AS Mr. Sichel says finely, the Monody — the Verses to the Memory of Garrick — is “in truth not so much an elegy on the life of a friend, as an epilogue to the play of Garrick’s life.” It was indeed, “of the theatre.” Sheridan wrote it to be delivered under theatrical conditions, to be spoken from the stage of Drury Lane Theatre, as David Garrick had spoken ten years before, his Ode in Commemoration of Shakespeare. The central “property” on the stage was not, of course, as then the bust of Shakespeare, but a monumental urn to the memory of Garrick. Before it stood the reciter, Mrs. Yates, surrounded by the choir and the orchestra. It was recited for the first time at Drury Lane Theatre on March 11th, 1779, after the comedy of The West Indian, when according to The Town and Country Magazine of the time: —
The stage was disposed nearly in the form as at Oratorios, with the difference only of a vacancy being left for Mrs. Yates to speak the poem. Before the organ a monument was erected.... It was generally remarked that if Mrs. Yates had not been obliged (we suppose for want of time) to read several passages, it would have had a still finer effect. However, it must be owned that she did justice to her author, as might be expected from the most pathetic speaker on the stage. The Monody is divided into three parts, between each of which, and at the conclusion, airs of a solemn nature are sung by Mr. Webster, Mr. Gaudry, a young lady, and Mrs. Wrighten. supported by a band of choristers.
This Stress upon the theatrical purpose of the Monody is deliberate. Its delivery from the Stage would at once, for many auditors, summon their recollections of Garrick’s Shakespeare Ode, with its many-changing metres. Accordingly it is not surprising to find that “The critics have nibbled at this Monody on account of the metre not being varied, and thereby leaving too constant a monotony on the auditor’s ear, which they say ought to have been relieved by a variation of measure.” Thus ‘The Town and Country Magazine, which shows that “the critics” had wanted, not a prolonged address in the heroic couplet, but an ode in varied measures. Moore urged that the monotony would have been diminished by a “greater variety of cadence,” an occasional disturbance of the “regular footfall, so long established.” But, he adds, the only licence of this kind hazarded through the poem— “All perishable” — was objected to by some of the author’s critical friends who suggested that it would have been better as “All doomed to perish.” Sheridan was using the conventional metre for theatrical addresses, the only accepted form for Prologues and Epilogues. He did not, it is true, use it here with the deftness and polish that he achieved in the Verses for Amoret — the so-called Dedicatory Poem for The School for Scandal — yet one would not deny the justness of Mr. Sichel’s praise— “All the elements of Sheridan’s Prologues and Epilogues characterize it — finish, fancy, grace, ingenuity, condensation.” Byron, in his famous passage saying that “whatever Sheridan has done, or chosen to do, has been par excellence, always the best of its kind,” described the Garrick Monody as “the best Address” in the language. The praise would be more impressive if it could be ascertained what other “Addresses” he had in mind.
Besides the objections to its structure or its monotony of cadence, time has matured other charges against it. There is the inevitable charge of plagiarism. “Sheridan” comments Boaden in his Life of Mrs. Siddons, “used freely everything recollected that made for his purpose,” adding that he obviously remembered Cibber, Lloyd’s Actor, and its paraphrase and commentary the Rosciad of Churchill. So, too, Moore: —
“The chief thought which pervades this poem, — namely, the fleeting nature of the actor’s art and fame, — had already been more simply expressed by Garrick himself in his Prologue to The Clandestine Marriage: —
The painter’s dead, yet still he charms the eye,
While England lives, his fame can never die;
But he, who struts his hour upon the Stage,
Can scarce protract his fame through half an age;
Nor pen nor pencil can the actor save;
The art and artist have one common grave.
Colley Cibber, too, in his portrait (if I remember right) of Betterton, breaks off into the same reflection, in the following graceful passage, which is one of those instances, where prose could not be exchanged for poetry without loss:— “Pity it is that the momentary Beauties, flowing from an harmonious Elocution, cannot, like those of Poetry, be their own record; that the animated Graces of the Player can live no longer than the instant Breath and Motion that presents them, or, at bet, can but faintly glimmer through the Memory of a few surviving Spectators.”
This “chief thought” is, indeed, no more than a great commonplace of the theatre. It had been uttered a thousand times when players were gathered together or playing was discussed. Colley Cibber, in that unsurpassed and unsurpassable example of histrionic criticism, his Short View of the actors of his youth, had placed it in his very first page, as an epigraph (as it were) to his entire commentary. Robert Lloyd had brought The Astor to a full close with it:
Relentless death untwists the mingled fame,
And sinks the player in the poet’s name, —
The pliant muscles of the various face,
The mien that gave each sentence strength and grace,
The tuneful voice, the eye that spoke the mind,
Are gone, nor leave a single trace behind.
Garrick in his Prologue to The Clandestine Marriage — a tribute to the memory of Quin and Mrs. Cibber — attested that it was a commonplace when he echoed Shakespeare’s: —
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poore Player
That struts and frets his houre upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
The charge of “plagiarism” is, therefore, unimportant. A more serious charge is the absence of personal feeling, which Moore has formulated:
— The Monody does not seem to have kept the stage more than five or six nights — nor is this surprising. The recitation of a long, serious address must always be, to a certain degree, ineffective on the stage; and though this subject contained within it many strong sources of interest, as well personal as dramatic, they were not, perhaps, turned to account by the poet with sufficient warmth and earnestness on his own part, to excite a very ready response of sympathy in others. Feeling never wanders into generalities — it is only by concentrating his rays upon one point that even Genius can kindle strong emotion; and, in order to produce any such effect in the present instance upon the audience, Garrick himself ought to have been kept prominently and individually before their eyes in almost every line. Instead of this, however, the man is soon forgotten in his Art, which is then deliberately compared with other Arts, and the attention, through the greater part of the poem, is diffused over the transitoriness of actors in general, instead of being brought strongly to a focus upon the particular loss just sustained.
The truth is, indeed, that the poem is a Monody to the Memory of Any Actor — or rather, of the actor who is the Burbage, the Betterton, the Garrick, the Irving of his generation. And therein lies its dignity and grace.