Kitabı oku: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 531, January 28, 1832», sayfa 3
NOTES OF A READER
DECLINE OF THE DRAMA
One thing which I am unable to interpret among the oddities of the English, is their inconsistency respecting dramatic entertainments. I have never yet been present where two or three of my countrymen were gathered together, that, after a wrangling review of the weather, they did not turn their conversation upon the theatres. There is no topic more universally discussed than the decadence of the drama, or the engagements, merits, and adventures of the performers. Neither the Lord Chancellor nor the Archbishop of Canterbury is ever so familiarly known by name and person to the public, as the first tragedian and comedian of the day; and the theatrical belles and heroines are either elevated to the peerage by matrimony, or lowered by the undertaker into Westminster Abbey. As some French Vaudevillist observed, "Moliere was denied in France the rights of sepulture, while
"Garrick repose à côté de leur rois!"
Yet, notwithstanding all this clamour of popularity—all this infatuation—there is no branch of the arts so grossly neglected in England as the drama. It is no longer the fashion in London to attend the theatres. Owing partly to the increase of private amusements, and partly to the late hours gradually adopted during the reign of George the Fourth, the custom of play-going has declined among the higher classes, and naturally produces the reaction of bad pieces and indifferent performers. Even a clever actor, when satisfied that he is to receive judgment from an unrefined and uneducated audience, will degenerate and grow slovenly; and from what I have observed of the London stage, I see it is the custom to daub for the galleries, or to creep through the business under cover of a cold, tame mediocrity. Without the slightest patronage from the court or substantial encouragement from the fosterers of literary merit, these luckless personages are expected to attempt the same exertions and intense study, which is rewarded, in foreign countries, by the most flattering and judicious attention; as well as by a pension, to cheer the infirmities of old age. Although tolerably well paid by his manager, the English actor has the mortification of being tyrannized and insulted by the gallery, and overlooked by the higher classes. A few persons of rank and fortune are provided with private boxes at the national theatres; but these are usually let by the night to plebeian tenants. It is rare indeed to observe a family of distinction in the dress circle of either Drury Lane or Covent Garden; while the French play is never deficient in a fashionable audience.
The Opera, too, is nightly becoming more crowded; while at the two patent theatres "a beggarly account of empty boxes," and an equally beggarly account of flat, stale, and unprofitable performances, greets me whenever I am rash enough to take my post of observation. Lady Romford has a private box, which she visits only in preference to staying at a still duller home, on a disengaged evening; and Bagot occasionally drags me to the play, to make my foreign ignorance and inexperience a pretext for following Lady Clara to a spot which no one seems to visit without an apology. People in society give as many reasons for having done so strange a thing as go to see the new tragedy, as they would invent in Paris to excuse a similar omission.
Since the Kemble munia, and the Byron mania, there has been a general affectation of indifference towards poetry and the drama; your true fashionable never mentions either without ridicule—the natural consequence of previously exaggerated enthusiasm.
But above all the absurdities connected with this national weakness, stands that of the public prints. So much importance is given by the newspapers to every thing relating to the histrionic art, that we are daily informed of the whereabout of all the third-rate performers of the minor theatres; that "Mr. Smith, of Sadler's Wells, is engaged to Mr. Ducrow for the ensuing season;" or that "Miss Brown, belonging to the ballet department of the Surrey theatre, has sprained her ankle." While two thirds of a leading print are occupied with details of the Reform Bill, or a debate on some constitutional question,—or while the foreign intelligence of two sieges and a battle is concentrated with a degree of terseness worthy a telegraph, half a column is devoted to the plot of a new melo-drama at the Coburg; or to a cut and dried criticism upon the nine hundredth representation of Hamlet—beginning with the "immortal bard," and ending with the waistcoats of the grave-digger!—The Opera, a Novel.
EUGENE ARAM
The recollection of this man is still preserved at Lynn, in Norfolk, at which town he was for some time usher at the grammar-school. A small room at the back of the house, in which he slept, was, until these last few years, (when it was pulled down and rebuilt,) mysteriously pointed to by the little urchins as they passed up to bed of a cold, ghost-enticing night, as the chamber in which the "usher, who was hanged for murder," was used to sleep.
The tradition which remains of his character is, that he was "a man of loneliness and mystery," sullen and reserved; that on half-holy-days, and when his duties would allow, he strayed solitary and cheerless, as if to avoid the world, amongst the flat uninteresting marshes which are situated on the opposite side of the river Ouse.
At Lynn the character of Aram was, until his apprehension, unexceptionable; but after that event, circumstances were then called to mind which seemed to indicate a naturally dark character; but whether these were all strictly founded in truth, or magnified suspicions arising from the appaling circumstances of the crime of which he was convicted, I am unable to determine. The following, derived from unquestionable authority, having been related by Dr. L., who was master of the grammar-school at the time, may serve as a sample:—there can be no doubt but that the worthy Dr. himself believed his suspicions well founded, as he used to tremble when he related it. It was customary for the parents of the scholars, on an appointed day, to dine with the master, at which time it was expected they would bring with them the amount of their bills. It was late at night, after one of such meetings, that Dr. L. was awakened by a noise at his bed-room door; he rose up, and going into the passage which led to the staircase, but which was not in the direct way from Aram's bed room to the ground-floor, he discovered the usher dressed. Having questioned him as to the object of his rising at that unseasonable hour, Aram confusedly answered that he had been taken unwell, and had been obliged to go do down stairs. The Dr. then retired, unsuspiciously, to bed. From the combined circumstances of the noise at the door, his great agitation and confusion, and from his being found in the passage, the worthy Dr., in later years, had no doubt, that, from its being known to Aram that a considerable sum of money was in his bed-room, Aram intended nothing less than to rob him; and no doubt, continued the narrator, he would have murdered me too, if it had been rendered necessary, from my discovering or opposing him.
The spot just at the entrance to the play-ground, at which Aram was taken into custody by two strange men from Yorkshire, is still remarked, and generally by the young scholar in a tremulous whisper.—Literary Gazette.
THE NATURALIST
AGENCY OF MAN IN EXTINGUISHING OR SPREADING SPECIES
Let us make some inquiries into the extent of the influence which the progress of society has exerted, during the last seven or eight centuries, in altering the distribution of our indigenous British animals. Dr. Fleming has prosecuted this inquiry with his usual zeal and ability, and in a memoir on the subject has enumerated the best authenticated examples of the decrease or extirpation of certain species during a period when our population has made the most rapid advances. We shall offer a brief outline of his results.
The stag, as well as the fallow-deer, and the roe, were formerly so abundant that, according to Lesley, from five hundred to a thousand were sometimes slain at a hunting-match; but the native races would already have been extinguished, had they not been carefully preserved in certain forests. The otter, the marten, and the polecat, were also in sufficient numbers to be pursued for the sake of their fur; but they have now been reduced within very narrow bounds. The wild cat and fox have also been sacrificed throughout the greater part of the country, for the security of the poultry-yard or the fold. Badgers have been expelled from nearly every district which at former periods they inhabited.
Besides these, which have been driven out from some haunts, and everywhere reduced in number, there are some which have been wholly extirpated; such as the ancient breed of indigenous horses, the wild boar and the wild oxen, of which last, however, a few remains are still preserved in the parks of some of our nobility. The beaver, which was eagerly sought after for its fur, had become scarce at the close of the ninth century, and, by the twelfth century, was only to be met with, according to Giraldus de Barri, in one river in Wales, and another in Scotland. The wolf, once so much dreaded by our ancestors, is said to have maintained its ground in Ireland so late as the beginning of the eighteenth century (1710,) though it had been extirpated in Scotland thirty years before, and in England at a much earlier period. The bear, which in Wales was regarded as a beast of the chase equal to the hare or the boar, only perished as a native of Scotland in the year 1057.
Many native birds of prey have also been the subjects of unremitting persecution. The eagles, larger hawks, and ravens, have disappeared from the more cultivated districts. The haunts of the mallard, the snipe, the redshank, and the bittern, have been drained equally with the summer dwellings of the lapwing and the curlew. But these species still linger in some portion of the British isles; whereas the large capercailzies, or wood grouse, formerly natives of the pine forests of Ireland and Scotland, have been destroyed within the last fifty years. The egret and the crane, which appear to have been formerly very common in Scotland, are now only occasional visitants.
The bustard (Otis tarda,) observes Graves in his British Ornithology, "was formerly seen in the downs and heaths of various parts of our island, in flocks of forty or fifty birds; whereas it is now a circumstance of rare occurrence to meet with a single individual." Bewick also remarks, "that they were formerly more common in this island than at present; they are now found only in the open counties of the south and east, in the plains of Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and some parts of Yorkshire." In the few years that have elapsed since Bewick wrote, this bird has entirely disappeared from Wiltshire and Dorsetshire.
These changes, we may observe, are derived from very imperfect memorials, and relate only to the larger and more conspicuous animals inhabiting a small spot on the globe; but they cannot fail to exalt our conception of the enormous revolutions which, in the course of several thousand years, the whole human species must have effected.
The kangaroo and the emu are retreating rapidly before the progress of colonization in Australia; and it scarcely admits of doubt, that the general cultivation of that country must lead to the extirpation of both. The most striking example of the loss, even within the last two centuries, of a remarkable species, is that of the dodo—a bird first seen by the Dutch when they landed on the Isle of France, at that time uninhabited, immediately after the discovery of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope. It was of a large size and singular form; its wings short, like those of an ostrich, and wholly incapable of sustaining its heavy body even for a short flight. In its general appearance it differed from the ostrich, cassowary, or any known bird.
Many naturalists gave figures of the dodo after the commencement of the seventeenth century; and there is a painting of it in the British Museum, which is said to have been taken from a living individual. Beneath the painting is a leg, in a fine state of preservation, which ornithologists are agreed cannot belong to any other known bird. In the museum at Oxford, also, there is a foot and a head, in an imperfect state, but M. Cuvier doubts the identy of this species with that of which the painting is preserved in London.
In spite of the most active search, during the last century, no information respecting the dodo was obtained, and some authors have gone so far as to pretend that it never existed; but amongst a great mass of satisfactory evidence in favour of the recent existence of this species, we may mention that an assemblage of fossil bones were recently discovered, under a bed of lava, in the Isle of France, and sent to the Paris museum by M. Desjardins. They almost all belonged to a large living species of land-tortoise, called Testudu Indica, but amongst them were the head, sternum, and humerus of the dodo. M. Cuvier showed me these valuable remains in Paris, and assured me that they left no doubt in his mind that the huge bird was one of the gallinaceous tribe.
