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

CHAPTER XVI
EDMUND KEAN – CONTINUED

Between the last-named period, and the time when Edmund Kean played Virginius, there is but one character in which he produced any extraordinary effect, namely King Lear. This sustained, but I do not think it increased, his glory. His other characters only seem to glide past, and disappear. Such are Richard, Duke of York, in a compilation from several of Shakspeare's plays; Barabas, in Marlowe's "Jew of Malta," the heaviness of which he relieved by a song, sweetly warbled; Selim, in Dimond's melodramatic "Bride of Abydos;" Young Norval, in which he was graceful and affecting; King John, which did not disturb the repose of Kemble; and Alexander the Great, which could as little stir the dead sleep of Verbruggen. Something more effective was his Brutus, in Payne's compilation. The scene of his simulated folly was skilfully played; that with the son whom he condemns to death, full of tenderness and gravity. He could not sustain Miss Porter's "Switzerland," and he would not support Mr. Bucke's "Italians." Soane literally measured him for Malvesi, in the "Dwarf of Naples," and misfitted him grievously. Mr. Twiss had no better success with the "Carib Chief," in which Kean played Omreah; and my recollections of his Rolla are not so agreeable as those which I have of Young, and even Wallack. Well do I remember his Coriolanus, for which he was physically unfitted; but only a great actor could have played the scene of the candidateship, and that of the death, as Kean did – who, however, gave more pleasure to the followers of the Kemble school by this performance, than he did to his own. He made up for all, by the grandeur, the touchingness, and the sublimity of his King Lear. It was throughout thoroughly original in conception and in execution, and by it he maintained his pre-eminency, and sustained, as I have said, without increasing his old glory. He did not quite realise his own assertion: "I will make the audience as mad as I shall be."

His laurels were menaced. Frederick Yates came from the camp, and flashed a promise in tragedy which moved the hearts of playgoers, who saw his later devotion to comedy with early regret, but an ultimate delight. Mr. Macready was steadily rising from melodrama to the highest walks of tragedy, and his golden opportunity came in Virginius. Hitherto, Kean had been shaking the secondary actors of the old Kemble type into fits of jealousy, fear, disgust, and admiration. Expressly for him did Knowles write the "Virginius," which gave a lasting celebrity to Mr. Macready. Already, however, had a play on the subject, by Soane, been accepted at Drury Lane, and in the Roman father Kean was for the first time designedly opposed to the younger actor, He utterly failed; while Mr. Macready, in the part written expressly, and by an able hand, for Kean, won a noble victory. Kean might have said as the captured French Marshal said to Marlborough: – "Change sides with me, and I'll fight it out again, to a very different issue."

A range through his principal parts, and a running salute of thundering puffs on the part of Elliston, heralded his visit to America in 1820. He played at Liverpool before embarking, and like George Frederick Cooke, had a hit at the audience before he left them. They were the coldest people, he said, in whose presence he had ever acted. That was true: but though Liverpool was chary of approbation, it had applauded ungrateful Edmund more cordially than any other actor.

From his first trip to America he brought back much solid gold, a detestation of the Boston people, who would not patronise the theatre at an unfashionable season of the year, and one of the toe-bones of Cooke, over whose translated and mutilated remains he raised the monument of which I have already spoken.

Some ill-health he brought back with him too; but he rallied, drank, relapsed, and struggled into strength again. It was wasted on Miss Baillie's "De Montfort;" though parts of this were played in his grandest style. He seemed conscious that something was expected of him by the public, and he flung himself, as it were, at everything. He played Hastings to the Jane Shore of a Miss Edmiston – whose success was predicted by aristocratic poets, and who is now, I believe, painfully "strolling." With Sir Pertinax he did not move the dead Macklin as his Shylock may have done; though it was better played, save in the accent, than any living actor could have played it. His Osmond gave some dignity to the "Castle Spectre," and his Wolsey but little to "Henry VIII."

For Miss Tidswell's farewell benefit, after forty years of useful subalternship, he attempted Don Felix. He would have done more for her had he been asked; for in his breadless, boyish days, she had beaten, taught, fed, and clothed him – till Nance Carey claimed him for her own, and stole all his earnings. Edmund's good impulses made him fail in affection to this parent. Thinking of Miss Tidswell, he used to say – "If she wasn't my mother, why was she kind to me?"

For his own benefit, in this season of 1821-22, he played the Roman actor, Octavian, and Tom Tug – the songs in which last part he sang with great feeling. The whole proceeds of this benefit he gave to the fund for the starving Irish. It was not exactly like Mrs. Haller's charity, who gives her master's wine to the sick poor; but, that virtue, which is said to begin at home, might have sent the amount in a different direction.¹¹⁸

In November 1822 he played out the first of his two great struggles with Young at Drury Lane. Since Quin and Garrick, or Garrick and Barry, no conjunction of great names moved the theatrical world like this. Both men put out all their powers, and the public profited by the magnificent display. Kean and Young acted together Othello and Iago, Lothair and Guiscard, Jaffier and Pierre, Alexander and Clytus, Posthumus and Iachimo, eliciting enthusiasm by all, but by none so much as by Othello and Iago. The two great wrestlers won equal honour; but that was not enough for one of them. "How long, sir," said Kean to Elliston, the manager, "how long am I to play with that —Jesuit, Young?"

Certainly, if he feared competition with experienced actors, Kean was very encouraging to beginners. "You are the best Iago I ever played to," he once remarked to an earnest, youthful gentleman at Edinburgh. The latter smiled; and Kean asked him wherefore? "Because, sir," was the answer, "I know of seven poor Iagos, to whom you have kindly said the same thing!"

In a revival of Shakspeare's "King Lear," Kean showed good taste, sublime acting, and an appreciation of opportunity for self-distinction. He was not always equally in the vein, but on some nights he excelled all he had done before. Genest says, that "his personal appearance was better than Kemble's or Young's, and his manner more natural. In the mad scenes he seemed to copy Murphy's account of Garrick." The only drawback I have heard of to this noble, and last of his noble and complete performances was, that he was neither tall enough nor strong enough to carry off the body of Cordelia (Mrs. W. West).

He might have begun a fresh career, however, from this new starting-point, had he been so minded. But this success did not brace him to new effort, except a quietly ineffectual one to make the world forget the Stranger of John Kemble. His failing strength was probably the chief cause of his avoiding or refusing to appear in the same piece with Mr. Macready, of whom he rather rudely remarked – "He is no actor, sir; he is a player!"

But the satirist himself was fast ceasing to be either. He had never recovered from the madness which he prophesied would follow his success in London. Gradually he lost all self-control, plunged into terrible excesses, courted rather than fell into evil company, took tribute, indeed, most willingly of the noble and intellectual who heaped rich gifts upon him, but he scorned or feared their society. He affected to feel that they invited him simply to stare at him, and that they would have despised him as a poor actor. He had not common sense enough to see that when the noble and intellectual opened their doors to him they rendered graceful homage to his genius, – and I have heard that where he did accept such homage, and was himself subdued to the refinements of the society where it was liberally, yet delicately rendered, his easy bearing was that of a man who had not lost his self-respect, and his manners and conversation emphatically "charming."

But this was under restraint, and to be thus "charming" was irksome to Edmund Kean; by this time it had become almost impossible, and he could charm only those on whom the magic was not worth expending. He had not broken his word to his wife – that she should ride in her carriage, nor to his son – that he should go to Eton, – but he had not made the first happier, nor the second the more attached to him. His home, indeed, was broken up, and in the season of 1824-25, after failing in the poor melodramatic part of Masaniello, came out the great scandal – that he loved his neighbour's wife better than his own. All its necessary consequences followed, – a fierce, an almost ruffianly hostility on the part of his audiences, damage to his fortune, and irretrievable ruin to his reputation.¹¹⁹ Reckless and defiant as he was, he was glad to endure exile, for such was his voyage to, and sojourn in, America during this and the following year.

Let me notice that he bore himself in presence of a cruel audience, with an almost ferocious courage. His pride was greater than his humiliation. As at Drury, he applied every strong epithet in his part to the howling pit, so, when running his erratic course through the minor theatres, he could treat audiences that were ignorant, as well as insolent, with strong terms and lofty contempt. He had one night played Othello to a "Coburg" public. Iago was acted by Cobham, the performer who had once vainly attempted to dethrone him, by acting Richard at Covent Garden, to a house, however, which would not listen to him to the end. The New-Cut costermongers adopted him; they applauded him, on this particular night, more than they did the great Kean, who received £50 for condescending to exhibit himself in Othello. Nevertheless, at the fall of the curtain, there was such an uproar in front, apparently a call for Kean, that he came slowly forward, and bluntly asked, "What do you want?" A thousand voices answered, "You! you!" Well, said Kean, after a slight peroration, "I have played in every civilised country where English is the language of the people; but I never acted to an audience of such unmitigated brutes as you are!" He walked slowly off as Cobham, to a shout for him from the sweet voices of his Lambeth-marsh patrons, rushed on the stage, proud and radiant, to tell Edmund's "unmitigated brutes" that they were the most enlightened and liberal audience that had ever sat as judges of acting, and that the happiest night of his life was that on which he had the opportunity of telling his friends and admirers that incontrovertible truth. A cry that might have been heard across St. George's Fields proclaimed him to be "a trump!" – and Cobham won the honours of the night!

Kean, as before recorded, betook himself again to America. Since his previous visit to the Northern States he was greatly changed; but that the seeds of insanity were in him at the earlier period, a passage from Dr. Francis's Old New York will mournfully show. Some hospitable friends exerted themselves to render his earlier stay agreeable, and this is an incident of the time – one out of many: —

"A few days after, we made the desired visit at Bloomingdale. Kean, with an additional friend and myself, occupied the carriage for a sort of philosophical exploration of the city on our way there. On the excursion he remarked, he should like to see our Vauxhall; we stopped, he entered the gate, asked the doorkeeper if he might survey the place, gave a double somerset through the air, and in the twinkling of an eye stood at the remote part of the garden. The wonder of the superintendent can be better imagined than described. Arriving at the Asylum, with suitable gravity he was introduced to the officials, invited to an inspection of the afflicted inmates, and then told if he would ascend to the roof of the building a delightful prospect would be presented to his contemplation; many counties, and an area of sea, rivers, and lands, mountains, and valleys, embracing a circuit of forty miles in circumference. His admiration was expressed in delirious accents: – 'I'll walk the ridge of the roof of the Asylum,' he exclaimed, 'and take a leap! it's the best end I can make to my life;' and forthwith started for the western gable end of the building. My associate and myself as he hurried forward seized him by the arms, and he submissively returned. I have ever been at a loss to account for this sudden freak in his feelings; he was buoyant at the onset of the journey; he astonished the Vauxhall doorkeeper by his harlequin trick, and took an interest in the various forms of insanity which came before him. He might have become too sublimated in his feelings, or had his senses unsettled (for he was an electrical apparatus) in contemplating the mysterious influences acting on the minds of the deranged, for there is an attractive principle, as well as an adhesive principle, in madness; or a crowd of thoughts might have oppressed him, arising from the disaster which had occurred to him a few days before with the Boston audience, and the irreparable loss he had sustained in the plunder of his trunk and valuable papers, while journeying hither and thither on his return to New York. We rejoiced together, however, when we found him again safely at home at his old lodgings at the City Hotel."

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!"