1823. Modern Dramas, and Dramatic Writers. dialogues of exquisite poetry-four or five situations (such as, by the way, we must not give now)—and, when so much was accomplished, their task was complete. There is this essential difference be- I cannot doubt that there are poets, the only poet who has lately written It would extend this article to a But if the altered tone and taste of society in the modern day, may ac count for some apparent abatement in the force of our English tragedy, that same change, as regards comedy, will be found to operate with still greater force. Those great natural sources of subject, which supplied material to the old writers ;-which were drawn upon first by Fletcher and Massinger, afterwards by Dryden, then by Shadwell, and, still later, by the school of Con greve, Wycherley, and Farquhar ;of those sources, scarcely one is left to the dramatist of the present day. A freedom from all restraints, of morality, or even of decency, was the birthright, if I may so express myself, of a poet of the sixteenth century. His free license was the soul of everything he did. Vice furnished his plot; vice pointed his dialogue; vice was in his characters-in his interest—in his wit. He lashed vice, sometimes, it is true; but, even in lashing, he paraded it. Even where he affected to give a moral tone to a play, his morality was al ways reserved for some absurd recantation in the last scene ;-he exhibit ed the sin, and lived upon it, through four acts and a half of his piece, and protested against it in the denouement, when he wanted it no longer. I will not say whether this course should, or should not, be forbidden; but I say, that it is forbidden upon the stage at the present day. Few of the older comedies-few indeed of the date of Congreve or Farquhar-are acted The few that do still keep the stage, may be said to linger rather than to live. They are acted more and more rarely from season to season; when acted, they are barely endured; and they will shortly be acted no longer. now. To wonder that similar plays are not written, when, if they were written, no theatre could dare to produce them, is as absurd as to expect that a modern comic poet, cramped as he is, and shackled, at every corner and on every hand, should produce the same free, bold, dashing, daring picture, which the old artist painted, whose pencil moved at liberty. If the appeal to any passion-no matter what-is to be cut off, a certain quantity of excitation, and consequently of interest, must be lost. Vice, even where it offends, almost constantly merits attention. A firean execution-a public riot-these are sights which give birth only to painful sensations; and yet multitudes flock, even at personal risk, to gaze upon them. The same disposition may be found existing in all times and in all places. Murder, in ancient Rome, was a popular spectacle. The Spanish auto da fe interested hundreds, who cared for the preservation of the faith not a farthing. A boxing-match, a bull-bait, a theft, or an accident in the street, the smallest of these incidents, will attract a crowd of spectators in London now. In short, that which is uncommon, and especially that which is in any way forbidden, will always be attractive to the great mass of human kind. No one cares to see that done which may be done with impunity by everybody. Who ever thought of going to look at a grocer selling figs?-but a thief draws a crowd round him, because he is the exception to the common rule. Threefourths of the charm in the comedy of our old dramatists, lie in their de velopement of those matters which it is usual to conceal. Half the point (even of the dialogue) of Farquhar and Wycherley, lies in their constant popping out of bold sentiments and unexpected truths. All their heroes are, to the multitude, exquisite fellows to be amused with;-they are so eternally saying that out, which common people only venture to think. We are told, that our modern comedy is weak, and flimsy and farcical; that it shews the pertness of soda water, rather than the spirit of champagne. I take that simile readily, for it suits my own purpose:Soda water, rather than champagne, is the drink of the present day. There is a want of stamina, it is said, about our modern writers of comedy. How is it possible for a man to intoxicate us, if we will drink nothing stronger than milk and water? How shall the modern comedy writer display a vigour, if he has it? In what form-in what style of dramatic character-shall he embody his strong conception? The lady cannot (now-a-days) speak her mind freely-the lover (of the drama) must set bounds to his passion-The honest gentleman, time out of mind, has been notoriously a dead weight upon the stage ;-and from the gay bold-faced villain," who was the life of all our old comedy, the dramatist of the modern day is entirely shut out. Into the depths of the human heart, the dramatist is now forbidden to penetrate. He has the aperies of fashion to work upon, instead of the propensities of nature. He may burlesque, if he can, the follies and fopperies of society; but he must not give the drama that interest which it held in the hands of his predecessors, by either exhibiting or chastising the real vices of mankind. I know I shall be told that, subject to all these checks, comedies have been produced-and sterling comedieswithin the last few years. I admit the fact, and it forms part of my argument. If the authors of those comedies quoted have done so much under restraint, how much more would they not have accomplished, if the field had been open to them? Sterling comedies have been produced, but how few they are in number! The fact is, that, under modern restrictions, the labour of production is too great. There is so little variety of subject left, that effective comedies cannot be numerous. For the last ten years, I believe, nothing like genteel comedy (and perhaps genteel comedy is the only sterling comedy,) nothing in the shape of genteel comedy has appeared at all. I say again, that the labour of production now is too great. In Fletcher's vein, or Farquhar's, a man would run on for ever. The mere esprit of their characters, and the force of their situations, would do sufficient alone to carry a play through. But what a different principle of producing effect do we see at work in the School for Scandal! There is more labouring of points, more expenditure of epigram, in that single play, than would have sufficed for sixteen comedies of Shirley, Massinger, or Fletcher. And, after all, the reliance of the piece is upon a display of art, rather than a display of nature. There is epigram in abundance in every scene, but very little of that gaieté de coeur which charms us in the older writers, and which was a quality (unlike epigram) inexhaustible where it existed. No one would suppose the School for Scandal to have been written in three weeks, or a month, under the influence of claret half the time, and of exuberant animal spirits the other half. In fact, the reign of genteel comedy is pretty nearly at an end. The force of a play now has changed its former bearing. Clowns and coxcombs were minor personages with the older writers-the gentleman was the author's organ for the diffusion of jest and gaiety. But the point of honour now has passed into other hands; the gentleman is but an appendage to carry on the plot of the piece, and the author's reliance is upon some tailor-some Jew with a humped back-some fop-some Frenchman, or other ridiculous personage, who may be pushed through a series of farcical dilemmas, and whose mishaps (not his triumphs) are to form the amusement of the audience. And the older writers, both of tragedy and comedy, beside that irregularity in which they were indulged as to plot-beside that appeal to one particular source of sympathy which gave them sure means of effect whenever a woman was on the stage-besides this, they selected such subjects, and such incidents, for their plays, as could not fail to produce strong interest; and upon that interest almost alone they often depended for their success. The great object (in the school of Fletcher) was to throw the hero, or heroine, into such a situation as must, of itself, excite attention. How the party was to be got into that situation, or how he was to be got out of it again, were minor considerations, or rather no considerations whatever. Without quoting extreme examples, like the Unnatural Combat of Massinger, the Woman Hater of Fletcher, or the 'Tis Pity she's a Whore of Fordwithout referring to instances so monstrous as these, there are examples to be met with at every step in the writings of the sixteenth century, of those certainly effective situations to which I now advert. Shirley, in one of his plays, makes a young lady of rank entrust a secret of vital importance to the servant of her father, and the villain afterwards forces her to yield up her chastity, on pain of having this secret discovered. Now the whole structure of this play of Shirley's is of the clumsiest description, but it was evident to the author, that he might depend upon a very strong interest in those scenes where the treacherous servant bends his mistress to his purpose. Again, in the Maid's Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, a young nobleman having married Evadne, to whom he is devotedly attached, is told by her (ceteris paribus) in her chamber, on her wedding night, that she despises him, and that she has only submitted to marry him, in order to cloak her intrigue with somebody else. In the more modern play of The Mysterious Mother, the manner in which the Countess falls in love with her son is most ingeniously contrived, and it is impossible not to be carried forward, to a certain degree, by such an event; but still the interest here, as in the two former plays, is interest upon which modern feeling will not suffer a play to turn. In comedy, take the point of Shirley's excellent play, The Gamester, where the husband believes, that, by a series of contrivances, he has unwittingly become accessory to his own dishonour. The scenes between Wilding and his wife, while he is under this belief, are spirited (and can hardly fail to be so) in a very high degree; but the whole matter is such as the stage, now, cannot talk about. So, again, in another of our old Dramas, where an old law is supposed to be discovered, which con demns all people to die at forty, the anxiety of heirs-the searching of church-books for registers and the seizure (personal) upon grandfathers, great-uncles, and elderly ladies-all this is very laughable in the reading, but it would not do now for stage representation. For, among those inclinations inseparable from our nature, which the usages of society compel us to conceal or deny, is the propensity to laugh sometimes at the misfortunes of cur fellow creatures. I will not admit this disposition to be, per se, any argument of evil feeling; for I am convinced that there are circumstances under which the best regulated mind might be disposed to laugh even at the commission of a wrong. Sultan Selim, for instance, goes the other day to put out a great fire in Constantinople, and, seeing the firemen backward to face the danger, orders three to be thrown into the flames by way of encouragement to the rest. This act is atrocious, but we laugh (I think) notwithstanding. Again, the story of the monkey at Bartholomew fair.-A showman of wild beasts has his booth inclosed with canvass, but a boy takes advantage of a nook in the cloth, and peeps from time to time at the exhibition for nothing. A monkey within (piqued, probably, at being beheld gratis) watches his opportunity with the felonious peeper; and, when he peeps again, pokes a skewer into his eye. Now, one does not exult a jot here in the suffering of the boy, but one would purchase such a monkey, and adopt him as one's son. And, without multiplying cases in which the older writers, both of comedy and tragedy, have dwelt upon matters forbidden to the stage at the present day, I think it will be obvious that (except only perhaps Shakespeare) they all of them have taken that course, and, more or less, succeeded in it. Shakespeare, certainly, whatever his irregularities or excrescences, did not, upon principle, always take the easiest path to effect; and the consequence is, that there is almost the same difference between his plays and those of his contemporaries, as there is between the poem of Don Juan, and the novels of the Author of Waverley, whose most singular attribute perhaps is, that he constantly contrives interest without touching upon the more unseemly passions of mankind; and that there is not a line, (at least I don't recollect one,) from the beginning to the end of his works, which might not be read aloud in a circle of ladies, without exciting an unpleasant emotion. Admitting, as who can question it, the splendid genius of the old writers admitting that their plays are, for any but stage purposes, so superior to our modern trifles as to admit of no comparison with them, still, I think, that it was to the subjects which they were allowed to select, and to the freedom with which they were permitted to write, more than to any general superiority in talent over the moderns, that they were indebted for the vigour, and above all, for the fertility, of their pens. Nature, in all her shapes, must be powerful; and from nature, in any shape, they were allowed to paint. Where they have condescended to describe humours and fashions, it must be remembered, that we now look at such descriptions as curious from their antiquity. An antick of the day of James the First, or Charles the Second, will excite interest with those who pass over a modern coxcomb with contempt. I cannot believe but that either the author of Don Juan, or the author of Anastasius, could produce, with ease, the same irregular fancies which succeeded, as plays, with Fletcher and with Massinger. I cannot help thinking, that the author of Waverley might write historical plays with admirable effect, if he would devote his attention to such a style of writing; but I believe that he gets too much, both of fame and money, by his novels, to be tempted to adventure on a less certain and less profitable pursuit. And I think, to go farther, that even those who do write for the stage, changed as it is for I maintain that the change is in the stage, and not in the power of writing for it-I think that even some of these, judging by what they have produced in their trammels, might have brought forth pieces not unworthy of at least the second class of writers of the 16th century, if they had enjoyed the same advantages which those earlier writers possessed. This some being understood as distinctly excluding those gentlemen who assist our patent managers in making the public taste even worse than it need be; and who are content to act, either by the year or by the piece, as illustrators to the work of the decorator and the machinist. TITUS. 1823. The Memorabilia of William Faux. THE MEMORABILIA OF WILLIAM FAUX.* WHEN we first saw a book announced by the title of " Memorable Days in America," we of course expected something about Cortez, Pizarro, General Washington, or, at the lowest penny, General Bolivar or Sir Gregor Macgregor. But the " Memorable Days" now in hand, turn out to have no relation to the doings of any The days are such memorable men. memorable in the language of this author, simply because they are frequently the subject of conversation at his own fireside. He himself is his own and his only hero,-and the days he spent in America are thus qualified in the true spirit of Mrs Quickly, who dated from the era of Goodwife Keech the butcher's wife's coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar. There is a great deal of bonne-foi, Authorship and book-making will up the page and had, perhaps, never The spirit of Grub Street has al- it is still the author we have to do with. When the modern commander of one of his Majesty's frigates happens to light upon a new coast, the very first thought that comes into his mind, is whether the costume of the natives will look best in line-engraving or lithography. For every letter he sends home to his mother, there are three to our friend John Murray: and when he reaches London, after three years' absence, he bids the hackto Albemarle ney-coachman drive Street, before the Admiralty.-Aidesdu-camp, as they are galloping about the field of battle, consider the outlines of the clouds, and observe how a distant hill will come in, if they live to pen a description of the affair. Lieutenants of the heavy dragoons pick up hits and graphic touches, when a town is sacked. Even men-of-war'smen have all their eyes about them for effects and ideas when the grog is piped: and John Nicoll himself, gay deceiver that he is, does not kiss his pretty convict, without a sly notion that she will make a pretty paragraph. People will woo and marry an' a', by and by, we take it, only that they may be able to paint more from the life the delicate whimsies which sharpen " the edge of that day's celebration."-But Mr Jeffrey once embodied the whole soul of authorship in three syllables. We were sitting close by him in the High Court of Justiciary, when a tolerably sentimental-looking murderer was called up to receive sentence of death-(this was Ante Chaldæum Scriptum)" Well, now," said the • Memorable Days in America: being a Journal of a Tour to the United States, principally undertaken to ascertain, by Positive Evidence, the Condition and probable Prospects of British Emigrants; including Accounts of Mr Birkbeck's Settlement in the Illinois; and intended to shew Men and Things as they are in America. By W. Faux, an English Farmer. London, W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823. |