It includes a fox-hunting Admiral, played, or rather worked, with great effect by Bartley;-a bluff and blundering boatswain, which Fawcett acted to the life, that is to say, somewhat disagreeably ;—a person wearing a white hat and pea-green pantaloons, things always enough to make the sight of Mr. Wrench pleasant; a suppositious spinster (Mrs. Davenport), who turns out to be the parent of one of the little offsprings,' her brother the Admiral being similarly situated as to the other; and finally, the offsprings' themselves, played (as aforesaid) by Miss Goward and Mr. Keeley, and about whom there is a good deal of ingenious equivoque which touches upon the extreme edge where such matters are, now-a-days, so apt to fall over. They pretty nearly did so on the above occasion, which has, no doubt, induced Mr. Peake to make the proper sacrifices to the suspicious delicacy of some people's ears.' KING'S THEATRE. Don Giovanni was played at this theatre on Thursday for the benefit of Madame Caradori, in which Mademoiselle Sontag sustained the part of Donna Anna with great truth and effect. We We said something lately on the company at the holiday theatres : we have something to say on the company at the Opera. have little hesitation in stating (we speak of the pit) that in its way it is quite as bad: from boisterous rudeness and familiarity it rises into distance and superciliousness. If for instance at the Surrey or the Coburg you see two fellows quarrelling which is the master and which is the man, at the King's Theatre you hear an elegant discourse on the higher and the lower orders.' A critic at CoventGarden or Drury-Lane thinks Sadler's Wells or the East London low: a critic of the self-same stamp, but one of softer phrase, pronounces the condemnation of the drama in good set terms as altogether exploded in the fashionable circles, and as flourishing most in our manufacturing towns and the semi-barbarous states of North America. You hear another take up the lamentable theme of an interval in the succession of regular Opera-singers, as if it were a pause in nature; and when notwithstanding he has heard Braham sing very well in this house,' repeating the words as if the atmosphere at the Haymarket wafted other sounds than common air, and music were a geographical distinction. Thus it is that an Englishman is always pinning his faith on places and persons; and that he cannot arrive (for the soul of him, let him be taught and trammelled how he will) at the contemplation of an abstract idea: and yet the booby talks of refinement. He has no conception of anything but from the situation where he finds it; or the figure it makes in the eyes of some one as wise as himself; or from its being a foil to some defect in others. You hear none of this gabble at the Theatre Français, or the Italian Opera in Paris, about those exploded authors Racine and Molière, or the low buffoonery of the Theatre des Varietés, because they understand or relish both: we, unfortunately, who understand and relish neither, are obliged to create an artificial admiration of what is exotic out of our contempt for what is native, and pamper our pretensions to refinement by constantly dwelling on the vulgarity of the lower orders. Delightful it is to hear the Frenchwomen speaking of the vulgar Englishwomen' in a lump, as these same Englishwomen speak of all the rest of their country-women! In France, to laugh and weep (at least with the comic or the tragic Muse) is not held vulgar. All wit is not confined to a shake of the toe, nor all sense to the squall of an Opera-singer, though they dance and give concerts as well as we. But in England our object is not the pursuit of pleasure, but to run away from the pleasures of others; and when a taste for the drama or anything else becomes a little common, we grow sulky and insensible by way of being spiritual and refined. We see no other refinement in the case, unless the getting rid of thought and feeling is a proof of refinement; and the figurantes at the Opera are an intermediate link, a soft imperceptible gradation, between the grossness of human passion and the absence of all human sympathy. Do the upper classes speak in recitative? Do they, in answer to a common question, vault into the air? Perhaps a Noble Duke might make one of his speeches intelligible by singing it, or solve the difficulties of the Corn question by calling out the Lord Chancellor to dance a minuet with him! We import Opera-singers, dancers, kings! Liberal land! That knows its own deficiencies in what is refined and elevated! Happy, that it finds others so ready to oblige it! All that they get from us, is hard blows or hard cash: all that we get from them, is politeness and luxury! In a word the question comes to this-Are the English an essentially vulgar people or not? If all that they have of their own is vulgar and unworthy of the notice of the upper classes, then the unavoidable inference is that the upper classes themselves are unworthy to see anything better, and are the most vulgar, fashionable audience in Europe. If we have the least possible capacity for the fine arts, namely, dancing, music, painting, then we must be, in spite of letterspatent of nobility, or a box at the opera, or a chapeau-bras, or an opera-glass, the worst possible judges of them; and if we would be anything at all, must set up for something else. Indeed, the effects are plain enough. There is that little Brocard; she was at one time a model of voluptuous, languishing grace; but it was thrown away upon the higher orders, and she now does nothing but walk on the tips of her toes. The little trifler, she that we have praised so often! We are after all in such matters a Bartlemy-fair audience or for a tumbler's show! Is Madame Pasta a favourite with the great vulgar? Not in the least. They hear her fame, but not her. What piteous, vacant aspects in the fine gentleman in the pit the first night of Mademoiselle Sontag's appearance! And what would they not have given (before committing themselves beyond an applause which might be construed into a good-natured encouragement) to know what the newspapers would say the next day! What then is the amount of this exclusive preference and fastidious superiority of fashionable taste? Mere arrogance and affectation. Look at the men in the pit. Are they in raptures with the ballet or the music? They are solely occupied in thinking how they themselves look, whether their coat is of the right cut, their cravat properly tied, and whether their next neighbour is good enough for them to speak to. Each opera-beau ought to have a glass-case over him to keep him within a certain precise sphere of dandy repulsiveness and self-importance. In an O. P. row you are in danger of being knocked down in the still-life of the Opera-house, every one seems in fear of touching his neighbour's elbow. The disagreeable either in thought or action is inseparable from our fogs and sea-coal fires. Look at the women in the boxes. Are they at their ease? Or do they not keep one fixed attitude, or else loll, and laugh, and stare without meaning? The great thing 's not to seem to take an interest; and this is not difficult, where none is felt. If to paint, to dress, to intrigue, and be insensible, is the height of refinement, then the women in the lobbies are even more refined than they. Do we then subscribe to this total disqualification of the English character? No: we have hearts and heads for other things besides the mechanism of the senses. We have books, which we send through the heart of all Europe; but our people of fashion and our parade of gentility are the laughing-stock of the world. One service which the work on Lord Byron and his Contemporaries has done the public, one offence it has given to the insolent few, is that it shews that even the strongest minds are not exempt from the shallowness and pedantry of this kind of jargon. The Noble Poet somewhere says that he and Tom Moore wrote well, because he himself from birth, and Mr. Moore from circumstances (circumstances indeed!) moved in the fashionable world. If this were all, we should have some thousands of fine geniuses come out every year, 'the mob of gentlemen who write with ease!' Why, instead of opening the casket to examine the contents, are we to be always looking at the outside? Or why, having found a jewel in it, persist that the wrapper was coarse brown paper? When we hear all the inhabitants of this great country whose names are not inscribed in the Red Book, or who are not crammed into the stifling, glittering atmosphere of the King's Theatre, stigmatised with the sweeping epithet of the lower orders,' our patience is a little out at elbows, and the answer, we fear, will not come from the pen alone! What is it that my Lord-Duke brings with him from the Continent-that he shews to his fellow-travellers as a precious curiosity-that he folds up and unfolds with such care? Is it a cameo, a drawing by Raphael, a bit of Claude? It is a copy of the Great Tun of Heidelberg! When did the polite world think it allowable for the last time to throng to the English theatre in crowds and with their expectations excited to the utmost? To see young Mr. Kean, a boy just come from Eton (classical reminiscence!) in the part of Norval! Or to see the bottle-conjuror, or a thing born with a crown on its head, or any other rare and striking novelty! Spare us, man of fashion, in the name of refinement! : THE BEGGARS' OPERA [May 11, 1828. COVENT-GARDEN. The Examiner.] ON Tuesday, the Beggars' Opera was acted here; or rather, half the Beggars' Opera to half a house. This is as it should be: if the Managers start and shrug up their shoulders at one half of a play, the public will shrink from the other. It is always wrong to cry stale fish. We suspect some clerical critic, some Jeremy Collier of the Times, has had a hand in this: what have these reverend divines to do with profane stage-plays, any more than poets and novelists with writing lay-sermons? Everything in our day is turned topsyturvy nothing prevails but vanity, chaotic vanity.' The consequence of this sort of slur and neglect thrown upon the piece is, that it is indifferently acted. There is not, in the expressive green-room phrase, a hand in the house' and without that, the performer has no heart to proceed. A player can no more act with spirit unless he sees the reflection of his excellences in the looks and satisfaction of the audience, than a fine lady can dress without a looking-glass. He makes a hit and it fails of effect; he is therefore thrown out, and the next time he does wrong or he does nothing. Filch (Meadows) picks a pocket as if he was afraid of being detected by the pit: Miss Kelly is shocked at the part of Lucy, and flounces and elbows through it as if she wished to get out of it, putting a negative on an encore that is likely to detain her five minutes longer in Newgate: Miss Stephens (the charming Polly) is frightened at the interest she might inspire, and is loth to waste her sweetness on a blackguard air the Captain 'And when the date of Nock was out, That's pretty However, the Beggars' Opera has run a century. well. Oh George Colman the Younger, Messrs. Reynolds and Morton, how will you rejoice, could you lift up your heads a hundred years hence, and see a five-act play of yours cut down to a one-act farce! It is not that there are not plenty of rogues and pickpockets at present; but the Muse is averse to look that way; the imagination has taken a higher flight; wit and humour do not flow in that dirty channel, picking the grains of gold out of it. Instead of descending, we aspire; and the age has a sublime front given to it to contemplate the heaven of drawing-rooms and the milky-way of fashion. You are asked if you like Fielding, as if it were a statuteable offence; and it was justly observed the other day in a comparison between De Vere and Count Fathom, that in a refined period like ours, a rogue aims at nothing short of being Prime-Minister! In a word, the French Revolution has spoiled all, like a great stone thrown into a well with hollow and rueful rumble,' and left no two ideas in the public mind but those of high and low. The jealousy of gentility, the horror of being thought vulgar, has put an end to the harmless double-entendre of wit and humour; and the glancing lights and shades of life (nothing without each other) are sunk into the dull night of insipidity and affectation. So be it, and so it will be! Yet we have heard |