toby and Sir 
 Andrew he looks down with very calm disdain. When in 
 the latter half of the play he has been bidden, as he thinks, 
 by her who will thrust greatness upon him, to be opposite 
 
140 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 with a kinsman, surly with servants, and, if he entertain her 
 love, to let it appear in his smiling; though he had been 
 practising behaviour to his shadow, all the smile he can 
 produce is one of intense satisfaction with himself, and all 
 the surliness but a more open expression of disdain for 
 those who do not pay him homage. When locked up as a 
 madman he is sustained by his self-content, and by the honest 
 certainty that he has been notoriously abused ; and when 
 at last he, for once, opens his eyes on learning how he has 
 been tricked, they close again in happy self-content, and he 
 is retiring in state without deigning a word to his tormentors, 
 when, as the fool had twitted him by noting how " the 
 whirligig of time brings in his revenges", he remembers 
 that the whirligig is still in motion. Therefore, marching 
 back with as much increase of speed as is consistent with 
 magnificence, he threatens all — including now Olivia in his 
 contempt — " I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you ! " 
 
 Other Malvolios seen by the playgoers of this generation 
 have been more fantastical and caused more laughter — 
 although this one causes much — but the impression made 
 by them has been less deep. Few who have seen or may 
 see at Sadler's Wells the Spanish-looking steward of 
 Countess Olivia, "and laughed at the rise and fall of his 
 chateau en Espagne, will forget him speedily. Like a quaint 
 portrait iu which there are master-strokes, his figure may 
 dwell in the mind for years. 
 
 Madame Girardin's charming drama, Une Fe7iime qui 
 deteste son Mart, has appeared this week at two of the 
 London theatres, and is to appear at yet another. At the 
 Haymarket it is given nearly as the author wrote it, with 
 only such touches as belong of necessity to a clever stage- 
 translation, and is called A Wicked Wife. At the Olympic 
 Mr. Tom Taylor has adapted it, changing' the scene from 
 France to England, and the title of the adaptation is A Sheep 
 in Wolfs Clothing. Each version has its own merits ; 
 
"A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing:' 141 
 
 both are most effective and successful. In the adaptation 
 a great point was necessarily lost. The royalist husband 
 whom the wife is concealing from the vengeance of the 
 revolutionary tribunal, while affecting to be a hard-hearted 
 republican, accepting the addresses of the friend of Robes- 
 pierre, must needs be considered dead when the story is 
 transferred to English soil. Easy divorce was not possible at 
 any period of English history, and- yet this topic yields some 
 of the best points in the original drama. Mr. Tom Taylor, 
 being compelled to give up this part of the story and to 
 substitute weaker machinery, has taken pains to add one 
 or two striking situations of his own invention to Madame 
 Girardin's plot ; thus there is on the whole, perhaps, as 
 much effective matter in the English adaptation as in the 
 original. A happier instance of the skilful transfer of a 
 story from one period and country to another, and of 
 adaptation from the French in the best sense of the phrase, 
 than the Sheep in Wolf's Clothing, I have seldom seen. 
 The Wife at the Haymarket is Miss Reynolds : at the 
 Olympic, Mrs. Stirling; and both ladies appear to great 
 advantage in the part. At the Haymarket, the Finot of 
 Mr. Compton strengthens the piece materially. 
 
 March 14. — Richard II, produced at the Princess's 
 Theatre for the first time on Thursday night, as to its 
 mounting is, perhaps, the most elaborate and costly spectacle 
 that Mr. Charles Kean has yet set upon the stage, and the 
 splendours are all unimpeachable. Fine as are the oppor- 
 tunities afforded by the part of Richard II to a tragedian, 
 no tragedian in recent times has made the play sufficiently 
 attractive to the public. It is full of passages that have 
 floated out of their place in the drama to live in the minds 
 of the people; the number of what are called "Beauties of 
 Shakespeare" in the play is great ; it contains also what 
 ought to be one of the best acting-characters, and it em- 
 bodies a fine picture of the old, wild days of English civil 
 
142 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 ■war. Only Shakespeare himself could have filled the stage 
 ■with a clash of arms, as ■we here find it, blended ■with so 
 many incidents of grief and terror. 
 
 It -was a fair object of ambition so to perform Richard II 
 as to present this picture to the eye as well as to the mind. 
 Mr. Charles Kean has reproduced the people of the time, 
 has restored to our eyes Richard the Second in his court, 
 shown in their strength castles now known as ruins, re- 
 produced with scrupulous fidelity the complete spectacle of 
 lists set out for a tournament on Gosford Green, and has 
 even interpolated between two acts of the play the triumph 
 of the entry of Bolingbroke with Richard into London, 
 which is a fine piece of stage-effect. The play gives reason- 
 able opportunity for all these shows. They leave the mind 
 bewildered for a time, but ultimately settle on the memory 
 as a true picture of at least one phase of a past state of 
 society. 
 
 Of course it is necessary to make room for stage-appoint- 
 ments and processions by omissions from the poetry, and 
 Richard II was well chosen as a play from which certain 
 omissions may be made without serious damage to its effect 
 for acting purposes. Thus I hold Mr. Charles Kean to be 
 quite justified in omitting the scenes in the fifth act founded 
 on Aumerle's treason against Bolingbroke, though, if we 
 consider the position of each, person concerned in the 
 episode, they contain truly the most vigorous sketch ever 
 conceived of the domestic misery that is among the incidents 
 of civil war. But it is to be regretted that to the necessities 
 of the scenery two passages have been sacrificed that are 
 most necessary to the play, and by the loss of which Mr. 
 Charles Kean impairs greatly the success of his own eff"orts 
 as an actor. At the end of the first act the curtain must 
 fall upon the spectacle of the tournament. The scene has, 
 therefore, to be sacrificed in which the audience is prepared 
 for Gaunt's death by tidings of his illness, and for Richard's 
 
"Richai'd 11" : Charles Kean. 143 
 
 seizure of his plate by a distinct knowledge of the King's 
 sore poverty, his need of means to fight the Irish rebels, and 
 his consequent wish that Gaunt may die, and leave his 
 wealth behind him. Thus prepared, we can see with less 
 surprise and abhorrence Richard's act of seizure in the first 
 scene of the act that follows. Still further to soften the im- 
 pression against Richard, which, if too strongly excited in 
 the first half of the drama, would check pity in the other 
 half, the poet has taken care to remove Gaunt from the 
 stage to die, so that when Richard, after receiving informa- 
 tion of his death, turns promptly to the subject of the Irish 
 ■wars and makes the seizure, he does not shock us by the 
 rapacity and selfishness displayed while the very body of 
 his uncle — dead but a minute since — lies before him. By 
 the omission of the last scene in the first act, as the play is 
 performed at the Princess's, we are brought suddenly from 
 Gaunt in regal favour to Gaunt on his death-bed. He dies 
 on the stage, and Richard, with the urgency of whose needs 
 we have not been carefully impressed, becomes immediately 
 a bird of prey beside the corpse, and loses irretrievably the 
 goodwill of the audience. The other dangerous omission 
 is that of the scene which should open the third act, and 
 which immediately precedes the change^f Richard's fortune, 
 cunningly preparing us for pity by producing Bushy and 
 Green for execution as the men who have "misled a prince, 
 a royal king", etc. The effect of these two omissions is to 
 impede seriously the course of sympathy in the audience for 
 King Richard's misfortunes, and to throw great difificulty in 
 the way of the actor by whom it is the whole purpose of the 
 play that sympathy shall be excited. Mr. Charles Kean 
 could not wholly overcome this difficulty by the most care- 
 ful acting, though the skill with which he marked, as the 
 turning point in Richard's story, the revoking of BoHng- 
 broke's sentence of banishment, went far to win some pity 
 for his hero. Mrs. Kean, too, conquered a few kind 
 
144 Journal of a London Playgoer. L^^S/- 
 
 thoughts for Richard by the pathos which she threw into 
 his Queen's parting from him at the Tower. 
 
 By other members of the company the parts less import- 
 ant were efificiently sustained, and there was much to praise, 
 in Mr. Ryder's Bolingbroke. The revival earned a most 
 complete and well-deserved success. 
 
 March 2 1. — Mr. Bayle Bernard's new play, A Life's Trial, 
 may be described as an Adelphi drama suited to the actors 
 and the audience at the Haymarket. It is in four acts, of 
 which the first three are so good and effective as to promise 
 more than usual success, but the last ends with a scene to 
 which expectation has been strongly directed only to be 
 balked. The scene itself — a West-end gambling club — is 
 richly mounted; in it all the elements from which should 
 arise the last conflict of love and passion are collected, and 
 yet no dramatic use is made of them. The hero is ruined 
 at cards by conspirators at a quiet table, where no word is 
 said; the heroine arrives too late to denounce the villain; 
 the villain himself has run off. Nobody has anything to say 
 that is worth saying, somebody looks in to report that the 
 villain of the piece has taken poison, and the curtain falls. 
 Every preceding act had ended with a situation not only 
 well conceived, but also powerfully wrought, and Mr. Ber-' 
 nard has only to re-write his concluding scene in such away 
 as to bring into play all the contending passions he has 
 stirred, to make the close of the fourth act as triumphant as 
 that of the second or the third, and to secure for the whole 
 drama unusual success. That for the fault of one scene, 
 hurried in the writing, a play everywhere else written so 
 skilfully, mounted so liberally, and acted throughout so well 
 as the Life's Trial, should miss the success it deserves, is 
 not to be tolerated. Precedent may be against such a pro- 
 ceeding, but so easy does it appear to remove the sole bar 
 to the durable success of this drama, by re-writing its close, 
 that I hope precedent will not be in this case too strictly 
 
Bayle Bernard's "A Life's Trial." 145 
 
 respected. Miss Reynolds, as the heroine, acted well, and 
 received at the close of the third act a hearty call, while 
 Mr. W. Farren, as the hero, in an expression of repressed 
 hatred for a false friend, at the close of the second act, 
 added one more to the number of his bits of acting in 
 which he now and then mounts high above the ordinary 
 level. Mr. Buckstone, as a tea-dealer who affects fine 
 company, wears white waistcoats, and hums Di tanti palpiti, 
 to the confusion of his business and to the beggary of 
 himself, and Mr. Compton, as an adventurer in many forms, 
 appear throughout to excellent advantage. The story ex- 
 tends over ten years, during which these two worthies are 
 much buffeted by fortune. 
 
 March 28. — One of Mr. Robson's very best successes is his 
 personation of the old rustic miser. Daddy Hardacre, in an 
 English version ol La Fille de I'Avare. The old man loves 
 his daughter and his gold, handles and hugs them with so 
 equal an affection, that to subdue either of the two loves, 
 when it seems to have become inevitable that he must bring 
 one into subjection to the other, is impossible. To save an 
 uncle's life the miser's daughter robs him of five thousand 
 pounds that he had stubbornly refused to lend. When he is 
 frantic with his loss, the daughter owns herself to be the 
 thief. He will fell her to the earth ; he will fondle her ; he 
 will starve her into more confession. He has sent her to her 
 room, and sits before the stairs that lead down to his money 
 and the stairs that lead up to his daughter. He sees her 
 weeping and praying. " Shut the door," he cries to the old 
 
 servant, " I'll never forgive I didn't tell you to shut it 
 
 close, you stupid fool !" The knot is untied at last without 
 violence to either of the miser's ruling passions. It will be 
 seen that there is full scope here given for Mr. Robson's 
 power as an actor. He has put his entire strength into the 
 part, filled it with minute touches of character, fantastic 
 shifts of mood. The half-maniacal exultation over success 
 2 K 
 
146 Journal of a London Playgoer, [1857. 
 
 in driving a hard bargain, an exultation that almost takes 
 away speech and that brings tears to the eyes, he contrasts 
 sharply with the pain it costs to pay even the small expenses 
 upon executing deeds from which there is to accrue large 
 profit. I say no more, for Daddy Hardacre ought to be 
 seen, and will be seen, by every faithful playgoer. Miss 
 Hughes, who made her first appearance at the Olympic, as 
 the miser's daughter, acted with a charming simplicity and 
 truth. The other characters were so well sustained by 
 Mr. George Vining, Mr. Cooke, and Miss Stevens, that 
 there was no drawback whatever on the satisfaction of the 
 audience. 
 
 April 18. — At Her Majesty's Theatre the success of 
 the season was decided on the first night by the substantial 
 triumph of the new tenor, Signor Giuglini. The opera was 
 La Favorita, and with one exception the singers were all 
 new ; with no exception they were good, but Signor Giuglini 
 won the honours of the night, and left upon all minds the 
 certainty that he will win no mean share of the honours of 
 the season. He has taste, feeling, sufficient power as an 
 actor, and a perfect voice. No success could have been less 
 spurious than his. The crowded audience was critical, the 
 opera is weak and dull ; at the end of the first act (into which 
 the first two had been wisely compressed) the applause 
 expressed simply a mild content. As the opera proceeded 
 the range of the new singer's power? was developed ; and 
 when in the last act Spirto gentil was sung with a purity 
 of voice and a delicacy of expression never to be surpassed, 
 the audience surrendered at discretion. One of the best 
 singers in Europe was before them, and no room was left 
 for any doubt about the fact. 
 
 April 25. — Maria di Rohan has been reproduced at the 
 Lyceum Opera, and after an interval of four years the public 
 is again surprised by the intensity of passion expressed in the 
 last act by Signor Ronconi, whose Chevreuse is the one thing 
 
Kobson's "Daddy Hardacre." — Ronconi. i/i,J 
 
 that keeps the opera upon our stage. In the first two acts 
 he is the chivalrous and devoted friend and lover. Some 
 people have sharp eyes. A daily critic, in a detailed analysis 
 of Signor Ronconi's performance of this part, calls attention 
 to the " seeds of suspicion" sown by the discovery of the 
 lady's mask in his friend's room, and to the metamorphosis 
 produced by a supposed knowledge that it is his wife's, which 
 is fearful in its painfully suppressed emotion. The scene is, 
 in fact, the only one in which Signor Ronconi has an oppor- 
 tunity of showing comic power. Ladies' masks all very much 
 resemble one another, and the " fearful expression" seen by 
 the critic was that of banter against a friend who has a lady in 
 a closet, and has been affecting only a solicitude about his 
 mother. Chevreuse after quitting the stage comes back to 
 look in at the door, and leave a parting joke behind him. 
 The suppressed emotion is in fact that of laughter. If 
 any evidence were needed beyond that of one's eyes, the 
 libretto clearly enough shows that the same man from the 
 moment of his discovering that friend and wife have de- 
 ceived him pants with an insane passion to bring back the 
 betrayer to his grasp, yet after the discovery of the mask not 
 on'y retires laughing, but fights the false friend's duel for 
 him; and yet more, when peril from Richelieu threatens, 
 although wounded already on his behalf, exerts himself to 
 mount him on a horse and speed him into safety. But 
 Chalais on the verge of the duel had written a parting letter 
 to Maria, in which he returned her portrait. This Richelieu 
 finding among his papers, sends to the deluded husband. 
 " The manner in which Ronconi perused the letter, and his 
 convulsive exclamation at the end," are then commented 
 upon by the too observant critic. The manner was that of 
 complete indifference. He was reading a farewell to some 
 lady — it mattered little whom ; there was no doubt yet in the 
 brave mind. The portrait was then opened carelessly ; and 
 with a loud cry, passing rapidly, as the words of it denote, 
 
 K 2 
 
148 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 from amazement into agony, and thence to wrath, the passion 
 that begets the whole catastrophe begins : 
 
 " Che ? Maria . . . dessa ! e Riccardo . . 
 La scorse notte ! . . Oh rabbia !" 
 
 The rest is all the work of passion. The whole catastrophe 
 is brought about during the first terrible half-hour of fury. I 
 am not sure whether the last glance at the actor as the 
 curtain falls does not show him with his wrath already half 
 repented. 
 
 May 23. — Mdlle. Parepa sang, for the first time in London, 
 at the IjYCEUM Opera last Thusday evening, as the Elvira of 
 I Puritani. She is very young, comely in person, graceful 
 in movement, and endowed with a sweet and flexible soprano 
 voice, which has all the fresh music of youth in it, and in the 
 use of which skill is not more apparent than quick feeling. 
 Mdlle. Parepa seems to have in her the material of a good 
 actress, and performs already with much tact and animation. 
 She deserved the honour of addition to the excellent Lyceum 
 company. 
 
 May 9. — No opera has been performed at Her Majesty's 
 Theatre this season so perfectly as t\\e.Luda di Lammermoor 
 in which Mddle. Piccolomini and Signor Giuglini appeared 
 for the first time on Thursday night. 
 
 The Lucia of Mdlle. Piccolomini was a double success. 
 It was her fourth success as an actress, her first as a singer. 
 As actress she has a very wide range of emotion to express 
 — maidenly love, fear of the spirit-world, fear of man, hope, 
 doubt, despair, and a sort of madness in which all moods 
 mingle. We need say only that she justified the highest 
 praisethat has been heretofore bestowed upon her skill. 
 The fir:t expression of her madness is in a recitative, 
 beginning // dolce suono, which, as Mdlle. Piccolomini 
 delivered it, was one of the most curious displays of a rare 
 power of dramatic expression that we can remember. The 
 
The Operas. 149 
 
 mood shifts with every line or every half-Una, and the 
 dramatic illustration was throughout exquisite. There 
 occurs in it Lucia's fancy that she hears the nuptial hymn, 
 and upon the words expressing this, Mdlle. Piccolomini 
 seized, that she might put into them a rapture of tenderness 
 which brought the lost life, and the happiness with which 
 it might have overflowed, into a startling contrast with the 
 girl's death and despair. With a like skill, by her delivery 
 of the lines 
 
 " NelF ira sua terribile, calpesta, oh Dio ! P anello . . . 
 Mi maledice!" 
 
 she not only flashes into every heart the reason of her mad- 
 ness, but makes it clear that sudden madness was to her 
 the inevitable consequence of Edward's curse. 
 
 May 16. — At Her Majesty's Theatre, Madame Alboni 
 has, during the past week, made her first appearance for the 
 season in the Barbiere di Seviglia, and on that occasion the 
 public had, for the first time this season, an opportunity of 
 hearing one of Rossini's operas performed at either house. 
 With that single exception, from the opening of the season 
 to the present time, there has been no music heard either 
 at Her Majesty's Theatre or at the Lyceum, except two 
 operas of Bellini^who is, at any rate, not the most vigorous 
 of composers — and the works of the two weakest writers who 
 have compassed fame, Donizetti and Verdi. Of Donizetti, 
 moreover, with a single exception, we have had only those 
 works — his serious ones — in which he most distinctly made 
 his weakness manifest. Is it the fault of the public, or of 
 public singers, that with two opera-houses open we so 
 seldom hear any first-class music ? It is time to begin 
 singing a better class of music than has been heard hitherto 
 at either opera-house, for we cannot believe that the polite 
 world wishes to place itself in unenviable contrast with the 
 throngs that crammed the Surrey Music Hall last Mon- 
 
150 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i 857- 
 
 day evening to hear Mendelssohn's Elijah., or with the 
 great shilling audience that will be regaled next Wednesday 
 evening at St. Martin's Hall with Mozart's Requiem and 
 Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise. 
 
 Adelphi. — Mr. Webster appeared last Monday evening, 
 for the first time this season, acting with Madame Celeste 
 in a new drama, entitled foseph Chavigny ; or, Under the 
 Thumb, foseph Chavigny is an Adelphi drama, unrelieved 
 by comic passages, and burdened with a mass of verbiage 
 under which a very fair plot sinks utterly exhausted in the 
 second act. The first act is the best, and would tell 
 capitally with only about one-fourth of the words omitted. 
 Of the second act, three-fourths of the words ought to have 
 been scored out before the piece was acted, and the third 
 act would have borne reducing by about one-half Un- 
 luckily the author, in his laudable desire to write his best 
 for his best actors, had overloaded most especially with his 
 copia verborum the parts of Mr. Webster and Madame 
 Celeste, and a dialogue between those excellent performers, 
 who are first favourites with the house and were putting 
 forth all their best powers, was, on the first night, the most 
 dangerous part of the whole drama, which but narrowly 
 escaped damnation. No doubt it has already been com- 
 pressed ; and as the story is good, and the Chavigny of Mr. 
 Webster really a good piece of acting, the compressed play 
 will have a reasonable power of attraction. 
 
 May 30. — The Boufifes-Parisiens are acting a variety of 
 gay little pieces which now tempt the town with mirth, and 
 raillery, and pleasant song. One of these is Les Pantins de 
 Violette. Violette, under the care of an old enchanter, is 
 bred to the belief that all the living things she sees are 
 mechanical machines, and the person whom she is to love 
 is then presented to her as the most beautiful of all the 
 puppets. This puppet performs until it wins her heart, 
 and then — but why tell every turn of the story? The 
 
"Joseph Chavigny" — RonconVs "Don Giovanni!' 1 5 1 
 
 pleasant little conceit is worked out gracefully, merrily, and 
 cleverly. 
 
 Ju7ie 13. — Mdlle. Piccolomini can do nothing without 
 showing the originality of her genius as an actress, and as 
 Zerlina in Don Giovanni she especially gave with a new 
 force certain dramatic points in the La ci darem ; her 
 rustic elbowings and wheedlings in Batti batti were de- 
 vised as a true artist would devise them ; and in the ball 
 scene she accounts cleverly for Zerlina's withdrawal by 
 showing her as a country girl absorbed in the business of 
 watching the steps of the other dancers that she may see 
 what she herself ought to be doing. Nevertheless, Zerlina 
 is her least successful part. She does not owe her triumph 
 as an actress to her piquant ways. If there be no depths 
 to be stirred, no hidden springs of emotion to be loosened, 
 no spiritual meaning to express, her strength is only as the 
 strength of actresses and actors who can please without 
 possessing any genius at all. Her comparative failure as 
 Norina in Don Pasquale indicated this, and her almost 
 positive failure as Zerlina proves it. Some of the best 
 melodies in the opera are here entrusted to her voice, and 
 as a vocalist she is, by a great deal, less perfect than as an 
 actress. 
 
 The Don Giovanni of Signor Ronconi is not perfectly 
 sung ; but I differ altogether from those who do not appre- 
 ciate it as a piece of acting, and who sigh for the gentle- 
 manly grace of Tamburini. It is admitted that Signor 
 Ronconi, as Chevreuse, assumes perfectly the dignity and 
 bearing of the noble chevalier of the Court of Louis Quatorze; 
 if, therefore, his Don Giovanni be not an agreeable and 
 pleasant gentleman, the reason must needs be that Signor 
 Ronconi does not choose to represent him so. A hero who 
 in the last scene of a play or opera goes down alive into 
 hell before the presence of the audience ought, one humbly 
 suggests, to be shown as something else than a most gentle- 
 
152 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 manly person in the early scenes. The character which 
 Signor Ronconi imprints on his Don Giovanni is one of 
 defiant wickedness. That is the true character of one who 
 delights in insulting the weak women whom he has betrayed. 
 He charms women with the serpent's power of fascination, 
 not with the noble bearing and the courtesy that are the 
 attributes of better men. He is wicked and defiant to the 
 last. Because he remains defiant, the last hope of rescue 
 from perdition leaves him. It is odd that the same censors 
 of the stage who object against Mdlle. Piccolomini that she 
 wins too much sympathy for the struggle of a dissolute girl 
 to wipe away her stains and falter back upon the road to 
 heaven, should think it a fault in Signor Ronconi that he 
 has not made sufficiently debonnaire and agreeable the 
 character of a licentious man who travels with his best 
 speed in the contrary direction. 
 
 June 27. — Madame Ristori has been acting the part of 
 Bianca in an Italian version of the Fazio of Dr. Milman. 
 It is an Italian rendering of an Italian tale, and when we 
 see it acted by Italians we are less sensible than usual of 
 that inadequacy of motive for their actions which in the 
 English play takes force out of the three leading characters, 
 Bianca, Fazio, and Aldabella. The Italian element in the 
 tale being more vividly presented to the mind, it proves 
 a better story than we take it to be when told in English 
 fashion to our English eyes and ears. In her own part of 
 Bianca, which is the one part of the piece, and for the sake 
 of which it keeps a place upon our stage, Madame Ristori 
 sees the weak point, and exerts her skill successfully to 
 strengthen it. By touching upon one or two characteristic 
 passages in her performance, we may indicate her reading 
 of the play. 
 
 She is a fond wife, but an Italian wife. In the first 
 scene she marks strongly the repose of wedded happiness 
 with Fazio. The repose is broken only by a natural impa- 
 
"Fazio" in Italian : Ristori. i S 3 
 
 tience at the mention of her husband's early love for the 
 proud Aldabella, who had scorned him in his poverty, and 
 by a weariness at his search for the secret of alchemy. She 
 is not the last speaker when she leaves the stage, but it is a 
 rule with Madame Ristori never to quit the stage without 
 making a point as she does so, and Fazio's last words were 
 a jesting reference to Aldabella. Bianca, therefore, turns 
 towards him at her chamber door, and with two little 
 parting gestures of the hand only — one representing playful 
 but half-earnest warning, and the other trusting love — 
 impossible to any English actress, natural to an Italian, 
 sul.is up in two instants the meaning of the scene. 
 
 Then the stabbed miser from next door enters and dies, 
 whereupon Fazio, yielding to temptation, buries him secretly 
 and steals his wealth. When Fazio, madly elated, shows 
 the treasure to his wife, Madame Ristori does not — as Dr. 
 Mil man directs — burst into tears, but shrinks from it with a 
 panting dread. Fazio is a weak fool, and, love him as she 
 may, instinctively she knows it. What will he do, with his 
 head turned by riches ? 
 
 When she appears next upon the stage, Fazio's head has 
 been turned not only by riches, but by the flatteries of 
 Aldabella, who has sought to win him again to her lure. 
 As he was before delirious with wealth, so is he now delirious 
 with flattery of woman ; and as he talks to her of the noble 
 lady whom she may see drinking light out of his eyes, 
 Madame Ristori's action is again full of significance. Listen- 
 ing to her husband with mute astonishment, she stirs twice 
 only during the rhapsody : once to look narrowly into his 
 face for the meaning of it, once to look round towards the 
 street for any outward cause of his disturbance. That leads 
 to her presently divining that he must have seen her rival. 
 A reasonable jealousy is now, of course, set boiling in her 
 blood ; but when she warns Fazio of the extremities to 
 which a woman may be driven in her passion, of the possible 
 
154 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 change from love to hate, she lets the word odio suddenly 
 fall broken on a sigh of wom?n's inextinguishable love, and 
 into a few tones breathes the entire spirit of the character 
 she plays. Fazio promises well, but when for the second 
 time Bianca parts with him, it is with an expression of more 
 hopeless dread than the sight of the gold had caused in 
 her. 
 
 We see Bianca next as a home-keeping wife, troubled by 
 Fazio's night-long absence, and soon learning that he had 
 supped at the house of Aldabella. She hears at the same 
 time that the Duke sits in council over the mysterious dis- 
 appearance of the old miser, she as a trusted wife being, of 
 course, mistress of the mystery. Then comes the dangerous 
 part of the story. It occurs to her to accuse her husband, 
 simply that he may be dragged from Aldabella's arms. The 
 least hint of reflection here would be the ruin of the part, 
 and we again appreciate Madame Ristori's perception of 
 the difficulty when with a peculiar action, as the thought 
 rises, she flashes to its execution. Perfectly original is the 
 way in which she contrives to pass from the stage, leaving 
 behind her an impression of eager swiftness and at the 
 same time of an intense preoccupation of the mind which 
 bars all reasoning. 
 
 When she appears before the Duke as the accuser of her 
 husband, Madame Ristori represents Bianca as a woman 
 transferred into a world of new sensations, who continues 
 almost mechanically to move in the direction taken after 
 the first impulse to go somewhere and do something was 
 received. Her mind is as a ball rolling in a straight line, 
 of which the pace begins to slacken. She enters slowly as 
 one in a dream, self-occupied ; she doe's not appear to see 
 the counsellors, answers their questions according to her 
 first purpose, slowly and with the manner of one speaking 
 to herself It moves her a little when, by the course of 
 inquiry, she is reminded that she is Fazio's wife ; but she is 
 
Madame Risiori. ISS 
 
 little stirred until her husband enters as a prisoner, then 
 suddenly she flies across the stage and hides her face, 
 because she does not meet him, as of old, with the true 
 features of a wife. Compelled to show herself as his 
 accuser, when he doubts her reality, and asks to see her 
 marriage-ring, she nervously attempts to cover the ring-finger 
 'with her other hand. But with what frenzy she becomes 
 Fazio's defender when he receives sentence of death, 
 how she pleads for him, humbles herself in the dust before 
 him, it is needless to go on to tell. The last half of the 
 play gives scope for nearly all Madame Ristori's powers. 
 Having shown how she understands the part, how skilfully 
 also she surmounts the difficulty of the play itself, I need 
 not describe in detail how she triumphs when she has simply 
 to display the usual resources of her art as a tragedienne. 
 
 July i8. — Mdlle. Piccolomini's Adina m EHstr d' Amore 
 is, or rather should be, one of her most genuine successes. 
 Certainly, though her reading of the part is all plainly 
 enough set down in the libretto, Mdlle Piccolomini is the 
 first person who has taught us to see in Adina more than a 
 mere coquette. 
 
 Mdlle. Piccolomini's Adina has from first to last her heart 
 set upon the over-modest Nemorino. She knows herself to 
 be the prettiest girl in the village, is well-to-do in the world, 
 and happy in her sense of power as well as in possession of the 
 lover whom out of pure gaiety she teases. When the over-bold 
 Sergeant Belcore addresses her in the come-see-and-conquer 
 vein, she is tickled by his conceit, humours him in the mock- 
 ing way of a girl who knows how far he is from ever making 
 an impression on her heart, amuses herself with him as 
 an agreeable absurdity. In the succeeding scene with 
 Nemorino, while Adina plays with his affection, Mdlle. 
 Piccolomini makes it most evident that her playfulness is of 
 another character. She worries out of him incessant pro- 
 testations of his love, at every fond word her face brightens 
 
IS6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S7- 
 
 with an innocent happiness, there are touches of respect also 
 in her behaviour. She is as much in love with Nemorino 
 as he is in love with her, but that swain has not courage to 
 believe it. 
 
 We see Adina next when she finds Nemorino foolishly 
 singing after he has taken the elixir which is to compel her 
 love on the day following. When she is coming to him, 
 and first notices his reckless, joyous manner, she stops 
 suddenly with a serious look of doubt and concern, her 
 love is for a moment openly betrayed; but before Nemorino 
 sees her she has leapt to the conclusion that he is endavour- 
 ing to take her at her word and break from her. Gay with 
 the expectation of to-morrow's victory, he encourages the 
 notion ; she affects unconcern on her part, yet reminds him 
 of his vows, and contradicts her former counsel by suggest- 
 ing that he may attempt to break them, but will not know 
 how. He abides by his gay mood. Adina, piqued a little, 
 must needs bring him back to his allegiance, and at that 
 moment Belcore's drum is heard. The drum suggests him 
 to her as a puppet of which she can make use for the 
 reconquest of her lover. Mdlle. Piccolomini shows here in 
 by-play how suddenly the thought of turning to her use the 
 empty sergeant is suggested. By the time he enters, her 
 mind is made up, and in a preoccupied, determined way — 
 every third gesture a glance at Nemorino — she begins to 
 coiirt him. She watches her lover throughout. She barely 
 does so much as think about the sergeant. He is a vain 
 man, ready to believe that she can love him in an instant. 
 He has told her so ; and if she takes him up, plays with 
 him, and puts him down at the last moment, he deserves 
 the lesson. It is his vanity that will be wounded, not his 
 heart, and in the meantime he may be serviceable as a 
 puppet-figure. Narrowly watching Nemorino, therefore, 
 Adina gives herself up to the soldier, promising more and 
 more as her pique rises, because her lover maintains his 
 
"L' Elisir d'Amore": Piccolomini. 157 
 
 gay humour. When the order for departure of the soldier 
 arrives, and she has been bidding higher and higher in the 
 hope to frighten back her truant to his old allegiance, and 
 she at last promises marriage to the sergeant on that very 
 day — before the happy morrow to which Nemorino has 
 been looking forward — her end seems to be half gained, for 
 the old lover shows signs of despair. She scolds him then, 
 she parades Belcore up and down before his eyes, she turns 
 the laugh against him; but she hovers near him instinct- 
 ively, her love shows through her anger, and once, when 
 the sergeant raises his hand to push Nemorino roughly, she 
 bounds forward to his rescue. 
 
 In the next act Adina finds that she had no just cause of 
 pique against her modest lover, and she not only throws 
 aside, a"s she meant always to throw aside, the sergeant, for 
 whom, as she frankly owns, "pieno di donne i il mondo", 
 but she throws aside much of her own feminine pride ; 
 and when she really fears that she may lose the husband 
 of her choice, makes, in a scene charmingly diversified with 
 lights and shades of feeling, first timidly and modestly by 
 implication, then, when he has not courage to act upon that, . 
 with a frank energy, the plainest and most unequivocal con- 
 fession of her love. 
 
 And this is the part of Adina, which opera-goers have 
 for many years been accustomed to regard as the part of a 
 mere hard-hearted village coquette, in which there is no 
 play given to the skill of a good actress. We have been so 
 lonp' used to look for no more, that many, whose attention 
 to the suggestions of the actrfess is divided by attention to 
 familiar and pleasant music, may fail to observe what other- 
 wise is manifest enough. The music, too, is in this opera 
 quite within Mdlle. Piccolomini's reach. 
 
 Tuly 25. — Of course it is hard for an Englishman to re- 
 concile himself to a Dutuano, Re di Scozia ; to believe in 
 Macbetto as he believes in Macbeth. It is impossible for 
 
158 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 Signor Giulio Carcano to translate Macbeth, though he 
 deserves credit for the result of the effort he has made ; and 
 it is amazing to see how Signor Vitaliani acts Macbeth. 
 His purpose is obvious enough. Macbeth is not the hero 
 of the play in the Italian version : it is his business to serve 
 as foil and contrast to his lady. 
 
 Madame Ristori conceives Lady Macbeth as a woman who 
 pens up her emotions, who is watchful, self-contained, who 
 fights against compunctious visitings of nature without 
 letting a stir be seen or any note of aches within to escape 
 her lips, until her heart too sorely charged gives way under 
 the weight it is forced secretly and silently to bear. She 
 contrasts the innate force of this wife's character with the 
 weakness of the man who cannot keep his troubles to him- 
 self, who gives all his emotions tongue, who when he 
 shrinks with his mind shrinks with his body also, who when 
 he is startled mentally starts bodily, and so, instead of 
 being self-contained, is always pouring himself out, even at 
 the very finger-tips. We suppose that she has asked Signor 
 Vitaliani to mark strongly this contrast between Macbeth 
 and his lady. In his excess of zeal accordingly that gentle- 
 man invents a performance equalled only in its more frantic 
 passages by the dancing of Mr. Robson in the choruses of 
 Vilikins and his Dinah. He wriggles, leaps, and pirouettes, 
 serving undoubtedly as a tremendous foil to the impassive 
 figure of the lady who when his fits are most distressing 
 commonly stands by his side. 
 
 Lady Macbeth is, of course, the entire play at the 
 Lyceum, and Madame Ristori can have studied no part 
 with more care than is manifest from her presentment of 
 this character. These are some of the main points in her 
 conception of it. 
 
 In Macbeth's letter, which she is reading when she enters 
 first, it is not to be overlooked that, by her intonation of 
 the passage, " They made themselves air into which they 
 
''Macbeth" tn Italian: Ristori. 159 
 
 vanished", she expresses the deep awe which supernatural 
 occurrences awaken in her. She is not less sensitive than 
 Macbeth to the terror they produce. 
 
 After her first interview with her husband, when she has 
 been nerving him to murder Duncan, and her face has 
 brightened with contentment at a half-accomplished purpose, 
 on his saying to her "We will speak further", the manner of 
 exit is pecuhar; she has her hands upon him, and with a 
 persuasive yet compelHng force urges him on, smiling the 
 while with firm-set lips and nodding satisfaction at her 
 work. He is in her power; he moves at her urging. 
 
 When Lady Macbeth appears next she is inviting Duncan 
 with false courtesies into thecastle that shall be his tomb, 
 and there is much subtlety in the art which makes the spirit 
 of the fox apparent in the manner of these humble and 
 graceful solicitations. It is not overacted. There is a false 
 tone in her voice, a false expression playing faintly now 
 and then across her face, always intensest when the spoken 
 words are humblest; they are courtesies with which women 
 may lead men to their death, exciting no suspicion in their 
 victims. Then follows the scene in which she breaks her 
 entire purpose to Macbeth. When at the close he, for the 
 first time, speaks as an accomplice, her face brightens with 
 exultation at a purpose all accomplished, and as the act 
 closes she repeats the old manner of exit. He is in her 
 hands, and she, with a gentle familiarity persuading yet 
 compelling, urges him on. 
 
 So the act ends. Again in the next act, when the murder 
 is to be done, she, nerved to the deed, outwardly impassive 
 and disdainful of his starts and contortions, again pushes 
 him before with her own hands, persuading and compelUng 
 him across the threshold of King Duncan's chamber. After- 
 wards there is a wild — but not a loud — defiance in her tone 
 when she shows him her own hands red with the blood of the 
 grooms. When the house has been alarmed, and she affects 
 
i6o Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 dismay and anxiety, Madame Ristori, without- making the 
 terror that is assumed too manifestly hypocritical, marks 
 clearly to the spectators the difference between that and the 
 terror that is real. She does not know how her husband 
 has dealt with the grooms, and listens with intense and real 
 anxiety till he has told her as well as all the rest that he has 
 killed them. Presently afterwards she is struck with a real 
 horror as Macbeth tells how he had found the murdered 
 king, "His silver skin laced with his golden blood". She 
 had before passed rapidly over the admission to herself that 
 she with her own hand would have killed Duncan "had he 
 not resembled her father as he slept". She had hurried 
 over the thought as one not to be dwelt upon, and showed 
 a fine taste in so doing. Macbeth afterwards inadvertently 
 thrusts it home into her heart, and then the point is made 
 that ninety-nine actresses in a hundred would assuredly have 
 tried to make before. 
 
 In the next act, during the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth 
 is supposed to ascribe her husband's horror at the ghost to 
 the death not of Banquo but of Duncan. Madame Ristori's 
 timing of the glances of anxiety towards her husband, and 
 of the solicitous courtesies towards the guests, is always 
 excellent. Her recurrence to the aspect of face in which 
 she had nerved him for the murder, when she attempts now 
 to nerve Macbeth against the terror of the spectre, is sug- 
 gestive. When Macbeth says — 
 
 "The times have been 
 That, when the brains were out, the man would die. 
 And there an end, but now they rise again," 
 
 Lady Macbeth drinks from a large bowl of wine; the cup is 
 in her hand when she tries to recall her husband to the 
 guests; she does not lay it down until after the next appear- 
 ance of the spectre. On the night of Duncan's murder she 
 had made addition to her courage by the help of wine. She 
 feels it sinking now. 
 
"MacbetJi^ in Italian : Ristori. i6i 
 
 When she next goes to Macbeth, after having anxiously 
 provided occupation for each guest, and warns him in the 
 old way, at Macbeth's retort upon her of his marvel, 
 
 " When I now think you can behold such sights. 
 And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks," 
 
 the sight before her mind's eye is the murdered Duncan. 
 Her spirit has been on the rack, but she has kept down 
 every cry, no eye has seen the torture she has borne; from 
 this last wrench she flinches bodily, and we see now that 
 her strength begins to fail. Those words of Macbeth mark 
 the turning point in Madame Ristori's personation of the 
 lady's character. She meets them with the action of an 
 eager, startled hush! She hurries away the guests in a 
 voice of which the tone betrays intense nervous emotion. 
 Then, when she is alone with her husband, and he in his 
 wild pacing up and down comes suddenly upon her still face, 
 over which a new expression is now creeping, he recoils as 
 from another spectre. After that she replies to his questions 
 in the tone of one wearily disregardful of their import. As 
 Macbeth continues talking, and his talk is of domestic 
 treachery, of the weird sisters, of wading in blood, she 
 watches him with a face of which the expression becomes 
 more and more spectral, and when she says, 
 
 "You lack the season of all natures, sleep,'' 
 
 there is a weariness of soul and body in her voice and 
 manner, and with a weary step she quits the stage with 
 him. 
 
 We see her next, for the last time, in the sleep-walking 
 scene. Her look is haggard, utterly haggard, her whole 
 aspect is spectral, her action slow and painfully nervous in 
 its manner, her voice low, full of such weariness as follows 
 acute and exhausting pain. Her exit, when her mind has 
 recurred to the night of the murder, is with a ghostly 
 repetition of the old gesture of urging Macbeth on before 
 her. 
 
 2 L 
 
i62 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S7- 
 
 This scene over, and Lady Macbeth's death announced, 
 short work is made by the adapter of the following paft of 
 the play, which is condensed into a single page of the 
 libretto. 
 
 August I. — At the farewell benefit of Mr. Alfred Wigan 
 the quality of the retiring actor was expressed significantly 
 by the nature of the audience assembled in his honour. The 
 best intellect of London was, on that occasion, fully repre- 
 sented on the benches of the small Olympic Theatre. Mr. 
 Wigan had attained perfection in some branches of his art, 
 was appreciated, and had, as all thought, many years before 
 him to be used in widening the bounds of his success. 
 What he has already done, however, would suffice to satisfy 
 no mean ambition, even if public success were the one aim 
 and comfort of existence. But every man's happiness has 
 many sources, and when one spring dies another may increase 
 its flow. 
 
 August 15. — The transfer of the management of this 
 theatre into the hands of Mr. Robson and Mr. Emden was 
 marked by the production before a crowded auditory of Mr. 
 Wilkie Collins's dramatic story. The Lighthouse, which then 
 for the first time passed to the public stage out of the draw- 
 ing-room theatres at Tavistock or Campden House. It may 
 be that one's judgment was obscured by an involuntary com- 
 parison, in each passage, of the acting of Mr. Robson with 
 the intensity of life that Mr. Dickens gave to the same 
 character. The public has had recent opportunity of seeing 
 that the genius of Mr. Dickens can take hold of us as surely 
 through the spoken as the written word. But I believe the 
 truth to be that Mr. Robson is most perfectly at home, and 
 can be seen to the best advantage, in those parts by which his 
 reputation has been made ; and that his success in parts of 
 serious interest will be greatest in those which, like Daddy 
 Hardacre, permit him to add to his strokes of passion some 
 fantastic touches that provoke us unexpectedly to mirth. In 
 Aaron Gurnock the whole interest is serious ; he has an 
 
Alfred Wigan. — F. Robson. — Charles Kean. 163 
 
 enfeebled body and a stricken soul, solemn awe of the 
 spirit-world, emotions shifting with the changes of his bodily 
 condition and of the events that pass around him. Full of 
 interest, full of fine touches of the artist's power, is Mr. 
 Robson's personation of the part ; but it is not one of his 
 triumphs. 
 
 August 29. — Immediately upon the expiration of Mr. 
 Charles Kean's dramatic season, the Princess's Theatre was 
 reopened by Mr. Willert Beale for twelve nights of opera. 
 
 Mr. Charles Kean's season is memofable for the liberality 
 by which it was distinguished. Four plays were produced, 
 all mounted not only in the most costly way, but so mounted 
 as to create out of the theatre a brilliant museum for the 
 student, in which Mexican antiquities, the days of English 
 chivalry,, Greek and Etruscan forms were presented, not as 
 dusty, broken relics, but as living truths, and made attractive 
 as well by their splendour as by the haze of poetry through 
 which they were to be seen. True, there is not much poetry 
 in Pizarro, and Fizarro was the least successful of the four 
 revivals. Mr. Charles Kean is right in feeling that there is 
 no Atlas except Shakespeare for the world he fashions. 
 Energetic, conscientious in exact fulfilment of his purpose, 
 working hard without a sordid motive, although followed 
 always by success on the peculiar path he has adopted, 
 Mr. Kean does the work he has appointed for himself, and he 
 has never done it more eiificiently than during the last twelve 
 months. 
 
 The new opera season is of a kind to maintain the accus- 
 tomed state of the benches in the theatre. The operas most 
 in fashion — not the best — sung by a company which includes 
 Madame Grisi, Madame Alboni, Madame Gassier, and Signer 
 Mario, and helped by a band and chorus chosen honestly out 
 of the staff of the great opera-houses, entertains the town at 
 play-house prices, and defies the weather. The stalls and 
 boxes fill ; the pit does not quite fill. Your true man of the 
 pit prefers Mozart and Rossini. 
 
 L2 
 
164 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 September 19. — Adelphi. — The Pilot\s2Ji been reproduced, 
 with most effective scenery, machinery, and costume, for the 
 purpose of restoring to the stage Mr. T. P. Cooke's super- 
 essential representation of the model stage-sailor, as Long 
 Tom Coffin. His performance is a marvel. The singing 
 voice is gone, and that is all ; nevertheless the songs are 
 given with effect. For about five minutes of hornpipe the 
 veteran's breath is good, and his feet are as nimble as they 
 were when they twinkled for the pleasure of our forefathers. 
 The acting is as full of quiet touches that bespeak the actor's 
 genius, and for all that belongs to the stage-sailor — love of salt 
 water, grogs, quids of tobacco, devotion, patriotism, power of 
 engaging in terrific combat any dozen of another nation, dying 
 true to his ship, and recovering suddenly from death at the 
 call of duty — Mr. Fitzball has determined that the gods shall 
 accuse him of shortcoming in no one particular. The plot of 
 The Pilot is clear enough to keep the audience well inter- 
 ested, and just misty enough to amuse thein with its puzzles. 
 No doubt it is all right, but I for my own part never can make 
 out whether the sentimental hero is not at last rewarded for 
 his goodness by obtaining leave to contract marriage with his 
 sister. If the renegade who turns out to be his father be also, 
 as I take him to be, Cecilia's father, and this hero marry at 
 last the Cecilia of his love — as the final tableau, in the midst 
 of a sea-fight, leads us to suppose he will — what will they say 
 at Doctors' Commons ? 
 
 October 10. — As Harry Hallyard, Mr. T. P. Cooke is 
 again faithful to My Poll and my Partner Joe, though sorely 
 tried at last by doubts of the fidelity of both. In this drama 
 he is both a fresh-water and a salt-water sailor, a Thames 
 waterman in the first act, and afterwards (having been taken 
 by the press-gang out of the midst of the frolic that was to 
 precede his wedding) the most heroic sailor on board 
 H.M.S. Polypheinus. He dances a double hornpipe; fights 
 the man who " never forgives an injury" — the diabolical 
 captain of a slaver ; comes home, is heartbroken by what 
 
T. P. Cooke. — Wright. — Addison. 165 
 
 he finds, and then is made heart-whole again. The piece 
 IS mounted with new and effective scenery. Mimic water- 
 men tug at their boats upon a mimic Thames. The slave- 
 ship in the second act seems to be speeding through the 
 waters, and when it is boarded by the men of the Poly- 
 phemus, there is such brisk fighting, such firing of guns, 
 hand-to-hand battle, with an unexpected shooting down 
 of the wicked slave captain at a critical moment by 
 the comic character who lies hidden inside a barrel, that 
 the audience is worked up to an exceedingly high point 
 of jubilation. To the comic character — Watchful Waxend, 
 a psalm-singing cobbler — Mr. Wright's acting gives import- 
 ance. In the first act, throughout which Mr. Waxend, who 
 has many weaknesses of the flesh, is to a limited extent 
 fuddled, Mr. Wright found substance in his part on which 
 to found a very finished bit of acting. Afterwards little was 
 asked of him except simple extravagance. 
 
 October 24. — A new comedy by Mr. Adolphus Troughton, 
 entitled Leading Strings, was produced last Monday even- 
 ing at the Olympic. It is an early work by M. Scribe, 
 planned afresh and rewritten, therefore a new comedy. The 
 most noticeable fact in the performance was the complete 
 transformation of Mr. Addison into a faithful, addleheaded, 
 old family butler, Binnings, who has also a son to manage, 
 and who, as a father, clothes himself in thunder. The 
 other day, Mr. Addison had so perfectly transformed him- 
 self into the old boatman at the Lighthouse that he shared 
 honours with Mr. Robson. Now, in a part altogether 
 different, he divides honours with Mrs. Stirling, and has 
 proved himself an artist in the true sense of the word. 
 Dramas always have been well acted at the Olympic, and 
 Mr. Addison has borne his part well in a most efficient 
 company; but if he can keep the ground he has won in The 
 Lighthouse and in Leading Strings, as we believe he can, 
 there is a new pleasure established for the playgoer. 
 
 Love's Labour's Lost — The Comedy of Leisure — ought to 
 
i66 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1857. 
 
 be acceptable as a relief to busy men in anxious times. It 
 has been observed that there is only one morsel of business 
 in the whole play, and that is mentioned to be postponed 
 till to-morrow. The play as now acted at Sadler's Wells 
 runs daintily and pleasantly. They err who see in it only 
 a caricature of euphuism. Euphuism, when the comedy 
 appeared, was a language of compliment congenial to the 
 temper of the times, and in many of its forms, while it was 
 not less absurd than the tone of compliment conventional 
 in our own day, it was a great deal wittier and wiser. There 
 was room for wit in the invention of conceits, and an 
 amusing ingenuity in their extravagance. 
 
 " Thou shin'st in every tear that I do weep ; 
 No drop but as a coach doth carry thee." 
 
 Shakespeare undoubtedly took pleasure in this way of 
 frolic with the wit ; it is a form of fancy, and over the whole 
 range of fancy he was lord. Pleasant euphuisms find their 
 way even into his graver plays, and in this play, which he 
 devoted to a chasing of conceit through all its forms, the 
 most poetical and the most prosy, it is manifest that he not 
 only heartily enjoyed the sport himself, but that it must have 
 given special pleasure to the men of his own day. 
 
 He laughed no doubt at the hoUowness of all conceits, 
 and represented them as labour lost, his sharpest satire 
 being expressed in the part of " Don Adriano de Armado, 
 a fantastical Spaniard". This is the part assumed at 
 Sadler's Wells by Mr. Phelps. ' 
 
 It has a certain general resemblance to his Malvolio, 
 inasmuch as these are both fantastical and foolish men ; . 
 but Mr. Phelps defines clearly the essential difference 
 between the two. One was a substantial and not ignorant 
 steward, covering with affectations a substantial ambition to 
 become the husband of his rich and beautiful mistress, and 
 to be a lord. The other is a man who carries all his 
 bravery outside. He talks conceitedly of love, and in his 
 soul carries enshrined the image of a country drab, its best 
 
Sadler's Wells: " Love' s Labour' s Lost" 167 
 
 ideal. He affects finery of speech, and is so utterly desti- 
 tute of ideas that to count three he must depend upon the 
 help of a child who is his servant, and his master in all 
 passages of wit. He carries a 'brave outside of clothes, but 
 cannot fight in his shirt, because, as he is driven to admit, 
 "the naked truth of it is, I have no shirt". This is the 
 view of his character to which Mr. Phelps gives prominence 
 by many a clever touch, such as the empty drawl on the 
 word love, whenever Armado uses it, or the lumbering 
 helplessness of wit displayed by the great Spaniard when 
 magnificently and heavily conversing with the tiny Moth, 
 in which part little Miss Rose Williams has been taught to 
 bring out very perfectly some telling points. 
 
 We must not part from the play without praising the 
 Biron of Mr. Henry Marston, the clever rendering of the 
 conceits of the Schoolmaster and Curate by Mr. Williams 
 and Mr. C. Fenton, and the Ferdinand of Mr. F. Robinson. 
 Mrs. Charles Young — who is new to London, and has, 
 during the last few weeks, taken honours at Sadler's 
 Wells in two or three characters — looked and spoke like a 
 lady as Princess of France, and Miss Fitzpatrick did fair 
 justice to her talent as the laughing Rosaline. 
 
 November 14. — Haymarket. — Mr. Tom Taylor's three- 
 act drama, An Unequal Match, was produced for the first 
 time at this house last Saturday night with unequivocal 
 success. As a literary work it is by no means the best of 
 Mr. Taylor's plays, but as a new play, exactly suited to the 
 company by which it is performed, it is very good indeed. 
 The hero, retired from disappointment in love with a 
 woman of the world, becomes enamoured of a child of 
 nature in a Yorkshire dale. She is a blacksmith's daughter, 
 and he is found by his fine friends carrying her milking- 
 cans and offering her marriage. Though he learns now 
 that by an uncle's death during the time of his withdrawal 
 from society he has become a baronet, he abides by his 
 troth. Sir Harry Arncliffe takes to wife the blacksmith's 
 
1 68 Journal of a London Playgoer. .[1857. 
 
 daughter, Hester Grazebrook, in spite of the amusement of 
 his fashionable friends and the profound consternation of 
 his man Blenkinsop. 
 
 In the second act we find the world, represented by a 
 crowd of polite visitors at Arncliffe Manor, shrugging its 
 shoulders at the frank way in which Lady Arncliffe gives 
 expression to her natural tastes and affections. The hus- 
 band chafes, instructs his wife how she must do at Rome 
 as Rome does, and then leaves her, on a plea of business, 
 to go to Ems for recovery from a first outbreak of con- 
 sumption that he has concealed from her. His old love, 
 the woman of the world — Lady Montresor — is among the 
 guests at the manor, and has been sowing sorrow between 
 man and wife. She also starts for Ems, and Hester believes 
 herself wronged. She resolves then to fight the world with 
 its own weapons. 
 
 The scene of the third act is the German watering-place. 
 Arncliffe is taking his ease there with restored health. Lady 
 Montresor is there flirting. Hester, who has spent a twelve- 
 month at home in learning everything, and has become an 
 Admirable Crichton of her sex, is creating a sensation at 
 German courts as die schone Engldnderin. She appears at 
 last, plays the fine lady's part, shows herself perfect in all 
 her husband's lessons, discomfits her rival utterly, and only 
 at last shows that she has rubbed in the polish without 
 rubbing out the better nature underneath. The marriage 
 of the baronet and blacksmith's daughter made the first un- 
 equal match, but more unequal is the match when a right- 
 hearted woman accepts battle with those who can bring to 
 the combat only artificial weapons. That is the tenor of 
 the closing sentiment. 
 
 The plot is of a hackneyed character, but Mr. Tom 
 Taylor does not work it out by use of only hackneyed 
 details. There is a complete change of circumstance in 
 every act ; this keeps alive the attention of the audience. 
 There are three phases of character to be presented by the 
 
Tom Taylor' s " Unequal Match!' 169 
 
 heroine, Miss Amy Sedgwick, who is in the first act naive 
 to the utmost degree as a country lass, and in the last act, 
 to the utmost degree short of burlesque, the manufactured 
 lady of high fashion. This was Miss Sedgwick's first 
 appearance here in a part for the acting of which she was 
 without help from traditions of the stage. Her success was 
 great, and it was fairly earned. Then, again, as a gentle- 
 man's gentleman, Mr. Compton had the best opportunity of 
 bringing his peculiar humour to the support of the play. 
 Mr. Buckstone, fitted with a less amusing part, first as a 
 rustic ^sculapius, touched with sentiment, then as a fine 
 lady's body doctor, then as the betitled and bestarred 
 physician to a little German duke, also pervades the piece, 
 .and keeps the audience in perpetual good-humour. All 
 the other parts are well sustained, and Mr. W. Farren brings 
 out quietly and well what few points of character the author 
 has accorded to his hero. 
 
 November 28. — Olympic. — What will they say at Bromp- 
 ton 1 is an elegant little piece, properly called a come- 
 dietta. The laughter it excites is moderate, the pleasure it 
 gives great. The author, Mr. Stirling Coyne, has planned 
 it ingeniously for the purpose of placing Mr. Robson in a 
 very ludicrously serious position, and then working him up 
 by successive disclosures to a climax of grotesque terror. 
 The actor's terror is so real that, while there is much 
 laughter at its odd manifestations, there is enough of 
 serious impression made to check any great outbreak of 
 mirth. 
 
 December i2.-^The place of Boots at the Swan, hereto- 
 fore occupied by Mr. Keeley, has been taken, and will for 
 a long time be kept, by Mr. Robson. Mr. Keeley was a 
 true Boots; Mr. Robson also is a true Boots. To the same 
 order of Boots each actor refers his part most clearly, but 
 not to the same genus of that order. Mr. Keeley was not 
 only deaf but humorously stolid; Mr. Robson, although deaf, 
 is humorously wide-awake. He is the Boots who is brisk. 
 
I/O Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 and alive to all the humour of the street, who would be pre- 
 tematurally knowing if he could but hear what people say. 
 In word and look and action he is more the gamin than the 
 simpleton. The extravagance of a most laughable farce is 
 heightened by him to the utmost, and there is not a long 
 face to be seen in the house while he is busy on the stage. 
 
 1858, January 23. — There has not been produced for 
 some years so dainty a little play as Mr. Leigh Hunt's 
 Lovers' Amazements, first acted on Wednesday last at the 
 Lyceum. For a time one might be in doubt whether it 
 did not make its appeal to a more refined audience than 
 that which is usually addressed in this country by the 
 dramatic author, but the doubt was unjust to the poet. 
 The genial spirit of his work was not to be resisted. A 
 cleverly devised web of small perplexities leading to neat 
 and original dramatic situations, a dialogue passing fre- 
 quently from delicate raillery or brisk battle of wit into 
 some strain of unaffected poetry that puts the heart's best 
 thoughts into a simple music, welcome even to the most 
 untrained ear, had their effect. Moreover, there is an air 
 of chivalry about the play. Homage to woman is the 
 essence of its plot. The charm of the story lies in the fact 
 that it sets two pairs of lovers wandering in a maze to meet 
 each other at most unexpected turns, and become hope- 
 lessly entangled, until one of them, dashing against a barrier, 
 breaks a way through for them all. This he does in a 
 most reprehensible and unfair manner, and yet to the 
 satisfaction of them all. " I have done it, though," he 
 says, and there's the comfort. The story is not one to 
 be told otherwise than as the author tells it. I can only 
 say that it is the story of two ladies and two gentlemen ; 
 that each lady in the party of four has fancied love for one 
 gentleman, and felt it for the other ; that each gentleman 
 has done as much by the two ladies ; and that exaggerated 
 records of the likings help to mystify the loves. All the 
 four people are lovable people and good friends, however 
 
Leigh Hunt's "Lovers' Amazements." 171 
 
 they may -cross swords or wits ; the character of each is 
 defined with pleasant touches, and the gentlemen, who take 
 high ground — one as a brave lord of creation, and the other 
 as a brave, good-natured fop — are effectually humbled before 
 the ladies, who in many a pleasant line put to the blush the 
 pomp and pride of man, and the unequal bargain that he 
 generally offers to his mate. 
 
 February 27. — Haymarket. — '&Q3Xx\ce.,vi\ Much Ado about 
 Nothing, is not one of Miss Amy Sedgwick's best characters. 
 In the earlier scenes the stage-laugh is too forced and too 
 frequent, but in the later scenes she succeeds better. As 
 Mr. Howe, who excels in this play, without abating any of 
 the mirth of Benedick, presents him as a soldier and a gentle- 
 man, so does Miss Sedgwick show, in Beatrice, behind the 
 mask of a gay mockery, the gentle spirit of a woman. In 
 the garden scene, after listening to Hero and Ursula, she 
 shows that her heart had not been filled with a new thought, 
 but only opened — 
 
 " For others say thou dost deserve ; and I 
 Believe it better than reportingly." 
 
 Miss Sedgwick's Beatrice is in fact hearty in her love as in 
 her mirth, and that is right. The distinct representing of 
 this is the best feature in her performance. As for Mr. 
 Compton, Shakespeare himself would have liked to shake 
 hands with an actor who could play his Dogberry so well. 
 
 Louis XI is a melodrama in five acts. The first act is 
 unnecessary, for it tells nothing that could not have been 
 expressed by four minutes' conversation following the old 
 stage-direction, " Enter two gentlemen, meeting." The 
 last two acts only work out, at twice the necessary length, an 
 idea that has been already expressed. Louis XI is the 
 chief person of the play, and is the play. Parricide, fratri- 
 cide cunningly wicked, he is an old man on the borders of 
 the grave, painfully hovering between earth and hell. To 
 fix his hold on earth he clings to his body physician, to 
 
172 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 secure rescue from hell he grasps the skirt of the priest, but 
 he still loads his conscience with offence and has the 
 executioner for his companion. To present such a man's 
 character with all its deep contrasts brought into direct 
 apposition for the production of those bold effects which 
 please the melodramatist has been the business of M. Casimir 
 Delavigne. The English version of the play, reproduced 
 this week at the Princess's, supplies Mr. Charles Kean 
 with his finest character. His Louis XI is a striking 
 picture, painted no doubt in the bold way which accepts 
 none but the brightest colours of the prism, after the 
 manner of the old illuminators, but none the less striking 
 for that. It is in such characters that Mr. Kean excels, and 
 he mingles with the presentment of this one a quaint, half- 
 humorous sense of the grotesque that greatly heightens its 
 effect. Whatever faults there may be in the piece — and 
 they are neither few nor small — there is none in the actor, 
 who depicts the mind of an old king as the illuminators 
 would have shown his body to us, and completely hides 
 under the work his own identity. 
 
 March 13. — At the Olympic Mr. Morton's farce of 
 Ticklish Times is full of practical fun, and supplies Mr. 
 Robson with a part in which he may produce laughter with- 
 out limit by the boldest plunge into the grotesque. He is 
 Mr. Griggs, a newly-married husband with a somewhat weak 
 brain, and an intolerance of the tickle of a whisper in his ear, 
 who in the days of the Pretender went to London upon 
 patriotic business, came back and found his wife sheltering a 
 man who claimed also to be Griggs. This man is an attainted 
 baronet, the husband of the dearest friend of Mrs Griggs, 
 but the real Mr. Griggs will not be whispered to, and cannot 
 understand. His mind gives way under bewilderment. 
 Mr. Robson has then the whole world of grotesque before 
 him, and he knows his way through it to a substantial 
 success. 
 
 April 17. — The Haymarket Opera has this week opened 
 
Charles Kean. — F. Robson. — Mdlle. Titiens. 173 
 
 with The Huguenots, and a new prima donna, Mdlle, Titiens, 
 to give freshness to the part of Valentine. Mdlle. Titiens 
 did not receive extravagant applause, but she was heartily 
 appreciated. She has a clear, not very sweet soprano, 
 steady, accurate, and of extensive range, a voice quite under 
 her control, that gives the comfort of reliable sound to the 
 ear. I did not observe any indication of original genius as 
 an actress, but among conventional actresses she is one of 
 the best upon the lyric stage. This impression is set down 
 after a first hearing only. Better acquaintance may disclose 
 in her yet higher faculties. 
 
 May 22. — Mdlle. Titiens has since the last report given 
 new strength to the cast of Don Giovanni by an admirable 
 performance of the part of Donna Anna. I admire her less 
 in the Trovatore, though the Leonora of that opera gives her 
 opportunity of further proving the range, power, and stability 
 of voice, which we may hope ere long to see employed in 
 doing justice to another Leonora. I suspect that Mdlle. 
 Titiens can both sing and act as Beethoven's Leonora better 
 than any lady who has yet enabled us to hear Fidelia on 
 the Italian stage. 
 
 June 19. — It is announced that the engagement of this 
 lady is now drawing to a close, but she has earned a perma- 
 nent position in the London opera, and will not be lost to 
 the public. We cannot spare from our double opera troupe 
 a good actress and an accomplished singer, who is most at 
 home in the best music. 
 
 At the Princess's The Merchant of Venice is the new 
 Shakespearean spectacle. Beyond question this is the best 
 of Mr. Kean's revivals. The literary alterations that have 
 been made in the acted play consist only in judicious resto- 
 rations of the text, which give not only more interest to the 
 play, but also more importance to the character of Portia. 
 Mrs. Charles Kean's Portia is known as one of the parts in 
 which she best displays her power as an artist, while Mr. 
 Charles Kean is seldom seen to more advantage than as 
 
174 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 Shylock. The scenery is so contrived as to suggest the 
 whole idea of Venice, and the play is only better understood 
 when thus presented with the local colouring that was in 
 Shakespeare's mind, marked strongly by the scene-painter. 
 Even the interpolated dance, which in some former revivals 
 has appeared to me inopportune, being introduced here, at 
 the close of an act, as that music and dance of masqued 
 revellers in the street under Jessica's window, against which 
 Shylock had warned her to lock up his doors and shut his 
 house's ears, is such a show as Shakespeare might have been 
 content to see appended to his text. 
 
 June 26. — Madame Ristori having appeared this week in 
 two characters translated from Rachel's French repertoire., 
 one or two words of comparison become inevitable. The 
 two actresses differ widely from each other. Rachel dazzled 
 and startled us by flashing an electric life into words and 
 lines. She was unrivalled in the power of giving an intensity 
 of meaning to a single phrase. Madame Ristori has this 
 kind of power, but she has it in a less degree ; her excellence 
 appears to lie in a clear artistic conception of each part she 
 represents, a resolute subordination of every detail to the 
 just working out of the central thought, and this not seldom 
 to the sacrifice of stage-effects easily produced, sure of 
 applause, but false in taste. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot define Madame Ristori's genius better 
 than by dwelling on her treatment of the part of Phfedre; 
 the result being that, where Rachel inspired terror, Madame 
 Ristori awakens pity. The new Phfedre is a woman full of 
 all honour and modesty, cursed by the supernatural wrath 
 of Venus with an impure passion. Her natural modesty 
 struggles in vain against relentless fate, but that it does 
 struggle, that Phfedre is a hapless woman, victim to the 
 passions of the gods, Madame Ristori sets forth as the fact 
 that is the soul of the whole tragedy. Racine herein exactly 
 followed the plan of the Greek tragedians, whose purpose 
 
"Phedre": Ristori. 175 
 
 was not to develop character, but to display in some great 
 passion the fulfilment of a Fate. 
 
 In the first act Phbdre tells CEnone, with all Womanly 
 shame, the passion for Hippolytus that had been raised 
 within her by the hatred of Venus. She is resisting it while 
 it is killing her. She keeps him from her sight, forbids the 
 mention of his name, battles against the curse with what 
 weapons are in a woman's power, and still feels its edge. 
 All this in the first act Madame Ristori paints by many 
 touches of her art. Then follows presently her interview 
 with Hippolytus, which she has sought, after the supposed 
 death of her husband Theseus, for honest purposes of state. 
 She approaches timidly and with averted eyesj and while 
 her eyes are still averted, her speech begins to run as Fate 
 wills that it must, she half looks towards Hippolytus, then 
 wholly looks, and only by a strong effort restrains herself 
 from running to embrace him. The passion of animal love 
 masters her. In marvellous contrast to her natural manner, 
 the modest Phfedre, possessed by her curse, yearns with a 
 supernatural intensity of lust towards Hippolytus. When 
 she has bared her secret to the youth a look of intense 
 horror marks her sense of her position; she struggles to 
 recover ground, and is again lost in a fury of desire. When, 
 at last, seeing no friendship in the face of Hippolytus, she 
 is suddenly attempting to slay herself with his sword, there 
 is a strange hurry of madness in her passion, and she is 
 drawn away with face convulsed as one exhausted by the 
 paroxysms of a fit that is upon her still. Phfedre has won 
 our sympathy and pity, even here. 
 
 In the next act Phedre is with QEnone, and her first pas- 
 sages enable Madame Ristori to mark strongly again the 
 natural instincts of the woman shrinking from the shame and 
 terror of her curse. But the passion soon returns to over- 
 whelm the shame. Then come the tidings that her husband 
 is alive and has returned. She is all woman again, too honest 
 to keep her secret, welcoming death, but dreading shame, and 
 
176 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 dwelling with intensity of womanly pathos on the future day 
 when her children shall blush for their mother's memory. 
 Exquisite is Madame Ristori's by-play while the insidious 
 counsel of CEnone is being given. When she counsels 
 accusation of the innocent Hippolytus, Phfedre with the 
 whole energy of her soul repels the crime, and, as CEnone 
 stills counsels, covers her face, stops her ears. But Theseus 
 comes, she sees Hippolytus, and becomes powerless. Her 
 words to Theseus, when she retires from his presence, are 
 spoken from the heart of a sad woman, not with the guileful 
 purpose of an assassin. CEnone takes her away. The wrath 
 of Theseus against Hippolytus Phfedre at once hurries to 
 appease, even at the cost of her own disgrace, but the 
 current of her thoughts is violently checked by the discovery 
 that upon Aricie alone the affections of Hippolytus are 
 ' fixed. While her mind pauses under the shock of this new 
 thought, Theseus has left her, and her evil counsellor CEnone 
 comes. In the succeeding dialogue Madame Ristori em- 
 ploys all her skill for the complete definition of her reading 
 of the part. She dwells with the purest tenderness upon 
 those lines which change a cry of passion into womanly 
 perception of the beauty of innocent love in Hippolytus and 
 Aricie, and pass on to a sigh for her own misery. Presently, 
 in a transport of passion, she desires the ruin of Aricie, but 
 from that passion falls into the deepest horror at the thoughts 
 of her own heart. She cries for a hiding-place from gods 
 and men. But the gods are her kindred, and she finds them 
 everywhere ; her tone of supernatural awe thrills through the 
 audience at the words 
 
 " II padre e xh de' Numi 
 Avo mi fu : degli avi miei son pieni 
 La terra, il mar, 1' Olimpo. Ove celarmi ?" 
 
 In hell her father Minos is the judge ; she pictures herself 
 before him, and here Madame Ristori is at the very crisis of 
 her part. She acts the judgment scene with the energy of a 
 
"Pkedre" : Ristori. 177 
 
 wild terror, she pleads to her father and judge that it was 
 the wrath of a hostile god that fell upon her in that shape of 
 sin. Flying, shrinking, cowering, pressing her hands down 
 over the head upon which, while she speaks, the scathing 
 lightnings seem to be rained down, she cries with a wild 
 despair, 
 
 "Ah! n6 perdona ! 
 
 Un Dlo crudele, un Dio la tua progenia 
 
 Tutta dannb !" 
 
 and falls senseless beneath the stroke. Beyond those lines 
 the speech of Phfedre runs in Racine, and in the Italian trans- 
 lation, to a simple plaint. This Madame Ristori properly 
 omits. She has struck the key-note of the tragedy with a 
 power beyond anything Racine ever supposed to lie in his 
 couplets when he wound the speech up with five lines of anti- 
 climax. From her swoon Phfedre is aroused by the voice of 
 CEnone giving impure counsel. She passionately spurns the 
 tempter who has made the downward way for her so smooth. 
 In the last act, when we have heard of the death of Hippo- 
 lytus, we see Madame Ristori's Phfedre but once more, at 
 all cost to her own fame, serving truth and honour with her 
 latest breath. Fate is fulfilled, and she is now quietly dying 
 as a stainless woman in the arms of her maidens ; stainless, 
 yet in such deep debasement at the memory of her great 
 shame that her last thought is of closing in death eyes that 
 by their immodest glances have defiled the light of heaven. . 
 I need not show wherein a conception of this kind, care- 
 fully and harmoniously elaborated in every detail, differs 
 from the Phfedre of Rachel. In as far as it is the develop- 
 ment of a Fate, it is, of course, and so was Rachel's, the 
 Phfedre of Racine. As the development of a character it is 
 certainly the most poetical, and we think also the most 
 legitimate, deduction from the words that are to be said. 
 Dramatists of Racine's school never have painted character 
 with a firm hand in distinct and consistent touches ; they 
 leave always something for the actor to create. 
 
178 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 In the modern play, Adrienne Lecouvreur, there is no 
 Fate, and there is development of character, but that we 
 have after the manner of the melodramatist, who, as he now 
 plies his art, differs as much from the true dramatist as 
 any second-class scene-painter may differ from a Turner. 
 In a play like Adrienne Lecouvreur there is nothing to in- 
 terpret ; the writer stimulates and satisfies dull wits with a 
 series of broad and obvious stage-effects, and provides his 
 leading personage with the greatest possible number of 
 showy points and situations. An English fashionable 
 audience can lift itself by an effort to the comprehension of 
 an Adrienne Lecouvreur in the drama, as in music it can 
 grasp such ideas as those of Donizetti or the Earl of West- 
 moreland. But Adrienne is a clever work after its kindj 
 and Madame Ristori has a rare courage in refusing points, 
 however sure to fetch applause, when it is bad taste in 
 the dramatist that has obtruded them for her acceptance. 
 Take for example the famous declamation scene. Through- 
 out the play Adrienne moves like a breath of fresh air and 
 sunshine through the stifling atmosphere of a licentious 
 court. She comes as the actress of the day to recite before 
 a brilliant company in the salons of the Princess, who is her 
 unknown rival. The two women become known to each 
 other. It is only when the smooth hypocrisy and un- 
 womanly cruelty of the Princess have stirred her blood 
 to the utmost that, upon being forced to recite under tor- 
 ture, she chooses that passage from Fhldre which closes 
 with a stroke into the heart of the smooth sinner. Very 
 characteristic of Madame Ristori is the way in which this 
 recitation is delivered. She does not, as the dramatist in- 
 tended, and as Rachel acted the passage, work up to a 
 grand stage-effect by visible and bodily denunciation of her 
 enemy. She is an actress, and a simple-minded one, re- 
 citing before a grand assemblage ; after the recitation she 
 is handed to her carriage, and departs with all formal 
 exchange of courtesies, and therefore in the recitation she 
 
"Adrienne Lecouvreur": Ristori. 179 
 
 is guilty of no breach of etiquette. When she begins, the 
 Princess, to torture her the more, is toying and trifling with 
 her lover. As she proceeds there is a strangeness about her 
 manner that attracts even the Princess's attention ; the in- 
 tensity of the direction of her mind causes in Adrienne a 
 slight and instinctive approach of the body towards her 
 tormentor, but she hardly looks at her, she does not point 
 at her by any discourteous outward sign, when suddenly 
 she brands her in the poet's lines with all the forces of her 
 soul. Rachel's was for ' most people the more effective, but 
 unquestionably this is the finer reading of the situation. 
 Then follows the business with the poisoned bouquet, which 
 gives room for an unlimited display of dramatic power. 
 Madame Ristori, as in duty bound, elaborately paints the 
 pains of death, but she dwells on the spiritual part of the 
 suffering, and reduces to as little as will satisfy her sense of 
 what is natural the presentation of mere physical distress. 
 The low, quick, unearthly cry with which she draws her 
 face back from the box which she has just opened, when 
 the scent of the poisoned bouquet rises from it and strikes 
 death into her, is a marvellous dramatic sound, wholly 
 distinct from the voice of misery that follows when she 
 looks on the returned bouquet as an insult from the man 
 she loved. When Maurice the Count comes to her with 
 his love in her last hour, and she in her delirium is fancying 
 herself upon the stage again, with Maurice in a box, to 
 whom the Princess enters, he may hear how large a part he 
 was in the poor girl's life by the agony of expostulation in 
 the cry " Maurizio ! Maurizio !" by which she seeks to draw 
 him from the rival's side. Indeed, there are several words 
 and passages in the last act of Adrienne Lecouvreur which 
 Madame Ristori delivers with an intensity of dramatic ex- 
 pression that reminds us of the peculiar powers of Rachel. 
 But the whole spirit in which she acts is different. The 
 quiet fondness with which the dying girl places her lover's 
 head in her lap, the last look of affection towards him, and 
 
i8o Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 of friendship towards the old prompter as she joins their 
 palms within hers, in one gesture of prayer, when in the 
 act of death, are in the true manner of an actress all whose 
 characters are women, and as natural women as, in each 
 case, the dramatist will suffer her to make them. 
 
 July 3. — Alfieri has made of Ottavia, the wronged wife of 
 Nero, an impossible woman. The play he founded on her 
 is remarkably well developed, and especially to be noticed 
 for its skilful opening, but his depiction of the heroine is a 
 distinct example of the bad character-painting that often 
 occurs in the "pure drama" of the Continent. Nero sends 
 for her from banishment, and she comes home to stand as a 
 lamb before her butcher, impatient of the presence of her 
 base rival Poppaea, but to Nero obedient and loving; she 
 has been silent while he slaughtered her mother, her brother, 
 and her friend — now she waits, brimful of love, to be 
 slaughtered in her turn; her love does not disappear, though 
 some of her patience does, when she is threatened with 
 infamy as well as death, and at last, when shrinking from 
 shame and torture she gets poison from Seneca, she, not 
 altogether in bitterness, asks pardon of her husband for 
 depriving him of the pleasure of killing her himself at his 
 own leisure. And yet this mild lady says hard things at odd 
 times, because the poet often thought more of the point in 
 his lines than of the substance in his characters. Probably 
 the defect of the play would have been lessened if some 
 touch of human nature had been given to the character of 
 Nero, if it were only some glimpse of a past life to account 
 for Ottavia's love. But there is nothing. He is such a 
 tyrant as a boy might paint. Having this impression of 
 Ottavia, we were unable to foresee how Madame Ristori 
 would read the part. 
 
 She so reads it as to reconcile not all its contradictions, 
 but more than we had been used to consider reconcilable. 
 Ottavia, she remembers, is a Roman matron, and, moreover, 
 a Roman queen, last of a royal line. She represents her. 
 
"Ottavia": Ristori. l8l 
 
 therefore, stately in every gesture, her attitudes are royal 
 attitudes, and magnificent in every look and tone and 
 movement is the expression of the height from which she 
 looks down as the daughter of a line of kings, and as a wife 
 without reproach, upon the base-born and immodest Poppsa. 
 In her fidelity to Nero, again, Madame Ristori represents 
 Ottavia as animated, not by sentimental love, but by the 
 virtue of a Roman matron. She is true to her duty, but 
 submissive in a Roman and a queenly way ; she does not 
 flinch before her husband, and can tell him a stern truth 
 sometimes. The charge of incontinence bewilders and 
 astonishes before it angers her, but that such a charge should 
 be laid upon her by Poppsea is the deepest wrong. Im- 
 measurable is the quiet scorn that Madame Ristori puts into 
 the words 
 
 "Poppea 
 Bassi amori mi appone." 
 
 In scenes with Poppsea she usually will not deign to look at 
 her, to notice that she speaks; when she obtrudes herself 
 Ottavia turns to Nero; but whenever the Queen, proud of 
 her lineage and of her virtue, does speak of her or to her, 
 exquisitely cruel and quiet is the expression of a disdain to 
 which her deep wrath against the woman who so shamelessly 
 usurps Ottavia's place gives only a more settled intensity. 
 
 "Ben m' t vergogna in ver, rival nomarmi 
 Di Poppea " 
 
 She twists the very name of the unfortunate woman who 
 writhes under it-s sting into a word of scorn that has a dozen 
 cruel modulations, and she dies with that word on her lips, 
 or its equivalent, — 
 
 "Conoscerai frattanto un di — costei." 
 
 We have dwelt only on the main feature in Madame 
 Ristori's Qttavia. The patient gentleness of spirit is not 
 left out of the study, but the portraiture is taken from the 
 land of dreams, and made a thing of life by that addition of 
 
i82 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 a strong emphasis upon Ottavia's position as a Roman 
 empress strong in her own dignity, and proud that she is, 
 even against all discouragement, in every sense faithful to 
 her duty as a wife. 
 
 June 10. — The Italian version of Schiller's Mary Stuart, 
 following the lights and shades of the original, differs so 
 essentially from the adaptation into French by M. Pierre 
 Lebrun, that all comparison between the Mary Stuart of 
 Madame Ristori and that of Rachel is at once put out of court. 
 The superficial resemblance between the two versions is very 
 close, but Schiller's Mary Stuart had a character too full of 
 light and shade for the French taste, and from M. Lebrun's 
 version there accordingly disappear altogether those pqints 
 in which the dramatic force of the character especially 
 resides. Schiller's Mary Stuart is not, like M. Lebrun's, an 
 angel of light, who once in a great scene, that stands apart 
 from the rest of the play, triumphs as a scold over Queen 
 Elizabeth; she is not only a sad captive, but a sad woman, 
 much hated and much loved, with passions that have 
 brought a stain of murder on her soul. At the very outset 
 of the play she is presented, shrinking from the thought 
 that Darnley's ghost is abroad and will not rest until her 
 crime is expiated. Her death is that expiation. This, 
 being the core of the play, M. Lebrun cut out; to make his 
 picture prettier, he wiped away the shades. Madame 
 Ristori, happy in a character conceived with real dramatic 
 energy, carefully adjusts throughout the emphasis on each 
 detail, and, thanks to the good material on which she works, 
 establishes Maria Stuarda as one of the best and most inter- 
 esting of her representations. We lose no sympathy for 
 Mary, since the evil she bears we see her bearing, and the 
 evil she has done we see only in her repentance over it. 
 Under her stillness are yet smouldering the passions that 
 she now repents, and in the scene with Elizabeth there is 
 sufficient provocation to set them again for a short time 
 fiercely raging. The true place of that proud, wild outbreak, 
 
"Mary Stuarf: Ristori. 183 
 
 in Schiller's whole conceptron, is lost, if we are to regard 
 Mary as one who has been an angel of light from her youth 
 upward. And where was M. Lebrun's soul when he ac- 
 cepted the necessity his change of character enforced, and 
 in his last act changed to the mere reception of a blessing 
 the scene in which Mary, finding an ordained priest in 
 Melvil, lays at his feet her load of sin and sorrow ? Madame 
 Ristori shows us the sad queen not only with all the pathos 
 of her leave-takings, but abased, content to die as expiation 
 for a crime that has deserved death, though innocent of 
 that for which she was condemned to suffer; anxiously, 
 painfully striving to subdue all earthly passion and to fix her 
 thoughts on heaven. Her eyes are nervously fixed on the 
 cross, as if she dared not loosen herself from it for an instant, 
 lest again some of the old worldly turbulence arise within 
 her. Then on her way to the scaffold she encounters 
 Leicester, the lover who has betrayed her hopes; she 
 struggles in vain to keep woman's thoughts out of her speech, 
 a faint spark of woman's passion shines through her last 
 words, and admirably conceived is then the eager rush of 
 the terror-stricken woman back to the cross, her fall upon 
 her knees, her anxious fastening back of her thoughts upon 
 it, and the still, nervous, preoccupied way in which she 
 walks to her death as one afraid lest any chance word or 
 sight should, by seizing her attention, draw her back among 
 the passions of the world. 
 
 By many and exquisite touches, Madame Ristori gives 
 prominence to the softer elements in Mary's ideal nature, 
 by which the poet represents her winning love, but I have 
 chosen rather to dwell upon those details in which lies the 
 distinctive character of her performance. 
 
 July 17. — With this week, Madame Ristori's performances 
 end for the season, and she will take her farewell benefit on 
 Monday in the Covent Garden Opera House. For that 
 occasion she has chosen to appear in her last and newest 
 part of Queen Elizabeth in Signor Giacometti's play of 
 
184 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 Elisabetta, Regina d' Inghilterra. The choice was wise, for 
 there is no part in which it is so advisable that the Italian 
 actress should be seen by those who would learn all they 
 can of the range of her powers in a single evening. More- 
 over, the play is by no means bad. Signor Giacometii 
 takes the common notions about Queen Elizabeth, and 
 brings into bold apposition many odd contrasts of charac- 
 ter ; she is tender and cruel, vain and heroic, playful and 
 grim, punishing a slight with death and pardoning a deadly 
 treason; we even see her young in one act and old in 
 another. Simply by accepting a tradition, Signor Giaco- 
 metti shelters himself against all reproach in furnishing 
 an actress with a character that gives her opportunity of 
 showing skill alike in comedy and tragedy, and of running 
 up and down the whole scale of her art. He has done 
 his work also in a pleasant spirit ; there are no inflated 
 speeches in his play, his dialogue is rather lively than 
 severe, and where there is passion he contents himself 
 with indicating by a series of words what the actress must 
 express. He works into his play all the most popular bits 
 of the history of Queen Elizabeth, and allows all his 
 dramatis personcR to grow grey before he parts with them. 
 With Queen Elizabeth he does not part till she has died 
 upon the stage. Unity of thought is secured by centering 
 everything upon the love of Elizabeth for Essex. Madame 
 Ristori, who always gives prominence to the essentials and 
 runs lightly over the accessories in her reading of a part, 
 works out this feature of the character with every elabora- 
 tion. In illustration of her manner of dealing with acces- 
 sories, take the scene in which she pardons Maria Lambourn 
 an attempt upon her life. A dozen strong points might be 
 made, and would be striven for by an inferior artist, but the 
 scene is only a bit of colour meant to embody the notion 
 that Elizabeth joined magnanimity to littleness ; it is not 
 one of the essential portions of the story, and with a light 
 touch, therefore, Madame Ristori runs over it, because she 
 
"EHsabetta": Ristori. 185 
 
 will not mar the just proportions of her picture. During a 
 long play of five acts, the heroine is almost incessantly 
 upon the stage. She sets out with comedy and ends with 
 tragedy. She is Elizabeth with her red hair, her great frill, 
 and her furbelow ; capricious, handsome, dangerous, hiding 
 a love in her heart. She signs her lover's death-warrant 
 with haggard face, ages at once when he is dead, and 
 appears years afterwards a decrepit woman eaten with re- 
 morse and spectre-haunted ; but still vain, denying her own 
 feebleness, still proud, asserting her own dignity; bowed 
 down, heart-broken, when in any snatch of solitude she 
 dares permit her thoughts to dwell upon the lover whom 
 she cut off in the blossom of his youth. 
 
 The play is well acted by the other members of the com- 
 pany, who, though they second Madame Ristori feebly 
 enough in classical plays, know how to give life to a 
 romantic drama. 
 
 July 31. — Signor Mario's Don Giovanni as an acted 
 character seems' to me weak. As I have said before, a 
 hero who is presented revelling in crime with such defiant 
 recklessness that ,the librettist must needs end by giving 
 him over visibly to the torment of devils, ought to be acted 
 as if there were meant by him something more than a 
 graceful gentleman, with manners seductive in the daintiest 
 and best sense of the term. I abide by the belief that 
 Signor Ronconi's Don Giovanni was, as a dramatic con- 
 ception, better than any other that has been seen on the 
 English stage for the last twenty years. 
 
 " Da quel cefifo si dovria 
 La ner" alma giudicar" — 
 
 Elvira does not speak to the purpose when she says that, 
 and points to the affable lover of all womankind expressed 
 by Signor Mario. Signor Ronconi showed the cold and 
 cruel heart of the seducer, gave prominence to his impiety, 
 a tragic rage to his last act of defiance, and terror to the 
 
1 86 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 depiction of his doom. By the tradition of Tamburini, 
 who had sung the part much better, but conceived it with 
 less power, Signor Ronconi was judged, and his Don 
 Giovanni was pronounced to be his one failure. He 
 acquiesces in the decision and retires from the part. 
 Signor Mario attempts it, and, as he makes of the part 
 what Signor Tamburini made of it — the perfection of a 
 stage-gentleman — he doubtless will be said to act it well. 
 
 Signor Ronconi now tries Leporello, and therein follows, 
 as a main rule, the line laid down by Lablache, in whose 
 buffoonery — when he conceived that he had a farce 
 character to support — there was an unction that made it 
 welcome even when most out of place. Signor Ronconi, 
 being a man of original genius, and indeed by a great deal 
 the best actor now upon the lyric stage, was of course not 
 merely a copyist. He succeeded perfectly in the great 
 buffo song of his part, filling it up with whimsical details 
 and a full dramatic expression following the course of 
 every word. He took pains to give life and natural colour 
 to his part by showing Leporello as a serving-man with not 
 enough of independent character to carry him out of the 
 circle of his master's influence — a coward, volatile, unstable 
 of purpose, ignorant, and superstitious. During the short 
 duel in which the commandant is killed he leaps on a bench 
 and crouches in the shadow of a wall. When one com- 
 batant has fallen he quietly takes off his hat in reverence 
 or prayer for the dead, but he comes forward only to speak 
 foolishness or fall into a witless levity. In the last scene 
 also Signor Ronconi takes care to subdue his part by look 
 and attitude into some keeping with the gravity of the 
 situation ; but, after all, Signor Ronconi's Leporello dis- 
 appoints me. Checked in his independence of conception 
 by the scant appreciation that was the reward of his 
 originality as Don Giovanni, probably he did not care to 
 risk a second failure by revision of the part of Leporello as 
 an acted character. Whatever the librettist meant, Mozart 
 
"Don Giovanni": Mario. — Ronconi. 187 
 
 meant more. It is possible to refer every incident in the 
 part of Leporello to the one central idea of cowardice, 
 physical and moral, and through all incidents to work out 
 a representation of this — and not essentially a comic one — 
 in a way that should be in harmony with all the music in 
 its gayest and its gravest strains, and should account per- 
 fectly for Leporello's otherwise most awkward retention 
 upon the stage during the whole of the last scene. 
 
 August 7. — As a good specimen of the music of the 
 French school the management of the Covent Garden 
 Opera has been just to the frequenters of that house, in 
 adding Zampa to the repertoire. 
 
 Zampa is the Don Giovanni of a Frenchman, bearing to 
 that of Mozart the proportion of a penny whistle to a 
 trumpet. He is a seductive corsair, who turns out to be 
 a count. Having destroyed the virtue and the life of a 
 saintly girl, Albina, he comes, in the presence of her statue, 
 to rob his brother of his bride. In defiance of the statue 
 he marries it with a ring. On the way to the wedding to 
 which he forces an unhappy bride, Albina's tomb opens, 
 and the statue ghost displays from it her ring. Finally, on 
 the wedding-night, the statue comes and carries down the 
 impious man through a trap-door, out of which shoot flames. 
 There are situations of all kinds proper to operas : lovers 
 wail, peasants sing wedding-songs ; hymns sound from a 
 church; there is a gondolier's song under a window; corsairs 
 sing a barcarole ; men dispute fiercely ; a sword is to be 
 proudly broken across a knee ; comic scenes of love or 
 terror are freely interspersed ; and it is all set to good light 
 music, which should please a Frenchman, but which, 
 because there is not a spark in it of fun or feeling — 
 because it is simply so much vocalisation and so much in- 
 strumentation — is received with dulness by an English 
 audience. As music, Harold's Zampa is a better opera than 
 Flotow's Martha. But there is a glow of mirth and pleasure 
 infused into Martha that will retain it as a favourite upon 
 the stage. 
 
i88 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 September 25. — At Sadler's Wells the play of The 
 Provoked Husband has been produced this week, and here 
 again we have had an example of the finish with which a 
 company well trained to work together may present a play 
 demanding no little variety of talent. Sadler's Wells has 
 a reputation for its acting of old comedy, as well earned as 
 its credit for fidelity to Shakespeare. The Provoked Hus- 
 band is an excellent example of the merit upon which this 
 reputation has been based. Mr. Phelps here presents a 
 play not because it presents a notable part for himself, but 
 because it brings out all the force of his company. Two 
 renderings of the part of Lord Townley are possible : one, 
 which is not the one selected, contains a display of restless 
 uneasiness, breaking out here and there into passion, an 
 effective and therefore a tempting version. In the other 
 rendering, which Mr. Phelps has chosen, Lord Townley 
 appears with all the dignity and self-command proper to a 
 nobleman of the old school who had a warm, strong heart, 
 but had learnt how to contain his passions. The repose 
 and dignity thus given to the figure of the husband serve 
 as an admirable foil to the wife's restless levity; just as the 
 worldly sense of Manly in the play is a foil to the folly of 
 the Wronghead family. We are disposed to think too that 
 this reading of the part of Lord Townley gives a solidity of 
 light and shade to the whole play, which would not be de- 
 rived from the old-fashioned proprieties of courtship between 
 Manly and Lady Grace. And while Mr. Phelps denies 
 himself all but the subtler indications of the feelings by 
 which he, as a stately lord, is not to be compelled into loud 
 bodily passion, he adds brilliancy to the part of Lady 
 Townley. If the play has been produced for the special 
 increase of any one artist's reputation, it has been produced 
 for the credit of Mrs. Charles Young. This lady won her 
 first laurels at Sadler's Wells, and is provided there with 
 the best opportunities of triumph. In The Provoked Hus- 
 band she is as truly the high-bred lady as her husband is 
 
Sadler's Wells : " The Provoked Husband." 1 89 
 
 the high-bred lord, but she is the lady who floats lightly on 
 the surface of society, while her sedate lord is one of its 
 foundations. She is fascinating in her folly, innocent even 
 in the seeming heartlessness of her frivolity, so light that 
 none can hope to fix her attention long enough to find a 
 passage through it to her heart; and when her attention is 
 at last rivetted by the strong measure that her husband is 
 compelled to take, she is a woman, with a woman's nature, 
 beautiful after all in its distress. Lady Townley is, perhaps, 
 the part in which Mrs. Charles Young has found herself 
 most free to exercise her skill. The other parts in the play 
 are all well filled. Mr. Marston, always a judicious actor, 
 did his duty by the part of JManly, and everyone concerned 
 in working out the almost farcial underplot of the adven- 
 tures of the Wronghead family in London — the "Wrong- 
 heads", as its chief observes, "were a considerable family ever 
 since England were England" — carried on the jest with an 
 unflagging spirit. 
 
 At the Olympic there is constant mirth over comediettas 
 bordering on farce. In Hush Money notice is due to the 
 excellence of Mrs. Emden's acting as the practical clear- 
 starcher who inflicts so terrible a shock upon the nerves of 
 Mr. Jasper Touchwood. Mrs. Emden in this little piece 
 really divides applause with Mr. Robson. 
 
 October 16. — At the Olympic we have had, during the 
 week, the opening of Mr. Wilkie Collins's Red Vial. Intent 
 upon the the course of his narrative, the author has in this 
 instance forgotten that in a drama characters are not less 
 essential than a plot. There is not a character in The Red 
 Vial. One person is, indeed, benevolent; another rigid in 
 the sense of probity; another, represented by Mrs. Stirling, 
 weak in the same, and wicked; and another, represented 
 by Mr. Robson, a maniac, with wits of dimensions 
 varying according to the convenience of the story; but 
 they are all shadows for a tale that should be read in 
 ten minutes, not characters to be offered bodily to our 
 
190 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 senses, for a two hours' study. Still with the same exclu- 
 sive care about the story, it happens also that the author of 
 The Red Vial has taken no pains to secure pithiness of 
 expression; there is no effort to say good things pointedly, 
 and sometimes even a tendency to say commonplace things 
 tediously, as if they were worth elaborating into speeches. 
 
 But the defect fatal to the success of this melodrama, 
 probably, is something in itself apparently more trivial 
 than any of these faults. The morality of the play is, 
 indeed, to a certain extent, bad ; we are asked for some 
 sort of sympathy with mother's love that begets robbery 
 and murder ; but plays seldom are condemned for bad 
 morality. Crowded houses at the Haymarket have this 
 week taken harmless delight in London Assurance, of which 
 the whole story shines only through a bright halo of 
 swindling and lying; a play without the faintest recognition 
 in it of such a principle as honour, except by a weak tag 
 at the end about two gentlemen. That play succeeds 
 because it has a fairly managed story, a pleasant variety of 
 well-marked stage-characters, enough of sparkle in the dia- 
 logue, although it is by no means good, and an easy sense 
 of the ridiculous everywhere paramount. Want of power 
 in the writing does not much offend an audience that is 
 otherwise contented. ^Vhen will Boots at the Swan fail 
 to attract playgoers to the Olympic, and to awaken peals of 
 laughter there ? Yet as a piece of writing it is utterly 
 unreadable. The fatal defect in The Red Vial is that it 
 makes no allowance for the good or bad habit that an 
 English audience has of looking out for something upon 
 which to feed its appetite for the absurd. The orthodox 
 writer of melodramas satisfies that hunger with a comic 
 underplot, and by so doing saves his terrors whole. But 
 Mr. Wilkie Collins has experimented in a drama without 
 one break in the chain of crime and terror, and the audience 
 therefore makes breaks for itself at very inconvenient 
 places. That a play so contrived should contain frequent 
 
Wilkie Collins : "The Red Vial" 191 
 
 solemn references to a doctor's shop, blue, green, and red 
 bottles, drops and tablespoonfuls, small matter as that may- 
 be, is in the presence of a laughter-loving public very 
 perilous. It needs the highest and the truest exaltation of 
 the language of the drama to keep an audience in an 
 English playhouse in a state of unbroken solemnity for two 
 hours at a stretch. Mr. Robson and Mrs. Stirling raise the 
 story to the utmost possible height by their acting ; every 
 help of effective scenery has been supplied on the most 
 liberal scale. The piece is the work of a popular writer, 
 admirably mounted, perfectly acted, with the favourite 
 actor of the day labouring his utmost in what should have 
 been a striking part. Nevertheless it was condemned, and 
 condemned, as we believe, not for any serious demerit, but 
 for a defect arising from misapprehension of the temper of 
 an English audience. It is no new temper among us. 
 Even Shakespeare felt that to King Lear the Fool was 
 necessary. Such plays as Jane Shore, or Otway's Orphan, 
 never had healthy life upon our stage; and as a nation we 
 have for the style of the serious French drama an ingrained 
 antipathy. There must be a deeper earnestness than plays 
 can demand, in whatever serious thing Englishmen are to 
 look at without exercise of that sense of the humorous 
 which is part of their life ; so natural a part that every man 
 is in every grade of society regarded as a bore who wants 
 it ; and the very phrase with thousands even among our 
 educated men for not finding a thing acceptable is " seeing 
 no fun" in it. 
 
 October 23. — Our English Tartuffe, BickerstafPs Hypo- 
 crite, has been revived at Sadler's Wells with more than 
 the usual success. It is a bright old comedy, with a brisk 
 dialogue, well-defined and amusing characters, and a hard 
 hit at the mean traders in piety, whom honest men detest 
 more heartily than any other sort of sinner. Mr. Phelps's 
 Dr. Cantwell must rank with his Sir Pertinax as a particular 
 success ; one of the personations which give strength to the 
 
192 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 argument of those who believe that his genius for his art 
 is most conspicuous as a comedian. The " make-up" of 
 the character is wonderfully good, the actor has transformed 
 his face, and a German critic might spend a chapter on dis- 
 cussion of the artist's fine sesthetical treatment of his own 
 nose. A couple of touches of black paint have given the 
 effect of a true Cantwell pinch to the nostrils. The hypo- 
 crite's mouth that he makes in speaking ; the large hand 
 with its outspread grasping fingers, that he lays upon his 
 heart in protest ; the houndish snuffing of the air with 
 which he scents a frailty in his patron's wife ; the change, 
 when he is unmasked, to a vulgar brutality of tone that 
 without one touch of caricature expresses the lowness of 
 his position among men and beasts ; his coarse, excited 
 triumph, and his miserable collapse when all his schemes 
 have crumbled about his head, and he has not the spirit of 
 a mole to set against the fall of all his mole-heaps and 
 the crushing in of the underground passages he has been 
 mining so industriously — are a few only of the points that 
 attest the pains bestowed upon the study of this part by an 
 accomplished actor. Mrs. Charles Young adds also a great 
 charm to the acted play by the sparkle and refinement of 
 her version of the lively, wilful, and kind-hearted Charlotte. 
 There is no actress now in London who in comedy of this 
 sort can so completely look her part, and at the same time 
 maintain with equal vivacity the stage-illusion, without 
 making the spectator conscious of the artifices of the stage. 
 Mr. Charles Young is the Mawworm, and the part in his 
 hands is sufficiently amusing, but he makes too obvious 
 the low-comedy intention. The canting sermon suddenly 
 preached from a chair behind the screen, at the close of 
 the play, is well given by Mr. Young, in the true Bethel 
 manner ; and exquisitely quiet in its humour is the way in 
 which Mrs. H. Marston, who has been making the most 
 throughout of the part of the sanctified grandmother, here 
 displays the force of habit. The moment Mawworm's head 
 
"The Porter's Knot": Robson. 193 
 
 rises above the screen, and he begins to sound the first 
 note of his discourse, she turns her chair so that she may 
 directly face him, settles herself as naturally as if she were 
 at chapel, and " sits under him" in proper form, while he 
 informs them all that he is to go up, up, up, but they are 
 to go down, down down ; they'll all want to cHng to his 
 skirts, but they'll be disappointed, for he'll wear a spencer. 
 Miss Atkinson's Young Lady Lambert was a quiet, un 
 obtrusive bit of acting, and Mr. Henry Marston and Mr. 
 Belford as Charlotte's brother and her lover, kept up the 
 good-humour of the play with an unflagging spirit. Not 
 only were the individual actors equal to their parts, but 
 numerous little concerted effects of grouping and stage- 
 management gave life and spirit to the business of the 
 scene. 
 
 December 4. — The theatrical event of the last day or two 
 is the production at the Olympic of a "new serio-comic 
 drama" which adds one more to the number of remarkable 
 successes by which the small house in Wych Street is distin- 
 guished. It is called The Porter's Knot, and is an adapta 
 tion from the French by Mr. Oxenford, but an adaptation 
 made so skilfully that the adapter is entitled to full honours 
 for the applause it wins. 
 
 Its hero, Sampson Burr, was an honest porter in a Kentish 
 seaport town, who toiled early and late, he and his wife 
 denying themselves all but the barest necessaries, that they 
 might make a doctor of their only child, a darling son. They 
 saved enough not only to send their son to London, but also 
 to retire with comfort to a little cottage, where they were 
 maintaining and cherishing an orphan niece, who was to be, 
 one day, their daughter, when the son came home with his 
 diploma; and the diploma was hung up in a grand frame, 
 and the father's heart danced with delight at the boy's glory, 
 and the mother's heart was satisfied at having her child by 
 her side again. Any friend of their son's was welcome, and 
 into the ears of a fast student from town, the companion of 
 
 2 . N 
 
194 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1858. 
 
 his son's follies, the proud father told the story of his life's 
 ambition and its crown. But there followed a mysterious 
 ■visit from a smooth, hard money-lender, and it appeared 
 that in secret extravagance the son had incurred a debt 
 ■equal to nearly all the old man's savings. Then Sampson 
 Burr did battle with his heart, and resolved nobly to bear 
 not only his own sorrow but as much of his old 'wife's burden 
 as he could take upon himself. They had a friend in a 
 stout-hearted captain, with whom Sampson sent his son 
 across the seas for the retrieval of his honour. He paid 
 then his son's debts, and, taking to himself in "a specula- 
 tion in which he had foolishly staked all" the blame of ruin, 
 ■went back to his truck and porter's knot, labouring day by 
 ■day and month by month, with his niece for accomplice, 
 to keep out of the tender mother's heart a knowledge that 
 would bring the bitterest of sorrows. What innocent frauds, 
 Tvhat heroic endurance, what generosities of love spring out 
 ■of this situation, are shown in the second act of the little 
 ■drama of The Porter's Knot. I have told only half its story. 
 Seldom has there been a story told upon the stage more 
 perfectly than this is told at the Olympic. 
 
 Mr. Robson's Sampson Burr is a piece of acting not less 
 perfect in its truth and its quaint mingling of comedy with 
 pathos than his Daddy Hardacre. There is the same rustic 
 ■dialect and manner, but there ends all Hkeness between the 
 two characters, except the perfect way in which each is 
 ■expressed. Sampson Burr's trouble in his chimney-corner, 
 ■or his talk with his wife when she has brought him his 
 ■dinner to the pier and they sit together on the truck while 
 ihe is eating it, cannot be seen without an emotion, expressed 
 ■either by laughter or by tears. And it is not by Mr. Robson 
 ■only that this piece is well acted. Mrs. Leigh Murray as 
 the mother, and Miss Herbert as the niece, leave nothing 
 •wanting to the picture of the Porter's home, or of the hearts 
 that make it when its other wealth is lost. Mr. G. Vining 
 ■displays all that can be looked for in the fast man from the 
 
Bayle Bernard. — Benjamin Webster. 195 
 
 hospitals, whose better nature shows itself at last. Mr. W. 
 Gordon is the prodigal- son, and Mr. H. Wigan is the 
 money-lender, of whose one appearance he makes such good 
 use that he has never before been seen as an actor to such 
 ..good advantage. 
 
 December 18. — Haymarket. — It is not easy to be out of 
 humour with a comedy like Mr. Bayle Bernard's Tide of 
 Time, the original work of a playwright who does not look 
 to France for his material, and, though he wants the 
 Frenchman's art in the construction of a plot, is well fur- 
 nished with English wit and English earnestness of feeling. 
 The story places a new factory next door to an old park, 
 and sets Manchester to work upon the good heart of a 
 fashionable daughter of the landed interest. Familiar con- 
 flicts of opinion through which the country has advanced 
 ■during the last twenty years reappear upon the stage de- 
 prived of all their bitterness ; justice is done to honest 
 principle on either side, extravagance is subjected to a 
 genial ridicule, and familiar truths, brightened with apt 
 touches of fancy, delight the audience throughout, partly by 
 reason of the wit upon their backs, partly by reason of their 
 ■own homely and honest faces. 
 
 iZt^g, January 22. — Adelphi. — The metrical translation 
 ■of Molifere's Tartuffe, which in the old house brought an 
 ■accession of fame to Mr. Webster, is the first work of note 
 produced in the new theatre opened upon the old site on 
 the 27th of last December. The play is worthy of the 
 house, and the players certainly are not unworthy of the 
 play. Mr. Webster's Tartuffe is well known and appreciated ; 
 he has made the part his own. But not less truly Molifere's 
 ■creation than her own is the Dorine of Mrs. Mellon. A 
 new member of the company. Miss Henrietta Simms, has 
 won credit at once by her performance of Elmire. Miss 
 Mary Keeley gives abundant life to Mariane ; and Mr. 
 Selby is an irritable Orgon, worthy of his position in the 
 centre of the plot. It is a pleasant thing to see a thoroughly 
 
 N 2 
 
196 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i8S9- 
 
 good play so well acted, and to sit at ease in seeing it, for 
 the new theatre proves to be at all points one of the most 
 comfortable as well as one of the prettiest yet built. 
 
 March 5. — The theatrical event of the past week has been 
 the return to the London stage of Mr. Alfred Wigan, who 
 appeared with Mrs. Wigan for the first time on Monday 
 evening at this theatre, in one of his best characters, that of 
 John Mildmay in Still Waters Run Deep. Mrs. Wigan, 
 who supported him most admirably in the part of Mrs- 
 Hector Sternhold, was visibly affected by the cordiality of 
 the welcome showered down upon her husband when the 
 curtain rose. There was more in the plaudits of the public 
 than expression of a selfish pleasure at the recovery of one 
 of its best entertainers. It meant a true sympathy well 
 founded upon personal respect, and genuine congratulation. 
 
 March 19. — Mr. and Mrs. Wigan have also been playing 
 together in The Bengal Tiger. It is hard to say whether 
 the playgoer will find most reason to be pleased with Mr. 
 Wigan as the irritable old Indian, or with Mrs. Wigan as 
 Mrs. Yellowleaf, the ambling old maid by whom he is 
 courted. A bit of cleverer farce-acting is seldom to be 
 seen. 
 
 April g. — Haymarket. — Mr. Stirling Coyne has written 
 for Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews, Mr. Buckstone, Mr. 
 Compton, Mrs. Wilkins, and Miss Reynolds, a new comedy- 
 farce, which consists mainly of original variations upon 
 Murphy's Way to Keep Him. It is called Everybody' s 
 Friend., and the design of the author seems to have been 
 the production of a three-act play that will, during the 
 engagement of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews, employ the 
 whole resources of the company for the amusement of the 
 audience. One advantage of the new play is, that, although 
 it provides Mrs. Charles Mathews with the heroine's part, 
 it does not overtask [her limited skill, as it was overtasked 
 in The Royal Salute. The contrast, however, between Mrs. 
 Charles Mathews's performance and the skilful acting of 
 
Death of Madame Bosio. 197 
 
 Miss Reynolds, when the two ladies are on the stage 
 together, is not to be overlooked by the most inexperienced 
 playgoer. 
 
 April 16. — At the Covent Garden Opera, Mdlle. Lotti 
 has, in Maria di Rohan, given reason for believing that she 
 will know how to win her way to higher ground from year 
 to year, following the brave example set by Madame Bosio, 
 whose energy enabled her to conquer for herself the first 
 place as a singer on our lyric stage. 
 
 This was written before Thursday, when the telegraph 
 brought news to London of the loss of Madame Bosio, who 
 died at St. Petersburg on Tuesday last, after a short illness. 
 By a wide circle of private friends she will be missed, and 
 her memory will be long honoured for her more substantial 
 worth. Although to the public Madame Bosio was nothing 
 but a singer, yet in the never- failing courtesy with which 
 she filled her place upon the stage, and the complete dis- 
 sociation of her name from every rumour of professional 
 dispute or jealousy, her private character undoubtedly went 
 far to add something of the cordiality of friendship to a 
 public admiration of her talent. That which she presented 
 on the stage was not the sole talent cultivated by her, but 
 that one all London could see how she cultivated to the 
 utmost.. The natural gift of a rare voice was joined by her to 
 an energy of character that secured her steady advance as an 
 artist. From the first season in which she sang to us, open 
 to exception upon this account and that, constant advance 
 was made until last year, when she was unequalled — perhaps 
 perfect — as a singer of the true Italian school. Then there 
 were also certain parts which she had conquered to herself, 
 even as an actress, and she was bent evidently upon further 
 increase of a dramatic power in which she had once seemed 
 to be utterly deficient. Of such an artist we can hardly say 
 that she died in the perfection of her fame. There was 
 always more to be achieved. Enough was done, however, 
 to secure for her a lasting reputation; and by the memory 
 
198 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1859. 
 
 of her example many a young artist will hereafter be nerved 
 for the steady, patient work through which alone in every 
 profession the true honours can be reached. 
 
 At the Olympic Mr. Tom Taylor has produced a very 
 successful comedietta, founded upon Mr. Savage's story 
 of Clover Cottage, and entitled Nine Points of the Law. 
 Mrs. Stirling is the widow in possession, Mr. Addison is the 
 rightful owner, transformed by the dramatist into a kind- 
 hearted Manchester man; the honest lawyer of the story is 
 a knavish lawyer in the comedy, and there are other changes 
 made in adaptation of the plot. The little piece is acted to 
 perfection, Mr. Addison's Manchester Man being another 
 of those curiously happy personations with which during the 
 last year or two it has occasionally pleased him to surprise 
 the town. 
 
 October i. — Even in farce there was a sense of truth about 
 Mr. David Fisher's acting, and a finish that is too rare to 
 pass unobserved. Mr. Fisher is now added to the strength 
 of the Adelphi staff, and in the drama of The Willow 
 Copse creates a character out of the part of Hulks. He 
 attempts no caricature, and now and then so delivers him- 
 self as to make of a melodramatic effect in the way of 
 speech, something much less galvanic, but at the same time 
 more living and more interesting, than the authors meant. 
 Hard, cunning, self-possessed; a loser by his cunning, as a 
 lawyer struck off the rolls ; a fast man, with a shabby dress 
 and hang-dog air; one self-possessed, who does not look men 
 in the face, and who watches tracings of his stick upon the 
 ground when he is rigidly speaking in accordance with his 
 plots — that is the Hulks of Mr. Fisher. When in the last 
 part of the story Hulks assumes the disguise of a subscrip- 
 tion-begging preacher, he does not at all caricature the- 
 affected twang of the pulpit orator, but fairly reproduces it, 
 as it is daily to be heard in public meetings. 
 
 At the Princess's Theatre, under the new management 
 of Mr. Augustiis Harris, everything is fresh. There is new 
 
David Fisher. — J. R. Planche. 199 
 
 and elegant decoration, there is a new drama and a new 
 burlesque; there are also several performers new to London 
 boards. Oxford Street audiences have been trained to 
 appreciate good scenery much better than good acting, and 
 their first want is still satisfied abundantly. Messrs. Grieve, 
 Telbin, and Beverley provide throughout both the new 
 pieces, one long feast to the eyes. In the new drama, Ivy- 
 Hall, traditional scenery of the days of the old English 
 gentleman, in hall and park, is displayed to perfection^ 
 Genuine old English airs furnish the music to the piece^ 
 and all serves for illustration of a story taken from the- 
 French. Ivy Hall is adapted (with much alteration to pro- 
 cure the local colouring) from a drama, The Romance of a 
 Poor Youth, which has been very popular in Paris. The- 
 chief law of such a drama is, that there shall be a good 
 story and plenty of it, that the action shall go forward 
 swiftly, and that, except in comic passages, there shall be.- 
 little talk that does not actively advance the plot. It must 
 be written with the tact of a man who knows what can be 
 said effectively upon the stage, and pays no heed to the 
 opinion of any reader in a closet. It must allow the scene- 
 painter as well as the actor to give all the pleasure that he can, 
 and may tickle the ear now and then with a popular air, or 
 a lively dance-tune with a dance-accompaniment. But it 
 may do all that, and, like Ivy Hall, be tedious. 
 
 With the dther novelty at the Princess's, Mr. Planchd's 
 burlesque of Love and Fortu7ie, not a fault is to be found. 
 It is exquisite trifling, very fanciful to hear, and very beau- 
 tiful to see. The dainty garden-scenes in which Watteau' 
 revelled are peopled with bright Arcadians of the eighteenth, 
 century, and are a playground for the fantastic persons with 
 which southern fancy furnished the burlesques belonging to- 
 the. ancestry of pantomime. Louis Quatorze, even when 
 real sheep bleated before him in the mimic paradise of 
 shepherds, never was treated with a better show, or better 
 pleasantry, than Mr. Beverley and Mr. Planche have pro- 
 
200 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1859. 
 
 vided for the public at this theatre. Bright animated 
 pictures, song and dance, and jest that never is impertinent, 
 amuse the audience till the curtain drops. 
 
 October 15. — The tediOusness of Ivy Hall having been 
 found incurable, that drama has been withdrawn; but every 
 night adds to the attraction of Mr. Planch6's elegant bur- 
 lesque, with the arch speaking and remarkably good singing 
 of Miss Louisa Keeley in her part of Cupid. 
 
 October 22. — Mr. Tom Taylor this week has especially 
 shown his dexterity in fitting any company of actors with a 
 play that will develop their particular resources and tht)se of 
 their theatre. For Astley's he has produced a hippodrame 
 upon the life of Garibaldi full of horses and gunpowder 
 explosions. For Sadler's Wells he has written a play in 
 blank verse. The Fool's Revenge, suggested hy LeRois' amuse 
 and Rigoletto. It is, however, really new as to its plot, and 
 in fact an original play, well designed and written with all 
 care. 
 
 November ig. — In The Fool's Revenge, Mr. Tom Taylor 
 has transformed the nightmare story, best known to Lon- 
 doners in association with the opera of Rigoletto, into a 
 wholesome English-natured plot. The character of the 
 jester is entirely altered. The old Count Monterone, 
 whose wrath at the Duke's seduction of his child is 
 mocked by Rigoletto, here becomes a nobleman, respect- 
 able in age, who, in his youth, brought the wife of 
 Bertuccio to shame and death. Her little daughter was sent 
 to a convent, while her husband, who had been an honest 
 notary, went to a madhouse. He recovered his wits, subject 
 only to one sharp twist, the determination on revenge. He 
 became the court fool, bent upon retahation for the wrong 
 done to him. His enemy was then become the husband of 
 a young, innocent wife. Oppressed by his loneliness and 
 yearning for his child, Bertuccio brought his daughter from 
 her convent, cherished her in seclusion, almost relented 
 when, his revenge being in his heart, her doctrine of love 
 
Tom Taylor: "The Fool's Revenge." 201 
 
 entered his ear. The lady, to whose ruin he was guiding 
 the Duke, had earned, as he Icnew, his daughter's prayers 
 by protecting her against an insult. It is not the 
 licentious Duke himself who in Mr. Taylor's play has won, 
 under disguise, the affections of the jester's daughter. For 
 this there is substituted a pure maidenly affection for a 
 brave and modest poet. He intervenes to save her from 
 abduction, but his intervention is ingeniously made to pro- 
 duce, with increase of dramatic force, the s.cene in which 
 the father helps, unwittingly, the Duke's design upon his 
 child.' 
 
 For the Nemesis of the scene, the Duke's offended wife — 
 a character left undeveloped in the opera — is used. The 
 jester had prepared her to appear at the right moment, 
 resolved to consummate such vengeance as befits the 
 character of an Italian duchess of the fifteenth century. 
 The moral of the play is expressed in the Fool's cry towards 
 its close — 
 
 " I would have grasped Heaven's vengeance, and have drawn 
 The bolt on my own head." 
 
 The title of the piece carries, in fact, the suggestion with it, 
 that Revenge is a Fool's business. The situations being 
 altogether changed, the poison of the angry Duchess, who 
 has brought also an army to the gates, stands for the dagger 
 and sack of Sparafucile; but the Duke suffers all punish- 
 ment, and Bertuccio, after enduring the last agony of his 
 despair, receives his daughter back. Furthermore for the 
 daughter there is a good husband waiting. 
 
 All this accords with the sense of right and justice in an 
 English audience, while by the change some of the most 
 effective points in the old story are increased in power. A 
 solidity of character is given to the Fool which accords 
 perfectly with the genius of Mr. Phelps. While the lips 
 gibe lightly, the hands clutch at the Fool's bauble as if it 
 were a sword. It is the instrument of his revenge, and the 
 
202 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1859. 
 
 actor tacitly suggests this by the manner of its handhng. 
 The dignity and tenderness of Bertuccio's relation as a 
 father with his child, the struggle of his revengeful spirit 
 with the counsels of her simple piety and purity of heart, 
 presently to be followed by the ferocity of exultation at 
 what he believes to be the success of his relentless plotting, 
 yield occasion for fine contrasts of dramatic colour. In 
 the last act the Fool's glorying, the baseness of his triumph 
 passing by swift stages, the terror of his doubt, the agony of 
 his despair, employ incessantly the actor's energies. Miss 
 Heath, a refined and graceful actress, aids the play very 
 much by her unstrained performance of the daughter's part. 
 The other characters are well sustained; the scenery is 
 excellent. The scene of the first act, indeed, is a charming 
 picture, although it ventures to present at one view both 
 the outside and the inside of a palace wall. 
 
 November 5. — The new drama produced at the Princess's 
 Theatre, The Master Passion^ is capital up to the end of 
 the second act. The third and last act requires the excision 
 of about three-fourths of the author's words, and some re- 
 vision of the incidents. If nothing whatever is to come of 
 the plan for carrying off the hero in the last scene, why 
 mention it? The smelling-bottle, said to contain poison, is 
 an old matter of scorn with English audiences, and, as in 
 this case nobody drinks the poison, I should recommend 
 the heroine to keep her bottle in her pocket. It may be 
 observed also that the adapter has throughout punished 
 excessively the English language, under the belief that by 
 so doing he can make blank verse of it. What he may 
 have taken for blank verse is prose in convulsions. Liberty 
 might, perhaps, wisely be given to each actor to make simple 
 English of his or her part, and omit every syllable that can 
 be spared. The supernumerary who has to refer to the 
 heroine as Snoria, might be permitted to say " Miss". Only 
 we would not deprive Mr. Ryder of a syllable supplied for 
 him. It was a grand thought to provide that actor so com- 
 
"The Master Passion!' 203 
 
 pletely with a part to tear a cat in, and, after setting him to 
 rave through three acts, make him burst in the last scene. 
 If the scissors are not spared, and the English be a little 
 cured of its convulsions, there may be a long run for The 
 Master Passion. The public will be sure always to laugh 
 in the wrong places, but it will be pleased. Rant and 
 fustian are good things in their way, and there is sense of 
 its own in a brilliant medley of robed doges, red spies with 
 crimped legs, romance-heroes in picturesque armour who- 
 thrust fists into the lion's mouth, picturesque Venetian 
 groups, romantic bandits, robbers' strongholds, wild heaps 
 of glittering plunder, dances, the perfection of stage-groupingj 
 dagger-fighting, heroine in white satin, ditto in fancy cos- 
 tumes, both with their hair now and then let down, both in 
 love with the same hero-robber and invincible defier of 
 hereditary foes. There is plenty also of the kind of story 
 men and women have all loved as boys and girls. The 
 brilliant bustling melodrama has in fact very much the 
 effect of a pantomime. It will delight any child, and make 
 the old feel young again. Only let three-fourths of the 
 rubbish of its words be shot into the waste-basket, and the 
 piece will be the gay beginning of a pleasant entertainment. 
 A French jest has been adapted at this house for Miss 
 Louisa Keeley. That young lady, for reasons which a 
 farce-writer is entitled to regard as sufficient, makes it her 
 business to persuade a dreary German student that she is 
 his cat transformed into a woman. This she does in a way 
 that more than confirms the impression made by her bright 
 acting and good singing in the charming burlesque that 
 still closes the entertainment at this house. Miss Louisa 
 Keeley has in her the spirit of an actress. 
 
 Nove77iber 12. — A New Adelphi drama on the most 
 elaborate scale, The Dead Heart, occupied on the first 
 night four hours in performance, and was nevertheless 
 perfectly successful. When compressed, as it must be, to 
 three-fourths of its present bulk, it will become a stock- 
 
204 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i859- 
 
 piece at the New Adelphi. Its faults are that the hero's 
 character is consistent to no ordinary standard, its inhar- 
 monious elements are only to be taken for granted on 
 the ground that, after seventeen years' neglect in the 
 Bastille, nobody knows what a man will say or do. The 
 smooth, dissolute, and cruel Abbd Latour is the only 
 character in the piece fairly and consistently worked out, 
 and it is thoroughly expressed by Mr. David Fisher's acting. 
 Mr. Webster, as the hero, presents an elaborate and most 
 effective study of a character that is not fairly comprehen- 
 sible, and wins unflagging attention to a part that is m.uch 
 overlaid with words. The writing of the drama is unstrained 
 and unaffected, but as it never rises above the common 
 level of thought and expression, no advantage is obtained 
 from the liberality with which words have been supplied to 
 the actor upon whom alone reliance is placed for the 
 production of any desired effect upon the audience. Mr. 
 Toole has a comic part sketched out for him, which as a 
 written part would amuse nobody, but which he knows how 
 to make amusing. Upon Mrs. Mellon (Miss Woolgar) no 
 hint of a possible pathos has been thrown away \ and other 
 members of the company have fille"d up very cleverly the 
 author's outlines, which were not the more ■ distinct for 
 being large. But in spite of these faults, the author is 
 entitled to a principal share of the credit earned by the 
 success of his new play. He has skilfully produced an 
 unbroken series of strong dramatic situations and effective 
 groupings on the stage, he has never sunk below the common 
 level in his dialogue, either into absolute dulness or by 
 the more wearisome pretension of fine writing. If there 
 had been a weak situation anywhere, the audience, on 
 the first night, being a little wearied by the quantity of 
 matter, might have become discontented ; but success was 
 absolute, as it deserved to be. It will be also permanent. 
 The scenes of the French Revolution produced in it, the 
 taking of the Bastille, the Conciergerie, the Guillotine itself, 
 
" The Dead Heart!' 205 
 
 are so represented as to seize on the imagination of 
 spectators. Cured of its wordiness, the drama may become 
 a treasure to the house. 
 
 December 3. — The dramatic event of the past week has 
 been the opening by Madame Celeste of the Lyceum, with 
 a Hvely piece, Paris and Pleasure, presented with great 
 brilhancy, full of smart dresses, tasteful decoration, and 
 effective grouping. As it affords Madame Celeste herself 
 an opportunity of personating half-a-dozen characters, its 
 light bustle and agreeable surprises do not fail of their 
 effect. 
 
 December 3 1 . — At the Princess's Theatre this Christmas 
 Jack the Giant Killer has a famous representative in Miss 
 Louisa Keeley, who is small enough, brisk enough, clever 
 enough, to be Jack himself in every child's eyes. Such a 
 giant, also, as is built up here was surely never before seen 
 on any stage. Mr. Shore animates, it is in vain to guess 
 how, a real giant form which opens its mouth where the 
 mouth, should be, bends its knees where the knees should 
 be, walks about not more clumsily than giants ought 
 to walk, handles his great club dexterously, and turns 
 up an enormous pair of boot-soles when he dies. The 
 introduction to this pantomime by Mr. H. J. Byron is, of 
 course, liberally supplied with puns, but it deals playfully 
 and ingeniously with the old child's-tale, and represents 
 the matter of it very effectively in comic fashion. 
 
 At the Olympic Mr. Robert Brough has written for 
 Mr, Robson, on the subject of King Alfred the Great, a 
 medley of puns, parodies, burlesque anachronisms, and 
 defiance of invasion. There seems to be a story in the 
 piece, but I could comprehend nothing of it, except that 
 Alfred the Great was Mr. Robson, who burnt oat-cakes and 
 defied the Danes. King Alfred imitates Blondin's per- 
 formance on the tight-rope, and ends a song about the 
 " Four Liverpool Merchants" with the chorus of " Rifle- 
 men, form !" The ballet presents evolutions of fair archers 
 
2o6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 instead of rifle-women, but a rifleman is conjured from a 
 caldron, and is an important figure in the last tableau. Of 
 all the Christmas pieces this is the most exuberant in its 
 defiance of invaders. 
 
 i860, January 14. — At the Adelphi Mr. Dickens's 
 Christmas Carol has introduced Mr. Toole for the first time 
 as an actor capable of more than amusing extravagance. 
 His Bob Cratchit contains homely natural touches that 
 enable it to stand its ground beside the Mrs. Cratchit of 
 Miss Woolgar (Mrs. Mellon), one of the neatest possible 
 stage-pictures of a bustling, bothered, scolding, and kind- 
 hearted mother of a poor man's family, at home with many 
 cares. 
 
 February 25. — At the Haymarket Mr. Tom Taylor's 
 Overland Mail shows during two acts the outside humours 
 and airs of the passengers on board the Simoon homeward 
 bound, and in the third act presents them as wrecked 
 people upon a rock, with their true natures that underlie the 
 humours forced into full view. The scheme of the drama 
 is a pleasant one. It is a drama of life and manners rather 
 than of incident, cleverly adapted to its actors, and at the 
 same time written with unusual care. Mr. Buckstone, Mr. 
 Compton, and Mr. Charles Mathews add their strength to 
 that of the whole Haymarket company for its effective per- 
 formance ; and the result is another of those thorough 
 successes with which the Haymarket has of late been 
 favoured. 
 
 March 10. — At the Lyceum, by winning Mrs. Keeley to 
 the stage again, Madame Celeste has conferred no small 
 favour on playgoers. That lady reappeared this week in 
 one of her earliest parts as Margot in the drama of The 
 Sergeant's Wife, Madame Celeste herself playing Lisette. 
 The Sergeant's Wife, as now acted at the Lyceum, is a 
 piece to be seen ; and as it has not been performed for the 
 last thirty years, it will be new to most playgoers. It is not 
 a good sort of play, but it is a wonderfully good play of its 
 
Mr^. Keeley. — Madame Celeste. 207 
 
 sort. Its topic is the night-adventure of a wayworn and 
 belated sergeant's wife, on the way to her husband, with a 
 lame old soldier who sups himself helpless in a ruined 
 chateau with two murderers, one cruel smooth, the other 
 cruel rough. Margot (Mrs. Keeley) is their maid, who with 
 her husband (Mr. Rouse) had discovered the trade of their 
 employers just before the arrival of the strangers. The drama 
 means to inspire terror, and so passes without rest from one 
 critical situation to another yet more frightful, allows no 
 ■underplot or change of place to distract attention, and con- 
 trives even out of terror, in its comic aspect, all its inci- 
 dental fun. The unity and energy of its intention, and the 
 absence of all waste writing, as well as of waste incident, 
 gives to the piece all the value that belongs to a production 
 perfect of its kind. The consoling certainty that everything 
 is to come right at last relieves the play of any painful effect 
 it might have, and the admirable melodramatic acting, not 
 by the two ladies only, but by all who' take part in the 
 piece, secures the fixed attention of the house. Madame 
 Celeste identifies herself with the part of Lisette, and Mrs. 
 Keeley as Margot, blending her grotesque terror with fine 
 womanly sympathies for the victim upon whose behalf she 
 becomes active, and with a visible sense of profound awe, 
 plays like an artist. Mr. Rouse is a shade too farcical as 
 Margot's husband, and appears to disadvantage in asso- 
 ciation with an actress who is in every gesture true to the 
 picture she is representing. 
 
 March 24. — For the benefit of Miss Louise Keeley, at 
 the Princess's last Thursday, Mr. Keeley himself reappeared 
 upon the stage ; while Mrs. Keeley, who is strengthening 
 the- hands of Madame Celeste at the Lyceum, acted on that 
 night at both theatres. Mr. Keeley remains for a night or 
 two at the Princess's, acting in London Assurance and 
 Twice Killed. 
 
 At the Olympic, Mr. Robson, in the farce of B. B., first 
 produced on Thursday night, represents a mild and some- 
 
2o8 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 what timid gentleman, having those initials on his luggage, 
 who arrives at an inn in Northumberland by the train from 
 which the American prize-fighter calling himself the Benicia 
 Boy is expected, and who undergoes much torture and 
 bewilderment. His suffering proceeds from the enthusiastic 
 interest taken in him by a sporting waiter and chambermaid, 
 a sympathising landlady, and the retired Chicken by whom 
 she is courted, as well as by the squire of the parish, who is 
 "a patron". The farce, which is received with hearty 
 laughter, is designed to exhibit Mr. Robson's skill in repre- 
 senting ludicrous mystification and alarm. It also shows to 
 great advantage Mr. Horace Wigan, who has made a small 
 character-sketch of his part as the retired pugilist. 
 
 April xi,. — In the interval between two of his dramatic 
 sessions at IsHngton, Mr. Phelps, engaged at the Princess's 
 Theatre, has been representing one of his favourite comedy 
 parts. Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, in The Man of the World. 
 Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, pliant in flattery and hard in 
 purpose, determined to grasp worldly success, and utterly 
 insensible to degradation that is not accompanied with loss 
 of worldly influence, is represented by the actor even in 
 what must pass for the repose of his face when on the stage. 
 The features are cunningly hardened ; the keen eyes, and a 
 certain slight but frequent turn of the head, with its ready 
 ear and fixed averted face, shrewdly suggests an intent, 
 secret watchfulness. Even when his schemes of family 
 aggrandisement are being foiled by love and honour in his 
 son, when the depths of his miserable passion have been 
 stirred into an almost tragic agony of meanness, he com- 
 monly abides by the same habit of listening with open ear, 
 keen, watchful eye, and face impenetrable. Mean, selfish 
 worldliness, utterly dead to the perception of a man's honour 
 and dishonour, is all that has to be represented, but of this 
 the actor seizes the whole range. If the house roars with 
 laughter at the littleness of the passion, it has also to note 
 with a more silent and more powerful emotion its intensity. 
 
Robson. — Phelps. — Burlesque. — Pantomime. 209 
 
 April 21. — A sense of the intolerable in literature has, 
 perhaps, been attained already by some of our burlesque 
 writers. There is, indeed, still somebody who can select 
 Lucrezia Borgia or Jane Shore for a subject, and there is an 
 appearance in aidvertisements of a burlesque by somebody 
 of fashion, who has written Arthtir, or the Hi-diddle diddles 
 of the King. But this Easter at any rate we are not con- 
 demned to hear laborious vulgarities connected with the 
 names of King Alfred or of William Tell. Mr. William 
 Brough's burlesque on the story of the Mountain Sylph, 
 produced as The Sylphide at the Princess's, takes fair game 
 in a fanciful tale, works out the story pointedly, and is to be 
 praised also for many evidences of a true spirit of fun that 
 underlies and overlies the punning. The scene of the witch 
 Hela at her toilet is merrily designed ; the dances, that are 
 now essential to burlesque, are cleverly joined to the story ; 
 and although a good deal of the word-splitting could be 
 spared, many of the puns are also honest jokes. The Sylphide, 
 in fact, is a good thing of a bad sort. The Forty Thieves, 
 also, are game well hunted, and it is rather good than bad 
 taste to make merry with The Miller and his Men. Mr. 
 Byron, who is dull in The Pilgrim of Love, has shown that 
 he knows how to be naturally merry, much as punning 
 checks natural mirth. He produced at Christmas one of the 
 heartiest and best pantomime openings that I have seen for 
 many years. Mr. F. Talfourd, Mr. William Brough, and 
 Mr. Byron, the chiefs of the modern school of burlesque, 
 are all capable of dispensing with the affectations of wit that 
 are now practised for delusion of the ignorant. A true 
 power of fun, that is in all these gentlemen, makes itself felt 
 by high and low. Is it not, then, worse than superfluous 
 that they should spoil their sport with a mere strain after 
 false wit, and aim also, by the use of slang words that take 
 the place of humour with the idle and stupid, to amuse the 
 worse at the cost of annoyance to the better half of any but 
 a tap-room audience ? 
 
 2 o 
 
210 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 April 21. — So supreme is Fidelio among operas and the 
 name of Beethoven among musicians, that it might be 
 natural to refer to some vaguely remote classical period a 
 Shakespeare of sound, by whom this opera was written for 
 us and for all time within the present century, when his age 
 was only thirty-five or thirty-six. There may have been 
 some who had shaken hands with Beethoven himself among 
 those who witnessed on Thursday night the admirable re- 
 presentation of his opera at Covent Garden. Most opera- 
 goers have heard the story of the first suggestion of the 
 subject of Fidelio to its composer. Paer had written an 
 opera upon the story, Beethoven went to hear it, and, when 
 the composer came into his box, expecting compliments, 
 met him with the exclamation, " Paer, I am delighted with 
 your opera; I shall set it to music." 
 
 And to what wonderful music is it set ! After all first 
 misadventures, the performances in two forms for three 
 nights only, the remodellings, and the four overtures pro- 
 duced for it (the third or Leonora being the best, and the 
 fourth written because the third was thought too long, and 
 could not be shortened without hurt), Beethoven's Fidelia 
 as it now stands is, in music, of all secular works, the one 
 that appeals most worthily to what is in the listeners. The 
 music itself thinks and feels, blending its harmonies with 
 all the variety and mystery of human emotion. As the 
 words are sung the music lives along the line. The most 
 exquisite of Mozart's melodies have no such life in them as 
 this, but are as the fancy of Spenser, pure fancy unsurpassed, 
 beside Shakespeare's sounding of all notes that are to be 
 drawn out of maa's heart. 
 
 Fidelio is now performed at Covent Garden better than 
 it has been performed in London for more than a score of 
 years. Since the time of Madame Schroeder Devrient, 
 there was a performance by a German company with 
 Madame Stoeckel Heinefetter in the part of Leonora, and 
 the opera runs so much better with German than Italian 
 
"Fidelo": Mdlle. Csillag. 21 r 
 
 words that until this week that may have been reckoned as- 
 the last best of the London representations. The Fideho 
 of Mdlle. Cruvelli was a display of the young lady's power^ 
 of the energy she could throw here and there into dramatic 
 points, but I greatly preferred the subsequent performance 
 of Mdlle. Jenny Ney. The young German singer who has. 
 now adventured to represent her true German Fidelia 
 on the Italian stage has every requisite of voice, and per- 
 haps is an accomplished actress. I suspect, however, that 
 her art would fail her in an uncongenial part. Her Fidelio. 
 is good because she evidently puts her heart into the part,, 
 and means its music. She was not to be distracted even by 
 the strange Italian words, but occupied the stage with a 
 beautiful earnestness ; never betraying her self-consciousness,, 
 never displaying a concern for stage-effect, straining at 
 points, or striking attitudes. There is one aspect of her 
 part that now becomes prominent in it for the first time at- 
 one of our Italian operas. The Leonora of Beethoven's 
 opera is a heroic wife, with all the tenderness and purity of 
 Shakespeare's Imogen. Very refined is the delicacy withi 
 which Mdlle. Csillag shadows the relation between herself,, 
 as a supposed boy, and the gaoler's daughter. She is true- 
 woman in every situation; most of all when clinging withins 
 her husband's arms she braves his assassin, and following: 
 him, pistol in hand, with excited firmness to the door, half 
 swoons at the threshold, to be revived directly by her hus- 
 band's voice and the new stir of a love suddenly released! 
 from its constraints. Her piercing cry is not the musical, 
 shriek to which we are accustomed, no note that her voice: 
 reaches is uncoloured by the feeling that it should express.. 
 In the famous cry, lo son sua sposat her intonation of 
 the word on which the whole force of the story and ther 
 music rests is wonderfully true in meaning. It is the- 
 natural result, I believe, of her full earnest realisation of her- 
 part, but it has all the force of a dramatic effect peculiarly- 
 her own. Of the strains of religious feeling woven by 
 
 o 2 
 
212 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 Beethoven into the music of the brave wife's part, not one 
 was lost upon the voice of the young singer. When Leonora 
 in the first words of the prisoner hears the voice of her 
 husband, it is upon her knees that she falls as the cry of 
 recognition escapes from her; - kneeling not consciously or 
 in set form of worship, but instinctively, as one suddenly in 
 presence of an issue that had been so long inseparable from 
 her prayers. The line in which she gives bread with bene- 
 diction to her husband is felt with a new force from Mdlle. 
 Csillag, who, without any display of intensity, fills the whole 
 prison scene with an air of truth and pathos that accords 
 most exquisitely with the music. A Leonora guiltless of 
 stage-trick, who achieves one of the most difficult of operatic 
 triumphs without once appearing to ask homage to herself, 
 but who is evidently paying her own homage to the genius 
 she interprets, is a Leonora to be valued to the utmost. 
 
 April 28. — At the Olympic Mr. Tom Taylor's adaptation 
 of a French sentimental comic sketch into The Christmas 
 Dinner gives opportunity to Mrs. Stirling for some capital 
 acting, to Mr. Horace Wigan for a clever make-up of 
 Hogarth, and to Mrs. Emden for one of her sturdiest and 
 pleasantest sketches of maid-servants. But although the 
 appeal seems to be throughout to the English home-feeling, 
 the expression of it is still somewhat foreign in its sentiment, 
 and it does not altogether come home to the audience. 
 What little applause the piece receives is earned, and is, 
 indeed, less than is earned, by Mrs. Stirling. 
 
 July 28. — Five London companies, that have been in- 
 debted to the pen of Mr. Robert Brough as a burlesque 
 writer, contributed to the entertainment at Drury Lane 
 last Wednesday for the benefit of the wife and children of 
 that excellent amuser of the public. Touching allusion was 
 made to the occasion of the benefit in the closing lines of 
 the address written by Mr. Shirley Brooks. It was an 
 address, spoken by Mrs. Stirling, as prologue to The 
 Enchanted Isle, the earliest of Mr. Brough's burlesques. 
 
Robert Brough. — "The Colleen Bawn." 213 
 
 which formed the last part of the entertainments in aid of 
 a fund for the benefit of his widow and his almost infant 
 children. It was performed by an amateur company of the 
 deceased writer's literary friends and comrades. Mr. Robert 
 Brough was but a young mto, for his career as a producer 
 of light literature began at an unusually early age. Deficient 
 health made it impossible for him to undertake the sustained 
 work by which alone large incomes that depend on labour 
 can be earned, and it raised also beyond reasonable means 
 the premium for hfe insurance. He lived laborious days, 
 and he was chargeable with no improvideijce. Had he 
 survived, even to middle age he might have left provision 
 for the household that depended on him safely while he 
 lived. He died without a blot upon his social character, 
 and it is an honour to his memory, not a reproach, that he 
 has left at his death friends zealous enough and prompt to 
 give substantial aid to those of whom he had in life been 
 the protector. 
 
 September 15. — Mr. Boucicault's transformation of Gerald 
 Griffin's excellent novel of The Collegians into an Adelphi 
 play again furnishes conspicuous evidence of his stage-tact. 
 The new drama of The Colleen Bawn would on its own merits 
 excel The Green Bushes in lasting popularity. It will not, 
 however, like The Green Bushes, be connected with the 
 picturesque melodramatic power of one favourite actress, or 
 especially supported by the broad fun of two favourite 
 comedians. The work of the piece is fairly distributed 
 among many persons, who all work together to ensure its 
 success. Mr. Boucicault himself in a genial Irish part, and 
 Mrs. Boucicault, playing with much quiet grace as the 
 heroine ; Mrs. Mellon as a comedy heroine, winning, 
 perhaps, the foremost honours of the night ; Mrs. Billington 
 as a tragic heroine seizing an opportunity to show (as she 
 has once or twice enabled us to see) that she sometimes 
 can rise as an artist far above her ordinary level; Mr. 
 Edmund Falconer as an Irishman, with terror of a crime 
 
:2 14 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 ;upon his mind, acting with an effective carefulness deserv- 
 dng of the highest praise that he has yet earned on the 
 London stage ; Mr. Billington as the hero ; Mr. David 
 Fisher, acting always well, but here able only to pass quietly 
 rthrough a part of which there is not much to be made 
 ■beyond a contribution to the general effect — I have not 
 yet named all the performers, but should have ,to do so 
 were I to name all to whom the piece is indebted for its 
 very great success. It owes much, however, to the genius 
 of Gerald Griffin, who contrived the story, and most to the 
 •constructive tact of the dramatist, in whose hands every 
 ^situation is effective, and from whom every phrase tells upon 
 .the audience. Upon the scenery, of course, pains have 
 ibeen spent, and the second act closes with some " Adelphi 
 ■effects" of sea in a cavern, with incidents of plunging, 
 swimming, drowning, and fishing up, of which the illusion 
 provokes rounds of applause. The production of The 
 ■Colleen Bawn is the most thorough old-fashioned success 
 achieved by Mr. Webster since his new'theatre was built. 
 
 September 22. — Mr. Phelps, who is now sole lessee of the 
 'theatre with which his name will be hereafter associated, 
 fulfils at Sadler's Wells all those conditions which the 
 Freiherr von Wolzogen considers necessary to the honest 
 progress of the drama. He acts national plays in a house 
 small enough to allow all to see, though few may appreciate, 
 the subtlest and most delicate shades of expression proper 
 to the art of the actor ; he has a company of performers 
 (trained and accustomed to support each other steadily, and 
 peculiarly able to present each play as an effective whole. 
 The unhallowed union of music with the drama, so deeply 
 •abhorred by Herr von Wolzogen, is not sanctioned at 
 Sadler's Wells ; and while the stage is always well 
 appointed, scenic display is made, even to a remarkable 
 degree, expressive of poetical intention. 
 
 Mr. Phelps has opened the campaign with two plays of 
 Shakespeare — As You Like It and Coriolanus. Coriolanus 
 
Samuel PJielps. — Herman Vezin. 215 
 
 I have been to see, and here as ever the first mention is 
 ■due to the whole truth and harmony of the representation. 
 The actors are all in accord together; and although the 
 company includes few bright particular stars, yet each does 
 justice to the dignity of his profession. Mr. Barrett is a 
 genial and genuine Menenius Agrippa ; Mr. Herman Vezin, 
 a new member of the company, who, I believe, has earned 
 honours as first tragedian in a transpontine house, is a 
 discreet and serious Aufidius, who mars nothing by errors 
 of commission, and errs only on the hopeful side by under- 
 acting his part. The Roman mob, admirably grouped and 
 disciplined, cannot easily be represented by a better first 
 citizen than Mr. Lewis Ball. 
 
 The httle part of the domestic friend and gossip of the 
 women in the hero's household is spoken delightfully by 
 Mrs. Marston. Miss Kate Saxon, an intelligent actress, 
 who supplies one of the losses of the company, delivers 
 with all due simplicity the few sentences that fall to her lot 
 as the wife of Coriolanus, and expresses quietly by her 
 stage-bearing the modest, faithful gentleness that follows, 
 strong in love, the warrior's career. As the proud mother 
 of the prouder son. Miss Atkinson also labours her best, 
 but she does not achieve her best. When she desires with 
 face and gesture to express scorn, it not seldom happens 
 that she fails to suggest more than intensity of spite. For 
 this reason her Volumnia is wanting in some of the dignity 
 with which the character has been invested by the poet. It 
 is a hard trial, no doubt, to measure the expression of a 
 Roman mother's pride with the show of pride that a man can 
 put into the part of Coriolanus. Pride, after all, is not a 
 woman's passion, for what passes by the name is often 
 vanity. 
 
 The pride of Coriolanus is heroic, and is a man's pride, 
 from which vanity is altogether absent. His own praises 
 are irksome in his ears. That which he is, he is ; and it is 
 little in his simple estimation of himself, for he esteems 
 
2i6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 himself by what he feels the power of becoming. Upon 
 comparisons between himself and the base multitude he never 
 wastes a thought. It matters not at what level other men 
 are content to dwell ; his mind abides on its own heights. 
 Thus when Caius Marcius in the camp, beset with irksome 
 praises that he is compelled to hear, is named Coriolanus, 
 and there is added to this honour the exhortation " Bear 
 the addition nobly ever", Mr. Phelps represents him stirred 
 by the warning into a large sense of what is in his soul, and 
 lifted upon tiptoe by his soaring thought. The same action 
 gives grandeur to the words, 
 
 " I'd rather be their servant in my way 
 Than sway with them in theirs," 
 
 and is afterwards more than once used, not ostentatiously, 
 and never without giving the emphasis intended. 
 
 As in the action of the piece, that pomp of processions 
 with the constant noise of drum and trumpet, which in the 
 good old days of the drama formed a prominent part of 
 the play, is subdued, and made to follow instead of leading 
 the march of the poem, so in the action of Coriolanus him- 
 self it is remembered that heroic pride is self-contained. 
 The passion least to be concealed by it is impatience of 
 subjection to the shifting voices of the mob. The pride of 
 Coriolanus is a virtue overgrown, and is associated with the 
 utmost purity and tenderness of home affections ; next to 
 his love of honour is his love of home. The two qualities 
 belong naturally to the same mind, and in the end of this 
 play we are left unable to determine which feeling has pre- 
 vailed. It is meant, doubtless, to be questionable whether 
 love would have conquered had not the mother made her 
 son — as Mr. Phelps does not forget to mark very distinctly 
 ■ — flinch at such a pleading as, 
 
 " Say my request's unjust 
 And spurn me back ; but, if it be not so. 
 Thou art not honest." 
 
Samuel Phelps: "Coriolanus." 217 
 
 The expulsion of Coriolanus from Rome is presented in a 
 capital stage-picture by the grouping of the mob, and here 
 the actor's reading of his part is marked very distinctly. He 
 had been wrung by the urgency of his friends and the com- 
 mands of his mother to attempt to flatter into quiet the 
 excited mob. The attempt to do this is presented with all 
 signs of suppressed passion, and impatient, yet in itself 
 almost heroic, endurance of what is really intense torture. 
 When the tribune calls Coriolanus traitor, he recoils as 
 from a blow, and lets his wrath have way. But when 
 the mob raising their staves expel him from the city, 
 he mounts proudly the steps from which as from his 
 mental height he looks down on them, and he is lord 
 of himself, lord as he feels of Rome. With a sublimity of 
 disdain he retorts on them that "I banish you", which 
 Edmund Kean erred in delivering with an ungovernable 
 passion. 
 
 The scenic effect of the view of Antium by the light of 
 the rising moon, when the banished Coriolanus haunts the 
 door of Aufidius, his deadly enemy, is contrived to give 
 colour to the poetry. But there is no scene in the play 
 more impressive to the eye than the succeeding picture of 
 the muffled figure of Coriolanus, seated by the glowing 
 embers of the brazier that represents his enemy's hearth. It 
 is one of the omissions of Mr. Vezin that he makes no sign 
 whatever when the stranger-guest discloses his name, though 
 he had vowed that 
 
 " Where I find him, were it 
 At home, upon my brother's guard, even there. 
 Against the hospitable canon, would I 
 Wash my fierce hand in his heart." 
 
 If nothing more were to be done, hands tightly clenched at 
 the hearing of the name, slowly relaxing till they are held 
 out in friendship with the words 
 
2i8 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 " O Marcius, Marcius, 
 Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart 
 A root of ancient envy," 
 
 ■would be better than absolute inaction. 
 
 I must not dwell much longer upon this performance. 
 Let me add only that the meaning of the heroic close fur- 
 nished by Shakespeare to the play is well brought out at 
 Sadler's Wells. The lofty pride that when defied by 
 Rome had defied Rome herself, and was to set a foot upon 
 the neck of the world's ruler, had, after painful struggle, 
 knelt at the voice of a mother, yielding nobly when to yield 
 •was dangerous, if not mortal. When Coriolanus has attained 
 his greatest height, Aufidius, fallen to his lowest, has sunk 
 into a dastardly chief of assassins. All hearts are thus 
 secured for sympathy with the pride with which, as Mr. 
 Phelps shows us, the hero resents the taunt of an enemy 
 basely triumphant. His whole frame enlarges, and his 
 hands press on the expanding breast, as he cries, 
 
 " Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart 
 Too great for what contains it ! " 
 
 And so at last the loftiness of his disdain carries all sym- 
 pathies with it when he whets the swords of the conspirators 
 by telling them 
 
 " How, like an eagle in a dovecote, I 
 Fluttered your Volsces in Corioli : 
 Alone I did it— Boy ! " 
 
 October 6. — The Lyceum opened on Monday for Madame 
 •Celeste's winter season with a new play by Mr. Tom 
 Taylor, Tlie Brigand and his Banker, founded on Edmond 
 About's novel, " Le Roi des Montagnes". The Lyceum play, 
 however, was so ill-contrived and feebly written that' not 
 even the personal efforts of Mrs. Keeley and Madame 
 Celeste, the beautiful scenery and dresses, and indulgence 
 for an opening night, could save it from the fate it merited. 
 
Tom Taylor. — Henry Neville. — Fechter. 2 1 9 
 
 October 13. — Mr. Boucicault's comedy of The Irish 
 Heiress^ in which the American actress, Miss Gougenheim, 
 has appeared this week at the Lyceum before a London 
 audience, is a poor work, and it may be well to defer judg- 
 ment on the lady's talent until she has been seen in another 
 part, a part also in which she has English to speak. It is 
 very difficult to use the voice as an instrument of expres- 
 sion when it is condemned to an incessant artifice of in- 
 tonation. 
 
 Miss Gougenheim's notion of an Irish brogue, picked up 
 too manifestly on the other side of the Atlantic, is so nasal 
 that there is only the difference of a stage-Irish trill between 
 it and the talk of the ladies who have presented Yankee 
 " gals" at the Adelphi. There are two parts of Yankee 
 to one part of Irish ; and when a character has to be ex- 
 pressed throughout in such a dialect, it is not easy to tell 
 whether the actress can make any or no good use of her voice. 
 Miss Gougenheim may be an attractive performer because 
 she is lively and good-looking, but whether as an actress 
 she has more than average ability I am disposed to doubt. 
 Mr. Henry Neville, from Liverpool, who also made a first 
 appearance in this play, is a new actor of real mark, who, 
 without much of a part, made good his title to a place in 
 Madame Celeste's excellent company. 
 
 October 27. — The Princess's Theatre opens to-night 
 with the Parisian Mr. Fechter as an English actor in an 
 English version of Ruy Bias. On Monday evening the 
 St. James's Theatre will open under Mr. Alfred Wigan's 
 management with a new play upon Anglo-Indian life, by 
 Mr. Tom Taylor, and a revived extravaganza by Mr. 
 Planchd. Next week, therefore, the accusation against the 
 public that it does not support the stage will be met by the 
 fact, unprecedented I believe for many years, that in the 
 winter season all the theatres in London from Her 
 Majesty's to the Soho are open together. The neglect 
 of English musical talent is met by the fact that, to say 
 
220 Journal of a London Playgoer. [i860. 
 
 nothing of the Great National Opera at the East-end of 
 town, the two opera-houses of the West are engaged in the 
 production of English music. 
 
 At the Lyceum Madame Celeste, strong in herself and iff 
 the help of Mrs. Keeley, has brought together some good 
 actors, and is labouring hard for the attainment of a strong 
 and effective working company. Miss Gougenheim will 
 hardly be a valuable member of it ; she has animal spirit, 
 but her performance in The Love Chase shows that she is 
 no artist, while her English proves to be, if possible, more 
 Yankee than her Irish. Miss Amy Sedgwick has been 
 acting Constance in the same play at the Haymarket, and 
 between the art of these two ladies there can be no com- 
 parison. But, on the other hand, the Widow Green of 
 Mrs. Wilkins, pleasant and genial as it is, only serves as a 
 foil to the humour with which Mrs. Keeley has enriched the 
 part. Miss Florence Hayden at the Haymarket is pleasant, 
 but her Lydia does not approach that at the Lyceum of 
 Miss Kate Saville, an intellectual and refined actress, of 
 whom much is to be hoped. 
 
 November 10. — At the St. James's Theatre a new play by 
 Mr. Tom Taylor, entitled Up at the Hills, \\^% been received 
 with moderate favour. It had been written for Mr. and 
 Mrs. Wigan, and has a half-serious domestic plot of the 
 French school of intrigue and encounter of wits, because it 
 is in such dramas that these excellent artists have achieved 
 their best successes. The actors are displayed and the 
 audience is interested. No more is desired. 
 
 At the Princess's Theatre Miss Heath, Mr. ■\^'alter Lacy, 
 and Mr. Fechter sustain the chief characters in Ruy Bias, 
 and the French actor, Mr. Fechter, as the hero in and 
 out of livery, draws crowded houses. In melodrama Mr. 
 Fechter acts effectively without extravagance. He suits 
 action to word with a nicety not usual upon the English 
 stage, and without obtrusion of his art where he is most arti- 
 ficial. Thus, when he says to Mr. AValter Lacy in the last 
 
Fechter in "Ruy Bias'' — Tom Taylor. 221 
 
 scene, "I was your lacquey, now I am your executioner", 
 by the help of a chair and a drawn sword he places himself 
 — standing in the middle of the stage — in a natural position, 
 instantly suggestive of the conventional attitude of the 
 headsman, and draws loud applause. Few melodramatic 
 actors could venture upon such an effect, for the least hard- 
 ness or clumsiness of manner would make it ridiculous. 
 Mr. Fechter speaks good English with no more of his own 
 accent than clings usually to an educated Frenchman resi- 
 dent among us. 
 
 November 17. — At the Haymarket Mr. Tom Taylor, 
 clever and ready as he is, miscalculated the proportion 
 between plot and dialogue in his Babes in the Wood. The 
 plot is so thin and transparent that no interest attaches to 
 it, and as first performed the play was a good deal longer 
 than Hamlet. Shortened now by an hour and a quarter, 
 the Babes ought to have a tolerable run; for there is a 
 capital part supplied to Mr. Buckstone, and Mr. Compton 
 is strong as a Bore of the Backstairs, though the author has 
 made him so exact a counterpart of the bore that, in spite 
 (or perhaps partly by help) of the marvellously true "make- 
 up", and the ingenious acting, the audience itself is at last 
 bored. It is noticeable that there is more clever writing in 
 this half-successful play than in some of its luckier prede- 
 cessors, and that there is a good artistic intention in some of 
 those very passages which proved the weakest in stage- 
 representation. 
 
 Decetnber i. — To the success of a melodrama Madame 
 Celeste has now added a yet greater success in a new Irish 
 comedian, Mr. John Drew, who is by far the best Irish 
 comedian seen in London since the days of Power, and who 
 in the drama of Handy Andy, judiciously compressed and 
 adapted into a mere vehicle for Irish fun, keeps the house 
 in as genuine a roar of mirth as is to be heard in any of the 
 playhouses. [Mr. Drew is dead and almost forgotten. 
 1866.] 
 
222 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1861. 
 
 At the Haymarket there is a new farce too closely 
 resembling in its construction the B. B. in which Mr. 
 Robson has this week been playing before Her Majesty at 
 Windsor. Mr. Compton is the hero, taken for a Lion 
 Slayer. The house is amused, but the curtain falls to 
 slight applause. The play of The Babes in the Wood, as 
 now acted, runs smoothly and merrily. 
 
 December 29. — At the Olympic Mr. Robson is fierce 
 Timour the Tartar in a burlesque written by Mr. Oxenford 
 and Mr. Shirley Brooks, who have been as successful in the 
 manufacture of puns as if they really had what they have not, 
 the punster's emptiness of wit. Tiinour is a good entertain- 
 ment of its kind. Its four scenes are admirably appointed, 
 and, though not the costliest, perhaps the best of the 
 burlesque scenes of the year. Mr. Robson is but mode- 
 rately well fitted with his part. The attempt to give him in 
 one scene a fit of jealousy double that of Othello, because it 
 is jealousy of two ladies instead of one, falls dead. It is a 
 gratuitous excrescence from the plot, and Mr. Robson seems 
 to have given up any attempt to turn it to account. 
 
 At the Adelphi the Christmas burlesque is by Mr. Byron, 
 and its subject Bluebeard. Mr. Toole is the Bluebeard, 
 really furnished with Othello's temper and that of a Timour 
 into the bargain. After seeing both, I must come to the 
 conclusion that Mr. Toole's Bluebeard is to be preferred to 
 Mr. Robson's Timour, the advantage being, perhaps, in the 
 part, not in the actor. 
 
 1 86 1, January 19. — At the Princess's Theatre Mr. 
 Garden, behind Robinson Crusoe's pantomime mask, sur- 
 prises the old playgoer by the comic force that he displays. 
 It is to be remembered, too, that he shone for the first time 
 as Dr. Caius. 
 
 January 26. — At the Princess's there is the French- 
 English actor, Mr. Fechter, acting in The Corsican Brothers, 
 and distinguishing the town-bred from the country-bred 
 brother, with a subtlety that makes us for the first time 
 
Robson. — Alfred Wigan. — Stirling Coyne. 223 
 
 fairly aware of what a good actor may get out of his part in 
 such a melodrama. 
 
 At the St. James's Mr. Wigan is still acting in the very 
 French Isle of Si. Tropez, and is a fair match for Mr. Fechter 
 in any part that he may play. Mr. Wigan, as an English 
 actor, meets the French on their own strongest ground, and 
 reproduces life and suffering, disease and death, in French 
 dramatic form with a delicacy and fidelity that no living 
 actor could surpass. Such art surely is worth better 
 material. 
 
 April 6. — At the Olympic The Chimney Corner has its 
 run — a pieCe not equal to The Porter's Knot or Daddy 
 Hardacre, upon recollection of both of which it appears to 
 be founded, and too hurriedly worked out in the cata- 
 strophe. The abruptness of the old man's miraculously 
 opportune appearance, with the immediately following 
 tableau at the finding of the money, is weak in conception, 
 and there is wearisome adoption of the old-fashioned use 
 of a catch-phrase in the grandfather's incessantly-recurring 
 question, " Where's my snuff-box ?" Mr. Craven has never- 
 theless shown ability as a playwright that makes his pro- 
 ductions worth friendly attention. 
 
 April 27. — Two new plays have been noticeably well 
 produced this week, both with complete success — an 
 " original comedy". Black Sheep, by Mr. J. Stirling Coyne, at 
 the Haymarket, and a new version, the second on the 
 London stage, of the French Pattes des Mouches at the St. 
 James's. The plottings of Mr. Coyne's Black Sheep, the 
 dishonest lawyer and the hypocritical philanthropist, are 
 the centre of action in his piece ; there is a story of the 
 author's own finding that interests the audience sufficiently, 
 and there is plenty of fun. The writing, too, is equal to 
 the best that we' have had of late years. It is not a comedy, 
 because it does not mirror life; its plot is impossible,- and it 
 contains no characters. It is simply impossible that a poor 
 artist very much in love, whose sweetheart was, with his 
 
224 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1861. 
 
 mother, perfectly at home in his studio, should paint seven 
 successive portraits of a city widow, and either care or be 
 able to conceal the fact. At least she must have seen the 
 portraits often enough to recognise the presence of the 
 original. But that she knows nothing whatever about her 
 is the supposition with which we are to set out. There is 
 no approach to a clear sketch of character. Even of the 
 hero and heroine we can assert only that they are parted 
 by impossible misunderstanding and some indistinct traces 
 of the traditional stage-pride. Mr. Compton's Shorter is 
 rich in absurdity and fun, but it is a farce character ; and 
 Mr. Buckstone's Bunny, although whimsical enough, is but 
 a feeble descendant of Tartuffe through a long line of more 
 or less ridiculous stage-hypocrites with sleek hair and 
 smooth tongues. The number of things that are written, 
 said, and done in the last act of the play at a lawyer's 
 annual evening party, with the grand finale of revelations 
 and heart-utterances in one of the reception-rooms, would 
 greatly edify a foreigner who should look to the EngHsh 
 stage for a fair, humorous sketch of English manners. 
 
 Still less are to be found Enghsh manners, or even 
 French life, represented in the clever French play which, 
 after having served Mr. Charles Mathews for some time, is 
 now translated afresh for Mr. and Mrs. Wigan, under the 
 title of A Scrap of Paper. It is a mere piece of stage- 
 ingenuity, as pleasant in its way of artifice and intrigue as 
 Mr. Stirling Coyne's piece in its way — and let me own, as 
 to that, its honest English way — of fun. The temptation 
 to adapt the piece was irresistible. Mr. and iSIrs. Wigan 
 are perhaps never seen to so much advantage on the stage 
 as when they represent a man and woman of the world 
 dealing politely while measuring wits against each other. 
 Therefore it was that Mr. Tom Taylor, in the half-successful 
 piece with which their house was opened, endeavoured to 
 fit them with such characters. Les Pattes des Mouches does 
 for them all that the English writer sought to do. 
 
Phelps in " King Lear!' 225 
 
 June I. — The King Lear of Mr. Phelps draws full houses 
 to the Princess's. In the opening of the play the actor 
 represents the Lear of the old legend. Infirm with age, he 
 is led to his seat. His hands tremble, and everything indi- 
 cates the weakness of body in which a weak mind is work- 
 ing. The curse upon Goneril is spoken, as the whole 
 character is conceived, with a sense rather of the pathetic 
 than the terrible. But I miss the majesty of absolute 
 dominion in the royal Lear whom Shakespeare brought 
 into grand contrast with the Lear in the storm, slave of the 
 elements, " a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man", 
 who goes shivering to the straw of the hovel. Mr. Phelps 
 does not make full use of all the hints given by Shake- 
 speare to the actor for expressing the imperious habit of 
 King Lear, who had grown old in despotic rule. Even in 
 his entry from the hunt, when at Albany's castle, with the 
 " Let me not wait a jot for dinner", which Mr. Charles 
 Kean interpreted as the words of a jovially hungry man 
 (generally treating I^ear at this stage of his tragedy as 
 a comic character), Mr. Phelps misses the true dramatic 
 meaning of the words. In all the first scene the impatient 
 majesty upon which Shakespeare dwelt is sacrificed to 
 representation of the age and infirmity of which alone the 
 legend teaches us. But the infirmity has in a great measure 
 to be laid aside. The shaking head and trembling hands 
 cannot be carried through the play. Thus there is double 
 loss rather than gain in laying at the outset too much stress 
 upon infirmity. There is another shortcoming in the early 
 part of Mr. Phelps's Lear. With unusual literalness, Shake- 
 speare indicates to the actor of Lear the exact course of 
 the change to madness. It is preceded by a pang of 
 terror in the close of the first act : — 
 
 " O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven ! 
 Keep me in temper ; I would not be mad !" 
 
 There are well-marked struggles with the rising pang at 
 2 P 
 
226 Journal of a London Playgoer.. [1861. 
 
 his heart indicated throughout the scenes in the second 
 act ; where the character formed by long habit of rule over- 
 lies even the natural agony of the father. Of Kent set in 
 the stocks by his son and daughter, the first exclamation is 
 " They durst not do 't"; and in the scene which opens with 
 their denial to speak with him, it is the wounded majesty 
 that rages first, and the wrung heart that appears through 
 it. The first act ended for Lear with terror lest he should 
 go mad. In the second his last words are, "O fool, 
 I shall go mad". In the third act the first scene on the 
 heath is a sane frenzy ; and towards the close of it, as 
 majesty creeps to the hovel, Lear simply defines his state : 
 " My wits begin to turn.'' He is not mad when, in the 
 next scene, he reads one of the grand lessons of the play, 
 praying in the storm outside the hovel, mindful of the 
 world's "looped and windowed raggedness". 
 
 " Take physic, pomp ; 
 Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel." 
 
 Just before, when thinking of his daughters, he had 
 ■shuddered and recoiled at the thought, " that way madness 
 lies ; let me shun that". But the night of exposure 
 to the storm completes the ruin. " This cold night," says 
 the Fool, "will turn us all to fools and madmen"; and 
 the wild talk of Edgar, in his assumed madness, precipi- 
 tates the real madness of Lear. When he is talking with 
 this philosopher, Kent urges Gloster to importune him to 
 go, because " his wits begin to unsettle"; and when he is 
 brought by Gloster into the farmhouse, we are, at last, 
 warned by Kent's first words that " all the power of his 
 wits have given way to his impatience''. Now, although 
 Mr. Phelps gives a fine reading of the part, I do not think that 
 he contrasts sufficiently the royal state with the abject misery; 
 the imperious way, strong in weak characters, with the 
 lowest humility of the infirm, weak, and despised old man. 
 Neither in the accession of Lear's madness do we set from 
 
Phelps. — Fechter. 227 
 
 Mr. Phelps, what, indeed, no actor in our time has 
 •altogether given, a satisfactory embodiment of Shake- 
 speare's conception. But from the time that Lear enters 
 "with his robes washed almost colourless by the rain, a 
 feeble old man, weary and witless after his night's wander- 
 ing under the storm, everything is exquisitely done, the story 
 being read wholly with regard to its pathos, not to its 
 terror. The king is utterly lost in the father. The wound 
 to the heart has struck, as no hurt to the dignity of royal 
 robes can strike a man. Majesty has been contemned in 
 its rags. Humanity lives to assert itself. The quiet broken 
 spirit, the strayed wits, the tender nursing and rocking of 
 the body of Cordelia in the closing scene • the faint in- 
 terest in all but her by whose love Lear's broken heart was 
 held together ; the tenderness with which he lays her down, 
 as for an instant, while he lifts his hands to the throat in 
 which the last convulsive throe of death is rising ; his quiet 
 death, with his eyes, his pointing hands, and his last words 
 directed to her lips, are exquisitely touching. 
 
 October 26. — The dignity of the heroic Moor, who fetches 
 " life and being from men of noble siege", Mr. Fechter 
 appears in the first two acts of Othello willing rather than 
 able to represent. At once, therefore, we have attention 
 called especially to his quick impressionable character. 
 
 In the very first passage of special note— Othello's speech 
 before the senators in answer to the charge of having taken 
 Desdemona from her father — the quickness of emotion in 
 Mr. Fechter's Othello is strongly marked. While Brabantio 
 complains to the Duke, he looks like a man conscious of 
 a good reply in store, which he is impatient to utter. He 
 is eager to speak. He begins so instantly upon the Duke's 
 question, "What, in your own part, can you say to this?" 
 that Brabantio's interpolation, "Nothing, but this is so", 
 comes as an interruption to be swept aside. And when 
 he does utter the well-known speech, standing near to the 
 table under the Doge's chair which has Brabantio and two 
 
228 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1861. 
 
 or three senators about it, having confessed that he has 
 " ta'en away this old man's daughter" — 
 
 " It is most true ; true, I have married her ; 
 The very head and front of my offending 
 Hath this extent, no more," — 
 
 he utters the " no more" as one violently repelling a foul 
 imputation on his honour, with fierce gesture of advance 
 towards the table. Upon this senators rise as if they almost 
 expected an attack, and Othello gives the next eight or nine 
 lines, "Rude am I in speech", etc., as a special apology called 
 for by that show of violence — an apology given, with Mr. 
 Fechter's French accent, in a tone that might seem, to a 
 critic out of tune with the actor, oddly suggestive of a 
 French politeness by no means in accord with the speaker's 
 own estimate of his character. But we have no right to 
 speak of it so lightly. The device is new and ingenious, it 
 gives a lively break to the speech, and carries it to the end 
 in true colloquial fashion. Shakespeare, however, meant 
 dignity of expression here ; and whatever force his true 
 interpreter would give to the " no more" was not such as 
 to make the court rise at Othello, or convert his simple 
 soldierly words in the following lines into a French apology 
 for his excitement, considered as a rudeness. The subse- 
 quent description of the wooing is given with a colloquial 
 ease that is most clever and agreeable, though not at all 
 "unvarnished". 
 
 In the second act, Mr. Fechter's Othello first appears in 
 Cyprus less as the soldier than as the newly-married hus- 
 band who rejoins the bride from whom he was parted on 
 the wedding-day. When, roused from his bridal bed, he 
 enters to quell the riot following Cassio's drunkenness, there 
 is more dignity of manner ; but the quick temper breaks 
 into a tone of passion almost petulant as he turns round 
 upon the tolling of the alarm-bell to cry, " Silence that 
 dreadful bell !" — rather as if its noise had worried him, 
 
Fechter's Othello. 229 
 
 than as if there were any special significance in the word 
 "dreadful", related to the reason he adds — as passionate 
 men are not apt to do in the same breath with a com- 
 mand — 
 
 " It frights the isle 
 From her propriety." 
 
 But the scene is well sustained, and Mr. Fechter, in the 
 first two acts of Othello, though he wins no laurels, loses 
 none. 
 
 I do not understand why, when lago brings Othello to 
 the room where Cassio is taking leave of Desdemona, 
 Othello sees their parting with a spasm of emotion pre- 
 ceding lago's " Ha ! I like not that". There was no sus- 
 picion planted in his mind, and the disturbance expressed 
 is beyond what should be excited by the sight of the dis- 
 graced Cassio, whom yet he loves. Mr. Fechter, too, 
 himself, goes on to prolong the period of complete trust 
 through much of the succeeding colloquy, and is not dis- 
 turbed by lago's hints until he says, 
 
 " She did deceive her father, marrying you ; 
 And when she seem'd to shake, and fear your looks, 
 She loved them most. 
 
 And so she did." 
 
 Here our new actor represents Othello tortured with a 
 deep, nervous thoughtfulness. He stands aside with his 
 eye fixed on vacancy, as one reasoning out in contempla- 
 tion the path shown him to the hell whither it leads. Few 
 passages in Mr. Fechter's rendering of the part are more 
 finely conceived than the manner of the sudden stop with 
 a sense of bitter shame and humiliation followed by 
 " Leave me, lago", when Othello finds himself, having so 
 far accepted the poison offered to his mind, impelled to say 
 to his ancient, " Set on thy wife to observe". 
 
 The soliloquy of Othello after lago has left him Mr. 
 Fechter delivers with admirable emphasis, and the manner 
 
230 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1861. 
 
 of his address to Desdemona in the little scene next follow- 
 ing, when he throws down her handkerchief, is in its 
 distressful hardness perfectly expressed. As the passion 
 grows the action becomes more wholly emotional, and Mr. 
 Fechter shows the physical effect of mental suffering in con- 
 vulsive twitchings and involuntary drawings of the corners 
 of the mouth till all the teeth are bare. The epilepsy into 
 which Shakespeare represents Othello as falling in the first 
 scene of the fourth act, and which is now wisely restored, 
 Mr. Fechter foreshadows by these signs of physical yielding 
 to the mental torture. When Othello demands the hand- 
 kerchief of Desdemona, the scene is enriched with some 
 new touches of tenderness. His face is averted when she 
 says, "It is not lost", and he turns suddenly with all his 
 love and trust flowing back on him, to take her to his arms, 
 when she repels him with the addition, " but what an' if it 
 were?" A like expression, only more prolonged, is given 
 to the scene in Desdemona's chamber, where Emilia waits 
 at the door. The " O Desdemona" is given as a cry of 
 irrepressible tenderness, at which the lovers wind insensibly 
 into each other's arms, and the following passage is spoken 
 by Othello seated with Desdemona at his feet, her face 
 between his hands, in tones of the old gentleness, that are 
 to give place to a renewal of the fury. 
 
 The scene between Cassio and Bianca having been re- 
 stored at the beginning of the fourth act, which opens upon 
 Othello insensible with epilepsy, and so passes to what 
 seems the strongest proof of Desdemona's guilt, the sense 
 of pity becomes strengthened. The appeal is, by Mr. 
 Fechter's rendering, more simply to pity for Othello than 
 we suppose Shakespeare to have intended, but it is most 
 effective, is made powerfully and with much success. The 
 gentler sympathies of the whole audience are secured, and 
 the fifth act therefore becomes very painful. 
 
 Here, too, Mr. Fechter has made noticeable innovations. 
 
Fechter's Othello. 231 
 
 The Bedchamber is elaborately set, and the bed, no longer 
 in an alcove at the back, is a pompous structure at the side 
 of the stage, with its back to the audience, so as to conceal 
 the sleeping Desdemona, and raised on a dais with several 
 steps ; so that it looks as portentous as a catafalque pre- 
 pared for a great funeral pomp. Othello is in the room 
 already ; and although one door is closed, open doors lead 
 to the outer world, where operatic boatmen perform Des- 
 demona's willow song, whereto he listens. That is a small 
 effect unworthy of Shakespeare; and the showy effects now 
 got with a great bed are rather more melodramatic than 
 Shakespearean. Othello bolts the door that leads from 
 within the house, but the doors by which there may be 
 entry from without are left wide open. The murder also 
 is too ostentatiously a murder, morally and physically. 
 
 When in the last act Othello enters Desdemona's chamber 
 to inflict upon his wife what he regards as the just penalty 
 of her offence, because his soul shrinks from the contem- 
 plated act, he strengthens it by bidding it look not to the 
 bloody deed, but to the reason justifying it. 
 
 " It is the cause, it is the cause, my Soul ! 
 Let me not name it to you, ye chaste stars," etc. 
 
 When Mr. Fechter spoke these lines holding a hand-glass 
 like a hair-brush that he had deliberately gone to fetch from 
 Desdemona's bed, and which he threw, after speaking a few 
 lines in dudgeon, to the carpenter, I had not imagination 
 strong enough to conceive what he meant. Probably, I 
 thought, Desdemona's vanity is being symbolised as the 
 cause of her fall — a very poor notion, but let it pass. Now 
 Mr. Fechter's explanatory book shows me that here Othello 
 looks at his face in the glass, and is telling his soul that his 
 skin is the cause of his misfortunes ! It is his skin that he 
 will not name to the chaste stars ! 
 
 Othello is, as he should be, in his own eyes executing 
 justice, and when stirred to passion cries — 
 
232 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1861. 
 
 " O perjur'd woman ! thou dost stone my heart, 
 And make me call what I intend to do, 
 A murder — which I thought a sacrifice." 
 
 The act, in Mr. Fechter's reading of it, is full of passion 
 and emotion, and the audience is deeply stirred, but the 
 effects in some respects belong rather to French melodrama 
 than to English tragedy, and Mr. Fechter even closes his 
 Othello with a melodramatic but false reading, by half- 
 throttling lago — whom he wounded before his sword was 
 taken from him, whom he would not be suffered again to lay 
 hold of with a dagger in his hand, and on whom in his last 
 speech he is very far -from spending thought. For it is then 
 that he accuses himself only for one, "whose hand, 
 
 " Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away, 
 Richer than all his tribe." 
 
 Instead of telling his tale of the circumcised dog whom he 
 took by the throat and smote him — "thus", in contempt of 
 himself mixed with a reminder of his old soldierly prowess, 
 Mr. Fechter's Othello is pulling lago about with uplifted 
 dagger, and at the " thus"— to flash surprise — stabs not 
 lago but himself 
 
 November 2. — Mr. Robson reappeared at the Olympic on 
 Monday after a second absence enforced on him by illness, 
 and was received with the most cordial and prolonged ap- 
 plause, which evoked from him a quiet " God bless you !" 
 His reappearance was in a new farce by Mr. Oxenford, A 
 Legal Impediment, of which the whole value consists in the 
 abundant opportunity it gives the actor to be droll in his own 
 way. Mr. Robson is the outdoor man of a firm of griping 
 lawyers, pinched himself, and bespattered with mud of the 
 streets, where he has caught, in spite of his little camlet 
 cloak, a permanent cold that allows him to get no farther 
 in the announcement of his own name Slush, than H ' ' ush. 
 Mistaken for a better man in eccentric disguise, Mr. H ' ' ush 
 is invited to make himself at home over the fruit and 
 
Rokson. — Sot herns Lord Dundreary. 233 
 
 wine of a City man's dessert in his suburban paradise ; and 
 he does make himself at home. Mr. Robson's toasts and 
 sentiments after the manner of the Pork Pie Club, his senti- 
 mental song, his disgust and astonishment on getting an 
 olive in his mouth — "they looks", he says, "like gooseberries, 
 they tastes like periwinkles" — are all occasion for uproarious 
 mirth. A farcical entertainment, in its way more thoroughly 
 Robsonian, none could desire. 
 
 November 16. — Our American Cousin is a piece of Trans- 
 atlantic extravagance which will have a long run at the 
 Haymarket, not only because it is well mounted and acted, 
 and presents Mr. Buckstone in a Yankee character, but 
 more especially for the sake of a sketch new to our stage, 
 given by an actor hitherto unknown in London, Mr. Sothern, 
 with an eccentric and whimsical elaboration that is irresistibly 
 amusing. It is the republican American's contemptuous 
 notion of an English lord. There is absolute vacuity in the 
 head of Lord Dundreary, but his whiskers are, with help of 
 dye, in good condition. He is polite and good-natured, 
 although inane, and very indulgent to an outside'world that 
 puzzles him sorely, by consisting chiefly of people whom he 
 takes to be lunatics. The stale jokes and the extravagant 
 suggestions of emptiness — his Lordship does not know what 
 butter is, and has trouble to fit the name to the thing in 
 speaking of a cow — would be intolerably stupid in the hands 
 of almost any actor. But Mr. Sothern has overlaid it all with 
 innumerable ludicrous touches of manner and byplay, and is 
 so imperturbably extravagant that shouts of laughter follow 
 almost every look and gesture. He contrives, in the midst 
 of all the extravagance, to maintain for his inane lord the 
 air of a well-bred, good-natured gentleman, and shows an art 
 in his absurdity that makes us curious to see what he can 
 do in some other character. But it will be long before 
 he has leave from the public to do anything but identify 
 himself with Lord Dundreary. The piece is sure of a long 
 
234 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1862. 
 
 December 7. — At the minor houses, including, alas! 
 Drury Lane, The Colleen Bawn, in licensed reproduction 
 or unlicensed burlesque, is to be seen in all directions. 
 Drury Lane and the Surrey give it in burlesque; the 
 Drury Lane version, enriched with a version of the water- 
 cave scene by Mr. Beverley and the acting of Miss Louisa 
 Keeley, has attractions. The burlesque acting by the com- 
 pany is also more welcome now that Mr. H. J. Byron, 
 instead of Shakespeare, furnishes the text. The Surrey 
 burlesque parodies the title of the popular play by calling 
 itself The Cooleen Drawn, and doubtless has a dialogue 
 about as clever as its title. 
 
 Meanwhile The Octoroon at the Adelphi, though the 
 public does not greatly care for it, is clever enough to earn 
 an ordinary run. And the opposition to The Colleen Bawn 
 at the Lyceum, Mr. Falconer's Peep 0' Day, now pruned of 
 much of its verbiage, commands and deserves full houses 
 with unbounded applause for what is called, according to 
 the new term in theatrical slang, which Mr. Boucicault 
 imported for us from the other side of the Atlantic, its 
 "sensation" scene. At the Haymarket Mr. Sothern's Lord 
 Dundreary is a piece of fun with which the playgoer is apt 
 to recreate himself more than once. Mr. Sothern has this 
 week appeared in a farce — an old friend, Livre III, Chap. 1, 
 with a new face — translated from the French for the fourth 
 or fifth time as My Aunfs Advice. He acts with ease and 
 spirit, pleasant and manly in his serious tones, and lively in 
 his mirth. At the Olympic a new comedietta, also from the 
 French, has been produced under the name of Court Cards, 
 with good scenes, delightfully brilliant and picturesque last- 
 century court dresses, and finished acting of a gaily compli- 
 cated little drama of intrigue. Mr. and Mrs. Wigan continue 
 to represent at the St. James's another play from the French, 
 The Poor Nobleman, which displays the highest finish of 
 English acting in the French manner. 
 
 1862, March 8. — There are, as to the main idea, two ways 
 
Fechter's I ago. 235 
 
 of representing on the stage Shakespeare's lago. Both have 
 been in use probably since Shakespeare's time. One is that 
 obtrusive presentment of a diaboHcal villainy which caused 
 it to be objected against the lago of Gibber that it made an 
 idiot of the Othello who was blind to so much patent 
 rascality; the other is that presentment of an accomplished 
 hypocrite — a gay, light-hearted monster, a careless, cordial, 
 comfortable villain — which Hazlitt found in the lago of 
 Edmund Kean. Mr. Fechter follows in his view of lago 
 the sense of Edmund Kean, and, what is far more to the 
 purpose, that of Shakespeare. He is careful even to mark 
 — what is so seldom marked in the acting — lago's gradual 
 though ready passage, led by circumstance, from crime to 
 crime, until the climax of the tragedy he works. A 
 thoroughly Italian quickness and vivacity of movement, 
 which is said to have been a character of Kean's lago, is 
 also one of the strong points in the lago of Mr; Fechter. 
 Nobody can be more instant to obey a bidding, more 
 animated in attention, quick in perception. When he leaves 
 Othello in torment of mind his fingers cast at him behind 
 his back a swift Italian gesture of contempt, instantly 
 followed by servile obeisance at the threshold as Othello 
 turns his face. Sometimes the vivacity of gesture leads to 
 a questionable interpretation of a passage; but so much of 
 what is new in Mr. Fechter's manner bears consideration, 
 and may justify itself, while the whole reading is so just, so 
 free from tricks of interpretation, and so smoothly coherent 
 — as a part well played must always be — that I think it is 
 far better than his Othello, and prefer it to his Hamlet. 
 
 March 15. — At the Haymarket, Mr. Westland Marston's 
 Household Picture under two Lights, called The Wife's 
 Portrait, is the best dramatic sketch I have seen lately. It 
 is not from the French, but a sketch from nature of true 
 character cunningly expressed by varied light and shade. It 
 is long since I have seen among the novelties of the theatre 
 so delightful a little English piece, with a true and complete 
 
236 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1862. 
 
 character in it delicately drawn alike by author and by 
 actress. Mrs. C. Young represents the heroine. 
 
 August 30. — Miss Avonia Jones has appeared this week 
 as Adrienne Lecouvreur, and confirms the impression made 
 by her Medea. The piece suits better than Medea the 
 Adelphi company. She is therefore sufficiently supported. 
 Miss Jones is clever and in earnest, she takes pains, feels 
 her words as she utters them, has the command of good and 
 varied facial expression, is not ungraceful in her attitudes, 
 and is altogether an actress entitled to public respect. In 
 the desire, probably, to feel that she may make others feel, 
 she pauses on her words too long, and the result is that she 
 seems to act on a theory that all persons who speak under 
 strong emotion speak very slowly, or, to be plain, drawl. 
 The language of emotion is far oftener rapid than slow, and 
 an actress really quickened by the instincts of genius would 
 almost be in danger of a' bodily explosion if, with the intel- 
 lectual steam up, she went at the pace taken by Miss Jones 
 when passionate utterance is asked of her. Variations in 
 the rate of utterance, variations also of tone, have yet to be 
 studied before Miss Jones can take the place that really is 
 within her reach among those leading actresses without 
 genius who, if they get their well and hardly-earned applause 
 in their own day, are in no concern at all about the silence 
 of posterity. 
 
 November i. — A new lessee of the Princess's, Mr. Lindus, 
 seems to be resolved on avoidance of all clap-trap and 
 sensation drama. He has brought together a very efficient 
 company, including Miss Amy Sedgwick and Miss Oliver, 
 Mr. George Vining, Mr. Marston, Mr. Herman Vezin, with 
 other good performers, and his programme hitherto has 
 been, after" a pleasant, well-appointed comedietta, one of 
 the plays of Mr. Sheridan Knowles, either The Hunchback 
 or The Love Chase. The Hunchback, as it is now acted, 
 with Miss Sedgwick and Miss Oliver for the two heroines, 
 Mr. Marston for the- Hunchback, and Mr. Vezin for the 
 
Fechter at the Lyceum. 237 
 
 chosen husband, draws a full house and gives satisfaction. 
 There is a bad imitation of Elizabethan manner in the 
 language and some clumsiness of invention in the plot of 
 these plays, but they are immeasurably better entertain- 
 ment than the extravagance of scenic melodrama by which 
 alone many managers are now tempted to think that the 
 public can be charmed. Mr. Lindus has begun his enter- 
 prise with a quiet good taste that deserves full recognition 
 and support. 
 
 t?i6t„ January 17. — A clean and elegant house, efficient 
 actors, a well-appointed stage, and a picturesque romantic 
 play that interests the public, Mr. Fechter now has, in 
 addition to the goodwill and high expectation of the town, 
 to assure him success at the outset of his venture as an 
 actor-manager at the Lyceum. The house before the cur- 
 tain looks its prettiest. 
 
 In the painted lace of the ceiling certain names from the 
 roll of English dramatists are worked in those crabbed 
 letters which only a heraldic ticket-writer is able to read 
 without labour — and the names follow each other thus in 
 unadmired confusion : Shakespeare, Massinger, Byron, 
 Knowles, Wycherley, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Otway, Beau- 
 mont, Fletcher, Rowe, Sheridan. On the stage, to be 
 sure, when the curtain rises, we don't see the English 
 drama, but a translation from the French of Le Bossu, one 
 of the three or four great Parisian dramatic hits of the year 
 1862, which may not prove a great London hit, but, at any 
 rate, deserves to have a run. I give my confidence to Mr. 
 Fechter, and believe that he does mean to dig in the great 
 unworked mines of our dramatic literature. At present we 
 have M. Paul F^val holding the stage, and the English 
 dramatists stuck only as flies upon the ceiling. 
 
 Never mind. M. Paul F^val's play, under its new name 
 of The Duke's Motto, is a sure success, as an English re- 
 vival might not be. It gives Mr. Fechter time, therefore, to 
 warm his house, start prosperously, and observe his public. 
 
238 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 The play is all bright picturesque romance. It even rivals 
 The Colleen Bawn and Peep 0' Day with a set " sensation'' 
 scene and acrobatic feat for the hero, Mr. Fechter, who 
 hauls himself up a rope, hand over hand, with a baby in 
 his arms. Why, if the baby instead of being only a doll 
 were but a real live baby, with a decent chance of being 
 dropped upon its head or squeezed to death, the piece 
 might run till Christmas 1866. With that magnificent 
 effect the prologue ends ; and the curtain rises next on 
 many twinkling feet, and a bright dance of Pyrenean 
 Gipsies. Here we see the bold outlawed free-lance who 
 had gone into the castle fosse of the Duke de Nevers, and, 
 assuming to be Duke, by uttering at a window the motto, 
 " I am here", had received the Ducal baby — why the Duke 
 himself had intended to elope with his own baby is not at 
 all clear; — and the bold free-lance who, when he looked at 
 the baby, was on the spot converted from his ruder ways, 
 so that, instead of fighting the Duke for vanity's sake, he 
 fought with him for love of right against six cowardly 
 assassins; and the bold free-lance who when he and the 
 Duke had beaten off the six assassins saw Nevers shot from 
 an ambush by his villainous enemy, the Prince George 
 Vining — a Prince with a villainous hunchback for his 
 familiar — and the bold free-lance, when he escaped for the 
 Duke's baby's sake by running up the rope for want of 
 stairs, denounced on Prince George Vining and his hirelings 
 vengeance from a window-sill, " the valets first, the master 
 afterwards". That same bold free-lance, whose deeds and 
 merits outrun twenty breaths, we find among the gipsies, 
 with the precious babe over whom he has ever since been 
 watching — now a fair maid twenty years old, secretly loving 
 him, and secretly beloved by him. 
 
 But, ah ! — the Prince George Vining, having married the 
 babe's mother, that is to say, the widow of the Duke he 
 shot in the back, to get the estates, must find and kill also 
 the missing child. He comes ; the Prince George Vining, 
 
" The Duke's Motto!' 239 
 
 or Gonzagues, comes among these gipsies seeking a sub- 
 stitute for the real daughter of the Duke, and finds a charm- 
 ing one in Miss Carlotta Leclerq, the Gipsy Queen. But, 
 as it happens, close at hand is the Chevalier Fechter, or 
 Lagardfere, the free-lance become gipsy, with Miss Kate 
 Terry herself, who is the rightful child. And the wicked 
 hunchback, with averted face and a big wig, he recognises 
 them. Upon which hunchback's time is come, as the last 
 unslain of the valets, to be killed, and he walks off the 
 stage to be killed, followed by the gallant avenger, who 
 presently returns in the big wig and with the hunchback's 
 robe, and with an assumed crook in his body and with 
 averted face, to enter for his own ends into the service 
 of the villainous Prince. After the valets the master. 
 Besides, there is the rightful child to protect. Prince 
 George Vining never discovers that a stranger has assumed 
 the place of his familiar. But much romance comes of the 
 mystification, and much clever acting and much pleasure 
 and amusement to the audience. The master might, 
 indeed, have been sent very speedily after the valets; but 
 then that would have cut two clever acts out of the play. 
 As for improbability of incident, he is a dull fellow who 
 does not sometimes like it. Certainly there is plenty of it 
 in the mine of English drama that we hope soon to see 
 Mr. Fechter drawing wealth from in every sense, material 
 as well as intellectual. There were more startling dramatic 
 incidents set forth upon the stage of the old Globe Theatre 
 than we shall ever get out of the Porte St. Martin. That 
 is not my complaint. What I do miss in these French 
 dramas is the glow of impassioned poetry, the daring flight 
 now into and now and then beyond the sublime, but always 
 gloriously and nobly on the wings of energetic thought. I 
 miss this, and the strains of a truer pathos or the flashes of 
 more sterling wit that belong to one or two of the dramatists 
 whose names I see, and one or two whose names I do not 
 see, on Mr. Fechter's ceiling. 
 
240 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 February 7.— Mr. Boucicault is at Astley's, transformed 
 under his new management into the Theatre Royal, 
 Westminster. His version of The Trial of Effie Beans 
 must have been originally written for an audience some- 
 what lower in taste than that whigh frequents the Surrey 
 Theatre. He has found it in him to construct out of 
 The Heart of Midlothian a pure Old Bailey play in three 
 acts. 
 
 All is done that can be done to make the audience as 
 happy as if they had paid half-a-crown apiece for seats in 
 the gallery of the Old Bailey to hear an interesting murder- 
 case and enjoy the humours of a popular criminal barrister, 
 who is to appear as counsel for the defence. It is all 
 there, in the second act, in prosy detail, from the formal 
 citation of the titles of our sovereign lord the King, includ- 
 ing his supremacy over the Channel Islands, and the call- 
 ing over the names of the jury, to the point of passing sen- 
 tence of death, upon which the curtain falls. And there is, 
 shining in brass, the popular criminal barrister, all his clap- 
 trap being caricatured with most undoubted cleverness by 
 Mr. Boucicault. Mr. Boucicault appears as counsel for the 
 defence. He had been described in the previous scene as 
 a generous barrister touched by the situation of EfBe Deans, 
 who had volunteered to speak in her defence without a fee. 
 He is presented by Mr. Boucicault as a bamboozler of 
 juries, who affects an enthusiasm that he does not feel, and 
 knows so little of the facts of his case that, in the midst of 
 grand bursts of mock eloquence, he makes comic stoppages 
 for dry asides to his junior, wherein he asks whether he 
 may venture to say this or that, and, being told that he 
 may, charges down on the jurymen again with his mock 
 thunder. It is as good as a farce, no doubt, and is pre- 
 cisely that which makes a seat in the Old Bailey gallery 
 delicious to the vulgar ; but it is absolutely at war with the 
 dramatic situation. It is not at all the pleading of a barrister 
 whose heart is in his cause, who has renounced his fee, and 
 
Boucicault at Astley^s. 241 
 
 speaks for the pure love of right and mercy. Yet to this 
 coarse Newgate entertainment Mr. Boucicault has reduced 
 Scott's delicate romance. 
 
 February 14. — At the St. James's Theatre a new piece 
 called The Dark Cloud, by the gentleman who is known to 
 the public as Mr. Arthur Sketchley, is a drama of plot and 
 counterplot, and so far of the French school that the plot 
 turns on an attempt against the honour of a wife. But 
 there is no lax French morality. A genial and wholesome 
 English tone prevails throughout. The villain is no polished, 
 smiling gentleman, but a rough fellow full of evil propen- 
 sities and evil deeds, who, being in youth an unsuccess- 
 ful rival to his friend in the love of the heroine, pushed 
 jealousy to crime. He obtained the ruin and transportation 
 of the innocent young husband, who died a convict; he was 
 himself sent abroad, and after ten years of a wild criminal 
 life in Australia, blended with successful gold-digging, came 
 back with the rough and desperate impression of his early 
 passion yet in his heart, to win the object of his perverted 
 love by force or fraud. A new actor, Mr. Arthur Stirling, 
 as the criminal, foully faithful to an old passion, when he in 
 subdued voice pleads his cause, seeks to persuade with so 
 clever and natural a suggestion of coarse tenderness that he 
 appears to singular advantage. This advantage, however, he 
 does not maintain in the other new piece lately produced at 
 the St. James's Theatre, The Merry Widow. His part is 
 not a promising one, but he makes it unnecessarily tedious. 
 The Merry Widow is a piece in two acts, adapted by Mr. 
 Leicester Buckingham from a recent French piece, Jeanne 
 qui pleure,-et Jea7ine qui rit. Jeanne qui pleure appears in 
 the first act as a crocodile widow, who by false tears entraps 
 into an engagement a young surgeon returned from India, 
 where there died by his side, as he thought, a gallant friend 
 whose wife's sister he has come home to marry. But he 
 finds his friend's widow, who is the heroine of the second 
 act, a Jeanne qui rit She goes with her sister to balls, con- 
 2 Q 
 
242 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 certs, and all gay entertainments, though her husband's death 
 is recent. She has forfeited all her good friends, and she 
 is mocked behind her back in polite circles as the Merry- 
 Widow. But her mirth covers a breaking heart. She has 
 not dared to tell the blind old mother of her husband, who 
 lives with her and to whose life any great shock would be 
 fatal, that her son is dead. The old lady forces her, there- 
 fore, to take her sister into society. 
 
 At home the sisters give lively accounts of their doings in 
 the world, and once a month the wretched wife goes through 
 the torture of reading an imaginary letter from her dead hus- 
 band that professes to be written to his mother or to herself. 
 Miss Herbert plays the wife, and the reading of such a letter 
 to the old woman, at a moment when her own heart is wrung 
 by the reappearance of her husband's friend, by the chilling 
 words of taunt that have accompanied the delivery of her 
 husband's last bequest of love, and by their friend's cold 
 retractation of his suit for her sister, is the situation in which 
 lies the whole interest and power of the piece. It is almost 
 Ford's Calantha brought into a modern drawing-room. Miss 
 Herbert's acting in this situation makes the fortune of the 
 little drama. I care much less for her acting at its close, 
 when she enters the room with haggard face while a real 
 letter is being read from her husband, who has, after all, been 
 in a prison and not in a grave. The transition from the belief 
 that the old farce is being re-enacted, to wonder, doubt, 
 eager curiosity, and a sudden assurance of joy, by which she 
 is struck to the ground, is unnaturally slow, and the stroke of 
 joy that felled a wife under such circumstances would not 
 allow her to articulate " He lives", or whatever the tag may 
 be, and place herself so as to form a tableau on which to 
 bring the curtain down. 
 
 Of the two acts of the piece, the first is wholly superfluous. 
 All that the first act shows for the interpretation of the second 
 is implied clearly in the dialogue of the second, or, if not so 
 implied to everybody, could be set forth by the addition of 
 ten words. 
 
''The Merry Widow!' — " Aurora Floyd!' 243 
 
 March 14. — At the St. James's Lady Audley's Secret 
 appears as a drama. It is only in two acts ; and the putting 
 of the superfluous husband into the well follows so closely on 
 the bigamy, the glow of the arson, again, so closely on the 
 stain of murder, and the interesting heroine goes mad so 
 immediately, with the glow of the house she has burnt yet 
 on her face, and the man she has burnt in it dying on a 
 stretcher by her side, that the audience has a pudding all 
 plums. 
 
 At the Princess's there was produced last Wednesday a 
 version of Aurora Floyd in four acts, and in this play 
 occurred the chief dramatic incident of the present week — 
 the distinct advance of Mr. G. Belmore, who represents the 
 half-witted murderer Stephen Hargreaves, from among the 
 ranks of actors clever only in burlesque and farce, towards 
 the higher ground occupied by Mr. Robson and Mr. Toole. 
 
 At the Olympic there is The Lottery Ticket, in which Mr. 
 Robson as Wormwood, the misanthropic lawyer's clerk, 
 enjoys "a heavenly day" of trouble to his neighbours. 
 
 March 21. — There was produced at the Adelphi on 
 Wednesday evening another version of Aurora Floyd. The 
 lowest form of literary taste in the uneducated having been 
 forced into fashion among readers who have better fare at 
 their command, the players, who seek only to please the 
 palate of the town, will cook the garbage that is in demand. 
 Omelets are accounted flavourless; a strong taste in the 
 mouth is the one thing desired. Aurora Floyd, as acted at 
 the Adelphi, lasted on the first night four hours and twenty 
 minutes in performance, being two hours longer than the 
 Princess's version, and, upon the principle here applicable of 
 the less the better, being in that proportion worse. 
 
 The life of the piece at the Adelphi, as at the Princess's, 
 is in the impersonation of the murderer, the "softy" Stephen 
 Hargreaves. Mr. Webster, in his representation of this part, 
 does not take a leaf from the laurels won at the Princess's 
 by Mr. Garstin Belmore. His conception is entirely different, 
 
 Q 2 
 
244 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1862. 
 
 a thing by itself. The weakness of intellect is shown only 
 in the lowness of its degradation. The make-up of the 
 actor, with deformed back, crooked limbs, a Caliban fore- 
 head under a thief s crop of red hair, a penthouse of shaggy 
 eyebrow over cunning eyes, and a great cruel, witless mouth 
 that, we know not how, seems to be all fang, creates a being 
 in whom not even an expert playgoer, without assurance of 
 the playbill, would easily recognise Mr. Webster. Mr. 
 Dickens's Quilp must have been suggested more than once 
 to half the audience. In this spirit Mr. Webster acts the 
 part through with a terrible energy. His greed, cunning, 
 and malice become diabolical under unwonted excitement 
 and temptation, and we part from him as he is dragged off 
 screaming unmitigated hate — in strong contrast to the abject, 
 entreating cries of animal fear with which the half-witted 
 man, as Mr. Belmore represents him, is carried off, as he 
 supposes, to be hanged like a dog straightway. 
 
 Ap-il 13. — The list of performances at London theatres 
 this week would, with but one or two exceptions, be an 
 insult to the taste of the town if it did not indicate a lament- 
 able change in the class to which the drama looks for 
 patronage. It is quite true that new conditions of society 
 have somewhat altered the relations between stage and 
 people. When there were few readers and few comfortable 
 homes, the story told to the eye and ear attracted thousands 
 whose imaginations needed active exercise. Now the story 
 can be read at ease among home comforts. Out of the 
 printed page graces of style and delicate suggestions of 
 the fancy rise to the mind undisturbed by flare of gas and 
 smell of orange-peel, and so it is that the men of genius who 
 would have written plays for the Elizabethan public are the 
 novelists of our own time. 
 
 How do the players meet this difficulty ? Not often by 
 resisting, too often by multiplying all the influences tending 
 to decay. I am heartily with the players, seeing constantly 
 how hard they work in their vocation, how well they honour 
 
The Play and the Public. 245 
 
 it by prudent charitable deeds, and how ready they some- 
 times are to honour it by acting good things that the pubUc 
 will not come to see. When that excellent actor Mr. Frank 
 Matthews first became the lessee of the St. James's Theatri;, 
 evei'y old playgoer wishing well to his venture, he produced 
 the best new plays he could get of a creditable sort, and 
 though they were not bad, and were acted well, I saw one 
 evening his curtain rise to an audience of five in the stalls, 
 seven in the dress-circle, and thirty in the pit. He is 
 now acting to crowded houses Lady Audley's Secret, and 
 a burlesque of Mr. Boucicault's burlesque of Effie Deans. 
 Let us not underrate the difficulty and the temptation. 
 Theatrical prosperity is most precarious, as many people 
 know too well, in spite of Mr. Boucicault's advertise- 
 ment of the glorious percentages to be made by specu- 
 lation in a couple of theatres under such enlightened 
 management as his, producing, of course, an unlimited series 
 of Phantoms, Dots, and Octoroons. The temptation is 
 very great to meet debility by stimulants, but there can be 
 only one end to that course. It leads, through the degra- 
 dation, sooner or later to the ruin of the stage. 
 
 In his worldly affairs, the actor has of late given con- 
 spicuous evidence to the public, in the excellent Dramatic 
 College, that he has the full average of prudence, with more 
 than the average of generosity and sound professional good- 
 fellowship. But, however hard the task, it must now be 
 expected of him that he should provide for the future of his 
 profession as well as of himself and his brethren. The 
 charm of a good play well acted is something wholly dif- 
 ferent from the enjoyment within reach of a home reader, 
 and it is most powerful over the most cultivated minds, 
 while it can hold the roughest crowd in thrall. The public 
 in the innyards and playhouses of Elizabeth's day was 
 rougher in its ways, and lower in its tastes, than the public 
 to which are now offered the vile, unintellectual, shambling 
 melodramas, bad punning, and senseless grotesque toeing 
 
246 Journal of a London Playgoer, [1862. 
 
 and heeling, recommended by much costly scenery. Yet on 
 the old rude stages before those rough audiences, actors 
 strained their skill to express the force of human life and 
 passion in words that at their wildest aimed towards some 
 height of a true poetry. There lie their plays, untouched. 
 Some of the names of the old dramatists Mr. Fechter has glued 
 to his ceiling, while he acts the translation of a French melo- 
 drama that is romantic, picturesque, but not enlivened with 
 a single word of power. Why are their works shelved? They 
 contain "sensation" plots by the score; for the Elizabethan 
 public also liked strong meat and mustard. It would not take 
 more trouble to adapt for the "sensation"-loving public 
 Marlowe's Faustus, or his Jew of Malta, than to translate 
 and adapt vapid French melodrama. There would be plenty 
 of room for scenery in such old English plays made new*; 
 plenty of wild marvel and startling situations: but instead of 
 the poor slipslop words there would come home to the very 
 souls of the audience, with a fair share of the bombast that I 
 would by no means have expunged, the wild stir again of a 
 true manly English poetry. How can a man be or seem a 
 great actor who has to speak night after night such words as 
 are now commonly set down for him? Put honest poetry of 
 passion in the actors' mouths, let them begin by ranting if 
 they will, and, if there be such stuff in them as I honestly 
 believe there is in many actors of our day, they will warm to 
 their new work, and soon win the educated a^ well as the 
 uneducated public to their stage. 
 
 May 23. — I>et our new school of burlesque writers be 
 taught by the success of the amusing comedy, Fi?tesse, pro- 
 duced last Saturday at the Haymarket. In the veins of 
 tjie writer runs the blood of Sheridan, and the abundant 
 mirth it causes is genuine mirth provoked by wit in its fair 
 sport and its extravagance. There is not a pun in the piece, 
 although one scene is full of mirthful and witty play upon 
 the double sense of words. The writer of Finesse is the 
 authoress of those Listings from Low Latitudes which form 
 
The Play and the Public. 247 
 
 one of the merriest and most genial of table-books with pen 
 and pencil burlesques upon life, and the wit of the comedy 
 runs often into burlesque as genuine. It has higher merits, 
 for it interweaves curiously a thread of fine comedy with the 
 broad merriment of farce. The audience is heartily amused 
 by a bright flashing of wit and witty fun, and becomes 
 joyous upon this new sort of provision. No punning can 
 suggest a more whimsically extravagant idea than that put 
 in the mouth of Mr. Buckstone, who, as a nautical cockney 
 after a hard day's trouble at Messina, complains that he is 
 hungry, for he has had nothing to eat but three watermelons 
 and a peppermint lozenge. Only the blockheads would be 
 enemies to broad burlesque; grotesque absurdity is fair 
 source of recreation, and we may concede as much licence 
 to the decoration of burlesque and the provision of gay 
 ballets as Ben Jonson might have taken for the decorations 
 and the dumb-shows of a masque. Burlesques of the pre- 
 sent day are wretched only by reason of the want of all true 
 fun, the inconceivable parade of poverty of wit that comes 
 of stuffing them with puns. Writers of this intolerable stuff 
 consider themselves comphmented by the deprecation to 
 which punning has been always liable. They will tell you 
 themselves that he who will ijiake a pun will pick a pocket, 
 and tell you that with a smile, as who should say. You know 
 what clever fellows we are nevertheless. 
 
 But punning is not a mark of cleverness. Except when 
 it involves a witty thought, the play on words is but the 
 mark of the mind too feeble to lay hold habitually with its 
 entire attention on the thoughts of which words are the 
 signs, but accustomed to stop at the mere perception of 
 their sound within the ear. It indicates the weakness of an 
 intellect so little attentive to sense that it is able to spend 
 what trifle of thoijght it connects with the use of words 
 on the jumping aside after any jingle that can be dragged 
 into false association with them. The social contempt 
 for the mere punster is not expressed as in playful joke 
 
248 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 against a spoilt child of good-humour ; it is the well- 
 grounded and demonstrably just censure of a manner of 
 speech that signifies commonly a want of intellect. Where 
 a man of sound judgment has been, like Sidney Smith, also 
 a punster, his puns always sent home a witty thought, and 
 were not a mere brainless playing upon words. 
 
 It is perfectly manifest that a story, told in language con- 
 trived incessantly to divert attention from the sense of 
 language to its sound, is told with such deficient use of 
 human speech that it can be but dimly presented to the 
 mind. The tale is inevitably sacrificed ; nearly every 
 natural source of fun in the writing is also dammed up by 
 this wretched obstruction ; and if the actors, who have all 
 the mirth to make for themselves, are not lavishly gro- 
 tesque, the piece becomes insufferably dull. The first and 
 easiest step, then, towards a restoration of the credit of the 
 stage is that managers, without lessening the scenic attrac- 
 tion, the gay ballets, or the grotesque action of their 
 burlesques, should require the burlesque writers to cease 
 their punning and begin to make use of their brains. 
 There is, I know, in more than one of them a hearty sense 
 of fun that would be glad to escape from the vile bondage 
 that now chains together in one gang the wits and the 
 dolts, and that would know how to revel to good purpose 
 in true merriment of mind. While there is abundant 
 absurdity, it is the absurdity of wit or humorist, in the 
 Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, Fielding's Tom Thumb, 
 Sheridan's Critic, or the German Tieck's fairy extravaganzas. 
 But where fancy should be free to frolic, let us set up no 
 models for imitation. I only pray for the abandonment of 
 the delusion that there is proper entertainment for the 
 public in a form of writing absolutely and incurably inane, 
 and of which we might almost say that for facility in its pro- 
 duction the possession of intelligence of any sort is the 
 most serious disqualification. 
 
 July 4. — The first new part in which Madame Ristori has 
 
Risiori: '■'■Deborah!' 249 
 
 appeared at Her Majesty's Theatre during her present 
 visit to London has been that of Deborah in an Italian 
 translation of a mildly benevolent and not unpoetical 
 German play, called Deborah, by S. B. Mosenthal. Herr 
 Mosenthal, whose Deborah, a Volks-Schauspiel in prose and 
 verse, was first produced about a dozen years ago, is also 
 the author of a version into modern German verse of the 
 works of old Austrian poets, and more recently of a clever 
 fanciful play. Das gefangene Bild. He belongs fairly to the 
 more refined class of modern German littirateurs. Doubt- 
 less his Deborah play was meant to be a lesson of toleration 
 between Christian and Jew, for there is much said on 
 behalf of toleration in the abstract. And yet the young 
 Albert, son of the village Mayor, having given his heart to 
 the poor trusting Jewish Deborah (instead of the Christian 
 Anna, the Pastor's niece, whom it is considered that he 
 ought to marry), is smuggled away from the Jewess, married 
 to the Christian, and becomes so wonderfully good, that 
 the heart of the woman he has wronged, which in the third 
 act poured the bitterness of its curses upon him, claiming 
 eye for eye and tooth for tooth, is at the close of the play 
 melted to exquisite tenderness ; and I don't think that the 
 author, with all his tolerance, could have brought himself 
 within five thousand miles of the assumption that Albert 
 ought to have married the Jewess, for whom his God was 
 her God and his ways her ways. 
 
 But his play is good. The great wrong to the Jewess 
 arises out of, and has everywhere for its background, the 
 tattle of the village. Every act but the last begins with a 
 little tumult of small-talk, in which the affairs of the Mayor 
 and his son, and the Pastor and his niece, and the opinions 
 of the schoolmaster, the mercer, the baker, the hostess, or 
 the representative of the superstitious old woman. Old 
 Martha, are put forth and discussed. The highest poetry 
 of life is thus, for the author's purpose, cleverly and effec- 
 tively set, as the world sets it, in its petty prose. 
 
250 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 In the wood outside a Styrian village are some poor Jews 
 who have been hunted out of Hungary. They are an old 
 blind man, a helpless woman with a new-born child, and 
 the high-hearted Deborah, daughter of a Habbi, who is out- 
 cast with them, and who faithfully but somewhat sternly 
 guides and succours them. Deborah has her mind stored 
 with the poetical traditions of her fathers, but she is a young 
 enthusiast who has her first and last love to bestow, and 
 she has given it all to the young Christian from the village, 
 Albert the Mayor's son, who secretly pours out his own love 
 at her feet. The sensitive girl's nature — that had been 
 exalted by the teaching of her father, the Rabbi, and the 
 sorrows of her people, into a vivid realisation of the wail 
 of the Jews at Babylon, and of their curse on the oppressor; 
 that had been hardened by the sense of wrong ; that had 
 yearned for the restoration of Sion — is all turned to woman's 
 love by the strong bidding of pature. Thus only we see 
 her in the first act. 
 
 The good Anna has found the Jews in the wood, desires 
 to bring Deborah's helpless charges into the village, and ex- 
 cites the ignorant outcry of the villagers. Into the midst 
 of their chatter Deborah comes, looking for Albert. The 
 villagers, did not Anna and her uncle the Pastor intercede, 
 would haul her off to the ducking-pond. She stands at bay; 
 and the author evidently intends a showy situation for the 
 actress here. 5ut Madame Ristori notes that in her next 
 scene with Albert, when he refers to her danger in the village, 
 she replies that she heard nothing, she thought only of him ; 
 and in this spirit alone, resisting every strong temptation to 
 produce a false effect, she acts at her first entry. Even the 
 apparent sanction of the author's stage-directions does not 
 betray her to a false emphasis that would secure worthless 
 applause. Not yet knowing her tale, one rather wonders, 
 as if it were fault in her, why, baited thus, Deborah is so 
 quiet. She seeks some one, when hunted is a little haughty 
 and distraught, but not excited, showing no signs of deep 
 
Ristori: "Deborah." 251 
 
 trouble. True actress as she is, Madame Ristori has read, 
 here as aiweays, only for the true and deep sense of her part, 
 and she relies wholly for stage-effect upon the most exact 
 expression of its poetry. But Deborah meets Albert as, pro- 
 tected by the Pastor, she is returning to the forest, and, in 
 exchange of a few rapid words, appoints a meeting with him 
 at the cross in the wood. Albert is left, guilty of mysterious 
 absences, to be the grief of his father and the perplexity of 
 Anna ; then for the rest of the act we have Deborah and 
 Albert in the wood. The poor Jews over whom Deborah 
 watches are asleep ; she awaits in the moonlight Albert, as 
 her Messiah, blending the girl's dream of love with solernn 
 memories of the mystical prayers learnt from the old Rabbi. 
 Albert comes, and she pours out on him her love and trust. 
 For him she has put to sleep the old wail of despair awaiting 
 vengeance, Cursed be thou, Babylon, and blessed he who 
 shall repay to thee the evil thou hast done ! As a weird 
 dream of the -past this memory surges up in her talk with 
 him, as the moan of the sea under moonlight, that when the 
 clouds gather will rise into the fury of the tempest. Albert, 
 whom we find detestably weak, whatever Herr Mosenthal 
 meant us to think of him, has crude dreams 'of the perfec- 
 tibility of man in an American millennium. Deborah shall 
 be his wife and fliy with hirn from all the petty discords of 
 small minds. He will be a priest of the rights of men. And 
 Deborah will do all as he shall order it, whither he goes she 
 will go, for he has taught her to know that his God is a God 
 of love. The old blind man, the helpless woman, the little 
 one — who will sustain them if she who is their eyes, their 
 feet, forsake them ? But Albert urges, and she yields — 
 " Dannabile non son colpe a te grate" — and upon the solemn 
 tenderness of the poor Jewess's love the act closes, as she 
 blesses her departing lover. 
 
 With the opening of the second act we are again plunged 
 into the tattle of the village. Albert has spoken out at last, 
 and his father has had an apoplectic iit in consequence. 
 
252 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 And then Albert is to be tenderly managed and reasoned 
 with after the manner of old people who wish to manage the 
 young, and is to be discussed after the manner of inquisitive 
 neighbours. Of course the young Jewess is a designing 
 person — neighbours do say that she fascinates by enchant- 
 ment — her sole object of course is to get money. Let her 
 have money and go. The schoolmaster has a secret of his 
 own, that he is a Jew turned Christian, and dreads any con- 
 tact of villagers with other Jews who might make it known 
 that he also had been one of the hated race. He gladly 
 undertakes the errand to the forest, with a village guard or 
 two, to turn the nest of Jews out by main force if they will 
 not be bribed. He finds, not Deborah but the old man, who, 
 though blind, knows his voice, and betrays him to the 
 gossips of the guard (he will be turned out of his school for 
 this), and then he meets the woman who is not Deborah, 
 but who eagerly takes the money and at once promises that 
 they shall all depart. Upon which the schoolmaster de- 
 spatches instantly a message to Albert and his father saying 
 that the money has been taken. 
 
 Meanwhile Deborah has been seen solemnly commend- 
 ing to the God of Israel the care over the helpless ones 
 that she lays down with anxious heart, and her last words 
 to herself had been the cry, " Forza, mio cuor . . Alberto ! 
 Abbimi iutta /" But he does not come to her. The night 
 is stormy. She is drawn to the door of her beloved. In 
 the thunder she hears now Jehovah upon Sinai, and now 
 a voice that may cry to Albert of the sorrow of her heart 
 and bid him come to comfort her with kisses. She knocks 
 fainting at the gate, and Albert's father opens to her. He 
 tells her that she had fascinated his son only for gold, had 
 taken gold, and now — she yet returns. Deborah under- 
 stands nothing; she is faint, bewildered; she follows him 
 only with a cry for Albert as he leaves her, and on her 
 knees before the old man yearns only for the sight of 
 Albert. The kindly Anna comes to her, still with the same 
 
Ristori: "Peborah." 253 
 
 tale of her barter of her love for gold. There is no wild 
 outbreak of passion here in Madame Ristori's Deborah; 
 she is benumbed, confounded, questions herself vaguely, 
 " oro . . . . qual orof and when these are shutting the 
 gate upon her, her thought is, that, for forsaking in the 
 darkness of the night the helpless who put trust in her, 
 she also is now in the darkness helpless and alone. But 
 Albert, the desire of her soul, is next to enter : with sudden 
 happiness she lightens up at his coming step, and at his 
 presence. He also disdains and formally discards her; 
 insults her by throwing money at her feet. They leave her 
 so, and with a piteous cry Deborah sinks at the threshold 
 of the closed door. 
 
 The next act opens with the tattle and bustle over the 
 marriage of Albert and Anna. Old Martha has an appetite 
 for placing over the joined hands of each new married 
 couple, as they go to church, her gift of a rosary with a cross 
 fastened to it, a rosary that has been prayed over and made 
 into a charm to preserve union and happiness in wedlock, 
 and guard the souls of the children and the children's 
 children. Albert and Anna receive such a rosary as the 
 wedding procession forms upon its way to church. 
 Ignorant of all that is passing, in the old churchyard 
 behind the church Deborah has kept vigil for seven days 
 and seven nights — for so long do her people mourn their 
 dead — over her dead love. We see her there in sad 
 lament, the spirit of vengeance stirs, but it is calmed 
 by the solemn strains of the organ as the marriage-service 
 is proceeding in the church. She hears voices as of a 
 marriage-ceremony ; and, passionately sensitive to the bless- 
 ings of a happy consecrated love, she kneels to add her 
 benediction. The dramatic situation is good, and nothing 
 could be more exquisite in its pathetic tenderness than 
 Madame Ristori's expression of the utterance of the bruised 
 heart — 
 
254 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 " anch 'io m' unisco, anch 'io 
 A benedirvi o sposi ! . . . oh 1 Amen, Amen !" 
 
 She rises from her knees, curious to see those whom she. 
 has blessed, and recoils with a wild horror when she recog- 
 nises Albert. Her blessing withers in her heart, she revokes 
 it; and when Albert presently comes alone into the church- 
 yard — for he had thought he heard the cry of Deborah — 
 Deborah herself is there in solemn majesty of Jewish wrath. 
 There is a tumult in her first of love and scorn. When 
 Albert seeks to explain, and tells his version of the story, of 
 her having taken money to go from him, the bitterest pang 
 strikes to the heart of Deborah, and marvellous is the 
 actress's delivery of the words, Credermi capace! which indi- 
 cates the uprooting of that idolatry which had possessed her 
 soul. If this was his religion, she returned penitent to the 
 God of her fathers. Love is transitory, vengeance is eternal; 
 and with fixed gaze, in low rapt voice, as though she were a 
 prophetess, she pours rapidly into his ears a curse upon the 
 earth he tills, the wife he loves, the children she may bear. 
 'Ihe curse seems to cleave to him as he cowers under it. 
 Again she hears the wail of Babylon, but now it is wild and 
 pitiless. May his child bear the mark of Cain, and languish 
 in its mother's arms like the babe of the Jewish woman she 
 forsook for him; may his father like the poor old Abraham 
 thenceforth wander in darkness. And all is sealed with a 
 solemn intensity: Maledetto, tre volte maledetto; E come all' 
 Ebal Israel gridava Tre volte io grido ; Amen! Amen! Amen/ 
 The whole grandeur and terror of the malediction is ex- 
 pressed by the actress. Even his charmed rosary Deborah 
 snatches from the new-made husband, winds it about her 
 clenched hand, and as she leaves him points to the cross on 
 it with bitter and defiant scorn. 
 
 In the next act we see, after lapse of half-a-dozen years, 
 Deborah sternly waiting the fulfilment of her curse. She is 
 among her people, who are departing from the land that 
 casts them out. She will not go till she has looked on 
 
Rtstori: "Deborah!' 255 
 
 Albert's ruin. The scene changes to Albert's hous2, happy 
 and rich in wife and child, and smiling harvests, and the 
 blessing of all rnen. Deborah enters upon this, and is met, 
 as one poor and weary, by Anna's Christian tenderness. 
 Albert is away, has been away some days on a good errand ; 
 but the miserable woman snatches at the hope that he may 
 have forsaken wife and child, and presses eagerly vindictive 
 fancies, until Anna shrinks from her, and bids her go, yet 
 calls her back. The Angelus sounds, and Anna prays for 
 Albert. Deborah will not hear that prayer, and withdraws. 
 Albert returns, and from his talk with his wife Deborah 
 learns that she is spoken of with love and tenderness 
 between them. When they retire into the house, her heart is 
 softened. Their child comes out, sees her and speaks to her; 
 she fastens with a trace of her old passionate delight upon 
 the features of its father bornagain in the child; discovers 
 that Albert's child has been taught to remember Deborah in 
 daily prayers, and kneels weeping; learns that the child's 
 name is Deborah, and kisses its face, the hem of its dress; 
 hangs the rosary upon its neck, and lays upon its head the 
 tenderest blessing. 
 
 "Te benedica Iddio . . . 
 
 E gli Altri tutti." 
 
 Here the curtain should fall, for the pathos of the situation,' 
 perfectly rendered, cannot be surpassed, but the author has 
 continued the scene into a weak final tableau. 
 
 July II. — The difference between the representations of M. 
 Gounod's Faust at Her Majesty's Theatre and at Covent 
 Garden is so great and so distinctly marked that I believe 
 it to have been designed by the author (who assisted at the 
 production in each case), with no small advantage to his own 
 work, and no prejudice at all to either house. There are 
 two ways of reading Goethe's Faust: it may be read literally 
 as the story of a village girl whose plain substantial love is 
 stolen from her by unholy arts, who is betrayed and for- 
 
2S6 Joiirnal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 saken, yet in her hour of uttermost distress finds pity in 
 heaven ; or it may be read mystically as a soul's tragedy of 
 the devil's war against the innocent. At Her Majesty's 
 Theatre we have the real, at Covent Garden the ideal side 
 of the conception. But the ideal to a great extent includes 
 the real, and is clearly the point of view from which espe- 
 cially the music was composed. Goethe's own sketches of 
 Margaret present distinctly in ideal outline the image of a 
 real and artless village girl. That is the Margaret of Mdlle. 
 Titiens, who plunges substantially into an abyss of love, and 
 with the help of Signor Giuglini brings out in the garden 
 scene the whole material and sensuous charm of the music. 
 
 Madame Miolan-Carvalho, who has been taught by M. 
 Gounod himself how he intends her part of Margaret to be 
 played, and for whom its music was written, represents not 
 so much the girl as the girl's soul. Even in the dressing of 
 the part this is remembered. Until her fall she walks in virgin 
 white, the idealisation of the character marked strongly by 
 contrast of her dress with the gay peasant costumes of the 
 other girls. Betrayed and forsaken, the white has been 
 changed for grey. After the death of her brother, his last 
 words laying his death at her door, she enters the cathedral 
 with dress black as ink ; no white, but in great sleeves like 
 wings about the arms she lifts in prayer. In prison she 
 wears grey again, with a white lining ; and she ascends at 
 last in pure white to the skies. 
 
 In her acting, Madame Miolan-Carvalho represents first 
 the still pure maiden spirit, on the way to church when Faust 
 first meets her. Afterwards, re-entering her garden, prayer- 
 book in hand, and through a strain of sacred melody won- 
 dering who was the stranger that accosted her, she does not 
 fling away Siebel's flowers, but drops them unconsciously as 
 she submits with an innocent grace to the fascination of the 
 devil's jewels. When Faust and Mephistopheles arrive, at 
 the first near approach of Mephistopheles to Margaret there 
 is a sudden jar in the music, Margaret is fluttered and half 
 
Gounod's "Faust" : Two Versions. 257 
 
 faints, and there is an exclamation of defiant hatred from the 
 disguised fiend ; but that first shock of the contending prin- 
 ciples underlies natural dialogue that accounts otherwise for 
 the fiend's cry and for Margaret's faintness. In the Hay- 
 market reading of the piece, the thought here intended is 
 conveyed ; but it seems rather a small detached effect than, 
 as at CovENT Garden, necessary to the harmony of the 
 entire performance. In the more spiritual version, Margaret 
 under fascination does not seek Faust, hardly dares to 
 look at him, delivers her love up wonderingly ; and so 
 throughout until the closing plaint of Margaret at her 
 window, which she begins sitting, and during which she 
 rises pressed with the magical longing to her full height in 
 the window, Madame Miolan-Carvalho maintains to the last 
 the sense that it is Mephistopheles, not Faust, who has 
 achieved the cruel victory. 
 
 In Mephistopheles as represented by M. Faure, instead 
 of M. Gassier's hunted Figaro, we have a malignant fiend 
 stricken with deadly terror, quaking, shrinking, gnashing 
 his teeth, when Mephistopheles is banned with the crosses 
 on the sword-hilts of the students. His mocking serenade 
 at the door of forsaken Margaret is no longer the almost 
 incomprehensible excrescence it appeared, as given by M. 
 Gassier, in connection with the other reading of the opera. 
 Here we have seen in the drama, and felt in the music, a 
 conflict between a pure soul and a mocking fiend ; and the 
 serenade, as given by M. Faure, has mockery for its natural 
 tone, but is the devil's cruel song of Iriumph in its motive. 
 
 A transposition of scenes in this act, as performed at the 
 Haymarket Opera, seems to confirm the impression that 
 M. Gounod meant to show separately at the London houses 
 the two sides, spiritual and human, of his work. In the 
 Haymarket version, the fiend's interference with the 
 prayers of Margaret takes place with diminished emphasis 
 outside the cathedral, and is followed by the killing of 
 Valentine and his curse on his sister, which forms the 
 
 2 R 
 
258 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 climax of the act. This is transposed from the original 
 arrangement, and the effect of the change is to bring out 
 with more emphasis the material incidents of the story, and 
 to throw its allegorical sense more into the background. 
 At CovENT Garden the original order is restored. The 
 curse has fallen upon Margaret before the struggle in the 
 church of the despairing soul with the demon who lurks to 
 betray it, and that conflict forms in a great cathedral scene 
 the chmax of the act. Mephistopheles speaks to his victim 
 from within a side-chapel, where, by a skilful arrangement 
 of the lights and shadows, he stands like a spectre. Again — ■ 
 to hurry at once to the end — the redemption of Margaret's 
 soul is not represented slightly by a transparency, but 
 dwelt upon in a substantial group that fitly crowns an opera 
 remarkable even at this house for the luxurious complete- 
 ness of its stage-appointments, and so brings the allegory to 
 its right, emphatic end. But Faust is held to his bargain. 
 At the Haymarket, where he is chiefly shown as one of a 
 pair of human lovers, he is, I believe, with M. Gounod's 
 consent, saved. 
 
 And let me not forget to mention how finely in the 
 rendering of Madame, Miolan-Carvalho the soul of Margaret, 
 :strong in prayer and victorious over the tempter, at last 
 strides forward and stands fearless breast to breast with its 
 great enemy. 
 
 August 15. — Mr. Tom Taylor's play, written by two 
 Frenchmen, the Leonard of MM. Edouard Brisbarre and 
 Eugfene Nus, Englished as The Ticket-of-Leave Man, has a 
 great run of success. When this drama was first produced 
 here Mr. Tom Taylor received from most people entire 
 credit for the play, while some profound observations were 
 made here and there as to his logic in illustrating the ticket- 
 of-leave question by a man who was not really a criminal. 
 ^Ve know what would be said of a writer in any other 
 department of literature, except only the stage, who, having 
 translated into English, with a few small changes and touches 
 
Customary Falsehood. 259 
 
 •and a transformation of title, the book of any foreign author, 
 should present it to the public as his own. The players 
 themselves, who are often good adapters from the French, 
 have lately taken to the honest way of naming their French 
 author in the play-bills. An Olympic actor, Mr. Horace 
 AVigan, has thus acknowledged all his obligations for some 
 time past. Of the source of The Duke's Motto we had two- 
 thirds of an acknowledgment in the announcement that it 
 was by " Paul F^val and John Brougham". For " and" 
 read " through", "and the acknowledgment is perfect. 
 
 If the actors disdain this mystification, surely the authors 
 should be far above it. The plea of custom is, no doubt, 
 admissible in bar of any question of literary dishonesty. 
 The suppressio veri in this matter has not for some years 
 past been considered dishonest, and it would, indeed, esta- 
 blish only a conventional fiction were the rule of transla- 
 tion and adaptation universal. But there are, perhaps, 
 some writers who would try to be original if they could get 
 credit for their originality ; and there are some who do try 
 and do not get credit ; because against every new piece 
 claimed as original the too common practice of dramatic 
 writers tends to raise the suspicion that it hoists false 
 colours. Some critics read, see, and try to reriiember, a 
 mass of French pieces that are not worth reading or seeing, 
 to say nothing of remembering, in order that they may 
 maintain credit as detectives ; and the sources of this sort 
 of mystification are so wide and obscure that, one might 
 almost say, every English dramatic writer is supposed in 
 this matter to be a licensed cheat, and nobody ever can be 
 proved honest. Nobody is now before the pubhc who is 
 more able than Mr. Tom Taylor to give us a play 
 " From his own hand, without a coadjutor, 
 Novice, journeyman, or tutor," 
 
 or to adapt with utmost neatness to the manner of its 
 English players, and the humour of its Engli-sh public, a 
 French drama worth his transplantation. For that reason 
 
 R 2 
 
26o Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 it is especially upon occasion of some clever work of his 
 that one prefers to direct attention to a mischievous custom 
 that must not be overlooked in any fair consideration of the 
 present condition of the London stage. 
 
 And one could wish, also, that the very few managers 
 who still beheve in it would abandon their faith in that 
 form of puffing which consists in stating what is not the 
 fact. Where is now the Theatre Royal, Westminster, 
 that was to show a trustful company how thirty thousand, 
 million, billion, or whatever other sum it was a year, formed 
 the natural profits of a right system of theatrical manage- 
 ment ? 
 
 We have then, at present, for the support of the London 
 stage behind the curtain, a well-organised, respectable pro- 
 fession, a large body of hard-working and well-meaning 
 actors and actresses, among whom are many capable of 
 aiding strongly in the elevation of the public taste. Let the 
 public give the full weight of its support and respect to 
 plain-speaking. Let it estimate mere puffery at its right 
 value. Let it expect to be told in the play-bills, when a 
 new piece is adapted from the French, who was the original 
 author, and what work of his is presented to them. Let 
 every branch and offshoot of the delusive system be thrown 
 to the quacks, with whom players, like all other professional 
 men, are infested, and throughout the middle and upper 
 ranks of the players' calling let us have, as between players 
 and public, an abandonment of every sort of customary 
 falsehood. 
 
 The only difficulty I see, says the player, to stand in the 
 way of a full accomplishment of this Hes with the public. 
 And he fancies that he finds reason every week to endorse 
 Colley Gibber's opinion that " it is not to the actor, but to 
 the vitiated and low taste of the spectator, that the corrup- 
 tions of the stage (of what kind soever) have been owing. 
 If the public by whom they must five had spirit enough to 
 discountenance and declare against all the trash and fop- 
 
"Manfred," 261 
 
 peries they have been so frequently fond of, both the actors 
 and the authors, to the best of their power, must naturally 
 have served their daily table with sound and wholesome 
 diet." 
 
 October 17. — There are a few hopeful features in the 
 recent bills of the play. Unmistakable the other evening 
 was the enthtisiastic testimony of a crammed house to the 
 satisfaction of the public at seeing Mr. Phelps in his right 
 place upon the boards of Drury Lane. Manfred has the 
 best of successes, it brings what it should be the aim of 
 every manager to bring, the educated classes back into the 
 theatre. Mr. Falconer has now, I believe, his fortune in 
 his hands. Mr. Phelps is an actor who does not fail in 
 high endeavour to give poetry its voice upon the stage. 
 Some individualities of manner are felt as defects. Art 
 absolutely perfect in any man does not appear once in three 
 centuries. But the playgoer has much to learn, let him be 
 sure of it, who does not feel the distinctive power of a true 
 actor in Mr. Phelps's delivery of Byron's poem. Costly 
 and beautiful as the spectacle of Manfred is, it really blends 
 with and illustrates Byron's verse. The best of the im- 
 mortals is Miss Rose Leclercq, whose Astarte is all that it 
 ought to be. She has only to look like the mysterious 
 spirit of Manfred's lost sister and love, to speak Manfred's 
 name, say Farewell, with one or two variations of expression, 
 and to utter about four words besides. But small as the 
 part is, it is difficult, because it is one easy to make ridiculous. 
 Miss Rose Leclercq knows how to make it touching. The 
 piece deserves a long run, and its influence as an antidote 
 to some faults in the taste of the day will be all the stronger 
 for its want of effective dramatic action of the ordinary sort. 
 When the town has learnt to sit and hear poetry almost for 
 its own sake, and because it is well interpreted, it will have 
 made a safe step towards the right sense of what it ought to 
 look for in a play. There is plenty of vigorous dramatic 
 action in a wholesome English playbook ; but just now it is 
 
262 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 very desirable to lay the emphasis on words and thoughts. 
 We get plays of action (from the French) worded only with 
 feeble commonplace. The action and the actors are the 
 play ; printed it usually is unreadable. I do not know 
 whether there was any deliberate design to lay stress on the 
 right point in reviving a dramatic poem that consists little 
 of action, and almost wholly of a poet's thought and fancy. 
 
 At the New Adelphi Miss Bateman's Leah is an 
 American version of the German Deborah, in which 
 Madame Ristori acted one night in London, not very 
 long ago. Of Miss Bateman, let me say, first, that she 
 can hardly be said to act the part at all, but only recites 
 it, until she comes to the fourth act, in which she displays 
 some dramatic energy. But in the fifth act she gives the 
 greatest hope of what she may hereafter do. She is still 
 young, is unassuming, although it was her misfortune to be 
 on the boards as an infant phenomenon when one of two 
 "Bateman children" some ten years ago, she has no set 
 faults, and in the fifth act of Leah she plays with a genuine 
 tenderness. Her Leah is not of course to be named with 
 Madame Ristori's Deborah, but the difference is not alto- 
 gether of her own making. The charm of the pastoral play 
 has been all trampled out by the hoof of the American 
 adapter. Deborah is to Leah as the cottage flower-garden, 
 neat and trim overnight, is to the same garden in the morn- 
 ing after a jackass has run loose in it. Leah is but a ghost 
 of Deborah, all the poetical elevation is trodden out of the 
 language of the rabbi's daughter, all the pastoral simphcity 
 has been rooted up out of the plot. Instead of a Jewish 
 maiden's spirit rising grandly in its brooding over the tradi- 
 tions of its race, beautiful in its abandonment to love of the 
 Christian who is made to spurn her — terrible in its kindling 
 of the Jewish spirit of revenge, and beautiful in its submis- 
 sion to rebuke, all set among the Geschwdtz — we have no 
 word of our own so expressive of the twitter and tattle — of 
 the village; we have Deborah degraded into commonplace; 
 
'■^LeaJi' : Miss Batemaii. 263 
 
 the villagers perverted into the stagiest of claptrap cha- 
 racters. The schoolmaster is transfornaed into a heavy 
 melodramatic villain, the doctor into the conventional low 
 comedian. A murder and a thunderbolt are added to the 
 story, and, after all is over, the heroine is fetched back to 
 draw daggers with the villain, talk melodrama, and die in 
 state among all the dramatis personce. With all the play's 
 proportions overturned, every flower of the original writer's 
 fancy stamped into mud, very much credit is due to Miss 
 Bateman for succeeding even in a single ^ct. All that I had 
 enjoyed was gone : Ristori's low undertone of the complaint 
 of the Jews captive in Babylon; the exquisite tenderness of 
 her farewell kiss on the brow of her lover; the simple ex- 
 pression of her great love and its great wrong, when one 
 after another they of her lover's household, and at last he 
 himself, spurn her, and go in and shut the door upon her, 
 and with one sharp cry she falls with her face against the 
 closed door; all crushed under the adapter's hoof, or over- 
 looked by the actress. That last situation, for example, so 
 simple and pathetic in the original, is improved by the 
 American adapter into a long-drawn-out melodramatic scold- 
 ing scene. Miss Bateman having grown to the part in this 
 version, a better one could not well be substituted ; but by 
 anyone who knows what the play was before "adaptation", 
 this version of Leah may be studied as an ingenious collec- 
 tion of the vulgar claptraps that our labour now should be 
 to banish from the stage. Yet, in spite of all. Miss Bateman, 
 who goes through the first three acts as if she were slowly 
 dictating her part to a spelHng school, earns credit in the 
 fourth, and in the fifth looks like an actress of true mark. 
 
 November 7. — It has been proved conclusively that scenery 
 alone will not draw full houses to Drury Lane, yet Manfred 
 crams the pit and fills the theatre. There has seldom been 
 a piece mounted with more lavish and picturesque scenic 
 effect, or with a stronger host of supernumeraries, than Mr. 
 Falconer's Bonnie Dundee. Nevertheless, Bonnie Dundee 
 
264 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1863. 
 
 could be played only for a few nights to almost empty 
 houses. It is quite true that beautiful and apt scenery, 
 harmonising with the descriptions and the few incidents of 
 the poem, is necessary to the successful stage-appointment 
 of Lord Byron's Manfred. It is not less true that a play 
 with so little dramatic action, even with all help of the 
 scenery, and Mr. Phelps in the chief character, would not 
 draw for a week, if there were not a high intellectual power 
 in the thoughts and language. Therefore, after all credit 
 has been given to the attractive art of the scene-painter, the 
 complete and unquestionable success of a play rather of 
 poetical thought and language than of action, in a theatre 
 that it takes a very large audience to fill, may be received 
 as evidence that I have not been arguing against the grain 
 of the public, but expressing its right mind, in protest 
 against plays of French incident and intrigue, that have no 
 words in them worth a good actor's speaking, and no 
 characters worth subtle study for their full artistic develop- 
 ment. 
 
 But, we are told, the race of good actors is all but 
 extinct : there are not half-a-dozen actors equal to those 
 parts in which the language rises above commonplace, or 
 where there is demand for anything not to be found in the 
 usual assortment of conventional emotions. I don't believe 
 it. Good plays and good parts, not in the conventional, 
 but in the best and truest sense, would make many good 
 actors. They would have to warm into the unaccustomed 
 work of really expressing freshly observed niceties and 
 varieties and harmonies of character, and they would not 
 know immediately how to speak a language of which every 
 word has to go forth with its soul in its sound. 
 
 I do not object to a play because it is romantic, and 
 abounds in stirring incidents, of which a good deal is im- 
 probable and some impossible. It is the romance of the 
 story, with good scenery to back it, that makes the success 
 of a play like The Duke's Motto of last season, or the 
 
" Bonnie Dtmdee" — "Bel Demonio." 26$ 
 
 inferior Bel Demonio produced last Saturday at the Lyceum. 
 But why give us plays without words ? There are not two 
 sentences worth hearing in Bel Demonio , there is not 
 a flash of wit, not a thought, that does not belong, like the 
 incidents, to the most threadbare stock of intellectual 
 properties for the romajntic drama. The piece itself re- 
 produces, with variations, that which had been already 
 worked up, adapted and draughted into a play for London, 
 called Sextus V, by Mr. Boucicault and Mr. Bridgman. 
 There is an escape of a hunted couple in monk's garments 
 through the ranks of their pursuers, who bonnet to them 
 respectfully, as we have seen done, only it was to more than 
 a couple, in The Crown Diamonds. Mr. Fechter tumbles 
 wounded down a rock into a torrent, because, since the 
 successful header in The Colleen Bawn, melodrama has 
 bidden for favour by the introduction of gymnastics. Indeed, 
 in Bel Demonio, as Mr. Brougham takes a header after Mr. 
 Fechter, there is double fare for the gods of this particular 
 sort of dainty. The defect of a play like Bel Demonio is 
 not that it contains this kind of stuff, but that it consists of 
 it wholly. It is all sauce and no fish ; all action, bounce, 
 conventional stage-chivalry, agony of the boards, pop, enter- 
 at-the-nick-of-time, tableau, and flummery, without a morsel 
 of substantial thought or satisfying literature under it. 
 
 \%(m^, January 16. — With hearty satisfaction I record in the 
 firstplacethetriumphantreceptionatthePRiNCESs'sTHEATRE 
 of a poetical English version, by Mr. Westland Marston, 
 of the German version of Moreto's masterpiece, which has 
 long been reckoned one of the four classical pieces of the 
 elder Spanish drama. El Desden con el Desden. This was 
 the play which Louis Quatorze, when he wished to delight 
 a Spanish wife and mother, caused to be produced at his 
 Court with the utmost magnificence of appointment, and 
 with Molifere for its translator. But Moliere's version of 
 the play, under the name of Princesse d'' Elide, was as com- 
 plete a failure as his imitation of Spanish heroic comedy in 
 
266 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 Don Garde de Navarre; except that Bon Garde, produced 
 for the public, was immediately damned, while the Princess 
 d' Elide, produced for a Court fete, was received with polite 
 admiration, and supposed at Court to be a great success. 
 The piece is usually omitted, and very properly, from 
 editions of the works of Molifere, for it was written in such 
 haste, to obey the King's wish and punctually to grace his 
 grand festival, that Moliere had only time to put the first 
 act and the first scene of the second act of his version into 
 metre, and hurried the rest into prose ; wherefore the chan- 
 sonnier Marigny said this Comedy had been summoned in 
 such haste to Court that she had only time to put on one 
 of her buskins, and appeared half-naked, with one shoe off, 
 the other on. More successful was the Italian version of this 
 famous drama, by the truest and wittiest poet among Italian 
 writers of comedy, Count Carlo Gozzi, familiar to Germany 
 through at least one work in Schiller's version of his 
 Turandot. Gozzi Italianised Moreto's masterpiece under 
 the title of The Philosophic Princess, or the Antidote — Prin- 
 cipessa Filosofa, il Contraveleno. Germany, too, has its 
 popular version of El Desden con el Desden in the Donna 
 Diana of Joseph Schreyvogel, a journalist of refined taste 
 but little genius, who translated two of Calderon's plays as 
 well as the play of Moreto. He was Kotzebue's successor 
 as secretary of the Viennese Court Theatre, and commonly 
 wrote under the name of West. It is evidence of its 
 popularity at home that his Donna Diatia has been one of 
 the plays chosen for acting in London by a German com- 
 pany, and that Mr. Westland Marston, except a serious 
 departure from his text in the last scene, has thought it 
 worth a close translation. Direct from Moreto, Mr. Marston 
 evidently has not taken a line, but he translates him through 
 a conscientious German, and I only wish he had confined 
 himself at the end of the play, as elsewhere, to the few 
 changes that satisfied the man he followed. Of that 
 presently. Meanwhile there is, on the whole, reason to be 
 
Westland Marston. 267 
 
 exceedingly well satisfied. Mr. Marston could find, per- 
 haps, good critics to argue in support of the modification 
 of the denouement, sacrificing poetry to stage-effect, which 
 is the one change he has made. He is a man credited 
 deservedly with good dramatic taste. Enough, and more 
 than enough, we have had of the contemporary rubbish of 
 the minor theatres of Paris. It is greatly to the credit of 
 Mr. Vining that he has taken from one of the few English 
 writers of our day of whom we know that they can raise 
 the dramatic taste of the public if we will let them, a 
 metrical English version of the Spanish masterpiece, which, 
 though but a translation of a translation, "is indeed, in 
 itself, a careful and most creditable piece of English 
 dramatic literature. 
 
 Don Agustin Moreto of Cabana, son of Agustin Moreto 
 and Violante Cavana, by seventeen years a younger man 
 than Calderon, was born at Madrid in the year 16 18, two 
 years after the death of Shakespeare. Lope de Vega was 
 born two years before the birth of- Shakespeare, and in the 
 year of the death of Lope de Vega, at the age of seventy- 
 three, Calderon was a man aged thirty-four, and Moreto was 
 a youth aged seventeen, already displaying his turn for song 
 and drama. He had written at least two, probably more, 
 of his numerous comedies before the age of twenty-three, 
 and his career was smoothed for him by the affectionate 
 regard of Calderon, who appreciated heartily his genius, and 
 probably procured for him his introduction to the Palace. 
 When Moreto began writing, the Spanish drama, which had 
 just attained its topmost height of glory, was there wrestling 
 with the superstition by which it was to be toppled down 
 into the depths. Lope de Vega was but nine years dead 
 when the King's Council subjected the stage to a rigid 
 censorship, reduced the number of the actors, forbade the 
 production of original comedies that were not histories or 
 lives of saints, and condemned the works of Lope de Vega 
 as pernicious. Thus • it is that we have from Calderon and 
 
268 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 Moreto so many sacred plays. But there was a true earnest- 
 ness in those men, a spiritual expression of the religious 
 fervour that was hard intolerance in many, and this charac- 
 terised also their one fellow poet and dramatist, a man 
 younger than Calderon but older than Moreto, SoUs y Riba- 
 deneira, at one time Secretary to Philip IV. Solis died in 
 the unfulfilled resolve to take holy orders. Calderon died a 
 member of the Congregation of the Apostle Peter at Madrid, 
 to which he had given all that he possessed. Moreto, having 
 forsaken poetry and the world, became a priest, and died 
 Rector of a Refuge at Toledo, where it was his chief duty 
 to attend the afflicted poor. In his latter days Moreto 
 regretted the lighter works of his wit, blameless as they all . 
 \yere. His graceful touch more than once gave new Hfe to 
 a hasty work of Lope de Vega's that had passed into obscu- 
 rity, and even this play of El Desden con el Desden, which 
 has made his fame in his own country imperishable, is 
 founded on a poor play that preceded it called The Avenger 
 of Women, if not on Lope de Vega's forgotten Miracles of 
 Contempt. 
 
 The original play is, like Mr. Westland Marston's version 
 of the German version of it, in three acts, and, of course, in 
 the usual rime asonante. Schreyvogel's version agrees with 
 Gozzi's in altering the name of the hero from Don Carlos 
 to Don Caesar. This change Mr. Marston adopts. He 
 follows his German original also in omitting the character of 
 the Prince of Beam from among the suitors, in altering the 
 name of the gracioso Polilla, confidential secretary to the 
 proud Princess Diana, into Perin, and in adding the short 
 character of a.Fioretta, with whom Perin may have a little 
 comic business. 
 
 The gracioso was a popular addition made by Lope de 
 Vega to the stock characters of a Spanish play. He was 
 a comic character, sometimes half a buffoon, like the 
 " fantastical person'' of the contemporary English stage, 
 more frequently the lively representative of the shrewd 
 
"El Desden con el Desden" 269 
 
 popular mother wit, and the person of his drama through 
 whom the author might be with the first to laugh at any 
 extravagance of plan or fervour of romance about his story. 
 Not seldom, and especially in Moreto's comedies, he is at 
 the very core of the play ; and it is so in El Desden or 
 Donna Diana. Here it is he who suggests to the hero how 
 he may touch in his cold Diana the warm heart of a woman; 
 how he may melt the snow on her proud heights till it shall 
 come throbbing down upon the valley in an eager flood. 
 True as his love is, let him leave the other suitors to pro- 
 voke her scorn by their submission, but let him surprise 
 her on her own ground, holding himself as grapes above 
 her reach, though elsewhere all the vintage on earth may 
 seemed to have been tilled only for her. He does so. 
 When the warmth of his love rises to his lips there is the 
 gracioso, the gay confidant on either side, to warn him back 
 into a show of ice ; or, if the lady doubt her senses, there 
 is the sly gracioso, a true friend though a deceiver, at her 
 ear. He is her confidential private secretary, who affects 
 to be of one mind with herself, and can she doubt him ? 
 The part is well played by Mr. Vining with a true gracioso's 
 breadth of comedy. 
 
 Mr. Herman Vezin, a quietly good actor, who can rightly 
 speak blank verse and give true but unforced expression to 
 a poet's thought, well represents the life and love under 
 the mask of a suitor who coerces himself to surprise disdain 
 with a disdain yet greater, though as a true Spanish gentle- 
 man punctilious of courtesy. Mrs. Charles Young, now 
 Mrs. Herman Vezin, plays the Diana with much grace and 
 feeling, and marks with variety of expression the gradations 
 of her passage from a cold disdain to a piqued curiosity, a 
 wound of pride, a growth of wonder, admiration, and the 
 loosening of the whole woman's nature in the Princess. It 
 is a wonderful part for a great actress, capable of displaying 
 nearly the whole range of her power, and absolutely 
 demanding, in the second act, that she shall put forth all 
 
2/0 Journal of a L ondon Playgoer. [ 1 864. 
 
 her arts of fascination. Mrs. Herman Vezin is not a great 
 actress, but she is a charming one who has achieved her 
 best successes in the poetical drama, and the quaHty of her 
 Donna Diana has assured the success of this play on the 
 London boards. The famous scene in the second act, 
 where the cold suitor, invited to speak commonplace of 
 love to the Princess, whose colour it has, by her contrivance, 
 fallen to his lot to wear, pours his whole soul out earnestly 
 at her feet, is triumphantly ^corned, and, recovering his 
 guard, dexterously turns the tables on the lady and builds 
 new success on his humiliation, is remarkably well played. 
 
 But why could not Mr. Westland Marston have faith to 
 the end ? I believe that he fell into the old snare of doubt- 
 ing the power of an English audience to enjoy the simple 
 play of wit and poetry. In the original play, and in the 
 German version of it too, the disdainful Diana is in the last 
 scenes all a woman, with the passion of her love set free. 
 To provoke her indifferent suitor into a word of desire to 
 win her, she tells him she has relented from her proud 
 theory, and means to give herself to one of his rivals, but 
 she is caught in that poor little trap, and tied in a knot of 
 etiquette that seems to. bind her to make good the word so 
 lightly spoken. She is in the last scene as a caught bird 
 fluttering in the net, with none of the high concern about 
 yet saving her dignity that Mr. Westland Marston gives her. 
 She is all anxious dread when they seem to be binding her 
 to the man, and her disdainful suitor to the woman, she 
 and he have, in affected disdain of each other, professed to 
 choose for mates. Mr. Westland Marston makes her struggle 
 yet to brave it out ; makes Perin bid the Count fix his eye 
 on her while she repeats at the dictation of her father the 
 form of betrothal to the other man ; makes her catch his 
 eye, break down, cry out at the unsympathetic face of the 
 knight to whom she is plighting herself; and, in short, gives 
 the British public something like the dose of claptrap it is 
 commonly considered to require. The German adapter, 
 
"Donna Diana!' 271 
 
 from whose text in this instance Mr. Marston has departed, 
 with better taste follows Moreto, who in this last scene 
 showed only a woman in a tender tumult of distressful love, 
 until Don Carlos has been admonished by the gradoso that 
 he must 'now give her opportunity herself to loose the knot 
 by which she is restrained. To the expectation that he will 
 now plight his faith to his mock love he replies, therefore, 
 that, since he is the Princess's knight and wears her colours, 
 he is not yet free to plight his troth elsewhere. He waits till 
 she has formally released him from her service. Then the 
 Princess herself, plucking eagerly at the knot where she is 
 warned that she may loosen it, claims and obtains the word 
 of both knights that they will abide by her decision. Her 
 decision is, that she belongs to him who has conquered 
 Disdain with Disdain. And who is he ? asks Carlos. With 
 two little tender whispered words — Tn solo — the softened 
 woman timidly creeps forward and lays her heart of love 
 down at his feet. Mrs. Herman Vezin would have known 
 how to give grace to such a close, if Mr. Westland Marston 
 had not resolved that the taste of the British public demands 
 less delicate fare. And thus it seems that even our good 
 dramatic poets, like our players, can fall into the mischievous 
 error of adapting their work to an assumed standard of bad 
 taste. 
 
 Here I stop for to-day, but will spare three lines and a 
 half to say that Mr. Falconer's new play. Night and Morn, at 
 Drury Lane, is certainly the best he has yet written. 
 
 March 5. — The theatres have been deserving success 
 lately and obtaining it. The only mistake made during the 
 last month or two has been Mr. Sothern's appearance at the 
 Haymarket, in a " piece of extravagance" called Bunkum 
 Muller, which, although he is clever enough in it to maintain 
 his popularity, is a step backwards instead of forwards. A 
 caricature should at least be a caricature of something. 
 Bunkum Muller is a caricature of nothing. There is an 
 intention, of which Mr. Sothern makes the most, to provoke 
 
2/2 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 mirth by incessant tripping up of the false subUme with the 
 ridiculous. Bunkum MuUer seems to have been meant for 
 a gushing dramatist with a scolding wife and nothing better 
 than a penny pickwick to console him, except the bust of 
 Shakespeare which he takes into his confidence, and which 
 is the only other person who appears with him upon the 
 stage. But the incidents that represent the story of the piece 
 are not witty extravagance, they are flat nonsense ; and as 
 the author has not been content with his antithesis between 
 Bunkum's mind and the small things of life with which its 
 aspirations are surrounded and infested, but makes Bunkum 
 himself continually thrust asides of a conflicting sort into the 
 midst of his burlesque of fervour, there is no character or 
 caricature, but a piece of the most witless nonsense. The 
 construction of the piece is in this respect as sensible as a 
 child's notion of improving a bright red by painting over it 
 with a bright green, the only possible result being a neutral 
 smear. It is wonderful to see how much Mr. Sothern does 
 with a bad piece ; and his make-up as a shabby Shakespeare 
 is very funny. 
 
 I never liked Mr. Watts Phillips so much as in his Paul's 
 Return, now acting at the Princess's, where Shakespeare's 
 Comedy of Errors forms an afterpiece as merry as a shorter 
 farce. At the St. James's Mr. Leicester Buckingham's 
 Silver Lining has a well-deserved success ; the piece, too, is 
 acted thoroughly well. Mr. Falconer, again, I never liked 
 so well as in his Night and Morn, which has had a good 
 run at Drury Lane. 
 
 May 14. — There is a particular enjoyment in the sort of 
 criticism that the players call for, which should go far in 
 aid of many better reasons for the well-being of the stage 
 among a free people. In the real world any blockhead of a 
 HohenzoUern may get homage when he plays in the worst 
 manner his part of king, but in the playhouse let him who 
 shall play the king look to it. For, as said Epictetus, "it is 
 not to be considered among the actors who is prince or who 
 
The English Drama. 273 
 
 is beggar ; but who acts prince or beggar best." Bad as 
 may be any critical taste that thus touches the mimic world 
 as with a divine philosophy, it will be well for the spectators 
 of performances in the great world when they have caught, 
 rather more generally than they yet have caught it, some- 
 thing of this spirit of the theatre. For in -the playhouse 
 even the dullest lout is something of a philosopher who 
 looks beyond the clothes o^ those who tread the scene. 
 Despotic governments abroad are never on good terms with 
 a free theatre ; and out of England there has been a long 
 stand made for the old theory that the kings and queens 
 and the people in fine clothes were upon the stage also to 
 be the leading characters. It wg-S to be they only who 
 should do and suffer the great things and have the leading 
 actors engaged for their worthy personation. That was the 
 rule in and after Shakespeare's day, and kings and dukes 
 duly appear, as nominal chiefs, in Shakespeare's plays. 
 But alas for the theories of despotism in politics and 
 literature ! By Shakespeare's genius these golden lads 
 and lasses were all stirred down into the common mass of 
 humanity, and Bottom the Weaver makes a better morsel 
 in that broth than Theseus Duke of Athens ; the Jew 
 Shylock counts in English art for more than the Duke of 
 Venice ; or in the play now to be seen at Drury Lane, 
 Falstaff and Hotspur for more than King Henry IV. 
 The literature of the English stage is rich in the true 
 freedom of the English character, and the critical habit 
 of looking through the King's robes at the man who 
 plays the King, to reckon him perhaps below a dozen 
 of his comrades, helps to keep up that attitude of philoso- 
 phical republicanism which has .sharpened enjoyment of 
 Shakespeare in the artistic mind of Victor Hugo. 
 
 The English theatre is, in fact, not something apart from 
 English life, but is so intimately connected with it that the 
 mind of our country has to this day found no better form 
 for the expression of its highest vigour. It is not to passing 
 
2/4 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 fashion only, but to nature itself— man's nature — that our 
 stage has held the mirror up. Bold and clear have been 
 its best utterances of those deeper truths of life on which it is 
 in the English character to dwell, not with a shadowy parade 
 of word-philosophies, but as thought in action with a prac- 
 tical keen sense that they are real. An English audience 
 with a thoroughly good English play before it should be one 
 of the worthiest assemblies that the world can show. 
 
 Again and again, then, I say, let the players believe in 
 their public. They are not the fast men who have given 
 their success to pieces which .have lately had remarkably 
 long runs. There is a great playgoing public that includes 
 all, except, perhaps, a still reluctant section of the educated 
 classes, and, of course, the class, every year diminishing, of 
 persons who retain in a religious dread of theatrical perform- 
 ances the tradition of a time when there was honest reason 
 why the theatre should be in ill repute. London is now so 
 populous, and the throng of strangers daily passing through 
 it is so vast, while there is so much recovered goodwill to 
 the playhouse, that it may take a year to pass through a 
 theatre by the houseful all the people who will wish to see a 
 play said to be good. This is, in fact, rather more success 
 than actors should desire, for to the development of an 
 appreciation of good acting, as much as to the development 
 of good acting itself, it is necessary that each actor should 
 in his time play many parts. 
 
 If it is to become usual for single plays, when attractive, 
 to run for a year in unbroken succession of performances, it 
 will be very difficult for the young actor to acquire or to 
 display his utmost skill, and the public will also be ill trained 
 to that sort of appreciation upon which the maintenance of 
 the best interests of the stage must finally depend. Mr. 
 Phelps wisely varied his Manfred with two or three perform- 
 ances of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, and has now passed 
 with his art cleverly from that gloomy state of metaphysical 
 abstraction as a melancholy soul too ready to cast off its 
 
Phelps s Falstaff. 275 
 
 body, into the fat flesh of the gross and humorous knight 
 who may owe God a death, but would be loth to pay him 
 before his day. Such contrasts the good actor should take 
 care to set before his audience if he would make them decent 
 critics of his art; and it is only by having opportunity to 
 show the whole range of his powers that an actor can ever 
 hope to prove his right to a first rank among his brethren. 
 
 If Mr. Phelps played nothing else than Falstaff, it would 
 be remarkable. Considered as one part in a singularly 
 varied series it is unquestionably good. He lays stress not 
 on Falstaff's sensuality, but on the lively intellect that stands 
 for soul as well as mind in his gross body, displays his 
 eagerness to parry and thrust, his determination to cap every 
 other man's good saying with something better of his own, 
 which makes him, according to the manner of the actor, 
 thrust in with inarticulate sounds, as if to keep himself a 
 place open for speech while he is fetching up his own flagon 
 of wit from the farthest caverns of his stomach. And the 
 fat knight who so familiarly cracks his jokes with the Prince 
 or upon Bardolph is not vulgarised in Mr. Phelps' reading. 
 When the Prince and Westmoreland meet Falstaff on the 
 road near Coventry, and the Prince hails his old comrade 
 with a joke, the change from the gay jesting answer to the 
 courteous salutation of "My good lord of Westmoreland" is 
 fnarked by the actor with a smooth delicate touch that 
 stamps the knight distinctly as a man well born and bred. 
 
 Mr. Walter Lacy is good as the Prince, giving all ease and 
 liveliness to his part of the scenes with Falstaff, but less at 
 home in the blank verse, and least in the soliloquy, "I know 
 you all", the only part of the play in which he seems to be 
 quite out of his element. But on the whole his Prince 
 Henry is a part remarkably well acted, and must rank next 
 to the Falstaff. 
 
 With the Hotspur Mr. Montgomery takes much pains. 
 The part is, in its different way yet for a similar reason, like 
 that of Mercutio, a very difficult one; for there is an airy 
 
 s 2 
 
2/6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 grace under the impetuosity of each of these characters 
 which it can be in the power of few actors to express. In 
 Hotspur it is especially difficult, for about the martial heat 
 of his quick spirit, that must be shown with a blunt vigour, 
 there plays constantly the light of a gay untamed fancy, full 
 of fresh life in mirth and sportive tenderness. This Mr. 
 Montgomery paints rather well in his scene with Lady Percy, 
 which is the best piece of his acting, but in the rest of the 
 play his manner is too much that of an unpleasantly head- 
 strong boy. The refinement of the character is absent. 
 Hotspur's description of the lord with the pouncet-box, who 
 came to him when the fight was done, is very carefully and 
 cleverly given by Mr. Montgomery, but with a manner 
 simply of rough, violent distaste. There is the same absence 
 of expression to the lighter graces of Hotspur's character in 
 his impatient jesting at Glendower; he is too heavily and 
 offensively contemptuous, where he should speak lightly 
 and with audacious gaiety on the quick impulse of young 
 blood. 
 
 Falstaff is to be seen also at Her Majesty's Theatre, 
 singing to the baton of Signor Arditi in true Italian fashion, 
 in an Italian version of Herr Otto Nicolai's Lustigen Weiber 
 von Windsor. Except that a short name is convenient for 
 an opera, we should call it a great mistake to have brought 
 Falstaff thus to the front, for the Donne Alkgre are the 
 soul of the piece, especially when their parts are played 
 and sung as they are played and sung by Mdlles. Titiens 
 and Bettelheim ; by both equally well. It is saying much 
 for Mdlle. Bettelheim, for Mdlle. Titiens sings and acts her 
 best, but there is no inferiority in her performance. Falstaff 
 is absolutely nothing in the hands of Signpr Marcello 
 Junca. The opera is light and pleasant, but it is no work 
 of genius ; it is of about the calibre of Flotow's Marfa, 
 and is not received with any sort of enthusiasm, though it 
 is impossible not to enjoy the pleasant musical impersona- 
 tion of the two wives by Mdlles. Titiens and Bettelheim. 
 
Stella Calais Juliet. 277 
 
 I believe that on the whole a theatre audience shows 
 better taste than an opera audience ; probably because it 
 has a more real understanding of what it has come out to 
 enjoy. Real so far as it goes. But what are we to say to 
 palliate the success of Mdlle. Stella Colas in Romeo and 
 Juliet at the Princess's ? Let me be fair both to the lady 
 and the public. The lady has returned to us not quite so 
 bad as she was ; and the public applauds her not quite so 
 much as it did. I saw her again on the first night of her 
 reappearance, and compelled myself to sit out — as on her 
 original first night I could not — all the five acts of Shake- 
 speare murder. There was nothing like the frantic en- 
 thusiasm of the first reception. If the management had 
 not dealt liberally in the morning with Covent Garden, 
 and supplied the lady in the evening with the consequent 
 apple-basket full of bouquets, her reception might have 
 seemed to her a cool one. Yet her English was more in- 
 telligible, and she had got rid of some of the worst absurdi- 
 ties of action ; the upward gesture of snipping with scissors, 
 for example, that accompanied Juliet's suggestion concern- 
 ing Romeo, that'Night, when he died, might " takS him and 
 cut him out in little stars", a line that, to a dressy second- 
 rate French ingenue, inevitably suggested millinery, and 
 Night as the editor of La Belle Assemblee. But although 
 not so bad as it was, this Juliet is still abominable ; for not 
 only it is not what it ought to be, but it is precisely all that 
 it ought not to be. Juliet is an innocent Italian child, 
 enjoying with an exquisitely simple honesty the first passion 
 of love. Artless, guileless, pouring out all the beauty of a 
 most pure girlhood in the newly-awakened poetry of an un- 
 grudging, unsuspecting love, hers is the very last character 
 to be represented to us by the stage-artifices and ghastly 
 grimaces of a French ingenue, in her stage-innocence the 
 most self-conscious of all forms into which the front of 
 womanhood has ever been recast. Mdlle. Colas cannot 
 even seem to forget herself. When Juliet, after her first 
 
278 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 entry, has only to stand at her mother's chair, hearing much, 
 answering little, Mdlle. Colas perks her head, grins, twists, 
 ambles from one side of the chair to the other, and looks 
 obtrusively conscious of every part of herself from the tip 
 of her nose to the tips of her toes. In the balcony scene 
 her coquetry with Romeo is abominable ; and the way in 
 which, for example, she speaks of their swift contract as 
 
 " Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be 
 Ere one can say — It lightens," 
 
 jumping up to deliver the last two words dramatically with 
 big eyes and a pretty surprised stare, is enough to make one 
 gnash one's teeth till they break. Her great point with the 
 audience is in the soliloquy before the taking of the sleeping- 
 potion. It is done with a great deal of misdirected force, 
 ending in a shriek and recoil of horror at " Stay, Tybalt, 
 stay ! " I am quite s,ure that no Juliet whom Shakespeare in 
 his time had the advising of ever recoiled with such a shriek 
 from the imagined ghost that sought the Romeo who, being 
 thus suggested, was in the next instant yet more intensely 
 present to her disordered vision. Mdlle. Colas spends so 
 much force upon the shrieking at and cowering by the bed- 
 side from Tybalt's ghost, that she can only add as an in- 
 significant tag to that claptrap stage-effect the line in which 
 a greater actress would have found the true climax, "Romeo, 
 I come ! this do I drink to thee." Juliet drinks the potion 
 with her mind full not of Tybalt, but of Romeo. Ghosts 
 do not themselves stab, poison, or strangle, and overpower- 
 ing sense of peril to Romeo certainly is not the thought 
 indicated in these lines : 
 
 " O look ! methinks I see my cousin's ghost 
 Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body 
 Upon a rapier's point : Stay, Tybalt, stay ! 
 Romeo, I come ! this do I drink to thee." 
 
 Every word of that last line, which Mdlle. Colas shuffles 
 through as an anticlimax after her great shrieking effect, is 
 
Stella Colas' s Juliet. 279 
 
 emphatic ; so emphatic, that it is the dramatic balance to 
 the whole preceding part of the soliloquy. At sight of the 
 potion that was to lay herself in imaged death, there Coursed 
 with a thrill through her girl's blood the gruesome images 
 that it suggested, till to her disordered mind the image of 
 Tybalt seeking Romeo turned her thought to the search 
 for Romeo, on which she also was, by that dread way, 
 bent. Instead of screaming the " Stay, Tybalt, stay", 
 Juliet more probably whispers it with abhorrent voice and 
 hands, yet less indicative of supernatural dread than of 
 returning thought of Romeo, whom not Tybalt, but Juliet, 
 must be the first to find. Her eye meanwhile wanders 
 distraught in search, until she sees the marriage-bed and 
 Romeo there present alone to her mind's eye. Her cry of 
 "Romeo" then pours out her heart's love towards him. 
 Each word in the " I come" is emphatic^ — it is I, not 
 Tybalt; but the sense of this should be most lightly 
 indicated, for always in this play the thought of Tybalt 
 hardly lives at all when Juliet's mind fills with the thought 
 of Romeo. Towards the imaged Romeo, towards the 
 marriage-bed, she hurries, fluttering with love. Every one 
 also of the next words, "This do I drink to thee", has its 
 poetic force. The " this" — the phial in her hand, which, 
 apart from Romeo, had suggested all those ghastly dreads 
 in the lines beginning " What if this mixture" — now that 
 the image of Romeo is present to her, brings joy, not dread, 
 *'This do I drink to thee". She drinks as from a festive 
 bridal-cup, and as she is bending in endearment over the 
 bridal-bed the form of death changes her face and fixes it. 
 So she then falls, and lies upon the bed in her long swoon. 
 A really good actress might, no doubt, find other and better 
 methods of interpreting the lines ; my only purpose is to 
 show that in every good interpretation the last line must 
 inevitably be the great one, for it is, as it were, the clench- 
 ing of all that had gone before. When Mdlle. Colas makes 
 a great scream at the ghost of Tybalt, and flies and crouches 
 
28o Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 as if she would take refuge under the bed, then huddles 
 anyhow over the last line, takes the poison, and gets into 
 bed as best she can, she may bring great applause from an 
 audience at the Princess's, but she is not acting Shake- 
 speare. Neither do I think anything in the rest of the play 
 really well done, except the Nurse of Mrs. Marston. Mr. 
 Nelson is but a heavy Romeo. The part of Friar Lawrence 
 is, with conventional stage-gestures, actually ranted ! The 
 gentleman who plays Capulet deliberately speaks the part 
 as if it were a heavy-father in broad farce. Mr. Vining is 
 out of his element, and gives but a low-comedy suggestion 
 of that light-hearted gentleman, the airy, graceful, quick- 
 witted, and quick-blooded Mercutio, of whom in our time 
 Mr. Charles Kemble has been the only sufficient repre- 
 sentative. There is nobody now on the stage able to play 
 the part. 
 
 The nearest approach to the right tone and manner would 
 probably be made by Mr. Neville of the Olympic. Mr. 
 Neville, who has been for more than a year playing the 
 Lancashire lad in The Ticket-of-Leave Man, now adds to 
 that performance a good contrast of character by playing 
 Petruchio to the Katherine of Miss Hughes in the abridged 
 stage-version of the Taming of the Shrew, treated as an 
 afterpiece. This runs like a farce ; indeed, the practical jests 
 of the scene in Petruchio's house are heightened here and 
 there unnecessarily into farcical extravagance ; but the chief 
 and the best of the fun is Shakespeare's, and the verse runs 
 with delightful ease and smoothness from the tongues of 
 Mr. Neville and Miss Hughes, rare as the gift has now 
 become of speaking blank verse well. 
 
 June 18. — At the Haymarket Mr. Sothern has con-, 
 sidered his dignity by discarding the mere nonsense of 
 Bunkum Midler, and sustaining a character in a play 
 which demands alternation of serious and comic acting. 
 The play is a translation from the French drama of Sulli- 
 van, and I msh, though probably Mr. Buckstone's Chan- 
 
Sothern's Garrick and Dundreary. 281 
 
 cellor of the Exchequer has his reasons for differing from 
 me, that the translator, Mr. T. W. Robertson, had not taken 
 the liberty of considering Sullivan the French for David 
 Garrick. The play-bill does, indeed, append to the name 
 of the piece a note, saying, " This play is founded on an 
 incident said to have occurred to Garrick, but which has no 
 pretension to biographical accuracy" ; euphemism for " This 
 play is called David Garrick, but has nothing on earth to 
 do with Garrick". But why should English actors deal so 
 lightly with the memory of their great chief, that, for the 
 sake of so poor and false an effect as the placarding of 
 SoTHERN as Garrick, they should falsify and confuse the 
 memory of Garrick's life ? Mr. Sothern, we think, should 
 have resisted the temptation to have his name brought into 
 such apposition ; for he is not a Garrick ; he is a very long 
 way indeed from being a Garrick, excellent as he is in his 
 own way of art. If he could act Abel Drugger, he could 
 not act Macbeth ; and his serious passages in this French- 
 English drama, though they are well felt, are delivered with 
 a heaviness of intensity remarkable in one whose touch as 
 a comedian is so light. He is cleverly supported. Miss 
 Nelly Moore is the heroine, a young lady whom I remember 
 having seen two or three years ago in some small farce at 
 the St. James's Theatre, and having liked much as a 
 genuine young English actress of the class which the French 
 call ingenue, and which is on the French stage my particular 
 aversion. She vanished almost immediately into the pro- 
 vinces, but has come back to London with a Haymarket 
 engagement, and quite justifies the good hope of her I 
 formed when she was first seen upon the stage. Let me 
 not forget to record of David Garrick that it is so very 
 moral as to proceed in the last act to the delivery of a long 
 exhortation, unbroken by dialogue, which Mr. Sothern 
 preaches with such quiet seriousness that we are almost 
 invited to look under his chin for the band and bibS. In 
 the main, however, it is comic, and it is now followed by a 
 
282 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 new and rapid act of Dundrearyism, written by Mr. H. J. 
 Byron, entitled Lord Dundreary Married and Done For, in 
 which Mr. Sothern's Lord Dundreary is amusing still, and 
 the nonsense, though it is nonsense, is rather smarter^than 
 it was in the original piece, and so we laugh heartily and do 
 not despise ourselves for laughing. We check the sense 
 that will rise sometimes of flagging in the imitator's strain at 
 a worn theme, while we appreciate the skill with which Mr. 
 Byron has caught and repeated, and even mellowed with 
 another humanising touch or two, all the characteristics of 
 Dundreary as we knew him in his days of bachelorhood. 
 
 At the Olympic Mr. Tom Taylor's truncated morality, 
 Sense and Sensation, failed on the first night for want of 
 connected and intelligible story, though, even then, several 
 of its scenes had, I believe, been cut out. Since the first 
 night, two or three more scenes have been omitted, in- 
 cluding one in a milliner's work-room, which was well 
 meant, but too stern and literal to be offered as occasion for 
 amusement. One of the scenes was a burlesque by itself, 
 an admirable jest upon the condition of the London stage, 
 including caricatures of the- " sensation" drama and the 
 taste for a French Juliet. This, with the original head and 
 tail, and a previous scene at a boarding-school, is nearly all 
 that is now left of the piece. 
 
 The new plays produced at the Princess's have been of 
 a better literary class than those acted recently at any other 
 house ; and in the last of his new pieces, Light and Shadow, 
 by Mr. Slous, the author of The Templar, there has appeared 
 an actor, Mr. Dominick Murray, who is evidently an im- 
 portant acquisition to the London stage. Both the play 
 and the actor are worth seeing. 
 
 June 25. — Fidelia is not only the best existing opera, 
 but probably, except the same composer's Mount of Olives, 
 the noblest musical work ever produced by the genius of 
 man. 
 
 Mdlle. Titiens is already the best of recent Leonoras, 
 
Titiens in ^^Fidelio!' 283 
 
 and she has not yet made the part all that she will make it. 
 There were quiet places on Thursday night which as Mdlle. 
 Titiens warms to the part will lighten up with new ex- 
 pression. Her determination evidently was to run no risk, 
 to attempt on the first night not a touch more than she 
 could make perfect. Her expression is throughout delicate 
 and true, but there are several passages in the first act which 
 she feels clearly, and which in a few nights she will make 
 the house feel more distinctly. More will be made, for 
 ■example, of Leonora's by-play at the opening of the 
 dungeons at the end of the first act. Her object was to 
 search for her husband among the prisoners, and Madame 
 Schroeder-Devrient, by her way of interpreting that, drew 
 tears. Mdlle. Titiens rightly avoids the merely conven- 
 tional rushing about, and leaves the dramatic points yet to 
 be made ; content by no tone, look, or movement to break 
 the harmony of her entire performance. In the second act, 
 ■admirably supported by Dr. Gunz as the Florestan, her 
 acting of the part is singularly delicate and true in its 
 pathos, and she sings it, I believe, better than it has ever 
 been sung in England. 
 
 August 6. — At the Princess's, Mr. George Vining has 
 just set up a piece of transpontine interest derived by 
 Mr. Boucicault from the same mint that coined the original 
 ■of The Ticket-of-Leave Man. The Princess's version of 
 Les Pauvres de Farts, under the name of The Streets of 
 London, has its French origin uneffaced in ingenious 
 unreality of realism, in sentimental suicide by charcoal- 
 fumes, and so forth. But it is capitally acted by Mr. Vining, 
 who appears in it to much better advantage than he did, 
 however well-dressed to the part, as Philip II of Spain, 
 in The Monastery of St. Just, which was more unpleasantly 
 French, and had the disadvantage of producing Mdlle. 
 Stella Colas in two of its characters. To glance back for an 
 instant to that piece, I may observe that, although I went to 
 see it with the belief that one could not only endure but 
 
284 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 like Mdlle. Colas in French melodrama, whatever we might 
 think of her in English poetry,. I ended by giving her up 
 altogether. She is obtrusively self-conscious, showy, jerky, 
 artificial as a puppet. When she acted the convent-boy, in 
 a surplice like a night-gown, she was lively, but showily 
 feminine in all her amblings, skippings, and minauderies. 
 She is unquestionably an actress below the level of Miss 
 Terry, or Miss Nelly Moore, who played the heroine so 
 simply and gracefully in David Garrick, or of half-a-dozen 
 other young English actresses whose names never appear on 
 posters. To name Mdlle. Colas in the same line with 
 Mrs. Herman Vezin would be preposterous enough ; but 
 she simply is not an actress at all in the sense in which 
 an English Helen Faucit or an Italian Ristori is an actress. 
 Enough of that. I am glad she is gone ; and coming back 
 to the Princess's new drama of The Streets of London, I 
 may commend the acting in that piece not only of Mr. 
 Vining, but also of Mrs. Marston, Mr. David Fisher, and 
 Mr. Dominick Murray, and record that it has two scenes, a 
 set scene of Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square as seen 
 from the corner of Hemming's Row, and a scene of a house 
 on fire, which take the place of literature to secure a long 
 run for the drama. The house on fire, which occupies the 
 whole breadth of the stage, is a wonderful scenic illusion. 
 
 October i. — Of the Second Part of King Henry LV, 
 at Drury Lane, it will suffice to record that Justice Shallow 
 is in Mr. Phelps's hands, as in Shakespeare's, anything but 
 a merely comic character. Comic upon the surface, it is at 
 the core terribly earnest, and was meant, with a profound 
 seriousness under the jest, as a picture of grey hairs without 
 honour, age looking back to a false heaven of youthful lusts • 
 that in its imbecile youth it had ill realised, instead of 
 forward to the well-earned rest, and downward to the open 
 grave before its feet. There is nothing more sternly earnest 
 in Shakespeare, and more tragic in its undertone, than the 
 dialogue between Shallow and Silence at the beginning of 
 
" Second Part of King Henry IV." 285 
 
 the second scene of the third act, and so Mr. Phelps feels 
 it, as his acting shows. We have in this play the un- 
 honoured age of two old men. Shallow and Falstaff j with 
 these men on one side of him* and the venerable Chief 
 Justice on the other, Henry the Fifth speaks his closing 
 speech, that begins, 
 
 " I know thee not, old man ; fall to thy prayers ; 
 How ill white hairs become a fool and jester !" 
 
 There is a particular contrast between the unhonoured 
 poverty of wit and soul in the old Shallow and the premature 
 decay of the King weighted with mighty care for earthly 
 dignities, that makes the representation of the two characters 
 by one competent actor fully possessed with their significance 
 a source of true artistic pleasure. It is well, also, that the 
 untaught in dramatic art should see how far the skill of a 
 true actor is removed from dull monotony, and through how 
 many differing conceptions it is able faithfully to follow with 
 its impersonation the true poet's mind. 
 
 October 8. — Drury Lane reopened last Saturday, not 
 only with the most creditable programme it was in the 
 manager's power to produce, but with evidence of added 
 strength in the performance. The First Part of King Henry 
 IV, as it has been performed this week, gains largely by 
 the substitution of Mr. H. Marston for Mr. Ryder in the 
 part of the King. Mr. Ryder declaims very well, but he 
 only declaims : Mr. Marston puts some of their life into the 
 lines. 
 
 Mr. Creswick has profited well by experience; and while 
 he has plenty of energy on occasion, now and then rather 
 too much, he knows how to be quiet, and can tone his per- 
 formance into pleasant harmony with other business of the 
 stage. Mr. Montgomery's Hotspur, with all its faults, was 
 more interesting than I find Mr. Cres wick's to be, with all 
 its merits. There was an independent strain and energy 
 about that actor, a desire to do worthily, and a rare power 
 
2S6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 of correcting faults, that won goodwill. When looking in 
 again upon the play towards the close of the last season, I 
 was surprised and pleased at the frequent skilful modifica- 
 tions by which Mr. Montgomery had brought his perform- 
 ance nearer to the poet's standard. His Hotspur as I last 
 saw it was a performance of a higher quality than Mr. Cres- 
 wick's. 
 
 November 5. — At Drury Lane the reappearance of Miss 
 Helen Faucit brought us Cymbeline; for Imogen, the most 
 beautiful of Shakespeare's female characters, is that in which 
 this lady seems most to delight and to excel, and with this 
 she desired, in returning to the London stage of which she 
 was some years since a chief ornament, to make her first 
 impression. The play had been formerly acted at Drury 
 Lane with very good scenery of its own, so that on its recent 
 revival it was found to be in all respects well mounted, and 
 the acting did not greatly impede the sense in following the 
 exquisite freedom of the poet's fancy through the swiftly 
 changing scene of British court and Roman camp and 
 royalty of man in savage mountain-life. No mortal actors, 
 perhaps, can fitly speak the lament of Guiderius and Arvira- 
 gus over the body of Fidele. There was inevitably much 
 that jarred in the representation. But Miss Faucit was on 
 the whole well supported, and she had Mr. Phelps for 
 Posthumus and Mr. Creswick for lachimo, parts that no 
 living actors could have better filled. In its tenderness and 
 grace of womanhood, in the simple piety that looks to the 
 gods when Imogen commits herself to rest or is about to 
 read a letter from her husband, in the wife's absolute love 
 and perfect innocence, void of false shame, slow to believe 
 ill, strong to resist it. Miss Faucit's Imogen is eloquent to 
 our eyes, even when she fails, now and then, to satisfy our 
 ears. She is an actress trained in the school of the Kembles, 
 careful to make every gesture an embodiment of thought, 
 too careful sometimes, as when, after the cry, "What ho, 
 Pisanio!" she remains with upraised arm throughout half 
 
Helen Faucifs Imogen. 287 
 
 the speech of lachimo that begins "O happy Leonatus!" 
 There is a graver fault of excess in the first part of the repre- 
 sentation of womanly fear when, as Fidele, she calls at the 
 mouth of the unoccupied cavern, and runs from the sound 
 herself had made. The warning of her error might be found 
 in the fact that her pantomime here excites rather general 
 laughter, where surely Shakespeare never meant that even 
 the dullest boor should grin. But that short sin of excess 
 is followed by the entry into the cavern, which is made most 
 charmingly. 
 
 Miss Faucit^s voice is more often at fault; it fails her 
 whenever she has a violent emotion to express, and passion 
 sounds often like petulance. The voice may not obey the 
 prompting of the will, or there may be defect of that higher 
 dramatic genius which can make words sound as "thoughts 
 that breathe". Whatever be the cause, she fails to express 
 by voice such phases of the character of Imogen as we have 
 in the scene with Pisanio near Milford Haven. Yet where 
 the mere emotion to be expressed is more tender than 
 violent she attains often — though even then, perhaps, with 
 a too visible art — to the utmost delicacy of expression. An 
 example of this is in her picture to Pisanio of how she 
 would have strained her eye to look on her departing lord, 
 
 "till he had melted from 
 The smallness of a gnat to air; and then 
 Have turned mine eye and wept." 
 
 The sense of the final vanishing, and of the tears that 
 follow it, is here exquisitely rendered by the actress. 
 
 Another incident of the week has been the opening of the 
 Olympic, on Wednesday evening, under the management 
 of Mr. Horace Wigan, with two farces and a drama, all 
 adapted from the French. The staple entertainment is The 
 Hidden Hand, a French melodrama of poisoning, called 
 L'Aieule, adapted into four acts, with the scene laid in a 
 Welsh castle in the reign of James the Second. It is a play 
 
288 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 of a bad class, remarkably well adapted for acting through- 
 out the second and third of its four acts, and cleverly acted 
 by Miss Terry, who, emancipated now from the Lyceum 
 panorama, gives evidence of a dramatic energy that may 
 secure, even for The Hidden Hand, a long lease of the public 
 favour. 
 
 December 3. — It is to be wished that, by way of special 
 favour to a portion of the public for which it already shows 
 a wise respect, the management of Drury Lane would 
 announce that their Macbeth would be acted, for a few nights 
 at least, without Locke's music, and the corps of witches 
 jigging to Davenant's misfitted rhymes. The very substantial 
 Hecate, who looks like a cross between a beef-eater from 
 the Tower and a ghost from the Styx, talks of anointing 
 herself, and sings of the pleasure it is " to sing, to toy, to 
 dance, and kiss", belongs to the stage of a very different sort 
 of Restoration than that which the Drury Lane manage- 
 ment has now in hand. To those shadowy weird sisters 
 who lie at the heart of the tragedy, this singing and jigging 
 corps de ballet is — so far as their poetry is concerned — a 
 ruinous accompaniment. By untuning the key-note they 
 spoil the harmonies of the whole play. 
 
 Mr. Phelps's Macbeth is a half-barbarous warrior chief, 
 around whom the powers of evil weave their fatal spell. 
 The strife of the elements that rolls over the acting of his 
 crime suggests the co-operation of the fiendish spirits who 
 have him in thrall. By nature he is a rude, impulsive soldier, 
 "valour's minion", " Bellona's bridegroom", turbulent of 
 mind, restless, imaginative, quick of ambition, but with a 
 religion strong in leaf, although fruitless and weak of root. 
 As his wife says, in words to which Miss Faucit rightly gives 
 clear, unmistakable emphasis, 
 
 " not without ambition, but without 
 The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly 
 That wouldst thou holily : wouldst not play false 
 And yet wouldst wrongly win." 
 
Lady Macbeth : Hekn Faucit. 289 
 
 The last words of the witches before Macbeth's entry are 
 of a "pilot's thumb, wrecked as homeward he did come" ; 
 at the words, Macbeth, who has been piloting through storm 
 the vessel of the State, is heard approaching, and on his 
 homeward way they wait to wreck him. An evil influence 
 that fastens on his soul comes with the foreboding of royalty. 
 His heart has been stirred by a breath from hell, that has 
 warmed into life damnable thoughts of the swift way to the 
 promised height of sovereignty. In the subsequent scene 
 with Duncan, Macbeth, still preoccupied, starts from his 
 reverie at the naming of Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland. 
 But though under the fatal spell of the weird sisters, unless 
 a power of earth, in the urging force of his wife's will, join 
 itself to the powers of hell, Duncan yet will sleep unharmed 
 in Macbeth's castle. 
 
 And here, in the acted play, appears the chief defect of 
 Miss Faucit's Lady Macbeth, which is weakest in the scenes 
 before the murder of Duncan. Miss Faucit is too essentially 
 feminine, too exclusively gifted with the art of expressing all 
 that is most graceful and beautiful in womanhood, to suc- 
 ceed in inspiring anything like awe or terror. The lines 
 beginning, 
 
 " Come all you spirits 
 That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here," 
 
 are simply spouted : at the closing passage — 
 
 " Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark 
 Tocry 'Hold, hold!'"— 
 
 Miss Faucit shouts " Hold ! hold !" in a most unheavenly 
 manner, and throughout the early stage of the character it 
 may be said that her Lady Macbeth is too demonstrative 
 and noisy. 
 
 Of Macbeth's " letting I dare not wait upon I would", 
 her censure is vixenish in manner. The famous passage in 
 delivering which Mrs. Siddons is said to have transformed 
 herself into a terrible she-fiend, " I have given suck," etc., 
 
 2 T 
 
290 Jotirnal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 is poured out by Miss Faucit in a way that, by tones and 
 gestures, vividly recalls a common spectacle of passion in 
 our London streets — the scold at the door of a gin-shop. 
 The comparison is by no means so degrading as it sounds,, 
 for the gin-shop scold pours out a true passion ; and in 
 passion, whatever the cause of it, high and low display alike 
 the common nature. But such tones belong to an out- 
 pouring of emotion inconsistent with the self-possessed 
 determination that makes Lady Macbeth terrible in this, 
 part of the play. In the latter part of the scene Miss 
 Faucit is still too noisy ; and when she suggests how upoii 
 Duncan's death they will make their "griefs and clamour 
 roar", she ends her part in the scene with voice pitched to 
 its highest key and outspread fingers all abroad. There is 
 the same excess of displayed emotion when she chides 
 Macbeth as " Infirm of purpose", and tells him " 'tis the 
 eye of childhood that fears a painted devil", spitting out at 
 him the word " painted". 
 
 This defect in the representation disappears, of course, 
 when the second phase of the character, that which is far 
 more congenial to the actress, has to be represented. Miss 
 Faucit's voice fails physically to express high tragic passion, 
 and it possibly is part of a softer, though, we think, 
 erroneous view taken by her of Lady Macbeth's character,, 
 to make her at the outset of the play passionately womanish, 
 and herself impulsive. 
 
 The reaction of disappointment and hidden suffering 
 after the crime is delicately shown by Miss Faucit. From 
 the words opening that new phase of the character — 
 
 " Nought 's had, all 's spent. 
 When our desire is got without content : 
 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, 
 Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy" — 
 
 Miss Faucit's Lady Macbeth becomes a performance that 
 no other English actress can approach. When Macbeth 
 hints to her of a new deed, a new crime, admirable in 
 
Lady Macbeth : Helen Faucit. 291 
 
 various expression is his wife's tone of weariness of wonder 
 and of dread in the question "What's to be done ?" And 
 when Macbeth replies — ■ 
 
 " Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, 
 Till thou applaud the deed" — 
 
 she stands averted as he crosses, and mechanically follows 
 as he leads. In the murder of Banquo, Lady Macbeth is 
 no accomplice. We have seen Miss Faucit praised for 
 representation of smooth treachery in the tender playing of 
 her fingers about the head of the child Fleance while Mac- 
 beth is sending father and child into the toils set for therfi. 
 Miss Faucit knows her Shakespeare better than that. The 
 fingers of the woman who has been a mother, and has 
 murder on her soul, wander sadly and tenderly over the 
 type of her lost innocence. In the banquet scene, where it 
 should be remembered that she, ignorant of Banquo's fate, 
 beheves it to be the murdered Duncan of whom Macbeth 
 speaks (save only a weakly scolding note or two in the 
 private warning to Macbeth, " O, these flaws, and starts", 
 etc.), Miss Faucit is admirably good. Her by-play during 
 Macbeth's speech, "What man dare I dare", is perfect, 
 and her collapse into weariness of life-long torture after the 
 departure of the guests, with all that follows to the close of 
 that scene, shows our best actress at her best. The sleep- 
 walking scene is very carefully delivered, but has too much 
 the air of a well-studied dramatic recitation. It is Miss 
 Faucit's Lady Macbeth, not Lady Macbeth, whose nature 
 sinks under the weight of her fatal secret, even in the sleep 
 that has brought no rest to her guilty soul. 
 
 December 17. — A visit this week to Drury Lane showed 
 us that Miss Helen Faucit has, like a true actress, profited 
 by information given from before the curtain, and now, in 
 expressing the first phase of Lady Macbeth's character, 
 avoids all the louder tones in which her voice failed 
 physically to express the thought in her mind, skilfully 
 
 T 2 
 
292 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 substituting for them methods of expression perfectly 
 within her range and far more impressive. The result is 
 a 'most harmonious interpretation of the part according 
 to that reading which finds all its womanhood in Lady 
 Macbeth's character. Some of the passages in her opening 
 scenes, which used to be weak, from a physical cause really 
 beside any question of the genius of the actress, are now to 
 be felt as even among the gems of the performance. I 
 observed also a point in Miss Faucit's acting which had, I 
 believe, always been part of her reading, but which I had 
 previously overlooked. It had been seen that during the 
 tumult after the discovery of Duncan's murder Lady Mac- 
 beth's assumed surprise and terror passed into a real and 
 sudden fainting, but in the general bustle of the scene had 
 not been observed why. I see now that she faints at 
 recurrence to the image which recalled her father when he 
 slept. It is at Macbeth's words — 
 
 " Here lay Duncan, 
 His silver skin laced with his golden blood" — 
 
 that the swoon comes over her. It is the right place for an 
 overpowering emotion. 
 
 On Monday and Tuesday Miss Faucit repeats her im- 
 personation of the most pure and womanly of Shakespeare's 
 heroines. There are parts of her performance of this 
 character that once seen few can forget — not the least 
 beautiful, Imogen's simple presence at Cymbeline's court 
 in the first scene, modestly clinging to her husband, shrink- 
 ing from the rough life outside their love, and stretching 
 out towards him, as he departs, the hands that return to her 
 empty. Last year there were passages in both her Imogen 
 and her Lady Macbeth that were like false touches of a 
 painter whose hand by disuse has lost its unerring corre- 
 spondence with the movements of the mind, '\^^herever the 
 physical strain passed a certain limit, the expression would 
 sometimes fall short of the conception. But Miss Faucit 
 
Imogen: Helen Faiicit. 293 
 
 soon succeeded in adjusting her performance to her powers 
 and to the house in which she was acting. It was like the 
 adjustment of an opera-glass to the sight, and in some parts 
 of each character the difference of effect between in range 
 and out of range is quite as striking. It has been notice- 
 able this week in one or two of the scenes of her Imogen, 
 chiefly the scene with lachimo, and that with Pisanio near 
 Milford Haven. It is no light honour to an actress, that 
 the part in which she excels most should be that which 
 represents the purest and most womanly of Shakespeare's 
 women ; in the whole range of poetry the most delicate 
 embodiment of all the qualities that blend to form a 
 womanly perfection — simple piety, wifely devotion, in- 
 stinctive, unobtrusive modesty, gentle courtesy, moral 
 heroism with all physical cowardice, — no thin ideal, but a 
 very woman, who includes among her virtues aptitude for 
 cookery. 
 
 In the important scene with lachimo. Miss Helen Faucit 
 is unfortunate in the change which gives her Mr. Anderson 
 instead of Mr. Creswick for a tempter. lachimo is no 
 doubt a brutal sort of villain, yet he is outwardly a well- 
 bred Roman, shamelessly but luxuriously dissolute. As 
 practised conqueror of women, he must have known better 
 than tempt virtue, even in the wildest British princess, 
 with the roughness of a cattle-drover, or by standing por- 
 tentously behind her with his nose in her back hair. There 
 is a spiritual way of rendering even such a part as that of 
 lachimo. Mr. Creswick left much to desire; Mr. Anderson 
 leaves everything to desire, yet he is skilled in the stage- 
 business that pleases an uneducated public. His bedroom 
 scene, spoken throughout in an oppressively ostentatious 
 stage-whisper, is an intolerable blunder. Does he suppose 
 that Shakespeare's soliloquies are pieces of mere realism, 
 representing the defects of people who can't keep their 
 tongues still even when they are alone? In all the solilo- 
 quies — and lachimo's part in Imogen's bedroom is especially 
 
294 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1864. 
 
 and most necessarily of this sort — we are supposed only to 
 be following a train of secret thought. We can thus, by 
 slight exercise of imagination, pass into the innermost 
 recesses of the mind depicted for us, watch its secret 
 workings, and look for the mainspring of its action. It 
 would be the densest stupidity to suppose that lachimo 
 uttered a sound he could suppress while he was at his base 
 work around the sleeping Imogen. Let his part here be 
 unostentatiously spoken, and we understand well enough 
 that, in the usual way, we are enabled to penetrate to the 
 thoughts that direct his silent action. But let it all be 
 ostentatiously whispered, and we have the foolish spectacle 
 of lachimo, with a tongue too loosely hung, making noise 
 enough to wake fifty Imogens, and huskily struggling to 
 keep his importunate hissing and breathing as much as he 
 can below the standard of an engine blowing off its steam. 
 The laboured stage-effect hopelessly ruins the illusion of 
 the scene. The Posthumus of Mr. Walter Montgomery is 
 played in better taste, with energy that never passes into 
 rant, and with manifest appreciation of good poetry. 
 
 On ^^^ednesday, Miss Faucit played Rosalind in As You. 
 Like It. In Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare jested at 
 euphuism ; in As You Like It he played euphuist himself 
 in pleasant mood, and out of quips and fancies built a wise 
 and tender day-dream of the world. Starting from one of 
 the fashionable Italianised novelets of his day, Shakespeare 
 wrote with a subtle waywardness this exquisite masque of 
 life. His forest of Arden is an Arcadia, and there shall be 
 lions in it if he will. With the Arcadia the court contrasts, 
 the court with its wicked and usurping duke, and its good- 
 hearted popinjay Le Beau ; with its pitiless wrestler who 
 breaks the ribs of youth and hope, and at its gate the grasp 
 of the world of cruel brothers and hard masters. They 
 who escape from the contest into that Arcadian shelter find 
 how sweet are the uses of adversity. And Rosalind, the 
 girl-woman, with her girlish devotion to her cousin Celia, 
 
Rosalind : Helen Faucit. 295 
 
 her soul of pity, her innocent mirth and bold playfulness ; 
 first bashfully conscious of her mannish dress when she 
 hears that young Orlando, too, is in Arcadia, then reck- 
 lessly plunging into enjoyment of his love ; what bold profit 
 5he takes out of his mystification, and how merrily she forces 
 from him oaths of love that are, as to her, to her and not to 
 her ! Girlish abandonment to exquisite delight, womanly 
 •depths of feeling shown from time to time when any rough 
 wind sweeps across the rainbow mist, these lie together in 
 her as the depths of its wisdom lie near to the playfulness 
 •of the whole exquisite dramatic show, and through breaks 
 in its golden cloud-world we seem to see all kingdoms of 
 the world of thought spread out before us. In all the. 
 •scenes with Orlando, Miss Faucit's acting is delightful. If 
 she has not the art to conceal art, the art she does not 
 ■conceal is true, is founded on quick and refined perception 
 ■of the poetry she is interpreting. She can realise line by 
 line, with tone and gesture, more of the spiritual grace and 
 beauty of true poetry than any lady who now acts upon the 
 English stage. Mr. Walter Montgomery plays Orlando 
 without rant and with much excellent expression. Mr. 
 Anderson is a heavy stage-Jaques, who takes pains with 
 the business, and especially with the delivery of the lines, 
 "All the world's a stage" I protest, whoever plays the 
 part, against the transfer of the description of the melan- 
 •choly Jaques 
 
 " as he lay along 
 Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out 
 Upon the brook that brawls along this wood," 
 
 from the mouth of one who had been observing him, to the 
 mouth of Jaques himself. It may seem very legitimate to 
 steal " lengths" of good poetry from a " first lord" who 
 might be a stick and not a gold one, and the transfer may 
 be usage of the stage ; but if Shakespeare were stage- 
 manager he never would permit it. It is a special fificulty 
 in this play, and more or less a difficulty in all plays of 
 
296 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 Shakespeare, that the small parts are worth great interpreters. 
 Shakespeare himself played the part of old Adam, which is 
 honoured by that pleasant tradition ; and the part, it is right 
 to say, was played on Wednesday by Mr. J. Neville better 
 than, so far as I know, he has acted anything before. Mr. 
 Walter Lacy is a good Touchstone, and has a most pleasant 
 Audrey in Miss Hudspeth. Mr. Belmore came on as 
 Audrey's rustic lover William, and, as the part is a very 
 small one, thereby did himself double credit. From such a 
 company as Drury Lane is gradually collecting we shall 
 look for many who are free from the false dignity in which 
 bad actors take shelter. In a first-rate play no part is un- 
 important ; and if a company enters worthily into its work 
 — necessities of rest allowed for — every part, whatever its 
 technical importance, should be filled by simply the most 
 competent actor or actress of it who is not otherwise 
 employed. 
 
 1865, February 25. — Mr. Phelps has been representing 
 two great Cardinals, Wolsey and Richelieu, and is now acting 
 Richelieu in Sir Bulwer Lytton's play to honestly full houses, 
 which enjoy throughout not only the acting but the fine 
 dramatic writing also that it worthily illustrates. The skil- 
 fully woven plot, the character of Richelieu expressed by 
 touches very various yet all well harmonised, the thoroughly 
 dramatic dialogue that elicits character and is instinct with 
 thought, the language that has in its measured cadence a 
 true music and an unaffected dignity, all this — the genius, 
 in short, of the author — is felt as it should be, through the 
 actor. 
 
 In Richelieu, how careful is the dramatic painting of a 
 character worth dramatising well. It has ambition, honesty, 
 dominant love for France. There is delight in the sense of 
 a power that survives and surpasses the old vigour of arm. 
 To the craft of the fox are added touches of love for the 
 orphan girl whom the old statesman guards as a trust from 
 his dead friend of old. There is a clear worldly insight. 
 
Richelieu : Phelps. 297 
 
 with the flattered and waylaid minister's bitterly low estimate 
 of men ; dry humour, genial enjoyment of the gallantry of 
 manhood ; a touch of Richelieu's literary vanity in regard 
 for the young critic who knew where to applaud his play. 
 All this we have in the person of an old man, strong only of 
 wit, now dallying playfully with power over those who come 
 near to his heart, now bitter in pursuit of his own foes and 
 those of France ; now defying and now counterfeiting death ; 
 a feeble old man whose life ebbs with his power to serve 
 France, clasping a feebler girl to his heart, and against the 
 lusts of a king rising in her defence armed with the thunders 
 of the Church ; a subtle minister, in the hour of his fall 
 turning defiant upon his triumphant enemies ; a dying man 
 into whom strong life flows back as there return into his 
 care the fortunes of his country. In these and all other 
 'phases of the character, Mr. Phelps by numberless touches 
 of an art kindred to the poet's genius gives to Sir Bulwer 
 Lytton's Richelieu life again, and a strong life, upon the 
 English stage. 
 
 Miss Atkinson is of the company who took honours when 
 graduating at Sadler's Wells, and she has lately played 
 Queen Katherine here in King Henry VIII. The grace 
 and dignity with which from her place by the King's side 
 she pleaded the cause of oppressed subjects, the quiet 
 womanliness with which she warned Wolsey and Bucking- 
 ham's accusing steward to deliver all with charity and to 
 charge not in spleen, were admirable. In the scene before 
 the court in Blackfriars, her womanly scorn and utter repu- 
 diation of Wolsey as her judge was delivered with a poetical 
 intensity artfully heightened by the coming forward of Cam- 
 peius at Katherine's words, " Lord Cardinal", to be saluted 
 by her with the humblest courtesy before she points to 
 Wolsey with averted figure and imperious scorn, as she 
 adds, " To you I speak". 
 
 Mr. Phelps's Wolsey is remarkable for the impression of 
 busy power subtly given through a marked quietness of 
 
298 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 ■demeanour. He move's easily as a Cardinal familiar with 
 courts, and meekly, except in the first proud glance at 
 ■defiant Buckingham, and in the short scene wherein Wolsey, 
 left alone with Cardinal Campeius, lays aside his mask and 
 shows the proud face underneath it. Everywhere, until 
 the scene that show? his fall, Wolsey is the Cardinal in pre- 
 sence of the world. He sits still under the imputations 
 cast on him by Katherine when she tells the King of the 
 exactions suffered by his subjects. He is as humbly quiet 
 at Blackfriars, and it would be a shrewd critic who could 
 define exactly how by gesture, turn of head, nice manage- 
 ment of voice, the proud ambitious spirit makes itself felt 
 in that unobtrusive figure. In the last scenes showing 
 Wolsey's fall there is a quiet restlessness of scheming that 
 precedes collapse, and in the fall itself a pathos in the quiet- 
 ness with which the old man stands at bay amid the mock- 
 ing courtiers ; a dignity of pathos in his pointing of the 
 moral of his life at court. CoUey Cibber, if I rightly under- 
 stand the records, was a Wolsey without ease of movement 
 or of action, and with much display of a proud speech and 
 bearing ; the Wolsey of Mr. Phelps is the reverse of this. 
 His movements are perfect in ease and in the quiet self- 
 possession of a man who always surely steals towards the 
 •end he seeks. With help only of a flash or two of haughty 
 spirit, as in the gesture that, when they are alone, denies 
 his fellow-cardinal, Campeius, precedence of exit, it is 
 iisually by a visible attempt to veil the inner pride that its 
 intensity is the more strongly shown. Shakespeare has 
 painted it all in his verse — in Wolsey's relentless crushing 
 •of defiant Buckingham, in the meek Cardinal who is hard 
 in council, who is pitilessly watchful of all those who come 
 between him and the King, a luxurious host, a scheming 
 servant of the Pope, but with high aims that give him dignity 
 in the last hour of his disgrace. Shakespeare's Wolsey 
 speaks to us most intelligibly when he comes free from dis- 
 tortion by a violent interpreter. 
 
Wolsey : Phelps. — Miss Bateman. 299 
 
 March 18. — Having now seen Miss Bateman in two 
 characters, one may estimate the measure of her ability. 
 Her acting as Julia in The Hunchback too exactly repeats 
 the impression made by her Leah. In Leah it was only 
 for a strain of pathos in the last act, and for a few touching 
 notes of the voice then, that she was to be credited with a 
 power of pathetic expression that came of her own genius, 
 and not of mere stage-drilling. 
 
 But in other respects I find Miss Bateman is just as 
 monotonous in the part of Julia as she was in the part of 
 Leah, showing no original ability of any sort, save when 
 she has to give pathetic expression to her voice, and there, 
 and there only, again succeeding. She says marvellously 
 well the words of distress, " Clifford, why don't you speak 
 to me ?" but acts lifelessly in the first scenes of country 
 simplicity, and almost lumpishly, certainly without a trace of 
 real vivacity, in the succeeding scenes of town gaiety, stand- 
 ing almost unexpressive while Clifford is cruelly wounding 
 her pride, and putting only the monotone of her pathos 
 into the few words she utters. She is heavy even when 
 rattling out words in stage-declamation, with the speed of a 
 patter-song, but with no more soul in the sound they make 
 than in the shaking of a bottle of shot. So I feel when she 
 forbids Clifford, in his character of Earl's secretary, to put 
 his arm about her waist, or when she pours on the Hunch- 
 back, in the last scene, a swift volley of monotonous sound 
 instead of a full utterance diversified, as the whole acting 
 of the character should be, with a quick play of thought and 
 feeling full of the liveliest contrasts of expression. It was 
 in this part of Julia that so spiritual an actress as Miss 
 Helen Faucit chose, when a girl of sixteen, to make her 
 first appeal to a London public. The part should be a 
 favourite one with every actress of quick sensibility, and 
 -with a wide range of expression in voice, feature, and man- 
 ner. Miss Bateman has almost no range. Her American 
 intonation adds to the natural monotony of her delivery; 
 
300 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 although its nasal tendency may lend itself to the effect of 
 those pathetic tones which are her one strong recommenda- 
 tion to the public favour. When she is loud or swift, or 
 anything but pathetic, she is never thoroughly expressive. 
 When Helen is scoffing at Clifford's fall into poverty, her 
 interpolations of "Helen!" convey no more feeling than the 
 half-idle warning of a nurse to a child who is spilling the 
 salt; and when she follows them up with a loud "I hate 
 you, Helen!" the words have no more soul or propriety of 
 tone than there would be in the same nurse's sudden out- 
 break of temper against the small offender. She walks over 
 to stand before Modus and lecture him on Clifford as an 
 American lady lecturer might walk up to her place at the 
 lecture-table, and recites her admonitions with less anima- 
 tion. Whatever her mood — as simple, heart-whole country 
 girl, as girl with her heart turned by town pleasures, as 
 woman with her love spurned and her pride stung, as wrath- 
 fully contemplating vengeance, as tenderly conscious of her 
 wounded love — Miss Bateman's notion always is to settle 
 herself into some quiet, well-looking attitude, and save her- 
 self all awkwardness by keeping in it as long as possible. 
 Even when Clifford is telling her, in her country-girl days, 
 of the joy of country life, she stands still, turns up her eyes, 
 and keeps them unwinking for a wonderful length of time; 
 as if she were standing for a carte de visite before an exceed- 
 ingly unsusceptible plate, and wouldn't have a hair stir till 
 the cap is clapped over the lens. Miss Bateman's JuHa is, 
 in fact, so monotonous — although a part which most fairly 
 good actresses would find it singularly difficult to make 
 monotonous — that the variety of expression in Miss Simms's 
 pleasant acting of Helen, and that young lady's flexibility of 
 voice, seem by comparison almost miraculous. 
 
 March 25. — Arrah-tta-Fogue, at the Princess's, is in the 
 first two acts cleverly constructed and well written, but the 
 interest does not pass into the third act, which is weak and 
 strained, though it is supported by the greatest scenic efforts, 
 
" Arrah-na-Pogue."— Watts Phillips. 301 
 
 and what is meant to be the great "sensational" effect of a 
 climb up an ivy-covered tower wall. The play is, neverthe- 
 less, thoroughly and deservedly successful. If the third act 
 were as good as the iirst and second, it would be the best 
 piece Mr. Boucicault has written. Faces in the Fire, at the 
 St. James's, is a play without a backbone. It is a French 
 drama with its corrupt plot drawn, and nothing left in the 
 way of adequate motive for the overwrought passion of the 
 acting, which nevertheless brings down applause. 
 
 Mr. Watts Phillips's Woman in Mauve, at the Hay- 
 market, is the work of a well-intentioned man who invents 
 his own stories, and always desires to read some wholesome 
 lesson to the audiences attracted by his plays. He has 
 written a solid melodrama. The Dead Heart, which still 
 keeps its ground as a stock-piece at the Adelphi. He has 
 written also a comedy of Paper Wings, to which Mr. Tom 
 Taylor's Settling Day bears obvious resemblance, and which 
 is on the whole decidedly a more satisfactory play than 
 Settling Day. He has written other pieces also, and I 
 acquired from them a great esteem for the good intentions 
 of the author. Latterly Mr. Phillips's dialogue seemed to 
 have brightened and grown more compact. And so I went 
 to see his burlesque upon sensation-writing with a decided 
 inclination to be pleased, although there was, founded upon 
 half-effaced reminiscences of the respectable heaviness of 
 his earher dramas, just a doubt whether the author had a 
 wit nimble enough to provide three acts of extravagance, 
 without flagging into a mere strain to produce nonsense. 
 
 What I did see was a combination of popular actors and 
 remarkably good scenery employed in making the best of 
 probably the clumsiest and poorest piece that has been 
 acted in a London theatre for many years past. The 
 author's good intentions, and an occasional cleverness in 
 the dialogue, will save his own credit ; but for the credit of 
 the Haymarket, the shorter the run of The Woman in 
 Mauve the better. And even the intention of the piece is 
 
302 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 ill- defined. The author seems no more to know what to- 
 attack than how to attack it. Using the now popular 
 Americanism introduced by Mr. Boucicault, his play is 
 meant as wholesome ridicule of what are called "sensa- 
 tion" novels and "sensation" plays. But the attack is 
 made, or rather seems to be intended —for the piece is so 
 weak that no attack is really made — upon stories of absorb- 
 ing interest in which there is crime or mystery. Now that 
 really is not the object of any attack made on behalf of 
 literature. A good story cannot be the worse for taking a 
 very strong hold on attention. They are the crimes and 
 mysteries of life that stir the depths of human character 
 and bring into play all the passions. If plays and stories 
 turning with strong interest upon incidents of crime are to 
 be put down as " sensational", let us bury our Shake^peares 
 fathoms five, cry " Out upon Marlowe, Ford, Massinger, and 
 all the rest of them", and burn half the best novels in our 
 language. Only mischief is done and confusion produced 
 by following the unthinking multitude when it feels the 
 shortcoming of a certain class of novels and plays nowa- 
 days called "sensational", and ignorantly mistakes the nature 
 of the fault. Nobody can feel less mercifully than I do 
 towards some of the claptrap dramas of Mr. Boucicault, 
 and the corresponding school of fiction. Always, however, 
 the complaint should be not of their strength of incident, 
 but of their poverty of wit. The sort of " sensation" novel 
 or play against which protest cannot be too constant and 
 too strong, is that which depends wholly upon the heaping 
 of crime, mystery, and surprise, and rehes on tricks of plot 
 or stage-effect, without making any use of the story as 
 means for the subtle development of character, and without 
 any charm of wit or wisdom in the language through which 
 all is told. Dialogues full of the bitterness of common- 
 place, a threadbare narrative style that is not even gram- 
 matical, and that never once flashes into a phrase of 
 independent thought— these are the evils to be fonfrht 
 
" Sensation Plays." 303 
 
 against. The same tale of bigamy and murder that excites 
 a merely vulgar curiosity when told in the Braddonian way 
 might be exalted into an immortal work of genius by the 
 mere difference of mind through which it comes to us. 
 For example, after reading Shelley's Cenci, fancy what Miss 
 Braddon would have made of such a story. 
 
 April 22. — Drury Lane takes new honours by pro- 
 ducing Milton's Comtis as a brilliant Easter piece. The 
 stage-version used places too little reliance on the whole 
 and unadulterated text. But Cotnus, pure and simple, 
 never has been acted yet at any theatre, and the present 
 Drury Lane management has done so much well that we 
 must not ask it to be over-bold. The masque of Comus, 
 as most people know, was written by Milton at the age of 
 five-and-twenty, as an entertainment to be presented at 
 Ludlow Castle on the arrival and installation there of the 
 Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales, Ludlow 
 Castle being the Lord President's official seat. The masque 
 was to be acted by members of the family ; and the 
 fourteen or fifteen year old daughter Alice was to represent 
 the principal character. In Milton's masque she was her- 
 self simply, but by the incidents of the scene became an 
 embodiment of temperance and purity. Her two actual 
 brothers took the brothers' parts in the masque, one a boy 
 of twelve or thirteen, the other a boy of eleven or twelve. 
 The attendant spirit was acted by Milton's friend, Harry 
 Lawes, who had been commissioned to write the music, 
 and doubtless, as in the case of The Arcades, recommended 
 as writer of the words the young poet whose genius and 
 worth he knew. 
 
 Given the occasion, there was to be produced a poem 
 fitted both to it and to Milton's early devotion of his life's 
 service to God, as one who, according to that sonnet which 
 was the sacred prelude to a life throughout attuned to it, 
 resolved that he would, as he said, 
 
 " Do all as in my great taskmaster's eye.'' 
 
304 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 There was not only the young company of actors to be 
 fitted to parts suited to their age, and words suited to 
 their innocence, and the Shropshire guests to be gratified — 
 as they were, by the use of the chaste nymph of their own 
 Severn to cut the last ktiot of the story — but there was God 
 to be served by the poet in a place noted for licentious 
 revelries. Richard Baxter, who had, for a year and a half 
 immediately before the writing of this work, been living in 
 Ludlow Castle as a lad in attendance on the chaplain to 
 the Council of Wales, tells in his autobiography how the 
 chaplain only sneered at Puritans ; how there was much 
 tippling and other profanity in the castle and town, crowded 
 with officials and their servants ; how a good friend of his 
 own, who had been zealously pious, was there transformed 
 into a drunkard and a scoffer, and he believed that, had he 
 remained in Ludlow, the bad influence of the place would 
 have erased from his own mind the good impressions of his 
 father's teaching. There can be no doubt that a know- 
 ledge of this character of the court and capital of the Welsh 
 Presidency was among the materials upon which Milton 
 founded the most exquisite plea for temperance and chastity 
 that ever poet penned. 
 
 A marked feature in Milton's character was his entire 
 purity of mind. He who in his youth spoke from the lips 
 of a young maid those counsels of perfect purity, and to his 
 chaste ideal gave victory over the sensual rout, was he 
 who in his mature life and in the days of Charles the Second, 
 when the common stews were less ignoble than the English 
 Court, produced, even among a rout as sensual as the 
 Court of Comus himself, a naked Eve as the embodiment 
 of purity. 
 
 Kui/tos originally meant a licentious dancing revel. In 
 Hesiod's shield of Hercules it means the promiscuous band 
 of revellers who followed with their wilder dance and song 
 after the trained chorus of a procession. In later times 
 Comus appeared as a god of festive mirth and joy. Philo- 
 
Milton's "Comus." 305 
 
 stratus describes him as painted drunk and languid after a 
 repast, his head sunk on his breast, asleep standing, with his 
 legs crossed. And so he passed into a type for use of 
 moralists; appeared, fourteen years before Milton's poem, 
 in Ben Jonson's masque of Pleasure reconciled to Virtue, 
 and had appeared, eleven years before that, in a Latin poem 
 entitled Comus, by Henri du Puy, of Louvain, which 
 Milton had read and liked, for at least one passage in it has 
 been distinctly imitated. In Peele's Old Wives' Tale there 
 are two brothers rescuing a lost sister from the spells of an 
 enchanter. So much for what Milton had in his mind 
 when he accepted the mission to write, for the Ludlow 
 masque, poetry to the music of his friend Henry Lawes. 
 Of the poetry, as spoken on the stage, much of the true 
 spirit is retained by the care of Mrs. Charles Young, who 
 represents the Lady. Let it be said by the way that it is 
 a mistake to admit colour in her dress, which should be 
 all white, or enriched only with emblematic ermine. But 
 there is need of the force of every line in the poetry to 
 maintain in the acted masque the triumph of the spiritual 
 over the sensual. When the Court of Comus forms the 
 whole attraction in the way of spectacle, and the piece 
 appeals to the eye most strongly by brilliant pictures of 
 licentious revel with a grand displayof ballet-dancers' legs, 
 it is essential that by every word the soul of Milton should 
 be a clear-voiced interpreter of what is shown. The right 
 emphasis of the poem is weakened by every stage-altera- 
 tion ; and how must the point of the work be broken to the 
 sense when a singer, Mr. Henri Drayton, takes the place of 
 the actor who should speak the part of Comus, and dis- 
 sipates into unmeaning musical shakes those words of the 
 reveller, after the pure song of the Lady has awakened even 
 in his heart some echoes. Those words are in the highest 
 degree emphatic, and contain, more than any other single 
 passage in the poem, the key to its spiritual import. Comus 
 2 tJ 
 
307 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 says that he had often heard the charmed song of his 
 mother Circe and the Sirens — 
 
 " Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense, 
 
 And in sweet madness robbed it of itself. 
 
 But such a sacred and home-felt delight, 
 
 Such sober certainty of waking bliss, 
 
 I never heard till now." 
 
 April 22. — The late Mr. Robson's son and namesake has 
 appeared this Easter for the first time in London, at the 
 St. James's Theatre, as Ulysses, in, as burlesques go, a 
 merry burlesque of that name by Mr. Burnand. Mr. 
 Robson the younger looks young, has family likeness to his 
 father, especially in some forms of expression, and acts in 
 his father's manner very agreeably and without obtrusive 
 imitation, giving pleasure now, with promise of vigour when 
 his acting shall have ripened with the ripening of his own 
 physical powers into perfect manhood. 
 
 June 3. — There are two kinds of good acting : one is that 
 in which a true artist can pass into the nature of the person 
 represented ; and the other is that in which a performer with 
 a pleasant personality can identify the character represented 
 with himself or herself. To neither class does the new 
 singer, Mdlle. lima de Murska, belong. She has not the 
 genius that would enable her to be for the time what she 
 would appear ; but she is cumbered with enough of con- 
 ventional stage-action to prevent her from identifying her 
 part with her own natural personality. Mdlle. Adelina Patti 
 belongs to the second class, and is a delightful example of 
 it ; for her natural perceptions are so quick, her ways so 
 pleasant, as to secure, for every part that has any harmony at 
 all with her own nature, a representation more delightful than 
 can be accomplished except by the very highest efforts of 
 true genius in another way. Mdlle. Patti uses her delicious 
 voice with lively natural expression, never jerks her arms 
 while she is singing, after the manner of a marionette, but is 
 always a charming little lady giving pleasure and creating 
 
Oxenford's "Brother Sam" 307 
 
 sympathies. In a thoroughly congenial part, it is hard to 
 ■distinguish acting of this kind from the best efforts of genius. 
 Indeed, it is only by observing the range of the performer's 
 art that one can rightly appreciate its character. 
 
 June 10. — The Haymarket is well set up with a whim- 
 sical character in Brother Smn, whom Mr. Oxenford has 
 connected with a play derived from a good German writer 
 of dramatic whimsicalities, Herr Corner, director of the 
 Court Theatre, Mecklenburg-Strelitz. As the smaller 
 •adapters all live by the copying of other folks' ideas, we may 
 think, by the way, it would be a blessing to the public if 
 one or two of our burlesque-writers would add a smattering 
 ■of German to their smattering of French, and look up Herr 
 Gorner's Possenspiele and Children's Plays, which are popular 
 holiday entertainments at extravaganza time on many a 
 German stage, are meant to please the young, and do amuse 
 children infinitely more than a splutter of bad puns, enlivened 
 with airs from the street-music and idiotic dancing. And 
 they contrive, too, plenty of bright work for the scene-painter 
 and cunning effects for the machinist, besides having in their 
 incidents and dialogue an essential whimsicality that would 
 be a new thing in burlesque to the old London playgoer. 
 In Brother Sam Mr. Oxenford has dealt as he pleased with 
 a play of Gorner's and made it his own. Dramatically that 
 is not saying much, perhaps, for he has exaggerated its 
 whimsical suggestions into incoherence. 
 
 But good nonsense is a legitimate source of fun, and 
 Mr. Oxenford presents, in a play of capital nonsense, happy 
 burlesques of character in merry dialogue. If the plot were 
 less absurd it would be bad. As in good hyperbole the 
 exaggeration must surpass truth, lest, being mistaken for it, 
 the effect be simple falsehood ; so, in a burlesque upon life 
 (which this play on Brother Sam is, rather than farce or 
 comedy), where the end to be obtained is pure and simple 
 fun, apart from any other purpose, there must be a disjoint- 
 ing of cause and effect, a whimsical exhibition of irrational 
 
 U2 
 
3o8 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 for rational motives, to prevent the comical extravagance of 
 action from being in any way whatever connected with the 
 serious business of life. 
 
 July I. — At the Olympic we now have Twelfth Night and 
 Miss Terry. The delicate poetical charm in the character 
 of Viola has been acutely felt by her. All that she does 
 feel she seems, as a true actress should, to feel in every 
 nerve. Her sensitive nature speaks not only by refined ex- 
 pression in a face over which the changing emotions pass 
 visibly and swiftly, but by every gesture of the body it adds 
 eloquence to a speech in which not seldom the soul of the 
 speaker is felt passing in quick sympathy along the poet's 
 line. Thus we have from Miss Terry, with youth and all 
 natural grace and aptitude, a near approach to the embodi- 
 ment of Shakespeare's Viola. Viola's love for the Duke, to 
 whom she plays the boy page, is defined vividly, but with 
 the utmost delicacy, from her first quick turn at the sound 
 of his voice in the question "Where's Cassario?" to her 
 lightening up with pleasure in his reference to her as "this 
 boy whom somewhat I love", and her last act of fond readi- 
 ness to suffer at his hands. The spiritual charm given by 
 Miss Terry to the whole part becomes especially manifest 
 in the skilful rendering of particular lines, to which an ordi- 
 nary actor might not suppose that any particular care was to 
 be given; as that line to Olivia, "I see what you are — you 
 are too proud", and the "She loves me sure", following a 
 most charming rendering of the scene of Malvolio's deliver- 
 ing of the ring, "I left no ring with her''. Miss Terry 
 heightens the poetical illusion of the play by representing 
 both the brother and the sister whose resemblance breeds 
 perplexity. Her Sebastian is skilfully distinguished from 
 her Viola, by the more firm walk and tone of voice, the use 
 of a few simple male gestures, as the folding of the arms, 
 and by a spirited display of firmness and skill in fence that 
 contrasts with Viola's womanly fear in the charming scene 
 of the mock duel. The playfulness as well as the poetry 
 
" Twelfth Night" : Kate Terry. 309 
 
 of the drama has been delicately appreciated by Miss Kate 
 Terry; nor should one omit to note the touch of true pathos 
 which she put into Sebastian's reference to the sister whom 
 he supposes to be drowned. 
 
 Mr. G. Vincent's Malvolio is not only an admirable stage- 
 figure, in its Elizabethan costume, with the hard Quixotic 
 face over the stiff Elizabeth ruff, but it is a thoroughly suc- 
 cessful impersonation that adds much to the already high 
 credit attained by this young actor. 
 
 Miss Lydia Foote, known to be apt for serious and earnest 
 parts, who has sometimes mind in her voice and speech in 
 her face, obtains also one of her best successes in this play 
 as the light-hearted Maria. Mr. Sutar, again, as Sir Toby, 
 showed that the public has not yet seen to the end of his 
 capabilities, and so with some others of the company. Given, 
 in fact, certain necessary general conditions of fitness, and 
 no actor at the Olympic is asked or, it would seem, allowed 
 to hold by the mechanical iteration of a simple dramatic 
 formula, to creep along one narrowly-defined line to which 
 parts written for them must be servilely adapted. 
 
 August 19. — Mr. Tom Taylor's new drama of The Serf is 
 constructed on this principle with great success. It is a 
 thoroughly interesting play, having that essential unity which 
 all good English dramatists observe, little as they care for the 
 artificial unities of the French classical school ; that is to say, 
 it has one central idea, that is its soul; an idea, in this case, 
 with the strongest hold upon the feelings of an English 
 audience — resentment against tyranny. In Count Karatefif 
 Mr. G. Vincent finds opportunity for another strongly- 
 marked dramatic sketch, and skilfully represents the cruel 
 Tartar under a thin varnish of civilisation. Mr. Neville and 
 Miss Terry, as hero and heroine, make every point felt. To 
 be critical, I may say that, although the last dialogue be- 
 tween them may be held to be a sufficient justification of 
 the second title of the play, Zove Levels All, the final expla- 
 nation, that the Serf is no serf, but the noble heir whom a 
 
3IO Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 wronged serf had got hold of in his infancy and bred thus 
 an instrument of revenge, is a begging of the question, a 
 flinching from the uttermost development of the idea upon 
 which the whole drama turns. 
 
 However that may be, Mr. Tom Taylor's play is a most 
 interesting one. The plot is unhackneyed, the dialogue 
 throughout written with literary taste and skill, the emotion 
 healthy and strong, the spirit of the piece English, its whole 
 tendency wholesome. 
 
 September 23. — Mr. Jefierson's Rip Van Winkle is pre- 
 ceded by the Nan of Mrs. Mellon (Miss Woolgar) in Good 
 for Nothing; and that picture of the true-hearted, neglected 
 girl, who plays hopscotch with the street-boys, and, when the 
 woman's heart in her is touched with jealousy, breaks awk- 
 wardly out of her tattered slovenliness, familiar to London 
 eyes as are the actress and the part, is set before us in 
 a piece of acting certainly as good as the new actor's Rip 
 Van Winkle. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle is Washington Irving's, 
 set in a play that seeks dramatic effect by tasteless variations 
 from the tale as Irving told it. As the village schoolmaster 
 in Deborah was transformed for the American Leah into a 
 conventional stage-villain, so here the harmless schoolmaster,. 
 Derrick Van Bummel, is selected for the villain's part. The 
 first act is brought to a melodramatic close by Rip's wife- 
 driving her husband from her hearth into a thunderstorm.. 
 He goes out snivelling. She of course cries in vain to him 
 to return, and, as the curtain descends, plumps on the 
 ground in the orthodox melodramatic swoon. This may be 
 great improvement in the eyes of an American audience ; 
 but an English audience, with a really good actor before 
 them, would have entered, perhaps, quite as readily into the 
 original notion of Rip's wandering off for a lazy autumn 
 scramble, escaped from the labour of the farm and his wife's, 
 clamour. 
 
 In the second act we have the adventure on the moun- 
 
"Rip Van Winkle" : Jefferson. 31 1 
 
 tains with the ghost of the old discoverer of Hudson 
 River and his solemn crew of nine-pin players. Here the 
 story is closely followed, except in the poor melodramatic 
 change that substitutes for Rip's attendance on the company 
 and his sly pulls at their flagon, a formal attendance of the 
 company upon him as the drinker, and the conventional 
 " Ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! " when he drinks. The original story 
 made them absolutely mute, allowing no sound but the 
 thunder produced by the rolling of their bowls. The 
 adapter, however, having ghosts on hand, could not dis- 
 pense with the conventional effect of the " Ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 ha!" 
 
 In the third act all the delicacies of the rest of the story 
 are smothered in the garlic and onions of the melo- 
 dramatist. Yet all this latter part of it is precisely the 
 dramatic part of the original. The happy notion of making 
 the American Revolution fall within the twenty years of 
 Rip's sleep, and bringing the dazed man, who had left his 
 village as a subject of King George, back into the bustle 
 of a republican electioneering crowd for which the story 
 supplies figures already sketched, would suit the humour 
 alike of a good dramatist and a fine actor. Surely there can 
 be no actor of high mark who would not rather have his 
 Rip left on a bench, astonishing the gossips by the door of 
 Doolittle's hotel, than presented with the claptrap effects 
 of a wife who has been borrowed and improved during his 
 absence, and a magnificent collection of town lots to make 
 him happy ever after. As an actor, Mr. Jefferson marks 
 Rip's weakness of character by giving very skilfully an air 
 of picturesque and easy indolence to all his postures and 
 movements, while his good-humoured Dutch-English is 
 spoken with a quiet laziness. When, as he sits out of doors 
 by the innkeeper's table, the innkeeper's little son Hendrick 
 tells him how he means to go to sea in a whaling-ship, and 
 has promised to come home and marry Rip's little daughter 
 Meenie, and the two children kneeling at Rip's knees tell of 
 
312 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1865. 
 
 their true love, the twinkle of humour in Rip's way of listening 
 to them, as one who finds a quiet luxury in his admission to 
 communion with children's happy thoughts, and his nod to 
 them over a wine-cup with his customary toast, " Well, 
 here 's your health and your family's. May they live long 
 and be happy,'' is acted with much quiet delicacy. In the 
 scene with his wife in the cottage — the wife's part being so 
 acted by Mrs. Billington as to be one of her marked suc- 
 cesses — it is impossible to cover the defect of bad invention 
 by the dramatist. A long story about shooting at a rabbit 
 and not hitting it is very tedious fun, and it is but a coarse 
 stage-effect to make Rip drink out of a spirit-flask over his 
 wife's back while she is embracing him because he has 
 again " swored off" his evil habit. Rip was good-hearted, 
 and his faults came of his laziness. Such a situation, 
 though it may be a broad stage-effect, degrades him far too 
 low. It was necessary, it may be said, to degrade Rip in 
 this and other ways to account for his wife's turning him out 
 of doors into a thunderstorm. But it is a pity that the 
 dramatist could not deny himself that incident, and be 
 content to carry through from first to last the lazy humour 
 of the story. 
 
 In the second act, Mr. Jefferson, as Rip "Van Winkle 
 among the ghosts, acts as well as the dramatists will let 
 him. But the words put in his mouth are poor, and the 
 variations from the original story are, in a dramatic sense, 
 for the worse. Rip falls to his twenty years' sleep, and the 
 ghosts leave him. 
 
 The opening of the third act shows him at his awakening 
 with rotten clothes and long white hair and beard — an 
 exaggeration not required. The story had said that his 
 beard was grey, and grey would be, in the dramatic render- 
 ing, more truly effective. The drama in this act is at its 
 poorest, but Mr. Jeff"erson is at his best. Retaining his old 
 Dutch- English with a somewhat shriller pipe of age in its 
 tone he quietly makes the most of every opportunity of 
 
" Never too Late to Mend!' 313 
 
 representing the old man's bewilderment. His timid ap- 
 proaches to an understanding of the change he finds, his 
 faint touch of the sorrow of old love in believing his wife 
 dead, and reaction into humorous sense of relief, his 
 trembling desire and dread of news about his daughter, 
 and, in a later scene, the pathos of his appeal to her for 
 recognition, are all delicately true. It is doubtful whether, 
 in such a drama, more could be done by the best effort of 
 genius to represent the Rip Van Winkle of whom Washington 
 Irving tells. It is certain that in a play more closely in 
 accordance with the spirit of the story, Mr. Jefferson's 
 success, real as it is, would have been yet more con- 
 spicuous. 
 
 At the Princess's Theatre, Mr. Charles Reade's play of 
 Never too Late to Mend is a weak three-act piece with a 
 fourth interpolated act, during which the plot stops while 
 the audience is edified by a transformation of the stage into 
 a treadmill, and of the supernumeraries into convict gangs, 
 under the rule of a demoniacal governor, who is touched at 
 last by the Ithuriel spear of an angelic chaplain, but not 
 until a boy who has only stolen a few potatoes from a rich 
 man's cart, to keep himself from starving, dies of his prison- 
 tortures when upon the point of hanging himself in presence 
 of the audience. Upon this repulsive excrescence, which 
 does not advance the story by a syllable, the manager spent 
 his chief energies in the way of scenic eifect; for it has 
 yielded the most costly scene in the play, a perspective of 
 radiating prison-corridors seen from the centre of a model 
 prison, with practicable tiers of galleries, and iron stair- 
 cases, and cells, and gaslights. For the rest there is 
 enough scenic effect. Real water comes out of a stage- 
 pump, and there is a fine stage-picture of an Australian 
 ravine. The play is a commonplace transpontine drama in 
 plot and in language, with only a chance gleam here and 
 there of the genius that produced, in conjunction with Mr. 
 Tom Taylor, one of the best dramas of our time — Masks 
 
314 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1866. 
 
 and Faces — and to which we owe so admirable a novel as. 
 The Cloister and the Hearth. 
 
 1866, February 10. — The School for Scandal is now 
 eighty-eight years old, but it holds the stage yet with 
 the liveliness and grace of youth. Sheridan wrote it at 
 the age of five-and-twenty, and it will stand as long as- 
 there are theatres in London. For permanence of interest 
 it is indebted not to the good wit alone. For we should 
 note that the good wit is spent, not merely on a story 
 suited to the taste of its own day, or in ephemeral satire 
 of a passing folly, but in attack on a vice of society that 
 must always arise out of the imperfect lives of men. 
 No literature lasts that does not found its argument upon 
 the inner truths of life. The lightest wit, if it be true wit, 
 is durable as granite when it deals with the essentials of 
 human nature, and not with the mere accidents of passing 
 fashion. Though several of the actors have yet much to 
 learn, the play runs well enough to support the one impor- 
 tant feature in it, the good acting of Miss Herbert, who has 
 too seldom given fair-play to her genius by spending it upon 
 stuff worth the study of an artist. Her Lady Teazle, like Mrs. 
 Abington's andallthat have followed, "plays her part in all the 
 extravagant fopperies of fashion and the town with as ready 
 a grace as if she never had seen a bush or a grass-plot out 
 of Grosvenor Square" ; and in raiment of white satin she 
 looks as handsome as my lady should. But while Miss. 
 Herbert plays the lady to perfection, she colours her part 
 with a natural joyousness that separates her altogether from 
 the town-bred members of the scandalous college, and that 
 well accords with the position of the country squire's 
 daughter who has changed her figured linen gown and 
 her work upon fruits in worsted for sudden enjoyment of 
 unhmited adornment to her beauty, and a thousand new 
 amusements for her wit. The fine lady is copied to the 
 life ; but the copyist is a quick-witted, joyous, home-bred 
 woman, who delights in the new pleasure of spending, and 
 
Miss Herbert as Lady Teazle. 315 
 
 enjoys the social triumphs of the home-bred wit that had 
 found, before her marriage, no Uvelier exercises than in a 
 game of " Pope Joan" with the curate. It is here, in the 
 essentials of character, that Lady Teazle's country breeding 
 is apparent, not in the trivial accidents of an external 
 awkwardness ; for those the squire's fair daughter was toO' 
 naturally graceful and too quick-witted to find any difficulty 
 in effacing speedily, while, with models enough before her, 
 she could learn in a week to mimic all the ways of fine- 
 ladyism to her heart's content and the distraction of Sir 
 Peter. It is in the true natural gaiety, based on the in- 
 nocence of her old way of life, and in essentials of 
 character allied to it, that a good actress should make 
 Lady Teazle's home-bred character appear. Miss Herbert 
 thoroughly succeeds in doing this. There is not a 
 trace in her Lady Teazle of th.e hardness of character 
 shown by the scandalous colleagues, to whom society has 
 been a nurse, a mother, and a god since they were born. 
 When Sir Peter's tenderness and generosity towards her 
 have stirred the wife's heart in her as Joseph's treachery had 
 stirred the woman's, the natural shame, the outspoken sim- 
 plicity of truth in all that, after this, is said or done by Lady 
 Teazle, the actress has brought into complete harmony with 
 the preceding phases of her character. Miss Herbert's is a 
 womanly Lady Teazle, acted with much care and finish, 
 every word and gesture thoroughly well weighed, yet with 
 less than we are used to see of defect in the art to conceal 
 art that sometimes impairs the effect of her graceful and 
 very skilful acting. 
 
 April 7. — Miss Herbert has since appeared as Miss Hard- 
 castle in She Stoops to Conquer, and passed from that to 
 Shakespeare's Beatrice. 
 
 Mr. Westland Marston's comedy. The Favourite of For- 
 tune, is another strong move in the right direction. The 
 author has given himself pains to write a dialogue worth 
 hearing, and he has invented a plot of his own which now 
 
3i6 Journal of a London Playgoer. [1866. 
 
 and then yields charming dramatic passages, marked by un- 
 usual delicacy of contrivance. It is a curious fact that, 
 although this play was written for Mr. Sothern, Mr. Sothern's 
 own part is so far from having been "written up", or 
 seasoned with marked eccentricities, that it is even a weak 
 one ; while a part calling for a wide range of power in the 
 actress has to be intrusted to Miss Snowdon, now Mrs. 
 Chippendale, who does more with it than might have been 
 expected from her, but is unequal to the full expression of 
 strong serious emotion. Mr. Buckstone gives a very genial 
 version of a part designed with so little direct reference to 
 his own manner of acting, that it would suit Mr. Neville, of 
 the Olympic, quite as well or better. Miss Kate Saville 
 does herself credit as the heroine, but the best acting in the 
 piece is that of Miss Nelly Moore. When she represents a 
 girl with lively generosity of character assuming the mask of 
 a she-Gradgrind with business notions upon marriage, to 
 avert an offer, which she is half bound not to refuse, from a 
 visitor who is himself hoisting false colours, her playful 
 humour of strongmindedness is touched with a right sense 
 of the purest comedy. 
 
 Mr. Fechter is also, I trust, now to be claimed as a recruit 
 in the real service of our drama. His recent version oi The 
 Bride of Lammermoor skilfully and effectively followed Scott, 
 even in dialogue, and gave a sense of overruling fate, as in 
 the old Greek drama. Some changes were necessary at the 
 close, but those made were not good. And yet one ought 
 to admire the accommodating quicksand that allowed Edgar 
 to stand on it with Lucy in his arms till he had quite finished 
 his theatrical business, and then let him go suddenly down, 
 together with the curtain. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Addison, Mr., 165. 198 
 
 " Adrienne Lecouvreur," 178-80 
 
 "Aggravating Sam," 85 
 
 Alboni, Madame, 116, 117, 149 
 
 " Alcestis," go, gi 
 
 Alfien's " Ottavia," 180-82 
 
 Amateur pantomime, 9=,, g6, 117, 118 
 
 Anderson, James, 293, 294 
 
 Anderson, Wizard of the North at Covent 
 
 Garden, 110-13 ; theatre burnt, 113 
 " Arrah na Pogue," 300, 301 
 Atkinson, Miss, 215, 297 
 " Aurora Floyd," 243, 244 
 
 B. 
 
 Ball, Lewis, 215 
 
 Barnett, Moiris, 78 
 
 Barnes, Mr., 89 
 
 Barnum, 27 
 
 Barrett, Henry M., 215 
 
 Bateman Children, 27, 28 
 
 Bateman, Miss, 13, 262, 263, 299, 300 
 
 Beale, Willert, 163 
 
 " Bel Demonio," 265 
 
 Belton, Mr., 68 
 
 Belmore, Garstin, 244, 296 
 
 *' Belphegor." 128, 129 
 
 " Bengal Tiger, The," 196 
 
 Bernard, Bayle, 93, 94, 195 
 
 Bettelheim, MdUe., 276 
 
 Beverley, scenery by, 67, 234 
 
 Billington, John, 214, 312 
 
 Billington, Mrs., 213 
 
 Birnstill, Herr, 33, 37 
 
 Bishop, Sir Henry, gi 
 
 " Black Sheep," 223, 224 
 
 Bland, Mr., 50 
 
 " Bombastes Furioso" by Marionettes, 29 
 
 " Bonnie Dundee," 263, 264 
 
 " Boots at the Swan," 169, 170, 190 
 
 Bosio, Madame, 72, 73, 105-7 » death of, 
 
 197, 198 
 " Bottle Imp, The," by Marionettes, 30 
 Boucicault, Dion, 46, 87, 92, 93, 213, 214, 
 
 2ig, 240, 265, 283, 284, 300, 301 
 Brooke, G. V., 54 
 Brooks, Shirley, 212, 222 
 " Brother Sam," 307, 308 
 Brough, Robert, 205, 212, 213 
 Brough, William, 209 
 Buckingham, Leicester, 241, 242, 272 
 Buckstone, J. B., 50, 85, 94, 145, 169, 206, 
 
 221, 224, 233, 247, 316 
 
 Bufton. Eleanor, 132 
 
 " Bunkum Muller," 271, 272 
 
 Burlesque, 209 
 
 tJyron, H. J., 205, 209, 234, 282 
 
 Campden House theatnca's, 103-5 
 
 Castellan, Madame, 47 
 
 Celeste, Madame, 87, 93 150, 205, 206, 
 
 207. 2(8, 220 
 Cento, 103 
 
 *' Chimney Corner, The," 223 
 Chippendale, W. H , 127 
 Chippendale, Mrs. (Misb Snowdon), 316 
 " Christmas Carol, The," 206 
 Colas, Stel'a, 277-80, 283. 284 
 " Colleen Bawn. The," 213, 214, 234, 265 
 Collins, Wilkie, 103-5, 189 91 
 Compton, H., 69, 94, 141, 145, 169, 196, 
 
 206, 221, 222, 224 
 " Comte Ory, Le," 78, 126, 127 
 " Comus," 312-16 
 Cooke, T. K, 164, 165 
 Cooper, Miss, 59, 60 
 " Coriolanus,' 213-18 
 Covent Garden Theatre burnt down, 113 
 Coyne, J. Stirling, 94, 169, 196, 223, 224 
 Craven, H. T, , 223 
 Creswick, W., 286, 293 
 Crimean War in Christmas pieces, 88, 89 
 Cruvelli, MdUe. Sophie, 73, 75, 76, 97, 
 
 211 
 Csillag, Mdlle., 2it, 212 
 Cushman, Miss, 68, 69 
 Cuthbert, Miss, 87 
 " Cymbeline," 286, 287, 292-94 
 
 D. 
 
 " Dark Cloud, The," 241 
 
 " David Garrick," 281, 282 
 
 " Dead Heart, The," 203-5 
 
 " Deborah," 249-55 
 
 Denk, Herr, 33 
 
 " Desden, El, con el Desden,"265 71 
 
 Devrient, Emil. 34, 35, 37, 38-41, 42. 43 
 
 Dickens, Charles, acts in "The Light- 
 house," 103-5 
 
 Dillon, Charles, 128, 129 
 
 " Donna Diana^" 265-71 
 
 Drayton, Henri, 305 
 
 Drew, John, 221 
 
 " Duke's Motto, The," 237-9, 264 
 
 "Dundreary," 233; " Married and Done 
 for," 282 
 
3i8 
 
 Index. 
 
 "*' Effie Deans," 240, 245 
 
 " E^mont," Goethe's, 31-5 
 
 "Ehsabetta Regina d'Inghilterra/' 184, 
 
 185 
 Emden, Mr., 162 
 Emden, Mrs., 189, 212 
 Emeryj Samuel A., 54, 135 
 ■** Emilia Galotti," Lessing^s, 43 
 
 Falconer, Edmund, 2J3, 214, 234, 263, 
 
 264, 271, 272 
 Farren (the elder), his Farewell, 108 
 Farren, William, 145 
 Faucit, Helen, 286, 287, 292-4, 289-92, 
 
 394-6 
 Faure, M., 257 
 " Faust," Goethe's, 44 ; Spohr's opera of, 
 
 46, 47 ; Gounod's opera of, 255-7 
 *' Favourite of Fortune, The," 315, 316 
 *' Fazio," Milman's, in Italian, 152-5 
 Fechter, Charles A-, 11, 219, 220, 221, 
 
 222, 2?3, 227-32, 235, 237, 239, 265, 316 
 Fenton, C, 167 
 " Fidelio," Beethoven's, 73, 97, 210-12, 
 
 282, 283 
 Fielding Club Amateur Pantomime, 95, 
 
 96, 117, ii8 
 Fisher, David, 198, 204 
 ■" Fool's Revenge, The," 200-2 
 Foote, Lydia, 309 
 Formes, Herr, 47 
 Froitzheim, Frau, 34 
 
 G. 
 'Garden, Mr., 63, 222 
 
 Gassier, M., 257 
 
 German Reed, Mr. and Mrs., 97 
 ■Glyn, Miss, 109 
 
 Gordon, Walter, 195 
 
 Gougenheim, Miss, 219, 220 
 
 Gracioso, the Spanish, 268, 269 
 
 Graziani, Signor, 99 
 'Grisi, Giulia, 76, 77, 103 
 
 Gunz, Dr., 283 
 
 *'Guy Mannering," 68, 69 
 
 H. 
 
 " Hamlet," 41, 42 
 
 *' Harlequin Gujr Fawkes,"95, 96 
 
 Harley, John Pritt, 132 
 
 Harris, Augustus (the elder), 198 
 
 Hayden, Miss Florence, 220 
 
 Heath, Miss, 220 
 
 Heraud, Miss Edith, 83 
 
 Herbert, Miss Louisa, 194, 242, 314, 315 
 
 '" Hidden Hand, The," 287, 288 
 
 Horton, Priscilla, 97 
 
 Howe, Henry H, 69, 171 
 
 Hudspeth, Miss, 296 
 
 Hughes, Fanny, 63, 280 
 
 ** Hunchback, The," 299, 300 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 170, 171 
 
 " Hypocrite, The," 191-93 
 
 lima di Murska, MdJle., 306 
 " Inconstant, The," 127, 128 
 " Ivy Hall", 199 
 
 J. 
 
 " Janet Pride,*' 92, 93 
 Jefferson, Joseph, 310-13 
 Jones, Avonia, 236 
 " Jones the Avenger," 137 
 "Josepli Chavigny," 150 
 
 K. 
 " Kabale und Liebe," 35-38 
 Kean, Charles, 30, 31, 141-44, 163, 172 
 Kean, Mrs. Charles, 31, 143, 144, 173 
 Keeley, Robert, 62, 63, 69, 71, 86, 87, 93, 
 
 169, 206, 207, 218, 220 
 Keeley, Mrs., 85, 87, 88, 94,^ 203, 205, 
 
 207, 234 
 Keeley, Miss Mary, 195 
 Keeley, Miss Louisa, 205 
 Kemble, Fanny, 91, 92 
 " King Henry IV, Part 2," 284, 285 
 " King John," 30, 31 
 *' King Lear," 225-27 
 Knowles, J. Sheridan, 236. 237 
 Kuhn, Herr, 34, 37, 42, 43, 44 
 
 L. 
 
 Lablache, Signor, 77, 102, 105, 107 
 
 Lacy, Walter, 220, 275, 256 
 
 " Lady Ai-dley's Secret," 243, 245 
 
 Lambert, Mr., 50 
 
 " Leading Strings," 165 
 
 " Leah," 262, 263 
 
 Leclercq, Rosa, 261 
 
 I-emaitre, Frederic, 128 
 
 Lemon, Mark, 85, 86 
 
 " Leon of the Iron Mask," 93, 94 
 
 '*L'Etoiledu Nord," 104-7 
 
 Lewis, Mr., 67 
 
 " Lighthouse, The," 103-5, 162, 163 
 
 Lindus, Mr., 236 
 
 " Locandiera, La," 125 
 
 "London Assurance," 190, 207 
 
 *' Louis XI," 171, 172 
 
 " Lovers' Amazements," 170, 171 
 
 "Love's Labour's Lost," 165-67 
 
 M. 
 " jNIacbeth," 288-92 
 " Majoratserbe, Der," 38-41 
 " Man of the World, The," 208 
 "Manfred," 261, 263 
 '* Marble Heart, The," 74, 75 
 Mario, Signor, 75, 102, 185, 186 
 Marionettes, 28, 29 
 Marston, Henry, 132, 167, 236 
 Marston, Mrs., 192, 215, 280, 284 
 Marston, Westfand, 235, 236, 265-71, 315, 
 
 316 
 " Masks and Faces," 47-51 
 " Master Passion, The, 202, 203 
 
Index. 
 
 319 
 
 Mathews, Charles, 61, 62, 63, 86, 112, 196, 
 
 206 
 Mathews, Mrs. Charles, ig6, 197 
 Matthews, Frank. 61, 62, 245 
 *' Matilda di Shabran," 71, 72 
 *' Medea" (burlesque), 135 
 Mellon, Mrs. (Miss Woolgar), 87, 88, 195, 
 
 206, 213 
 ■" Merchant of Venice, The," 173, 174 
 ** Merry Widow, The," 241, 242 
 "Middleman, The," 128 
 " Midsummer Night's Dream, The," 56- 
 
 61, gi, 92, i32--'5 
 ^'Mind your own Business," 85, 86 
 Miolan-Carvalho, Mdme., 256-58 
 ""Monastery of St. Just, The," 283, 284 
 Mont Blanc, Albert Smith's, 65, 66 
 Montgomery, Walter, 275. 276 
 Moore, Miss Nelly, 281, 284, 316 
 Morton, J. Maddison, SOj 172 
 *' Much Ado about Notmng," 171 
 Murdoch, Mr.^ 127, 128 
 Murray, Dommick, 282, 284 
 Murray, Leigh, 49, 50, 194 
 *' My Poll and my Partner Joe," 164, 165 
 
 N. 
 *' Never too Late to Mend," 313 
 Neville, Henry, 219, 280, 309 
 Neville, J., 296 
 
 Ney, Mdlle. Jenny, 97, 102. 211 
 Nicolai's " Lustigen Weiber von Wind- 
 sor," 276 
 ^' Night and Morning," 271, 272 
 " Nine Points of the Law," ig8 
 *' Nitocris," 109 
 
 O. 
 
 *' Octoroon, The," 234 
 
 Oliver, Miss, 236 
 
 "Once upon a Time there were Two 
 
 Kings," 66, 67 
 ** Original" pUys, 258-60 
 *' Othello," 227-32, 235 
 "Our American Cousin,'' 233 
 Oxenford, John, 22, 193, 222, 307 
 
 P. 
 
 ■*' Pantins de Violette, Les," 150 
 
 Pantomime, 68, 69, 87-go, 95, g6, no, in 
 
 Patti, Adelina, 306 
 
 *' Peep o' Day," 234 
 
 "Pericles," 78-84 
 
 " Phfedre," Ristori in, 175-77 
 
 Phelps, Samuel, 7, 13, 56-61, 78-84, 135- 
 
 40, 166, 167, 188, r8g, 191, 192,201, 202, 
 
 208, 215-18, 225-27, 261, 274, 275, 284, 
 
 285, 286, 288, 289, 296-g8 
 Phillips, Watts, 272, 301 
 Piccolomini, Mdlle., ii4*i6, iig, 120, 125, 
 
 126, 151, 155-57 
 *' Pierre the Foundling, 87-g 
 " Pilot, The," 164 
 Planchi^, J. R., 66, 67, go, igg, 200 
 
 " Porter's Knot, The," 193 95 
 "Provoked Husband, The,'^ 188, r8 
 Punning, 247, 248 
 
 Queen Victoria and the actress, 64 65 
 
 Rachel, Mdme., 108, 177 
 
 " Railway Belle, The," 85 
 
 Reade, Charles, 47-50, 69-71, 313, 314 
 
 " Retribution," 113 
 
 Reynolds, Miss, 85, 141, 145, ig6 
 
 " Richard II," 141-44 
 
 "Richard HI," 27 
 
 Ristori, Mdme., 121-24, 125,152-55, 157- 
 62, 175-77, 17^ ^°' 180-82, 183-85, 249 55 
 
 '' Rip Van Wmkle," 310-13 
 
 "Robbers,'' Schiller's, 44, 45 
 
 Robertson, T. W., 281 
 
 Robinson, F. , 167 
 
 Robson, Frederick, 51, 52, go, 135, 137, 
 145, 146, 162, 163, 169, 170. 172, i8g- 
 gi, igs-gs, 205, 206, 207, 208, 222, 223, 
 (reappeared after illjiess) 232, 233, 
 {died March 12, 1864, aged ^■^) 
 
 Robson, F., the younger, 306 
 
 Rogers, James, 85 
 
 Ronconi, Signor, 47, 73, 74, 146-48, 151, 
 152, 185, 186, 187 
 
 " Rosmunda," Alfieri's, 121-24 
 
 Rossi, Signor, 125 
 
 Rouse, John, 207 
 
 " Ruy Bias," 220, 221 
 
 Ryder, John, 202, 203 
 
 S. 
 Saville, Miss Kate, 220, 316 
 Saxon, Miss Kate, 215 
 Schafer, Fraulein, 37 
 '* School for Scandal, The," 513-15 
 Schrader, Herr, 37, 38 
 "Scrap of Paper, A," 224 
 " Sea and Land, " 85 
 " Secret Agent, The," g4 
 Sedgwick, Amy, i6g, 171, 220, 236 
 Selby, Mr., 85, g3 
 " Sensation" drama, 301-3 
 " Serf, The," 309, 310 
 " Sergeant's Wife, The." 206, 207 
 " Sheep in Wolf's Clothing, A," 140, 141 
 Simms, Henrietta, 195, 300 
 Sketchley, Arthur, 241 
 Slous, Mr , 282 
 Smith, Albert, 65, 66 
 Smith, E. T., 54-6 
 Smith, C, 6g 
 Sothern, Edward A., 233, 234, 271, 272, 
 
 280-82, 316 
 Spicer, Henry, 90 
 Spohr, Dr., 46, 47 
 " Still Waters Run Deep,'' 135 
 Stirling, Mrs., 50, 53, 54, 85, 141, 165, 
 
320 
 
 Index, 
 
 Stirling, Arthur, 241 
 
 Stolte, Frau. 34 
 
 " Streets of London, The," 283, 284 
 
 Sutar, Mr., 309 
 
 T. 
 
 Tagliafico, Signer, 99 , 
 
 Talfourd, F., 209 
 
 Tamberlik, Signor, 47, 73, iot, 102 
 
 Tamburini, Signor, 103 
 
 "Taming of the Shrew," 135-37, 280 
 
 *'Tartuffe " 195, 196 
 
 Taylor, Tom, 22, 47-50, 61, 62, 69-71, 
 135, 140, 141, 167-69, 198, 200-2, 206, 
 212, 2i8, 221, 258, 282, 309, 310 
 
 Terry, Miss Kate, 284, 308, 309 
 
 Thompson, Lydia, 69. 89 
 
 " Tide of Time, The,'* 195 
 
 " Timon of Athens " 129-32 
 
 Titiens, Mdme., 173, 276, 283 
 
 Toole, J. L., 206, 222 
 
 "Traviata," 114-16, 126 
 
 Troughton, Adolphus, 165 
 
 " Trovatore," 97-102, 113 
 
 "Trustee, The, "84 
 
 " Two Loves and a Life," 69-71 
 
 U. 
 " Unequal Match, The," 167-69 
 " Up at the Hills," 220 
 
 V. 
 "Vampire, The," 45, 46 
 Vandenhoff, Miss, 90, 91 
 Vestris, Madame, 67 
 Vezin, Herman, 215, 217, 236, 269, 270 
 Vezin, Mrs. (formerly Mrs. Charles 
 
 Young), 167, 188, 189. 192, 284, 305 
 Viardot, Madame Garcia, 76, 100-2 
 
 Vincent, G., 309 
 
 Vining, George, 135, 194, 236, 238, 239. 
 269, 280, 283 
 
 W. 
 
 Wagner, Mdlle. Johanna, 118, 124, 125 
 
 Wallack, Mr. and Mrs., 94 
 
 Warner, Mrs., 63, 64 
 
 Webster, Benjamin, 47-50, 51, ?5, 93,, 
 
 150, 195, 214, 243, 244 
 "Wife's Portrait, The, 235 
 Wigan, Alfred, 31,52,53, 54, 84, 113,114, 
 
 ^35i 162, 195. 2ig, 220, 223, 224 2'>4 
 Wigan, Mrs. Alired, 196, 220, 224. 234 
 Wigan, Horace, 195 208, 212, 287 
 Willcins, Mrs., 196, 220 
 Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Barney, 128 
 Williams, Mr., 167 
 Wingfield, Hon. Lewis, 6, 7 
 " Wives as they Were, and Maids as they 
 
 Are," 137 
 "Woman in Mauve, The," 30T, 302 
 Woolgar, Miss (Mrs. Mellon), 87, 88, 
 
 195, 206, 213 
 Wright, Mr., 165 
 Wyndham, Miss, 85 
 
 " Yellow Dwarf, The," 90 
 
 Young, Charles, 192 
 
 Young, Mrs. Charles (afterwards Mrs. 
 
 Herman Vezin), 167, 188, i8g, 192,284, 
 
 305 
 " Young Couple," Scribe's, the Bateman 
 
 Children in, 27, 28 
 
 Z. 
 
 " Zampa," 187 
 
 Zerr, Malle. Anna, 47 
 
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