Rare Criticism
Mrs. Siddons is known to have described to Campbell the scene of her probation on the Edinburgh boards with no small humour: the grave attention of the Scotsmen, and their canny reservation of praise till sure it is deserved, she said, had well nigh worn out her patience. She had been used to speak to animated clay, but she now felt as if she had been speaking to stone. Successive flashes of her elocution that had always been sure to electrify the south, fell in vain on those northern flints. At last she said that she coiled up her powers to the most emphatic possible utterance of one passage, having previously vowed in her heart that if this could not touch the Scotch, she would never again cross the Tweed. When it was finished, she paused, and looked to the audience. The deep silence was broken only by a single voice, exclaiming, “That’s no bad!” This ludicrous parsimony of praise convulsed the Edinburgh audience with laughter. But the laugh was followed by such thunders of applause, that amidst her stunned and nervous agitation, she was not without fears of the galleries coming down.
Another instance of encouraging criticism occurs in The Memoirs of Charles Mathews. Early in 1794, he played Richmond to his friend Lichfield’s Richard III.; and both being good fencers, they fought the fight at the end with uncommon vigour, and prolonged it to an unreasonable length. After the performances, the two stars lighted each other to their inn, in hope of liberal applause from their landlord, whom they had gratified with a ticket. But though thus treated, and invited to take a pipe and a glass with the two performers after supper, he was provokingly silent on the great subject; till at length, finding every circuitous approach ineffectual, they attacked him with the direct question, “Pray tell us really what you thought of our acting.” This question was not to be evaded: the landlord looked perplexed, his eyes still fixed on the ground; he took at length the tube slowly from his mouth, raised his glass, and drank off the remainder of his brandy-and-water, went to the fire-place, and deliberately knocked out the ashes from his pipe; then, looking at the expectants for a minute, exclaimed in a deep though hasty tone of voice, “Darned good fight!”—and left the room.