the original of those Italian, or Italianized,
voluptuaries in sin which pleased the fancy of
Shakespeare's age. Mixed up with many strik-
ing, thoroughly dramatic physiognomies, it
must be confessed that some of these portraits
scarcely help at all to explain the power of
the players to whom they belonged. That,
perhaps, is what we might naturally expect;
the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is
a matter in which many very subtle and indirect
channels to men's sympathy are called into play.
Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at
77
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
his noble foundation at Dulwich, like a fine
Holbein, figures, in blent strength and delicacy,
as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time
for sentiment, ā Prynne (included, we suppose,
in this company, like the skull at the feast) as
a likable if somewhat melancholic young man ;
while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after
Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice young
people. On the other hand, the tail- pieces,
chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonder-
ful natural variety there was in Garrick's soul,
and are well worth comparative study. Notice-
able again, among the whole-plate portraits, is
the thoroughly reassuring countenance of Steele,
the singularly fine heads of John, Charles, and
Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain,
pinched countenance of William Davenant re-
minds one of Charles Kean, and might well
have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came
into it, into power and charm, as the speaking
eyes assure us even in its repose.
The Renaissance inherited the old foolish pre-
judice of Roman times, when, although the
writers of plays were the intimate friends of
emperors, the actors were thought infamous.
78
THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
Still, on the whole, actors fared better in England
than in Romanist France, where Moliere was
buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog.
Very different was the treatment of the eminent
Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730 : ā
" Poor ' Narcissa ' after death (says Walpole)
was attired in a Holland nightdress, with tucker
and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which
latter material she also wore a headdress, and
a pair of new kid gloves. In this dress the
deceased actress received such honour as actress
never received before, nor has ever received
since. The lady lay in state in the Jerusalem
Chamber. Had she been really a queen the
public could not have thronged more eagerly
to the spectacle ; and after the lying in state
there was a funeral of as much, ceremony as has
been observed at the obsequies of many a queen.
There were anthems and prayers and a sermon ;
and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when
all was over, to a few particular friends, and
with some equivocation, as it seems to me, that
he ' buried her very willingly, and with much
satisfaction.' "
Yet even in England players had need of
79
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
powerful protectors. " Wit," said Chesterfield,
opposing an unjust licensing Act, " Wit, my
lords ! is the property of those who have it, and
too often the only property they have to depend
on." Wit, indeed, with the other gifts that
make good company, has largely gone with
theatrical talents, too often little to the benefit
of the gifted persons. Theatrical society, rather
than the theatre, has made the lives of actors
as we see them in these volumes, in many cases
so tragic, even sordidly tragic.
If misery and madness abound in stage life,
so also does an indomitable cheerfulness, always
at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's
book abounds, as might be expected, with
admirable impromptus and the like ; one might
collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a
sweep on a blood-horse, remarked, " There goes
Warburton on Shakespeare ! " When he heard
that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to
death and at its wits' end, he exclaimed that
it could not have been the length of the journey
which had tired it. Again, when Lord Car-
marthen, at a party, told him his handkerchief
was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced
80
THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
it with a " Thank you, my lord ; you know the
company better than I." Jevon, a century
earlier, was in the habit of taking great Hberties
with authors and audience. He made Settle
half mad and the house ecstatic when having, as
Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "y^// on his sword,'*
he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over
it, " died," according to the direction of the
acting copy. Quaint enough, but certainly no
instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how
a French translation of a play of Vanbrugh ā
not architect of Blenheim only, but accomplished
in many other ways ā appeared at the Odeon, in
1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous
work of Voltaire recently discovered. The Vol-
tairean wit was found as " delightful in this as
in the last century."
Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has
a hundred curious things to note : ā that Richard
the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first
practically useful patron." We see Queen Eliza-
beth full of misgiving at a difficult time at
the popularity of Richard the Second : ā " The
deposition and death of King Richard the
G 81
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
Second." " Tongues whisper to the Queen that
this play is part of a great plot to teach her
subjects how to murder kings." It is perhaps
not generally known that Charles Shakespeare,
William's brother, survived till the Restoration.
Oldys says, a propos of the restoration of the
stage at that time : ā
" The actors were greedily inquisitive into
every little circumstance, more especially in
Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his
brother could relate of him. But he, it seems,
was so stricken in years, and possibly his memory
so weakened by infirmities, that he could give
them but little light into their inquiries ; and
all that could be recollected from him of his
brother Will in that station was the faint,
general, and almost lost ideas he had of having
once seen him act a part in one of his own
comedies, wherein being present to personate a
decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and
appeared so weak and drooping and unable to
walk, that he was forced to be supported and
carried by another person to a table, at which
he was seated among some company who were
eating, and one of them sang a song."
82
THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
This description applies to old Adam in As
Tou Like It. Many are the evidences that
Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time
a struggle to maintain itself. James Howard, in
Pepys's day ā
" Belonged to the faction which affected to
believe that there was no popular love for
Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he
arranged Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a
double denouement ā one serious, the other hilari-
ous. If your heart were too sensitive to bear
the deaths of the loving pair, you had only to
go on the succeeding afternoon to see them
wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured
domestic felicity."
In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly
a true testimony to the acting of his time ?) that
Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius as
"Jack Puddins."
Here, as in many another detail, we are re-
minded, of course, of the difference between our
own and past times in mimic as in real life.
For Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage
was the introduction of actresses from France by
Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young
83
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some inter-
esting notices. Who the lady was who first
trod the stage as a professional actress is not
known, but her part was Desdemona. And yet
it was long after that ā
"Edward Kynaston died (in 171 2). He lies
buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent
Garden. If not the greatest actor of his day,
Kynaston was the greatest of the ' boy-actresses.'
So exalted was his reputation 'that,' says Downes,
*it has since been disputable among the judici-
ous, whether any woman that succeeded him so
sensibly touched the audience as he.' "
In Charles II. 's time it was a custom to
return the price of admission to all persons who
left the theatre before the close of the first act.
Consequently, many shabby persons were wont
to force their way in without paying, on the
plea that they did not intend to remain beyond
the time limited. Hence much noisy contention,
to the great discomfort even of Royalty. The
brawling, drinking habits of the time were even
more discomforting. An angry word, passed
one April evening of 1682 between the son of
Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young
84
THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-
drawing. The two young fellows not having
elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the
stage, and fought there, to the greater comfort
of the audience, and with a more excited fury
on the part of the combatants. The mingling
of the public with the players was a practice
which so annoyed the haughty French actor,
Baron, that to suggest to the audience the
absurdity of it, he would turn his back on them
for a whole act, and play to the audience on the
stage. Sometimes the noise was so loud that an
actor's voice would scarcely be heard. It was
about 1 710 that the word encore was introduced
at the operatic performances in the Haymarket,
and very much objected to by plain- going
Englishmen. It was also the custom of some
who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra
volta ! Altra volta 1
Even indirectly the history of the stage illus-
trates life, and affords many unexpected lights
on historical characters. Oliver Cromwell,
though he despised the stage, could condescend
to laugh at, and with, men of less dignity than
actors. Buffoonery was not entirely expelled
85
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
from his otherwise grave court. Oxford and
Drury Lane itself dispute the dignity of giving
birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where a
mean house is still pointed out as the first home
of this mother of a line of dukes, whose great-
grandson was to occupy the neighbouring palace
as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her
burial in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop
Tenison preached the sermon. When this was
subsequently made the ground of exposing him
to the reproof of Queen Mary, she remarked
that the good doctor, no doubt, had said nothing
but what the facts authorized.
" Who should act genteel comedy perfectly,"
asks Walpole, " but people of fashion, that have
sense ? " And, in truth, the seventeenth century
gave many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being
the most famous of them. Like many eminent
actors, she was famous for the way in which she
would utter one single expression in a play. Dr.
Doran gives some curious instances from later
actors. " What mean my grieving subjects .? "
uttered in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was
invested by her with such emphatic grace and
dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation
86
THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
which swelled into thunders of applause. Her
noble head is here engraved after Kneller, like
the head of a magnificent visionary man.
Should we really care for the greatest actors
of the past could we have them before us ?
Should we find them too different from our
accent of thought, of feeling, of speech, in a
thousand minute particulars which are of the
essence of all three .? Dr. Doran's long and
interesting records of the triumphs of Garrick,
and other less familiar, but in their day hardly
less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of
the doubt. Garrick himself, as sometimes
happens with people who have been the subject
of much anecdote and other conversation, here
as elsewhere, bears no very distinct figure. One
hardly sees the wood for the trees. On the
other hand, the account of Betterton, " perhaps
the greatest of English actors," is delightfully
fresh. That intimate friend of Dryden, Tillot-
son, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's
portrait by Kneller which is still extant, was
worthy of their friendship ; his career brings
out the best elements in stage life. The stage
in these volumes presents itself indeed not merely
87
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
as a mirror of life, but as an illustration of the
utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
characters of the players. Ups and downs,
generosity, dark fates, the most delicate good-
ness, have nowhere been more prominent than
in the private existence of those devoted to the
public mimicry of men and women. Contact
with the stage, almost throughout its history,
presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring
out the bizarrerie, the theatrical tricks and con-
trasts, of the actual world.
88
VI
WORDSWORTH
27TH February 1889
89
WORDSWORTH
The Complete Poetical Works of William Words-
worth. With an Introduction by John
Morley. Macmillans.
The Recluse. By WilHam Wordsworth. Mac-
millans.
Selections from Wordsworth. By William Knight
and other Members of the Wordsworth
Society. With Preface and Notes. Kegan
Paul.
The appearance, so close to each other, of Pro-
fessor Knight's careful and elaborately anno-
tated Selections from William Wordsworth., of
Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the
poet's works, with the first book of The Recluse.,
now published for the first time, and of an
excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley,
forms a welcome proof that the study of the
91
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
most philosophic of English poets is increasing
among us. Surely nothing could be better,
hardly anything more directly fitted than a
careful reading of Wordsworth, to counteract
the faults and offences of our busy generation,
in regard both to thought and taste, and to
remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at
the present time, of all that is material and
mechanical in life, of the essential value, the
permanent ends, of life itself. In the collected
edition the poems are printed with the dates, so
far as can be ascertained, in the order of their
composition ā an arrangement which has indis-
putable recommendations for the student of
Wordsworth's genius ; though the former
method of distributing his work into large
groups of subject had its value, as throwing
light upon his poetic motives, and more especi-
ally as coming from himself.
In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has
dwelt strongly on the circumstance of Words-
worth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
had much to do with the physiognomy of his
poetic creation ā a calm, irresistible, well-being
ā almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless
92
WORDSWORTH
connected with physical conditions. Long ago
De Quincey noted it as a strongly determinant
fact in Wordsworth's literary career, pointing,
at the same time, to his remarkable good luck
also, on the material side of life. The poet's
own flawless temperament, his fine mountain
atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no
doubt a good deal to do with that. What a
store of good fortune, what a goodly contribu-
tion to happiness, in the very best sense of that
term, is really involved in a cheerful, grateful,
physical temperament ; especially, in the case
of a poet ā a great poet ā who will, of course,
have to face the appropriate trials of a great
poet.
Coleridge and other English critics at the
beginning of the present century had a great
deal to say concerning a psychological distinction
of much importance (as it appeared to them)
between \h.Q fancy and the imaginatwi. Stripped
of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical
theory, this distinction reduced itself to the
certainly vital one, with which all true criticism
more or less directly has to do, between the
lower and higher degrees of intensity in the
93
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
poet's conception of his subject, and his concen-
tration of himself upon his work. It was
Wordsworth who made most of this distinction,
assuming it as the basis for the final classification
(abandoned, as we said, in the new edition) of
his poetical writings. And nowhere is the dis-
tinction more realizable than in Wordsworth's
own work. For though what may be called
professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew
Arnold, found a value in all that remains of him
ā could read anything he wrote, "even the
* Thanksgiving Ode,' ā everything, I think, ex-
cept * Vaudracour and Julia,'" ā yet still the
decisiveness of such selections as those made by
Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight,
hint at a certain very obvious difference of level
in his poetic work.
This perpetual suggestion of an absolute
duality between his lower and higher moods,
and the poetic work produced in them, stimulat-
ing the reader to look below the immediate
surface of his poetry, makes the study of Words-
worth an excellent exercise for the training of
those mental powers in us, which partake both
of thought and imagination. It begets in those
94
WORDSWORTH
who fall in with him at the right moment of
their spiritual development, a habit of reading
between the lines, a faith in the effect of con-
centration and collectedness of mind on the
right appreciation of poetry, the expectation
that what is really worth having in the poetic
order will involve, on their part, a certain dis-
cipline of the temper not less than of the
intellect. Wordsworth meets them with the
assurance that he has much to give them, and
of a very peculiar kind, if they will follow a
certain difficult way, and seems to possess the
secret of some special mental illumination. To
follow that way is an initiation, by which they
will become able to distinguish, in art, speech,
feeling, manners, in men and life generally,
what is genuine, animated, and expressive from
what is only conventional and derivative, and
therefore inexpressive.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness
of outward things, which ponders, listens, pene-
trates, where the earlier, less developed con-
sciousness passed lightly by, is an important
element in the general temper of our modern
poetry. Critics of literary history have again
95
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
and again remarked upon it ; it is a character-
istic which reveals itself in many different forms,
but is strongest and most sympathetic in what
is strongest and most serious in modern litera-
ture ; it is exemplified by writers as unlike
Wordsworth as the French romanticist poets.
As a curious chapter in the history of the
human mind, its growth might be traced from
Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand, from
Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo ; it has no doubt
some obscure relationship to those pantheistic
theories which have greatly occupied people's
minds in many modern readings of philosophy ;
it makes as much difference between the modern
and the earlier landscape art as there is between
the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine
mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney.
Of this new landscape sense the poetry of
Wordsworth is the elementary and central ex-
position ; he is more exclusively occupied with
its development than any other poet. Words-
worth's own character, as we have already
observed, was dominated by a certain content-
ment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not
often found in union with a poetic sensibility so
96
WORDSWORTH
active as his ; and this gentle sense of well-
being was favourable to the quiet, habitual
observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly
animate, world. His life of eighty placid years
was almost without what, with most human
beings, count for incidents. His flight from
the active world, so genially celebrated in this
newly published poem of The Recluse; his
flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of
some pious youth to the Chartreuse, is the most
marked event of his existence. His life's
changes are almost entirely inward ones ; it
falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat
monotonous, spaces ; his biographers have very
little to tell. What it really most resembles,
different as its superficies may look, is the career
of those early mediasval religious artists, who,
precisely because their souls swarmed with
heavenly visions, passed their fifty or sixty years
in tranquil, systematic industry, seemingly with
no thoughts beyond it. This placid life de-
veloped in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary
degree, an innate sensibility to natural sights
and sounds ā the flower and its shadow on the
stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of
H 97
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
" Resolution and Independence " is a storehouse
of such records ; for its fulness of lovely imagery
it may be compared to Keats's " Saint Agnes*
Eve." To read one of his greater pastoral
poems for the first time is like a day spent in
a new country ; the memory is crowded for a
while with its precise and vivid incidents : ā
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
On some grey rock :
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall : ā
In the meadows and the lower ground.
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn ; ā
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears !
Clear and delicate at once as he is in the
outlining of visible imagery, he is more finely
scrupulous still in the noting of sounds ; he con-
ceives of noble sound as even moulding the
human countenance to nobler types, and as some-
thing actually " profaned " by visible form or
colour. He has a power likewise of realizing
and conveying to the consciousness of his reader
abstract and elementary impressions, silence,
darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the
whole complex sentiment of a particular place,
the abstract expression of desolation in the long
98
WORDSWORTH
white road, of peacefulness in a particular fold-
ing of the hills.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which
in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was,
then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was
for him almost literal fact. To him every
natural object seemed to possess something of
moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a
companionship with man, full of fine intimacies.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not
to the moving leaves or water only, but to the
distant peak arising suddenly, by some change
of perspective, above the nearer horizon of the
hills, to the passing space of light across the
plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a
certain weird fellowship in it with the moods
of men. That he awakened " a sort of thought
in sense " is Shelley's just estimate of this
element in Wordsworth's poetry.
It was through nature, ennobled in this way
by the semblance of passion and thought, that
the poet approached the spectacle of human
life. For him, indeed, human life is, in the
first instance, only an additional, and as it were
incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
99
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
When he thought of men and women, it was
of men and women as in the presence and
under the influence of those effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associa-
tions. Such influences have sometimes seemed
to belittle those who are the subject of them,
at the least to be likely to narrow the range of
their sympathies. To Wordsworth, on the
contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He raises
physical nature to the level of human thought,
giving it thereby a mystic power and expression ;
he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives
him therewith a certain breadth and vastness
and solemnity.
Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural
affections and rights of the human heart, above
all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing
human clay of which relic-worship is but the
corruption, has always had much to do with
localities, with the thoughts which attach them-
selves to definite scenes and places. And what
is true of it everywhere is truest in those
secluded valleys, where one generation after
another maintains the same abiding-place ; and
100
WORDSWORTH
it was on this side that Wordsworth appre-
hended religion most strongly. Having so much
to do with the recognition of local sanctities,
the habit of connecting the very trees and stones
of a particular spot of earth with the great events
of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the
half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full of oracular
voices, even the religion of those people of the
dales appeared but as another link between them