Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 3 of 3)

That the fit had not decreased by lapse of time, another extract from the same volume will amply demonstrate. Kean was not so satisfied with the success he achieved professionally, as he was of a visit to an Indian tribe who had enrolled him among their chiefs. It was a freak which he took seriously, as will be seen by what follows: —

"Towards the close of his second visit to America, Kean made a tour through the northern part of the State, and visited Canada; he fell in with the Indians, with whom he became delighted, and was chosen a chief of a tribe. Some time after, not aware of his return to the city, I received at a late hour of the evening a call to wait upon an Indian chief, by the name of Alantenaida, as the highly finished card left at my house had it. Kean's ordinary card was Edmund Kean, engraved; he generally wrote beneath, 'Integer vitæ scelerisque purus.' I repaired to the hotel, and was conducted upstairs to the folding-doors of the hall, where the servant left me. I entered, aided by the feeble light of the room; but at the remote end I soon perceived something like a forest of evergreens, lighted up by many rays from floor-lamps, and surrounded by a stage or throne; and seated in great state was the chief. I advanced, and a more terrific warrior I never surveyed. Red Jacket or Black Hawk was an unadorned simple personage in comparison. Full dressed, with skins tagged loosely about his person, a broad collar of bear-skin over his shoulders, his leggings with many stripes, garnished with porcupine quills; his moccasins decorated with beads, his head decked with the war-eagle's plumes, behind which flowed massive black locks of dishevelled horse-hair, golden-coloured rings pendant from the nose and ears, streaks of yellow paint over the face, massive red daubings about the eyes, with various lines in streaks about the forehead, not very artistically drawn. A broad belt surrounded his waist, with tomahawk; his arms with shining bracelets, stretched out with bow and arrow, as if ready for a mark. He descended his throne, and rapidly approached me. His eye was meteoric and fearful, like the furnace of the Cyclops. He vociferously exclaimed, Alantenaida, the vowels strong enough. I was relieved, he betrayed something of his raucous voice in imprecation. It was Kean. An explanation took place. He wished to know the merits of the representation. The Hurons had honoured him by admission into their tribe, and he could not now determine whether to seek his final earthly abode with them, for real happiness, or return to London and add renown to his name by performing the Son of the Forest. I never heard that he ever after attempted in his own country the character. He was wrought up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm at the Indian honour he had received, and declared that even old Drury had never conferred so proud a distinction on him as he had received from the Hurons."

I shall not soon forget that January night of 1827, on which he reappeared at Drury Lane, in Shylock. A rush so fearful, an audience so packed, a reconciliation so complete, acting so faultless, and a dramatic enjoyment so exquisite, I never experienced. Nothing was heeded, – indeed, the scenes were passed over, till Shylock was to appear; and I have heard no such shout since, as that which greeted him. Fire, strength, beauty; – every quality of the actor seemed to have acquired fresh life. It was all deceptive, however. The actor was all but extinguished, after this convulsive, but seemingly natural effort. He lay in bed at the Hummums' hotel, all day, amusing himself melancholily with his Indian gewgaws, and striving to find a healthy tonic in "cognac." While immolating himself, he still clung to a hope of rescue; and he strove to create one more new character, Ben Nazir, in Mr. Colley Grattan's tragedy of that name. His power of memory was gone; but he had a fatuitous idea that he had mastered his part, and this is how he figured in it, as told by the author of that hapless drama, himself. The picture has been often exhibited; but it must needs be looked upon once more: —

"He did at length appear. The intention of the author, and the keeping of the character, required him to rush rapidly on the stage, giving utterance to a burst of joyous soliloquy. What was my astonishment, to see him, as the scene opened, standing in the centre of the stage, his arms crossed, and his whole attitude one of thoughtful solemnity. His dress was splendid; and thunders of applause greeted him from all parts of the house. To display the one, and give time for the other, were the objects for which he stood fixed for several minutes, and sacrificed the sense of the situation. He spoke; but what a speech! The one I wrote, consisted of eight or nine lines; his, was of two or three sentences, – but not six consecutive words of the text. His look, his manner, his tone, were to me quite appalling; to any other observer, they must have been incomprehensible. He stood fixed; drawled out his incoherent words, and gave the notion of a man that had been half hanged and then dragged through a horse pond. My heart, I confess it, sank deep in my breast. I was utterly shocked. And as the business of the play went on, and as he stood by, with moveless muscle and glazed eye, throughout the scene which should have been one of violent, perhaps too violent exertion, – a cold shower of perspiration poured from my forehead, and I endured a revulsion of feeling which I cannot describe, and which I would not for worlds one eye had witnessed. I had all along felt that this scene would be the touchstone of the play. Kean went through it like a man in the last stage of exhaustion and decay. The act closed; a dead silence followed the fall of the curtain; and I felt, though I could not hear, the voiceless verdict of 'damnation.' … When the curtain fell, Mr. Wallack, the stage manager, came forward, and made an apology for Kean's imperfection in his part, and an appeal in behalf of the play. Neither excited much sympathy; the audience was quite disgusted. I now, for the first time during the night, went behind the scenes. On crossing the stage towards the green-room, I met Kean, supported by his servant and another person, going in the direction of his dressing room. When he saw me, he hung down his head, and waved his hand, and uttered some expressions of deep sorrow, and even remorse. 'I have ruined a fine play, and myself; I cannot look you in the face,' were the first words I caught. I said something in return, as cheering and consolatory as I could. I may say, that all sense of my own disappointment was forgotten, in the compassion I felt for him."

The descent now was rapid, but it was not made at one leap. Penniless, though he might have been lord of "thousands," he caught at an offer to provide for his son by a cadetship; but the son refused to accept the offer – as such acceptation would have exposed his mother to worse than the destitution of her earlier days – before hope of a bright, though closing future, had died away. To lose her son was to lose the best friend she had; for she had none now in her faithless and suicidal husband. Edmund Kean heard of his son's determination to go on the stage, in order to support his mother, with grim dissatisfaction, and, I should hope, some sense of reproach and abasement. They parted in anger, it is said, as far as the father was concerned; the more angry, perhaps, that in his temporary wrath he cast off the son whom he, in his heart, must have respected.

Consequently, the season of 1827-28, at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, had a singular incident to mark them; – the struggle of the son to rise, at the former; the struggle of the father not to fall, at the latter. Mr. Charles Kean opened the season, in Norval. Mr. Cole, in his biography of the son, quotes a letter, written by a friend of the father, to the latter, in which the writer, who watched the attempt, remarks: – "The speech, 'My name is Norval,' he hurried, and spoke as though he had a cold, or was pressing a finger against his nose."

The attempt, in short, was unsuccessful; so had that of many an aspirant been who subsequently reaped triumphs at his will; and Mr. Charles Kean might find consolation. The attempt, at all events, enabled him to fix his foot on the first step of the giddy ascent; and, let it be said, he owed the possibility of doing so entirely to his father's name. So young a man, without a great name, would have found no access to Drury open to him; and I like to think, that if he missed the fortune which his half mad, yet kindly impulsive father had promised him, he owed to that father the foundations on which he raised another. He inherited a great name and a great warning.

While the son was anxiously and painfully laying those foundations, the sire was absolutely electrifying audiences at Covent Garden by old flashes of his might, or disappointing them by his incapacity, or his capricious absence. He reminded me of Don Juan, who, though he went with open eyes recklessly to destruction, flung off the fiends who at last grasped him, with a fearful, but vainly expended energy. On one night, when he played Othello to Young's Iago, the Cassio of Charles Kemble, the Roderigo of Farley, and the Desdemona of Miss Jarman, I saw strong men clamber from the pit, over the lower boxes, to escape suffocation, and weak men, in a fainting condition, passed by friendly hands towards the air, in the same way. I remember Charles Kemble, in his lofty, bland way, trying to persuade a too-closely packed audience to fancy themselves comfortable, and to be silent, which they would not be till he appeared, who, on that, and some after nights, could subdue them to silence or stir them into ecstasy, at his will.

To those who saw him from the front, there was not a trace of weakening of any power in him. But, oh ye few who stood between the wings where a chair was placed for him, do you not remember the saddening spectacle of that wrecked genius – a man in his very prime, with not merely the attributes of age about him, but with some of the infirmities of it, which are wont to try the heart of love itself. Have you forgotten that helpless, speechless, fainting mass bent up in that chair; or the very unsavoury odour of that very brown, very hot, and very strong brandy-and-water, which alone kept alive the once noble Moor? Aye, and still noble Moor; for when his time came, he looked about as from a dream, and sighed, and painfully got to his feet, swayed like a column in an earthquake, and in not more time than is required for the telling of it, was before the audience, as strong and as intellectually beautiful as of old; – but only happy in the applause which gave him a little breathing space, and saved him from falling dead upon the stage.

During a few nights of another year or two, he acted under the exacting conditions of a nature that had been violated. He gained a little strength from his island home in Bute, and even acted in Glasgow, Cork, and Dublin with his son, in whose success he took a father's part. Thrice he essayed fresh study, and once he nearly conquered; his Virginius, in Knowles's play, was superbly affecting, in fragmentary passages, but he tried it at too late a period, not of his natural life, but of his professional career. Richard II. was magnificently got up for him, but as the curtain was about to rise, it was discovered that he was not in the house – and days passed before he emerged into the world and decency. His last essay in a new part was in "Henry V.;" but he broke down, addressed the audience deprecatorily, muttered something about being the representative of Shakspeare's heroes, and lamented, at little more than forty, what Macklin did not plead till he was past ninety – his decaying memory.

Now and then the town saw him, but his hold on it was nearly gone. He was now at the Haymarket; and then, uncertainly, at Drury Lane; and again at the Haymarket in 1832, where I saw him for the last of many times, in Richard. The sight was pitiable. Genius was not traceable in that bloated face; intellect was all but quenched in those once matchless eyes; and the power seemed gone, despite the will that would recall it. I noted in a diary, that night, the above facts, and, in addition, that by bursts he was as grand as he had ever been, – that though he looked well as long as he was still, he moved only with difficulty, using his sword as a stick. I find, and perfectly remember, that there was a murmur of approbation at the pause and action of his extended arm, as he said – "In the deep bosom of the ocean, – buried!" – as if he consigned all lowering clouds to the sea. At – "The dogs bark at me, as I halt by them;" the action was so expressive as to elicit a round of applause; and in the last of the lines —

"Why what a peevish fool was he of Crete,Who taught his son the office of a fowl,And yet for all his wings, the fool was drowned,"

the playful yet fiendish sarcasm was delivered with marvellous effect. His words, after "Die, prophet, in thy speech," – "For this among the rest was I ordained," seemed like a devilish joke after a burst of fury. In —

"Villains, set down the corse, or by St. Paul,I'll make a corse of him that disobeys," —

his voice was scarcely distinguishable; but his old attitude of leaning at the side scene, as he contemplated Lady Anne, was as full of grace as ever, – save that the contemplator had now a swollen and unkingly face. Then —

"Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,That I may see my shadow as I pass," —

was sportive in accent as in the very action of saluting; and there was a world of argument and resolution in the delivery of the simple words – "The tower? —Aye; the Tower!" The chuckle at "So much for Buckingham!" I always considered wanting in dignity, but it brought a roar of applause. In the scene with the Mayor and Buckingham, he displayed talent unsurpassable; – the scarcely-subdued triumph that lurked in his eyes, as he refused the crown; his tone in "Call him again;" his acceptance of the throne, and his burst of joy, when he had dismissed the petitioners, were perfect in their several ways; but he was exhausted before the fifth act, and when, after a short fight, Richmond (Cooper) gave him his death-wound in Bosworth Field, as he seemed to deal the blow, he grasped Kean by the hand, and let him gently down, lest he should be injured by a fall.

The end was at hand. He could no longer even venture, after the play, to Offley's symposium, in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, that lively singing-room, with a window looking into the mouldiest of churchyards, – where, however, slept some noble actors. To and from Richmond he occasionally travelled, – a feeble bundle of humanity, that seemed to lie unconsciously in one corner of his carriage. But, I think, conscience was there, too, and rage, and remorse, – that a life had been so wasted, and mighty powers, almost as divine as the poet's, so irretrievably abused. He aroused himself to make his last appearance, as it proved, on the stage, in conjunction with his son, in Othello, Mr. Charles Kean playing Iago. The night was the 25th of March 1833. Edmund Kean was so shattered in frame, that he had scarcely strength to pass over him the dress of the Moor; so shattered in nerve, that he dreaded some disaster. Brandy gave some little heart to the greatly fallen actor, but he anxiously enjoined his son to be ever near him, in case of some mischance, and he went through the part, dying as he went, till after giving the sweet utterance, as of old, to the celebrated "Farewell," ending with "Othello's occupation's gone!" he attempted to utter the next speech, and in the attempt fell on his son's shoulder, with a whispered moan, "I am dying, – speak to them for me!" The curtain here descended on him for ever, and the rest was only slow death, with intervals of hope. He, the faithless, and now helpless, husband sent a note, which sounds as a cry of anguish, to that good Mary Chambers of old, who had had the ill-luck to listen to his wooing. But, having so listened, she would not now be deaf to the wail of the man who said that he had gone wrong in judgment, not in feeling; in head, not in heart, and who cried, "Come home; forget and forgive!" She went, and forgave; an angel could not, however, have forgotten all; but she acted as if she had, and the true-hearted young partner of his early miseries was the gentle alleviator of his last sufferings. She stood by him till, on the 15th of May, death came upon the unconscious man after some old tag of Octavian had passed his restless lips, of "Farewell, Flo – , Floranthe!"

Come home! was the dying actor's cry to his wife. Dead; there was no home for the widow; for creditors took possession of it, and its contents. To such end had come the humble and hapless wedding of Mary Chambers and Edmund Kean at Gloucester, the brief glory after long suffering, – sorrow and want at the end as at the beginning; with him, an added shame; with her, uncomplainingness. Yes, and consolation. The happiness she lacked with her husband was vouchsafed to her through her son, and the union of the two strolling players at Gloucester was thus not altogether barren of good and happy fruits.

And over the grave of one of the greatest of actors something may be said in extenuation of his faults. Such curse as there can be in a mother's indifference hung about him before his birth. A young Huron, of whose tribe he subsequently became a member, could not have lived a more savage, – but certainly enjoyed a more comfortable and better-tended boyhood. Edmund Kean, from that very time of boyhood, had genius, industry, and ambition, – but, with companionship enough to extinguish the first, lack of reward sufficient to dull the second, and repeated visitations of disappointment that might have warranted the exchange of high hopes for brutal despair, – he nourished his genius, maintained his industry, and kept an undying ambition under circumstances when to do so was a part of heroism. Compare his young and hard and blackguard life with the disciplined boyhood of Betterton, the early associations of Booth, the school career of Quin, the decent but modest childhood of Macklin, the gentlemanly home of the youth Garrick, the bringing up of Cooke, and the Douay College life of the Kembles. Kean was trained upon blows, and curses, and starvation, and the charity of strangers. It was enough to make all his temper convert to fury, and any idea of such a young, unnurtured savage ever becoming an inheritor of the mantle worn by the actors I have named, would have seemed a madness even to that mother who soon followed him in death, Nance Carey. But Edmund Kean cherished the idea, warm in his bosom, never ceased to qualify himself for the attempt, studied for it while he starved, – and when about to make it, felt and said that success would drive him mad. I believe it did; but whether or not, I can part from the great actor of my young days only with a tender respect. I do not forget the many hours of bright intellectual enjoyment for which I, in common with thousands, was indebted to him, and, in the contemplation of this actor's incomparable genius, I desire to forget the errors of the man.

Over his remains, in Richmond churchyard, a plain tablet arrests the eye. I never look at it without a crowd of memories of the old and brilliant scene he for awhile adorned, nor without thinking of the words of Lesingham, in the Elizabethan drama: —

"Oh! what our wills will do,With over-rash and headlong peevishness,To bring our calm discretion to repentance!"Epilogue

I leave the history of the great players who rivalled or succeeded Edmund Kean, to other chroniclers. They belong – the great players – to a vocation which is next in dignity to that of the poet. In the far off Ionian Islands, Demodocus first inspired his countrymen with that taste for dramatic representation which has overrun the world. Five centuries later, Thespis invented tragedy; and after seven centuries more had elapsed, and there was a new dispensation upon earth, and heathenism was fiercely fighting out its last struggle with Christianity, the stage yielded two of the noblest martyrs to the faith, in the persons of the then renowned actors, – Genesius of Rome, and Gelasinus of Heliopolis.

Looking, recently, at the old patent granted by Charles II. to Killigrew and Davenant (now in Drury Lane Theatre), I could not help remarking, that the parchment for which so many hundreds of thousands of pounds had been given, was now virtually worthless, save for the superb portrait of Charles, within the gigantic initial letter of his name. When that patent for two theatres was granted, London was less populous than Manchester is now; and as the population increased, theatres (beginning with that in Goodman's Fields) sprung up in spite of the patent or Lord Chamberlain. The latter granted licenses to a few, with great restrictions. At the Lyceum, for instance, not even a tragedy could be produced unless there were at least five songs or concerted pieces in each act; and the tragedy even then must be called a burletta. The licenser's powers did not extend to St. George's Fields, where political plays forbidden on the Middlesex side of the river were attractive merely because they were forbidden.

Subsequently, at the minor theatres, plays, which could only be legally acted at the patent houses, were performed, without being converted into burlettas. The proprietors of the patents prosecuted the offenders; but the levying of penalties (£50 nightly) against Englishmen, for producing or acting in Shakspeare's plays, seemed so absurd, that after some toying with the question, in 1842, the government brought forward the bill of 1843, which passed both houses, after Lord Campbell had deprived it of some tyrannic authority it conferred upon the Lord Chamberlain. A "free trade" principle was thereby introduced. The patent houses lost all their privileges, save that of being exempt from a yearly renewal of license to act; and the legitimate drama could be performed in any licensed theatre. At Sadler's Wells, for instance, it was long and worthily upheld by Mr. Phelps, without fear of every actor therein incurring a penalty of £300 weekly, as when he played every night, contrary to law.

Since 1843, then, the term of "Their," or "Her Majesty's Servants," is a mere formality, as there is no especial company now privileged to serve or solace royalty. Mr. Webster, who occupies Garrick's chair, in the management of the Theatrical Fund, tells me, that Baddeley was the last actor who wore the uniform of scarlet and gold, prescribed for the "gentlemen of the household," who were patented actors; and that he used to appear in it at rehearsal. He was proud of being one of their "Majesties' servants;" – a title once coveted by all nobly-aspiring actors. They were sometimes nearest to the desired end when they seemed farthest off. "Have you ever heard," asks Garrick, in an unpublished letter to Moody, then at Liverpool, "of a Mrs. Siddons, who is strolling about somewhere near you?" Four months later, Garrick brought her out at Drury Lane. That space of time intervened, between the periods when Edmund Kean was starving and triumphing. And now, in the green-room of Drury Lane Theatre, the busts of Mrs. Siddons and Kean face each other; while that of Shakspeare, opposite Garrick, seems to smile on all three, —his great interpreters, as well as Their Majesties' Servants.

1

Vol. ii., pp. 398-406.

2

"One of the most capital poems in the English language" is what Gray is reported to have said.

3

Produced 8th May 1777.

4

Should be 1755. The "Chinese Festival" was produced 8th November 1755.

5

Probably a misprint for "Ten nights later," October 1 and October 11 being the dates in question.

6

Should be 15th May.

7

See the London Chronicle, 9th October 1783, for the account of this visit.

8

Dr. Doran omits "this raised a prodigious and continued hiss, Harlequin all the while suspended in the air."

9

It is quite apocryphal that Macklin was two months old when his father was killed at the Battle of the Boyne. When he was in full possession of his faculties he said he was born in November 1699. As he died in 1797 he had accomplished ninety-seven years, the age stated on his coffin-lid, and was in his ninety-eighth year. —Doran MS.