THE LIFE OF EDMUND KEAN.* IF we cannot compliment Mr.
Hawkins on his style, or recommend a close perusal of his two volumes, at least we may say that he has succeeded in bringing the great actor of a past generation clearly before the present, and that, on the whole, the interest of the subject predominates over the imperfections of its treatment. It would not be worth our while to criticize Mr. Hawkins's faults in detail ; he admits his inexperience as a writer, and is content to claim the benefit of au equally obvious enthusiasm. The story he lies to tell may fairly call for our undivided attention, and the character of Edmund Kean, his early mishaps, bis efforts, his success, and his astonishing genius, make up a succession of varied and dramatic scenes worthy of his own acting. The contemporary criticisms of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, on which Mr. Hawkins has drawn copiously, record the main features of Kean's theatrical career, and show what were the points on which he differed from the school he superseded. We must admit:that Mr. Hawkins has followed these guides faithfully and intelligently. Very often the account of Kean's reading of particular parts is too minute, and more often still Mr. Hawkins is betrayed into rant and rhapsody by the wish to communicate his own impressions of Kean's greatest hits to less informed readers. But, as a rule, we are able to judge of the greatness of these hits by the effect they produced on cultivated audiences. The mere description of these results sometimes verges on frenzy. When we read of Byron (whom Mr. Hawkins calls rather unnecessarily "the greatest poet of that or any other age ") being seized with a convulsive fit at Kean's performance of "Sir Giles Overreach," of the whole house rising in a body and applauding, and of the very actors on the stage fainting, weeping aloud, or standing:transfixed with astonishment and terror, we cannot wonder at alyoung and inexperienced biographer being similarly affected.
It may be said that, on the one hand, there was nothing in Kean's birth or training to prepare us for the development of such surprising powers. But, on the other hand, he did not rely on these powers alone, and his success was as much owing to the most painful and assiduous study as to his native genius. His wife described him as " moping about for hours, walking miles and miles alone with his hands in his pockets, thinking intensely on his characters. No one could get a word from him. He studied and slaved beyond any actor I ever knew." Before acting the part of King Lear, it is said that he went through scene after scene before the pier-glass from midnight to noonday. For the same part he studied the effects of madness in constant visits to St. Luke's and Bethlehem Hospital, and he was always on the watch for touches of nature, which he afterwards reproduced with great effect. Towards the end of his life, being with some friends in a room at the Castle Inn, Richmond, he was asked when he studied. " I am studying now," he replied, pointing to a man on the other side of the room who was far gone in liquor, but was trying to look as if he was sober. " I wish some of my Cassios were here. They might see that instead of rolling about in the ridiculous way they do, the great secret of delineating intoxication is the endeavour to stand straight when it is impossible to do so. One of Kean's finest effects as Sir Giles Overreach was taken directly from nature. He had once trespassed on a farmer's land with a companion, and the farmer, learning they were players, threatened them with the stocks. Kean's companion challenged the farmer to fight, fought, and was worsted, on which, "U a paroxysm of defeated wrath which convulsed his whole frame and seemed all but to suffocate him, he dragged open his shirt-collar and tore it to ribbons. This incident was not lost upon Kean, who subsequently reproduced it in the last scene of A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' when he appeared as Overreach in London ; and no one who saw him in that character can ever forget the appalling sensations produced by his manner, as with face livid, eyes distended, lips swollen and parted at the corners, teeth set, and visag?, quivering, he dragged open his shirt collar and tore it to ribbons. Such incessant observation and study must have done far more to fit Kean for his triumphant career than the Eton education which he is said to have received, but about which his other biographers are sceptical. Mr. Hawkins gives as his reasons for adopting the tradition that during the period generally assigned to Kean's stay at Eton all other trace of him is lost, that in after years he was as familiar with Cicero, Virgil, and Sallust as with Shakespeare, and that the materials for a contemporary sketch of Kean which mentions the Eton story were derived from Dr. Drury, the head master of Harrow, who is said to have sent Keau to Eton. We cannot treat this evidence as at all conclusive ; indeed, there is one fatal objection to Mr. Hawkins's theory. In the Eton school lists published by Mr. Stapylton, and ranging over the very time to which Edmund Kean's residence in the school is assigned, no such name is to be found. We think Mr. Hawkins should have referred to these lists before relying on what he calls strong circumstantial evidence, and arguing that nothing can be brought against it but the " occasional imperfectness of the tragedian's Latin."
If there was anything in the tradition which has thus imposed on the biographer, it would at least show a wonderful rise in Kean's circumstances since his earlier childhood. He was the natural son of a man who is alternately described as a tailor, an architect, and a stage carpenter, and of a woman who was sometimes a strolling player and sometimes a hawker. The father had abandoned the mother before the child's birth, and three months after his birth the child was deserted in his turn. He was picked up in the streets by a poor couple, and was taken care of by them till his mother reclaimed him in order to train him for the stage. When three years old he figured as Cupid in a ballet at the Opera ; he was afterwards a demon in the Drury Lane pantomime, and when Kemble brought. out " Macbeth " at the same theatre, Kean, then aged six, appeared as one of the goblin troupe in the scene of the witches' cauldron. On this occasion he played the manager and the rest of the goblins a trick which " led to the abandonment of what Kemble is reported to have termed the finest commentary ou and illustration of Shakespeare ever attempted on the stage." Kean, being hampered by some irons which had been applied to his limbs as a cure for distortion, made a false step, tripped up his neighbour, and sent the whole troop sprawling. One of the next events in Kean's boyhood is his trial of a sea life. He ran away from home, walked to Portsmouth, and shipped himself as cabin-boy on a vessel bound to Madeira. Of course he was not long in discovering that he had made a change for the worse. To procure his freedom, he affected complete deafness and lameness, keeping up the deception so well that he was sent to hospital in Madeira, and thence back to England. We afterwards hear of sundry other pranks, of continual escapes from the uncle with whom he was staying, of his turning head-over-heels and giving imitations of monkeys and knifegrinders at taverns, and of his being once found tarred and feathered at a public-house where he was tumbling and singing for halfpence. If this was not a worthy preparation for an Etonian, it was still less in character with the dignity of the future tragedian.
The beginning of Kean's dramatic career, when people wondered who was "that little man in the capes," waiting in the hall at Drury Lane, or when Mrs. Siddons, playing with him at the Belfast Theatre, asked, " Who is that horrid little man ?" scarcely lead up to the sudden success he gained on his appearance as Shylock. But from that time forward he rose from glory to glory. In almost every part he played he worked a revolution. The conservatives of the drama objected to his black wig in the part of Shylock, to the " quickness of familiar utterance " with which as Richard III. he pronounced sentence on Hastings, to the "light, gay, and careless air " substituted for gloom and grimness in the representation of Iago. But the public was with Kean in all these points, and, right or wrong, they were applauded to the echo. We have already heard of his reception as Sir Giles Overreach, When he first acted Shylock to a thin house, the actors in the green-room wondered how such a noise could be made by so few people. The nightly receipts of the theatre rose so rapidly that the committee of management doubled Keau's salary, and gifts, praises, tributes flowed in to him from all quarters. Among his finest hits must be ranked the attitude he assumed in Richard
when the action of the play was suspended in order that he !night stand for a while drawing figures on the sand and gazing Into vacancy. Of his performance of Luke in Massinger's " City Madam " it is recorded that an old lady, who had intended leaving him a large sum of money, was so appalled by the cold-blooded villany he displayed, that she transferred the legacy to a distant relation. We will let Mr. Hawkins speak of the crowning effect in Kean's Zanga But all was cast into tho shade by the unspeakable grandeur of his avowal of the terrible success attendant upon those stratagems which had turned the hydra of calamities—jealousy—to his dire intent; • Born for use, I live but to oblige you; Know, then, 'onus His eye lit up with a preternatural brilliance ; the long-smothered hate blazed forth with fearful intensity; as Alonzo fell ho majestically extended his arms over the fainting Spaniard ; towering over the prostrate body with terrific energy and power, he trampled upon it in an attitude which Hazlitt regarded us not tho less dreadful from its being perfectly beautiful. The effect was appalling ; the fiery soul flashed out with a look and gesture which imparted a corresponding dignity to the body ; Rao (Alenz,), although by far the largest man, seemed to wither— shrink into half his size and appear smaller than Kean; and as Barry Cornwall contemplated the dark and exulting Moor standing over his victim, with his flashing oyes and arms thrown upwards (' as though he would lay open his very heart to view ho thought that ho had never behold anything so like the Archangel ruined.' He was recalling to mind the line descriptive of the •sail-broad vans' of the groat spirit of Milton when, by an extraordinary coincidence of idea, ho hoard
Southey exclaim to a companion, God! he looks liko the Devil. "
Perhaps amidst all his triumphs the most gratifying recognition Keats met with was that which he received from Garrick's widow. She declared at once that Keau reminded her of her husband, and when Kean dined with her, she led him solemnly to a chair that had been Garrick's favourite chair, saying to him, " You are the only person I think worthy of sitting in it." Oa Kean's complain ing to Mrs. Garrick that the critics often misapprehended him, giving him credit where he did not deserve it, and passing over parts on which he had bestowed the greatest care and attention, the old lady replied naively, " You should write your own criticisms : David always did." But when Kean came out in the part of Abel Dragger, Mrs. Garrick made herself his severest censor. She wrote him the following note :—" Dear Sir, you can't play Abel Drugger.—Yours, &c., Eva Garrick." Kean replied more shortly still, "Dear Madam, I know it.—Yours, Edmund Kean." Criticism from such a quarter lie took with good grace, and the play disappeared from the bills after two more representations. But it is interesting to contrast with this docility Kean's proper pride and independence when he was bearded by uncultivated
audiences. At the Glasgow Theatre he quelled a disturbance by advancing to the footlights and asking, with a contemptuous emphasis, " What are your commands, gentlemen ?" In Guernsey
he applied to the audience a line from his part,—
" Unmannered dogs, stand ye when I command!"
Au apology was demanded, and Kean exclaimed, " Apology I take it from this remark : the only proof of intelligence you have yet given is in the proper application of the words I have just uttered."
In like manner, at the Coburg Theatre, being called after the fall of the curtain by an audience which had not appreciated his acting, but thought itself entitled to make him bow his acknowledgments, Kean said calmly, " Well, I have played iu every civilized country where English is the language of the people, but 1 never acted to an audience of such ignorant, unmitigated brutes as you are."
And yet Kean was doomed to face much bitter opposition at
various periods of his life. His early struggles were light compared with the intensity of that in which he was involved by his unhappy intrigue with an alderman's wife. Thie, and the troubles arising out of it, embittered his closing years, and the curtain which had risen on want and hardship fell upon a more cruel
sorrow.
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