The Sun.
London, England, 1868-04-08 00:00:00

THE SPECTA 7OR ON MRS. GAMP.

Mr. J. Clarke has achieved a certain success in
the delineation of Mr. Dickens's greatest character
—Mrs. Gamp—but he has produced the character
with such " modifications" (as Lord Stanley says
with regard to the Irish Church) that it could
scarcely satisfy the mind of her profoundest ad-
mirers. To act Mrs. Gamp is a greater effort, of
course,—because Mrs. Gamp herself is so much
grander a conception,—than to act Bailey Junior ;
and we do not deny, therefore, that Mr. J. Clarke
has achieved something greater than Miss E. Far-
ren in her impersonation of Todgers's boy. But
certainly the masculine nature in Mr. Clarke has in-
jured Mrs. Gamp, more than the woman in Miss
Farren has injured Bailey Junior. Hence her
Bailey Junior, though a considerably inferior, is,
on the whole, a more perfect artistic effort than Mr.
Clarke's more ambitious and more powerful per-
formance. The pert, keen, Loudon gamin, half
drilled, but with an ambition for flashy grandeur,
is quite within Miss Farren's grasp ; indeed, we are
not quite sure that she was not born for the part.
But the conception of Mrs. Gamp can scarcely
be within any man's grasp,—though more nearly
perhaps than within any woman's, for Mr. Dickens,
though he has constructed her character most truly
on the foundations of a monthly nurse's propensi-
ties, has given it an originality, a force of initiative,
a far-reaching variety of comprehension, to which
we never saw any actress ever approach. Still, the
masculine basis is a false basis for the character,
though it may be subservient to the effects of imagi-
native freshness and grasp with which the great
humourist has endowed his greatest creation. Con-
sider this only—that Bailey Junior's precocious ex-
ternal criticism on Mrs. Gamp has to be curtailed
of one of its most expressive features—morally as
well as physically impressive, we mean—in order to
suit Mr. Clarke's impersonation : " There's the re-
mains of a fine woman about Sairah, Poll," ob-
served Mr. Bailey, with genteel indifference ; " too
much crumb, you know, too fat, Poll; but there's
many worse at her time of life." The criticism in
italics is necessarily left out at the Olympic, for it
would be a very false criticism on Mr. Clarke's "Mrs.
Gamp." There is certainly by no means " too much
crumb" about her—too much crust rather, both
physically and mentally. She is, indeed, bony ;
and being bony, and in physique altogether more
like Mr. Dickens's conception of her " pard-
ner Betsy Prig," than the true Mrs. Cramp, there
is a want of keeping between the unwholesome
but overflowing imaginative fat of her mind, which
so fills iu and cushions the hard knobs of her indi-
vidual selfishness, and her physical appearance.
But even if Mr. Clarke were fat, and not lean, we
do not think that—fat being by no means a pecu-
liarity of either sex—the shortcomings of his quali-
fications for the character would be removed. The
freshness and audacity, the incessant initiative, the
sustained selfishness of purpose in Mrs. Gamp's
imagination are masculine in their originality ; but
the plan of its manifestation, the indirectness, the
subtle innuendo, the wealth of involved suggestion,
the fussy detail, the dappled surfaee of her profes-
sional sentiment, are all completely female, and it is
in the delineation of these that Mr. Clarke's efforts
are so imperfect. To explain what we mean, let us
contrast for a moment the style of Mr. Mould the
undertaker's professional sentiments with the style
of Mrs. Gamp's. Both are vulgar people, full of
the same class of vulgarities, and Mr. Mould is, as
pictured by Mr. Dickens (he is omitted from the
play at the Olympic), much more of a true carica-
ture than Mrs. Gamp ; but note how Mr. Dickens
makes Mr. Mould's professional self- interest and
self-admiration diffuse itself equably and uniformly,
as it were, over his mind and speech, while Mrs.
Gamp's washes and eddies in and out of the wind-
ing course of her fertile invention, with a truly
female finesse, a truly female delight in domestic
detail, and yet with a breadth and sweep of con-
ception as masculine as the form is feminine :
" I'll tell you what, my dear' (Mr. Mould observes,
when Mrs. Gamp bad just left him, after some very acute
flattery), 'that's a very shrewd woman. That's a woman
whose intellect is immensely superior to her station in life.
That's a woman who observes and reflects in an uncom-
mon manner. She's the sort of woman, now,' said Mould,
drawing his silk handkerchief over his head again, and
composing himself for a nap, one would almost be dis-
posed to bury for nothing, and do it neatly, too.' "

But compare that with the exquisite detail and
finesse with which Mrs. Gamp offers a suggestion
of precisely identical philanthropy and generosity—
her object being, however, to convey to Mr. Peck-
sniff an idea of the terms she should expect for her.
funereal job :
" Ah !' repeated Mrs. Gamp, 'ah dear! When Gamp
was summoned to his long home, and I see him a lying ie
Guy's Hospital, with a penny piece on each eye, and his
wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I should have
fainted away, but I bore up !' . . . You have become
indifferent since then, I suppose ?' said Mr. Pecksniff. Use
is second nature, Mrs. Gamp.'—' You may well say second
natA-, sir,' returned that lady, one's first ways is to find
such things a trial to the feelings, and so is one's lasting
custom. If it wasn't for the nerve a little sip of liquor
gives mo ([ never was able to do more than taste it) I never
could go through with what I sometimes has to do. "Mrs.
Harris," I says, at the very last case as over I acted in,
which it was but a young person, " Mr. Harris," I says,
"leave the bottle on the chhaley-piece, and don't ask me
to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so
dispoged, and then I will do what I'm engaged to do ac-
cording to the best of my ability." " Mrs. Gawp," she
says, in answer, " if ever there was a sober croetur to be
got at eightoonponce a day for working poople, and three-
and-six for gentle-folks,"—' night watching,' said Mrs.
Gamp, with emphasis, ' being a extra chargo,—" you are
thatinwallable person." "Mrs. Harris," I says to her, "don't
name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my follow
croeturs out for nothink, 1 would gladly do it, sich is the
love I bears 'em. But what I always says to them as has
the management of matters, Mrs. Harris"—here she kept
her eye on Mr. Pecksniff —" bo they gents, or be they
ladieg, is, don't ask me whether I won't take none, or
Whether I will, but put the bottle on the chimley-piece,
and let me put my lips to it when so dispoged."

What a subtle finesse, and yet what a stretch of
bold imagination there is here—as unlike Mr.
Mould's sober and practical measurement of his
individual regard for Mrs. Gamp, by his approach
to willingness "to bury her for nothing, and do
it neatly too," as is the illimitable sea which
yet winds so close and subtly round the coasts,
and creeks, and inlets of the islands it en-
compasses, from the mere artificial moat of
a mediaeval castle I Now, what we mean
by saying that Mr. J. Clarke's sex is a great
hindrance to him in the efficient delineation of
Mrs. Gamp, in spite of some incidental advantages,
is that he fails to give to his manner this vulgar
finesse, this womanish interest in the:inns and outs,
the details and domestic pictures, of Mrs. Gamp's
vagrant, yet thoroughly practical imagination. He
acts her severe style admirably. Nothing could be
better than the way he booked Mr. Pinch with the
umbrella at the steam packet wharf, and then sa-
vagely replied to his courteous question of which
packet she wanted, " I suppose nobody but your-
self can want to look at a steam packet without
wanting to go a boarding of it, can they, booby ?',
Mr. Clarke is admirable also in the common-place
servile parts, where he makes Mrs. Gamp curry
favour. with young married ladies whom she
thinks possible customers. But Le brings
out her meditative memories as if they were
points (which, of course, to the andiance, they
are), and without any of the fat and rambling
pensiveness of Mrs. Gam p's rehearsing. imagination.
For instance, when she recalls the fate of her own
children, " ' My own,' I says, has fallen out of
three pair backs, and hail damp door-steps settled
on their lungs, and one was turned up snailin' in a
bedstead unbeknown r " Ur, Clarke doefi sot teem

really absorbed at all in the intrinsic interest of
what he is recalling ; but, on the contrary, speaks
it to the audience as one of his points. Mrs. Gamp
is, no doubt, almost as difficult to act when in-
dulging these great recollections, as is Hamlet in
reverie and soliloquy—and Mr. Clarke makes the
same sort of mistake in delivering her recollections
as Mr. Fechter in the celebrated, " To be, or not to
be ?'' He does not let his mind wander gently
over the subject, with a sort. of chuckling emphasis
on ,the detail. He thrusts out his recollections with
too much emphasis on the jokes, though, we
admit, with the thick and snuffy articulation of the
true Mrs. Gamp. His conception of the way in
which Mrs. Gamp probably took snuff, and of the
audible convulsions in the throat which followed
that operation, is perfect. Again,, her frenzy of
passion with Betsy Prig, when both those ladies
have drunk enough from the teapot to inflame as
well their noses as their passions, is very good. But
these are but the superficial traits of this great
creation. The audacious originality of Mrs. Gamp's
genius in inventing a Mrs. Harris (with a family
history of an immense minuteness and detail that is
worthy of Defoe, and capable of indefinite extempore
additions from time to time), and the immense
subtlety with which this artifice is used as
the medium of panegyric on ber own capacities
and virtues, both professional and domes-
tic, _is not at all adequately expressed in
Mr. Clarke's impersonation. We have said that
there is insufficient lovingness in the way in which
be makes her recall the real and imaginary incidents
of her picturesque career. There is also a want of
cunning self-importance in the manner of those
circumbendibuses which she always brings round
with such admirable dramatic success of aim to her
own merits and hopes. And theft is a general de-
ficiency of spontaneousness and involuntary cur-
rent about the drift of her recollections and inven-
tions. Mrs. Gamp, though cunning enough, is not,
we must remark, consciously so in her recollections.
They turn on the pivot of self unconsciously.
When she offers to prepare toast and butter for
others, she asks them if they would like it " with-
out crust," and then lapses with a perfect uncon-
sciousness into the theme of herself, for whom, of
course, it turns out that she is really preparing it—
" by reason of her tender teeth, which Gamp, being
in liquor, knocked out four at a blow," &c. But
this turn of her reverie is entirely spontaneous, re-
verting to herself only as the natural centre of all
things, and is not in any way wrenched cunningly
to her purpose. _ _

The; is, then, an immense abandon of nature
about Mrs. Gamp, which Mr. Clarke renders very
imperfectly. Perhaps it is beyond not only him,
but all human actors. A woman who could con-
template quite casually laying out " all her fello w-
creeturs" from the love she bears them, is not easily
to be portrayed on any human stage.

NAVAL AND MILITARY IN7ELLIGENCE.

Forty non-commissioned officers and men of the
2d Battalion of the 17th Regiment at Chatham
have been transferred to the Ist Battalion in Ire-
land, in consequence of the service companies being
below their proper complement.
By direction of the Secretary of War volunteer-
ing has been opened at the Royal Engineer estab-
lishment, Chatham, for the companies of Royal
Engineers attached to the Public Works Department
in India. The volunteers required are those who
are acquainted with handicraft trades, besides archi-
tects and engineers. About half the number re-
quired have already volunteered, and volunteering
is still open. An order received from the Horse
Guards directs volunteering to be opened from the
depot and other companies at headquarters for the
four companies of Royal Engineers employed on
the trigonometrical survey of Great Britain, each
of which is below its proper strength.
The St. Lawrence, Indiaman, Commander Wil-
cox, arrived from Calcutta yesterday evening at
Spithead, with time-expired and invalided soldiers,
accompanied by the following officers:—Col. Bird,
and Capt. Macpherson, 93d Regiment; Capt. Gard-
ner, 105th Regiment ; Lieut. Davy, 105th Regi-
ment ; and Sir George and Lady Youall. The St.
Lawrence sailed from Calcutta on the 3d of January
last, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope on the 9th
of February, sailed thence on the 13th, and called
in at St. Helena February 21. The troops will
disembark from the ship at Spithead this morning.
The Admiralty paddle.yacht Enchantress, Staff-
Commander J. E. Petley, is in dry dock at Wool-
wich, being refitted and re-decorated for conveying
the Prince and Princess of Wales to Ireland on
their approaching visit to that part of the United
Kingdom.

The Repulse, frigate, is completing rapidly her
armour-plating, so as to be ready for launching
about the 25th of the present month.
Staff-Commander George Raymond, late of the
Dee steam transport, is appointed to the Britannia,
training-ship at Dartmouth.

The chartered ship Matilda Atheling, taken up
by the Government, has sailed from the Nore, having
on board a number of convicts under lengthened
terms of penal servitude from the establishment at
Chatham for conveyance to Gibraltar. Among the
convicts despatched from Chatham are several of
the Fenian prisoners, together with the two convicts,
Corbett and Sweetland, who recently made an at-
tempted escape from the Chatham prison. The
Matilda Atheling will receive on board a few con-
victs from the establishments at Portsmouth and
Portland. A strong military guard from the 13th
Light Infantry and the 15th Regiment proceeds in
charge of the convicts.

Ills Prussian Majesty's iron frigate Prins Frede-
rick Carl, some time under repair at Plymouth, left
on Monday for the Baltic. The Prussian corvettes
Medusa and llertha, which arrived on Sunday from
the Mediterranean, left the Sound yesterday morn-
ing for Kiel. The Prussian brigs of war Rover and
Masquibb, are now in the Sound. The homeward
bound merchant ship Salisbury landed passengers at
llbay yesterday morning.

AIARIiETS—(This Day.)