Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/383

 affected he was, the audience called out ‘No farewell.’ Kemble, however, spoke the customary address. A banquet was given him on Friday, 27 June, with Lord Holland in the chair. Very many people of distinction were present, and the well-known ode of Thomas Campbell was recited by Young. An asthmatic affection which had long disturbed him compelled him to retire to Toulouse, where he remained for some years. He was in London in 1820, after the death, 2 Oct., of Thomas Harris, and assigned his share of Covent Garden to his brother Charles. His collection of old plays was bought by the Duke of Devonshire for 2,000l., his general library and prints being sold for a somewhat larger sum; subsequently his house in Great Russell Street (No. 89), absorbed in the British Museum, was let, and he retired to Lausanne, whither, after a short stay in Rome, he returned, and where he died on 26 Feb. 1823. On 1 March his remains were buried in a piece of ground adjoining the cemetery in the Berne road. He was attended in his last illness by a protestant clergyman, and is believed to have died a protestant. His will, by which his wife and brother Charles, who were joint trustees, principally benefited, but in which various members of his family were granted bequests, was proved 26 April 1823.

Kemble was a fine actor, with a larger range of characters in which he was excellent than any English tragedian. Coriolanus was his masterpiece; in ‘Richard III’ he yielded to Cooke, and, of course, to Edmund Kean. Hamlet, King John, Cato, Petruchio, Leon, Zanga, Wolsey, Hotspur, Octavian, the Duke in ‘Measure for Measure,’ Penruddock, The Stranger, Lord Townley, Jaques, Rolla, De Montfort, Leontes, Pierre, and Brutus are a few only among the parts in which he won high commendation. In comedy he left a smaller reputation. He was the chief founder of what is known as the Kemble school of acting, a somewhat stilted and declamatory school, the influences of which, though fading, are still felt on the stage. Leigh Hunt speaks of Kemble as excelling in the grand rather than the passionate, denies his power to express love, praises his excellence in soliloquy, calls him an actor of correct rather than quick conception, and says that his great fault is a laborious preciseness. Hazlitt, who declares that Kean had destroyed the Kemble religion, and is very severe on some of Kemble's performances, notably his Sir Giles Overreach, describes him as the only modern actor who both in figure and action approached the beauty and grandeur of the antique. Byron called him ‘the most supernatural of actors.’ Moore spoke of him as ‘a cultivated man, but a poor creature when he put pen to paper.’ Pitt called him the noblest actor he had seen, and Scott lamented his loss as that of ‘an excellent critic, an accomplished scholar, and one who graced our forlorn drama with what little it has left of good sense and gentlemanlike feeling.’ Lamb, who found it difficult to ‘disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. Kemble,’ defends and praises him in comedy, and even vindicates his Charles Surface. ‘No man,’ he says, ‘could deliver brilliant dialogue, the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley, because none understood it half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine in “Love for Love” was, to my recollection, faultless. … The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him; the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet, the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard, disappeared with him.’ Charles Kemble told Crabb Robinson that he thought Kemble a better actor than Mrs. Siddons, an opinion shared by Kemble himself, and probably by no one else.

Kemble's affectations of speech were the subject of much satire. His pronunciation of aches ‘aitches’ in certain passages of Shakespeare is defensible. His misuse of the letter e was, however, unpardonable. According to Leigh Hunt, beard was always ‘bird,’ cheerful ‘churful,’ fierce ‘furse,’ and so forth; d was pronounced j, as in ‘insijious,’ ‘hijeous.’ Merchant he is said, perhaps excusably, to have pronounced ‘marchant.’ His deliberateness of speech was ascribed to some malformation of the vocal organs. Kemble's literary claims are of the smallest. His verses are obvious and feeble imitations of well-known models; and of the long list of plays assigned him in the ‘Biographia Dramatica’ there are few, if any, to which he has contributed anything but the fruits of his experience as actor and stage-manager. He published an essay on Macbeth and Richard III. In respect of scenery and costume he made an advance, the full credit of which, however, he can scarcely claim, some change of the kind having begun in France and the notion being in the air. A worthy, prudent, estimable man, he was honourable in all his dealings, not incapable of generosity, though scarcely prone to it, and his assault upon Miss De Camp is the one serious blot upon a life which was creditable to the stage. He was not averse to the pleasures of the table, and stories of his indulgence in the bottle, then a fashionable vice, may be accepted. Scott, who knew Kemble well, and sympathised with his literary tastes, declared him to be the only man who ever seduced him in his middle