1826.] The T'heatre—Its Literature, and General Arrangement. 53 
with! because, here, no want of pecuniary encouragement can be alleged; the 
gains of performers are enormous. A fresh actor of first rate success, or-actress, 
appearing to-morrow in tragedy or comedy, would realize probably £4,000-a+ 
year'for the: first five years, and secure £1,200 a year afterwards, as-long as 
health and power lasted. These are the people who keep “ private secretaries,”’ 
and travel in * carriages and four.”? A new actor, not of the very highest rank , 
such an actor as Covent Garden Jones—would command £1,000 a-year to- 
morrow; aman like Emery, or Irish Johnson, not Jess, A tors of a still in- 
ferior rank, but respectable, like Mr. Cooper, or Mr. Warde, who play at 
Covent Garden; these persons, who are never supposed, specifically, to attract . 
money, will obtain salaries of fifteen and sixteen pounds per week ; about twice 
the pay of a Lieut. Colonel in the army! And, even at this rate, they are 
difficult to be obtained. 
‘This dearth of that which we demand as talent (and admit to be such) 
in*London, it becomes difficult to derive any means for supplying; unless it 
were possible to point out what the qualifications necessary to an actor’s success 
in London should be; or to form some idea, prior to actual experiment, what 
wouldbe any given individual’s chance for beingreceived. And thisis not only— 
as those persons declare who are most experienced—impossible; but the more 
we'examine people who have succeeded as actors, the more the apparent diffi- 
culty generally increases; for the means by which success has been obtained, upon 
close investigation—as far as we can trace them—seem, five times in six, so 
very greatly disproportioned to the end—! 
‘The actor of that which we call “ low comedy”—that is, the imitator of 
grotesque habits, or the conceiver of extravagant humours—if we laugh, in spite 
of all criticism—this actor has succeeded ;—and it is pretty nearly impossible to 
say, of any audience in a theatre, or of any mixed assembly of men—at what 
they will, or will not laugh. We laugh at a crime upon the stage—at a folly— 
an infirmity—a successful falsehood—or a detection suffered—at an odd face— 
a religious enthusiasm—a dress and deportment miraculously true to custom and 
fashion—or the same ridiculously opposed to it. In France, and in England, 
they laugh at exhibitions which have very little in common; and each wonders, 
independent of ill-nature or affectation, what the devil his neighbour can find 
to» be amused with.—In Paris, where they vote an Englishman triste, M. 
Mazurier, the Polichinelle, passes for the most humorous person under the sun ; 
M. Mazurier came over to London ; and people were amazed to think that, in 
any part of the world, he could have been thought comical at all. It is probably 
impossible to decide, unless by the experiment, what effect any particular ex- 
hibition will produce upon an audience; or what powers—great, or littlek—any 
comic actor may exhibit when he comes upon the stage. Actors themselves 
know very little how their effect upon an audience is produced: as a proof 
of this, great numbers of them begin their career in characters entirely opposite 
to those in which they afterwards become eminent. And this is particularly the 
case with low comedians; who seem, time out of mind, always to have found 
out that they were comical dogs, entirely by accident. 
Among people of our own time in this situation, Mathews and Liston both 
began by acting tragedy ;—Liston no doubt is a tragedian, in the natural bent of 
his inclination—a hero in his soul. _Munden had no idea, probably, when. 
he played fops by choice, like Jemmy Jumps, that he could command the 
pocket-handkerchiefs of enormous crowds, in such parts as Old Rapid, or 
Captain Bertram. Bannister, when he aimed at Hamlet, did not know that his 
strength layin Scrub; and Irish Johnson sighed and sang as first tenor, in the 
character of Young Meadows, in the opera of Love in a Village, never dreaming 
of the glories that he should acquire as Dennis Bulgruddery, or Looney 
MeTwolter. The difficulty seems to be here, in a man’s judging how far he is, 
humorous or ridiculous—as we laugh (without knowing why) at a monkey,, 
and do not:daugh at-an elephant. For we have no ready case of an_actor’s. 
making his blunder the other way—fancying that he could play Moses in The 
School: for Scandal, and turning out to be great in Shylock or Othello... Dowton, 
tried this—the Shylock ; but it did not do. 
