The Sun.
London, England, 1867-12-31 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDOAL ITqEsp

DICKENS IN NEW YORK.

(From the Nation.)

Doubtless there is something of a disappointment
in store for a great many of the people who are
going to hear Mr. Dickens read. To him and his
celebrated readings we have all been paying the
compliment—natural to human nature to pay—of
thinking him to be more impressive in appearance,
and them to be more entirely and suddenly capti-
vating, than in the nature of things it is possible
that either of them should really be. Probably,
most of us went to Steinway Hall on Monday even-
ing last in much the same frame of mind with which
one goes to look for the first time at some master-
piece of art or some wonder of nature, and perhaps
most of us came away as one comes from his first
view of Niagara or a Titian—not quite satisfied,
with some waiting and remembering and comparing
to be done before one perceives how much it is that
has been seen.

The audience—every seat filled—wait for Mr.
Dickens to appear, and meantime look at the fur-
niture of the platform—a little red-covered reading
desk, behind it a screen of a brown crimson colour,
in front of it, on the edge of the stage, a little to
the right and left of the desk, two tall rots, which
support what, as the audience sees it, resembles a
red maroon-coloured board. On the other side of
the board are fixed the lamps which light the figure
of the reader. There is nothing else in the nature
of scenery—to use a technical word of the theatre.
And here we come to one of the two momentary
disappointments of which we have spoken. Most
people, we dare say, will go to hear the readings
with a vague expectation that they are to be pleased
as an actor pleases them, or rather they go with
suggested reminiscences of great actors in their
minds, and with little knowledge of what it is in
which " reading," properly so-called, consists. But
there is no more of the theatre in the reader
than there is in the accessories of which we
have spoken, and how slight and simple those acces-
sories are we have seen. The true theory of the
performance is not that it is acting in which the
actor, as much as possible, forgets himself into the
very likeness of what he personates, but is rather
that a gentleman dramatically tells a story among
friends, indicating rather than perfectly assuming
the characters of the personages brought before us ;
never wholly, indeed never nearly, losing sight of
his hearers and himself ; never wholly, never at
any rate for very long, getting away from the gen-
tlemanly drawing-room, with its limiting conven-
tionalities, into the wider and freer atmosphere of
the stage. Readings are simply story-telling or
declaiming, or the recitation of poetry, with excep-
tionally good elocution, and with occasional feats of
imitation of a kind more or less subdued.

The future hearer being warned against the error
above-mentioned—one into which very many people
very naturally fall—there remains to speak of the
other disappointment to which we have alluded.
At first, at least, everybody, we suppose, will ex-
perience it, and every one will at once admit to
himself that it is childish. We feel it, neverthe-
less, perpetually demanding that each fresh hero,
in spite of the failure of his predecessors, shall ap-
pear to the bodily eye as he appears to the eye of
imagination. The man who has created Mr. Richard
Swiveller and three generations of \Yellers and Mr.
'roots and Captain Cuttle and Air. Wegg and Mr.
Peggotty and Mr. Micawber and young Bailey, and
so many other members of every well-regulated
household, must be prepared to find us feeling not
altogether rightly used when we see that as he
steps quickly across the stage he seems to the
casual eye—if any casual eye were there—an ordi-
nary elderly gentleman, with steel-grey hair, thin
on the top of the head and brought forward into
two tufts just above the ear, with a rosy or flushed
face, in evening dress, and, generally, with a dapper
air than with a look of—what shall we say ?—a
great genius who is a part of the happiness of man-
kind henceforth. From this disappointment one
soon recovers. One looks closely at the strong fea-
tures, sees the mingled kindness and sharpness of
the eyes, sees the whole face smiling—not the lips
only, hut the eyes and cheeks—at some lucky,
humorous stroke, and it is easy to forget some small
things, and to admit that only the face before us
could be the face of the Dickens whom we know.

The flowers and the jewellery and the diffuse
moustache and imperial seem also proper and not
to be dispensed with.
Our New York audiences are not, we think, so
far as we know them west of the Bowery, apt to
be extremely enthusiastic; not apt to be so enthu-
siastic as Boston audiences, we should say, though
it is true that the individual New Yorker wants the
gravity of the individual Bostonian. He lives in a
whirl of all things earthly, which makes particular
things of no great importance to him, which re-
duces special sensations to comparative insigni-
ficance ; there are so many things to make him light
that even as " a house" he is not to be brought
down heavily. It will have to be admitted, too,
that he is not so susceptible to purely intellectual
impressions as the average Athenian of the Modern
Athens. So Mr. Dickens was not received with
anything like the warmth which greeted bim in
Boston. A round of applause welcomed him as he
walked across the platform to his desk, another left
him waiting for half a minute, or some seconds less
than that time, as he made his boiv, and then he
11 was allowed to begin, and continued throughout
the reading without interruptions of any length,
though not without frequent interruptions.
" Marley was dead," he began. " Marley was
dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever
about that ;" and he went on, not following per-
fectly closely the text of that edition of his reading
which Ticknor and Fields have just published,' but
varying from it in two ways—by' omissions which
included some of his finest bits of humour—as when
the intelligent British juryman, who knows himself
a painstaking bulwark of the Constitution, inquires
of Sergeant Buzfuz the precise date of the Chops
Tomato Sauce billet-doux; and not only by omissions,
but by interpolations—as when the sergeant tells the
jury that it is " an enlightened, a high-minded, a
right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a
sympathising, a contemplative, and, it is not going
too far to say, a HIGHLY POETICAL jury of her
civilised countrymen"— the words in italics and
capitals being a very effective " reading" addition
to the words in our copy of the novel. Of these
omissions and interpolations there were very many,
some advantageous, some injurious.
To pronounce judgment on Mr. Dickens as a
reader we are not in all respects competent. But
we may say that as we listened to him it seemed
to us•that in the level passages he was not extra-
ordinarily good ; that his voice is not a particularly
fine one ; that many of his inflections and the
spirit in which he reads many passages are not
at all what we should have expected or what we
liked, but that wherever his admirable histrionic
abilities could supplement or almost take the
place of his abilities as a reader merely then
all things were done at least well, many things
excellently well, and some things done so well that
we have not as yet conceived of their being done
better. The old judge in the trial scene seemed to
us unsurpassable. The look of drowsy, stupid
dignity, the voice of the real Justice Stareleigh,
were perfectly rendered by Mr. Dickens's face and
voice. His presentation of the judge, as it seemed
to us, was the best thing in his reading. By far the
best, we were going to say, but Sergeant Buzfuz,
in his opening speech, was nearly as good.
The other lawyers were not so well brought before
us—neither the bullying tone of the cross-examina-
tions nor the details as given by Mr. Dickens
struck us as being very true to life. For example—
that the worth of our criticism may be judged—
we should say that a lawyer would ask a witness,
" Can you swear that you have not seen the defen-
dant fifty times? Can you swear that you have
not seen him seventy-five times? Do you think—
mind, now, you're on your oath—that you have
seen him more than three times ?"—and so on. Mr.
Dickens reads a perfectly similar passage without
italicising the numerical adjectives.

In the " Christmas Carol" it was the humorous
passages that were chiefly applauded. Even the
passages in which Bob Cratchit tells his wife how
green Tiny Tim's grave is, although Mr. Dickens
makes a " point" of it more decidedly than of any