epics and reviews from his brow like dew-drops from the lion's mane,' smile a comedy that should point the nice gradations from the city to the court Fine by degrees, and beautifully less,' and make it for ever impossible for Cheapside to pass Temple-bar or Russell-square to step into the Regent's Park? We understand, indeed, that Mr. Colburn has a plan in contemplation to remedy all this, and that we may look forward to the dawn of a new era in literature, through the happy idea which the little bookselling Buonaparte has conceived of establishing an inviolable Concordat between the world of genius and fashion. The proposal is to buy up the manuscripts of all authors by profession, to lock them in a drawer, so as to put the whole corps of Garretteers and Grub street writers on the shelf, and leave the door open to none but persons of quality and amateurs, lords, ladies, and hangers-on of the great. The scheme has in a great measure succeeded in the periodical department, and only requires a little management to be extended to the stage. What an air already breathes from the New Parnassus! What a light breaks over DruryLane and Covent-Garden! What delicacy, what discrimination, what refinement of sentiment! What halycon days! What peaceable productions! There will be no grossness, no violence, no political allusions or party spite! The best understanding will subsist between Government and men of letters, nor will there be any occasion for a Dramatic Censor, when Ministers of State furnish the plot, and Peeresses in their own right suggest the last corrections to the dialogue. There is no doubt the taste for the drama will be revived by means of such an arrangement-people of fashion will go to see what people of fashion write the manners of high life will be reflected on the stage as in the mirrors at each end of the dress circle "They best can paint them who have known them most;' the hireling crew will withdraw to hide themselves in a garret or a jail-the pit will wonder-the galleries be silent or shut up--Lord Porchester's tragedy will be crowned with bays, Lord Morpeth's transferred from the closet to the stage-Mr. Moore, by particular desire of several persons of distinction, will try his hand at another Blue-Stocking affair-and the Sphynx, the Athenæum, the Argus (a new evening), and the Aurora (a new morning paper), which Mr. Buckingham will by that time have set up on the same independent principles of voluntary contribution, will applaud to the skies the change which Mr Colburn's spirit and genius will have brought like a perfect paradise upon earth. It is whispered that a certain Duke He at has got through the first act of a piece, called The Deaf and Dumb Politician,' but dreads the vulgar composition of the public taste:nay, who knows but the coast being cleared of plebeian scribblers and the rabble of competitors, Majesty itself might not take the field, the Lady Godiva of the scene, in a night-gown and slippers, with a grand romantic interlude called The Prince and the Pretender, or the Year 1745'-with Mr O— holding the glass-door in Burlington street for three days together in his hand, and Mr. C-p-b-ll to officiate as Peeping Tom-Oh! dearest Ophelia, we are ill at these numbers: but neither Ups and Downs nor Carron-Side suggested anything better. Mr. Liston in the first played a city fortune-hunter, who pays his addresses to, who jilts, and is jilted by three mistresses in succession, to whom he is introduced by Jack Pointer (Jones), his pretensions rising with his fortune, and with whom he is confronted and exposed without much effect in the last act. first aspires no higher than to Kitty Corderoy, a tradesman's daughter; but having twenty thousand pounds left him, he contrives to cut with her, to her great joy, she being secretly in love with Mr. Christopher Higgins (Russell), her father's apprentice, a person by no means approved by her mother Mrs. Corderoy (Mrs. C. Jones), because he himself is a little sneaking chap,' and his father a tailor-as if tailors were not in the order of nature or of civil society. Our hero, that is, Mr. Felix Mudberry, next offers himself, with a large bunch of flowers and a suit of clothes picked up on the way at the Readymade Depôt, to Miss Amelia Mammonton (the charming Miss Ellen Tree), a banker's sister, who is in love with Earl Delamere (Mr. Hooper), love and romantic sentiment, according to the situation or rank in which it is found, aiming at still greater and more airy heights. She laughs at him and his delicate attentions' (as she well may)—but being led to suppose that his uncle, Mr. Stanley, a Liverpool merchant, or as he used to call him Black Boy Billy,' is dead, and has left him a fortune of half a million, he begins to blubber out his sorrow for his uncle's death and his own good, he means, bad fortune,' stammers his excuses for leaving the company of Mr. Mammonton and his sister, and is wound up to a Countess by his mischievous prompter. Lady Charlewood (Miss I. Paton) is disgusted with the behaviour of her new and absurd admirer; her mother, the Countess Dowager Delamere (Mrs. Davison), admires his fortune, and patronises the match according to the etiquette of rank and high life. His inconstancy and meanness are however exposed in the meantime by Miss Kitty Corderoy, who is intimate with both the young ladies, having been at the same school with them somewhere in the neighbourhood of London, and runs up and 6 down the Ladder of Life' as she pleases (in the French play the corresponding character is a milliner, which is a little more in keeping) and Mr. Felix Mudberry, in his own emphatic phrase, is blown' by all the three at once;-the bubble of his legacy also bursts, and Jack Pointer turning short round upon him at this extremity, advises him to go abroad again, make another fortune, and on his return, promises to introduce him to a Princess! Mr. Liston produced a good deal of laughter in the part, but perhaps from not being near enough to see his face, the drollery fell flat upon us. It was (to get within bow-shot of an Hibernicism) like hearing the report of a pistol, before seeing the flash. Weepers and a round hat do not move our risible muscles. We think Mr. Liston shines in the cockney, more than in the cockney and dandy together. 'He knows his cue best without a prompter. His affectation even must be unaffected. We will match his lead against anybody's, we will not answer for the tinsel. We have a delicate request to make of him, that he would play Madge for his benefit and our satisfaction -unless Moll Flagon should complain of it as compromising her dignity. Is this piece Mr. Kenney's? It shivers on the brink of nothing, and plunges over head and ears into nonsense. We wish our authors and architects, if they must give us foreign models, would give them entire, and not by bits and samples, altering only to spoil. COVENT-GARDEN. or Carron-Side, or the Fête Champêtre, a new Opera, the words by Mr. Planche, the music by M. Liverati, was brought out here on Tuesday, and was repeated on Thursday. The dialogue is tolerable; and so are the songs. Miss Stephens was the chief attraction in it; though she does not make much figure by Scottish stream mountain. Mr. Sapio and Mr. Wood personated, the one a military, the other a naval hero in it, and maintained the superiority of their several professions in song and bold defiance-with equal loudness and skill. Miss Stephens (Blanche Mackay) the supposed daughter of a peasant, is in love with Captain Allan Lindsay (Sapio), and he with her, though he is about to be married to Grace Campbell (Miss Cawse), who likes another of her cousins, Cornet Hector Lindsay (Mr. Wood) quite as well or better, as far as we could judge by the event. When Blanche has to present a bouquet to the intended couple on the morning of their nuptials, and to sing a song of congratulation, her voice falters and she faints away in the midst of it. She then, partly through shame and partly through vexation, escapes to the house of the miller (Little Keely) and his wife (Miss Goward), where she is kindly received, but supposed by her own friends to have rashly drowned herself. The anguish of Captain Allan Lindsay is not to be restrained on this occasion, and betrays his passion for the unhappy girl, who is at the same time discovered not to be the real daughter of the old trumpeter Donald Mackay (Bartley), but the daughter of Mrs. Campbell, who had been supposed to be lost when an infant in the Spanish campaign. The mystery being cleared up, the secret of her birth is communicated to poor Blanche amidst her smiles and tears. Miss Grace Campbell under the circumstances, and from her previous indifference, declares for Cornet Lindsay, and Blanche is united to the Captain. Mr. Keely crept on and off the stage as usual; and Miss Cawse danced and flourished round it as she sung, because Madame Vestris does so. We are quite satisfied with Madame Vestris, without wishing to see her imitated. MR. KEAN The Examiner.] [June 15, 1828. We do not wonder at Mr. Kean's want of success in Paris. As they do not like or understand Shakespear, it is not to be supposed they should like or understand any one who goes near to represent him, or who gives anything more than a trite version or modernised paraphrase of him. Voltaire has borrowed largely from the English dramatist, and has taken Othello's dying speech almost entire, as far as the prose-ground of it, but has contrived to leave out all the striking, picturesque points of it :-so they would no doubt object to and cancel, by a sweeping condemnation, all the unexpected and marked beauties of an impassioned recitation of it. Whatever is not literal and conventional, is with them extravagant and grotesque : they have so long been accustomed (we are speaking of serious matters) to consider affectation as nature, that they consider nature when it comes across them as affectation and quaintness. 'The poet's eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.' So the actor's eye (if truly inspired) comprehends more than is set down for him, starts at hidden fancies that only pale passion sees; and his voice is the trembling echo and the broken instrument of thoughts and of an agony that lie too deep for mere words to express. This licence, that is, this truth of nature is, with our accomplished and more thorough-bred neighbours, entirely out of the question. Their art, whether in poetry, acting, painting, is well-drilled regimental art :-it is art in uniform and on parade. Thus tragic poetry cannot, in its dumb despair, call on all nature to supply it with an appropriate language, that places what it feels in palpable and lofty imagery before the reader: it must, on the contrary, have its rhetorical and didactic flourishes all ready for the occasion-these may be as tedious, as pompous, as bombastic as you please, but to pass or allude to anything beyond them, is vile and Gothic indeed. The actor may mouth, rant, and whine as much as he pleases, so that he does it in measured time, and seems in perfect health and spirits all the while; but if he is once thrown off his guard, and loses sight of himself and the audience in the sufferings of his hero, it is all over with him. Again, an actor's face should be as a book where one may read strange matters.' This would be an inexpiable offence in France, where there is nothing strange, and where all must appear upon the surface or be kept quite out of sight, on the score of decency and good manners. As the poet must introduce no image or sentiment for which there is not a prescribed formula, so the tragedian must give no shade or inflection of feeling which the entire audience were not prepared complacently to anticipate. The self-love of the pit would rise in open rebellion if he did. In France it is a rule that no person is wiser than another: you cannot be beforehand with their conceit and infinite superiority in impertinence. So they themselves tell the story of a man who, hearing of the assassination of the Duke of Berri, and not willing to allow that his informant had the start of him on so interesting a topic, made answer-Yes, I knew it!' We are not therefore surprised that the Parisians find fault with the only actor of much genius we possess he must puzzle them almost as much as the Hetman Platoff; and this assuredly they cannot forgive, as in the present case their rank cowardice cannot get the better of their consummate vanity. It is ludicrous too that they should charge us with extravagance and fustian-they, who have their Pensions de l'Univers and Diligences de l'Univers stuck on every pillar and post! As we know what the most refined people in the universe do not like, we are also happy in learning what they do like. For others to despise what we admire, is always to assume an attitude of seeming superiority over us : to admire what we do not think much of, is to give us our revenge again. Fastidiousness is here, as in many other cases, the effect not 1 'Lodging-houses for the Universe,' and 'Stage-coaches of the Universe.' |