Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 61, No. 376, February, 1847
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Two words about the Palais Royal, and we have done; leaving the dramatic aristocracy of the theatres royal, and the smaller fry of the Boulevards, for some future opportunity of comment. The Français, although it reckons in its company several excellent comic actors, relies chiefly on tragedy, and will doubtless continue to do so, as long as it possesses Rachel, or until a comedian of very extraordinary talent starts up. And in French tragedies, even, heretical as it may sound, in the classic masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, we take far less pleasure than in the witty and sparkling comedies of many less renowned authors, to which the genius of the language so much better adapts itself. Nay, we confess to have more than once passed the Français without the least compunction, with les Horaces or Andromaque on the bills, and a crowd at the door, to commit ourselves, a few paces farther, to the friendly arms of a stall at the Palais Royal, and the mirth-inspiring influence of Tousez and Levassor, the most comical buffoon and admirable mimic on the French stage.
When the Variétés' company was expelled from the little theatre of the Palais Royal, it became the scene of all manner of bastard performances. Rope dancers, wooden puppets, even dogs were the actors. The most intelligent of these were the quadrupeds. Mr. Hervey gives the following analysis of a melodrama enacted by them:—
"A young Russian princess, held captive in a castle by a tyrant, has a lover, who has sworn to effect her rescue. On the rising of the curtain, the fair prisoner, a pretty spaniel, is discovered walking on the parapet of a tower; the lover, a very handsome dog, presently appears at the foot of the wall, barking most amorously. As for the tyrant, he is represented by a ferocious-looking bull-dog, with a smashed nose. On a given signal, the lover's army make their entrée, and scale the walls of the castle, which, after a gallant defence on the part of the garrison, is finally taken, and the princess delivered."
When the public had had enough of these canine comedies, the theatre was converted into a coffee-house. But the old dramatic prestige still hung about the place, and, after a time, the frequenters of the establishment were diverted, whilst sipping their punch and lemonade, with detached scenes and short vaudevilles, performed by two or three persons. Finally, in 1830, the house was rebuilt, and a regular license obtained; and from that date to the present day it has been a favourite resort of all lovers of a hearty laugh. Déjazet and Achard were long its chief support. They have left it; but others, little, if at all, inferior, have replaced them. Foremost amongst these stands Pierre Levassor, the best comic ballad-singer in France. Innumerable were the difficulties he had to overcome before he could fully gratify his passion for acting, and display his innate talent at a Paris theatre. His father, an old soldier of Napoleon's armies, opposed his propensity, which early manifested itself, in every possible way, and apprenticed him to a trade. During the revolution of 1830, young Levassor was on business at Marseilles, where a dinner was given to celebrate the event. "At the general request, he sang the song of the Trois Couleurs, with such immense success, that on the party adjourning after dinner to the theatre, a note was thrown on the stage, in which he volunteered to sing it in public, if agreeable to the audience. The offer was accepted; and both song and vocalist were loudly applauded." This incident was decisive of his future career. On his return to Paris he became an actor, and soon conquered great popularity. He is particularly clever in disguising himself, so as to be quite unrecognisable. With his dress he changes his voice, gait, and even his face; and will look the part of a decrepid old woman every bit as well as the more easily assumed one of a scapegrace student. His vivacity, good-humour, and fun, are inexhaustible. In the ludicrous extravaganzas, reviews of the past year, which nearly every carnival sees produced at the Palais Royal, he is perfectly irresistible. Powerfully aided by Grassot, Lemenil, Sainville, and Alcide Tousez, he keeps the house in an unceasing roar, even at pieces which, like the Pommes-de-terre Malades and the Enfant du Carnaval, are in themselves of very feeble merit. An excellent singer and clever actor, he is also a capital dancer and first-rate mimic, imitating with extraordinary facility every possible sound, whether the cries of animals or any thing else. And, off the stage, Levassor is as unassuming and gentlemanly as he is amusing and accomplished upon it.
Ravel is another droll dog, but quite in a different style from Levassor. The latter is all quickness, impetuosity, and entrain; Ravel is of a more passive style of comicality. At times he reminds us of two English actors, Buckstone of the Haymarket, and Wright, the Adelphi low comedian. He has something of Buckstone's odd monotony of manner, and, like him, often excites the laughter of an audience by his mere look or attitude. When Wright is not compelled to make a buffoon of himself in some stupid travestie, but is allowed fair scope for the display of his comic talents, which are really considerable, we prefer him to Ravel. He is a steady and improving performer. In Paul Pry, and some other stock pieces, his acting is quiet and excellent. Many of Ravel's characters have been taken by him in the English version. Ravel is seldom seen to greater advantage than as a soldier. He exactly renders the mingled simplicity and cunning of the conscript; the tricks of the barrack-room grafted upon clownish dulness. The piece called the Tourlourou—the French nickname for a recruit—founded on a novel of Paul de Kock's, was one of his triumphs, and another was Le Caporal et la Payse, Englished as "Seeing Wright." In short, he occupies a high position amongst the half-dozen drolls who, night after night, send home the audience of the Palais Royal brimful of mirthful reminiscences.
In this imperfect sketch of some of the leading French theatres and actors, we have taken little opportunity of censure. We could notice but a few, and have selected from the most worthy. In Paris, as elsewhere, pumps, to use a green-room term, are plentiful. But in the higher class of theatres they are in the minority; and moreover there is a neatness and tact in the performance of French actors, which, in the less prominent characters, at least, goes some way to atone for the absence of decided talent. A French comedian may be tame, he may be incorrect in the conception of his part; he is rarely vulgar or ridiculous. We refer, of course, to the actors allowed to figure on the boards of the half-score good theatres in Paris. There is no lack of inferior ones, where the laugh is more often at the performer than at the performance. But most even of these will repay a visit, if not for the sake of the actors, for that of the audience. Despised by the fashionable and pleasure-seeking, they afford a rich field to the observant man. He must not, it is true, be squeamish, and fear to let the unsavoury reek of tabac-de-caporal, or the odours of potato brandy and logwood wine come betwixt the wind and his nobility. Neither must he dread contact with the mechanic's blouse, with the cotton gown of the grisette, or the velveteen vest of the titi of the Boulevards; he must even make up his mind to see his neighbour, dispensing with his upper garment, exhibit his brawny arms in shirt sleeves of questionable purity. If he dare encounter these little imaginary contaminations, he will find entertainment in the humours of the Boulevard du Temple; in the pantomimes of the Funambules—once the scene of poor Debureau's triumphs—and in the ten-franc vaudevilles of the Petit Lazari.
THE REIGN OF GEORGE THE SECOND. 16
Walpole, in giving his history to the world, renounces the title of an historian. He proclaims himself simply a compiler; his volumes, Memoires Pour Servir; and his chief purpose, simply, to give his own recollections, day by day, of the men and things passing before his eyes. Yet what historian has ever told his story with more spirit, ever sketched his characters with more living truth, or led our curiosity onward through the labyrinth of political intrigue, parliamentary struggle, and national vicissitude, with so light, and yet so leading a hand? A part of this charm arises from the interest which he himself took in his performance. He evidently delighted in the revival of those scenes in which he had once figured, and the powerful portraiture which, in his study, realized the characters of the eminent men whom he had seen successively depart from the political world. In this lies the spell which makes Walpole the favourite of all the higher order of readers in our age, and will make him popular to the last hour of the English language.
We read Gibbon like a task. We are astonished at his learned opulence, his indefatigable labour, and his flood of rich and high-wrought conception; but we grow as weary of him, as if we walked through an Indian treasury, and rested the eye only on heaps of gold. With all our great historical writers, the mind feels a sense of their toil, and, however it may be endured for the sake of its knowledge, our toil, too, is inevitable, and the crop must be raised only by the sweat of our own brow.
But the pages of Walpole give us the knowledge without the toil, and, instead of bending to the tillage, we pluck the fruit from the tree as we pass along. When he, too, is heavy, his failure arises simply from his attempting to assume the style of his contemporaries. He is not made for their harness, however it may be plated and embroidered. He cannot move in their stately and measured pace. His genius is volatile and vivid; he moves by bounds: and his display is always the most effective when, abandoning the beaten tracks of authorship, he speeds his light way across the field, and exhibits at once the agility of his powers and the caprice of his will.
What infinite gratification have we lost, by the want of such a writer in the days of classical antiquity! With what interest would the living world follow a Greek or a Roman Walpole! With what delight should we contemplate a Greek Council, with Pericles for its president, sketched by the hand of a spectator, and shown in the brilliant contests, intellectual intrigue, and ardent ambition of these sons of soul! What a scene would such a writer make of Cicero confronting Catiline, with the supremacy of Rome trembling in the scale, and the crowded senate-house preparing to hear the sentence of life or death! We might have wanted the strong historic phraseology of Sallust; or, in a subsequent age, the gloomy grandeur of Tacitus, that Caravaggio of ancient Rome; we might have lost some of the classic beauty, and all the theatric drapery, but we should have had a clearer, more emphatic, and more faithful picture, than in the severe energy of the one, or the picturesque mysticism of the other. We should have known the characters as they were known to the patrician and the populace of two thousand years ago; we should have seen them as they threw out all their stately and muscular strength; we should have been able to recover them from the tomb, make them move before us "in their armour, as they lived," and gather from their lips the language of times and things, now past away from man.
Still, we must acknowledge that Walpole's chief excellence is in his letters. His sportive spleen, his polished sarcasm, and his keen insight into the ways of men, place him at the head of all epistolary authorship. He has had but two competitors for this fame,—it is remarkable that they were both women,—De Sevigne in France, and Lady Wortley Montague in England; yet, how utterly inferior are De Sevigne's feeble sketches of court life, and vapid panegyrics on the "adorable Grignan;" or the Englishwoman's rambling details of travels and tribulations, to the pungent pleasantry and substantial vigour of Walpole! The Frenchwoman's sketches are like her artificial flowers, to the freshness of the true. Lady Mary's slipshod sentences and coarse voluptuousness are equally inferior to the accurate finish and fashionable animation of the man who combined the critic with the courtier, and was the philosopher even more than he was the man of fashion.
Walpole is now an English classic. It is striking, to see a man of talent thus vindicating his genius in the grave, making a posthumous defence of his character, and compelling posterity to acknowledge the distinctions of which he was defrauded by the petulance of his time. His example and his success administer a moral which ought not to be thrown away. There are many individuals in our own time, who might thus nobly avenge themselves on the injustice of their age. The Frenchman's maxim, Il n'y a que bonheur, et malheur, is unanswerably true; and not only men of the finest faculties are often ill used by fortune, but they are often the worst used. Their conscious superiority renders them fastidious of the lower arts of success; their sense of honour disqualifies them for all those services which require flexibility of conscience; and their sensibility to injustice makes them retort public injury, by disdainfully abandoning the struggle, and retiring from the vulgar bustle of the world.
Let such men, then, glance over the pages of Walpole, and see how productive may be made the hours of obscurity; how vigorously the oblivion of one generation may be redeemed by the honours of another; and how effectively the humble man of genius may survive the glaring favourites of an ephemeral good fortune.
Walpole, in his lifetime, was either pitied as a disappointed official, or laughed at as a collector of cracked china; but who either pities or laughs at him now? Posterity delights in the products of his study, while the prosperous tribe of his parliamentary day are forgotten, or remembered only through those products of his study. The Pulteneys, Granvilles, Lyttletons, and Wyndhams, are extinguished, and their chief interest now arises from Walpole's fixing their names in his works; as an architect uses the busts and masks of antiquity to decorate the gates, or crowns the buttresses of his temple.
Lord Holland's preface contains the following brief statement relative to the present publication.
Among the papers found at Strawberry Hill, after the death of Lord Orford, was the following memorandum, wrapped in an envelope, on which was written, "Not to be opened till after my will."
"In my library, at Strawberry Hill, are two wainscot chests or boxes, the larger marked with an A, the lesser with a B. I desire that, as soon as I am dead, my executor and executrix will cord up strongly and seal the larger box marked A, and deliver it to the Honourable Hugh Conway Seymour; to be kept by him unopened and sealed, till the eldest son of Lady Waldegrave, or whichever of her sons, being Earl of Waldegrave, shall attain the age of twenty-five years, when the said chest, with whatever it contains, shall be delivered to him for his own."
The rest of the order refers simply to the keeping of the key in the interim. The date is August 19, 1796.
Lord Holland then argues, with a rather unnecessary waste of argument, that the history contained within this chest was intended for publication, which, of course, it must have been.
In his private correspondence, Walpole frequently alludes to his preparation of the present work. In a letter to Mr. Montague, in 1752, he tells him, that "his memoirs of last year are quite finished," but that he means to add some pages of notes, "that will not want anecdotes;" and in answer to Montague, who had ludicrously menaced him with a messenger from the Secretary's office, to seize his papers, he says, "I have buried the memoirs under the oak in my garden, where they are to be found a thousand years hence, and taken perhaps for a Runic history in rhyme."
In another part of his memoirs of 1758, he says, with reference to the different stages of his work, "During the former part, I lived in the centre of business, was intimately acquainted with many of the chief actors, was eager in politics, and indefatigable in heaping up materials for my work. Now, detached from those busy scenes, with many political connexions dropped or dissolved; indifferent to events, and indolent; I shall have fewer opportunities of informing myself or others." And in this supposed indolence and ignorance, he sits down to his work without delay, and fills his volumes with information, inaccessible to nine-tenths of the ablest and most active in his generation.
But it is not our purpose to give a consecutive view of the contents of those volumes. Their nature is the reverse of consecutive. They are as odd, irregular, and often as novel, as the changes of a kaleidoscope. Nothing can be less like a picture, with its background, and foreground, its middle tints and its chiaroscuro. Their best emblem perhaps would be the "Dissolving views," where a palace has scarcely met the eye, before it melts into an Italian lake; or the procession to a Romish shrine is metamorphosed into a charge of cavalry. The volumes are a melange of characters, anecdotes, and reflections. We shall open the pages at hazard, and take, as it comes first, in those "Sortes Walpolianæ," a Westminster election.
There is "nothing new under the sun." What the Irish cry for "Repeal" is now, the cry for the "Stuarts" was a hundred years ago. Faction equally throve on both; and the tribe who live by faction in all ages uttered both cries with equal perseverance—the only distinction between them being, that as the Jacobite cry was an affair of the scaffold, it was uttered with a more judicious reserve.
Yet, it is only justice to the men of the older day, to acknowledge that their motives were of a much higher order than the stimulants of the modern clamour. With many of the Scottish Jacobites, the impulse was a sense of honour to their chieftains, and a gallant devotion to their king; with many of the English, it was a conscientious belief that they were only doing their duty to the lawful throne in resisting the claims of the Prince of Orange. It is remarkable, that of the "seven bishops" sent to trial by James, but one, Trelawny, could be prevailed on to take the oath of allegiance to William; yet, unfounded and extravagant as were these conceptions, they showed manliness and conscience. Later times have had motives, unredeemed by the chivalry of the Scotch, or the integrity of the English; but the cause of both has been marked with a similarity of operation, which makes Solomon still "an oracle."
The elections became the chief scenes of display. The efforts to return Jacobite members were of the most pertinacious kind, and sometimes proceeded to actual violence. In one of the Westminster elections, the court candidate had been furiously attacked by a hired mob; and one Murray, a man of family, and marked, by his name, for an adherent of the Stuarts, had exhibited himself as a leader, had been captured, and consigned to the custody of the Serjeant-at-arms.
After a period of confinement, pardon was tendered to him, if he would ask it. He refused contemptuously, and obtained popularity by playing the hero.
Murray was brought to the bar of the House of Commons to be heard in his own defence. He asserted his innocence, smiled when he was taxed with having called Lord Trentham and the High Bailiff rascals, desired counsel, and was remanded. Another character then comes on the tapis by way of episode. This was Sir William Yonge. It has been said of the celebrated Erskine, that in the House he was a natural, out of the House he was a supernatural; and certainly nothing could be less like, than the orator of the bar, and the prattler of the House of Commons. Yonge's characteristics were just the reverse. He was always trifling, out of the House, and sometimes singularly effective in it. Walpole says of him, that his Parliamentary eloquence was the more extraordinary, as it seemed to come upon him by inspiration. Sir Robert Walpole frequently, when he did not choose to enter early into the debate himself, gave Yonge his notes as the latter came into the House; from which he could speak admirably, though he had missed all the preceding discussion.
Sir Robert Walpole said of him, with a pungency worthy of his son, that "nothing but Yonge's character could keep down his parts, and nothing but his parts support his character;" but, whatever might be his character, it is certain that his parts served him well, for though but four-and-twenty years in Parliament, he was twice a Lord of the Treasury, a Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary at War, finishing with the then very lucrative situation of Vice-Treasurer of Ireland. For the more honorary part of his distinctions, he had the Ribbon of the Bath, was a Privy Councillor, and was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Carnarvonshire.
We now return to Murray. It was moved that he should appear before the House on his knees. Walpole's description is very graphic. "He entered with an air of confidence, composed of something between a martyr and a coxcomb.
"The Speaker called out, Your obeisances, sir, your obeisances, and then, sir, you must kneel. He replied, Sir, I beg to be excused, I never kneel but to God. The Speaker repeated the command with great warmth. Murray answered, Sir, I am sorry I cannot comply with your request: I should in any thing else. Speaker cried, Sir, I call upon you again to consider of it. Murray answered, Sir, when I have committed a crime, I kneel to God for pardon, but I know my own innocence, and I cannot kneel to any one else. The Speaker ordered the Serjeant to take him away and secure him. He was going to reply, but the Speaker would not suffer him. The Speaker then made a representation to the House of his contemptuous behaviour, and said, However you may have differed in the debate, I hope you will be unanimous in the punishment.
"Then ensued a long, tedious, and trifling succession of speakers, finishing by an adjournment at two in the morning."
Then comes another character passing through the magic lantern. The Mutiny Bill is the back-ground for this caricature. The front figure is Lord Egmont. John Percival, second Earl of Egmont, seems to have been an extraordinary compound of the fanatic and the philosopher. He was scarcely of age, before he had a scheme of assembling the Jews, and making himself their king. His great talent was, indefatigable application. He was never known to laugh. He was once, indeed, seen to smile; but that was at chess. His father had trained him to history and antiquities; and he early settled his own political genius by scribbling pamphlets. Towards the decline of Sir Robert Walpole's power, he had created himself a leader of the Independents, a knot of desperate tradesmen, many of them converted to Jacobinism, by being fined at the custom-house for contraband practices. One of their chiefs was Blackistone, a grocer in the Strand, detected in smuggling, and forgiven by Sir Robert Walpole; detected again, and fined largely, on which he turned patriot and became an alderman of London.
At the beginning of this parliament, rejected by Westminster, and countenanced nowhere, he bought what Walpole pleasantly calls, the loss of an election at Weobly, for which place, however, on a petition, Fox procured his return to parliament, and immediately had the satisfaction to find him declare against the court. At the Westminster election, his indefatigability against the ministerial favourite came amply into play. All the morning he passed at the hustings, then came to the House, where he was a principal actor, and the rest of the day he spent at hazard, not to mention the hours spent in collecting materials for his speeches, or in furnishing them to his weekly mercenaries.
We then have a touch of the pencil at Lord Nugent.
"This Irishman's style was florid bombast; his impudence as great as if he had been honest. He affected unbounded good-humour, and it was unbounded, but by much secret malice, which sometimes broke out into boisterous railing, but oftener vented itself in still-born satires. Nugent's attachments were to Lord Granville; but all his flattery was addressed to Mr. Pelham, whom he mimicked in candour, as he often resembled Granville in ranting. Nugent had lost the reputation of a great poet, by writing works of his own, after he had acquired fame by an ode that was the joint production of several others."