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If few can remember Dodd, many yet for the matter. He was known, like Puck, living will not easily forget the pleasant by his note-Ha! Ha! Ha!-sometimes creature, who in those days enacted the part deepening to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irreof the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew.- sistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely Richard, or rather Dicky Suett-for so in from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his life-time he delighted to be called, and his prototype of-0 La! Thousands of time hath ratified the appellation-lieth hearts yet respond to the chuckling O0 La! buried on the north side of the cemetery of of Dicky Suett, brought back to their rememHoly Paul, to whose service his nonage and brance by the faithful transcript of his friend tender years were dedicated. There are Mathews's mimicry. The "force of nature who do yet remember him at that period- could no further go." He drolled upon the his pipe clear and harmonious. He would stock of these two syllables richer than the often speak of his chorister days, when he cuckoo. was "cherub Dicky."

What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to "commerce with the skies,"—I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us.

I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathedral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart-kind, and therefore glad-be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice-his white stole, and albe.

The first fruits of his secularisation was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imitable.

He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put him off with an "Away, Fool."

Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Goodfellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet.

Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch.

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this:-Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood-but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him—not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,-but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to

fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert If you did, they would shock and not divert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns he received the last stroke, neither varying from sea, the following exquisite dialogue his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with occurs at his first meeting with his father :the simple exclamation, worthy to have been Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, recorded in his epitaph-O La! O La! Bobby! Ben, since I saw thee. The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dead, as you say well, and how?—I have a many

dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards -was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant,* you said "What a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant !" When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.

Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis personæ were supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of Young Wilding, and the sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface-the villain of artificial comedy-even while you read or see them. * High Life Below Stairs.

Ben. Ey, ey, been. Been far enough, an that be all. -Well, father, and how do all at home? how does

brother Dick, and brother Val?

Sir Sampson. Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead

these two years. I writ you word when you were at

Leghorn.

Ben. Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's

questions to ask you

Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben-the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us-but a piece of satire-a creation of Congreve's fancy-a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character— his contempt of money-his credulity to women-with that necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucination as is here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom-the creature dear to half-belief-which Bannister exhibited-displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor-a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar-and nothing else-when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose-he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone-we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personæ, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain, but in the first or second gallery.

D D

ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.

THE artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. 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 -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 going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither,

like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioningthe sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry-is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.

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.

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's-nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's-comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never

very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties,

connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of 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 them none. blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?-The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They 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 worthless. 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 lantis, a scheme, out of which our COXinteresting 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

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets, the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced, in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings-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 supposed 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 At

combical 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. now, would not dare to do the part in the We would indict our very dreams.

same manner. He would instinctively avoid Amidst the mortifying circumstances at- every turn which might tend to unrealise, tendant upon growing old, it is something to and so to make the character fascinating. He have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. must take his cue from his spectators, who This comedy grew out of Congreve and would expect a bad man and a good man as Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the rigidly opposed to each other as the deathsentimental comedy which followed theirs. beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the It is impossible that it should be now acted, prints, which I am sorry to say have disapthough it continues, at long intervals, to be peared from the windows of my old friend announced in the bills. Its hero, when Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Churchyard Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Sur- memory-(an exhibition as venerable as the face. When I remember the gay boldness, adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured bad and good man at the hour of death; step, the insinuating voice-to express it in where the ghastly apprehensions of the a word-the downright acted villany of the former,-and truly the grim phantom with part, so different from the pressure of con- his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be scious actual wickedness,-the hypocritical despised,-so finely contrast with the meek assumption of hypocrisy,—which made Jack complacent kissing of the rod,—taking it in so deservedly a favourite in that character, I like honey and butter,—with which the latter must needs conclude the present generation submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or Time, who wields his lancet with the appremore dense. I freely confess that he divided hensive finger of a popular young ladies' the palm with me with his better brother; surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not not covet to meet half-way the stroke of but there are passages,-like that, for in- such a delicate mower?-John Palmer was stance, where Joseph is made to refuse a twice an actor in this exquisite part. He pittance to a poor relation,-incongruities was playing to you all the while that he was which Sheridan was forced upon by the playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You attempt to join the artificial with the senti- had the first intimation of a sentiment bemental comedy, either of which must destroy fore it was on his lips. His altered voice the other-but over these obstructions Jack's was meant to you, and you were to suppose manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage from him no more shocked you, than the perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality you if that half reality, the husband, was overany pleasure; you got over the paltry ques- reached by the puppetry—or the thin thing tion as quickly as you could, to get back into (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it the regions of pure comedy, where no cold was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of moral reigns. The highly artificial manner Othello and Desdemona were not concerned of Palmer in this character counteracted in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage every disagreeable impression which you in good time, that he did not live to this our might have received from the contrast, sup- age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle posing them real, between the two brothers. King, too, is gone in good time. His manner You did not believe in Joseph with the same would scarce have passed current in our day. faith with which you believed in Charles. We must love or hate-acquit or condemnThe latter was a pleasant reality, the former censure or pity-exert our detestable coxa no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The combry of moral judgment upon everything. comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a mixture of Congreve with sentimental in- downright revolting villain-no compromise compatibilities; the gaiety upon the whole-his first appearance must shock and give is buoyant; but it required the consummate horror-his specious plausibilities, which the art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed elements. with such hearty greetings, knowing that no

A player with Jack's talents, if we had one harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or

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