"On the Acting Styles of Kemble and Kean" (1831)
We believe it was the opinion of a great many besides ourselves that Kean did extinguish Kemble: at all events, we hold it for certain that Kean hastened his going out; and we are greatly mistaken if Kemble did not intimate as much to his friends, putting the case as Quin did on a like occasion respecting Garrick,—that new notions had come up in acting, and that if , those were true, it was time for the teachers of the old ones to be gone. Garrick's nature displaced Quin's formalism: and in precisely the same way did Kean displace Kemble. The opinion is no new one on our parts, nor on those of many others. We, expressed it at the time. We always said that John Kemble's acting was not the true thing; and the moment we heard what sort of an actor Kean was (for circumstances prevented our seeing him at the moment) we said that he would carry all before him. It was as sure a thing as Nature against Art, or tears against cheeks of stone.
We do not deny a certain merit of taste and what is called "classicality" to John Kemble. He had one idea about tragedy, and it was a good one; namely, that a certain elevation of treatment was due to it, that there was a dignity, and a perception of something superior to common life, which should justly be regarded as one of its constituent portions; and furthermore, that in exhibiting the heroes of the Roman world, it was not amiss to invest them with the additional dignity they had received from the length of their renown and the enthusiasm of scholarship. These ideas were good: and as he had a fine person, a Roman cast of countenance, and equal faith in the dignity of his originals and his own, he obtained, in the absence of any greater and more natural actor, a whole generation for his admirers, many of whom could not bear to give him up when the greater came. This is the whole secret of the fondness entertained for his memory. It is a mere habit and a prejudice, though a respectable one; and we should be the last to quarrel with it were nature let alone. It is observable that Mr. Kemble's admirers never enter into any details of criticism or comparison. They content themselves with a fine assumption or two, like his own—a stately or sovereign metaphor—and a reference to his gentility. Now Mr. Kemble had a solemnity of manner off the stage, analogous to what he had on it, and we believe he kept "good company," in the ordinary sense of that phrase; but that he was more of a gentleman than Mr. Kean, either in his strongest or weakest moments, we have yet to learn. Allusions are frequently made to a habit in Mr. Kean, which his predecessor certainly shared with him, though with comparative harmlessness to his less sensitive temperament. On the other hand (for we never saw him in private) Mr. Kean, we believe, is as much of a gentleman in ordinary as Kemble was; and we have heard accounts of his behaviour to his brother actors and inferiors, which argue an inner gentility—a breeding of the heart—which at all events we never did hear of the other. In the power of appreciating moral and intellectual refinement, we should say that there could be no sort of comparison between the man who can act Othello as Kean does, and the dry, tearless, systematical, despotical style of all Mr. Kemble's personations. Everything with Kemble was literally a personation —it was a mask and a sounding-pipe. It was all external and artificial. There was elegance, majesty, preparation: it was Gracchus with his pitch-pipe, going to begin—but nothing came of it. It was not the man, but his mask; a trophy, a consul's robe, a statue; or if you please, a rhetorician. It was Addison's "Cato," or an actor's schoolmaster, which you will; but neither Shakspeare nor genuine acting.
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