The Sketcher.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 227, 15 January 1876, Page 5

The Sketcher.

EDMUND KEAK The new actor had chosen the part of Shylock for his debut in London because he thought the loose oriental dress would conceal his diminutive figure, and prevent comparisons being made between him and the stately Kemble. After six nights as the Jew he appeared as Richard 111., his anxiety for success bringing on a short illness. But he soon leaped to success. He was neither coarse, like Cooke, nor monotonous, like Kemble. Some thought him wanting in dignity, and in his sudden courtship of Lady Anne too obvious a hypocrite. But all allowed his brilliancy and vigor, and the combat and death-scene were pronounced magnificent. On one special night there was £6OO in the theati-e. Presents showered upon him. A nobleman sent him £IOO. The Drury Lane Committee presented him with £SOO, and four of the Drury shareholders gave him each a share in the theatre, which now rested on his Atlas back.

The pai-t of Hamlet was Kean's next triumph, but the critics differed here even more than usual. Mrs. Garrick thought the closet scene "too tame;" on the whole, Kean did not show the vigor and fire he had displayed in "Richard" or the intense passion he afterwards exhibited in "Othello." About hia representation of the Moor, however, there was but one voice. His lago many thought too careless and gay, but his Othello was in the noblest sense a consistent and epical figure. His change from tenderness to mad and murderous rage was like a storm seen by lightning. In the sixty-eight nights of this first season of Kean he delighted 166,742 persons, and the theatre cleared, by his attraction alone, upwards of £20,600.

In Kean's second season he played Romeo, Reuben Glenroy, Richard the Second, Penruddock, Zanga, Abel Drugger, Leon, Octavian, and Macbeth. The last part was a great success; it wanted the regal dignity of Kemble and also the supernatural gloom, but the vigor and passion in certain parts were incomparable. The horror and stupefacation after the murder of Duncan, the fight, and his desperate death were matchless ; but Kean allowed that Kemble, in the banquet scene, gave greater effect to the character. In the meditative parts, as in "after life's fitful fever, he sleeps well," he wanted pathos, though his grand farewell in " Othello " had been so incomparable ; nor were the lines upon the Queen's murderous death, "She would have died hereafter," delivered with any peculiar power. In 1815 Kean attempted Romeo with no great success ; his most energetic passage was where his sentence of banishment is declared, and he was grand in the death scene. The love passages were commonplace, nor did he do much more with Richard the Second, though he flashed out in parts. Zanga, however, though merely a blown-out lago, suited him better, and aaain he animated the overdone character with his genius. In the scene where he discloses his crimes to Alonzo, " Know, then, 'twas I," as he stood over his victim with his flashing eyes and arms thrown upwards, says Barry Cornwall, he looked like Milton's archangel. Kean was now the lion of London. Mrs. Garrick gave him her husband's stage jewels, Lord Byron a gold box and two swords, another friend sent him a real live lion for a pet. In January, 1816, Kean carried the town before him by his Sir Giles Overreach, that vigorous creation of Massinger's. The performance was harmoniously consistent and complete, and the dying scene was terrific. Ladies fell into hysterics, Mrs. Glover fainted upon the stage, Lord Byron had what he called "a convulsive fit." Dr. Dox-an especially remembers the great actor's voice in his reply to Lovel's " Are you not moved !"

Yes, as rocks are When foamy billows split themselves against Their flinty ribs ; or as the moon is moved When wolves with hunger pin'd howl at her brightness. " I seem to hear the words and the voice still —now composed, now grand as the foamy billows ; resting flute-like on the word, ' moon,' creating a scene with the sound, and anon" sharp, harsh, and fierce in the last line, with a look upward from those matchless eyes that rendered the wolves visible and their howl perceptible to the ear." Kemble never attempted the part of Sir Giles again after this.

In Maturin's " Bertram," Kean was full of passion, pathos, love, and tenderness. His great point, " God bless the child," he had practised looking at his own sleeping boy, and it always called forth tears. About this time Kean played the public one of his old perverse tricks. He ran away for three days and spent the time drinking at Deptford. In 1816-7 he played with his rival Booth, and eventually, as Othello to his lago, crushed him in a terrific performance, in which he acted with all the noble madness of his genius. In his " King Lear," the best critics seem to agree that Kean " sustained" rather than increased his fame. The curse was ranted ; he was too violent or too tame. "He sank," says Hazlitt, " from unmixed rage to mere dotage." His attitude in the curse, however, Hazlitt describes with a terrible force worthy of the actor: —" He threw himself on his knees, lifted up his arms like withered stumps, threw his head quite back, and in that position, as if severed from all that held him to life, breathed a heartstruck prayer, like the figure of a man obtruncated. It was the only moment worthy of himself and of the character."

Kean visited America in 1820, and stayed nearly a year, creating a frantic enthusiasm, the tickets being often put up for auction. On his second visit to Boston (in the dead season), Kean cut short his engagement in disgust, and was nearly lynched for his pains. In 1823, the rivalry of Young and Kean found vent on the Drury stage, but the two schools of acting had no power of cohesion.

And now again broke out the vice and semimadness of Kean's old Bohemian days. He hired a house in the Isle of Bute at a great expense, and though he had playbills sent him from London every day, soon grew tired of solitude. On his return to London he made up for it by incessant dissipation ; he was always drunk at night, and when drunk gave cheques away almost to any one. This debauched career ended by his seducing the wife of his friend Alderman Cox, and having to pay a sum of £BOO. Hissed and hooted at in Edinburgh and London, Kean started a second time for America.

In America he raked in heaps of guineas, but in private his conduct was gross, reckless, and insane. He got himself elected chief of a tribe of Indians, adopted their dress or rather their want of it, and drank enough for the whole tribe. He erected a monument to George Frederic Cooke, another dipsomaniac, and brought home one of Cooke's toe bones with all the mystery and awe of a Loretto pilgrim. He had long ago deserted his wife and become the tipsy Juan of theatrical taverns. He now renounced his generous-hearted son because Charles would not abandon all thoughts of the stage, and would not accept a cadetship unless his fatherwould settle £3OO a-year upon his mother. He acted all those great creations of the poet by means of incessant draughts of brandy and water at the wings ; "stronger and very hot" was his incessant croak. Before and after the excitement, he was a shivering, drooping, panting, half-fainting, worn-out man. Sharks and parasites got hold of him, and, as such creatures do, fed his vices and flattered his faults. But an inexorable creditor, who cannot and will not be put off, was at hand. Kean and his brave-hearted son (who if not a genius was a erentleman to the core) had become reconciled. In February, 1833, for the first and only time, the father and son met on a London stage—Charles as lago, and Kean, of course, as the soldier Moor. There was no rehearsal that day in Covent Garden, no arrangement as to by-play. The son found the wornout genius in his dressing-room shivering, nervous, and weak. "I am very ill," he said, "I am afraid that I shall not be able to act."

Charles Kemble, in his cheery way, harkened on the old lion. At the close of the first scene the old factor's pride in his son quickened, and he said with a smile, "Charles is getting on to-night; he's acting very well. I suppose that's because he is acting with me." Kean was very feeble, but by the aid of constant brandy and water, hot and strong, struggled on to the commencement of the third act; then just as the drop was rising, the wan, worn old man, who had to transform himself into a demon of vengeance, shook with anxieby, and said kindly to the son he had so cruelly cast off : Mind, Charles, and keep before me ; mind and don't get behind me in this act. I may not be able to kneel, but if I do, be sure that you help me up/' He went on and off with Desdemona, and still no perceptible faltering. But on entering where he had to say, "What! false to me ?" he could scarcely stagger across the stage. He kept up, however, to the great farewell, "Farewell the big plumed wars, farewell content," &c, and concluded it; but he then made two feeble steps towards his son, and uttering the violent speech, " Villain, be sure, &c, his poor head sank on his son's shoulder, and he never spoke word on earthly stage again.

"I am dying. Speak to them for me," he groaned in Charles' ear, and the audience, with their usual generosity and kindness, refusing to hear an apology, Kean was borne from the stage. __ They carried him to his dressing-room, and laid the actor—no longer acting—on a sofa. He was cold as ice, his pulse was beating the "Dead March" faintly. When remedies restored him, he was carried to " The Wrekin" Tavern, and doctors were sent for. After a week's imprisonment at the Wrekin, he was taken back to Richmond, where he managed the theatre. He then caught cold and grew worse, reviving at intervals. One day he struggled to a table and wrote a touchr ing letter to the wife from whom he had cast himself seven years since. The good son had done this :

"My dear Mary. Come home. Forget and forgive. If I have erred, it was my head, not my heart."

What did that injured and heart-bleeding woman do ? Who knows women truly will give the true answer. She was back by return coach, and they were reconciled once more and for ever. Poor lost fellow, he could not eat now, could scarcely read the books that strewed his bed. At times he rallied, and showed his son how Sir George Beaumont had explained to him that Garrick and Barry acted Lear ; and then he would give with his dying voice, and with the pathos of personal experience, those most tearful and tender of all lines : " Pray do not mock me, ... do not laugh at me, For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia." Then he grew worse, his pulse was scarcely perceptible ; he was fading away. Once he rallied, drank brandy, and in his old reckless way crawled out of bed, wrapped himself in a racoon's skin, dragged himself into another room, and was found there half dead, drinking, and smoking a cigar. Death heeds not such masquerade. His last hours were hours of insensibility. He died May 15, 1833, aged only forty-six. " And what a loss was there, my countrymen !" Alas ! poor Yorick.— Walter Thorniury in Concordia.

THE MODERN NEWSPAPER. (From the Warder.) The marvellous accuracy attained in the production of first-class daily journals has become so familiar to the public that little consideration is given to the process by which the result is accomplished. Editors and publishers can almost now literally effect the rapid miracle which the old Scotch lady desired, who, visiting a bookseller's shop in Glasgow, and asking for a " big prent" Bible, found none of those submitted to her attention suffi-

ciently distinct in typography. She announced, however, her intention of calling again. " I'm gaun," said she, "up the toun a wee, to buy some bits o' things, and ye can just pit your stampin' aims in the fire, and hae ane ready for me as I come back." The " stampin' aims " are now put into the fire at a late hour every night, and there is produced, long before sunrise, day by day, an amount of printed matter from freshly set types which would have made even the printers of twenty years ago stare with astonishment. The business of a morning newspaper commences usually at seven or eight o'clock in the evening, by which time the sub-editor—a most important functionary—begins to see the way before him. " Copy " being. supplied to the printers, of whom there must be from 60 to 200, the work of putting the types together begins. Almost simultaneously with this operation the correctors of the press, of whom there may be as many as seven or eight, begin with their proofs. Curious typographical errors are sometimes found after careless printers. An eminent Irish orator concluding a martial speech on the eve of the memorable fight at Ballingarry, called upon his compatriots to raise the standard of freedom, and invoke the God of Battles. The appeal was intended to have a magnificent effect, and we do not know that the failure of that struggle has been before imputed to the accidental perversion of that appeal. It was printed in the talented organ of the party in this form :—"Let us raise the standard of freedom and invoke the God of Rattles!" The "god of x-attles" in point of fact was sprung next morning in the form of a burly constable, and the orator placed in the nearest police station. A very slight displacement of a comma may portentously alter the effect of a passage, and the corrector is obliged to observe the caution usually given to occupants of the first form, and " mind his stops." Every newspaper office has its tales of this sort, derived generally from its own experience. What we plead for is a certain amount of toleration for " errors of the press," which in truth are sometimes unavoidable from a variety of causes. Leading articles and other important contributions are usually read twice in proof, as are also advertisements more than once, and it will be admitted that a very high ■ degree of accuracy is the result. By ten o'clock at night the business of the morning newspaper is in full swing. Telegraphs are flowing in from all parts of the world. Baron Reuter has a monopoly of the foreign news, - which is supplied to English and Irish journals by bis agency, at a cost of which the ordinary newspaper reader has little conception. " Reuter," however, is only a small portion of the material which the moi*ning journals consume. There are English general news, telegrams, special telegrams, sporting telegrams, market telegrams, besides long reports . by telegraph of meetings and incidents—of anything and everything in fact, possessing importance or • interest. A newspaper now is, with the exception of its advertisements and articles of purely local intelligence, nothing but a series of telegrams. This development of telegraphy, which puts all readers of first-class journals substantially on the sa.me level, and secures almost instantaneous diffusion of news, is the work of not more than the past five or. six years, and has trebled the cost in this department of producing a public journal. A revolution has been effected in the press by the electric telegraph. Few persons completely realise the fact that from day to day the news both of a general kind and affecting mercantile and monetary matters, placed before the reader for a small copper coin literally is the news of the world. Even ten years ago the arrangements for the transmission of telegraphic news were bounded by a small European geographic circle ; but at the present time, chiefly through the agency of Baron Reuter, no piece of information of the slightest political or monetary consequence, arising in any country in Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, is withheld from first-claBS newspapers of the United Kingdom. Baron Reuter is a Prussian, who was a courier to several of the courts of Europe from the Government of Berlin, and is understood to have made a great fortune since the year 1858 in the new enterprise for which his previous position so well prepared him. No more delicate operation could be conceived than the selection of the matter to be circulated for the purpose of being printed in journals of every class of religious and political complexion, especially at a time when such convulsion of opinion prevails. Yet those telegrams are entirely above suspicion, and, in fact, are marvels of accuracy, impartiality, and freshness. Baron Reuter has a large establishment in Paris where translators and editors are constantly at work. The expense to which journals go on special occasions to secure early news by telegraph would hardly be credited by those unacquainted with the fact. The Manchester Guardian paid £4OO for a telegram from Metz. A special account of the battle of Gravelotte was telegraphed to a London journal at a still greater cost. The New York Herald, during the same war, "passed on" one of these London letters by Atlantic cable at a cost of £IOOO. Before a few years are out telegrams will doubtless appear regularly in the daily papers from Australia and Japan, as well as from India and the States.