MRS. GAMP AT THE OLYMPIC.
MR. J. CLARKE has achieved a certain success in the deli- neation 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 admirers. To act Mrs. Gamp is a greater effort, of course,—because Mrs. Gamp herself is so much grander a conception,—than to act Bailey Juniors; and we do not deny, therefore, that Mr. J. Clarke has achieved something greater than Miss E. Farren in her imper- sonation of Todgers's boy. But certainly the masculine nature in Mr. Clarke has injured 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 perfict artistic effort than Mr. Clarke's more ambitious and more powerful performance. The pert, keen, London 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 propensities, 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 imaginative freshness and grasp with which the great humourist has endowed his greatest creation. Consider this only, —that Bailey Junior's precocious external 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 remains of a fine woman about Sairah, Poll," observed Mr. Bailey, with genteel in- difference ; "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 " pardner Betsy Prig," than the true Mrs. Gamp, there is a want of keeping between the unwholesome but overflowing imaginative fat of her mind, which so fills in and cushions the hard knobs of her individual 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 peculiarity of either sex, —the shortcomings of his qualifications for the character would be removed. The freshness and audacity, the incessant initia- tive, the sustained selfishness of purpose in Mrs. Gamp's imagination are masculine in their originality ; but the plan of its manifesta-
tion, the indirectness, the subtle innuendo, the wealth of involved suggestion, the fussy detail, the dappled surface of her professional 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 vul- garities, and Mr. Mould is, as pictured by Mr. Dickens (he is omitted from the play at the Olympic), much more of a true cari- cature 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, vhile Mrs. Gamp's washes and eddies in and out of the winding coirse of her fertile invention, with a truly female finesse, a truly fengle delight in domestic detail, and yet with a breadth and sweei of conception as masculine as the form is feminine :—
" you what, my dear' [Mr. Mould observes, when Mrs. Gamp had iffilt It him, after some very acute flattery], that's a very shrewd woman. i'st's a woman whose intellect is immensely superior to her station in lift. That's a woman who observes and reflects in an un-
common manner. She's the sort of woman, now,' said Mould, draw- ing his silk handkerchief over his head again, and composing himself for a nap, one would almost be disposed 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 philan- thropy and generosity,—her object being, however, to convey to Mr. Pecksniff an idea of the terms she should expect for her funereal job :—
"' Ah !' repeated Mrs. Gamp, eh dear ! When Gamp was sum- monsed to his long home, and I see him a lying in 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 nater, Sir,' re- turned 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 me (I 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 ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, "Mrs. Harris," I says, "leave the bottle on the chimley-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 according to the best of my ability."—" Mrs. Gamp," she says, in an- swer, "if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteenpence a day for working people, and three-and-six for gentle-folks,"—' night watching,' said Mrs. Gamp, with emphasis, being a extra charge,'— " you are that inwallable person."—" Mrs. Harris," I says to her, "don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow creeturs out for not/link, I would gladly do it, skit 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,—" be they gents, or be they ladies, 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 measure- ment 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 encompasses, from the mere artificial moat of a medimval castle ! 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 in- cidental advantages, is that he fails to give to his manner this vulgar finesse, this womanish interest in the ins 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 hooked Mr. Pinch with the umbrella at the steam-packet wharf, and then savagely replied to his courteous question of which packet she wanted, "I suppose nobody but yourself can want to look at a steam- package 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 he brings out her meditative memories as if they were points (which, of course, to the audience, they are), and without any of the fat and rambling pensiveness of Mrs. Gamp's rehearsing imagination. For instance, when she recalls the fate of her own children, "My My own,' I says, 'has fallen out of three pair backs, and had damp door- steps settled on their lungs, and one was turned up smilin' in a bed-stead unbeknown ! ' " Mr. Clarke does not seem 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 indulging 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 blurts out his recollections with too much emphasis on the jokes, though, we admit, with the thick and snuffy articulation of the true Mrs. Gawp. 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 her own capacities and virtues both professional and domestic, is not at all adequately expressed in Mr. Clarke's impersonation. We have said that there is insufficient lovingness in the way in which he 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 eireumbendi- buses.which she always brings round with such admirable dra- matic sureness of aim to her own merits and hopes. And there is a general deficiency of spontaneousness and involuntary current, about the drift of her recollections and inventions. Mrs. Gamp, though conning 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 not like it "without the crust," and then lapses with a perfect unconsciousness into the theme of herself, for whom, of course, it turns out that she is really preparing it,—"by reason of tender teeth, which, Gamp being in liquor, knocked out four at a blow," &c. But this turn of her reverie is entirely spontaneous, reverting to herself only as the natural centre of all things, and is not in any way wrenched cunningly to her purpose.
There 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 contem- plate quite casually laying out "all her fellow-creeturs " from the love she bears them, is not easily to be portrayed on any human stage.
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