29 JANUARY 1853, Page 8

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An early portion of Mr. Douglas Jerrold's dramatic career was cast in a very dark age,of theatricals—darker in some senses even than the pre- sent, and that is saying a great deal. The grievance now-a-days is not so much that there is no field open to the display of dramatic authors, as that there are no dramatic authors capable of shining in any field what- ever —we mean, of course, in such a way as to raise the drama to the rank of an important branch of national literature. Twenty years ago, we had plenty of-aspirants, but no sphere of action • and we were made to believe that even if another Shakspere burst forth from the shell, he would find all the stage-doors barricaded against him. The doctrine was deliberately laid down, that literary merit had ceased to be a means of theatrical attraction, and that opera, ballet, and spectacle, could alone bring money to the treasury. The literary world smarted under this state of things : every little genius fancied that he was a great one in shackles ; and, by a ca' me, ea' thee " sort of proceeding, puny Ambi- tion the first persuaded puny Ambition the second that there was an immense amount of concentrated dramatic genius yet unexplored, but capable, on receiving the slightest spark of opportunity, of expanding with the explosive force of gunpowder. " Nous aeons change tout eels." The system of monopoly, which secured to the two patent theatres privi- leges which the managers of them did not care to exercise, is now abo- lished, and in every corner of London we may find a theatre legally ca- pable of playing any sort of drama that the imaginative man could devise, or that the unimaginative man could produce by force of imitation. • The spark of opportunity has fallen, but the gunpowder will not go off. When poor Mr. Bunn played ballets at whole-price at the "great houses," and did not allow five-act plays to be performed anywhere else, we had no living drama : the fatal obstacle now is removed, and we—have no living drama now.

The present state of things, though bad enough, is provocative of the wail rather than the grumble. We may lament over the lack of dra- matic talent in our day, but there is no cause for a host of untried " ta- lent " to meet and complain that a cork has been inserted to their disad- vantage in the trumpet of Fame ; and hence, we may not only console ourselves with the possibility that the "coming man" is still at hand, but we may be pretty sure that when he does come there will be plenty of room to receive him. No barred doors will meet his vision, but a hos- telry open in every quarter. To a man of real literary genius, like Mr. Jerrold, the aspect of the drama at the time to which we more especially refer—the time immedi- ately preceding Mr. Macready's, management of Covent Garden—must have been particularly revolting. The large theatres were professedly devoted to opera and spectacle. The Olympic, then under Madame Ves- tris, was indeed charmingly managed, and might fairly be called the most literary theatre of the Metropolis ; but then, the bill of fare avowedly consisted of savoury entremets rather than of substantial joints, and the entertainment was of too French and too delicate a character to realize the idea of Mr. Jerrold, with the Democracy of his sentiment and the truly British character of his wit. The Adelphi was even less literary than at the present day ; while as for Princess's and Sadler's Wells, (as under Mr. Phelps,) they are modern existences, with nothing whatever corresponding to them in the days bygone. The HaymaT,Icet, then under Mr. Morris, alone stood out as the representative of "legitimacy" in any sense of the word : and one theatre was certainly not much in this big metropolis.

In that evil day, Mr. Jerrold stood as one of the very few practical re- presentatives of the literary drama. What wonder, then, that finding "effects" and the melodramatic aids of the art in the hands of the enemy, he should eschew them, and endeavour to make language alone the important affair in a dramatic work ? The foe could light up-blue fire, dazzle the eyes with tinsel, lure the heart with muslin divinities,— but the foe could not write ; he could amaze his audience by a real broad- sword combat,—but he could not get up a rapier contest of repartee. Mr. Jerrold, therefore, relied on his writing, while he seemed to slight construction, as somewhat beneath the serious attention of the literary artist. Hence originated his good qualities, and his defects. The power of repartee has been developed in him to a degree that claims unmixed. admiration ; the author having so used it as to have formed a distinctive style of his own, almost as peculiar as that of Mr. Thomas Carlyle ; but his story and his characters rarely lay a strong hold on the sympathies. What we have just said generally will apply particularly to Mr. Jer- rold's new three-act piece of St. Cupid, played yesterday week before the Queen at Windsor, and on the following night (last Saturday) at the Princess's. It is a sort of pendant to The Housekeeper; having, like that favourite drama, the contest between Hanoverians and Jacobites as an historical background. The heroine of The Housekeeper is a young lady, who adopts the position of a superior servant to captivate the heart of a recluse ; the hero of St. Cupid is a young gentleman of fortune and family, who assumes the disguise of an usher to make an impression on the daughter of a suburban schoolmaster. In both, the leading female cha- racter is one of those combinations of sentiment and repartee which no- one can personate better than Mrs. Charles Kean, who so well understands haw to convey an emotion by a glance and a point by an accent. When we look for differences, the advantage is on the side of The Housekeeper, as being the more compact of the two. It should be mentioned, that Mr. Wright, after an invisibility of no short duration, has reappeared in this piece, as an old gipsy woman ; and sustains the part with his own style of humour. After the character played by Mrs. C. Kean, this is the most striking in the piece.