NOT many nights ago
I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop;
and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck
by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest
myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations.
I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life;
private misery, public calamity. All would not do.
--------There the antic sate
Mocking our state -
his queer visnomy -- his bewildering
costume -- all the strange things which he had raked together
-- his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket -- Cleopatra's
tear, and the rest of his relics -- O'Keefe's wild farce, and
his wilder commentary -- till the passion of laughter, like grief
in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep
which in the first instance it had driven away.
But I was not to escape
so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image,
only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not
one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the
faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking
opium -- all the strange combinations, which this strangest of
all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from
the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for
the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of
the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since
there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there
should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter
would not fall far short of the former.
There is one face of
Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston;
but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his.
When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable
warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely
new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not
so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied
like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone,
literally makes faces: applied to any other person, the phrase
is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human
countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces,
as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily.
I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head
of a river horse; or come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered
metamorphosis.
I have seen this gifted
actor in Sir Christopher Curry -- in Old Dornton -- diffuse a
glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre
beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit,
doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint
approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in
the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and
unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers.
The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.
Can any man wonder,
like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his
own shadow -- " sessa " -- as he does in that strangely-neglected
thing, the Cobbler of Preston -- where his alternations from the
Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler,
keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some
Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him can throw,
or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the
commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his
conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair.
It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak
of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament.
A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the
Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles
what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal
as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A
tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea.
He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering,
amid the common-place materials of life, like primeval man with
the sun and stars about him.
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