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This is pleasant. I like her decidedly. 'If anybody wants small talk by handfuls, of glittering dust swept out of salons, here's Mr. Thackeray besides! . . . Rome: March 29. . . . We see a good deal of the Kembles here, and like them both, especially Fanny, who is looking magnificent still, with her black hair and radiant smile. A very noble creature indeed.
This is one of man's most effective engines for our division and subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangmen for our sex. Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, the George Sands, the Fanny Kembles, of all ages; and now men mock us with the fact, and say we are ever cruel to each other.
Mrs. Yates, though an accomplished actress, was far from possessing the personal gifts of the Kembles' sister. To Romney's studio Cumberland also brought Garrick, with some hope that the great actor might interest himself in favour of the painter. But Garrick was too closely allied with Sir Joshua; he was wilfully blinded to the merits of Romney.
In reading this tragedy now, one is at a loss to understand how such trash could have been tolerated at the very time of the revival of a pure dramatic literature, how such an unsavored broth of sentiment, such a meagre hash of heroics, could have been relished, even when served by Kembles, after the rich, varied, Olympian banquets of Shakspeare. The argument is briefly this:
"Well, she may hear it if she chooses when I go to England to read the old Parrot in the right way, under their very noses, Kembles and all. I'll let Mrs. Shelley know I'm there," and she laughed merrily. "And what is your idea of the way to read Shakespeare, Bertie dear?" I asked, playfully.
Shakespeare and Burbage, Betterton, Colley Cibber, the Kembles, the Keans, Phelps, Calvert and Henry Irving, as artists, recognised that there was but one way to treat the play of Henry VIII. It is pleasant to sin in such good company. I contend that Henry VIII. is essentially a realistic and not a symbolic play. Indeed, probably no English author is less "symbolic" than Shakespeare.
It was impossible that the Romantic movement in itself, and the study of the Elizabethan drama which it induced, should not lead to the practise of tragedy, while the existence of the Kembles as players and managers, might be thought to promise well for the tragic stage. Yet there has always been something out of joint with English nineteenth century tragedy.
"The Kembles," writes Mrs Browning, "were our gain in Rome." Towards the end of May 1854 farewells were said, and the Brownings returned from Rome, to Florence by vettura. They had hoped to visit England, or if this should prove impracticable, to take shelter among the mountains from the summer heat.
What it wants is freshness, spontaneity, abandon. Among English artists of a bygone age her style might probably find a parallel in the stately elegance and artificial grandeur of the Kembles. It has nothing in common with the electric verve and romantic ardor of Edmund Kean. Of the feu sacre which irradiated Rachel and gives to Bernhardt splendor ineffable, Miss Anderson has not a spark.
The place is given up to abominable dialects and individual tricks, any vulgarity flourishes, and on top of it all the Americans, with every conceivable crudity, come in to make confusion worse confounded. And when one laments it people stare; they don't know what one means." "Do you mean the grand manner, certain pompous pronunciations, the style of the Kembles?"
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