The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 08 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 08 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
Miss Stephens made her appearance again on Saturday at Covent-Garden, as
Mandane, in Artaxerxes. She becomes more and more a favourite with the
public. Her singing is delicious; but admired as it is, it is not yet
admired as it ought to be. Oh, if she had been wafted to us from
Italy!—A voice more sweet, varied, and flexible, was perhaps never heard
on an English stage. In ‘The Soldier tired,’ her voice, though it might
be said to cleave the very air, never once lost its sweetness and
clearness. ‘Let not rage thy bosom firing’ was deservedly and
rapturously encored. But if we were to express a preference, it would be
to her singing the lines, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c. in
which the notes seemed to fall from her lips like the liquid drops from
the bending flower, and her voice fluttered and died away with the
expiring conflict of passion in her bosom. We know, and have felt the
divine power and impassioned tones of Catalani—the lightning of her
voice and of her eye—but we doubt whether she would give the ballad
style of the songs in Artaxerxes, simple but elegant, chaste but full of
expression, with equal purity, taste, and tenderness.
Mr. Liston’s acting in Love, Law, and Physic, was as excellent as it
always is. It is hard to say, whether the soul of Mr. Liston has passed
into Mr. Lubin Log, or that of Mr. Lubin Log into Mr. Liston:—but a most
wonderful congeniality and mutual good understanding there is between
them. A more perfect personation we never witnessed. The happy compound
of meanness, ignorance, vulgarity, and conceit, was given with the
broadest effect, and with the nicest discrimination of feeling. Moliere
would not have wished for a richer representative of his _Gentilhomme
Bourgeois_. We insist the more on this point, because of all imitations
we like the imitation of nature best. The marked _cockneyism_ of
pronouncing the V for the W, was the only circumstance to which we could
object, and this is an interpolation on the part since we first saw it,
suggested (we suppose) by friends. It is a hackneyed and cheap way of
producing a laugh, unworthy of the true comic genius of Liston.
THE BEGGAR’S OPERA
_The Morning Chronicle._
_Oct. 23, 1813._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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