THE LIFE AND REMAINS OF C. R. PEMBERTON, CHARLES REECE
PEMBERTON, an actor and a dramatic lecturer, was better known to the world by the exertions of his admirers than for any distinct or lasting impression he himself made upon the public. He was indeed one of that class of men whose abilities are underrated by the world and overrated by his acquaintances,
perhaps without much of wrong judgment in either case. The public have neither time nor care to bestow upon picking out latent qualities. Whoever presents himself to them must have something of the teres atque rotundus, however rough and rugged his completeness may be ; so that a less able or even a very common- place person, who can fill a post of any sort sufficiently, will be more generally approved, so far as he goes, than a man more gifted, if his gifts, from some defect of nature or peculiarity of habit, cannot be made to tell. On the other hand, our familiars see us at times when the completeness the public expect is not required, and would indeed be out of place. The favourite part—the richer fragments of the mind—are exhibited without need of the callida jaw-tura; and the true nature of this kind of merit is uncon- sciously expressed by friends themselves, when they say, "he was a very clever fellow, but somehow or other he did not take with the public." It may be added, that acquaintanceships are generally made for some qualities in common, or some congenial tastes; whereas the people discard this, and (as ArtisroxLa long since observed) come to a juster judgment upon the whole than any single person, however superior tbat person may be to any one of that people. Mr. Sergeant Taixonan, for example—the person, we believe, who was the means of introducing poor PEMBERTON to a London theatre—was equal or probably superior in taste to any person there ; but he could not take so tolwle a view as the audi- ence. Natural or accidental sympathies fixed his attention upon the excellences—perhaps disposed him to exaggerate them, and shut his eyes to the overpowering defects. Foolish patronage is partly explainable in a similar way.
Poor PEMBERTON was indeed rather a remarkable example of this personal power; for he had no extrinsic qualities of any kind to attract men towards him. Nearly forty years of his life were passed in an obscurity so profound that the authors of this publica- tion have not been able to penetrate it. The remainder of his career was that of a strolling player and itinerant dramatic lecturer: his highest point in acting was permission to try his powers at Covent Garden, where he failed ; his efforts in literature were bounded by some articles in periodicals. Even for success such as he attained, he was indebted to personal feelings. Mr. TALFOURD saw him at a country-town, and became hot in his favour; not only pressing him upon CHARLES KEMBLE, but bespeaking public atten- tion to his appearance by an elaborate and judicious account of his acting, in the New Monthly Magazine. When, broken in health and by disappointment, as far as a sanguine man can be disappointed, Pansareroir landed at Gibraltar, to see what a warmer climate would do for him, he knew not, in his own expression, "man, woman, or child" : he advertised two lectures on SHAKSFERE ; and was at once not so much the favourite as the friend of the place. "Real kindness," he says in his letters—" no expectation of playing French poodle when they invite me" ; and "there is developed a bland solicitude for the convenience of an invalid, care to consult his fancies, and consideration even of his caprices, which are at once agreeable and painful." Still later, when lecturing and almost speaking was over, he met a medical man at Gibraltar, a "true friend," he writes, "who nurses, medicates, advises, watches me with the most kindly solicitude, houses' feeds, tends me, with as much frank cordiality of affection as if I had been his brother," and who forced upon him all his own Egyptian travelling apparatus. It was the same when he got to Egypt—he picked up a new friend there in Dr. LAIDLAW : it was by friends who subscribed to an "ill- ness fund," that he was enabled to take his last chance of life in this Mediterranean trip ; and it is only the zeal of his friends that has induced the publication of the volume before us,—for so far as circulation depends upon mere intrinsic qualities, we suspect his most attached friends must look upon it rather as a monument, to his memory than as a source of profit.
The Life and Literary Remains of Charles Reece Pemberton is a work of six sections. 1. A life by the editor; which chiefly con- sists of his own friendly reminiscences and effusions: for little is known of PEMBERTON'S career, except that he was born in 1790; apprenticed to an uncle, a brass-founder in Birmingham ; with whom he disagreed, and from whom he ran away in his eighteenth year. He was shortly kidnapped by a press-gang; sent to sea ; and then till 1828 all seems to be blank : but in that year he was lecturing and acting in the provinces, and was seen by Mr. TALFOURD at Hereford. 2. The "Autobiography of Pel Verjuice," a series of papers that appeared in the Mo-nthly Repository, under the super- intendence of Mr. Fox ; and which that gentleman conceives truly represent the growth of his mind, though he knows not how far they are to be taken as real iu their adventures. 3. A collection of miscellaneous articles, chiefly literary and dramatic reviews ; though the literature has a dash of red-hot Radical or Chartist politics, such as the hard rubs of life might be supposed to induce in a highly nervous temperament. 4. Three posthumous dramas, by which the author set some store, as they were the only manu- script productions whose publication he permitted; but his friends seem to think his partiality misplaced. 5. Letters written from the Mediterranean during his last wanderings in search of health. 6. A notice of his character, by Mr. Fox. Of these papera, we think the Letters from the Mediterranean the best; as having more matter, reality, and variety, than the others. In general, PEMBERTON poured out with more of gush than force ; so that a fluency acquired by extemporaneous speaking, and a mind whose temperament overpowered Judgment, rendered him prolix and discursive. The principal thought, if worth having, was so surrounded by "supernumeraries," that it was hardly worth the trouble of getting at. Amid the foreign, though not perhaps new scenes, (for he seems to have once served in the Mediterra- nean,) be was occupied with facts; he was writing without much thought of the public ; and probably his illness, by rendering the mechanical act of writing an effort, compelled him to concentrate his energy upon the more essential points. There is also a further interest : he is much occupied about his health ; and it is curious to trace the delusive nature of his complaint—consumption. Almost to the last he seemed to be certain of recovery. It was a backward spring and summer, he held, that first made him ill ; and when it was clear the disease had fast hold of him, he writes thus from Gibraltar—
"Now, I fancy myself at intervals as well as ever I was. Indeed, I am greatly bettered in generalities. My cough, I think, is as it was. I have an impression that nobody understands my complaint. The general notion is that my lungs are damaged : this, I am quite sure, is not the case. My ailing is a diseased mucus membrane; or perhaps a damage in the bronchial tubes, which causes a most annoying and enormous secretion of mucus, that can be expectorated only by the muscular effort of coughing. I eat. drink, and sleep well ; and two days ago scrambled up this mountain, and walked and crawled and leaped about, at the Signal Station and to Si. Michael's Cave, (a great curiosity and natural wonder,) for five or six hours, and finished without the east distress of breath or fatigue of limb; a sure proof that my lunge are safe."
Again, some months after, we have not so certain but still a sanguine view, though he was evidently doomed, if not dying.
" My cough is greatly increased in frequency, and in the pain attending its muscular compulsions ; and my debility of frame so wretched, that the effort to struggle and crawl up a single flight of stairs results in utter prostration or flyncope. I felt that I was committing a rash act by embarking in the steamer, in such a state, for Malta ; yet it seemed as if it were my destiny, and embark I did. My first night on board was very, very wretched, and rendered double in its misery by the sense that I was a disturbance and annoyance to all my fellow-passengers. But, delicious change ! renovation how joyous! how great! and, more than all, how strange! Within twenty-four hours after quitting the port, I was possessed of a new existence—or rather, my old life had come back to me. I was elastic buoyant, cheering; coughing only by easy units at
long intervals, instead of convulsive fifties incessantly. Yet I could not walk—my legs would not work. I had suddenly grown enormously fat at the ankle, so much so that my stockings felt as a painfully tight bandage ; boots or shoes I could not persuade my feet to look at : so, encasing them in soft flannel slippers, I submitted to a change in the order of nature : my legs no longer supported and carried my body, but on my head, shoulders, and trunk, was now imposed the labour of dragging my lower extremities hither and thither : it was in vain that I tried to make the machinery work ' orderly '; every order to 'go' and 'do,' which the motor nerve gave to the muscles, was instantly answered by the sensitive nerve I can't ! ' Yet was I not discontent, by no means disheartened or depressed by this new affliction, because I was so much bettered in every other way ; and in two days my ankles fell into their ordinary state of leanness."
Although we cannot go the length of his admirers, it must not be supposed that we wish to depreciate CHARLES PEMBERTON. He was unquestionably a man of considerable talent, which he had cultivated, irregularly, under great disadvantages ; but, as we indicated at starting, he failed as a whole, though he might do parts as well as more successful men, or even better. Even his friends admit that his early scenes in Virginia: were something like a failure, although he subsequently made some superior hits. So in his writings, good thoughts well expressed (though in some- what player fashion) are continually found, but surrounded by a mass of verbiage. Alexandria and its neighbourhood, for instance, had often been described, but we never saw so distinct an idea of the extent of the ruins as in this extract ; although the borrowed finery of the drama is not always happily used.
"Remember, my dear friend, that this is Egyptian Alexandria, the child, though but a ragged and rather beggarly one, of old Alexandria, the magnifi- cent, the proud, the vast, the voluptuous, the Cleopatrian and Ptolemaic Alex- andria—Nile-neighboured and gorgeous-templed Alexandria. Su don't permit the romance of the locality to sink into the mere commonplace of Alexandria, a sea-port and town on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt.' Remember that this is written on the site of old wonder, of ponderous grandeur and beauty, massed in magnificences—in the dominion of Osiris, the land of Cheops and the Pharaohs—the Moses-plagued and priest-mystified, the pyramid-immortal- ized Egypt. All this I think it necessary to remind you of, lest you should forget to estimate correctly the honour due to me as a great and interesting traveller. And do not call these my allusions to the olden Alexandria the lan- guage of exaggeration. That it once was worthy the adjectives I have bestowed on it, it is impossible for the mind to doubt, if the eye or the foot will course over even one-half of the visible ruins : they are, in truth, amazing; and scarcely less amazing has been the toil of devastation that has been employed upon the vast, huge, and massive fabrics, which are actually smashed, pounded up into minute fragments, and are collected in hillocks for miles and miles in continuity. I yesterday rode in one line for two hours, at a good smart donkey pace—oh, that you hail been there to see me 'witch the world with noble ass- mansitip '—and yet saw beyond and beyond signs of architectural ruin. Yet, spite of the perseverance in destruction by time and earthquake, the pounding by savag,e warrior vengeance, and the besotted bigotry, or call it the mistaken zeal of the early Christians, evidences of magnificence and the excellences of sculptured art, are almost daily turning up from the depths of their tombs, into the sun's broad light: and I question not that treasures of genius and skill will yet repay the efforts of the perseveringly curious who may search among the world of rubbish. Every thing of beauty in art which the early Christians of Alexandria could see and seize, they devoted to ruthless destruc- tion; yet there may be thousands of specimens, which, escaping misdirected zeal, lie hidden fathoms deep among the ruins of the palaces and temples which they adorned."
There is a deeper truth in the following,—a truth the writer had felt in his own person ; for, according to Mr. Fox, he had often had "a tattered coat, an empty stomach, a wearied frame, and an aching heart." EFFECTS OF HUNGER ON MIND AND MORALS.
Certain it is, that in the endurance of cold and hunger, both the intellectual and moral faculties suffer ; not merely in the sense of physical pain, but do actually undergo a deterioration : the clearness of the one is darkened, the preventive and stimulus of the other are partially neutralized, and sermons and psalms won't mend them : their, buoyancy and elasticity are stultified : in- telligence in hunger and want, though "sharpened," moves only in feverish leaps, or in ferocious impulses. Useless it will be found, as it ever has been, to preach "be resigned, content, submissive to the will, decrees, &c." Strike a discord on the belly and all the harmony of thought and feeling re:omits SI fitful howling. Pinch the toes and fingers with nipping frost, and the melody of a healthy heart and mind will "jangle out of tune and harsh." My great- est fear, next, is that knaves will employ this season of distress, in making
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