The Sun.
London, England, 1867-01-16 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Journal of a Playgoer. From 1851 to 1866.
By Henry Morley. One Vol. Pp. 384. George
Routledge and Sons.
A valuable and most interesting addition to the
History of the English Stage has here been
produced by the London University College
Professor of English Literature. It is a
work, too, that has grown up, if not from
small beginnings, at any rate most unpreten-
tiously. It has budded leaf by leaf into existence
almost imperceptibly under its writer's hands—by
reason of his acting in its regard upon much less
than the old scholiast's axiom, dictum, principle,
however you may like to term it—nulla die sine linea.
Contributing intermittently (that is, at very uncer-
tain intervals, and not by any means regularly from
week to week) theatrical criticisms to his own
weekly newspaper, the Examiner—whilom iu suc-
cession Leigh Hunt's, Albany Fonblanque's, and John
Forster's Examiner—Professor Morley has at length,
very judiciously as it appears to us, collected together
his fragmentary criticisms and published them collec-
tively for the first time in this exceedingly readable
volume, under the modest title of " The Journal of
a London Playgoer." And a Journal it is, as his
title-page specifies at the very outset, extending
over no more than an interval of fifteen years alto-
gether. The fifteen years, that is to say, com-
prised between the two years of grace 1851
and 1866. Nevertheless, jotted down though
these sketches of the London Drama between 1851
and 1866 have been quite unpretendingly, simply
by the way, almost par parenthese they con-
stitute when grouped together in a consecutive
series, as we have already indicated in so many
words, a valuable and a most entertaining addition
to the annals of our National Theatre—meaning, of
course, no one theatre in particular, but the
Theatre as an InstitUtion. So valuable, in
its way and of its kind so really invaluable, is
it in our estimation—regarding the book as a whole,
as a record of dramas and of actors during one spe-
cial epoch, and that the latest or most recent—that
we cannot hesitate to attach to the fact of this
little volume's publication a value of almost his-
torical importance. And we do so for this one simple
reason that unless we hunt elsewhere very discursively
indeed for some data in regard to the rise, growth,
and development of the English Theatre as an In-
stitution, we shall have to restrict our attention to
three Books, to three Writers, to three Annalists,
for the acquisition of anything like a broad or ccm-
prensive outline (between them) of the Expansion
or Variation of the English Theatre as a
National Institution. And of those three
books we have here one in this unpre-
tentious Journal of a London Playgoer. From
Colley Cibber's Apology for his Life, and
William Hazlitt's Criticisms on the English Stage,
and Henry Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer
—from those three books alone it is practicable,
without going anywhere else for assistance or infor-
mation, to obtain a broad and general knowledge,
here and there worked out with wonderful detail,
of the. Dramatic Art in this country, and
of its more conspicuous cultivators or illus-
trators—from Betterton to Garrick, from Gar-
rick to the Kembles, from the Kembles to Edmund
Kean, and from Edmund Kean down to the actors
and actresses of nowadays. Not but what, apart
from the three delightful books we have just now
particularised there have been other critics of note
besides Cibber and Hazlitt and Morley who have
dedicated their powers to the illustration of the
alternate advancement and declension of the
English Theatre—of the .Dramatic and His-
trionic Arts there combined. Our meaning
being simply this, that nowhere else can
we point to individual productions marking
out certain easily-defined or definable epochs in the
History of the Stage of England—a country which,
thanks to the peerless genius of one man, has a
Dramatic Literature taking precedence of all
others. There is this significant peculiarity, how-
ever, in regard to Cibber, and Hazlitt, and Morley,
when their several works, which are annals of their own
times, are brought into comparison, that whereas the
hero of Cibber's time was Betterton, and the hero
of Hazlitt's was Kean—it would, be difficult indeed
to specify any one individual among Professor
Morley's immediate contemporaries who could safely
be pronounced, morally or artistically speaking, as
taller than his fellows even by a head and shoulders.
Another peculiarity distinguishing Professor Morley
no less significantly as a dramatic, or more strictly
speaking as a theatrical, critic, from either Cibber
or Hazlitt, is this, that very seldom, indeed, we
might almost go so far as to assert that never, can
he get up even the show or semblance of anything
like enthusiasm. Betterton could carry away his
audience, could carry away even the critics among
his audience, as the phrase is, "by storm." Kean,
meaning obviously Edmund Kean, could do precisely
the like by his audience and his critics-..and this
not simply upon rare or isolated occasions,
but habitually. And no wonder—when a man
like Byron could be thrown (as Byron was) into
a fit on witnessing one of his performances—when
an actress like Mrs. Glover could be carried faint-
ing from the stage (as Mrs. Glover was) under
the malediction of his King Lear—when, to use
Kean's own phrase, the houses were wont to
" rise at him."—when, speaking of his acting, a poet
such as Coleridge could without extravagance de-
scribe it to be, " like reading Shakspere by flashes of
lightning." But—of whom since Betterton and
Garrick, and Siddons, and Kean, could the like
be recorded without exciting in those who might
read such a record the sense of anutterl3;
incongruous and even intolerable exaggeration
Notwithstanding all which, by the sagacious
exercise of his own sound judgment, and of his
many rare, and some of them very remarkable,
qualifications as a critic, Professor Morley has con-
trived by the judicious and dispassionate employ-
ment of the materials that happened to come to hand
as he watched and listened while jotting down
these his records of a London Playgoer during the
fifteen years intervening between 1851 and 1866, to
pen a really charming and delightful, and, more
than that, a perfectly reliable record of the stage
as it has actually been during that not wholly
colourless interval. His own opinions in regard
to the actors and actresses of his time (meaning
of this our own time) he entertains very
strongly—but those opinions while they amount
to nothing less than convictions in his own mind,
he never thrusts pragmatically upon anyone's ac-
ceptance. He has a lively appreciation of the
force of the quot homines tot sententite considera-
tion. He thinks so-and-so himself, and, thinking
it, expresses the same with all the force of
his energetic language. But—he never looks
for an universal acceptance of his own convic-
tions when so thinking or so writing. Himself re-
garding Mr. Phelps as an artist of very considerable
powers, he takes occasion to notify, in his very Pro-
logue, that he is perfectly conscious at the same time
that there are others who are by no means disposed
to coincide with him in so thinking. " A critic,"
he says, " to whom 1 look up, holds Mr. Phelps to
be no actor." Professor Morley, again, fails
altogether to recognise any genius at all in Miss
Bateman—yet, quoth h?, upon the same occasion
and in precisely the same spirit, " A veteran man
of letters, who has a clear judgment, has astonished
me with glowing admiration of her Juliet"—that is,
of the Juliet of Miss Bateman. Professor Morley
(to give yet one other instance) protests, quite em-
phatically, that he fails altogether, for his own
part, to recognise the poetic insight, with which
he nevertheless acknowledges that intellectual
men have accredited Mr. Charles Kean in his most
honourable career as an actor and a manager.
Outspeakingly, fairly, frankly, manfully, thus, does
this skilled and honest theatrical critic speak through-
out. And, precisely in this manful outspeaking lie
the main value and interest and excellence of his
JoUrnal as a London Playgoer. it is a book to put
upon our shelves within easy reach for frequent
reference. Our one only regret in regard to it, as a
book of reference, is this—that ,it lacks, what
would just perfect it as a record of the English Stage
from 1851 to 1866, a full and comprehensive Index,
alphabetically arranged.