Add to all this varied life the English passion for the theater, which rages to this day. And even as now the dramatists were of but minor worth, and the actors were the play. The inescapable competition of Shakespeare seemed to discourage the writing of tragedies; after the heyday of Sheridan and Goldsmith the best new comedies were mortal efforts like Thomas Holcroft’s The Road to Ruin (1792) and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798), which clung to the frail line of middle-class sentiment rather than the virile strain of Jonson’s lethal laughter or Shakespeare’s philosophic fun. Only the actors were still at the top of their form.
They seemed at first glance to be all of a family, which walked the boards from Roger Kemble, who died in 1802, to Henry Kemble, who died in 1907. Roger sired Sarah Kemble, who became Mrs. Siddons; John Philip Kemble, who joined the Drury Lane company in 1783 and became its manager in 1788; and Stephen Kemble, who managed the Edinburgh Theatre from 1792 to 1800.
Sarah was born in 1755, in the Shoulder-of-Mutton Inn at Brecon, Wales, as an incident in the tour of her father’s troupe. As soon as she could act she was given a role; she became a seasoned actress by the age of ten. Amid her hectic life she managed to get considerable education; she became a woman of mature and cultivated mind as well as professional excellence and ageless charm. At eighteen she married William Siddons, a minor member of her company. Two years later Garrick, having heard of her success in the provinces, sent an agent to watch her perform. The report being favorable, Garrick offered her an engagement at Drury Lane, and she appeared there as Portia on December 29, 1775. She did not do well, partly through nervousness, partly, perhaps, because she had recently given birth. She was thin, tall, and grave; classic in features and restraint; and her voice, accustomed to smaller theaters, failed to fill the immense theater. After a disappointing season she returned to the provincial circuit, and for seven years she labored patiently to improve her art. In 1782 Sheridan, who had succeeded Garrick as manager, persuaded her to return to London. On October 10, 1782, she took the lead in Thomas Southerne’s century-old The Fatal Marriage; and her success was so complete that from that evening she moved on to become the finest tragedienne in British history. For twenty-one years she ruled at Drury Lane, and for ten more she was the undisputed queen at Covent Garden. To see her there as Lady Macbeth was the culminating experience of a theatergoer’s life. When she retired from the stage, on June 29, 1812, at the age of fifty-seven, she played that role, and the audience was so moved by her performance of the sleepwalking scene that it preferred to applaud her through the rest of the evening rather than let the play go on.59 For nineteen years thereafter she lived in quiet retirement, cheating town gossipers by her marital fidelity. Gainsborough triumphed with his painting of her, and she reigns to this day in the National Portrait Gallery.
Her brother John Philip Kemble, born like her in a provincial inn, was destined by his parents for the Catholic priesthood, perhaps in the popular theory that a member in holy orders would gain heaven for all the family. He was sent to Douai to study in its Catholic college and seminary; there he received a good classical education, and there he acquired a clerical solemnity that later clung to nearly all his roles. But in that quiet environment the exciting career of his father kept a secret fascination for him. At eighteen (1775) he left Douai and returned to England; a year later he joined a theatrical troupe; by 1781 he was playing Hamlet in Dublin. There for a time his sister Sarah joined him, and thence she brought him with her to Drury Lane.60 His debut there as Hamlet (1783) was only a moderate success; the London public found him too sedate for its taste, and the critics condemned him for not only abbreviating but emendating Shakespeare’s text. However, when he joined Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth (1785) their performance was hailed as an event in the history of the English theater.
In 1788 Sheridan, then chief owner of the Drury Lane, appointed Kemble manager of the company. He continued to fill the leading roles, but Sheridan’s gay despotism and financial unreliability made the sensitive actor uncomfortable. In 1803 he accepted the management of the Covent Garden Theatre, and bought a sixth share of the enterprise for £ 23,000. In 1808 the edifice burned down. After a costly idleness Kemble assumed management of the rebuilt theater; but when he tried to offset the unexpectedly high cost of the new structure by raising the price of admission, the audience stopped his next performance by persistent cries of “Old prices!”; he was not allowed to continue until he promised to restore them.61 The Duke of Northumberland saved the company with a gift of £10,000. Kemble struggled on, increasingly challenged by younger actors. With a final triumph in Coriolanus, when the same public that had hooted him in 1809 shook the theater with acclaim, he left the British stage, and surrendered his crown to Edmund Kean. The classic style of acting disappeared from England with him, as it was disappearing from France with his friend Talma; and the Romantic movement triumphed in the theater as it was doing in painting, music, poetry, and prose.
Kean’s life included all the vicissitudes of his high-strung profession, all its humors and tragedies. He was born in a London slum in 1787, as one result of a night’s outing between Aaron (or Edmund) Kean, a stagehand, and Ann Carey, who earned a minimal living on the stage and the street. Deserted in early childhood by his parents, he was brought up by his father’s brother, Moses Kean, a popular entertainer, and more formally by Moses’ mistress, Charlotte Tidswell, a minor actress at Drury Lane. She trained him in histrionic art and tricks, while Moses made him study Shakespearean roles; the boy learned everything that could hold a provincial audience, from acrobatics, ventriloquism, and boxing to Hamlet and Macbeth. But he had waywardness in his blood, and ran away repeatedly; at last Charlotte bound a dog collar around his neck, inscribed “Drury Lane Theatre.” By the age of fifteen he had shed the collar, and strayed off to an independent career as an actor of any part, for fifteen shillings a week.
For ten years he lived the hectic, exhausting life of a strolling player, nearly always poor and humiliated, but burning with confidence that he could outperform any man on the English stage. Soon, to forget his toil and torments, he took to alcohol as favoring his dreams of his supposedly noble birth and his forthcoming victories. In 1808 he married Mary Chambers, a fellow trouper; she gave him two sons, and clove to him through all his bouts with whiskey and women. Finally, after many years of degrading alternations between Shakespearean parts and impersonating an agile chimpanzee, he received an invitation to a trial appearance at Drury Lane.
For his debut there (January 26, 1814) he chose the difficult role of Shylock. He poured into the role some of the resentments that life’s indignities had stored up in him. When Shylock said, in scorn and sarcasm, to the Christian Venetian merchant asking for a loan,
Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?,
Kean seemed to have forgotten that he was anyone other than Shylock; and the passion, the violence, that he poured into the part put an end, almost in two lines, to the classic era in English acting, and opened on the London boards the era of feeling, imagination, and romance. Gradually the audience, sparse and skeptical, was carried away by this unknown actor, himself carried away by immersion in his part. Scene by scene the response and applause grew, until, at the close, that half-audience surrendered to him ecstatically. William Hazlitt, ablest critic of the age, hurried off to write an enthusiastic review. Kean, rushing home to his family, embraced his wife and child, saying to the one, “Now, Mary, you shall ride in your carriage,” and to the boy, “My son, you shall go to Eton! “62
At Kean’s second performance in The Merchant of Venice, the house was full. After the third the reigning manager, Samuel Whitbread, gave Kean the contract they had agreed upon for a three years’ engagement at eight pounds a week; Kean signed; Whitbread took it and changed the eight pounds to twenty. The time would come when Kean’s contract would call for fifty pounds per night. He played almost all the famous Shakespearean roles—Hamlet, Richa
rd III, Richard II, Henry V, Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Romeo. He succeeded in all but the last; the delicate shades of Romeo’s aristocratic character eluded an actor too hardened and embittered by the ruthless inequalities of life.
When it came his turn to see young actors waiting eagerly to take his place, he squandered his earnings in drink, fed on the idolatry of tavern habitués,63 joined a secret movement for “the damnation of all lords and gentlemen,” and was successfully sued for adultery with the wife of a city alderman (1825).64 He paid the charges, and labored to win back his place in the theater; but his mind lost hold of the parts he played, and more than once he forgot his lines. The audience was as merciless as it had been idolatrous; it shouted insults at him, asked him why he drank so heedlessly. He left England, toured America triumphantly, made another fortune, squandered it. He returned to London, and agreed to play Othello to his son’s Iago at Covent Garden (1833). The audience acclaimed Iago, received Othello silently. The effort, unsupported by applause, was too much for Kean; his strength ran out, and he neared collapse. After speaking the line “Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone” he fell into the arms of his son, and whispered to him, “Charles, I am dying; speak to them for me.”65 He was taken home; the wife whom he had once abandoned took loving care of him. Two months later he died, May 15, 1833, only forty-six years old. Life had broken in midlife the greatest actor—barring Garrick—in English history.
VIII. IN SUM
All in all, it was a virile and fruitful England. There were many weak spots in the picture, as in every picture true to life: the yeomanry disappearing, the proletariat enslaved, drink and gambling ruining fortunes and breaking up homes; government frankly a class privilege, and law made by a few men for other men and all women. And yet amid these faults and crimes science was developing, philosophy was ruminating, Constable was revealing English landscapes, Turner was chaining the sun and stilling the storm, and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley were giving England a feast of poetry unequaled anywhere since the first Elizabeth. Under all the turbulence there lay a saving order and stability that allowed many freedoms —more than in any other European state except in France, where excessive freedom had committed suicide. There was freedom of movement and travel except in war, freedom of worship this side of blasphemy, freedom of the press this side of treason, freedom of opinion this side of advocating a violent revolution which would, by all precedents, involve a decade or more of bewildering lawlessness and insecurity.
It was not a highly educated public opinion; it often expressed Mrs. Gump, and upheld outworn taboos; but it had the courage to boo a degenerate prince and applaud his cruelly discarded wife.66 It expressed itself also in a hundred associations and societies dedicated to education, science, philosophy, and reform. On critical issues it expressed itself in public assemblies and exercised the right of petition guaranteed by English law; and when it felt too heavily the hand of an oligarchic state it took to resistance as the final stand of patient Englishmen; more than once a healthy riot ran through the countryside and city streets.
The government was an aristocracy, but it was at least polite; it transmitted manners, checked fads, and maintained standards of taste against barbarism in art and superstition in belief; it supported several good causes, and kept its great poets from starvation. There was an occasionally insane King, but his claws had been cut, he had become helplessly lovable, and he served as a symbol of national unity, a focus of national fervor and pride; there seemed no sense in killing a million people to depose so useful a master of ceremonies. After a bow or two an Englishman might follow his own mood, go his own way, provided he did not insist upon the equal rights of bootblacks and baronets to make the laws of the land. “In England,” Mme. de Staël noted, “originality is allowed to individuals, so well regulated is the mass”;67 it was the superimposed order that allowed the burgeoning of freedom.
Let us see this combination at work in art, science, philosophy, literature, and statesmanship. Only then will the picture of English life, A.D. 1800, be, within our limits, just and complete.
CHAPTER XVII
The Arts in England
I. THE ARTISTS
THE words art and artist, which in guild days had been applied to any craft or craftsman, changed their meaning in the eighteenth century as crafts and guilds were replaced by industries and workingmen; now they were applied to the practice and practitioners of music, decoration, ceramics, drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Likewise the word genius, which had signified some innate and characteristic quality, or some supernatural spirit, now increasingly denoted a transcendent native ability, or its possessors; like miracle and act of God, it became a convenient substitute for a natural and specific explanation of an unusual person or event.
The transition to industry, commerce, and city life brought a further decline in aristocratic patronage of art; however, we must note that moneyed men supported Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Lord Egremont opened his manor house at Petworth to Turner as a refuge from London. George III had helped to establish (1768) the Royal Academy of Art with a gift of five thousand pounds and handsome quarters in Somerset House. Its forty members were not made automatically immortals like their French models, but they were raised to the gentry with the title of (e) squire, and though their new dignity could not be passed on to their offspring, it helped to improve the social standing of major artists in Britain. The Academy organized classes in anatomy, drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Inevitably an institution supported by a conservative monarch became a citadel of tradition and respectability. Innovative artists denounced it, and became so numerous, and won such acclaim, that in 1805 some nobles and bankers financed the organization of the British Institution for the Development of the Fine Arts, which held periodic exhibitions, awarded prizes, and provided a lively competition for the Royal Academy. Guided, angered, and nourished by these rival forces, British art produced excellent works in every field.
No; music was an exception; it was barren of memorable compositions in this period. England was keenly conscious of this dearth, and made up for it in some measure by generous appreciation of composers coming to her from the Continent; so she gave Haydn a warm welcome in 1790 and again in 1794. The Royal Philharmonic Society was founded in 1813, survived the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, two Napoleons, and two World Wars, and still exists as one element of permanence in an incalculable flux.
The minor arts flourished without flair. They continued to produce elegant but sturdy furniture, powerful or fanciful metalware, quietly beautiful ceramics. Benjamin Smith molded iron into an ornate candelabrum for presentation by the city of London to the Duke of Wellington.1 John Flaxman, besides making classical designs for Wedgwood pottery, fashioned the famous Trafalgar Cup to commemorate Nelson’s victory,2 and he was both sculptor and architect of the massive monument to Nelson in St. Paul’s.
Sculpture, however, was almost a minor art in England, perhaps because it favored a nudity uncongenial to the national climate and morality. In 1801 Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, while serving as British envoy to the Porte, persuaded the Turkish authorities in Athens to let him remove from the Acropolis “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon.” Interpreting this like a lord, Lord Elgin removed the great frieze of the Parthenon, and many marble busts, and transported them, in ship after ship, 1803–12, to England. He was denounced by Byron and others as a rapacious vandal, but he was vindicated by a committee of Parliament, and the “Elgin marbles” were bought by the nation for £ 35,000 (much less than Elgin paid for them), and were deposited in the British Museum.3
II. ARCHITECTURE
The marbles shared in supporting the classic wave against the Gothic ripples in the war of architectural styles; a thousand columns—Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian—advanced to oppose the amateur efforts of Walpole and Beckford to restore the pointed arches and towered battlements so dear to medieval knights
and saints. Even in secular structures the columns won; Sir William Chambers’ Somerset House (1775 ff.) is a spreading Parthenon, and many a country house looks like a Greek peristyle guarding a Roman palace; let James Wyatt’s Ashridge Park mansion (1806–13) serve as a stately instance of the kind. In 1792 the future Sir John Soane, son of a bricklayer, began to rebuild the Bank of England behind a Corinthian portico, combining the Arch of Constantine with the Temple of the Sun or Moon.
The Gothic revival inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (1748–73) could not maintain itself against the avalanche of pillars, domes, and pediments. William Beckford was the romantic hero of this medieval trance. Born rich of a father who twice became mayor of London, he was given more education than he could stand: he received piano lessons from the young Mozart, architectural training from Sir William Chambers, and history via the Grand Tour. At Lausanne he bought the library of Edward Gibbon. After some ambisexual scandals he married Lady Margaret Gordon, who died in childbirth. Meanwhile he had written Vathek, the most powerful of the Oriental mystery novels that were swelling the Romantic wave; it was published in English and French (1786–87), and won high praise from Byron. Helped by Wyatt, Beckford began in 1796 to build a Gothic abbey at his Fonthill estate in Wiltshire, filled it with art and books, and lived there, hermitically sealed, from 1807 to 1822. Then he sold it, and shortly afterward its collapse revealed basic faults in its structure and design. He died at Bath in 1844, aged eighty-five. John Hoppner’s sympathetic portrait (c. 1800) preserves a spirit poetic, mystic, and humane.
John Nash lightened the heaviness of British architecture by adding a bit of rococo gaiety. Well seconded by Humphry Repton as landscape gardener, he designed country estates with a distribution of cottages, bowers, dairies, in French, Indian, Chinese styles. They pleased the bored nobles and gentry; Nash became rich, and won the patronage of the lavish Prince. In 1811 he was commissioned to rebuild a mile of Regent Street to run from the Regent’s Carlton House in a sweeping curve out to the countryside. Nash varied the lines with crescents and terraces, interspersed open spaces of grass and trees between the building groups, and used Ionic columns to grace the curve of the avenue. (Most of the work has been demolished to allow more buildings and less grass.) It was a brilliant essay in town planning, but its cost shocked a nation that was half starving itself to defeat Napoleon.