little variation of cadence, and in a deep full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the senate than of the stage in it, he rolled out his heroics with an air of dignified indifference that seemed to disdain the plaudits that were bestowed on him.
It may be supposed that Quin was not greatly pleased at the advent of Garrick, and the rush of the town to his feet. “Garrick is a new religion,” he said, mockingly; “Whitfield was followed for a time, but the people will all come to church again!” But they never did. Once in the magic circle of Garrick’s art there was no breaking away again. He attracted and kept his public. His fame grew and strengthened every day. The town flocked from the court end to Goodman’s Fields. In 1745 he was playing at Drury Lane. He visited Dublin, receiving an extraordinary welcome. The title of the English Roscius was first bestowed upon him there. In 1747, in conjunction with Mr. Lacy, he was manager of Drury Lane Theatre.
Johnson must have been more than mortal to have felt no envy at his pupil’s brilliant triumph. He was entitled to rate his intellect and talents at a higher rate than Garrick’s, yet he found himself suffering often the severest privations while the actor was in the receipt of an enormous income. His own poverty, however, seemed more easily borne than the prosperity of his friend. He could not but be jealous. He took to undervaluing the abilities of Garrick, to scoffing at his profession. In his life of Savage, published in 1744, writing complimentarily of Wilks, the actor, he could not refrain from violent reflections upon other players. “A man,” he wrote, “who, whatever were his abilities or skill as an actor, deserves at least to be remembered for his virtues, which are not often to be found in the world, and perhaps less often in his profession than in any other. To be humane, generous and candid is a very high degree of merit in any case; but those qualities deserve still greater praise when they are found in that condition which makes almost every other man for whatever reason contemptuous, insolent, petulant, selfish, and brutal.” These are strong words. Indeed his pupil’s success was hard to forgive. Throughout his life Johnson was steadily consistent in his abuse of the actors; both before and after the production of “Irene” his tone was the same. “Players, sir! I look upon them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint-stools to make faces and produce laughter like dancing dogs!” “A player!—a showman!—a fellow who exhibits himself for a shilling.” “To talk of respect for a player! Do you respect a rope-dancer or a ballad-singer? A fellow who claps a hump on his back and a lump on his leg, and cries ‘I am Richard the Third!’ Nay sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things—he repeats and he sings; there is both recitation and music in his performance; the player only recites.”
“Who can repeat Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be,’ as Garrick does it?” Boswell asks.
“Anybody may,” is the answer. “Jemmy there”—(a boy about eight years old who was in the room)—“will do as well in a week.”
Boswell. “No, no, sir! and, as a proof of the merit of great acting, and of the value which mankind sets upon it, Garrick has got a hundred thousand pounds!”
Johnson. “Is getting a hundred thousand pounds a proof of excellence? That has been done by a scoundrel commissary!”
“You two talk so loud,” says Garrick, playing King Lear, to Johnson and Murphy, conversing in the wings of Drury Lane; “you destroy all my feelings.”
“Prithee!” cries Johnson, “don’t talk of feelings! Punch has no feelings!”
Garrick, manager, generously offered to produce his old master’s tragedy. But there were great difficulties in the way, proceeding chiefly, it must be said, from the author. Garrick suggested the alterations he thought necessary. These Johnson refused to make. He would not suffer that the work he “had been obliged to keep more than the nine years of Horace should be revised and altered at the pleasure of a player.” A violent dispute ensued, and Garrick called upon the Rev. Dr. Taylor to interpose.
“Sir!” cried the author, in a rage, “the fellow wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels!”
A compromise was effected: certain of the suggested changes were made, others were abandoned.
The subject of the tragedy is very hard and grim. It is undramatic—it is uninteresting—without pathos, or feeling, or emotion. It is a story of one incident. The Sultan Mahomet, charged by his ministers with over-fondness for his Greek mistress Irene, to the neglect of his state affairs and the ruin of his empire, puts her to death as an atonement for his fault. What can be done with such materials? Are we to sympathise with the sultan murderer or with his seraglio victim? Where is the poetical justice of the story? And certainly Johnson had no power to invest the fable with any tenderness or sentiment it did not possess in itself. His characters are simply grand automata, who walk about and wave their hands and utter musical but pompous blank verse. Nature is carefully hammered out of the hues; they pertain to Art solely. All is brain-work; there is no heart in the play. The verses scan perfectly, they are as smooth as ice, and as cold; while there is something cloying and oppressive about the monotonous march of the music, which seems to be almost the more somniferous where it should be the more stirring. There is not a broken line in the play; no emotion nor excitement ever disturbs the rhythm, and Irene does not forget the melody of her lines even in the throes of strangulation.
Garrick had engaged a strong company, He desired to give “Irene” the benefit of this. To secure the aid of his rival, Spranger Barry, “the silver-toned,” the manager made a merit of ceding to him the part of Mahomet, taking himself that of Demetrius. It is probable, however, that he deemed this character afforded him better opportunities; and, certainly, the most dramatic scenes in the play are those in which the Greek lover appears, though his influence upon the story is not
