The Drama by Sir Irving Henry (most inspirational books of all time TXT) 📕

to himself as it was ill-deserved by its object. Time would not suffice, had I as many hours as I have minutes before me, to tell you of all the acts of generosity that this mean man, this niggardly actor, performed in his lifetime. One characteristic anecdote will suffice. When Whitfield was building his Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road, he employed one of the carpenters who worked for Garrick at Drury Lane. [142]Subscriptions for the Tabernacle do not seem to have come in as fast as they were required to pay the workmen, so that the carpenter had to go to Garrick to ask for an advance. When pressed for his reason he confessed that he had not received any wages from Mr. Whitfield. Garrick made the advance asked for, and soon after quietly set out to pay a visit to Mr. Whitfield, when, with many apologies for the liberty he was taking, he offered him a five hundred pound bank note as his subscription towards the Tabernacle. Considering that Garrick had no particular sympathy with Nonconformists, this action speaks as much for his charity as a Christian as it does for his liberality as a man.

Perhaps Richard III. remained Garrick's best Shakesperean character. Of course he played Cibber's version and not Shakespeare's. In fact, many of the Shakesperean parts were not played from [143]the poet's own text, but Garrick might have doubted whether even his popularity would have reconciled his audiences to the unadulterated poetry of our greatest dramatist.

Next to Richard, Lear would seem to have been his best Shakesperean performance. In Hamlet and Othello he did not equal Betterton; and in the latter, certainly from all one can discover, he was infinitely surpassed by Edmund Kean. In fact Othello was not one of his great parts. But in the wide range of characters which he undertook, Garrick was probably never equalled. A poor actor named Everard, who was first brought out as a boy by Garrick, says: "Such or such an actor in their respective fortes have been allowed to play such or such a part equally well as him; but could they perform Archer and Scrub like him? and Abel Drugger, Ranger, and Bayes, and Benedick; speak his own [144]prologue to Barbarossa, in the character of a country-boy, and in a few minutes transform himself in the same play to Selim? Nay, in the same night he has played Sir John Brute and the Guardian, Romeo and Lord Chalkstone, Hamlet and Sharp, King Lear and Fribble, King Richard and the Schoolboy! Could anyone but himself attempt such a wonderful variety, such an amazing contrast of character, and be equally great in all? No, no, no! Garrick, take the chair."

Garrick was, without doubt, a very intense actor; he threw himself most thoroughly into any part that he was playing. Certainly we know that he was not wanting in reverence for Shakespeare; in spite of the liberties which he ventured to take with the poet's text, he loved and worshipped him. To Powell, who threatened to be at one time a formidable rival, his advice was, "Never let your Shakespeare be out of your hands; keep him [145]about you as a charm; the more you read him, the more you will like him, and the better you will act." As to his yielding to the popular taste for pantomime and spectacle, he may plead a justification in the words which his friend Johnson put into his mouth in the Prologue that he wrote for the inauguration of his management at Drury Lane:—

"The Drama's laws the Drama's patrons give,
And we, who live to please, must please to live."

We must remember how much he did for the stage. Though his alterations of Shakespeare shock us, they are nothing to those outrages committed by others, who deformed the poet beyond recognition. Garrick made Shakespeare's plays once more popular. He purged the actors, for a time at least, of faults that were fatal to any high class of drama, and, above all, he gradually got rid of those abominable nuisances (to which we have [146]already alluded), the people who came and took their seats at the wings, on the stage itself, while the performance was going on, hampering the efforts of the actors and actresses. The stage would have had much to thank Garrick for if he had done nothing more than this—if only that he was the first manager who kept the audience where they ought to be, on the other side of the footlights.

In his private life Garrick was most happy. He was fortunate enough to find for his wife a simple-minded, loyal woman, in a quarter which some people would deem very unpromising. Mrs. Garrick was, as is well-known, a celebrated danseuse, known as Mademoiselle Violette, whose real name was Eva Maria Weigel, a Viennese. A more affectionate couple were never seen; they were not blessed with children, but they lived together in the most uninterrupted happiness, and their house was the scene of[147] many social gatherings of a delightful kind. Mrs. Garrick survived her celebrated husband, and lived to the ripe age of ninety-eight, retaining to the very last much of that grace and charm of expression which had won the actor's heart.

Time will not allow me to dwell on the many points of interest in Garrick's career; all of which are to be found in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's Life of Garrick. On returning to London after a visit to the Spensers at Althorp in January, 1779, he was struck down by a fatal attack of his old malady, the gout, and died at the age of sixty-three.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey with ceremonies as imposing as ever graced the funeral of a great man. The pall-bearers were headed by the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl Spenser, while round the grave there were gathered such men as Burke and Fox, and last, not least, his old friend and tutor, [148]Samuel Johnson, his rugged countenance streaming with tears, his noble heart filled with the sincerest grief. The words so often quoted, artificial though they may seem, came from that heart when, speaking of his dear Davy's death, he said that it "had eclipsed the gayety of nations."

Garrick's remarkable success in society, which achieved for him a position only inferior to that he achieved on the stage, is the best answer to what is often talked about the degrading nature of the actor's profession. Since the days of Roscius no contempt for actors in general, or for their art, has prevented a great actor from attaining that position which is accorded to all distinguished in what are held to be the higher arts.

Nearly nine years after the death of Garrick, on November 4th, 1787, a young woman, who had run away from home when little more than a child to join a company of strolling players, and who, [149]when that occupation failed, earned a scanty living as a hawker in the streets of London, gave birth, in a wretched room near Gray's Inn, to an illegitimate child. This woman was Nancy Carey, the grand-daughter of Henry Carey, the author of the "National Anthem." She was the great-grand-daughter of George Saville, Marquis of Halifax, whose natural son Henry Carey was. A compassionate actress, Miss Tidswell, who knew the father of the child, Aaron Kean, gave her what assistance she could. Poor Nance was removed to her father's lodgings, near Gray's Inn, and there, on the day before mentioned, Edmund Kean was born.

Three months after his birth his mother deserted him, leaving him, without a word of apology or regret, to the care of the woman who had befriended her in her trouble. When he was but three years old he was brought, amongst a number [150]of other children, to Michael Kelly who was then bringing out the opera of Cymon at the Opera House in the Haymarket, and, thanks to his personal beauty, he was selected for the part of Cupid. Shortly afterwards he found his way to Drury Lane, where the handsome baby—for he was little more—figured among the imps in the pantomime. Taught here the tricks of the acrobat, he had at four years old acquired such powers of contortion that he was fit to rank as an infant phenomenon. But the usual result followed: the little limbs became deformed, and had to be put in irons, by means of which they regained that symmetry with which nature had at first endowed them. Three years afterwards, in March, 1794, John Kemble was acting Macbeth at Drury Lane; and, in the "cauldron scene," he engaged some children to personate the supernatural beings summoned by the witches from that weird vessel. Little [151]Edmund with his irons was the cause of a ridiculous accident, and the attempt to embody the ghostly forms was abruptly abandoned. But the child seems to have been pardoned for his blunder, and for a short time was permitted by the manager to appear in one or two children's parts. Little did the dignified manager imagine that the child—who was one of his cauldron of imps in Macbeth—was to become, twenty years later, his formidable rival—formidable enough to oust almost the representative of the Classical school from the supremacy he had hitherto enjoyed on the Tragic stage. In Orange Court, Leicester Square, where Holcroft, the author of The Road to Ruin, was born, Edmund Kean received his first education. Scanty enough it was, for it had scarcely begun before his wretched mother stepped in and claimed him; and, after her re-appearance, his education seems to have been of a most [152]spasmodic character. Hitherto, the child's experience of life had been hard enough. When only eight years of age he ran away to Portsmouth, and shipped himself on board a ship bound to Madeira. But he found his new life harder than that from which he had escaped, and, by dint of feigning deafness and lameness, he succeeded in procuring his removal to an hospital at Madeira, whence, the doctors finding his case yielded to no remedies, the authorities kindly shipped him again to England. He insisted on being deaf and lame: indeed, so deaf that in a violent thunder-storm he remained perfectly unmoved, explaining his composure by declaring that he could not hear any noise at all. From Portsmouth he made his way on foot to London. On presenting himself at the wretched lodgings where his mother lived, he found that she had gone away with Richardson's troupe. Penniless and half-starving, [153]he suddenly thought of his uncle, Moses Kean, who lived in Lisle Street, Leicester Square, a queer character, who gained a precarious living by giving entertainments as a mimic and ventriloquist. The uncle received his nephew warmly enough, and seems to have cultivated, to the best of his ability, the talent for acting which he recognized at once in the boy. Edmund again enjoyed a kind of desultory education, partly carried on at school and partly at his uncle's home, where he enjoyed the advantage of the kind instructions of his old friend, Miss Tidswell, of D'Egville, the dancing master, of Angelo, the fencing master, and of no less a person than Incledon, the celebrated singer, who seems to have taken the greatest interest in him. But the vagrant, half-gypsy disposition, which he inherited from his mother, could never be subdued, and he was constantly disappearing from his uncle's house for [154]weeks together, which he would pass in going about from one roadside inn to another, amusing the guests with his acrobatic tricks, and his monkey-like imitations. In vain was he locked up in rooms, the height of which from the ground was such as seemed to render escape impossible. He contrived to get out somehow or other, even at the risk of his neck, and to make