Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 372, October 1846. Various
Paris the exhibition comes with the violets – in Berlin with the asters. I prefer the autumn show at Berlin to the spring exhibition in Paris; also intrinsically, with respect to art. Our German painters have more poetry. With us painting is lyric – here all is, or strives to be, dramatic. Every picture seems to thrust itself forward and demand applause. I see great effects, but little feeling. Religion is represented by a few gigantic altar-pieces. They are the offerings of a devotion which only thinks of the saints because new churches require new pictures. New churches consist of stone, wood, gold, silver, an organ, an altar-piece. These pictures of saints belong to the ministry of public works; it is easy to see that they have been done to order. Besides them, the gallery is full of Oriental scenes, family pictures and portraits. The first are to inspire enthusiasm for Algiers, the second illustrate the happiness of wedded life, the last are matrimonial advertisements in oil colour. In the family groups, children and little dogs are most prominent; of the male portraits the beard is the principal part. It is useless to look for men here; one sees nothing but hair. Everybody wears a beard à la mode du moyen âge – flâneurs, coachmen, marquises, artisans. On all sides one is surrounded with Vandyke and Rubens heads, poetical beards and hair, contrasting strangely with prosaic eyes, pallid lips, and the graceless costumes of the nineteenth century."
After some more very negative praise of French art, Mr Gutzkow gets sick of turpentine and confinement, and rushes out of the Louvre into the sunshine and the Champs Elysées, where the sight of the throng of dashing equipages, gay cavaliers, and pretty amazons, instead of causing him to throw up his hat and bless his stars for having conducted him into such ways of pleasantness, renders him melancholy and metaphysical. He is moralising on the Parisian ladies, when a cloud of dust and the clatter of cavalry give a new turn to his reflections. "Here," he exclaims, "comes an example of earthly happiness. Louis Philippe, King of the French, surrounded by a half squadron of his body-guard; a narrow and scarcely perceptible window in his deep six-horse carriage; a King, flying by, resting not, leaning back in his coach, not venturing to look out, breathing with difficulty under the shirt of mail which, according to popular belief, he ever wears beneath his clothes. But of this more hereafter." Quite enough as it is, Mr Gutzkow; and you are right, being in so gloomy a mood, to run off to the Theatre Français, and try to dissipate your vapours by seeing Rachel in Chimène. An unfavourable criticism of that actress, retracted at a later period, closes the chapter. Chimène is one of Rachel's worst parts, and her critic was not in his best humour. He found her cold, and deficient in voice. Subsequently, in Joan of Arc, she fully redeemed herself in his opinion, although he had seen the best German actresses in Schiller's tragedy of that name, with which the work of Soumet ill bears comparison. Here, he acknowledges, she raised herself to an artistical elevation to which no German actress of the present day can hope to attain.
The next actress of whom Mr Gutzkow records his judgment, is the queen of the vaudeville, the faded but still fascinating Dejazet. From the classic hall of the "Français" to the agreeable little den of iniquity at the other end of the Palais Royal, the distance was not great, but the transition was very violent. It was passing from a funeral to an orgie, thus to leave Phèdre for Frétillon, Rachel for Dejazet. "She performed in a little piece called the Fille de Dominique, in which she represents the daughter of a deceased royal comedian of the days of Molière. She comes to Paris to get admitted into the troop to which her father belonged. She is to give proofs of her talents, and has already done so before any one suspects it. She has been to Baron, the comedian, and presented herself alternately as a peasant girl, a fantastical lady, and as a young drummer of the Royal Guard. She is seen by the audience in all these parts. Her first word, her first step, convinced me of the great fidelity of her acting. She is no queen, no fairy, or great dame out of Scribe's comedies, but the peasant girl, the grisette, the heroine of the vaudeville. All about her is arch, droll, true. Her gestures are extraordinarily correct and steady; and in spite of her harsh counter-tenor, and of an organ in which many a wild night and champagne debauch may be traced, she sings her couplets with clearness of intonation, grace of execution, and not unfrequently with most touching effect. I am at a loss fully to explain and define her very peculiar style of acting."
Mr Gutzkow thought that the French public had become careless of Dejazet, even when he first saw her, now four years ago. We believe he is mistaken, and that she is as much appreciated as ever, in spite of her five and forty years, soon to be converted into fifty. Although haggard from vigils and dissipation, neither on the stage nor off it does she look her age. The good heart and joyous disposition that have endeared her to her comrades of the buskin, have in some degree neutralized the effects of her excesses. On his second visit to Paris, our author finds her grown exceedingly old, and depreciates as much as he before praised her – calls her a rouged corpse, and makes all manner of uncivil and unsavoury comments and comparisons. He goes so far as to style her acting in 1846, languid, feeble, and insipid. Qui trop dit, ne dit rien, and this is palpable exaggeration. We perceive scarcely any difference in Dejazet now and five years ago. Her singing voice may be a little less sure, her eyes a trifle hollower – she may need rather more paint to conceal the inroads of time on her piquante and spirituelle physiognomy, but she preserves the same spirit and vivacity, verve and vigour. Her appearance this spring at the Variétés theatre, in the vaudeville of Gentil Bernard, was a triumph of talent over time; and crowded houses, attracted not by the excellence of the piece, but by the perfection of the acting, proved that Dejazet is still, which she long has been, the pet of the Parisians. She is an extraordinary actress – so true to nature, possessed of such perfect judgment, and grace of gesticulation. Not a movement of her hand, a turn of her head, an inflexion of her voice, but has its signification and produces its effect. Her performance in the picturesque and bustling second act of Gentil Bernard is faultless. The frequenters of St James's theatre have this summer had an opportunity of appreciating it. At Paris she was better supported. Lafont makes a very fair La Tulipe, but not so good a one as Hoffmann. The inferior parts, also, were far better filled on the Boulevard des Italiens, than in King Street, St James's, where the whole weight of the protracted and not very interesting vaudeville rested upon the shoulders of Dejazet.
The success of Rachel has roused the ambition and raised the reputation of the daughters of Israel, who are now quite in vogue at the Paris theatres. Mesdemoiselles Rebecca and Worms, at the "Français," are both Jewesses; at the minor theatre of the "Folies Dramatiques," Judith delights a motley audience by her able enactment of the grisette. Instances have been known of very Christian young ladies feigning themselves of the faith of Moses, in hope that the fraud might facilitate their admission to the Thespian arena.
A severe judgment is passed by Mr Gutzkow upon the present state of musical art and representations in the French capital. The opera, he affirms, and not without reason, is on its last legs, sustained only by the ballet, by the beauty of the scenery and costumes. Duprez has had his day, Madame Stolz is among the middlings, Barroilhet alone may be reckoned a first-rate singer. Our author saw the Elísir d'Amore given by a company which he says would hardly be listened to in a German provincial town. Madame Stolz was then absent on a starring expedition. The ballet of Paquita was some compensation for the poorness of the singing. "At the 'Italiens' I heard the Barber of Seville, with Lablache, Ronconi, Tagliafico, Mario, and Persiani. This opera is considered the triumph of the Italian company; but I confess that the magnificence of the theatre, the high charge for admission, the Ohs! and Ahs! of the English women in the boxes, just arrived from London, and who had never before heard good music, were all insufficient to blind me with respect to the merits of the performance. I look upon the Italian opera at Paris as a mystification on the very largest scale, a thorough classic-Italian swindle. That a German company, composed of our best opera singers, would be infinitely superior to this Italian one, appears to me to admit of no dispute; but even at an ordinary theatre in Germany or Italy, one hears as good singing, perhaps with the exception of Lablache in Bartolo– and even he is cold and careless, devoid of freshness, and always seems to say to the audience, 'You stupid people, take that for your twelve francs a-seat!' The quackery of this theatre becomes the more intelligible when we reflect that, in all Paris, there is no other where a single note of Italian opera music can be heard, the Italians having the monopoly of the sweet melodies of their native country. The Grand Opera, and the Opera Comique, deal in French music only; and the pleasure obtainable in any small German town possessing a theatre, that, namely, of hearing