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Leader (1850-1860), 31st July 1852, Edition Country of 2, Page 17, JtNLY 81^ 1852 ] THE LEADER. 733 togethe...

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      Jtnly 81^ 1852 ] The Leader. 733 Togethe...

      _JtNLY 81 _^ 1852 ] THE LEADER . 733 together !

      Loftiest, The Severest Tragedy Is Repres...

      loftiest , the severest tragedy is represented *» all its dreary integrity by solemn veterans . Shiakspeare _especially—Shakspeare undented—textual . Massinger , Beaumont and Fletcher , _£ ven rugged John Marston- —all that is venerable and artificial . It is the Odeon or the suburbs . The very farces they play are ancient . All the old worn out and long forgotten pieces are dug up to enjoy a second youth , and figure in the eyes of young Islington as sparkling novelties . It is a downright dramatic curiosity shop . Pantomime is not excluded ; on the contrary , is generally well done . Such Saturnalia are allowed at Christmas , and sometimes they venture on a new tragedy , moulded , however , on the antique ; but woe to the man who mentions puny French authors . Translators ayaunt ! The theatre is picturesquely situated , on the banks of the city canal , shaded agreeably by leafless genealogical trees , and its audience is _composed of metropolitan villagers , the unsophisticated inhabitants of the verdant pavement which graces this Rus in Urbe ; a most respectable and above all a most classical audience , seeing and hearing for the first time the divine ShaJcspeare and Jiis nervous contemporaries ; loving , I may say doating , upon their very obscurities ; indeed , the less it understands , the more is this worthy audience pleased—it is so very respectable ; It shies apples now and then , does this superior audience , but they are always classical ones—apples of the Jcind that Paris used to throw at Venus . " The City ( No . 18 ) is the natural son of the Victoria , and inherits its parent ' s tastes . It has the same task to fulfil . It is a sort of Newgate Calendar dramatised—an Apotheosis of the seven deadly sins—a chapel of ease to the Old Bailey . " The Standard ( No . 19 ) is another in the same line , but with additional delights . Foreign voltigeurs , rope-dancers , wonderful dogs , men-monkeys , learned pigs , all that can enchant the eye , improve the mind , and enlarge the understanding . The ambition of the manager is evidently to please the whole human race , and as flies are not to be caught with fishing nets , he displays the alternate fascina tions of honey , vinegar , fruits , sweetmeats , treacle , everything—excep t French comedies . dine at and take post

      " As to the Pavillion ( No . 20 ) , one must actually noon - horses afterwards , in order to get there by half-past six . It is a theatre whose merit completely carries you away , far away—indeed the distance it is off secures for it successes beyond those of every other theatre—nearly a mile beyond . The shipping interest is here represented—its play bill ought to be posted at Lloyds . Vessels are nightly wrecked in latitude O . P ., longitude P . S . As you enter you smell the ' distempered sea / You sniff the brine of the ' set waters , ' and feel the dusty spray of the canvas waves . At the Victoria , the sanctity of the domestic hearth is invaded—here the very ocean is laid under contribution , and success is sought amidst the roar of its breakers—success as boundless as the ocean it springs from . The object of the management is to ' hold the mirror up' to sailors . An eternal tide of marine melo-dramas and nautical novelties ebbs and flows in this dry Naumachia , where ' life afloat' is depicted by fresh-water seamen before an audience of real tars . I leave you to judge whether the pieces are not likely to be pitched tolerably strong to suit the web-footed connoisseurs who roll in at half-price , who help to whistle the act music , and only app laud a dialogue made up of cabins , cables , and cabooses , booms , binnacles , and backy boxes ; whose nearest notion of attic salt is saltpetre , and whose sides are only to be tickled with points like p ikes , quips like quids , and jokes like junk . A visit here is a suffering one undergoes voluntarily once in one ' s life , like sea-sickness . " likelto

      I to makoh great fun with their versions of _English History , and then glances ut Le _Sottgc _d'uiw Nuit _d'JZtS : —• " W « _begiu by finding _ShakspewV and ' FftlutafP drinking _together _ut a _public Having shown that only four theatres out of twenty-three are y care much for French pieces , and having shown that out of 253 French pieces produced in 1851 , only eight were thought worth reproducing in England , Mr . Mathews then tells the authors why it is so few are available—the main reasons are absurdity and immorality . " What do you suppose , for instance , that we could do with a ' Mistress Siddons ?' ( meaning our great tragic actress ) who , represented by the piquante Dejazet , puts on the disguise of a village idiot , and runs about the muddy lanes barefoot , accompanied by a mysterious stranger , who turns out to be ' Sheridan , ' in order to convince her friends that she is capable of playing the part of the crazy girl which had been cast to her ? " What could wo do with * a ' Miss Kelly , ' who , to escape from a lover she never had , abandons her line of comic and melodramatic actress , and accepts an engagement as Prima Donna at the grand Opera at Naples ?—Miss Kelly ! who never got even as far as Calais in all her born days . " What use could wo make of a ' Gamin de Londres' a young ragamuffin of a London coachmaker ' s boy , called ' Robinson , ' frequenting in company with his < : hum * . Ui _gdog' a _tiivuru in the city , too / tiny u « _ihi > sea , ' and with 'fishing nets hanging from the walls '—who is declared by tho _' Lord Mayor' in the person of his ' constable , ' to be the natural son' of the ' Duke of Melford , ' a peer of the realm , and ' as such , ' to be heir to his title and estates ! ! !—who is carried oil' in tho euHtody of the said ' constable' and his assistant ' policeinens , ' to bo installed in bin father ' s magnificent mansion , at the corner of ' Holy well Street , ' in tho Strand , where his marriage with ' Nelly IJligtone' is broken oft" by the Lord Mayor , and from whence he is ordered by the eternal ' constable' and the * policeinons , ' who ' threaten him with their staves , ' to depart for the ' University of Oxford '—who then becomes , while waiting for the title of the Duke of Melfort , ' Sir Robinson , Count of _Sheilield '—talks of his ' Steward , who lives in Richard Street '—of _hia friend , the ' young Count of Cantwell , ' ( as if tho inuthodist doctor had ever been ennobled ) and of his high-born aunt , the proud Countess of Birmingham '—who consents to please tho Queen of _England , by marrying ' the daughter of tho great Nelson ' s grandson , ' a ¦* commodore who died about n month previously at Malta / ( Nelson ! ! who never oven had a son , much less ti son ' s granddaughter)—who at the end of the piece \» allowed , however , to marry Nelly , tho waitress at the eating-house in tho city , thanks again to the kindness of tho queen , whose carriage ) is slopped short in ' Koenig Street , ' by old mother ' _Hligtone , ' who shouts ' . lustiee , your Majesty ! ' and _proves on the instant , in the middle of the street , that her late husband , the lamented _liligtone , the landlord of the Hlaplmug shop in ( _Iraeeehurch Street , bad ' saved the . royal fleet in India ! ! / ' on which tho queen , still in tho middle of the street , promises ' her protection and a thumping dowry to Nelly , ' commands ' Sir ' Robinson * to marry her on the spot , and tho day after his wedding , dispatches the ev-nigamulnn _eonehmaker ' sboy to represent tho court of St . . James's , as British Ambassador at . Paris V "

      Loftiest, The Severest Tragedy Is Repres...

      house ! The creator and the created ! The poet and his work jumbled . That ' s not bad by way of a commencement . Falstaff is , moreover , the ' Hanger of Richmond Park ! ' We next find ' Queen Elizabeth' walking about the city with a pocket full of ' blank forms / signed by the high-sheriff , by virtue of which she disposes of the lives and liberties of her subjects—even to the extent of having them hanged without judge or jury ! The immaculate queen is avowedly in love with the poet , whom she meets accidentally at the public-house in the city , where she has gone masked , in company w ith one of her maids of honour , ' Miss Olivia , ' in the hope of finding him . Elizabeth then addresses William thus : ' Thy native place is Strafford '; ' to which the ' Divine Williams' replies ( without caring to correct her error ) ' Yes ,, I remember , in the days of my early youth , having tended my flocks in those v _& st solitudes—on the dizzy heights of those craggy mountains , enthroned atnidst the silent majesty of nature / ( The dreary solitudes , the mountain peaks , and silent wildernesses of the smiling county of Warwick !) Shakspeare is shortly afterwards carried out dead drunk , and conveyed , by the high sheriff ' s orders ( filled up by the queen ' s own hand on the public-house table ) , to Richmond Park , and there deposited . Elizabeth , draped in a white veil , appears to him in the moonlight in the character of his guardian genius , lectures him on his _irregularities , and next day sends for him to Whitehall , and encourages him by saying , ' Come , come , William ! Come , come , my poet ! To work!—and thus snatches ' Sir Williams' from the abyss of debauchery in which his hig h intellect was about to perish / " All this I can only repeat , though ingenious and fanciful in the extreme , is forbidden fruit as far as we are concerned . "

      One more extract and we have done : — " Give us good well-considered , pleasant works , free from dirt and indeeency , and we shall infallibly buy largely ; provided always , as the lawyers say , that you do not put too high a price upon them . You must bear in mind that we have to pay our authors as much , per act , for good adaptations from the French as for origiual productions . Literal , word-for-word translations , are of no use whatever , and have never , nor will they ever , have much success on the English stage . The taste of the two countries is so essentially different , that it requires a very skilful hand to adapt , expand , retrench , and arrange even the most available foreign dramasespecially as it is a well known circumstance that the details which produce the most effect in Paris are frequently those which produce the least in London . Up to the present time , we have been in the habit of changing , cutting , adding , and altering whatever we have thought nec essary to success , without the fear of the law before our eyes ; but shall we be able to do so in future , even after paying the French authors ? Perhaps you will be kind enoug h to inform me , when I have placed before you the difficulty I foresee . " I will take , as an illustration , one of your pieces , called ' Un Enfant de Paris ' from whence we , not long ago , adapted a very successful drama for the Lyceum . Do you t hink we should have d ared offe r this to our audience exactly as it stood ? Certainly not . A countess saves the life and honour of a young man of the lower orders , who breaks into her house for the purpose of robbing her of her diamonds , and who , out of gratitude for her forbearance , devotes himself to her service . So far , all is well enough . But it soon becomes too plain that the young man ' s devotion springs as much from love as from gratitude , and this we don't like . We don ' t relish the idea of a low fellow , with dirty hands , and black nibs to them , languishing sentimentally about the person of a woman of rank and refinement . There is no reason why he shouldn't , it is true , and it may be as right as possible ; but rig ht or wrong , we don't like it . Nor do we fancy any better the notion of a count ' s threatening his lovely wife with a stick ! ( The very gallery would rise en masse , and pelt him ofl' the stage . ) Nor the drunken revelry of a set of roues and courtesans , who force their way into the countess ' s apartments at the instigation of her husband , and insult her so grossly and brutally that , at last , to escape them , she itates herself from a rock into the sea ; from whence the sentimental

      precip young house-breaker fishes her up again , out of love and gratitude . Nor the dramatic _denouement of the encroaching tide , which sends a couple of remorseless waves so ve ry apropos , to swallow up the principal characters , and bring the drama to an untimely end . All these things , so distasteful to our feelings , were altered or suppressed , without which the piece would unquestionably have failed . And what harm did it do to the French author ? None at all . He was not known in the business , his name was not even printed on the play-bill , and , consequently , his reputation could not suffer by the liberties taken with his work . It could not matter to him in any way . " Hut under the new law it will matter very much , for his reputation will then Ik ; at . stake . We shall have to buy the right of translating his piece ; his name will be publicly attached to it as the author ; ho will become responsible for what he has written ; and will insist upon having his play represented , not that of an English author . And when they talk of garbling his work , and altering the very things that produced the greatest effect in Paris , he will cry , Stop , gentlemen , touch me at your peril ! Lot my burglar , with the dirty hands , doat upon my great lady ; let my count beat his wife with a stick ; let my drunken bucks and courtesans bully my countess till she gives three cheers and jumps overboard ; and let my high tide come in and wash away my dramatis persona ' -, or you shall not have my play . I have just sold it to a charming young man , who has undertaken to translate it without altering a line / "

      Rkminisoioncks Of Tjioucj Ht And Fkelinu...

      _RKMINISOIONCKS OF TJIOUCJ HT AND _FKELINU . Jiemitiiscentuis of Thought and _jpuol-int / . My tho Author of " Visiting my Eolations . ' Pickering . T . HK strange composite nature of this volume is not inaptly characterized by its title . It ih a gathering un of old reflections , recent readings , and that sort of intermittent philosophy in which women indulges untrained as they are to any continuous development of" their thoughts ; and these desultory pages at hunt wander into a somewhat continuous autobiography , curious , as all autobiography ever will be , and especially curious to tho religious world . Of the autobiography itself wo will say no word . It has p leased the authoress to remove the veil of privacy , and , l > y so doing , to mvite comment ; and yet , on the real inward character of any human being , comment is a delicate matter , therefore we prefer silence in thia case , lest our judgment _unpour harsh , and that _hanmnesH misapprehension i

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), July 31, 1852, page 17, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_31071852/page/17/