The Sun.
London, England, 1866-06-05 00:00:00

THE PRINCESS'S THEATRE.

Mr. Charles Kean as Louis Xi.
The impersonation of King Louis the Eleventh
of France by Mr. Charles Kean is, beyond all manner
of doubt, one of the most legitimate and consum-
mate pieces of acting anywhere to be found upon
the stage. It takes rank with the noblest achieve-
ments, in the way of impersonation, recorded in the
histrionic art in connection with the names of the
greatest actors who have ever lived. It is, in point of
fact, more than simply an impersonation in the ordi-
nary acceptation of the term. It is a creation. It is an
incarnation. It is the realisation to us, in a living
and breathing form, to the mind's eye and
to the body's eye of the spectator, of at once a-poetic

delineation and an actual historical character. It
is a thing apart—purely and absolutely sui generis.
As an evidence of the genius of the actor, it is re-
splendent and distinctive. It affords conclusive
attestation of the depth, the scope, the subtlety, the
power, the refinement, and the grasp of the artist's
genius, not merely as a remarkable actor, but as a
great actor, as an actor who assumes his place, by.
right, in the very front rank and among the
very greatest representatives of his profession.
Insomuch is this literally the case in the instance
we are here alluding to, that Charles Kean's Louis
XI. is as secure of taking its place henceforth in
the history of the English stage as among the most
masterly performances the memory of which will
always be treasured up in those annals—as, let
us say (to give here but a very few instances)—
Edmund Kean's Sir Giles's Overreach, as John
Henderson's Falstaff, as Charles Kemble's Young
11lirable, or as other renowned impersonations,
which it would be both tedious and needless
here to enumerate. Briefly —itis an imper-
sonation which the actor makes so entirely his
own that it sets competition with regard to it
at defiance. During the representation he loses his
own identity—he becomes the character. The
idiosyncracy of the creation he has for the time
being assumed, or absorbed into himself, becomes,
for that time being, his own idiosyncracy.
It is in instances like these, moreover, that the
genius of a great actor is always the most
signally demonstrated. And assuredly, there is
no nobler illustration of the reality of this anywhere
to be found upon the English stage, than that which
is afforded by Charles Kean's impersonation of
Louis Xl. An impersonation so wonderful in its
intensity and in its completeness that it may be
said, thanks to the actor's genius, if not literally
to have " created a soul under the ribs of death "

—to have certainly summoned back to life the
mean and mighty soul of Louis XI. wherewith
to animate for a while the mere skeleton outline of
that terrible being's character as that character has
been lightly delineated by the hand of Casimer
Delavigne, in the historical drama, adapted to our
stage by Mr. Markwell, the English translator. Mr.
Charles Kean's Louis the Eleventh is at once the
very Louis of History and the very Louis of
Romance—the Louis of Comines, of " Quentin
Durward," of " Notre Dame de Paris." Looking
at him, one sees in the very aspect of the man,
the cruel and remorseless fanatic, as Fenelon pic-
tured Linn when he wrote, " Ses yeux creux sont pleins
d'un feu apre et farouche ; ils sont sans cesse errans
de tous cotes ; it prete l'oreille au moindre bruit, et
se sent tout emu ; it est pale, &fait, et les noirs
soucis sont peints sur son visage toujours ride. 11
se tait, it soupirc, it tire de son cceur de pro-
fonde gemissemens, it ne peut cacher les
remoras qui d;:ollirent ses entrailles." Pre-
cisely, too, as Sir Walter describes Louis, that
same Louis—stepping out of his grave from a period
very nearly removed from us by four centuries—
appears before us in the flesh whenever Charles
Kean subjects himself to this extraordinary trans-
formation ! The very expression of his countenance
is there, as Scott describes it, " partly attractive
and partly forbidding." There, in truth, be con-
fronts us to the very life—" His strong features,
sunls cheeks, and hollow eyes, having an expression
of shrewdness and humour"--those same sunken
eyes betraying, however, " something in them at
once commanding and sinister." Never, probably,
has our distinguished actor impersonated the Louis
Xl. of Cassimcr Delavigne—or rather of himself
and of history—with more admirable power than
he did last evening, when, to the delight of his
audience, he appeared again in that character—
a character which, if not actually, as we ourselves
are disposed to regard it, his very greatest
part, certainly the part which among all his
great part he has made the most entirely his own
In it the varied powers of the actor are called forth
with astonishing rapidity, diversity, subtlety, and
impressiveness. He is there before us alternately
—sometimes all but simultaneously—as the Trage:
dian and as the Comedian. His comedy at mo-
ments almost running into burlesque, his tragedy into
the appalling. It is in the subtler parts of his acting,
however, that its consummate excellence as an imper-
sonation is the most distinctly recognisable—por-
tions, these are, nevertheless, so subtle of their kind
as to be 'all but indefinable by words, as to be ex-
pressible the merest by look, by a glance of the eye,
by the faintest emotional thrills of the scarcely per-
ceptible lines of the cadaverous countenance, by
inarticulate gutteral tones hardly audible in tem-
selves yet momentarily convulsing the audience at
the Princess's last night into shouts of laughter—or
under the more sinister aspect of the man hushing
them into breathless and horrified attention. The
abject craven fear of the criminal king—murderer,
parricide, fratricide—shrinking in terror from the ap-
proach of death ; the wily, cunning, machavellian,
mephistophelian astuteness of the great master of
statecraft, who was almost the first to build up the
Science of Modern Politics from among the ruins
of Feudalism and Chivalry ; the grovelling
superstition of the remorseless fanatic incon-
sistently alternating, or interweaving the one
with the other, devotional practices and
crimes of the most sanguinary atrocity; the
wit of the vulgar yet kingly jester ; the raillery of
the cynical humourist—these and countless other
phases of the same character, a character com-
pounded, as one may say, of a bewilderingly chaotic
mass of antithesis and paradox, are all pourtrayed
with an equally wonderful skill by the genius of the
actor! Who contives through them all, somehow—by
what we cannot but regard as the happiest indica-
tions of that genius of his as manifested in this ex-
traordinary impersonation—to realise to our appre-
hension, time and again, through the very contempt
inspired by the meanness of the craven, through the
very horror awakened by the cruelty of the monster,
through the very disdain called forth by the fanati-
cism of the bigot, a sense of the intellectual capacity
underlying all those ignoble attributes ! That ca-
pacity, in effect, which made Louis XI., in spite
of all that history has related to his disadvantage,
one of the greatest of the Kings of France—the Sove-
reignwho first joined to that Crown, Roussillon, and
Provence, and Cerdagna, and Anjou, and Artois,
and Burgundy The King, within the
memorable interval of whose reign, if on
the one hand it has to be told that the taxes rose
from a total of 1,800,000 livres to the enormous ag-
gregate 4,700,000—it has to be told also that im-
mediately upon the invention of printing by John
Guttemburg of Mayence, the first printing press
ever established in France was, at that same King's
instance, constructed at the Sorbonne—a printing
press that we surely may be allowed to term
the first lever of modern civilization. As a
whole, the performance last night was a new
and a very signal triumph achieved by the prin-
cipal actor, who was supported ably enough by
several of those were associated with him in the
representation. Mrs. Charles Kean's espzglerie, as
Martha, imparted, as usual, at once a charm and
an importance to a character that is simply insigni-
ficant in itself—only being thus noticeable, in fact,
by reason of so accomplished an actress condescend-
ing to impersonate it. Miss Chapman's Dauphin,
again, was singularly gracious and winning
throughout. As for the rest of the dramatis persona,
they can hardly be said to admit in any way of
being here particularised. The whole force, inte-
rest, and fascination of the play, in truth, con-
centrates in and around the king whose name forms
the very title of it— and while, during its perfor-
mance, we watch this wonderful impersonation
of Louis XL by Mr. Charles Kean, from first to
last, with a varied sense of the most conflicting
and incongruous emotions, we remember it after-
wards with only one—that of tuibouudqd admiration.