Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 21.djvu/30

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Garrick
24
Garrick

years of age, was placed beside him. His monument, erected by his friend Wallis, is on the opposite wall, with an inscription by Pratt, substituted for one by Burke, rejected as too long. Of the monument and inscription Lamb said in the 'Essays of Elia:' 'I found inscribed under this harlequin figure a farrago of false thoughts and nonsense.' Burke's rejected epitaph said: 'He raised the character of his profession to the rank of a liberal art' (Windham, Diary, p. 361). Garrick is the last actor who was buried in the Abbey (Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, p. 306). Garrick left behind him a sum that with no great exaggeration has been estimated at 100,000l. To his widow were left the houses at Hampton and in the Adelphi, with plate, wine, pictures, &c., 6,000l., and an annuity of 1,500l. No memorials were left to any of his friends, but his relations, including a German niece of Mrs. Garrick, had sums varying from 1,000l. to 10,000l., which last named amount was left to his brother George, who did not directly benefit by it. Of George, who had been his right-hand man, and who only survived him a few days, it was said with touching humour that he followed his brother so close because 'David wanted him,' a phrase which had been familiar in the theatre.

Garrick's correspondence is a mine of information, and from this and the recorded opinions of friends and observers, English and foreign, we have a livelier idea of his character than we possess of any actor, and of almost any contemporary. Of his weaknesses the best account is given in Goldsmith's masterly summary in 'Retaliation.' Garrick had the burning desire for admiration common to men of his craft. He was jubilant in success, petulant in defeat, timid in the face of menace, miserable in the absence of recognition. Naturally careful, he acquired a wholly unmerited reputation for meanness. Few actors indeed have been more reasonably and judiciously generous. His biographer, Davies, who is nowise given to over-praising Garrick, has collected many instances of his generosity. He was steadily beneficent in private as well as in public (Life of Garrick, ii. 395). His offer to Clairon in her fight against the ministry and the court of France elicited from Voltaire the question whether there was a marshal or a dnke in France who would do the like. Davies also mentions that his death was deplored as a calamity in Hampton, and says that he heard Johnson express his knowledge that Garrick gave away more money than any man in London (ib. ii. 398). Garrick also 'dearly loved a lord,' a not unnatural failing in one courted by lords. He was the object of special attention on the part of the Due de Nivernois and other foreign ministers, and was probably more caressed than any man of his epoch. Impressionable in nature, and accustomed from his early days to a struggle for existence, belonging to 'a family whose study was to make fourpence do as much as others made fourpence half-penny' (Johnson, Life, iii. 387), he was prudent and cautious even in the midst of his liberalities, and he was led to overestimate the value of social attention. Like most men of his epoch he was inclined to be a free, though, as Johnson said, 'a decent liver,' and he paid in ill-health the penalty of indulgence that does not seem to have been excessive. He confessed to fieriness of disposition, especially in disputes with Mrs. Clive or Mrs. Woffmgton. With the chief actresses of his company his relations during his married life were not always friendly, but he secured the esteem and the respect of the most petulant. Literature presents little that is pleasanter than his correspondence with his Pivy, a contraction of Clivey Pivey, as he called Mrs. Clive. One letter written by Mrs. Clive, 23 Jan. 1776, when she was sixty-five years of age, tells him that none of his surroundings could be sensible of half his perfections, and speaks in the highest terms of the manner in which he trained his company, endeavouring to beat his 'ideas into the heads of creatures who had none of their own' (Garrick Correspondence, ii. 128). Johnson,, though he scolded Garrick and sneered at his profession, would, as Sir Joshua Rey- nolds said, let no one attack him but himself.. 'It is wonderful,' he said, 'how little Garrick assumes.' Stockdale says (Memoirs, ii. 186) that Johnson said of Garrick: 'More pains have been taken to spoil that fellow than if he had been heir-apparent to the empire of India.' Most of the accusations levelled against Garrick are attributable to the reckless Foote and to petulant and unreasonable dramatists. His success made him from the outset many enemies, and each step of importance aroused a fierce polemic. In some cases, as in that of Kenrick, whose 'Love in the Suds; a Town Eclogue,' 1772, of whick an imperfect copy is in the British Museum, charges Garrick with infamy, a public apology was made by Garrick's assailant. Other attacks, attributed to the Rev. David Williams, Leonard McNally, William Shirley, Fitzpatrick, Theophilus Cibber, Edward Purdon, and various nameless writers, were answered by friends of Garrick. 'An Essay on Acting, in which will be considered the mimical behaviour of a certain fashionable faulty actor,