ith Alexander Dyce; and with Harness and his
sister, or his niece and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Archdale; made
especially pleasant by talk about great days of the stage. It was
something to hear Kemble on his sister's Mrs. Beverley; or to see
Harness and Dyce exultant in recollecting her Volumnia. The enchantment
of the Mrs. Beverley, her brother would delightfully illustrate by
imitation of her manner of restraining Beverley's intemperance to their
only friend, "You are too busy, sir!" when she quietly came down the
stage from a table at which she had seemed to be occupying herself, laid
her hand softly on her husband's arm, and in a gentle half-whisper "No,
not too busy; mistaken perhaps; but----" not only stayed his temper but
reminded him of obligations forgotten in the heat of it. Up to where the
tragic terror began, our friend told us, there was nothing but this
composed domestic sweetness, expressed even in the simplicity and neat
arrangement of her dress, her cap with the strait band, and her hair
gathered up underneath; but all changing when the passion _did_ begin;
one single disordered lock escaping at the first outbreak, and, in the
final madness, all of it streaming dishevelled down her beautiful face.
Kemble made no secret of his belief that his sister had the higher
genius of the two; but he spoke with rapture of "John's" Macbeth and
parts of his Othello; comparing his "Farewell the tranquil mind" to the
running down of a clock, an image which he did not know that Hazlitt had
applied to the delivery of "To-morrow and to-morrow," in the other
tragedy. In all this Harness seemed to agree; and I thought a
distinction was not ill put by him, on the night of which I speak, in
his remark that the nature in Kemble's acting only supplemented his
magnificent art, whereas, though the artist was not less supreme in his
sister, it was on nature she most relied, bringing up the other power
only to the aid of it. "It was in another sense like your writing," said
Harness to Dickens, "the commonest natural feelings made great, even
when not rendered more refined, by art." Her Constance would have been
fishwify, he declared, if its wonderful truth had not overborne every
other feeling; and her Volumnia escaped being vulgar only by being so
excessively grand. But it was just what was so called "vulgarity" that
made its passionate appeal to the vulgar in a better meaning of the
word. When she first entered, Harness said, sway