ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.

THE artificial Comedy, or Comedy of man- | of reality, so much as to confirm our expeners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve rience of it; to make assurance double, and and Farquhar show their heads once in seven take a bond of fate. We must live our toilyears only, to be exploded and put down some lives twice over, as it was the mournful instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the it for a few wild speeches, an occasional shades. All that neutral ground of character, licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. which stood between vice and virtue; or The business of their dramatic characters which in fact was indifferent to neither, will not stand the moral test. We screw where neither properly was called in queseverything up to that. Idle gallantry in a tion; that happy breathing-plaee from the fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an burthen of a perpetual moral questioningevening, startles us in the same way as the the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted alarming indications of profligacy in a son casuistry is broken up and disfranchised, or ward in real life should startle a parent as injurious to the interests of society. The or guardian. We have no such middle privileges of the place are taken away by emotions as dramatic interests left. We see law. We dare not dally with images, or a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs two hours' duration, and of no after conse- at shadows. We dread infection from the quence, with the severe eyes which inspect scenic representation of disorder, and fear a real vices with their bearings upon two painted pustule. In our anxiety that our worlds. We are spectators to a plot or morality should not take cold, we wrap it intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of up in a great blanket surtout of precaution strict morality), and take it all for truth. against the breeze and sunshine. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis persona, his peers. We have been spoiled with-not sentimental comedy

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts, — but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions - to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me

-Secret shades
Of woody Ida's inmost grove,

While yet there was no fear of Jove.

but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, the same as in life, with an interest in what is I come back to my cage and my restraint going on so hearty and substantial, that we the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear cannot afford our moral judgment, in its my shackles more contentedly for having deepest and most vital results, to compromise respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. or slumber for a moment. What is there I do not know how it is with others, but I transacting, by no modification is made to feel the better always for the perusal of one affect us in any other manner than the same of Congreve's-nay, why should I not add events or characters would do in our relation- even of Wycherly's-comedies. I am the ships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns gayer at least for it; and I could never to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, connect those sports of a witty fancy in any like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure shape with any result to be drawn from

1

them none.

them to imitation in real life. They are a moral light, I will call it, rather than by
world of themselves almost as much as fairy- the ugly name of palpable darkness, over
land. Take one of their characters, male or his creations; and his shadows flit before
female (with few exceptions they are alike), you without distinction or preference. Had
and place it in a modern play, and my he introduced a good character, a single
virtuous indignation shall rise against the gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the
profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of judgment to actual life and actual duties,
the pit could desire; because in a modern the impertinent Goshen would have only
play I am to judge of the right and the lighted to the discovery of deformities,
wrong. The standard of police is the measure which now are none, because we think
of political justice. The atmosphere will
blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into Translated into real life, the characters of
a moral world, where it has no business, his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are
from which it must needs fall headlong; as profligates and strumpets, the business of
dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a their brief existence, the undivided pursuit
Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered of lawless gallantry. No other spring of
unawares into the sphere of one of his Good action, or possible motive of conduct, is re-
Men, or Angels. But in its own world do cognised; principles which, universally acted
we feel the creature is so very bad? - The upon, must reduce this frame of things to a
Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants chaos. But we do them wrong in so trans-
and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own lating them. No such effects are produced,
sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in in their world. When we are among them,
fact they do not appeal to it at all. They we are amongst a chaotic people. We are
seem engaged in their proper element. They
break through no laws, or conscientious
restraints. They know of none. They have
got out of Christendom into the land-what
shall I call it? —of cuckoldry-the Utopia
of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the
manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a
speculative scene of things, which has no
reference whatever to the world that is. No
good person can be justly offended as a
spectator, because no good person suffers on
the stage. Judged morally, every character
in these plays-the few exceptions only are
mistakes — is alike essentially vain and worth-
less. The great art of Congreve is especially
shown in this, that he has entirely excluded
from his scenes—some little generosities in
the part of Angelica perhaps excepted - not
only anything like a faultless character, but
any pretensions to goodness or good feelings
whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly,
or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as
the design (if design) was bold. I used to
wonder at the strange power which his Way
of the World in particular possesses of
interesting you all along in the pursuits of
characters, for whom you absolutely care
nothing for you neither hate nor love his
personages-and I think it is owing to this
very indifference for any, that you endure
the whole. He has spread a privation of

not to judge them by our usages. No re-
verend institutions are insulted by their pro-
ceedings- for they have none among them.
No peace of families is violated-for no
family ties exist among them. No purity of
the marriage bed is stained
for none is sup-
posed to have a being. No deep affections
are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are
snapped asunder-for affection's depth and
wedded faith are not of the growth of that
soil. There is neither right nor wrong,
gratitude or its opposite, claim or duty,
paternity or sonship. Of what consequence
is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned
about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit
steal away Miss Martha; or who is the
father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's
children?

The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our COXcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.

Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some alloys of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice-to express it in a word the downright acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness-the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages, - like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure: you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.

--

and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Churchyard memory (an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,— and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be despised, finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod, -taking it in like honey and butter, with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower? John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry—or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate-acquit or condemn-censure or pity-exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain— no compromise his first appearance must shock and give horror-his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene-for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate

A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealise,

ends, but his brother's professions of a good Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) rest of the characters, with very slight exmust be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage, - he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury· a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villanous seducer Joseph. To realise him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree and Sir Benjaminthose poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your mirth-must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realisation into asps or amphisbænas; and Mrs. Candour-O! frightful! - become a hooded serpent. Oh! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal-in those two characters; and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part-would forego the true scenic delight-the escape from life-the oblivion of consequences the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection - those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world to sit instead at one of our modern plays to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals - dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be-and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes generously given away that cost the author nothing?

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original

ceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-because none understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him- the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet-the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard - disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors - but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy - politic savings, and fetches of the breath — husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist - rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance,-the "lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy.

ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN.

Nor many nights ago, I had come home | and he alone, literally makes faces: applied from seeing this extraordinary performer in to any other person, the phrase is a mere Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do:

-There the antic sate
Mocking our state-

his queer visnomy-his bewildering costume -all the strange things which he had raked together his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket-Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics-O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary-till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away.

But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium-all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them† when I awoke! A season or two since, there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety, the latter would not fall far short of the former.

figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river-horse; or come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.

I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry-in old Dornton - diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Mnnden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end, with himself.

Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his own shadow-" SESSA”. as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston - where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects? A table or a joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says There is one face of Farley, one face of Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston; the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles but Munden has none that you can properly what it touches. His pots and his ladles are pin down, and call his. When you think he as grand and primal as the seething-pots and has exhausted his battery of looks, in unac- hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of countable warfare with your gravity, sud- butter, contemplated by him amounts to a denly he sprouts out an entirely new set of Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutfeatures, like Hydra. He is not one, but ton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, legion; not so much a comedian, as a com- amid the common-place materials of life, like pany. If his name could be multiplied like primeval man with the sun and stars about his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, him.