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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shadows of the Stage, by William Winter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: Shadows of the Stage
+
+Author: William Winter
+
+Release Date: July 18, 2006 [EBook #18860]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHADOWS OF THE STAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Taavi Kalju and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+
+
+
+SHADOWS OF THE
+STAGE
+
+BY
+WILLIAM WINTER
+
+
+    _"The best in this kind are but shadows"_
+
+SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+NEW YORK
+MACMILLAN AND COMPANY
+AND LONDON
+1893
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1892,
+BY MACMILLAN & CO.
+
+Set up and electrotyped May, 1892. Large Paper Edition printed May.
+Ordinary Edition reprinted June, August, November, 1892; January, June,
+October, November, 1893.
+
+Norwood Press:
+J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith.
+Boston, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+Henry Irving
+
+IN MEMORY AND IN HONOUR
+OF ALL THAT HE HAS DONE
+TO DIGNIFY AND ADORN THE STAGE
+AND TO ENNOBLE SOCIETY
+THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED
+
+    _"Cui laurus aeternos honores
+    Delmatico peperit triumpho"_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+_The papers contained in this volume, chosen out of hundreds that the
+author has written on dramatic subjects, are assembled with the hope
+that they may be accepted, in their present form, as a part of the
+permanent record of our theatrical times. For at least thirty years it
+has been a considerable part of the constant occupation of the author to
+observe and to record the life of the contemporary stage. Since 1860 he
+has written intermittently in various periodicals, and since the summer
+of 1865 he has written continuously in the New York Tribune, upon actors
+and their art; and in that way he has accumulated a great mass of
+historical commentary upon the drama. In preparing this book he has been
+permitted to draw from his contributions to the Tribune, and also from
+his writings in Harper's Magazine and Weekly, in the London Theatre, and
+in Augustin Daly's Portfolio of Players. The choice of these papers has
+been determined partly by consideration of space and partly with the
+design of supplementing the author's earlier dramatic books, namely:
+Edwin Booth in Twelve Dramatic Characters; The Jeffersons; Henry Irving;
+The Stage Life of Mary Anderson; Brief Chronicles, containing eighty-six
+dramatic biographies; In Memory of McCullough; The Life of John Gilbert;
+The Life and Works of John Brougham; The Press and the Stage; The Actor
+and Other Speeches; and A Daughter of Comedy, being the life of Ada
+Rehan. The impulse of all those writings, and of the present volume, is
+commemorative. Let us save what we can._
+
+    _"Sed omnes una manet nox,
+    Et calcanda semel via leti."_
+
+W.W.
+APRIL 18, 1892.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+  CHAP.                                        PAGE
+
+     I. THE GOOD OLD TIMES                       13
+
+    II. IRVING IN FAUST                          30
+
+   III. ADELAIDE NEILSON                         47
+
+    IV. EDWIN BOOTH                              63
+
+     V. MARY ANDERSON                            90
+
+    VI. OLIVIA                                  119
+
+   VII. ON JEFFERSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY            130
+
+  VIII. ON JEFFERSON'S ACTING                   151
+
+    IX. JEFFERSON AND FLORENCE                  159
+
+     X. ON THE DEATH OF FLORENCE                169
+
+    XI. SHYLOCK AND PORTIA                      178
+
+   XII. JOHN McCULLOUGH                         185
+
+  XIII. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN                       206
+
+   XIV. LAWRENCE BARRETT                        215
+
+    XV. IRVING IN RAVENSWOOD                    226
+
+   XVI. MERRY WIVES AND FALSTAFF                243
+
+  XVII. ADA REHAN                               258
+
+ XVIII. TENNYSON'S FORESTERS                    269
+
+   XIX. ELLEN TERRY: MERCHANT OF VENICE         286
+
+    XX. RICHARD MANSFIELD                       301
+
+   XXI. GENEVIEVE WARD                          315
+
+  XXII. EDWARD S. WILLARD                       322
+
+ XXIII. SALVINI                                 339
+
+  XXIV. IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM                   348
+
+   XXV. CHARLES FISHER                          367
+
+  XXVI. MRS. GILBERT                            374
+
+ XXVII. JAMES LEWIS                             379
+
+XXVIII. A LEAF FROM MY JOURNAL                  383
+
+
+
+
+    _"--It so fell out that certain players
+    We o'er-raught on the way: of these we told him;
+    And there did seem in him a kind of joy
+    To hear of it."_
+
+HAMLET.
+
+     _"Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world--though
+     the cant of hypocrites may be the worst--the cant of criticism is
+     the most tormenting. I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not
+     a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man who will give
+     up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands,--be
+     pleased he knows not why and cares not wherefore."_
+
+TRISTRAM SHANDY.
+
+
+
+
+SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE GOOD OLD TIMES.
+
+
+It is recorded of John Lowin, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare and
+associated with several of Shakespeare's greater characters (his range
+was so wide, indeed, that it included Falstaff, Henry the Eighth, and
+Hamlet), that, having survived the halcyon days of "Eliza and our James"
+and lingered into the drab and russet period of the Puritans, when all
+the theatres in the British islands were suppressed, he became poor and
+presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called The Three Pigeons. Lowin
+was born in 1576 and he died in 1654--his grave being in London, in the
+churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields--so that, obviously, he was one
+of the veterans of the stage. He was in his seventy-eighth year when he
+passed away--wherefore in his last days he must have been "a mine of
+memories." He could talk of the stirring times of Leicester, Drake,
+Essex, and Raleigh. He could remember, as an event of his boyhood, the
+execution of Queen Mary Stuart, and possibly he could describe, as an
+eye-witness, the splendid funeral procession of Sir Philip Sidney. He
+could recall the death of Queen Elizabeth; the advent of Scottish James;
+the ruffling, brilliant, dissolute, audacious Duke of Buckingham; the
+impeachment and disgrace of Francis Bacon; the production of the great
+plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the meetings of the wits and poets
+at the Apollo and the Mermaid. He might have personally known Robert
+Herrick--that loveliest of the wild song-birds of that golden age. He
+might have been present at the burial of Edmund Spenser, in Westminster
+Abbey--when the poet brothers of the author of _The Faerie Queene_ cast
+into his grave their manuscript elegies and the pens with which those
+laments had been written. He had acted Hamlet,--perhaps in the author's
+presence. He had seen the burning of the old Globe Theatre. He had been,
+in the early days of Charles the First, the chief and distinguished
+Falstaff of the time. He had lived under the rule of three successive
+princes; had deplored the sanguinary fate of the martyr-king (for the
+actors were almost always royalists); had seen the rise of the
+Parliament and the downfall of the theatre; and now, under the
+Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, he had become the keeper of an humble
+wayside inn. It is easy to fancy the old actor sitting in his chair of
+state, the monarch of his tap-room, with a flagon of beer, and a
+church-warden pipe of tobacco, and holding forth, to a select circle of
+cronies, upon the vanished glories of the Elizabethan stage--upon the
+days when there were persons in existence really worthy to be called
+actors. He could talk of Richard Burbage, the first Romeo; of Armin,
+famous in Shakespeare's clowns and fools; of Heminge and Condell, who
+edited the First Folio of Shakespeare, which possibly he himself
+purchased, fresh from the press; of Joseph Taylor, whom it is said
+Shakespeare personally instructed how to play Hamlet, and the
+recollection of whose performance enabled Sir William Davenant to impart
+to Betterton the example and tradition established by the author--a
+model that has lasted to the present day; of Kempe, the original
+Dogberry, and of the exuberant, merry Richard Tarleton, after whom that
+comic genius had fashioned his artistic method; of Alleyne, who kept the
+bear-garden, and who founded the College and Home at Dulwich--where they
+still flourish; of Gabriel Spencer, and his duel with Ben Jonson,
+wherein he lost his life at the hands of that burly antagonist; of
+Marlowe "of the mighty line," and his awful and lamentable
+death--stabbed at Deptford by a drunken drawer in a tavern brawl. Very
+rich and fine, there can be no doubt, were that veteran actor's
+remembrances of "the good old times," and most explicit and downright,
+it may surely be believed, was his opinion, freely communicated to the
+gossips of The Three Pigeons, that--in the felicitous satirical phrase
+of Joseph Jefferson--all the good actors are dead.
+
+It was ever thus. Each successive epoch of theatrical history presents
+the same picturesque image of storied regret--memory incarnated in the
+veteran, ruefully vaunting the vanished glories of the past. There has
+always been a time when the stage was finer than it is now. Cibber and
+Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and
+Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton,
+and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean and
+John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been buried,
+never to rise again, with the dust of Garrick and Henderson, beneath the
+pavement of Westminster Abbey. Less than fifty years ago an American
+historian of the stage (James Rees, 1845) described it as a wreck,
+overwhelmed with "gloom and eternal night," above which the genius of
+the drama was mournfully presiding, in the likeness of an owl. The New
+York veteran of to-day, although his sad gaze may not penetrate backward
+quite to the effulgent splendours of the old Park, will sigh for
+Burton's and the Olympic, and the luminous period of Mrs. Richardson,
+Mary Taylor, and Tom Hamblin. The Philadelphia veteran gazes back to the
+golden era of the old Chestnut Street theatre, the epoch of tie-wigs and
+shoe-buckles, the illustrious times of Wood and Warren, when Fennell,
+Cooke, Cooper, Wallack, and J.B. Booth were shining names in tragedy,
+and Jefferson and William Twaits were great comedians, and the beautiful
+Anne Brunton was the queen of the stage. The Boston veteran speaks
+proudly of the old Federal and the old Tremont, of Mary Duff, Julia
+Pelby, Charles Eaton, and Clara Fisher, and is even beginning to gild
+with reminiscent splendour the first days of the Boston Theatre, when
+Thomas Barry was manager and Julia Bennett Barrow and Mrs. John Wood
+contended for the public favour. In a word, the age that has seen
+Rachel, Seebach, Ristori, Charlotte Cushman, and Adelaide Neilson, the
+age that sees Ellen Terry, Mary Anderson, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson,
+Henry Irving, Salvini, Coquelin, Lawrence Barrett, John Gilbert, John S.
+Clarke, Ada Rehan, James Lewis, Clara Morris, and Richard Mansfield, is
+a comparatively sterile period--"Too long shut in strait and few, thinly
+dieted on dew"--which ought to have felt the spell of Cooper and Mary
+Buff, and known what acting was when Cooke's long forefinger pointed the
+way, and Dunlap bore the banner, and pretty Mrs. Marshall bewitched the
+father of his country, and Dowton raised the laugh, and lovely Mrs.
+Barrett melted the heart, and the roses were "bright by the calm
+Bendemeer." The present writer, who began theatre-going in earnest over
+thirty years ago, finds himself full often musing over a dramatic time
+that still seems brighter than this--when he could exult in the fairy
+splendour and comic humour of _Aladdin_ and weep over the sorrows of
+_The Drunkard_, when he was thrilled and frightened by J.B. Booth in
+_The Apostate_, and could find an ecstasy of pleasure in the loves of
+Alonzo and Cora and the sublime self-sacrifice of Rolla. Thoughts of
+such actors as Henry Wallack, George Jordan, John Brougham, John E.
+Owens, Mary Carr, Mrs. Barrow, and Charlotte Thompson, together in the
+same theatre, are thoughts of brilliant people and of more than commonly
+happy displays of talent and beauty. The figures that used to be seen on
+Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John
+Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light.
+Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual
+beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so
+noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so
+copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching,
+irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of
+colour or the hyacinth of grace, and as delicate and refined as an
+exquisite bit of old china--those actors made a group, the like of
+which it would be hard to find now. Shall we ever see again such an
+Othello as Edwin Forrest, or such a Lord Duberly and Cap'n Cuttle as
+Burton, or such a Dazzle as John Brougham, or such an Affable Hawk as
+Charles Mathews? Certainly there was a superiority of manner, a tinge of
+intellectual character, a tone of grace and romance about the old
+actors, such as is not common in the present; and, making all needful
+allowance for the illusive glamour that memory casts over the distant
+and the dim, it yet remains true that the veterans of our day have a
+certain measure of right upon their side of the question.
+
+In the earlier periods of our theatrical history the strength of the
+stage was concentrated in a few theatres. The old Park, for example, was
+called simply The Theatre, and when the New York playgoer spoke of going
+to the play he meant that he was going there. One theatre, or perhaps
+two, might flourish, in a considerable town, during a part of the year,
+but the field was limited, and therefore the actors were brought
+together in two or three groups. The star system, at least till the time
+of Cooper, seems to have been innocuous. Garrick's prodigious success
+in London, more than a hundred years ago, had enabled him to engross the
+control of the stage in that centre, where he was but little opposed,
+and practically to exile many players of the first ability, whose lustre
+he dimmed or whose services he did not require; and those players
+dispersed themselves to distant places--to York, Dublin, Edinburgh,
+etc.--or crossed the sea to America. With that beginning the way was
+opened for the growth of superb stock-companies, in the early days of
+the American theatre. The English, next to the Italians, were the first
+among modern peoples to create a dramatic literature and to establish
+the acted drama, and they have always led in this field--antedating,
+historically, and surpassing in essential things the French stage which
+nowadays it is fashionable to extol. English influence, at all times
+stern and exacting, stamped the character of our early theatre. The tone
+of society, alike in the mother country, in the colonies, and in the
+first years of our Republic, was, as to these matters, formal and
+severe. Success upon the stage was exceedingly difficult to obtain, and
+it could not be obtained without substantial merit. The youths who
+sought it were often persons of liberal education. In Philadelphia, New
+York, and Boston the stock-companies were composed of select and
+thoroughly trained actors, many of whom were well-grounded classical
+scholars. Furthermore, the epoch was one of far greater leisure and
+repose than are possible now--- when the civilised world is at the
+summit of sixty years of scientific development such as it had not
+experienced in all its recorded centuries of previous progress.
+Naturally enough the dramatic art of our ancestors was marked by
+scholar-like and thorough elaboration, mellow richness of colour,
+absolute simplicity of character, and great solidity of merit. Such
+actors as Wignell, Hodgkinson, Jefferson, Francis, and Blissett offered
+no work that was not perfect of its kind. The tradition had been
+established and accepted, and it was transmitted and preserved.
+Everything was concentrated, and the public grew to be entirely familiar
+with it. Men, accordingly, who obtained their ideas of acting at a time
+when they were under influences surviving from those ancient days are
+confused, bewildered, and distressed by much that is offered in the
+theatres now. I have listened to the talk of an aged American
+acquaintance (Thurlow Weed), who had seen and known Edmund Kean, and
+who said that all modern tragedians were insignificant in comparison
+with him. I have listened to the talk of an aged English acquaintance
+(Fladgate), who had seen and known John Philip Kemble, and who said that
+his equal has never since been revealed. The present day knows what the
+old school was,[1] when it sees William Warren, Joseph Jefferson,
+Charles Fisher, Mrs. John Drew, John Gilbert, J.H. Stoddart, Mrs. G.H.
+Gilbert, William Davidge, and Lester Wallack--the results and the
+remains of it. The old touch survives in them and is under their
+control, and no one, seeing their ripe and finished art, can feel
+surprise that the veteran moralist should be wedded to his idols of the
+past, and should often be heard sadly to declare that all the good
+actors--except these--are dead. He forgets that scores of theatres now
+exist where once there were but two or three; that the population of the
+United States has been increased by about fifty millions within ninety
+years; that the field has been enormously broadened; that the character
+of, the audience has become one of illimitable diversity; that the
+prodigious growth of the star-system, together with all sorts of
+experimental catch-penny theatrical management, is one of the inevitable
+necessities of the changed condition of civilisation; that the feverish
+tone of this great struggling and seething mass of humanity is
+necessarily reflected in the state of the theatre; and that the forces
+of the stage have become very widely diffused. Such a moralist would
+necessarily be shocked by the changes that have come upon our theatre
+within even the last twenty-five years--by the advent of "the sensation
+drama," invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of
+the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its
+multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious
+ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by
+the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed,
+half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living
+as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in
+the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was
+formerly concentrated is now scattered.
+
+The stage is keeping step with the progress of human thought in every
+direction, and it will continue to advance. Evil influences impressed
+upon it there certainly are, in liberal abundance--not the least of
+these being that of the speculative shop-keeper, whose nature it is to
+seize any means of turning a penny, and who deals in dramatic art
+precisely as he would deal in groceries: but when we speak of "our
+stage" we do not mean an aggregation of shows or of the schemes of
+showmen. The stage is an institution that has grown out of a necessity
+in human nature. It was as inevitable that man should evolve the theatre
+as it was that he should evolve the church, the judiciary tribunal, the
+parliament, or any other essential component of the State. Almost all
+human beings possess the dramatic perception; a few possess the dramatic
+faculty. These few are born for the stage, and each and every generation
+contributes its number to the service of this art. The problem is one of
+selection and embarkation. Of the true actor it may be said, as Ben
+Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The
+finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without
+training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure,
+takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution.
+The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing
+nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the
+desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to
+be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however,
+impulse soon recognises the curb of common sense, and the aspirant finds
+his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way
+the several types of dramatic artist--each type being distinct and each
+being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry--are
+maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates
+silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this
+field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic
+stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It
+is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the
+young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to
+present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and
+to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art,
+every species of person; in order that all human life--whether of the
+street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and
+sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most
+ideal state--may be so copied that the picture will express all its
+beauty and sweetness, all its happiness and mirth, all its dignity, and
+all its moral admonition and significance, for the benefit of the world.
+Such a dramatic stock-company, for example (and this is but one of the
+commendable products of the modern stage), has grown up and crystallised
+into a form of refined power and symmetry, for the purpose to which it
+is devoted, under the management of Augustin Daly. That purpose is the
+acting of comedy. Mr. Daly began management in 1869, and he has remained
+in it, almost continually, from that time to this. Many players, first
+and last, have served under his direction. His company has known
+vicissitudes. But the organisation has not lost its comprehensive form,
+its competent force, and its attractive quality of essential grace. No
+thoughtful observer of its career can have failed to perceive how prompt
+the manager has been to profit by every lesson of experience; what keen
+perception he has shown as to the essential constituents of a theatrical
+troop; with what fine judgment he has used the forces at his disposal;
+with what intrepid resolution and expeditious energy he has animated
+their spirit and guided their art; and how naturally those players have
+glided into their several stations and assimilated in one artistic
+family. How well balanced, how finely equipped, how distinctively able
+that company is, and what resources of poetry, thought, taste,
+character, humour, and general capacity it contains, may not, perhaps,
+be fully appreciated in the passing hour. "_Non, si male nunc, et olim
+sic erit._" Fifty years from now, when perchance some veteran, still
+bright and cheery "in the chimney-nook of age," shall sit in his
+armchair and prose about the past, with what complacent exultation will
+he speak of the beautiful Ada Rehan, so bewitching as Peggy in _The
+Country Girl_, so radiant, vehement, and stormily passionate as
+Katherine; of manly John Drew, with his nonchalant ease, incisive tone,
+and crisp and graceful method; of noble Charles Fisher, and sprightly
+and sparkling James Lewis, and genial, piquant, quaint Mrs. Gilbert! I
+mark the gentle triumph in that aged reminiscent voice, and can respect
+an old man's kindly and natural sympathy with the glories and delights
+of his vanished youth. But I think it is not necessary to wait till you
+are old before you begin to praise anything, and then to praise only the
+dead. Let us recognise what is good in our own time, and honour and
+admire it with grateful hearts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NOTE.--At the Garrick club, London, June 26, 1885, it was my fortune to
+meet Mr. Fladgate, "father of the Garrick," who was then aged 86. The
+veteran displayed astonishing resources of memory and talked most
+instructively about the actors of the Kemble period. He declared John
+Philip Kemble to have been the greatest of actors, and said that his
+best impersonations were Penruddock, Zanga, and Coriolanus. Mrs.
+Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great
+genius,--the precursor of Dickens. For Edmund Kean he had no enthusiasm.
+Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and after that in
+Shylock. Miss O'Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet: a beautiful,
+blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who retained her beauty to
+the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher.
+
+[Footnote 1: This paper was written in 1888, and now, in 1892, Mr.
+Jefferson, Mr. Stoddart, Mrs. Drew, and Mrs. Gilbert are the only
+survivors of that noble group.]
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST.
+
+
+It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe's colossal poem--a work
+which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of
+provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius--should
+find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although
+dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly
+dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being
+radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More
+disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it
+never has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of
+its contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical
+significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; it is not the
+Fiend. Mephistopheles, indeed, might, for the purpose of philosophical
+apprehension, be viewed as an embodied projection of the mind of Faust;
+for the power of the one is dependent absolutely upon the weakness and
+surrender of the other. The object of the poem was the portrayal of
+universal humanity in a typical form at its highest point of development
+and in its representative spiritual experience. Faust, an aged scholar,
+the epitome of human faculties and virtues, grand, venerable,
+beneficent, blameless, is passing miserably into the evening of life. He
+has done no outward and visible wrong, and yet he is wretched. The utter
+emptiness of his life--its lack of fulfilment, its lack of
+sensation--wearies, annoys, disgusts, and torments him. He is divided
+between an apathy, which heavily weighs him down into the dust, and a
+passionate, spiritual longing, intense, unsatisfied, insatiable, which
+almost drives him to frenzy. Once, at sunset, standing on a hillside,
+and looking down upon a peaceful valley, he utters, in a poetic strain
+of exquisite tenderness and beauty, the final wish of his forlorn and
+weary soul. It is no longer now the god-like aspiration and imperious
+desire of his prime, but it is the sufficient alternative. All he asks
+now is that he may see the world always as in that sunset vision, in
+the perfection of happy rest; that he may be permitted, soaring on the
+wings of the spirit, to follow the sun in its setting ("The day before
+me and the night behind"), and thus to circle forever round and round
+this globe, the ecstatic spectator of happiness and peace. He has had
+enough and more than enough of study, of struggle, of unfulfilled
+aspiration. Lonely dignity, arid renown, satiety, sorrow, knowledge
+without hope, and age without comfort,--these are his present portion;
+and a little way onward, waiting for him, is death. Too old to play with
+passion, too young not to feel desire, he has endured a long struggle
+between the two souls in his breast--one longing for heaven and the
+other for the world; but he is beaten at last, and in the abject
+surrender of despair he determines to die by his own act. A childlike
+feeling, responsive in his heart to the divine prompting of sacred
+music, saves him from self-murder; but in a subsequent bitter revulsion
+he utters a curse upon everything in the state of man, and most of all
+upon that celestial attribute of patience whereby man is able to endure
+and to advance in the eternal process of evolution from darkness into
+light. And now it is, when the soul of the human being, utterly baffled
+by the mystery of creation, crushed by its own hopeless sorrow, and
+enraged by the everlasting command to renounce and refrain, has become
+one delirium of revolt against God and destiny, that the spirit of
+perpetual denial, incarnated in Mephistopheles, steps forth to proffer
+guidance and help. It is as if his rejection and defiance had suddenly
+become embodied, to aid him in his ruin. More in recklessness than in
+trust, with no fear, almost with scorn and contempt, he yet agrees to
+accept this assistance. If happiness be really possible, if the true
+way, after all, should lie in the life of the senses, and not in
+knowledge and reason; if, under the ministrations of this fiend, one
+hour of life, even one moment of it, shall ever (which is an idle and
+futile supposition) be so sweet that his heart shall desire it to
+linger, then, indeed, he will surrender himself eternally to this at
+present preposterous Mephistopheles, whom his mood, his magic, and the
+revulsion of his moral nature have evoked:--
+
+    "Then let the death-bell chime the token!
+      Then art thou from thy service free!
+    The clock may stop, the hand be broken,
+      And time be finished unto me."
+
+Such an hour, it is destined, shall arrive, after many long and
+miserable years, when, aware of the beneficence of living for others and
+in the imagined prospect of leading, guiding, and guarding a free people
+upon a free land, Faust shall be willing to say to the moment: "Stay,
+thou art so fair"; and Mephistopheles shall harshly cry out: "The clock
+stands still"; and the graybeard shall sink in the dust; and the holy
+angels shall fly away with his soul, leaving the Fiend baffled and
+morose, to gibe at himself over the failure of all his infernal arts.
+But, meanwhile, it remains true of the man that no pleasure satisfies
+him and no happiness contents, and "death is desired, and life a thing
+unblest."
+
+The man who puts out his eyes must become blind. The sin of Faust is a
+spiritual sin, and the meaning of all his subsequent terrible experience
+is that spiritual sin must be--and will be--expiated. No human soul can
+ever be lost. In every human soul the contest between good and evil must
+continue until the good has conquered and the evil is defeated and
+eradicated. Then, when the man's spirit is adjusted to its environment
+in the spiritual world, it will be at peace--and not till then. And if
+this conflict is not waged and completed now and here, it must be and it
+will be fought out and finished hereafter and somewhere else. It is the
+greatest of all delusions to suppose that you can escape from yourself.
+Judgment and retribution proceed within the soul and not from sources
+outside of it. That is the philosophic drift of the poet's thought
+expressed and implied in his poem. It was Man, in his mortal ordeal--the
+motive, cause, and necessity of which remain a mystery--whom he desired
+and aimed to portray; it was not merely the triumph of a mocking devil,
+temporarily victorious through ministration to animal lust and
+intellectual revolt, over the weakness of the carnal creature and the
+embittered bewilderment of the baffled mind. Mr. Irving may well say, as
+he is reported to have said, that he will consider himself to have
+accomplished a good work if his production of Faust should have the
+effect of invigorating popular interest in Goethe's immortal poem and
+bringing closer home to the mind of his public a true sense of its
+sublime and far-reaching signification.
+
+The full metaphysical drift of thought and meaning in Goethe's poem,
+however, can be but faintly indicated in a play. It is more distinctly
+indicated in Mr. Wills's play, which is used by Mr. Irving, than in any
+other play upon this subject that has been presented. This result, an
+approximate fidelity to the original, is due in part to the preservation
+of the witch scenes, in part to Mr. Irving's subtle and significant
+impersonation of Mephistopheles, and in part to a weird investiture of
+spiritual mystery with which he has artfully environed the whole
+production. The substance of the piece is the love story of Faust and
+Margaret, yet beyond this is a background of infinity, and over and
+around this is a poetic atmosphere charged with suggestiveness of
+supernatural agency in the fate of man. If the gaze of the observer be
+concentrated upon the mere structure of the piece, the love story is
+what he will find; and that is all he will find. Faust makes his compact
+with the Fiend. He is rejuvenated and he begins a new life. In "the
+Witch's Kitchen" his passions are intensified, and then they are
+ignited, so that he may be made the slave of desire and afterward if
+possible imbruted by sensuality. He is artfully brought into contact
+with Margaret, whom he instantly loves, who presently loves him, whom
+he wins, and upon whom, since she becomes a mother out of wedlock, his
+inordinate and reckless love imposes the burden of pious contrition and
+worldly shame. Then, through the puissant wickedness and treachery of
+Mephistopheles, he is made to predominate over her vengeful brother,
+Valentine, whom he kills in a street fray. Thus his desire to experience
+in his own person the most exquisite bliss that humanity can enjoy and
+equally the most exquisite torture that it can suffer, becomes
+fulfilled. He is now the agonised victim of love and of remorse. Orestes
+pursued by the Furies was long ago selected as the typical image of
+supreme anguish and immitigable suffering; but Orestes is less a
+lamentable figure than Faust--fortified though he is, and because he is,
+with the awful but malign, treacherous, and now impotent sovereignty of
+hell. To deaden his sensibility, destroy his conscience, and harden him
+in evil the Fiend leads him into a mad revel of boundless profligacy and
+bestial riot--denoted by the beautiful and terrible scene upon the
+Brocken--and poor Margaret is abandoned to her shame, her wandering, her
+despair, her frenzy, her crime, and her punishment. This desertion,
+though, is procured by a stratagem of the Fiend and does not proceed
+from the design of her lover. The expedient of Mephistopheles, to lull
+his prey by dissipations, is a failure. Faust finds them "tasteless,"
+and he must return to Margaret. He finds her in prison, crazed and
+dying, and he strives in vain to set her free. There is a climax,
+whereat, while her soul is borne upward by angels he--whose destiny must
+yet be fulfilled--is summoned by the terrible voice of Satan. This is
+the substance of what is shown; but if the gaze of the observer pierces
+beyond this, if he is able to comprehend that terrific but woeful image
+of the fallen angel, if he perceives what is by no means obscurely
+intimated, that Margaret, redeemed and beatified, cannot be happy unless
+her lover also is saved, and that the soul of Faust can only be lost
+through the impossible contingency of being converted into the likeness
+of the Fiend, he will understand that a spectacle has been set before
+him more august, momentous, and sublime than any episode of tragical
+human love could ever be.
+
+Henry Irving, in his embodiment of Mephistopheles, fulfilled the
+conception of the poet in one essential respect and transcended it in
+another. His performance, superb in ideal and perfect in execution, was
+a great work--and precisely here was the greatness of it. Mephistopheles
+as delineated by Goethe is magnificently intellectual and sardonic, but
+nowhere does he convey even a faint suggestion of the god-head of glory
+from which he has lapsed. His own frank and clear avowal of himself
+leaves no room for doubt as to the limitation intended to be established
+for him by the poet. I am, he declares, the spirit that perpetually
+denies. I am a part of that part which once was all--a part of that
+darkness out of which came the light. I repudiate all things--because
+everything that has been made is unworthy to exist and ought to be
+destroyed, and therefore it is better that nothing should ever have been
+made. God dwells in splendour, alone and eternal, but his spirits he
+thrusts into darkness, and man, a poor creature fashioned to poke his
+nose into filth, he sportively dowers with day and night. My province is
+evil; my existence is mockery; my pleasure and my purpose are
+destruction. In a word, this Fiend, towering to the loftiest summit of
+cold intellect, is the embodiment of cruelty, malice, and scorn,
+pervaded and interfused with grim humour. That ideal Mr. Irving made
+actual. The omniscient craft and deadly malignity of his impersonation,
+swathed in a most specious humour at some moments (as, for example, in
+Margaret's bedroom, in the garden scene with Martha, and in the duel
+scene with Valentine) made the blood creep and curdle with horror, even
+while they impressed the sense of intellectual power and stirred the
+springs of laughter. But if you rightly saw his face, in the fantastic,
+symbolical scene of the Witch's Kitchen; in that lurid moment of sunset
+over the quaint gables and haunted spires of Nuremburg, when the
+sinister presence of the arch-fiend deepened the red glare of the
+setting sun and seemed to bathe this world in the ominous splendour of
+hell; and, above all, if you perceived the soul that shone through his
+eyes in that supremely awful moment of his predominance over the hellish
+revel upon the Brocken, when all the hideous malignities of nature and
+all those baleful "spirits which tend on mortal consequence" are loosed
+into the aerial abyss, and only this imperial horror can curb and subdue
+them, you knew that this Mephistopheles was a sufferer not less than a
+mocker; that his colossal malignity was the delirium of an angelic
+spirit thwarted, baffled, shattered, yet defiant; never to be
+vanquished; never through all eternity to be at peace with itself. The
+infinite sadness of that face, the pathos, beyond words, of that
+isolated and lonely figure--those are the qualities that irradiated all
+its diversified attributes of mind, humour, duplicity, sarcasm, force,
+horror, and infernal beauty, and invested it with the authentic quality
+of greatness. There is no warrant for this treatment of the part to be
+derived from Goethe's poem. There is every warrant for it in the
+apprehension of this tremendous subject by the imagination of a great
+actor. You cannot mount above the earth, you cannot transcend the
+ordinary line of the commonplace, as a mere sardonic image of
+self-satisfied, chuckling obliquity. Mr. Irving embodied Mephistopheles
+not as a man but as a spirit, with all that the word implies, and in
+doing that he not only heeded the fine instinct of the true actor but
+the splendid teaching of the highest poetry--the ray of supernal light
+that flashes from the old Hebrew Bible; the blaze that streams from the
+_Paradise Lost_; the awful glory through which, in the pages of Byron,
+the typical figure of agonised but unconquerable revolt towers over a
+realm of ruin:--
+
+          "On his brow
+    The thunder-scars are graven; from his eye
+    Glares forth the immortality of hell."
+
+Ellen Terry, in her assumption of Margaret, once more displayed that
+profound, comprehensive, and particular knowledge of human love--that
+knowledge of it through the soul and not simply the mind--which is the
+source of her exceptional and irresistible power. This Margaret was a
+woman who essentially loves, who exists only for love, who has the
+courage of her love, who gives all for love--not knowing that it is a
+sacrifice--and whose love, at last, triumphant over death, is not only
+her own salvation but that also of her lover. The point of strict
+conformity to the conception of the poet, in physique and in spiritual
+state, may be waived. Goethe's Margaret is a handsome, hardy girl, of
+humble rank, who sometimes uses bad grammar and who reveals no essential
+mind. She is just a delicious woman, and there is nothing about her
+either metaphysical or mysterious. The wise Fiend, who knows that with
+such a man as Faust the love of such a woman must outweigh all the
+world, wisely tempts him with her, and infernally lures him to the
+accomplishment of her ruin. But it will be observed that, aside from the
+infraction of the law of man, the loves of Faust and Margaret are not
+only innocent but sacred. This sanctity Mephistopheles can neither
+pollute nor control, and through this he loses his victims. Ellen
+Terry's Margaret was a delicious woman, and not metaphysical nor
+mysterious; but it was Margaret imbued with the temperament of Ellen
+Terry,--who, if ever an exceptional creature lived, is exceptional in
+every particular. In her embodiment she transfigured the character: she
+maintained it in an ideal world, and she was the living epitome of all
+that is fascinating in essential womanhood--glorified by genius. It did
+not seem like acting but like the revelation of a hallowed personal
+experience upon which no chill worldly gaze should venture to intrude.
+
+In that suggestive book in which Lady Pollock records her recollections
+of Macready it is said that once, after his retirement, on reading a
+London newspaper account of the production of a Shakespearean play, he
+remarked that "evidently the accessories swallow up the poetry and the
+action": and he proceeded, in a reminiscent and regretful mood, to speak
+as follows: "In my endeavour to give to Shakespeare all his attributes,
+to enrich his poetry with scenes worthy of its interpretation, to give
+to his tragedies their due magnificence and to his comedies their entire
+brilliancy, I have set an example which is accompanied with great peril,
+for the public is willing to have the magnificence without the tragedy,
+and the poet is swallowed up in display." Mr. Irving is the legitimate
+successor to Macready and he has encountered that same peril. There are
+persons--many of them--who think that it is a sign of weakness to praise
+cordially and to utter admiration with a free heart. They are mistaken,
+but no doubt they are sincere. Shakespeare, the wisest of monitors, is
+never so eloquent and splendid as when he makes one of his people
+express praise of another. Look at those speeches in _Coriolanus_. Such
+niggardly persons, in their detraction of Henry Irving, are prompt to
+declare that he is a capital stage manager but not a great actor. This
+has an impartial air and a sapient sound, but it is gross folly and
+injustice. Henry Irving is one of the greatest actors that have ever
+lived, and he has shown it over and over again. His acting is all the
+more effective because associated with unmatched ability to insist and
+insure that every play shall be perfectly well set, in every particular,
+and that every part in it shall be competently acted. But his genius and
+his ability are no more discredited than those of Macready were by his
+attention to technical detail and his insistence upon total excellence
+of result. It should be observed, however, that he has carried stage
+garniture to an extreme limit. His investiture of _Faust_ was so
+magnificent that possibly it may have tended in the minds of many
+spectators, to obscure and overwhelm the fine intellectual force, the
+beautiful delicacy, and the consummate art with which he embodied
+Mephistopheles. It ought not to have produced that effect--because, in
+fact, the spectacle presented was, actually and truly, that of a
+supernatural being, predominant by force of inherent strength and charm
+over the broad expanse of the populous and teeming world; but it might
+have produced it: and, for the practical good of the art of acting,
+progress in that direction has gone far enough. The supreme beauty of
+the production was the poetic atmosphere of it--the irradiation of that
+strange sensation of being haunted which sometimes will come upon you,
+even at noon-day, in lonely places, on vacant hillside, beneath the dark
+boughs of great trees, in the presence of the grim and silent rocks, and
+by the solitary margin of the sea. The feeling was that of Goethe's own
+weird and suggestive scene of the Open Field, the black horses, and the
+raven-stone; or that of the shuddering lines of Coleridge:--
+
+    "As one that on a lonesome road
+      Doth walk in fear and dread,
+    And, having once turned round, walks on
+      And turns no more his head,
+    Because he knows a frightful fiend
+      Doth close behind him tread."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+ADELAIDE NEILSON AS IMOGEN AND JULIET.
+
+
+Shakespeare's drama of _Cymbeline_ seems not at any time in the history
+of the stage to have been a favourite with theatrical audiences. In New
+York it has had but five revivals in more than a hundred years, and
+those occurred at long intervals and were of brief continuance. The
+names of Thomas Barry, Mrs. Shaw-Hamblin (Eliza Marian Trewar), and
+Julia Bennett Barrow are best remembered in association with it on the
+American stage. It had slept for more than a generation when, in the
+autumn of 1876, Adelaide Neilson revived it at Philadelphia; but since
+then it has been reproduced by several of her imitators. She first
+offered it on the New York stage in May 1877, and it was then seen that
+her impersonation of Imogen was one of the best of her works. If it be
+the justification of the stage as an institution of public benefit and
+social advancement, that it elevates humanity by presenting noble
+ideals of human nature and making them exemplars and guides, that
+justification was practically accomplished by that beautiful
+performance.
+
+The poetry of _Cymbeline_ is eloquent and lovely. The imagination of its
+appreciative reader, gliding lightly over its more sinister incidents,
+finds its story romantic, its accessories--both of the court and the
+wilderness--picturesque, its historic atmosphere novel and exciting, and
+the spirit of it tender and noble. Such a reader, likewise, fashions its
+characters into an ideal form which cannot be despoiled by comparison
+with a visible standard of reality. It is not, however, an entirely
+pleasant play to witness. The acting version, indeed, is considerably
+condensed from the original, by the excision of various scenes
+explanatory of the conduct of the story, and by the omission of the
+cumbersome vision of Leonatus; and the gain of brevity thereby made
+helps to commend the work to a more gracious acceptance than it would be
+likely to obtain if acted exactly according to Shakespeare. Its movement
+also is imbued with additional alacrity by a rearrangement of its
+divisions. It is customarily presented in six acts. Yet,
+notwithstanding the cutting and editing to which it has been subjected,
+_Cymbeline_ remains somewhat inharmonious alike with the needs of the
+stage and the apprehension of the public.
+
+For this there are several causes. One perhaps is its mixed character,
+its vague, elusive purpose, and its unreality of effect. From the nature
+of his story--a tale of stern facts and airy inventions, respecting
+Britain and Rome, two thousand years ago--the poet seems to have been
+compelled to make a picture of human life too literal to be viewed
+wholly as an ideal, and too romantic to be viewed wholly as literal. In
+the unequivocally great plays of Shakespeare the action moves like the
+mighty flow of some resistless river. In this one it advances with the
+diffusive and straggling movement of a summer cloud. The drift and
+meaning of the piece, accordingly, do not stand boldly out. That astute
+thinker, Ulrici, for instance, after much brooding upon it, ties his
+mental legs in a hard knot and says that Shakespeare intended, in this
+piece, to illustrate that man is not the master of his own destiny.
+There must be liberal scope for conjecture when a philosopher can make
+such a landing as that.
+
+The persons in _Cymbeline_, moreover--aside from the exceptional
+character of Imogen--do not come home to a spectator's realisation,
+whether of sympathy or repugnance. It is like the flower that thrives
+best under glass but shivers and wilts in the open air. Its poetry seems
+marred by the rude touch of the actual. Its delicious mountain scenes
+lose their woodland fragrance. Its motive, bluntly disclosed in the
+wager scene, seems coarse, unnatural, and offensive. Its plot, really
+simple, moves heavily and perplexes attention. It is a piece that lacks
+pervasive concentration and enthralling point. It might be defined as
+_Othello_ with a difference--the difference being in favour of
+_Othello_. Jealousy is the pivot of both: but in _Othello_ jealousy is
+treated with profound and searching truth, with terrible intensity of
+feeling, and with irresistible momentum of action. A spectator will
+honour and pity Othello, and hate and execrate Iago--with some infusion,
+perhaps of impatience toward the one and of admiration for the
+other--but he is likely to view both Leonatus and Iachimo with
+considerable indifference; he will casually recognise the infrequent
+Cymbeline as an ill-tempered, sonorous old donkey; he will give a
+passing smile of scornful disgust to Cloten--that vague hybrid of
+Roderigo and Oswald; and of the proceedings of the Queen and the
+fortunes of the royal family--whether as affected by the chemical
+experiments of Doctor Cornelius or the bellicose attitude of Augustus
+Caesar, in reaching for his British tribute--he will be practically
+unconscious. This result comes of commingling stern fact and pastoral
+fancy in such a way that an auditor of the composition is dubious
+whether to fix his senses steadfastly on the one or yield up his spirit
+to poetic reverie on the other.
+
+Coleridge--whose intuitions as to such matters were usually as good as
+recorded truth--thought that Shakespeare wrote _Cymbeline_ in his
+youthful period. He certainly does not manifest in it the cogent and
+glittering dramatic force that is felt in _Othello_ and _Macbeth_. The
+probability is that he wrought upon the old legend of Holinshed in a
+mood of intellectual caprice, inclining towards sensuous and fanciful
+dalliance with a remote and somewhat intangible subject. Those persons
+who explain the immense fecundity of his creative genius by alleging
+that he must steadily have kept in view the needs of the contemporary
+theatre seem to forget that he went much further in his plays than there
+was any need for him to go, in the satisfaction of such a purpose, and
+that those plays are, in general, too great for any stage that has
+existed. Shakespeare, it is certain, could not have been an exception to
+the law that every author must be conscious of a feeling, apart from
+intellectual purpose, that carries him onward in his art. The feeling
+that shines through _Cymbeline_ is a loving delight in the character of
+Imogen.
+
+The nature of that feeling and the quality of that character, had they
+been obscure, would have been made clear by Adelaide Neilson's
+embodiment. The personality that she presented was typical and unusual.
+It embodied virtue, neither hardened by austerity nor vapid with excess
+of goodness, and it embodied seductive womanhood, without one touch of
+wantonness or guile. It presented a woman innately good and radiantly
+lovely, who amid severest trials spontaneously and unconsciously acted
+with the ingenuous grace of childhood, the grandest generosity, the most
+constant spirit. The essence of Imogen's nature is fidelity. Faithful to
+love, even till death, she is yet more faithful to honour. Her scorn of
+falsehood is overwhelming; but she resents no injury, harbours no
+resentment, feels no spite, murmurs at no misfortune. From every blow of
+evil she recovers with a gentle patience that is infinitely pathetic.
+Passionate and acutely sensitive, she yet seems never to think of
+antagonising her affliction or to falter in her unconscious fortitude.
+She has no reproach--but only a grieved submission--for the husband who
+has wronged her by his suspicions and has doomed her to death. She
+thinks only of him, not of herself, when she beholds him, as she
+supposes, dead at her side; but even then she will submit and
+endure--she will but "weep and sigh" and say twice o'er "a century of
+prayers." She is only sorry for the woman who was her deadly enemy and
+who hated her for her goodness--so often the incitement of mortal
+hatred. She loses without a pang the heirship to a kingdom. An ideal
+thus poised in goodness and radiant in beauty might well have
+sustained--as undoubtedly it did sustain--the inspiration of
+Shakespeare.
+
+Adelaide Neilson, with her uncommon graces of person, found it easy to
+make the chamber scene and the cave scenes pictorial and charming. Her
+ingenuous trepidation and her pretty wiles, as Fidele, in the cave,
+were finely harmonious with the character and arose from it like odour
+from a flower. The innocence, the glee, the feminine desire to please,
+the pensive grace, the fear, the weakness, and the artless simplicity
+made up a state of gracious fascination. It was, however, in the revolt
+against Iachimo's perfidy, in the fall before Pisanio's fatal
+disclosure, and in the frenzy over the supposed death of Leonatus that
+the actress put forth electrical power and showed how strong emotion,
+acting through the imagination, can transfigure the being and give to
+love or sorrow a monumental semblance and an everlasting voice. The
+power was harmonious with the individuality and did not mar its grace.
+There was a perfect preservation of sustained identity, and this was
+expressed with such a sweet elocution and such an airy freedom of
+movement and naturalness of gesture that the observer almost forgot to
+notice the method of the mechanism and quite forgot that he was looking
+upon a fiction and a shadow. That her personation of Imogen, though more
+exalted in its nature than any of her works, excepting Isabella, would
+rival in public acceptance her Juliet, Viola, or Rosalind, was not to
+be expected: it was too much a passive condition--delicate and
+elusive--and too little an active effort. She woke into life the
+sleeping spirit of a rather repellant drama, and was "alone the Arabian
+bird."
+
+Shakespeare's Juliet, the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of his consummate
+poem of love and sorrow, was the most effective, if not the highest of
+Adelaide Neilson's tragic assumptions. It carried to every eye and to
+every heart the convincing and thrilling sense equally of her beauty and
+her power. The exuberant womanhood, the celestial affection, the
+steadfast nobility, and the lovely, childlike innocence of Imogen--shown
+through the constrained medium of a diffusive romance--were not to all
+minds appreciable on the instant. The gentle sadness of Viola, playing
+around her gleeful animation and absorbing it as the cup of the white
+lily swallows the sunshine, might well be, for the more blunt senses of
+the average auditor, dim, fitful, evanescent, and ineffective. Ideal
+heroism and dream-like fragrance--the colours of Murillo or the poems of
+Heine--are truly known but to exceptional natures or in exceptional
+moods. The reckless, passionate idolatry of Juliet, on the
+contrary,--with its attendant sacrifice, its climax of disaster, and its
+sequel of anguish and death,--stands forth as clearly as the white line
+of the lightning on a black midnight sky, and no observer can possibly
+miss its meaning. All that Juliet is, all that she acts and all that she
+suffers, is elemental. It springs directly from the heart and it moves
+straight onward like a shaft of light. Othello, the perfection of
+simplicity, is not simpler than Juliet. In him are embodied passion and
+jealousy, swayed by an awful instinct of rude justice. In her is
+embodied unmixed and immitigable passion, without law, limit, reason,
+patience, or restraint. She is love personified and therefore a fatality
+to herself. Presented in that way--and in that way she was presented by
+Adelaide Neilson--her nature and her experience come home to the
+feelings as well as the imagination, and all that we know, as well as
+all that we dream, of beauty and of anguish are centred in one image. In
+this we may see all the terrors of the moving hand of fate. In this we
+may almost hear a warning voice out of heaven, saying that nowhere
+except in duty shall the human heart find refuge and peace--or, if not
+peace, submission.
+
+The question whether Shakespeare's Juliet be correctly interpreted is
+not one of public importance. It might be ever so correctly interpreted
+without producing the right effect. There have been many Juliets. There
+has, in our time, been no Juliet so completely fascinating and
+irresistible as that of Adelaide Neilson. Through the medium of that
+Shakespearean character the actress poured forth that strange,
+thrilling, indescribable power which more than anything else in the
+world vindicates by its existence the spiritual grandeur and destiny of
+the human soul. Neither the accuracy of her ideals nor the fineness of
+her execution would have accomplished the result that attended her
+labours and crowned her fame. There was an influence back of these--a
+spark of the divine fire--a consecration of the individual life--as
+eloquent to inform as it was potent to move. Adelaide Neilson was one of
+those strange, exceptional natures that, often building better than they
+know, not only interpret "the poet's dream" but give to it an added
+emphasis and a higher symbolism. Each element of her personality was
+rich and rare. The eyes--now glittering with a mischievous glee that
+seemed never to have seen a cloud or felt a sorrow, now steady, frank,
+and sweet, with innocence and trust,--could, in one moment, flash with
+the wild fire of defiance or the glittering light of imperious command,
+or, equally in one moment, could soften with mournful thought and sad
+remembrance, or darken with the far-off look of one who hears the waving
+wings of angels and talks with the spirits of the dead. The face, just
+sufficiently unsymmetrical to be brimful of character, whether piquant
+or pensive; the carriage of body,--easy yet quaint in its artless grace,
+like that of a pretty child in the unconscious fascination of infancy;
+the restless, unceasing play of mood, and the instantaneous and perfect
+response of expression and gesture,--all these were the denotements of
+genius; and, above all these, and not to be mistaken in its irradiation
+of the interior spirit of that extraordinary creature, was a voice of
+perfect music--rich, sonorous, flexible, vibrant, copious in volume, yet
+delicate as a silver thread--a voice
+
+          "Like the whisper of the woods
+    In prime of even, when the stars are few."
+
+It did not surprise that such a woman should truly act Juliet. Much
+though there be in a personality that is assumed, there is much more in
+the personality that assumes it. Golden fire in a porcelain vase would
+not be more luminous than was the soul of that actress as it shone
+through her ideal of Juliet. The performance did not stop short at the
+interpretation of a poetic fancy. It was amply and completely that--but
+it was more than that, being also a living experience. The subtlety of
+it was only equalled by its intensity, and neither was surpassed except
+by its reality. The moment she came upon the scene all eyes followed
+her, and every imaginative mind was vaguely conscious of something
+strange and sad--a feeling of perilous suspense--a dark presentiment of
+impending sorrow. In that was felt at once the presence of a nature to
+which the experience of Juliet would be possible; and thus the conquest
+of human sympathy was effected at the outset--by a condition, and
+without the exercise of a single effort. Fate no less than art
+participated in the result. Though it was the music of Shakespeare that
+flowed from the harp, it was the hand of living genius that smote the
+strings; it was the soul of a great woman that bore its vital testimony
+to the power of the universal passion.
+
+Never was poet truer to the highest truth of spiritual life than
+Shakespeare is when he invests with ineffable mournfulness--shadowy as
+twilight, vague as the remembrance of a dream--those creatures of his
+fancy who are preordained to suffering and a miserable death. Never was
+there sounded a truer note of poetry than that which thrills in
+Othello's, "If it were now to die," or sobs in Juliet's "Too early seen
+unknown, and known too late." It was the exquisite felicity of Adelaide
+Neilson's acting of Juliet that she glided into harmony with that
+tragical undertone, and, with seemingly a perfect unconsciousness of
+it--whether prattling to the old nurse, or moving, sweetly grave and
+softly demure, through the stately figures of the minuet--was already
+marked off from among the living, already overshadowed by a terrible
+fate, already alone in the bleak loneliness of the broken heart.
+Striking the keynote thus, the rest followed in easy sequence. The
+ecstasy of the wooing scene, the agony of the final parting from Romeo,
+the forlorn tremor and passionate frenzy of the terrible night before
+the burial, the fearful awakening, the desperation, the paroxysm, the
+death-blow that then is mercy and kindness,--all these were in unison
+with the spirit at first denoted, and through these was naturally
+accomplished its prefigured doom. If clearly to possess a high purpose,
+to follow it directly, to accomplish it thoroughly, to adorn it with
+every grace, to conceal every vestige of its art, and to cast over the
+art that glamour of poetry which ennobles while it charms, and while it
+dazzles also endears,--if this is greatness in acting, then was Adelaide
+Neilson's Juliet a great embodiment. It never will be forgotten. Its
+soft romance of tone, its splendour of passion, its sustained energy,
+its beauty of speech, and its poetic fragrance are such as fancy must
+always cherish and memory cannot lose. Placing this embodiment beside
+Imogen and Viola, it was easy to understand the secret of her
+extraordinary success. She satisfied for all kinds of persons the sense
+of the ideal. To youthful fancy she was the radiant vision of love and
+pleasure; to grave manhood, the image of all that chivalry should honour
+and strength protect; to woman, the type of noble goodness and constant
+affection; to the scholar, a relief from thought and care; to the
+moralist, a spring of tender pity--that loveliness, however exquisite,
+must fade and vanish. Childhood, mindful of her kindness and her frolic,
+scattered flowers at her feet; and age, that knows the thorny pathways
+of the world, whispered its silent prayer and laid its trembling hands
+in blessing on her head. She sleeps beneath a white marble cross in
+Brompton cemetery, and all her triumphs and glories have dwindled to a
+handful of dust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NOTE ON CYMBELINE.--Genest records productions of Shakespeare's
+_Cymbeline_, in London, as follows: Haymarket, November 8, 1744; Covent
+Garden, April 7, 1746; Drury Lane, November 28, 1761; Covent Garden,
+December 28, 1767; Drury Lane, December 1, 1770; Haymarket, August 9,
+1782; Covent Garden, October 18, 1784; Drury Lane, November 21, 1785,
+and January 29 and March 20, 1787; Covent Garden, May 13, 1800, January
+18, 1806, June 3, 1812, May 29, 1816, and June 2, 1825; and Drury Lane,
+February 9, 1829; Imogen was represented, successively, by Mrs.
+Pritchard, Miss Bride, Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bulkley, Miss
+Younge, Mrs. Jordan, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Pope, Miss Smith, Mrs. H.
+Johnston Miss Stephens, Miss Foote, and Miss Phillips. Later
+representatives of it were Sally Booth, Helen Faucit, and Laura
+Addison.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+EDWIN BOOTH.
+
+
+There was a great shower of meteors on the night of November 13, 1833,
+and on that night, near Baltimore, Maryland, was born the most famous
+tragic actor of America in this generation, Edwin Booth. No other
+American actor of this century has had a rise so rapid or a career so
+early and continuously brilliant as that of Edwin Booth. His father, the
+renowned Junius Brutus Booth, had hallowed the family name with
+distinction and romantic interest. If ever there was a genius upon the
+stage the elder Booth was a genius. His wonderful eyes, his tremendous
+vitality, his electrical action, his power to thrill the feelings and
+easily and inevitably to awaken pity and terror,--all these made him a
+unique being and obtained for him a reputation with old-time audiences
+distinct from that of all other men. He was followed as a marvel, and
+even now the mention of his name stirs, among those who remember him,
+an enthusiasm such as no other theatrical memory can evoke. His sudden
+death (alone, aboard a Mississippi river steamboat, November 30, 1852)
+was pathetic, and the public thought concerning him thenceforward
+commingled tenderness with passionate admiration. When his son Edwin
+began to rise as an actor the people everywhere rejoiced and gave him an
+eager welcome. With such a prestige he had no difficulty in making
+himself heard, and when it was found that he possessed the same strange
+power with which his father had conquered and fascinated the dramatic
+world the popular exultation was unbounded.
+
+Edwin Booth went on the stage in 1849 and accompanied his father to
+California in 1852, and between 1852 and 1856 he gained his first
+brilliant success. The early part of his California life was marked by
+hardship and all of it by vicissitude, but his authentic genius speedily
+flamed out, and long before he returned to the Atlantic seaboard the
+news of his fine exploits had cleared the way for his conquest of all
+hearts. He came back in 1856-57, and from that time onward his fame
+continually increased. He early identified himself with two of the most
+fascinating characters in the drama--the sublime and pathetic Hamlet and
+the majestic, romantic, picturesque, tender, and grimly humorous
+Richelieu. He first acted Hamlet in 1854; he adopted Richelieu in 1856;
+and such was his success with the latter character that for many years
+afterward he made it a rule (acting on the sagacious advice of the
+veteran New Orleans manager, James H. Caldwell), always to introduce
+himself in that part before any new community. The popular sentiment
+toward him early took a romantic turn and the growth of that sentiment
+has been accelerated and strengthened by every important occurrence of
+his private life. In July 1860 he was married to a lovely and
+interesting woman, Miss Mary Devlin, of Troy, and in February 1863 she
+died. In 1867 he lost the Winter Garden theatre, which was burnt down on
+the night of March 22, that year, after a performance of John Howard
+Payne's _Brutus_. He had accomplished beautiful revivals of _Hamlet_,
+_Othello_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and other plays at the Winter
+Garden, and had obtained for that theatre an honourable eminence; but
+when in 1869 he built and opened Booth's Theatre in New York, he
+proceeded to eclipse all his previous efforts and triumphs. The
+productions of _Romeo and Juliet_, _Othello_, _Richelieu_, _Hamlet_, _A
+Winter's Tale_, and _Julius Caesar_ were marked by ample scholarship and
+magnificence. When the enterprise failed and the theatre passed out of
+Edwin Booth's hands (1874) the play-going public endured a calamity. But
+the failure of the actor's noble endeavour to establish a great theatre
+in the first city of America, like every other conspicuous event in his
+career, served but to deepen the public interest in his welfare. He has
+more than retrieved his losses since then, and has made more than one
+triumphal march throughout the length and breadth of the Republic,
+besides acting in London and other cities of Great Britain, and gaining
+extraordinary success upon the stage of Germany. To think of Edwin Booth
+is immediately to be reminded of those leading events in his career,
+while to review them, even in a cursory glance, is to perceive that,
+notwithstanding calamities and sorrows, notwithstanding a bitter
+experience of personal bereavement and of the persecution of envy and
+malice, Edwin Booth has ever been a favourite of fortune.
+
+The bust of Booth as Brutus and that of John Gilbert as Sir Peter,
+standing side by side in the Players' Club, stir many memories and
+prompt many reflections. Gilbert was a young man of twenty-three, and
+had been six years on the stage, before Edwin Booth was born; and when,
+at the age of sixteen, Booth made his first appearance (September 10,
+1849, at the Boston Museum, as Tressil to his father's Richard), Gilbert
+had become a famous actor. The younger man, however, speedily rose to
+the higher level of the best dramatic ability as well as the best
+theatrical culture of his time; and it is significant of the splendid
+triumph of tragic genius, and of the advantage it possesses over that of
+comedy in its immediate effect upon mankind, that when the fine and
+exceptional combination was made (May 21, 1888, at the Metropolitan
+Opera House, New York), for a performance of _Hamlet_ for the benefit of
+Lester Wallack, Edwin Booth acted Hamlet, with John Gilbert for
+Polonius, and Joseph Jefferson for the first Grave-digger. Booth has had
+his artistic growth in a peculiar period in the history of dramatic art
+in America. Just before his time the tragic sceptre was in the hands of
+Edwin Forrest, who never succeeded in winning the intellectual part of
+the public, but was constantly compelled to dominate a multitude that
+never heard any sound short of thunder and never felt anything till it
+was hit with a club. The bulk of Forrest's great fortune was gained by
+him with _Metamora_, which is rant and fustian. He himself despised it
+and deeply despised and energetically cursed the public that forced him
+to act in it. Forrest's best powers, indeed, were never really
+appreciated by the average mind of his fervent admirers. He lived in a
+rough period and he had to use a hard method to subdue and please it.
+Edwin Booth was fortunate in coming later, when the culture of the
+people had somewhat increased, and when the old sledge-hammer style was
+going out, so that he gained almost without an effort the refined and
+fastidious classes. As long ago as 1857, with all his natural grace,
+refinement, romantic charm, and fine bearing, his impetuosity was such
+that even the dullest sensibilities were aroused and thrilled and
+astonished by him,--and so it happened that he also gained the
+multitude. To think of these things is to realise the steady advance of
+the stage in the esteem of the best people, and to feel grateful that we
+do not live in "the palmy days"--those raw times that John Brougham
+used to call the days of light houses and heavy gas bills.
+
+Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke, wife of the distinguished and excellent comedian
+John S. Clarke, wrote a life of her father, Junius Brutus Booth, in
+which she has recounted interesting passages in his career, and
+chronicled significant and amusing anecdotes of his peculiarities. He
+was on the stage from 1813 to 1852, in which latter year he died, aged
+fifty-six. In his youth he served for a while in the British navy,
+showed some talent for painting, learned the printer's trade, wrote a
+little, and dabbled in sculpture--all before he turned actor. The
+powerful hostility of Edmund Kean and his adherents drove him from the
+London stage, though not till after he had gained honours there, and he
+came to America in 1821, and bought a farm near Baltimore, where he
+settled, and where his son Edwin (the seventh of ten children) was born.
+That farm remained in the family till 1880, when for the first time it
+changed hands. There is a certain old cherry-tree growing upon
+it--remarkable among cherry-trees for being large, tall, straight,
+clean, and handsome--amid the boughs of which the youthful Edwin might
+often have been found in his juvenile days. It is a coincidence that
+Edwin L. Davenport and John McCullough, also honoured names in American
+stage history, were born on the same day in the same month with Edwin
+Booth, though in different years.
+
+From an early age Edwin Booth was associated with his father in all the
+wanderings and strange and often sad adventures of that wayward man of
+genius, and no doubt the many sorrowful experiences of his youth
+deepened the gloom of his inherited temperament. Those who know him well
+are aware that he has great tenderness of heart and abundant playful
+humour; that his mind is one of extraordinary liveliness, and that he
+sympathises keenly and cordially with the joys and sorrows of others;
+and yet that he seems saturated with sadness, isolated from
+companionship, lonely and alone. It is this temperament, combined with a
+sombre and melancholy aspect of countenance, that has helped to make him
+so admirable in the character of Hamlet. Of his fitness for that part
+his father was the first to speak, when on a night many years ago, in
+Sacramento, they had dressed for Pierre and Jaffier, in _Venice
+Preserved_. Edwin, as Jaffier, had put on a close-fitting robe of black
+velvet. "You look like Hamlet," the father said. The time was destined
+to come when Edwin Booth would be accepted all over America as the
+greatest Hamlet of the day. In the season of 1864-65, at the Winter
+Garden theatre, New York, he acted that part for a hundred nights in
+succession, accomplishing a feat then unprecedented in theatrical
+annals. Since then Henry Irving, in London, has acted Hamlet two hundred
+consecutive times in one season; but this latter achievement, in the
+present day and in the capital city of the world, was less difficult
+than Edwin Booth's exploit, performed in turbulent New York in the
+closing months of the terrible civil war.
+
+The elder Booth was a short, spare, muscular man, with a splendid chest,
+a symmetrical Greek head, a pale countenance, a voice of wonderful
+compass and thrilling power, dark hair, and blue eyes. His son's
+resemblance to him is chiefly obvious in the shape of the head and face,
+the arch and curve of the heavy eyebrows, the radiant and constantly
+shifting light of expression that animates the countenance, the natural
+grace of carriage, and the celerity of movement. Booth's eyes are dark
+brown, and seem to turn black in moments of excitement, and they are
+capable of conveying, with electrical effect, the most diverse
+meanings--the solemnity of lofty thought, the tenderness of affection,
+the piteousness of forlorn sorrow, the awful sense of spiritual
+surroundings, the woful weariness of despair, the mocking glee of wicked
+sarcasm, the vindictive menace of sinister purpose, and the lightning
+glare of baleful wrath. In range of facial expressiveness his
+countenance is thus fully equal to that of his father. The present
+writer saw the elder Booth but once, and then in a comparatively
+inferior part--Pescara, in Shiel's ferocious tragedy of _The Apostate_.
+He was a terrible presence. He was the incarnation of smooth, specious,
+malignant, hellish rapacity. His exultant malice seemed to buoy him
+above the ground. He floated rather than walked. His glance was deadly.
+His clear, high, cutting, measured tone was the exasperating note of
+hideous cruelty. He was acting a fiend then, and making the monster not
+only possible but actual. He certainly gave a greater impression of
+overwhelming power than is given by Edwin Booth, and seemed a more
+formidable and tremendous man. But his face was not more brilliant than
+that of his renowned son; and in fact it was, if anything, somewhat less
+splendid in power of the eye. There is a book about him, called _The
+Tragedian_, written by Thomas R. Gould, who also made a noble bust of
+him in marble; and those who never saw him can obtain a good idea of
+what sort of an actor he was by reading that book. It conveys the image
+of a greater actor, but not a more brilliant one, than Edwin Booth. Only
+one man of our time has equalled Edwin Booth in this singular splendour
+of countenance--the great New England orator Rufus Choate. Had Choate
+been an actor upon the stage--as he was before a jury--with those
+terrible eyes of his, and that passionate Arab face, he must have
+towered fully to the height of the tradition of George Frederick Cooke.
+
+The lurid flashes of passion and the vehement outbursts in the acting of
+Edwin Booth are no doubt the points that most persons who have seen him
+will most clearly remember. Through these a spectator naturally discerns
+the essential nature of an actor. The image of George Frederick Cooke,
+pointing with his long, lean forefinger and uttering Sir Giles's
+imprecation upon Marrall, never fades out of theatrical history.
+Garrick's awful frenzy in the storm scene of King Lear, Kean's colossal
+agony in the farewell speech of Othello, Macready's heartrending yell in
+_Werner_, Junius Booth's terrific utterance of Richard's "What do they
+i' the north?" Forrest's hyena snarl when, as Jack Cade, he met Lord Say
+in the thicket, or his volumed cry of tempestuous fury when, as Lucius
+Brutus, he turned upon Tarquin under the black midnight sky--those are
+things never to be forgotten. Edwin Booth has provided many such great
+moments in acting, and the traditions of the stage will not let them
+die. To these no doubt we must look for illuminative manifestations of
+hereditary genius. Garrick, Henderson, Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Booth,
+and Edwin Booth are names that make a natural sequence in one
+intellectual family. Could we but see them together, we should
+undoubtedly find them, in many particulars, kindred. Henderson
+flourished in the school of nature that Garrick had created--to the
+discomfiture of Quin and all the classics. Cooke had seen Henderson
+act, and was thought to resemble him. Edmund Kean worshipped the memory
+of Cooke and repeated many of the elder tragedian's ways. So far,
+indeed, did he carry his homage that when he was in New York in 1824 he
+caused Cooke's remains to be taken from the vault beneath St. Paul's
+church and buried in the church-yard, where a monument, set up by Kean
+and restored by his son Charles, by Sothern, and by Edwin Booth, still
+marks their place of sepulture. That was the occasion when, as Dr.
+Francis records, in his book on old New York, Kean took the index finger
+of Cooke's right hand, and he, the doctor, took his skull, as relics. "I
+have got Cooke's style in acting," Kean once said, "but the public will
+never know it, I am so much smaller." It was not the imitation of a
+copyist; it was the spontaneous devotion and direction of a kindred
+soul. The elder Booth saw Kean act, and although injured by a rivalry
+that Kean did not hesitate to make malicious, admired him with honest
+fervour. "I will yield Othello to him," he said, "but neither Richard
+nor Sir Giles." Forrest thought Edmund Kean the greatest actor of the
+age, and copied him, especially in Othello. Pathos, with all that it
+implies, seems to have been Kean's special excellence. Terror was the
+elder Booth's. Edwin Booth may be less than either, but he unites
+attributes of both.
+
+In the earlier part of his career Edwin Booth was accustomed to act Sir
+Giles Overreach, Sir Edward Mortimer, Pescara, and a number of other
+parts of the terrific order, that he has since discarded. He was fine in
+every one of them. The first sound of his voice when, as Sir Edward
+Mortimer, he was heard speaking off the scene, was eloquent of deep
+suffering, concentrated will, and a strange, sombre, formidable
+character. The sweet, exquisite, icy, infernal joy with which, as
+Pescara, he told his rival that there should be "music" was almost
+comical in its effect of terror: it drove the listener across the line
+of tragical tension and made him hysterical with the grimness of a
+deadly humour. His swift defiance to Lord Lovell, as Sir Giles, and
+indeed the whole mighty and terrible action with which he carried that
+scene--from "What, are you pale?" down to the grisly and horrid viper
+pretence and reptile spasm of death--were simply tremendous. This was in
+the days when his acting yet retained the exuberance of a youthful
+spirit, before "the philosophic mind" had checked the headlong currents
+of the blood or curbed imagination in its lawless flight. And those
+parts not only admitted of bold colour and extravagant action but
+demanded them. Even his Hamlet was touched with that elemental fire. Not
+alone in the great junctures of the tragedy--the encounters with the
+ghost, the parting with Ophelia, the climax of the play-scene, the
+slaughter of poor old Polonius in delirious mistake for the king, and
+the avouchment to Laertes in the graveyard--was he brilliant and
+impetuous; but in almost everything that quality of temperament showed
+itself, and here, of course, it was in excess. He no longer hurls the
+pipe into the flies when saying "Though you may fret me, you can not
+play upon me"; but he used to do so then, and the rest of the
+performance was kindred with that part of it. He needed, in that period
+of his development, the more terrible passions to express. Pathos and
+spirituality and the mountain air of great thought were yet to be. His
+Hamlet was only dazzling--the glorious possibility of what it has since
+become. But his Sir Giles was a consummate work of genius--as good then
+as it ever afterward became, and better than any other that has been
+seen since, not excepting that of E.L. Davenport. And in all kindred
+characters he showed himself a man of genius. His success was great. The
+admiration that he inspired partook of zeal that almost amounted to
+craziness. When he walked in the streets of Boston in 1857 his shining
+face, his compact figure, and his elastic step drew every eye, and
+people would pause and turn in groups to look at him.
+
+The actor is born but the artist must be made, and the actor who is not
+an artist only half fulfils his powers. Edwin Booth had not been long
+upon the stage before he showed himself to be an actor. During his first
+season he played Cassio in _Othello_, Wilford in _The Iron Chest_, and
+Titus in _The Fall of Tarquin_, and he played them all auspiciously
+well. But his father, not less wise than kind, knew that the youth must
+be left to himself to acquire experience, if he was ever to become an
+artist, and so left him in California, "to rough it," and there, and in
+the Sandwich Islands and Australia, he had four years of the most severe
+training that hardship, discipline, labour, sorrow, and stern reality
+can furnish. When he came east again, in the autumn of 1856, he was no
+longer a novice but an educated, artistic tragedian, still crude in some
+things, though on the right road, and in the fresh, exultant vigour, if
+not yet the full maturity, of extraordinary powers. He appeared first at
+Baltimore, and after that made a tour of the south, and during the
+ensuing four years he was seen in many cities all over the country. In
+the summer of 1860 he went to England, and acted in London, Liverpool,
+and Manchester, but he was back again in New York in 1862, and from
+September 21, 1863 to March 23, 1867 he managed what was known as the
+Winter Garden theatre, and incidentally devoted himself to the
+accomplishment of some of the stateliest revivals of standard plays that
+have ever been made in America. On February 3, 1869 he opened Booth's
+Theatre and that he managed for five years. In 1876 he made a tour of
+the south, which, so great was the enthusiasm his presence aroused, was
+nothing less than a triumphal progress. In San Francisco, where he
+filled an engagement of eight weeks, the receipts exceeded $96,000, a
+result at that time unprecedented on the dramatic stage.
+
+The circumstances of the stage and of the lives of actors have greatly
+changed since the generation went out to which such men as Junius Booth
+and Augustus A. Addams belonged. No tragedian would now be so mad as to
+put himself in pawn for drink, as Cooke is said to have done, nor be
+found scraping the ham from the sandwiches provided for his luncheon, as
+Junius Booth was, before going on to play Shylock. Our theatre has no
+longer a Richardson to light up a pan of red fire, as that old showman
+once did, to signalise the fall of the screen in _The School for
+Scandal_. The eccentrics and the taste for them have passed away. It
+seems really once to have been thought that the actor who did not often
+make a maniac of himself with drink could not be possessed of the divine
+fire. That demonstration of genius is not expected now, nor does the
+present age exact from its favourite players the performance of all
+sorts and varieties of parts. Forrest was the first of the prominent
+actors to break away from the old usage in this latter particular.
+During the most prosperous years of his life, from 1837 to 1850, he
+acted only about a dozen parts, and most of them were old. The only new
+parts that he studied were Claude Melnotte, Richelieu, Jack Cade, and
+Mordaunt, the latter in the play of _The Patrician's Daughter_, and he
+"recovered" Marc Antony, which he particularly liked. Edwin Booth, who
+had inherited from his father the insanity of intemperance, conquered
+that utterly, many years ago, and nobly and grandly trod it beneath his
+feet; and as he matured in his career, through acting every kind of
+part, from a dandy negro up to Hamlet, he at last made choice of the
+characters that afford scope for his powers and his aspirations, and so
+settled upon a definite, restricted repertory. His characters were
+Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Iago, Richard the Second, Richard the
+Third, Shylock, Cardinal Wolsey, Benedick, Petruchio, Richelieu, Lucius
+Brutus, Bertuccio, Ruy Blas, and Don Caesar de Bazan. These he acted in
+customary usage, and to these he occasionally added Marcus Brutus,
+Antony, Cassius, Claude Melnotte, and the Stranger. The range thus
+indicated is extraordinary; but more extraordinary still was the
+evenness of the actor's average excellence throughout the breadth of
+that range.
+
+Booth's tragedy is better than his elegant comedy. There are other
+actors who equal or surpass him in Benedick or Don Caesar. The comedy in
+which he excels is that of silvery speciousness and bitter sarcasm, as
+in portions of Iago and Richard the Third and the simulated madness of
+Lucius Brutus, and the comedy of grim drollery, as in portions of
+Richelieu--his expression of those veins being wonderfully perfect. But
+no other actor who has trod the American stage in our day has equalled
+him in certain attributes of tragedy that are essentially poetic. He is
+not at his best, indeed, in all the tragic parts that he acts; and, like
+his father, he is an uneven actor in the parts to which he is best
+suited. No person can be said to know Edwin Booth's acting who has not
+seen him play the same part several times. His artistic treatment will
+generally be found adequate, but his mood or spirit will continually
+vary. He cannot at will command it, and when it is absent his
+performance seems cold. This characteristic is, perhaps, inseparable
+from the poetic temperament. Each ideal that he presents is poetic; and
+the suitable and adequate presentation of it, therefore, needs poetic
+warmth and glamour. Booth never goes behind his poet's text to find a
+prose image in the pages of historic fact. The spectator who takes the
+trouble to look into his art will find it, indeed, invariably accurate
+as to historic basis, and will find that all essential points and
+questions of scholarship have been considered by the actor. But this is
+not the secret of its power upon the soul. That power resides in its
+charm, and that charm consists in its poetry. Standing on the lonely
+ramparts of Elsinore, and with awe-stricken, preoccupied, involuntary
+glances questioning the star-lit midnight air, while he talks with his
+attendant friends, Edwin Booth's Hamlet is the simple, absolute
+realisation of Shakespeare's haunted prince, and raises no question, and
+leaves no room for inquiry, whether the Danes in the Middle Ages wore
+velvet robes or had long flaxen hair. It is dark, mysterious,
+melancholy, beautiful--a vision of dignity and of grace, made sublime by
+suffering, made weird and awful by "thoughts beyond the reaches of our
+souls." Sorrow never looked more wofully and ineffably lovely than his
+sorrow looks in the parting scene with Ophelia, and frenzy never spoke
+with a wilder glee of horrid joy and fearful exultation than is heard
+in his tempestuous cry of delirium, "Nay, I know not: is it the king?"
+
+An actor who is fine only at points is not, of course, a perfect actor.
+The remark of Coleridge about the acting of Edmund Kean, that it was
+like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning," has misled many
+persons as to Kean's art. Macready bears a similar testimony. But the
+weight of evidence will satisfy the reader that Kean was, in fact, a
+careful student and that he never neglected any detail of his art. This
+is certainly true of Edwin Booth. In the level plains that lie between
+the mountain-peaks of expression he walks with as sure a footstep and as
+firm a tread as on the summit of the loftiest crag or the verge of the
+steepest abyss. In 1877-78, in association with the present writer, he
+prepared for the press an edition of fifteen of the plays in which he
+acts, and these were published for the use of actors. There is not a
+line in either of those plays that he has not studiously and thoroughly
+considered; not a vexed point that he has not scanned; not a
+questionable reading that he has not, for his own purposes in acting,
+satisfactorily settled. His Shakespearean scholarship is extensive and
+sound, and it is no less minute than ample. His stage business has been
+arranged, as stage business ought to be, with scientific precision. If,
+as king Richard the Third, he is seen to be abstractedly toying with a
+ring upon one of his fingers, or unsheathing and sheathing his dagger,
+those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because
+they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by
+the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as
+Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding
+spectre, as a protective cross--the symbol of that religion to which
+Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself
+and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy he
+directs that one of the skulls thrown up by the first clown shall have a
+tattered and mouldy fool's-cap adhering to it, so that it may attract
+attention, and be singled out from the others, as "Yorick's skull, the
+king's jester." These are little things; but it is of a thousand little
+things that a dramatic performance is composed, and without this care
+for detail--which must be precise, logical, profound, vigilant,
+unerring, and at the same time always unobtrusive and seemingly
+involuntary--there can be neither cohesion, nor symmetry, nor an
+illusory image consistently maintained; and all great effects would
+become tricks of mechanism and detached exploits of theatrical force.
+
+The absence of this thoroughness in such acting as that of Edwin Booth
+would instantly be felt; its presence is seldom adequately appreciated.
+We feel the perfect charm of the illusion in the great fourth act of
+_Richelieu_--one of the most thrilling situations, as Booth fills it,
+that ever were created upon the stage; but we should not feel this had
+not the foreground of character, incident, and experience been prepared
+with consummate thoroughness. The character of Richelieu is one that the
+elder Booth could never act. He tried it once, upon urgent solicitation,
+but he had not proceeded far before he caught Joseph around the waist,
+and with that astonished friar in his arms proceeded to dash into a
+waltz, over which the curtain was dropped. He had no sympathy with the
+moonlight mistiness and lace-like complexity of that weird and
+many-fibred nature. It lacked for him the reality of the imagination,
+the trumpet blare and tempest rush of active passion. But Edwin Booth,
+coming after Forrest, who was its original in America, has made
+Richelieu so entirely his own that no actor living can stand a
+comparison with him in the character. Macready was the first
+representative of the part, as everybody knows, and his performance of
+it was deemed magnificent; but when Edwin Booth acted it in London in
+1880, old John Ryder, the friend and advocate of Macready, who had
+participated with him in all his plays, said to the American tragedian,
+with a broken voice and with tears in his eyes, "You have thrown down my
+idol." Two at least of those great moments in acting that everybody
+remembers were furnished by Booth in this character--the defiance of the
+masked assailant, at Rouel, and the threat of excommunication delivered
+upon Barradas. No spectator possessed of imagination and sensibility
+ever saw, without utter forgetfulness of the stage, the imperial
+entrance of that Richelieu into the gardens of the Louvre and into the
+sullen presence of hostile majesty. The same spell of genius is felt in
+kindred moments of his greater impersonations. His Iago, standing in the
+dark street, with sword in hand, above the prostrate bodies of Cassio
+and Roderigo, and as the sudden impulse to murder them strikes his
+brain, breathing out in a blood-curdling whisper, "How silent is this
+town!" his Bertuccio, begging at the door of the banquet-hall, and
+breaking down in hysterics of affected glee and maddening agony; his
+Lear, at that supreme moment of intolerable torture when he parts away
+from Goneril and Regan, with his wild scream of revenges that shall be
+the terrors of the earth; his Richard the Third, with the gigantic
+effrontery of his "Call him again," and with his whole matchless and
+wonderful utterance of the awful remorse speech with which the king
+awakens from his last earthly sleep--those, among many others, rank with
+the best dramatic images that ever were chronicled, and may well be
+cited to illustrate Booth's invincible and splendid adequacy at the
+great moments of his art.
+
+Edwin Booth has been tried by some of the most terrible afflictions that
+ever tested the fortitude of a human soul. Over his youth, plainly
+visible, impended the lowering cloud of insanity. While he was yet a
+boy, and when literally struggling for life in the semi-barbarous wilds
+of old California, he lost his beloved father, under circumstances of
+singular misery. In early manhood he laid in her grave the woman of his
+first love--the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely
+past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all that knew her
+precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well-nigh
+broken and his life was well-nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic
+brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world.
+Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into
+the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America,
+and he saw his fortune of more than a million dollars, together with the
+toil of some of the best years of his life, frittered away. Under all
+trials he has borne bravely up, and kept the even, steadfast tenor of
+his course; strong, patient, gentle, neither elated by public homage nor
+imbittered by private grief. Such a use of high powers in the dramatic
+art, and the development and maintenance of such a character behind
+them, entitle him to the affection of his countrymen, proud equally of
+his goodness and his renown.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+MARY ANDERSON: HERMIONE: PERDITA.
+
+
+On November 25, 1875 an audience was assembled in one of the theatres of
+Louisville, Kentucky, to see "the first appearance upon any stage" of "a
+young lady of Louisville," who was announced to play Shakespeare's
+Juliet. That young lady was in fact a girl, in her sixteenth year, who
+had never received any practical stage training, whose education had
+been comprised in five years of ordinary schooling, whose observation of
+life had never extended beyond the narrow limits of a provincial city,
+who was undeveloped, unheralded, unknown, and poor, and whose only
+qualifications for the task she had set herself to accomplish were the
+impulse of genius and the force of commanding character. She dashed at
+the work with all the vigour of abounding and enthusiastic youth, and
+with all the audacity of complete inexperience. A rougher performance of
+Juliet probably was never seen, but through all the disproportion and
+turbulence of that effort the authentic charm of a beautiful nature was
+distinctly revealed. The sweetness, the sincerity, the force, the
+exceptional superiority and singular charm of that nature could not be
+mistaken. The uncommon stature and sumptuous physical beauty of the girl
+were obvious. Above all, her magnificent voice--copious, melodious,
+penetrating, loud and clear, yet soft and gentle--delighted every ear
+and touched every heart. The impersonation of Juliet was not highly
+esteemed by judicious hearers; but some persons who saw that performance
+felt and said that a new actress had risen and that a great career had
+begun. Those prophetic voices were right. That "young lady of
+Louisville" was Mary Anderson.
+
+It is seldom in stage history that the biographer comes upon such a
+character as that of Mary Anderson, or is privileged to muse over the
+story of such a career as she has had. In many cases the narrative of
+the life of an actress is a narrative of talents perverted, of
+opportunity misused, of failure, misfortune, and suffering. For one
+story like that of Mrs. Siddons there are many like that of Mrs.
+Robinson. For one name like that of Charlotte Cushman or that of Helen
+Faucit there are many like that of Lucille Western or that of Matilda
+Heron--daughters of sorrow and victims of trouble. The mind lingers,
+accordingly, impressed and pleased with a sense of sweet personal worth
+as well as of genius and beauty upon the record of a representative
+American actress, as noble as she was brilliant, and as lovely in her
+domestic life as she was beautiful, fortunate, and renowned in her
+public pursuits. The exposition of her nature, as apprehended through
+her acting, constitutes the principal part of her biography.
+
+Mary Anderson, a native of California, was born at Sacramento, July 28,
+1859. Her father, Charles Joseph Anderson, who died in 1863, aged
+twenty-nine, and was buried in Magnolia cemetery, Mobile, Alabama, was
+an officer in the service of the Southern Confederacy at the time of his
+death, and he is said to have been a handsome and dashing young man. Her
+mother, Marie Antoinette Leugers, was a native of Philadelphia. Her
+earlier years were passed in Louisville, whither she was taken in 1860,
+and she was there taught in a Roman Catholic school and reared in the
+Roman Catholic faith under the guidance of a Franciscan priest, Anthony
+Miller, her mother's uncle. She left school before she was fourteen
+years old and she went upon the stage before she was sixteen. She had
+while a child seen various theatrical performances, notably those given
+by Edwin Booth, and her mind had been strongly drawn toward the stage
+under the influence of those sights. The dramatic characters that she
+first studied were male characters--those of Hamlet, Wolsey, Richelieu,
+and Richard III.--and to those she added Schiller's Joan of Arc. She
+studied those parts privately, and she knew them all and knew them well.
+Professor Noble Butler, of Louisville, gave her instruction in English
+literature and elocution, and in 1874, at Cincinnati, Charlotte Cushman
+said a few encouraging words to her, and told her to persevere in
+following the stage, and to "begin at the top." George Vandenhoff gave
+her a few lessons before she came out, and then followed her debut as
+Juliet, leading to her first regular engagement, which began at Barney
+Macaulay's Theatre, Louisville, January 20, 1876. From that time onward
+for thirteen years she was an actress,--never in a stock company but
+always as a star,--and her name became famous in Great Britain as well
+as America. She had eight seasons of steadily increasing prosperity on
+the American stage before she went abroad to act, and she became a
+favourite all over the United States. She filled three seasons at the
+Lyceum Theatre, London (from September 1, 1883, to April 5, 1884; from
+November 1, 1884, to April 25, 1885; and from September 10, 1887, to
+March 24, 1888), and her success there surpassed, in profit, that of any
+American actor who had appeared in England. She revived _Romeo and
+Juliet_ with much splendour at the London Lyceum on November 1, 1884,
+and she restored _A Winter's Tale_ to the stage, bringing forward that
+comedy on September 10, 1887, and carrying it through the season. She
+made several prosperous tours of the English provincial theatres, and
+established herself as a favourite actress in fastidious Edinburgh,
+critical Manchester, and impulsive but exacting Dublin. The repertory
+with which she gained fame and fortune included Juliet, Hermione,
+Perdita, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Julia, Bianca, Evadne, Parthenia,
+Pauline, The Countess, Galatea, Clarice, Ion, Meg Merrilies, Berthe,
+and the Duchess de Torrenueva. She incidentally acted a few other parts,
+Desdemona being one of them. Her distinctive achievements were in
+Shakespearean drama. She adopted into her repertory two plays by
+Tennyson, _The Cup_ and _The Falcon_, but never produced them. This
+record signifies the resources of mind, the personal charm, the exalted
+spirit, and the patient, wisely directed and strenuous zeal that
+sustained her achievements and justified her success.
+
+Aspirants in the field of art are continually coming to the surface. In
+poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and in acting--which involves and
+utilises those other arts--the line of beginners is endless. Constantly,
+as the seasons roll by, these essayists emerge, and as constantly, after
+a little time, they disappear. The process is sequent upon an obvious
+law of spiritual life,--that all minds which are conscious of the art
+impulse must at least make an effort toward expression, but that no mind
+can succeed in the effort unless, in addition to the art impulse, it
+possesses also the art faculty. For expression is the predominant
+necessity of human nature. Out of this proceed forms and influences of
+beauty. These react upon mankind, pleasing an instinct for the
+beautiful, and developing the faculty of taste. Other and finer forms
+and influences of beauty ensue, civilisation is advanced, and thus
+finally the way is opened toward that condition of immortal spiritual
+happiness which this process of experience prefigures and prophesies.
+But the art faculty is of rare occurrence. At long intervals there is a
+break in the usual experience of stage failure, and some person hitherto
+unknown not only takes the field but keeps it. When Garrick came out, as
+the Duke of Gloster, in the autumn of 1741, in London, he had never been
+heard of, but within a brief time he was famous. "He at once decided the
+public taste," said Macklin; and Pope summed up the victory in the
+well-known sentence, "That young man never had an equal, and will never
+have a rival." Tennyson's line furnishes the apt and comprehensive
+comment--"The many fail, the one succeeds." Mary Anderson in her day
+furnished the most conspicuous and striking example, aside from that of
+Adelaide Neilson, to which it is possible to refer of this exceptional
+experience. And yet, even after years of trial and test, it is doubtful
+whether the excellence of that remarkable actress was entirely
+comprehended in her own country. The provincial custom of waiting for
+foreign authorities to discover our royal minds is one from which many
+inhabitants of America have not yet escaped. As an actress, indeed, Mary
+Anderson was, probably, more popular than any player on the American
+stage excepting Edwin Booth or Joseph Jefferson; but there is a
+difference between popularity and just and comprehensive intellectual
+recognition. Many actors get the one; few get the other.
+
+Much of the contemporary criticism that is lavished upon actors in this
+exigent period--so bountifully supplied with critical observations, so
+poorly furnished with creative art--touches only upon the surface.
+Acting is measured with a tape and the chief demand seems to be for
+form. This is right, and indeed is imperative, whenever it is certain
+that the actor at his best is one who never can rise above the
+high-water mark of correct mechanism. There are cases that need a deeper
+method of inquiry and a more searching glance. A wise critic, when this
+emergency comes, is something more than an expert who gives an opinion
+upon a professional exploit. The special piece of work may contain
+technical flaws, and yet there may be within it a soul worth all the
+"icily regular and splendidly null" achievements that ever were possible
+to proficient mediocrity. That soul is visible only to the observer who
+can look through the art into the interior spirit of the artist, and
+thus can estimate a piece of acting according to its inspirational drift
+and the enthralling and ennobling personality out of which it springs.
+The acting of Mary Anderson, from the first moment of her career, was of
+the kind that needs that deep insight and broad judgment,--aiming to
+recognise and rightly estimate its worth. Yet few performers of the day
+were so liberally favoured with the monitions of dullness and the
+ponderous patronage of self-complacent folly.
+
+Conventional judgment as to Mary Anderson's acting expressed itself in
+one statement--"she is cold." There could not be a greater error. That
+quality in Mary Anderson's acting--a reflex from her spiritual
+nature--which produced upon the conventional mind the effect of coldness
+was in fact distinction, the attribute of being exceptional. The
+judgment that she was cold was a resentful judgment, and was given in a
+spirit of detraction. It proceeded from an order of mind that can never
+be content with the existence of anything above its own level. "He
+hath," said Iago, speaking of Cassio, "a daily beauty in his life that
+makes me ugly." Those detractors did not understand themselves as well
+as the wily Italian understood himself, and they did not state their
+attitude with such precision; in fact, they did not state it at all, for
+it was unconscious with them and involuntary. They saw a being unlike
+themselves, they vaguely apprehended the presence of a superior nature,
+and that they resented. The favourite popular notion is that all men are
+born free and equal; which is false. Free and equal they all are,
+undoubtedly, in the eye of the law. But every man is born subject to
+heredity and circumstance, and whoever will investigate his life will
+perceive that he never has been able to stray beyond the compelling and
+constraining force of his character--which is his fate. All men,
+moreover, are unequal. To one human being is given genius; to another,
+beauty; to another, strength; to another, exceptional judgment; to
+another, exceptional memory; to another, grace and charm; to still
+another, physical ugliness and spiritual obliquity, moral taint, and
+every sort of disabling weakness. To the majority of persons Nature
+imparts mediocrity, and it is from mediocrity that the derogatory denial
+emanates as to the superior men and women of our race. A woman of the
+average kind is not difficult to comprehend. There is nothing
+distinctive about her. She is fond of admiration; rather readily
+censorious of other women; charitable toward male rakes; and partial to
+fine attire. The poet Wordsworth's formula, "Praise, blame, love,
+kisses, tears, and smiles," comprises all that is essential for her
+existence, and that bard has himself precisely described her, in a
+grandfatherly and excruciating couplet, as
+
+    "A creature not too bright and good
+    For human nature's daily food."
+
+Women of that sort are not called "cold." The standard is ordinary and
+it is understood. But when a woman appears in art whose life is not
+ruled by the love of admiration, whose nature is devoid of vanity, who
+looks with indifference upon adulation, whose head is not turned by
+renown, whose composure is not disturbed by flattery, whose simplicity
+is not marred by wealth, who does not go into theatrical hysterics and
+offer that condition of artificial delirium as the mood of genius in
+acting, who above all makes it apparent in her personality and her
+achievements that the soul can be sufficient to itself and can exist
+without taking on a burden of the fever or dulness of other lives, there
+is a flutter of vague discontent among the mystified and bothered rank
+and file, and we are apprised that she is "cold." That is what happened
+in the case of Mary Anderson.
+
+What are the faculties and attributes essential to great success in
+acting? A sumptuous and supple figure that can realise the ideals of
+statuary; a mobile countenance that can strongly and unerringly express
+the feelings of the heart and the workings of the mind; eyes that can
+awe with the majesty or startle with the terror or thrill with the
+tenderness of their soul-subduing gaze; a voice, deep, clear, resonant,
+flexible, that can range over the wide compass of emotion and carry its
+meaning in varying music to every ear and every heart; intellect to
+shape the purposes and control the means of mimetic art; deep knowledge
+of human nature; delicate intuitions; the skill to listen as well as
+the art to speak; imagination to grasp the ideal of a character in all
+its conditions of experience; the instinct of the sculptor to give it
+form, of the painter to give it colour, and of the poet to give it
+movement; and, back of all, the temperament of genius--the genialised
+nervous system--to impart to the whole artistic structure the thrill of
+spiritual vitality. Mary Anderson's acting revealed those faculties and
+attributes, and those observers who realised the poetic spirit, the
+moral majesty, and the isolation of mind that she continually suggested
+felt that she was an extraordinary woman. Such moments in her acting as
+that of Galatea's mute supplication at the last of earthly life, that of
+Juliet's desolation after the final midnight parting with the last human
+creature whom she may ever behold, and that of Hermione's despair when
+she covers her face and falls as if stricken dead, were the eloquent
+denotements of power, and in those and such as those--with which her art
+abounded--was the fulfilment of every hope that her acting inspired and
+the vindication of every encomium that it received.
+
+Early in her professional career, when considering her acting, the
+present essayist quoted as applicable to her those lovely lines by
+Wordsworth:--
+
+    "The stars of midnight shall be dear
+    To her, and she shall lean her ear
+        In many a secret place
+    Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
+    And beauty born of murmuring sound
+        Shall pass into her face."
+
+In the direction of development thus indicated she steadily advanced.
+Her affiliations were with grandeur, purity, and loveliness. An inherent
+and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more
+and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her
+imagination--Ion, Galatea, Hermione--but she did not leave them
+soulless. In the interpretation of passion and the presentation of its
+results she revealed the striking truth that her perceptions could
+discern those consequences that are recorded in the soul and in
+comparison with which the dramatic entanglements of visible life are
+puny and evanescent. Though living in the rapid stream of the social
+world she dwelt aloof from it. She thought deeply, and in mental
+direction she took the pathway of intellectual power. It is not
+surprising that the true worth of such a nature was not accurately
+apprehended. Minds that are self-poised, stately, irresponsive to human
+weakness, unconventional and self-liberated from allegiance to the
+commonplace are not fully and instantly discernible, and may well
+perplex the smiling glance of frivolity; but they are permanent forces
+in the education of the human race. Mary Anderson retired from the
+stage, under the pressure of extreme fatigue, in the beginning of 1889
+and entered upon a matrimonial life on June 17, 1890. It is believed
+that her retirement is permanent. The historical interest attaching to
+her dramatic career justifies the preservation of this commemorative
+essay.
+
+There is so much beauty in the comedy of _A Winter's Tale_--so much
+thought, character, humour, philosophy, sweetly serene feeling and
+loveliness of poetic language--that the public ought to feel obliged to
+any one who successfully restores it to the stage, from which it usually
+is banished. The piece was written in the maturity of Shakespeare's
+marvellous powers, and indeed some of the Shakespearean scholars believe
+it to be the last work that fell from his hand. Human life, as depicted
+in _A Winter's Tale_, shows itself like what it always seems to be in
+the eyes of patient, tolerant, magnanimous experience--the eyes "that
+have kept watch o'er man's mortality"--for it is a scene of inexplicable
+contrasts and vicissitudes, seemingly the chaos of caprice and chance,
+yet always, in fact, beneficently overruled and guided to good ends.
+Human beings are shown in it as full of weakness; often as the puppets
+of laws that they do not understand and of universal propensities and
+impulses into which they never pause to inquire; almost always as
+objects of benignant pity. The woful tangle of human existence is here
+viewed with half-cheerful, half-sad tolerance, yet with the hope and
+belief that all will come right at last. The mood of the comedy is
+pensive but radically sweet. The poet is like the forest in Emerson's
+subtle vision of the inherent exultation of nature:--
+
+    "Sober, on a fund of joy,
+    The woods at heart are glad."
+
+Mary Anderson doubled the characters of Hermione and Perdita. This had
+not been conspicuously done until it was done by her, and her
+innovation, in that respect, was met with grave disapproval. The moment
+the subject is examined, however, objection to that method of procedure
+is dispelled. Hermione, as a dramatic person, disappears in the middle
+of the third act of Shakespeare's comedy and comes no more until the end
+of the piece, when she emerges as a statue. Her character has been
+entirely expressed and her part in the action of the drama has been
+substantially fulfilled before she disappears. There is no intermediate
+passion to be wrought to a climax, nor is there any intermediate mood,
+dramatically speaking, to be sustained. The dramatic environment, the
+dramatic necessities, are vastly unlike, for example, those of Lady
+Macbeth--one of the hardest of all parts to play well, because exhibited
+intermittently, at long intervals, yet steadily constrained by the
+necessity of cumulative excitement. The representative of Lady Macbeth
+must be identified with that character, whether on the stage or off,
+from the beginning of it to the end. Hermione, on the contrary, is at
+rest from the moment when she faints upon receiving information of the
+death of her boy. A lapse of sixteen years is assumed, and then,
+standing forth as a statue, she personifies majestic virtue and
+victorious fortitude. When she descends from the pedestal she silently
+embraces Leontes, speaks a few pious, maternal and tranquil lines (there
+are precisely seven of them in the original, but Mary Anderson added
+two, from "All's Well"), and embraces Perdita, whom she has not seen
+since the girl's earliest infancy. This is their only meeting, and
+little is sacrificed by the use of a substitute for the daughter in that
+scene. Perdita's brief apostrophe to the statue has to be cut, but it is
+not missed in the representation. The resemblance between mother and
+daughter heightens the effect of illusion, in its impress equally upon
+fancy and vision; and a more thorough elucidation is given than could be
+provided in any other way of the spirit of the comedy. It was a
+judicious and felicitous choice that the actress made when she selected
+those two characters, and the fact that her impersonation of them
+carried a practically disused Shakespearean comedy through a season of
+one hundred and fifty nights at the Lyceum Theatre in London furnishes
+an indorsement alike of her wisdom and her ability. She played in a
+stage version of the piece, in five acts, containing thirteen scenes,
+arranged by herself.
+
+While Mary Anderson was acting those two parts in London the sum of
+critical opinion seemed to be that her performance of Perdita was better
+than her performance of Hermione; but beneath that judgment there was,
+apparently, the impression that Hermione is a character fraught with
+superlatively great passions, powers, and qualities, such as are only to
+be apprehended by gigantic sagacity and conveyed by herculean talents
+and skill. Those vast attributes were not specified, but there was a
+mysterious intimation of their existence--as of something vague,
+formidable, and mostly elusive. But in truth Hermione, although a
+stronger part than Perdita, is neither complex, dubious, nor
+inaccessible; and Mary Anderson, although more fascinating in Perdita,
+could and did rise, in Hermione, to a noble height of tragic power--an
+excellence not possible for her, nor for anybody, in the more juvenile
+and slender character.
+
+Hermione has usually been represented as an elderly woman and by such an
+actress as is technically called "heavy." She ought to be represented as
+about thirty years of age at the beginning of the piece, and forty-six
+at the end of it. Leontes is not more than thirty-four at the opening,
+and he would be fifty at the close. He speaks, in his first scene, of
+his boyhood as only twenty-three years gone, when his dagger was worn
+"muzzled, lest it should bite its master"--at which time he may have
+been ten years old; certainly not more, probably less. His words, toward
+the end of act third, "so sure as this beard's gray," refer to the beard
+of Antigonus, not to his own. He is a young man when the play begins,
+and Polixenes is about the same age, and Hermione is a young woman.
+Antigonus and Paulina are middle-aged persons in the earlier scenes and
+Paulina is an elderly woman in the statue scene--almost an old woman,
+though not too old to be given in marriage to old Camillo, the
+ever-faithful friend. In Mary Anderson's presentation of _A Winter's
+Tale_ those details received thoughtful consideration and correct
+treatment.
+
+In Hermione is seen a type of the celestial nature in woman--infinite
+love, infinite charity, infinite patience. Such a nature is rare; but it
+is possible, it exists, and Shakespeare, who depicted everything, did
+not omit to portray that. To comprehend Hermione the observer must
+separate her, absolutely and finally, from association with the
+passions. Mrs. Jameson acutely and justly describes her character as
+exhibiting "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness
+without weakness." That is exactly true. Hermione was not easily won,
+and the best thing known about Leontes is that at last she came to love
+him and that her love for him survived his cruel and wicked treatment,
+chastened him, reinstated him, and ultimately blessed him. Hermione
+suffers the utmost affliction that a good woman can suffer. Her boy
+dies, heart-broken, at the news of his mother's alleged disgrace. Her
+infant daughter is torn from her breast and cast forth to perish. Her
+husband becomes her enemy and persecutor. Her chastity is assailed and
+vilified. She is subjected to the bitter indignity of a public trial. It
+is no wonder that at last her brain reels and she falls as if stricken
+dead. The apparent anomaly is her survival for sixteen years, in lonely
+seclusion, and her emergence, after that, as anything but a forlorn
+shadow of her former self. The poet Shelley has recorded the truth that
+all great emotions either kill themselves or kill those who feel them.
+It is here, however, that the exceptional temperament of Hermione
+supplies an explanatory and needed qualification. Her emotions are never
+of a passionate kind. Her mind predominates. Her life is in the
+affections and therefore it is one of thought. She sees clearly the
+facts of her experience and condition, and she knows exactly how those
+facts look in the eyes of others. She is one of those persons who
+possess a keen and just prescience of events, who can look far into the
+future and discern those resultant consequences of the present which,
+under the operation of inexorable moral law, must inevitably ensue.
+Self-poised in the right and free from the disturbing force of impulse
+and desire, she can await the justice of time, she can live, and she can
+live in the tranquil patience of resignation. True majesty of the person
+is dependent on repose of the soul, and there can be no repose of the
+soul without moral rectitude and a far-reaching, comprehensive, wise
+vision of events. Mary Anderson embodied Hermione in accordance with
+that ideal. By the expression of her face and the tones of her voice, in
+a single speech, the actress placed beyond question her grasp of the
+character:--
+
+                          "Good my lords,
+    I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
+    Commonly are--the want of which vain dew
+    Perchance shall dry your pities--but I have
+    That honourable grief lodged here, which burns
+    Worse than tears drown."
+
+The conspicuous, predominant, convincing artistic beauty in Mary
+Anderson's impersonation of Hermione was her realisation of the part, in
+figure, face, presence, demeanour, and temperament. She did not afflict
+her auditor with the painful sense of a person struggling upward toward
+an unattainable identity. She made you conscious of the presence of a
+queen. This, obviously, is the main thing--that the individuality shall
+be imperial, not merely wearing royal attire but being invested with the
+royal authenticity of divine endowment and consecration. Much emphasis
+has been placed by Shakespeare upon that attribute of innate grandeur.
+Leontes, at the opening of the trial scene, describes his accused wife
+as "the daughter of a king," and in the same scene her father is
+mentioned as the Emperor of Russia. The gentleman who, in act fifth,
+recounts to Autolycus the meeting between Leontes and his daughter
+Perdita especially notes "the majesty of the creature, in resemblance of
+the mother." Hermione herself, in the course of her
+vindication--expressed in one of the most noble and pathetic strains of
+poetical eloquence in our language--names herself "a great king's
+daughter," therein recalling those august and piteous words of
+Shakespeare's Katharine:--
+
+    "We are a Queen, or long have thought so, certain
+    The daughter of a king."
+
+Poor old Antigonus, in his final soliloquy, recounting the vision of
+Hermione that had come upon him in the night, declares her to be a woman
+royal and grand not by descent only but by nature:--
+
+    "I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
+    So filled and so becoming. In pure white robes,
+    Like very sanctity, she did approach."
+
+That image Mary Anderson embodied, and therefore the ideal of
+Shakespeare was made a living thing--that glorious ideal, in shaping
+which the great poet "from all that are took something good, to make a
+perfect woman." Toward Polixenes, in the first scene, her manner was
+wholly gracious, delicately playful, innocently kind, and purely frail.
+Her quiet archness at the question, "Will you go yet?" struck exactly
+the right key of Hermione's mood. With the baby prince Mamillius her
+frolic and banter, affectionate, free, and gay, were in a happy vein of
+feeling and humour. Her simple dignity, restraining both resentment and
+grief, in face of the injurious reproaches of Leontes, was entirely
+noble and right, and the pathetic words, "I never wished to see you
+sorry, now I trust I shall," could not have been spoken with more depth
+and intensity of grieved affection than were felt in her composed yet
+tremulous voice. The entrance, at the trial scene, was made with the
+stateliness natural to a queenly woman, and yet with a touch of
+pathos--the cold patience of despair. The delivery of Hermione's
+defensive speeches was profoundly earnest and touching. The simple cry
+of the mother's breaking heart, and the action of veiling her face and
+falling like one dead, upon the announcement of the prince's death, were
+perfect denotements of the collapse of a grief-stricken woman. The skill
+with which the actress, in the monument scene--which is all repose and
+no movement--contrived nevertheless to invest Hermione with steady
+vitality of action, and to imbue the crisis with a feverish air of
+suspense, was in a high degree significant of the personality of genius.
+For such a performance of Hermione Shakespeare himself has provided the
+sufficient summary and encomium:--
+
+    "Women will love her, that she is a woman
+    More worth than any man; men that she is
+    The rarest of all women."
+
+It is one thing to say that Mary Anderson was better in Perdita than in
+Hermione, and another thing to say that the performance of Perdita was
+preferred. Everybody preferred it--even those who knew that it was not
+the better of the two; for everybody loves the sunshine more than the
+shade. Hermione means grief and endurance. Perdita means beautiful youth
+and happy love. It does not take long for an observer to choose between
+them. Suffering is not companionable. By her impersonation of Hermione
+the actress revealed her knowledge of the stern truth of life, its
+trials, its calamities, and the possible heroism of character under its
+sorrowful discipline. Into that identity she passed by the force of her
+imagination. The embodiment was majestic, tender, pitiable,
+transcendent, but its colour was the sombre colour of pensive melancholy
+and sad experience. That performance was the higher and more significant
+of the two. But the higher form of art is not always the most
+alluring--never the most alluring when youthful beauty smiles and rosy
+pleasure beckons another way. All hearts respond to happiness. By her
+presentment of Perdita the actress became the glittering image and
+incarnation of glorious youthful womanhood and fascinating joy. No
+exercise of the imagination was needful to her in that. There was an
+instantaneous correspondence between the part and the player. The
+embodiment was as natural as a sunbeam. Shakespeare has left no doubt
+about his meaning in Perdita. The speeches of all around her continually
+depict her fresh and piquant loveliness, her innate superiority, her
+superlative charm; while her behaviour and language as constantly show
+forth her nobility of soul. One of the subtlest side lights thrown upon
+the character is in the description of the manner in which Perdita heard
+the story of her mother's death--when "attentiveness wounded" her
+"till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did bleed tears." And of
+the fibre of her nature there is perhaps no finer indication than may be
+felt in her comment on old Camillo's worldly view of prosperity as a
+vital essential to the permanence of love:--
+
+    "I think affliction may subdue the cheek,
+    But not take in the mind."
+
+In the thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare there is no strain of the
+poetry of sentiment and grace essentially sweeter than that which he has
+put into the mouth of Perdita; and poetry could not be more sweetly
+spoken than it was by Mary Anderson in that delicious scene of the
+distribution of the flowers. The actress evinced comprehension of the
+character in every fibre of its being, and she embodied it with the
+affluent vitality of splendid health and buoyant temperament--presenting
+a creature radiant with goodness and happiness, exquisite in natural
+refinement, piquant with archness, soft, innocent, and tender in
+confiding artlessness, and, while gleeful and triumphant in beautiful
+youth, gently touched with an intuitive pitying sense of the thorny
+aspects of this troubled world. The giving of the flowers completely
+bewitched her auditors. The startled yet proud endurance of the king's
+anger was in an equal degree captivating. Seldom has the stage displayed
+that rarest of all combinations, the passionate heart of a woman with
+the lovely simplicity of a child. Nothing could be more beautiful than
+she was to the eyes that followed her lithe figure through the merry
+mazes of her rustic dance--an achievement sharply in contrast with her
+usually statuesque manner. It "makes old hearts fresh" to see a
+spectacle of grace and joy, and that spectacle they saw then and will
+not forget. The value of those impersonations of Hermione and Perdita,
+viewing them as embodied interpretations of poetry was great, but they
+possessed a greater value and a higher significance as denotements of
+the guiding light, the cheering strength, the elevating loveliness of a
+noble human soul. They embodied the conception of the poet, but at the
+same time they illumined an actual incarnation of the divine spirit.
+They were like windows to a sacred temple, and through them you could
+look into the soul of a true woman--always a realm where thoughts are
+gliding angels, and feelings are the faces of seraphs, and sounds are
+the music of the harps of heaven.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN OLIVIA.
+
+
+It has sometimes been thought that the acting of Henry Irving is seen at
+its best in those impersonations of his that derive their vitality from
+the grim, ghastly, and morbid attributes of human nature. That he is a
+unique actor, and distinctively a great actor, in Hamlet, Mathias,
+Eugene Aram, Louis XI., Lesurque, and Dubosc, few judges will deny. His
+performances of those parts have shown him to be a man of weird
+imagination, and they have shown that his characteristics, mental and
+spiritual, are sombre. Accordingly, when it was announced that he would
+play Dr. Primrose--Goldsmith's simple, virtuous, homely, undramatic
+village-preacher, the _Vicar of Wakefield_,--a doubt was felt as to his
+suitability for the part and as to the success of his endeavour. He
+played Dr. Primrose, and he gained in that character some of the
+brightest laurels of his professional career. The doubt proved
+unwarranted. More than one competent observer of that remarkable
+performance has granted it an equal rank with the best of Henry Irving's
+achievements; and now, more clearly than before, it is perceived that
+the current of his inspiration flows as freely from the silver spring of
+goodness as from the dark and troubled fountain of human misery.
+
+On the first night of _Olivia_, at the Lyceum Theatre (it was May 27,
+1885, when the present writer happened to be in London), Henry Irving's
+performance of Dr. Primrose was fettered by a curb of constraint. The
+actor's nerves had been strained to a high pitch of excitement and he
+was obviously anxious. His spirit, accordingly, was not fully liberated
+into the character. He advanced with cautious care and he executed each
+detail of his design with precise accuracy. To various auditors, for
+that reason, the work seemed a little Methodistical; and drab is a
+colour at which the voice of the scoffer is apt to scoff. But the
+impersonation of Dr. Primrose soon became equally a triumph of
+expression and of ideal; not only flowing out of goodness, but flowing
+smoothly and producing the effect of nature. It was not absolutely and
+identically the Vicar that Goldsmith has drawn, for its personality was
+unmarked by either rusticity or strong humour; but it was a kindred and
+higher type of the simple truth, the pastoral sweetness, the benignity,
+and the human tenderness of that delightful original. To invest goodness
+with charm, to make virtue piquant, and to turn common events of
+domestic life to exquisite pathos and noble exaltation was the actor's
+purpose. It was accomplished; and Dr. Primrose, thitherto an idyllic
+figure, existent only in the chambers of fancy, is henceforth as much a
+denizen of the stage as Luke Fielding or Jesse Rural; a man not merely
+to be read of, as one reads of Uncle Toby and Parson Adams, but to be
+known, remembered, and loved.
+
+Wills's drama of _Olivia_, based upon an episode in Goldsmith's story,
+is one of extreme simplicity. It may be described as a series of
+pictures displaying the consequences of action rather than action
+itself. It contains an abundance of incident, but the incident is mostly
+devoid of inherent dramatic force and therefore is such as must derive
+its chief effect from the manner in which it is treated by the actors
+who represent the piece. Nevertheless, the piece was found to be,
+during its first three acts, an expressive, coherent, interesting play.
+It tells its story clearly and entirely, not by narrative but by the
+display of characters in their relations to each other. Its language,
+flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is
+consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can
+sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as
+that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia
+and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful
+relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It
+is paternal love that thrills its structure with light, warmth, colour,
+sincerity, moral force, and human significance. Opinion may differ as to
+the degree of skill with which Wills selected and employed the materials
+of Goldsmith's story; but nobody can justly deny that he wrought for the
+stage a practical dramatic exposition of the beauty and sanctity of the
+holiest relation that is possible in human life; and to have done that
+is to have done a noble thing.
+
+Many persons appear to think that criticism falls short of its duty
+unless it wounds and hurts. Goldsmith himself observed that fact. It
+was in the story of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ that he made his playful
+suggestion that a critic should always take care to say that the picture
+would have been better if the painter had taken more pains. Wills
+probably heard more than enough for his spiritual welfare about the
+faults of his piece; yet there is really nothing weak in the play except
+the conclusion. It is not easy to suggest, however, in what way the
+fourth act could be strengthened, unless it were by a recasting and
+renovation of the character of Squire Thornhill. But the victory was
+gained, in spite of a feeble climax. Many persons also appear to think
+that it is a sort of sacrilege to lay hands upon the sacred ark of a
+classic creation. Dion Boucicault, perceiving this when he made a play
+about _Clarissa Harlowe_, felt moved to deprecate anticipated public
+resentment of the liberties that he had taken with Richardson's novel.
+Yet it is difficult to see why the abundant details of that excellent
+though protracted narrative should not be curtailed, in order to
+circumscribe its substance within the limits of a practical drama.
+Jefferson was blamed for condensing and slightly changing the comedy of
+_The Rivals_. Yet the author, who probably knew something about his
+work, deemed it a wretchedly defective piece, and expressed the
+liveliest regret for having written it. Wills did not reproduce
+Goldsmith's Vicar upon the stage: in some particulars he widely diverged
+from it--and his work, accordingly, may be censured. Yet _The Vicar of
+Wakefield_ is far from being a faultless production, such as a divinity
+should be supposed to hedge. Critical students are aware of this. It is
+not worth while to traverse the old ground. The reader who will take the
+trouble--and pleasure--to refer to that excellent chapter on Goldsmith
+in Dr. Craik's _History of English Literature_ will find the structural
+defects of the novel specifically enumerated. If the dramatist has
+ignored many details he has at least extracted from the narrative the
+salient points of a consistent, harmonious story. The spectator can
+enjoy the play, whether he has read the original or not. At the end of
+its first act he knows the Vicar and his family, their home, their way
+of life, their neighbours, the two suitors for the two girls, the
+motives of each and every character, and the relations of each to all;
+and he sees, what is always touching in the spectacle of actual human
+life, the contrasted states of circumstance and experience surrounding
+and enmeshing all. After this preparation the story is developed with
+few and rapid strokes. Two of the pictures were poems. At the end of act
+first the Vicar, who has been apprised of the loss of his property,
+imparts this sad news to his family. The time is the gloaming. The
+chimes are sounding in the church-tower. It is the hour of evening
+prayer. The gray-haired pastor calls his loved ones around him, in his
+garden, and simply and reverently tells them of their misfortune, which
+is to be accepted submissively, as Heaven's will. The deep religious
+feeling of that scene, the grouping, the use of sunset lights and
+shadows, the melody of the chimes, the stricken look in the faces of the
+women and children, the sweet gravity of the Vicar--instinct with the
+nobleness of a sorrow not yet become corrosive and lachrymose, as is the
+tendency of settled grief--and, over all, the sense of blighted
+happiness and an uncertain future, made up a dramatic as well as a
+pictorial effect of impressive poetic significance. In act second--which
+is pictorial almost without intermission--there was a companion
+picture, when the Vicar reads, at his fireside, a letter announcing the
+restitution of his estate; while his wife and children and Mr. Burchell
+are assembled around the spinet singing an old song. The repose with
+which Henry Irving made that scene tremulous, almost painful, in its
+suspense, was observed as one of the happiest strokes of his art. The
+face and demeanour of Dr. Primrose, changing from the composure of
+resignation to a startled surprise, and then to almost an hysterical
+gladness, presented a study not less instructive than affecting of the
+resources of acting. Only two contemporary actors have presented
+anything kindred with Mr. Irving's acting in that situation and
+throughout the scene that is sequent on the discovery of Olivia's
+flight--Jefferson in America and Got in France.
+
+Evil is restless and irresistibly prone to action. Goodness is usually
+negative and inert. Dr. Primrose is a type of goodness. In order to
+invest him with piquancy and dramatic vigour Henry Irving gave him
+passion, and therewithal various attributes of charming eccentricity.
+The clergyman thus presented is the fruition of a long life of virtue.
+He has the complete repose of innocence, the sweet candour of absolute
+purity, the mild demeanour of spontaneous, habitual benevolence, the
+supreme grace of unconscious simplicity. But he is human and passionate;
+he shows--in his surroundings, in his quick sympathy with natural
+beauty, and in his indicated rather than directly stated ideals of
+conduct--that he has lived an imaginative and not a prosaic life; he is
+vaguely and pathetically superstitious; and while essentially grand in
+his religious magnanimity he is both fascinating and morally formidable
+as a man. Those denotements point at Henry Irving's ideal. For his
+method it is less easy to find the right description. His mechanical
+reiteration of the words that are said to him by Sophia, in the moment
+when the fond father knows that his idolised Olivia has fled with her
+lover; his collapse, when the harmless pistols are taken from his
+nerveless hands; his despairing cry, "If she had but died!"; his
+abortive effort to rebuke his darling child in the hour of her
+abandonment and misery, and the sudden tempest of passionate affection
+with which the great tender heart sweeps away that inadequate and paltry
+though eminently appropriate morality, and takes its idol to itself as
+only true love can do--those were instances of high dramatic achievement
+for which epithets are inadequate, but which the memory of the heart
+will always treasure.
+
+It was said by the poet Aaron Hill, in allusion to Barton Booth, that
+the blind might have seen him in his voice and the deaf might have heard
+him in his visage. Such a statement made concerning an actor now would
+be deemed extravagant. But, turning from the Vicar to his cherished
+daughter, that felicitous image comes naturally into the mind. To think
+of Ellen Terry as Olivia will always be to recall one especial and
+remarkable moment of beauty and tenderness. It is not her distribution
+of the farewell gifts, on the eve of Olivia's flight--full although that
+was of the emotion of a good heart torn and tortured by the conflict
+between love and duty--and it is not the desperate resentment with which
+Olivia beats back her treacherous betrayer, when, at the climax of his
+baseness, he adds insult to heartless perfidy. Those, indeed, were made
+great situations by the profound sincerity and the rich, woman-like
+passion of the actress. But there was one instant, in the second act of
+the play, when the woman's heart has at length yielded to her lover's
+will, and he himself, momentarily dismayed by his own conquest, strives
+to turn back, that Ellen Terry made pathetic beyond description. The
+words she spoke are simply these, "But I said I would come!" What
+language could do justice to the voice, to the manner, to the sweet,
+confiding, absolute abandonment of the whole nature to the human love by
+which it had been conquered? The whole of that performance was
+astonishing, was thrilling, with knowledge of the passion of love. That
+especial moment was the supreme beauty of it. At such times human nature
+is irradiated with a divine fire, and art fulfils its purpose.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+ON JEFFERSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+Joseph Jefferson has led a life of noble endeavour and has had a career
+of ample prosperity, culminating in honourable renown and abundant
+happiness. He was born in Philadelphia, February 20, 1829. He went on
+the stage when he was four years old and he has been on the stage ever
+since. His achievements as an actor have been recognised and accepted
+with admiration in various parts of the world; in Australia and New
+Zealand and in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as in the United
+States. Among English-speaking actors he is the foremost living
+representative of the art of eccentric comedy. He has not, of late
+years, played a wide range of parts, but, restricting himself to a few
+characters, and those of a representative kind, the manner in which he
+has acted them is a perfect manner--and it is this that has gained for
+him his distinctive eminence. Jefferson, however, is not simply and
+exclusively an actor. His mind is many sided. He has painted landscape
+pictures of a high order of merit,--pictures in which elusive moods and
+subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and
+denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He
+has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy,
+colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand,
+expeditious work,--after passing it as a serial through their Century
+Magazine,--the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It
+is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere,
+and, for its own sake as well as his, will everywhere be preserved.
+
+Beginning a theatrical career nearly sixty years ago (1833), roving up
+and down the earth ever since, and seldom continuing in one place,
+Jefferson has had uncommon opportunities of noting the development of
+the United States and of observing, in both hemispheres, the changeful
+aspect of one of the most eventful periods in the history of the world.
+Actors, as a class, know nothing but the stage and see nothing but the
+pursuit in which they are occupied. Whoever has lived much among them
+knows that fact, from personal observation. Whoever has read the various
+and numerous memoirs that have from time to time been published by
+elderly members of that profession must have been amused to perceive
+that, while they conventionally agree that "all the world's a stage,"
+they are enthusiastically convinced that the stage is all the world.
+Jefferson's book, although it contains much about the theatre, shows him
+to be an exception in this respect, even as he is in many others. He has
+seen many countries and many kinds of men and things, and he has long
+looked upon life with the thoughtful gaze of a philosopher as well as
+the wise smile of a humourist. He can, if he likes, talk of something
+besides the shop. His account of his life "lacks form a little," and his
+indifference to "accurate statistics"--which he declares to be "somewhat
+tedious"--is now and then felt to be an embarrassment. One would like to
+know, for instance, while reading about the primitive theatrical times,
+when actors sailed the western rivers in flatboats, and shot beasts and
+birds on the bank, precisely the extent and limits of that period. Nor
+is this the only queer aspect of the dramatic past that might be
+illumined. The total environment of a man's life is almost equally
+important with the life itself--being, indeed, the scenery amid which
+the action passes--and a good method for the writing of a biography is
+that which sharply defines the successive periods of childhood, youth,
+manhood, and age, and, while depicting the development of the individual
+from point to point, depicts also the entire field through which he
+moves, and the mutations, affecting his life, that occur in the historic
+and social fabric around him. Jefferson, while he has painted vigorously
+and often happily, on a large canvas, has left many spaces empty and
+others but thinly filled. The reader who accompanies him may,
+nevertheless, with a little care, piece out the story so as to perceive
+it as a sequent, distinct, harmonious, and rounded narrative. Meanwhile
+the companionship of this heedless historian is delightful--for whether
+as actor, painter, or writer, Jefferson steadily exerts the charm of a
+genial personality. You are as one walking along a country road, on a
+golden autumn day, with a kind, merry companion, who knows all about
+the trees that fringe your track and the birds that flit through their
+branches, and who beguiles the way with many a humorous tale and many a
+pleasant remembrance, now impressing your mind by the sagacity of his
+reflections, now touching your heart by some sudden trait of sentiment
+or pathos, and always pleasing and satisfying you with the consciousness
+of a sweet, human, broad, charitable, piquant nature. Although an
+autobiographer Jefferson is not egotistical, and although a moralist he
+is not a bore. There is a tinge of the Horatian mood in him--for his
+reader often becomes aware of that composed, sagacious, half-droll,
+quizzical mind that indicates, with grave gentleness, the folly of
+ambition, the vanity of riches, the value of the present hour, the
+idleness of borrowing trouble, the blessing of the golden medium in
+fortune, the absurdity of flatterers, and the comfort of keeping a
+steadfast spirit amid the inevitable vicissitudes of this mortal state.
+
+Jefferson has memories of a boyhood that was passed in Washington,
+Baltimore, and New York. He went to Chicago in 1838, when that place was
+scarcely more than a village--making the journey from New York to
+Buffalo in a canal-boat, and sailing thence, aboard a steamer, through
+the lakes of Erie, Huron, and Michigan. He travelled with his parents,
+and they gave dramatic performances, in which he assisted, in western
+towns. It was a time of poverty and hardship, but those ills were borne
+cheerfully--the brighter side of a hard life being kept steadily in
+view, and every comic incident of it being seen and appreciated. His
+father was a gentleman of the Mark Tapley temperament, who came out
+strong amid adverse circumstances, and the early disappearance from the
+book of that delightful person (who died in 1842, of yellow fever, at
+Mobile), is a positive sorrow. His mother, a refined and gentle lady, of
+steadfast character and of uncommon musical and dramatic talents and
+accomplishments, survived till 1849, and her ashes rest in Ronaldson's
+cemetery, in Philadelphia. Jefferson might have said much more about his
+parents, and especially about his famous grandfather, without risk of
+becoming tedious--for they were remarkably interesting people; but he
+was writing his own life and not theirs, and he has explained that he
+likes not to dwell much upon domestic matters. The story of his long
+ancestry of actors, which reaches back to the days of Garrick (for there
+have been five generations of the Jeffersons upon the stage), he has not
+mentioned; and the story of his own young days is hurried rapidly to a
+conclusion. He was brought on the stage, when a child, at the theatre in
+Washington, D.C., by the negro comedian Thomas D. Rice, who emptied him
+out of a bag; and thereupon, being dressed as "a nigger dancer," in
+imitation of Rice, he performed the antics of Jim Crow. He adverts to
+his first appearance in New York and remembers his stage combat with
+Master Titus; and he thinks that Master Titus must remember it
+also,--since one of that boy's big toes was nearly cut off in the fray.
+That combat occurred at the Franklin theatre, September 30, 1837--a
+useful fact that the autobiographer cares not to mention. He speedily
+becomes a young man, as the reader follows him through the first three
+chapters of his narrative,--of which there are seventeen,--and he is
+found to be acting, as a stock player, in support of James W. Wallack,
+Junius Brutus Booth, W.C. Macready, and Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Wallack, Jr.
+Upon the powers and peculiarities of those actors, and upon the traits
+of many others who, like them, are dead and gone (for there is scarcely
+a word in the book about any of his living contemporaries), he comments
+freely and instructively. He was "barn-storming" in Texas when the
+Mexican war began, and he followed in the track of the American army,
+and acted in the old Spanish theatre in Matamoras, in the spring of
+1846; and, subsequently, finding that this did no good, he opened a
+stall there for the sale of coffee and other refreshments, in the corner
+of a gambling hell. He calls to mind the way of domestic life and the
+every-day aspect of houses, gardens, people, and manners in Matamoras,
+and those he describes with especial skill--deftly introducing the
+portraiture of a dusky, black-eyed, volatile Mexican girl, to whom he
+lost, temporarily, the light heart of youth, and whom he thinks that he
+might have married had he not deemed it prudent to journey northward
+toward a cooler clime. In New Orleans, at about that time, he first saw
+the then young comedian John E. Owens: and he records the fact that his
+ambition to excel as an actor was awakened by the spectacle of that
+rival's success. Owens has had his career since then,--and a brilliant
+one it was,--and now he sleeps in peace.
+
+After that experience Jefferson repaired to Philadelphia, and during the
+next ten years, from 1846 to 1856, he wrought in that city and in New
+York, Baltimore, Richmond, and other places, sometimes as a stock actor,
+sometimes as a star, and sometimes as a manager. He encountered various
+difficulties. He took a few serious steps and many comic ones. He was
+brought into contact with some individuals that were eminent and with
+some that were ludicrous. He crossed the Allegheny mountains in
+mid-winter, from Wheeling to Cumberland, in a cold stage-coach, and
+almost perished. He was a member of Burton's company at the Arch Street
+theatre, Philadelphia, and was one of the chorus in that great actor's
+revival of _Antigone_--which there is little doubt that the chorus
+extinguished. He was the low comedian in Joseph Foster's amphitheatre,
+where he sang _Captain Kidd_ to fill up the "carpenter scenes," and
+where he sported amid the turbulent rhetorical billows of _Timour the
+Tartar_ and _The Terror of the Road_. He acted in New York at the
+Franklin theatre and also at the Chatham. He managed theatres in Macon
+and Savannah, where he brought out the blithe Sir William Don; and one
+of the sprightliest episodes of his memoir is the chapter in which he
+describes that tall, elegant, nonchalant adventurer. Don was a
+Scotchman, born in 1826, who made his first appearance in America in
+November 1850 at the Broadway theatre, New York, and afterward drifted
+aimlessly through the provincial theatres. Don was married in 1857 to
+Miss Emily Sanders, and he died at Tasmania, March 19, 1862, and was
+buried at Hobartstown. Jefferson saw the dawn of promise in the career
+of Julia Dean,--when that beautiful girl was acting with him, in the
+stock--and afterwards he saw the noonday splendour of her prosperity;
+and he might have recalled, but that sad touches are excluded from his
+biography, her mournful decline. In 1853 he was stage manager of the
+Baltimore museum, for Henry C. Jarrett, and in 1854 he was manager of
+the Richmond theatre, for John T. Ford. Among the players whom he met,
+and who deeply influenced him, were James E. Murdoch, Henry Placide,
+Edwin Forrest, Edwin Adams, and Agnes Robertson. But the actor who most
+affected the youth of Joseph Jefferson, whose influence sank deepest
+into his heart and has remained longest in his memory and upon his
+style, was his half-brother, Charles Burke: and certainly, as a
+serio-comic actor, it may be doubted whether Charles Burke ever was
+surpassed. That comedian was born March 27, 1822, in Philadelphia, and
+he died in New York, November 10, 1854. Jefferson's mother, Cornelia
+Frances Thomas, born in New York, October 1, 1796, the daughter of
+French parents, was married in her girlhood to the Irish comedian Thomas
+Burke, who died in 1824; and she contracted her second marriage, with
+Jefferson's father, in 1826. Jefferson writes at his best in the
+description of scenery, in the analysis of character, and in the
+statement of artistic principles. His portraiture of Murdoch, as a
+comedian, is particularly clear and fine. His account of Julia Dean's
+hit, as Lady Priory, is excellent and will often be cited. His portrayal
+of the reciprocal action of Burton and Charles Burke, when they were
+associated in the same piece, conveys a valuable lesson. His anecdotes
+of Edwin Forrest present that grim figure as yet again the involuntary
+cause of mirth. It often was so. Jefferson, however, draws a veil of
+gentle charity over those misused powers, that perverse will, that
+wasted life. The most striking dramatic portraiture in the book is that
+bestowed on Charles Burke, William Warren, George Holland, Tom Glessing,
+and Edwin Adams. Those were men who lived in Jefferson's affections, and
+when he wrote about them he wrote from the heart. The sketch of
+Glessing, whom everybody loved that ever knew him, is in a touching
+strain of tender remembrance.
+
+Jefferson visited England and France in 1856, but not to act. At that
+time he saw the famous English comedians Compton, Buckstone, Robson, and
+Wright, and that extraordinary actor, fine alike in tragedy and comedy,
+the versatile Samuel Phelps. In 1857 he was associated with Laura Keene
+at her theatre in New York; and from that date onward his career has
+been upon a high and sunlit path, visible to the world. His first part
+at Laura Keene's theatre was Dr. Pangloss. Then came _Our American
+Cousin_, in which he gained a memorable success as Asa Trenchard, and in
+which Edward A. Sothern laid the basis of that fantastic structure of
+whim and grotesque humour that afterward became famous as Lord
+Dundreary. Sothern, Laura Keene, and William Rufus Blake, of course,
+gained much of Jefferson's attention at that time, and he has not
+omitted to describe them. His account of Blake, however, does not impart
+an adequate idea of the excellence of that comedian. In 1858 he went to
+the Winter Garden theatre, and was associated with the late Dion
+Boucicault. His characters then were Newman Hoggs, Caleb Plummer, and
+Salem Scudder--in _Nicholas Nickleby_, _The Cricket on the Hearth_, and
+_The Octoroon_. Mr. Boucicault told him not to make Caleb Plummer a
+solemn character at the beginning--a deliverance that Jefferson seems to
+have cherished as one of colossal wisdom. He made a brilliant hit in
+Salem Scudder, and it was then that he determined finally to assume the
+position of a star. "Art has always been my sweetheart," exclaims
+Jefferson, "and I have loved her for herself alone." No observer can
+doubt that who has followed his career. It was in 1859 that he reverted
+to the subject of Rip Van Winkle, as the right theme for his dramatic
+purpose. He had seen Charles Burke as Rip, and he knew the several
+versions of Washington Irving's story that had been made for the theatre
+by Burke, Hackett, and Yates. The first Rip Van Winkle upon the stage,
+of whom there is any record in theatrical annals, was Thomas Flynn
+(1804-1849). That comedian, the friend of the elder Booth, acted the
+part for the first time on May 24, 1828, at Albany. Charles B. Parsons,
+who afterward acted in many theatres as Rip, and ultimately became a
+preacher, was, on that night, the performer of Derrick. Jefferson's
+predecessors as Rip Van Winkle were remarkably clever men--Flynn,
+Parsons, Burke, Chapman, Hackett, Yates, and William Isherwood. But it
+remained for Jefferson to do with that character what no one else had
+ever thought of doing--to lift it above the level of the tipsy rustic
+and make it the poetical type of the drifting and dreaming
+vagrant--half-haunted, half-inspired, a child of the trees and the
+clouds. Jefferson records that he was lying on the hay in a barn in
+Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1859, taking advantage
+of a rainy day to read Washington Irving's _Life and Letters_, when that
+plan came to him. It proved an inspiration of happiness to thousands of
+people all over the world. The comedian made a play for himself, on the
+basis of Charles Burke's play, but with one vital improvement--he
+arranged the text and business of the supernatural scene so that Rip
+only should speak, while the ghosts should remain silent. That stroke of
+genius accomplished his object. The man capable of that exploit in
+dramatic art could not fail to win the world, because he would at once
+fascinate its imagination while touching its heart.
+
+In 1861 Jefferson went to California and thence to Australia, and in the
+latter country he remained four years. He has written a fine description
+of the entrance to the harbour at Sydney. His accounts of "the skeleton
+dance," as he saw it performed by the black natives of that land; of his
+meeting with the haunted hermit in the woods; of the convict audience at
+Tasmania, for whom he acted in _The Ticket-of-Leave Man_; and of the
+entertainment furnished in a Chinese theatre, are compositions that
+would impart to any book the interest of adventure and the zest of
+novelty. Such pictures as those have a broad background; they are not
+circumscribed within the proscenium frame. The man is seen in those
+passages as well as the actor; and he plays his part well, amid
+picturesque surroundings of evil and peril, of tragedy and of pathos. In
+Australia Jefferson met Charles Kean and his wife (Ellen Tree), of whom
+his sketches are boldly drawn and his memories are pleasant. Mr. and
+Mrs. Kean afterward made their farewell visit to the United States,
+beginning, when they reached New York (from San Francisco, in April
+1865), with _Henry VIII._, and closing with _The Jealous Wife_. In 1865
+Jefferson went from Australia to South America and passed some time in
+Lima, where he saw much tropical luxury and many beautiful ladies--an
+inspiriting spectacle, fittingly described by him in some of the most
+felicitous of his fervent words. In June 1865 he reached London, and
+presently he came forth, at the Adelphi, as Rip Van Winkle,--having
+caused the piece to be rewritten by Mr. Boucicault, who introduced the
+colloquy of the children, paraphrased for it the recognition scene
+between King Lear and Cordelia, and kept Gretchen alive to be married to
+Derrick. Mr. Boucicault, however, had no faith in the piece or the
+actor's plan, and down to the last moment prophesied failure.
+Jefferson's success was unequivocal. Friends surrounded him and in the
+gentle and genial record that he has made of those auspicious days some
+of the brightest names of modern English literature sparkle on his page.
+Benjamin Webster, Paul Bedford, John Billington, John Brougham, and
+Marie Wilton were among the actors who were glad to be his associates.
+Robertson, the dramatist, was his constant companion--one of the most
+intellectual and one of the wittiest of men. Planche, aged yet hearty
+and genial (and no man had more in his nature of the sweet spirit of the
+comrade), speedily sought him. Charles Reade and Anthony Trollope became
+his cronies; and poor Artemas Ward arrived and joined the party just as
+Jefferson was leaving it--as bright a spirit, as kind a heart, and as
+fine and quaint a humourist as ever cheered this age--from which he
+vanished too soon for the happiness of his friends and for the fruition
+of his fame. "I was much impressed," says the comedian, "with Ward's
+genial manner; he was not in good health, and I advised him to be
+careful lest the kindness of London should kill him." That advice was
+not heeded, and the kindness of London speedily ended Ward's days.
+
+Jefferson came home in 1866 and passed ten years in America--years of
+fame and fortune, whereof the record is smooth prosperity. Its most
+important personal incident was his second marriage, on December 20,
+1867, at Chicago, to Miss Sarah Warren. In July 1873 he made a voyage to
+Europe, with his wife and William Warren, the comedian, and remained
+there till autumn. From November 1, 1875 to April 29, 1876 and from
+Easter 1877 until midsummer he was again acting in London, where he
+redoubled his former success. In October 1877 he returned home, and
+since then he has remained in America. The chronicle that he has written
+glides lightly over these latter years, only now and then touching on
+their golden summits. The manifest wish of the writer has been to people
+his pages as much as possible with the men and women of his artistic
+circle and knowledge who would be likely to interest the reader. Robert
+Browning, Charles Kingsley, and George Augustus Sala come into the
+picture, and there is a pleasing story of Browning and Longfellow
+walking arm in arm in London streets till driven into a cab by a summer
+shower, when Longfellow insisted on passing his umbrella through the
+hole in the roof, for the protection of the cab-driver. Jefferson lived
+for one summer in an old mansion at Morningside, Edinburgh, and he
+dwells with natural delight on his recollections of that majestic city.
+He had many a talk, at odd times, with the glittering farceur Charles
+Mathews, about dramatic art, and some of this is recorded in piquant
+anecdotes. "By many," says the amiable annalist, "he was thought to be
+cold and selfish; I do not think he was so." There is a kind word for
+Charles Fechter, whose imitations of Frederick Lemaitre, in _Belphegor,
+the Mountebank_, live in Jefferson's remembrance as wonderfully graphic.
+There are glimpses of James Wallack, Walter Montgomery, Peter Richings,
+E.A. Sothern, Laura Keene, James G. Burnett, John Gilbert, Tyrone Power,
+Lester Wallack, John McCullough, John T. Raymond, Mr. and Mrs. Barney
+Williams, John Drew (the elder), F.S. Chanfrau, Charlotte Cushman, Mrs.
+Drake, and many others; and the record incorporates two letters, not
+before published, from John Howard Payne, the author of _Home, Sweet
+Home_--a melody that is the natural accompaniment of Jefferson's life.
+There is a pretty picture of that ancient supper-room at No. 2 Bulfinch
+Place, Boston--Miss Fisher's kitchen--as it appeared when William Warren
+sat behind the mound of lobsters, at the head of the table, while the
+polished pewters reflected the cheerful light, and wit and raillery
+enlivened the happy throng, and many a face was wreathed with smiles
+that now is dark and still forever. In one chapter Jefferson sets forth
+his views upon the art of acting; and seldom within so brief a compass
+will so many sensible reflections be found so simply and tersely
+expressed. The book closes with words of gratitude for many blessings,
+and with an emblematic picture of a spirit resigned to whatever
+vicissitudes of fortune may yet be decreed.
+
+Jefferson's memoir is a simple message to simple minds. It will find its
+way to thousands of readers to whom a paper by Addison or an essay by
+Hume would have no meaning. It will point for them the moral of a good
+life. It will impress them with the spectacle of a noble actor,
+profoundly and passionately true to the high art by which he lives,
+bearing eloquent testimony to its beauty and its worth, and to the fine
+powers and sterling virtues of the good men and women with whom he has
+been associated in its pursuit. It will display to them--and to all
+others who may chance to read it--a type of that absolute humility of
+spirit which yet is perfectly compatible with a just pride of intellect.
+It will help to preserve interesting traits of famous actors of an
+earlier time, together with bright stories that illumine the dry
+chronicle of our theatrical history. And, in its simple record of the
+motives by which he has been impelled, and the artistic purposes that he
+has sought to accomplish, it will remain an eloquent, vital,
+indestructible memorial to the art and the character of a great
+comedian, when the present reality of his exquisite acting shall have
+changed to a dim tradition and a fading memory of the past.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+ON JEFFERSON'S ACTING.
+
+
+Fifty years from now the historian of the American stage, if he should
+be asked to name the actor of this period who was most beloved by the
+people of this generation, will answer that it was Joseph Jefferson.
+Other actors of our time are famous, and they possess in various degrees
+the affection of the public. Jefferson is not only renowned but
+universally beloved. To state the cause of this effect is at once to
+explain his acting and to do it the honour to which it is entitled. That
+cause can be stated in a single sentence. Jefferson is at once a poetic
+and a human actor, and he is thus able to charm all minds and to win all
+hearts. His success, therefore, is especially important not to himself
+alone but to the people.
+
+Public taste is twofold. It has a surface liking, and it has a deep,
+instinctive, natural preference. The former is alert, capricious,
+incessant, and continually passes from fancy to fancy. It scarcely knows
+what it wants, except that it wants excitement and change. Those persons
+in the dramatic world who make a point to address it are experimental
+speculators, whose one and only object is personal gain, and who are
+willing and ready to furnish any sort of entertainment that they think
+will please a passing caprice, and thereby will turn a penny for
+themselves. To judge the public entirely by this surface liking is to
+find the public what Tennyson once called it--a many-headed beast. With
+that animal every paltry and noxious thing can be made, for a time, to
+flourish; and that fact leads observers who do not carefully look
+beneath the surface to conclude that the public is always wrong. But the
+deep preference of the public comes into the question, and observers who
+are able to see and to consider that fact presently perceive that the
+artist, whether actor or otherwise, who gives to the public, not what it
+says it wants but what it ought to have, is in the long run the victor.
+The deep preference is for the good thing, the real thing, the right. It
+is not intelligent. It does not go with thinking and reasoning. It does
+not pretend to have grounds of belief. It simply responds. But upon the
+stage the actor who is able to reach it is omnipotent. Jefferson
+conspicuously is an actor who appeals to the deep, instinctive, natural
+preference of humanity, and who reaches it, arouses it, and satisfies
+it. Throughout the whole of his mature career he has addressed the
+nobler soul of humanity and given to the people what they ought to have;
+and the actor who is really able to do that naturally conquers
+everything. It is not a matter of artifice and simulation; it is a
+matter of being genuine and not a sham.
+
+Still further, Jefferson has aroused and touched and satisfied the
+feelings of the people, not by attempting to interpret literature but by
+being an actor. An actor is a man who acts. He may be an uneducated man,
+deficient in learning and in mental discipline, and yet a fine actor.
+The people care not at all for literature. They do not read it, and they
+know nothing about it until it is brought home to their hearts by some
+great interpreter of it. What they do know is action. They can see and
+they can feel, and the actor who makes them see and feel can do
+anything with them that he pleases. It is his privilege and his
+responsibility. Jefferson is one of those artists (and they are few) who
+depend for their effects not upon what authors have written but upon
+impersonation. He takes liberties with the text. It would not perhaps be
+saying too much to say that he does not primarily heed the text at all.
+He is an actor; and speaking with reference to him and to others like
+him it would perhaps be well if those persons who write criticisms upon
+the stage would come to a definite conclusion upon this point and
+finally understand that an actor must produce his effects on the instant
+by something that he does and is, and not by rhetoric and elocution, and
+therefore that he should not be expected to repeat every word of every
+part, or to be a translator of somebody else, but that he must be
+himself. If we want the full, literal text of Shakespeare we can stop at
+home and read it. What we want of the actor is that he should give
+himself; and the true actor does give himself. The play is the medium. A
+man who acts Romeo must embody, impersonate, express, convey, and make
+evident what he knows and feels about love. He need not trouble himself
+about Shakespeare. That great poet will survive; while if Romeo, being
+ever so correct, bores the house, Romeo will be damned. Jefferson is an
+actor who invariably produces effect, and he produces it by
+impersonation, and by impersonation that is poetic and human.
+
+Jefferson's performance of Acres conspicuously exemplifies the
+principles that have been stated here. He has not hesitated to alter the
+comedy of _The Rivals_, and in his alteration of it he has improved it.
+Acres has been made a better part for an actor, and a more significant
+and sympathetic part for an audience. You could not care particularly
+for Acres if he were played exactly as he is written. You might laugh at
+him, and probably would, but he would not touch your feelings. Jefferson
+embodies him in such a way that he often makes you feel like laughing
+and crying at the same moment, and you end with loving the character,
+and storing it in your memory with such cherished comrades of the fancy
+as Mark Tapley and Uncle Toby. There is but little human nature in Acres
+as Sheridan has drawn him, and what there is of human nature is coarse;
+but as embodied by Jefferson, while he never ceases to be comically
+absurd, he becomes fine and sweet, and wins sympathy and inspires
+affection, and every spectator is glad to have seen him and to remember
+him. It is not possible to take that sort of liberty with every author.
+You can do it but seldom with Shakespeare; never in any but his juvenile
+plays. But there are authors who can be improved by that process, and
+Sheridan--in _The Rivals_, not in _The School for Scandal_--is one of
+them. And anyway, since it ought to be felt, known, understood, and
+practically admitted that an actor is something more than a telegraph
+wire, that his personal faculty and testimony enter into the matter of
+embodiment and expression, Jefferson's rare excellence and great success
+as Acres should teach a valuable lesson, correcting that pernicious
+habit of the critical mind which measures an actor by the printed text
+of a play-book and by the hide-bound traditions of custom on the stage.
+Jefferson has had a royal plenitude of success as an actor, chiefly with
+the part of Rip Van Winkle, but also with the characters of Caleb
+Plummer, Bob Brierly, Dr. Pangloss, Dr. Ollapod, Mr. Golightly, and Hugh
+de Brass. The reason of that success cannot be found in conventional
+adherence to stage customs and critical standards.
+
+Jefferson has gained his great power over the people--of which his great
+fame is the shadow--- by giving himself in his art--his own rich and
+splendid nature and the crystallised conclusions of his experience. As
+an artist, when it comes to execution, he leaves nothing to chance. The
+most seemingly artless of his proceedings is absolutely defined in
+advance, and never is what heedless observers call impulsive and
+spontaneous. But his temperament is free, fluent, opulent, and
+infinitely tender; and when the whole man is aroused, this flows into
+the moulds of literary and dramatic art and glorifies them. When you are
+looking at Jefferson as Acres in the duel scene in _The Rivals_, you
+laugh at him, but almost you laugh through your tears. When you see
+Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle confronting the ghosts on the lonely
+mountain-top at midnight, you see a display of imaginative personality
+quite as high as that of Hamlet in tremulous sensibility to supernatural
+influence, although wholly apart from Hamlet in altitude of intellect
+and in anguish of experience. The poetry of the impersonation, though,
+is entirely consonant with Hamlet, and that is the secret of Jefferson's
+exceptional hold upon the heart and the imagination of his time. The
+public taste does not ask Jefferson to trifle with his art. Its deep,
+spontaneous, natural preference feels that he is a true actor, and so
+yields to his power, and enjoys his charm, and is all the time improved
+and made fitter to enjoy it. He has reached as great a height as it is
+possible to reach in his profession. He could if he chose play greater
+parts than he has ever attempted; he could not give a better
+exemplification than he gives, in his chose and customary achievement,
+of all that is distinctive, beautiful, and beneficent in the art of the
+actor.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+JEFFERSON AND FLORENCE IN OLD COMEDY.
+
+
+A revival of _The Heir at Law_ was accomplished in the New York season
+of 1890, with Joseph Jefferson in the character of Dr. Pangloss and
+William James Florence in that of Zekiel Homespun. That play dates back
+to 1797, a period in which a sedulous deference to conventionality
+prevailed in the British theatre, as to the treatment of domestic
+subjects; and, although the younger Colman wrote in a more flexible
+style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting
+Sheridan, he was influenced to this extent by contemporary usage, that
+often when he became serious he also became artificial and stilted. The
+sentimental part of _The Heir at Law_ is trite in plan and hard in
+expression. Furthermore that portion of it which, in the character of
+Dr. Pangloss, satirises the indigent, mercenary, disreputable private
+tutors who constituted a distinct and pernicious class of social
+humbugs in Colman's day, has lost its direct point for the present age,
+through the disappearance of the peculiar type of imposture against
+which its irony was directed. Dr. Pangloss, nevertheless, remains
+abstractly a humorous personage; and when he is embodied by an actor
+like Jefferson, who can elucidate his buoyant animal spirits, his gay
+audacity, his inveterate good-nature, his nimble craft, his jocular
+sportiveness, his shrewd knowledge of character and of society, and his
+scholar-like quaintness, he becomes a delightful presence; for his
+mendacity disappears in the sunshine of his humour; his faults seem
+venial; and we entertain him much as we do the infinitely greater and
+more disreputable character of Falstaff,--knowing him to be a vagabond,
+but finding him a charming companion, for all that. This is one great
+relief to the hollow and metallic sentimentality of the piece. Persons
+like Henry Moreland, Caroline Dormer, and Mr. Steadfast would be
+tiresome in actual life; they belong, with Julia and Falkland and
+Peregrine and Glenroy, to the noble army of the bores, and they are
+insipid on the stage; but the association of the sprightly and jocose
+Pangloss with those drab-tinted and preachy people irradiates even their
+constitutional platitude with a sparkle of mirth. They shine, in spite
+of themselves.
+
+Colman's humour is infectious and penetrating. In that quality he was
+original and affluent. As we look along the line of the British
+dramatists for the last hundred years we shall find no parallel to his
+felicity in the use of comic inversion and equivoke, till we come to
+Gilbert. Though he was tedious while he deferred to that theatrical
+sentimentality which was the fashion of his day (and against which
+Goldsmith, in _She Stoops to Conquer_, was the first to strike), he
+could sometimes escape from it; and when he did escape he was brilliant.
+In _The Heir at Law_ he has not only illumined it by the contrast of Dr.
+Pangloss but by the unctuous humour and irresistible comic force of the
+character of Daniel Dowlas, Lord Duberly. Situations in a play, in order
+to be invested with the enduring quality of humour, must result from
+such conduct as is the natural and spontaneous expression of comic
+character. The idea of the comic parvenue is ancient. It did not
+originate with Colman. His application of it, however, was novel and his
+treatment of it--taking fast hold of the elemental springs of mirth--is
+as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago. French minds, indeed, and
+such as subscribe to French notions, would object that the means
+employed to elicit character and awaken mirth are not scientifically and
+photographically correct, and that they are violent. Circumstances, they
+would say, do not so fall out that a tallow-chandler is made a lord. The
+Christopher Sly expedient, they would add, is a forced expedient.
+Perhaps it is. But English art sees with the eyes of the imagination and
+in dramatic matters it likes to use colour and emphasis. Daniel Dowlas,
+as Lord Duberly, is all the droller for being a retired tallow-chandler,
+ignorant, greasy, conventional, blunt, a sturdy, honest, ridiculous
+person, who thinks he has observed how lords act and who intends to put
+his gained knowledge into practical use. We shall never again see him
+acted as he was acted by Burton, or by that fine actor William Rufus
+Blake, or even by John Gilbert--who was of rather too choleric a
+temperament and too fine a texture for such an oily and stupidly
+complacent personage. But whenever and however he is acted he will be
+recognised as an elemental type of absurd human nature made ludicrous by
+comic circumstances; and he will give rich and deep amusement.
+
+It is to be observed, in the analysis of this comedy, that according to
+Colman's intention the essential persons in it are all, at heart, human.
+The pervasive spirit of the piece is kindly. Old Dowlas, restricted to
+his proper place in life, is a worthy man. Dick Dowlas, intoxicated by
+vanity and prosperity, has no harm in him, and he turns out well at
+last. Even Dr. Pangloss--although of the species of rogue that subsists
+by artfully playing upon the weakness of human vanity--is genial and
+amiable; he is a laughing philosopher; he gives good counsel; he hurts
+nobody; he is but a mild type of sinner--and the satirical censure that
+is bestowed upon him is neither merciless nor bitter. Pangloss, in Milk
+Alley, spinning his brains for a subsistence, might be expected to prove
+unscrupulous; but the moraliser can imagine Pangloss, if he were only
+made secure by permanent good fortune, leading a life of blameless
+indolence and piquant eccentricity. From that point of view Jefferson
+formed his ideal of the character; and, indeed, his treatment of the
+whole piece denoted an active practical sympathy with that gentle view
+of the subject. He placed before his audience a truthful picture of old
+English manners; telling them, in rapid and cheery action, Colman's
+quaint story--in which there is no malice and no bitterness, but in
+which simple virtue proves superior to temptation, and integrity is
+strong amid vicissitudes--and leaving in their minds, at the last, an
+amused conviction that indeed "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her
+time." His own performance was full of nervous vitality and mental
+sparkle, and of a humour deliciously quaint and droll. Dr. Panglass, as
+embodied by Jefferson, is a man who always sees the comical aspect of
+things and can make you see it with him, and all the while can be
+completely self-possessed and grave without ever once becoming slow or
+heavy. There was an air of candour, of ingenuous simplicity, of demure
+propriety, about the embodiment, that made it inexpressibly funny. There
+was no effort and no distortion. The structure of the impersonation
+tingled with life, and the expression of it--in demeanour, movement,
+facial play, intonation and business--was clear and crisp, with that
+absolute precision and beautiful finish for which the acting of
+Jefferson has always been distinguished. He is probably the only
+American comedian now left, excepting John S. Clarke, who knows all the
+traditional embellishments that have gone to the making of this part
+upon the stage--embellishments fitly typified by the bank-note business
+with Zekiel Homespun; a device, however, that perhaps suggests a greater
+degree of moral obliquity in Dr. Pangloss than was intended by the
+author. It was exceedingly comical, though, and it served its purpose.
+Jefferson has had the character of Pangloss in his repertory for almost
+forty years. He first acted it in New York as long ago as 1857, at Laura
+Keene's theatre, when that beautiful woman played Cicely and when
+Duberly was represented by the lamented James G. Burnett. It takes the
+playgoer a long way back, to be thinking about this old piece and the
+casts that it has had upon the American stage. _The Heir at Law_ was a
+great favourite in Boston thirty years ago and more, when William Warren
+was in his prime and could play Dr. Pangloss with the best of them, and
+when Julia Bennett Barrow was living and acting, who could play Cicely
+in a way that no later actress has excelled. John E. Owens as Pangloss
+will never be forgotten. It was a favourite part with John Brougham. And
+the grotesque fun of John S. Clarke in that droll character has been
+recognised on both sides of the Atlantic.
+
+In Jefferson's impersonation of Dr. Pangloss the predominant beauty was
+spontaneous and perfectly graceful identification with the part. The
+felicity of the apt quotations seemed to be accidental. The manner was
+buoyant, but the alacrity of the mind was more nimble than the celerity
+of the body, and those wise and witty comments that Pangloss makes upon
+life, character, and manners flowed naturally from a brain that was in
+the vigour and repose of intense animation. The actor was completely
+merged in the character, which nevertheless his judgment dominated and
+his will directed. No other representative of Pangloss has quite
+equalled Jefferson in the element of authoritative and convincing
+sincerity. His demure sapience was of the most intense order and it
+arose out of great mental excitement. No other actor of the part has
+equalled him in softness and winning charm of humour. His embodiment of
+Dr. Pangloss has left in the memory of his time an image of eccentric
+character not less lovable than ludicrous.
+
+With Zekiel Homespun, an actor who is true to the author's plan will
+produce the impression of an affectionate heart, virtuous principles,
+and absolute honesty of purpose, combined with rustic simplicity.
+Florence easily reached that result. His preservation of a dialect was
+admirably exact. The soul of the part is fraternal love, and when Zekiel
+finds that his trusted friend has repulsed him and would wrong his
+sister, there is a fine flash of noble anger in the pride and scorn with
+which he confronts this falsehood and dishonour. Florence in days when
+he used to act the Irish Emigrant proved himself the consummate master
+of simple pathos. He struck that familiar note again in the lovely
+manner of Zekiel toward his sister Cicely, and his denotement of the
+struggle between affection and resentment in the heart of the brother
+when wounded by the depravity of his friend was not less beautiful in
+the grace of art than impressive in simple dignity and touching in
+passionate fervour. In point of natural feeling Zekiel Homespun is a
+stronger part than Dr. Pangloss, although not nearly so complex nor so
+difficult to act. The sentiments by which it is animated awaken instant
+sympathy and the principles that impel command universal respect. No
+actor who has attempted Zekiel Homespun in this generation on the
+American stage has approached the performance that was given by
+Florence, in conviction, in artless sweetness, in truth of passion, and
+in the heartfelt expression of the heart.
+
+Purists customarily insist that the old comedies are sacred; that no one
+of their celestial commas or holy hyphens can be omitted without sin;
+and that the alteration of a sentence in them is sacrilege. The truth
+stands, however, without regard to hysterics: and it is a truth that the
+old comedies owe their vitality mostly to the actors who now and then
+resuscitate them. No play of the past is ever acted with scrupulous
+fidelity to the original text. The public that saw the _Heir-at-Law_ and
+the _Rivals_, when Jefferson and Florence acted in them, saw condensed
+versions, animated by a living soul of to-day, and therefore it was
+impressed. The one thing indispensable on the stage is the art of the
+actor.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+ON THE DEATH OF FLORENCE.
+
+
+The melancholy tidings of the death of Florence came suddenly (he died
+in Philadelphia, after a brief illness, November 19, 1891), and struck
+the hearts of his friends not simply with affliction but with dismay.
+Florence was a man of such vigorous and affluent health that the idea of
+illness and death was never associated with him. Whoever else might go,
+he at least would remain, and for many cheerful years he would please
+our fancy and brighten our lives. His spirit was so buoyant and
+brilliant that it seemed not possible it could ever be dimmed. Yet now,
+in a moment, his light was quenched and there was darkness on his mirth.
+We shall hear his pleasant voice no more and see no more the sunshine of
+a face that was never seen without joy and can never be remembered
+without sorrow. The loss to the public was great. Few actors within the
+last forty years have stood upon a level with Florence in versatility
+and charm. His gentleness, his simplicity, his modesty, his affectionate
+fidelity, his ready sympathy, his inexhaustibly patience, his fine
+talents--all those attributes united with his spontaneous drollery to
+enshrine him in tender affection.
+
+William James Florence, whose family name was Conlin, was born in
+Albany, July 26, 1831. When a youth he joined the Murdoch Dramatic
+Association, and he early gave evidence of extraordinary dramatic
+talent. On December 9, 1849 he made his first appearance on the regular
+stage, at the Marshall theatre in Richmond, Virginia, where he
+impersonated Tobias, in _The Stranger_. After that he met with the usual
+vicissitudes of a young player. He was a member of various stock
+companies--notably that of W.C. Forbes, of the Providence museum, and
+that of the once-popular John Nickinson, of Toronto and Quebec--the
+famous Havresack of his period. Later he joined the company at Niblo's
+theatre, New York, under the management of Chippendale and John Sefton,
+appearing there on May 8, 1850. He also acted at the Broadway, under
+Marshall's management, and in 1852 he was a member of the company at
+Brougham's Lyceum. On January 1, 1853 he married Malvina Pray, sister of
+the wife of Barney Williams; and in that way those two Irish comedians
+came to be domestically associated.
+
+At that time Florence wrote several plays, upon Irish and Yankee
+subjects, then very popular, and he began to figure as a star--his wife
+standing beside him. They appeared at Purdy's National theatre, June 8,
+1853, and then, and for a long time afterward, they had much popularity
+and success. Florence had composed many songs of a sprightly character
+(one of them, called _Bobbing Around_, had a sale of more than 100,000
+copies), and those songs were sung by his wife, to the delight of the
+public. The Irish drama served his purpose for many years, but he varied
+that form of art by occasional resort to burlesque and by incursions
+into the realm of melodrama. One of his best performances was that of
+O'Bryan, in John Brougham's play of _Temptation, or the Irish Emigrant_,
+with which he often graced the stage of the Winter Garden. In that he
+touched the extremes of gentle humour and melting pathos. He was
+delightfully humorous, also, in Handy Andy, and in all that long line of
+Irish characters that came to our stage with Tyrone Power and the elder
+John Drew. He had exceptional talent for burlesque, and that was often
+manifested in his early days. _Fra Diavolo_, _Beppo_, _Lallah Rookh_,
+_The Lady of the Lions_, and _The Colleen Bawn_, were among the
+burlesques that he produced, and with those he was the pioneer.
+
+Engagements were filled by Mr. and Mrs. Florence, at the outset of their
+starring tour, in many cities of the republic, and everywhere they met
+with kindness and honour. Among the plays written by Florence were _The
+Irish Princess_, _O'Neil the Great_, _The Sicilian Bride_, _Woman's
+Wrongs_, _Eva_, and _The Drunkard's Doom_. On April 2, 1856 Mr. and Mrs.
+Florence sailed for England, and presently they appeared at Drury Lane
+theatre, where they at once stepped into favour. The performance of the
+_Yankee Gal_ by Mrs. Florence aroused positive enthusiasm--for it was
+new, and Mrs. Florence was the first American comic actress that had
+appeared upon the English stage. More than two hundred representations
+of it were given at that time. Florence used to relate that his
+fortunes were greatly benefited by his success in London, and he
+habitually spoke with earnest gratitude of the kindness that he received
+there. From that time onward he enjoyed almost incessant prosperity. A
+tour of the English provincial cities followed his London season. He
+acted at Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin,
+and both his wife and himself became favourites--so that their songs
+were sung and whistled in the streets, wherever they went.
+
+Returning to the United States Mr. and Mrs. Florence renewed their
+triumphs, all over the land. In 1861 Florence played some of Burton's
+characters in Wallack's theatre--among them being Toodle and Cuttle. At
+a later period he made it a custom to lease Wallack's theatre during the
+summer, and there he produced many burlesques. In 1863, at the Winter
+Garden, he offered _The Ticket-of-Leave Man_ and acted Bob Brierly,
+which was one of the best exploits of his life. In 1867 Wallack's old
+theatre being then called the Broadway and managed by Barney Williams,
+he brought to that house the comedy of _Caste_ and presented it with a
+distribution of the parts that has not been equalled. The actors were
+Mrs. Chanfrau, Mrs. Gilbert, Mrs. Florence, William Davidge, Owen
+Marlowe, Edward Lamb, and Florence--who played George D'Alroy. In 1868
+he presented _No Thoroughfare_ and enacted Obenreizer,--a performance
+that established his rank among the leading actors of the time. In 1876
+he made a remarkable hit as the Hon. Bardwell Slote in the play of _The
+Mighty Dollar_, by Benjamin E. Woolff. That was the last important new
+play that he produced. During the last fifteen years of his life he
+offered selections from his accepted repertory. For a time he was
+associated with Jefferson--to whom he brought a strength that was deeply
+valued and appreciated, equally by that famous actor and by the
+public--acting Sir Lucius O'Trigger in _The Rivals_ and Zekiel Homespun
+in _The Heir-at-Law_.
+
+The power of Florence was that of impersonation. He was imaginative and
+sympathetic; his style was flexible; and he had an unerring instinct of
+effect. The secret of his success lay in his profound feeling, guided by
+perfect taste and perfect self-control. He was an actor of humanity, and
+he diffused an irresistible charm of truth and gentleness. His place
+was his own and it can never be filled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An Epitaph.
+
+_Here Rest the Ashes of_
+WILLIAM JAMES FLORENCE,
+_Comedian_.
+
+_His Copious and Varied Dramatic Powers, together with the Abundant
+Graces of his Person, combined with Ample Professional Equipment and a
+Temperament of Peculiar Sensibility and Charm, made him one of the Best
+and Most Successful Actors of his Time, alike in Comedy and in Serious
+Drama. He ranged easily from Handy Andy to Bob Brierly, and from Cuttle
+to Obenreizer. In Authorship, alike of Plays, Stories, Music, and Song,
+he was Inventive, Versatile, Facile, and Graceful. In Art Admirable; in
+Life Gentle; he was widely known, and he was known only to be loved._
+
+HE WAS BORN IN ALBANY, N.Y.,
+    JULY 26, 1831.
+HE DIED IN PHILADELPHIA PENN.,
+    NOVEMBER 19, 1891.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    By Virtue cherished, by Affection mourned,
+    By Honour hallowed and by Fame adorned,
+    Here FLORENCE sleeps, and o'er his sacred rest
+    Each word is tender and each thought is blest.
+    Long, for his loss, shall pensive Mem'ry show,
+    Through Humour's mask, the visage of her woe,
+    Day breathe a darkness that no sun dispels,
+    And Night be full of whispers and farewells;
+    While patient Kindness, shadow-like and dim,
+    Droops in its loneliness, bereft of him,
+    Feels its sad doom and sure decadence nigh,--
+    For how should Kindness live, when he could die!
+
+    The eager heart, that felt for every grief,
+    The bounteous hand, that loved to give relief,
+    The honest smile, that blessed where'er it lit,
+    The dew of pathos and the sheen of wit,
+    The sweet, blue eyes, the voice of melting tone,
+    That made all hearts as gentle as his own,
+    The Actor's charm, supreme in royal thrall,
+    That ranged through every field and shone in all--
+    For these must Sorrow make perpetual moan,
+    Bereaved, benighted, hopeless, and alone?
+    Ah, no; for Nature does no act amiss,
+    And Heaven were lonely but for souls like this.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
+
+
+In his beautiful production of _The Merchant of Venice_ Henry Irving
+restored the fifth act, the jailer scene, and the casket scenes in full,
+and the piece was acted with strict fidelity to Shakespeare. With Ellen
+Terry for Portia that achievement became feasible. With an ordinary
+actress in that character the comedy might be tedious--notwithstanding
+its bold and fine contrasts of character, its fertility of piquant
+incident, and its lovely poetry. Radiant with her fine spirit and
+beautiful presence, and animated and controlled in every fibre by his
+subtle and authoritative intellect, judiciously cast and correctly
+dressed and mounted, Henry Irving's revival of _The Merchant of Venice_
+captured the public fancy; and in every quarter it was sincerely felt
+and freely proclaimed that here, at last, was the perfection of stage
+display. That success has never faded. The performance was round,
+symmetrical, and thorough--every detail being kept subordinate to
+intelligent general effect, and no effort being made toward overweening
+individual display.
+
+Shakespeare's conception of Shylock has long been in controversy.
+Burbage, who acted the part in Shakespeare's presence, wore a red wig
+and was frightful in form and aspect. The red wig gives a hint of low
+comedy, and it may be that the great actor made use of low comedy
+expedients to cloak Shylock's inveterate malignity and sinister purpose.
+Dogget, who played the part in Lord Lansdowne's alteration of
+Shakespeare's piece, turned Shylock into farce. Macklin, when he
+restored the original play to the stage--at Drury Lane, February 14,
+1741--- wore a red hat, a peaked beard, and a loose black gown, playing
+Shylock as a serious, almost a tragic part, and laying great emphasis
+upon a display of revengeful passion and hateful malignity. So terrible
+was he, indeed, that persons who saw him on the stage in that character
+not infrequently drew the inference and kept the belief that he was
+personally a monster. His look was iron-visaged; the cast of his
+manners was relentless and savage. Quin said that his face contained not
+lines but cordage. In portraying the contrasted passions of joy for
+Antonio's losses and grief for Jessica's elopement he poured forth all
+his fire. When he whetted his knife, in the trial scene, he was silent,
+grisly, ominous, and fatal. No human touch, no hint of race-majesty or
+of religious fanaticism, tempered the implacable wickedness of that
+hateful ideal. Pope, who saw that Shylock, hailed it as "the Jew that
+Shakespeare drew"--and Pope, among other things, was one of the editors
+of Shakespeare. Cooke, who had seen Macklin's Shylock, and also those of
+Henderson, King, Kemble, and Yates, adopted, maintained, and transmitted
+the legend of Macklin. Edmund Kean, who worshipped Cooke, was
+unquestionably his imitator in Shylock; but it seems to have been Edmund
+Kean who, for the first time, gave prominence to the Hebraic majesty and
+fanatical self-consecration of that hateful but colossal character.
+Jerrold said that Kean's Shylock was like a chapter of Genesis.
+Macready--whose utterance of "Nearest his heart" was the blood-curdling
+keynote of his whole infernal ideal--declared the part to be "composed
+of harshness," and he saw no humanity in the lament for the loss of
+Leah's ring, but only a lacerated sense of the value of that jewel.
+Brooke, a great Shylock, concurred with Kean's ideal and made the Jew
+orientally royal, the avenger of his race, having "an oath in heaven,"
+and standing on the law of "an eye for an eye." Edwin Forrest, the elder
+Wallack, E.L. Davenport, Edwin Booth, Bogumil Davison, and Charles Kean
+steadily kept Shylock upon the stage,--some walking in the religious
+track and some leaving it. But the weight of opinion and the spirit and
+drift of the text would justify a presentment of the Jew as the
+incarnation not alone of avarice and hate, but of the stern, terrible
+Mosaic law of justice. That is the high view of the part, and in
+studying Shakespeare it is safe to prefer the high view.
+
+There must be imagination, or pathos, or weirdness, or some form of
+humour, or a personal charm in the character that awakens the soul of
+Henry Irving and calls forth his best and finest powers. There is little
+of that quality in Shylock. But Henry Irving took the high view of him.
+This Jew "feeds fat the ancient grudge" against Antonio--until the law
+of Portia, more subtle than equitable, interferes to thwart him; but
+also he avenges the wrongs that his "sacred nation" has suffered. His
+ideal was right, his grasp of it firm, his execution of it flexible with
+skill and affluent with intellectual power. If memory carries away a
+shuddering thought of his baleful gaze upon the doomed Antonio and of
+his horrid cry of the summons "Come, prepare!" it also retains the image
+of a father convulsed with grief--momentarily, but sincerely--and of a
+man who at least can remember that he once loved. It was a most austere
+Shylock, inveterate of purpose, vindictive, malignant, cruel, ruthless;
+and yet it was human. No creature was ever more logical and consistent
+in his own justification. By purity, sincerity, decorum, fanaticism, the
+ideal was aptly suggestive of such men as Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes,
+and John Felton--persons who, with prayer on their lips, were
+nevertheless capable of hideous cruelty. The street scene demands
+utterance, not repression. The Jew raves there, and no violence would
+seem excessive. Macklin, Kean, Cooke, and the elder Booth, each must
+have been terrific at that point. Henry Irving's method was that of the
+intense passion that can hardly speak--the passion that Kean is said to
+have used so grandly in giving the curse of Junius Brutus upon Tarquin.
+But, there was just as much of Shylock's nature in Henry Irving's
+performance as in any performance that is recorded. The lack was
+overwhelming physical power--not mentality and not art. At "No tears but
+of my shedding" Henry Irving's Shylock took a strong clutch upon the
+emotions and created an effect that will never be forgotten.
+
+Ellen Terry's Portia long ago became a precious memory. The part makes
+no appeal to the tragic depths of her nature, but it awakens her fine
+sensibility, stimulates the nimble play of her intellect, and cordially
+promotes that royal exultation in the affluence of physical vitality and
+of spiritual freedom that so often seems to lift her above the common
+earth. There have been moments when it seemed not amiss to apply
+Shakespeare's own beautiful simile to the image of queen-like
+refinement, soft womanhood, and spiritualised intellect that this
+wonderful actress presented--"as if an angel dropped down from the
+clouds." Her Portia was stately, yet fascinating; a woman to inspire awe
+and yet to captivate every heart. Nearer to Shakespeare's meaning than
+that no actress can ever go. The large, rich, superb manner never
+invalidated the gentle blandishments of her sex. The repressed ardour,
+the glowing suspense, the beautiful modesty and candour with which she
+awaited the decision of the casket scene, showed her to be indeed all
+woman, and worthy of a true man's love. Here was no paltering of a puny
+nature with great feelings and a great experience. And never in our day
+has the poetry of Shakespeare fallen from human lips in a strain of such
+melody--with such teeming freedom of felicitous delivery and such dulcet
+purity of diction.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+JOHN McCULLOUGH IN SEVERAL CHARACTERS.
+
+
+There is no greater gratification to the intellect than the sense of
+power and completeness in itself or the perception of power and
+completeness in others. Those attributes were in John McCullough's
+acting and were at the heart of its charm. His repertory consisted of
+thirty characters, but probably the most imposing and affecting of his
+embodiments was Virginius. The massive grandeur of adequacy in that
+performance was a great excellence. The rugged, weather-beaten plainness
+of it was full of authority and did not in the least detract from its
+poetic purity and ideal grace. The simplicity of it was like the lovely
+innocence that shines through the ingenuous eyes of childhood, while its
+majesty was like the sheen of white marble in the sunlight. It was a
+very high, serious, noble work; yet,--although, to his immeasurable
+credit, the actor never tried to apply a "natural" treatment to
+artificial conditions or to speak blank verse in a colloquial
+manner,--it was made sweetly human by a delicate play of humour in the
+earlier scenes, and by a deep glow of paternal tenderness that suffused
+every part of it and created an almost painful sense of sincerity.
+Common life was not made commonplace life by McCullough, nor blank verse
+depressed to the level of prose. The intention to be real--the intention
+to love, suffer, feel, act, defend, and avenge, as a man of actual life
+would do--was obvious enough, through its harmonious fulfilment; yet the
+realism was shorn of all triteness, all animal excess, all of those
+ordinary attributes which are right in nature, and wrong because
+obstructive in the art that is nature's interpretation.
+
+Just as the true landscape is the harmonious blending of selected
+natural effects, so the true dramatic embodiment is the crystallization
+of selected attributes in any given type of human nature, shown in
+selected phases of natural condition. McCullough did not present
+Virginius brushing his hair or paying Virginia's school-bills; yet he
+suggested him, clearly and beautifully, in the sweet domestic repose
+and paternal benignity of his usual life--making thus a background of
+loveliness, on which to throw, in lines of living light, the terrible
+image of his agonising sacrifice. And when the inevitable moment came
+for his dread act of righteous slaughter it was the moral grandeur, the
+heart-breaking paternal agony, and the overwhelming pathos of the deed
+that his art diffused--not the "gashed stab," the blood, the physical
+convulsion, the revolting animal shock. Neither was there druling, or
+dirt, or physical immodesty, or any other attribute of that class of the
+natural concomitants of insanity, in the subsequent delirium.
+
+A perfect and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see
+than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and
+for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred
+exaltation,--the love of the parent for the child,--is so fair a mark
+for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of
+apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in McCullough's
+embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was
+imparted by its presence,--even before the tragedian, with an exquisite
+intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not
+admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and
+agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting
+than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural"
+school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic
+grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that
+McCullough did and said, in the forum scene--the noble severity of the
+poise, the grace of the outlines, the terrible intensity of the mood,
+the heartrending play of the emotions, the overwhelming delirium of the
+climax. Throughout the subsequent most difficult portraiture of
+shattered reason the actor never, for an instant, lost his steadfast
+grasp upon sympathy and inspiration. Every heart knew the presence of a
+nature that could feel all that Virginius felt and suffer and act all
+that Virginius suffered and acted; and, beyond this, in his wonderful
+investiture of the mad scenes with the alternate vacancy and lamentable
+and forlorn anguish of a special kind of insanity, every judge of the
+dramatic art recognised the governing touch of a splendid intellect,
+imperial over all its resources and instruments of art.
+
+Virginius as embodied by McCullough was a man of noble and refined
+nature; lovely in life; cruelly driven into madness; victorious over
+dishonour, by a deed of terrible heroism; triumphant over crime, even in
+forlorn and pitiable dethronement and ruin; and, finally, released by
+the celestial mercy of death. And this was shown by a poetic method so
+absolute that Virginius, while made an actual man to every human heart,
+was kept a hero to the universal imagination, whether of scholar or
+peasant, and a white ideal of manly purity and grace to that great
+faculty of taste which is the umpire and arbiter of the human mind.
+
+The sustained poetic exaltation of that embodiment, its unity as a grand
+and sympathetic personage, and its exquisite simplicity were the
+qualities that gave it vitality in popular interest, and through those
+it will have permanence in theatrical history. There were many subtle
+beauties in it. The illimitable tenderness, back of the sweet dignity,
+in the betrothal of Virginia to Icilius; the dim, transitory, evanescent
+touch of presentiment, in the forecasting of the festival joys that are
+to succeed the war; the self-abnegation and simple homeliness of grief
+for the dead Dentatus; the alternate shock of freezing terror and cry of
+joy, in the camp scene--closing with that potent repression and
+thrilling outburst, "Prudence, but no patience!"--a situation and words
+that call at once for splendid manliness of self-command and an ominous
+and savage vehemence; the glad, saving, comforting cry to Virginia, "Is
+she here?"--that cry which never failed to precipitate a gush of joyous
+tears; the rapt preoccupation and the exquisite music of voice with
+which he said, "I never saw thee look so like thy mother, in all my
+life"; the majesty of his demeanour in the forum; the look that saw the
+knife; the mute parting glance at Servia; the accents of broken reason,
+but unbroken and everlasting love, that called upon the name of the poor
+murdered Virginia; and then the last low wail of the dying father,
+conscious and happy in the great boon of death--those, as McCullough
+gave them, were points of impressive beauty, invested with the
+ever-varying light and shadow of a delicate artistic treatment, and all
+the while animated with passionate sincerity. The perfect finish of the
+performance, indeed, was little less than marvellous, when viewed with
+reference to the ever-increasing volume of power and the evident reality
+of afflicting emotion with which the part was carried. If acting ever
+could do good the acting of McCullough did. If ever dramatic art
+concerns the public welfare it is when such an ideal of manliness and
+heroism is presented in such an image of nobility.
+
+In Lear and in Othello,--as in Virginius,--the predominant quality of
+McCullough's acting was a profound and beautiful sincerity. His
+splendidly self-poised nature--a solid rock of truth, which enabled him,
+through years of patient toil, to hold a steadfast course over all the
+obstacles that oppose and amid all the chatter that assails a man who is
+trying to accomplish anything grand and noble in art--bore him bravely
+up in those great characters, and made him, in each of them, a stately
+type of the nobility of the human soul. As the Moor, his performance was
+well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in
+the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the
+display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes.
+The tendency of that sort of ornamentation--however consonant it may be
+deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor--is to suggest him as
+heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience
+to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to
+the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and
+McCullough, in his treatment of the part, testified to his practical
+appreciation of that truth. His ideal of Othello combined manly
+tenderness, spontaneous magnanimity, and trusting devotion, yet withal a
+volcanic ground-swell of passion, that early and clearly displayed
+itself as capable of delirium and ungovernable tempest. His method had
+the calm movement of a summer cloud, in every act and word by which this
+was shown. For intensity and for immediate, adequate, large, and
+overwhelming response of action to emotion, that performance has not
+been surpassed. There were points in it, though, at which the massive
+serenity of the actor's temperament now and then deadened the glow of
+feeling and depressed him to undue calmness; he sometimes recovered too
+suddenly and fully from a tempest of emotion--as at the agonising appeal
+to Iago, "Give me a living reason she's disloyal"; and he was not
+enough delirious in the speech about the sybil and the handkerchief. On
+the other hand, once yielded to the spell of desecrated feeling, his
+mood and his expression of it were immeasurably pathetic and noble.
+Those two great ebullitions of despair, "O, now forever," and "Had it
+pleased heaven," could not be spoken in a manner more absolutely
+heart-broken or more beautifully simple than the manner that was used by
+him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and
+dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his
+more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of
+his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet
+fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness
+for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of
+soft, romantic affection--always spiritualised, never sensual--that his
+deep and loving sincerity diffused throughout the work, was shown the
+grand unity of the embodiment; a unity based on the simple passion of
+love. To hear that actor say the one supreme line to Iago, "I am bound
+to thee forever," was to know that he understood and felt the meaning
+of the character, to its minutest fibre and its profoundest depth.
+
+There were touches of fresh and aptly illustrative "business" in the
+encounter of Othello and Iago, in the great scene of the third act. The
+gasping struggles of Iago heightened the effect of the Moor's fury, and
+the quickly suppressed impulse and yell of rage with which he finally
+bounded away made an admirable effect of nature. In the last scene
+McCullough rounded his performance with a solemn act of sacrifice. There
+was nothing animal, nothing barbaric, nothing insane, in the slaughter
+of Desdemona. It was done in an ecstasy of justice, and the atmosphere
+that surrounded the deed was that of awe and not of horror.
+
+For the character of King Lear McCullough possessed the imposing
+stature, the natural majesty, the great reach of voice, and the human
+tenderness that are its basis and equipment. No actor of Lear can ever
+satisfy a sympathetic lover of the part unless he possesses a greatly
+affectionate heart, a fiery spirit, and,--albeit the intellect must be
+shown in ruins,--a regal mind. Within that grand and lamentable image of
+shattered royalty the man must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is
+puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal
+sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in
+mind--already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution;
+not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all
+about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses
+disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him
+with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit but he will soon break;
+and the spectator loves him and is sorry for him and would avert the
+destiny of woe that is darkly foreshadowed in his condition. McCullough
+gave the invectives--as they ought to be given--with the impetuous rush
+and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of
+agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages
+is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of
+government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls
+them forth from a breaking heart and a distracted mind. He loves, and he
+loathes himself for loving: every fibre of his nature is in horrified
+revolt against such lack of reverence, gratitude, and affection toward
+such a monarch and such a father as he knows himself to have been. The
+feeling that McCullough poured through those moments of splendid yet
+pitiable frenzy was overwhelming in its intense glow and in its towering
+and incessant volume. There was remarkable subtlety, also, in the manner
+in which that feeling was tempered. In Lear's meeting with Goneril after
+the curse you saw at once the broken condition of an aged, infirm, and
+mentally disordered man, who had already forgotten his own terrible
+words. "We'll no more meet, no more see one another" is a line to which
+McCullough gave its full eloquence of abject mournfulness and forlorn
+desolation. Other denotements of subtlety were seen in his sad
+preoccupation with memories of the lost Cordelia, while talking with the
+Fool. "I did her wrong" was never more tenderly spoken than by him. They
+are only four little words; but they carry the crushing weight of
+eternal and hopeless remorse. It was in this region of delicate,
+imaginative touch that McCullough's dramatic art was especially
+puissant. He was the first actor of Lear to discriminate between the
+agony of a man while going mad and the careless, volatile, fantastic
+condition--afflicting to witness, but no longer agonising to the lunatic
+himself--of a man who has actually lapsed into madness. Edwin
+Forrest--whose Lear is much extolled, often by persons who, evidently,
+never saw it--much as he did with the part, never even faintly suggested
+such a discrimination as that.
+
+To one altitude of Lear's condition it is probably impossible for
+dramatic art to rise--the mood of divine philosophy, warmed with human
+tenderness, in which the dazed but semi-conscious vicegerent of heaven
+moralises over human life. There is a grandeur in that conception so
+vast that nothing short of the rarest inspiration of genius can rise to
+it. The deficiences of McCullough's Lear were found in the analysis of
+that part of the performance. He had the heart of Lear, the royalty, the
+breadth; but not all of either the exalted intellect, the sorrow-laden
+experience, or the imagination--so gorgeous in its disorder, so
+infinitely pathetic in its misery.
+
+His performance of Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of
+passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment
+of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the
+low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and
+then--and rightly broken--with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness
+never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's
+utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of
+the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not
+weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply
+tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting in
+tragic climax.
+
+Throughout _Othello_ and _King Lear_ McCullough's powers were seen to be
+curbed and guided, not by a cold and formal design but by a grave and
+sweet gentleness of mind, always a part of his nature, but more and more
+developed by the stress of experience, by the reactionary subduing
+influence of noble success, and by the definite consciousness of power.
+He found no difficulty in portraying the misery of Othello and of Lear,
+because this is a form of misery that flows out of laceration of the
+heart, and not from the more subtle wounds that are inflicted upon the
+spirit through the imagination. There was no brooding over the awful
+mysteries of the universe, nor any of that corroding, haunted gloom that
+comes of an over-spiritualised state of suffering, longing, questioning,
+doubting humanity. Above all things else Othello and Lear are human; and
+the human heart, above all things else, was the domain of that actor.
+
+The character of Coriolanus, though high and noble, is quite as likely
+to inspire resentment as to awaken sympathy. It contains many elements
+and all of them are good; but chiefly it typifies the pride of
+intellect. This, in itself a natural feeling and a virtuous quality,
+practically becomes a vice when it is not tempered with charity for
+ignorance, weakness, and the lower orders of mind. In the character of
+Coriolanus it is not so tempered, and therefore it vitiates his
+greatness and leads to his destruction. Much, of course, can be urged in
+his defence. He is a man of spotless honour, unswerving integrity,
+dauntless courage, simple mind, straightforward conduct, and magnanimous
+disposition. He is always ready to brave the perils of battle for the
+service of his country. He constantly does great deeds--and would
+continue constantly to do them--for their own sake and in a spirit of
+total indifference alike to praises and rewards. He exists in the
+consciousness of being great and has no life in the opinions of other
+persons. He dwells in "the cedar's top" and "dallies with the wind and
+scorns the sun." He knows and he despises with active and immitigable
+contempt the shallowness and fickleness of the multitude. He is of an
+icy purity, physical as well as mental, and his nerves tingle with
+disgust of the personal uncleanliness of the mob. "Bid them wash their
+faces," he says--when urged to ask the suffrages of the people--"and
+keep their teeth clean." "He rewards his deeds with doing them," says
+his fellow-soldier Cominius, "and looks upon things precious as the
+common muck of the world." His aristocracy does not sit in a corner,
+deedless and meritless, brooding over a transmitted name and sucking the
+orange of empty self-conceit: it is the aristocracy of achievement and
+of nature--the solid superiority of having done the brightest and best
+deeds that could be done in his time and of being the greatest man of
+his generation. It is as if a Washington, having made and saved a
+nation, were to spurn it from him with his foot, in lofty and by no
+means groundless contempt for the ignorance, pettiness, meanness, and
+filth of mankind. The story of Coriolanus, as it occurs in Plutarch, is
+thought to be fabulous, but it is very far from being fabulous as it
+stands transfigured in the stately, eloquent tragedy of Shakespeare. The
+character and the experience are indubitably representative. It was some
+modified form of the condition thus shown that resulted in the treason
+and subsequent ruin of Benedict Arnold. Pride of intellect largely
+dominated the career of Aaron Burr. More than one great thinker has
+split on that rock, and gone to pieces in the surges of popular
+resentment. "No man," said Dr. Chapin, in his discourse over the coffin
+of Horace Greeley, "can lift himself above himself." He who repudiates
+the humanity of which he is a part will inevitably come to sorrow and
+ruin. It is perfectly true that no intellectual person should in the
+least depend upon the opinions of others--which, in the nature of
+things, exist in all stages of immaturity, mutability, and error--but
+should aim to do the greatest deeds and should find reward in doing
+them: yet always the right mood toward humanity is gentleness and not
+scorn. "Thou, my father," said Matthew Arnold, in his tribute to one of
+the best men of the century, "wouldst not be saved alone." To enlighten
+the ignorant, to raise the weak, to pity the frail, to disregard the
+meanness, ingratitude, misapprehension, dulness, and petty malice of the
+lower orders of humanity--that is the wisdom of the wise; and that is
+accordant with the moral law of the universe, from the operation of
+which no man escapes. To study, in Shakespeare, the story of Coriolanus
+is to observe the violation of that law and the consequent retribution.
+
+    "Battles, and the breath
+    Of stormy war and violent death"
+
+fill up the first part of the tragedy as it stands in Shakespeare, and
+that portion is also much diversified with abrupt changes of scene; so
+that it has been found expedient to alter the piece, with a view to its
+more practical adaptation to the stage. While however it is not acted in
+strict accordance with Shakespeare its essential parts are retained and
+represented. Many new lines, though, occur toward the close. McCullough
+used the version that was used by Forrest, who followed in the footsteps
+of Cooper, the elder Vandenhoff, and James R. Anderson. There is,
+perhaps, an excess of foreground--a superfluity of fights and
+processions--by way of preparing for the ordeal through which the
+character of Coriolanus is to be displayed. Yet when Hecuba at last is
+reached the interest of the situation makes itself felt with force. The
+massive presence and stalwart declamation of Edwin Forrest made him
+superb in this character; but the embodiment of Coriolanus by
+McCullough, while equal to its predecessor in physical majesty, was
+superior to it in intellectual haughtiness and in refinement. An actor's
+treatment of the character must, unavoidably, follow the large, broad
+style of the historical painter. There is scant opportunity afforded in
+any of the scenes allotted to Coriolanus for fine touches and delicate
+shading. During much of the action the spectator is aware only of an
+imperial figure that moves with a mountainous grace through the fleeting
+rabble of Roman plebeians and Volscians, dreadful in war, loftily calm
+in peace, irradiating the conscious superiority of power, dignity,
+worth, and honourable renown. McCullough filled that aspect of the part
+as if he had been born for it. His movements had the splendid repose
+not merely of great strength but of intellectual poise and native mental
+supremacy. The "I must be found" air of Othello was again displayed, in
+ripe perfection, through the Roman toga. His declamation was as fluent
+and as massively graceful as his demeanour. If this actor had not the
+sonorous, clarion voice of John Kemble, he yet certainly suggested the
+tradition of the stately port and dominating step of that great master
+of the dramatic art. He looked Coriolanus, to the life. More of poetic
+freedom might have been wished, in the decorative treatment of the
+person--a touch of wildness in the hair, a tinge of imaginative
+exaltation in the countenance, an air of mischance in the gashes of
+combat. Still the embodiment was correct in its superficial
+conventionality; and it certainly possessed affecting grandeur. Whenever
+there was opportunity for fine treatment, moreover, the actor seized and
+filled it, with the easy grace of unerring intuition and spontaneity.
+The delicacy of vocalism, the movement, the tone of sentiment, and the
+manliness of condition--the royal fibre of a great mind--in the act of
+withdrawal from the senate, was right and beautiful. It is difficult not
+to over-emphasise the physical symbols of mental condition, in the
+street scene with "the voices"; but there again the actor denoted a fine
+spiritual instinct. To a situation like that of the banishment he proved
+easily equal: indeed, he gave that magnificent outburst of scorn with
+tremendous power: but it was in the pathetic scene with Volumnia and
+Virgilia that he reached the summit of the Shakespearean conception. The
+deep heart as well as the imperial intellect of Coriolanus must then
+speak. It is, for the distracted son, a moment of agonised and pathetic
+conflict: for McCullough it was a moment of perfect adequacy and
+consummate success. The stormy utterance of revolted pride and furious
+disgust, in the denial of Volumnia's request--the tempestuous outburst,
+"I will not do it"--made as wild, fiery, and fine a moment in tragic
+acting as could be imagined; but the climax was attained in the pathetic
+cry--
+
+    "The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
+    They laugh at."
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN.
+
+
+Making, one summer day, a pilgrimage to the grave of Charlotte Cushman,
+I was guided to the place of her rest by one of the labourers employed
+about the cemetery, who incidentally pronounced upon the deceased a
+comprehensive and remarkable eulogium. "She was," he said, "considerable
+of a woman, for a play-actress." Well--she was. The place of her
+sepulture is on the east slope of the principal hill in Mount Auburn.
+Hard by, upon the summit of the hill, stands the gray tower that
+overlooks the surrounding region and constantly symbolises, to eyes both
+far and near, the perpetual peace of which it is at once guardian and
+image. All around the spot tall trees give shade and music, as the sun
+streams on their branches and the wind murmurs in their leaves. At a
+little distance, visible across green meadows and the river
+Charles,--full and calm between its verdant banks,--rise the "dreaming
+spires" of Cambridge. Further away, crowned with her golden dome, towers
+old Boston, the storied city that Charlotte Cushman loved. Upon the spot
+where her ashes now rest the great actress stood, and, looking toward
+the city of her home and heart, chose that to be the place of her grave;
+and there she sleeps, in peace, after many a conflict with her stormy
+nature and after many sorrows and pains. What terrific ideals of the
+imagination she made to be realities of life! What burning eloquence of
+poesy she made to blaze! What moments of pathos she lived! What moods of
+holy self-abnegation and of exalted power she brought to many a
+sympathetic soul! Standing by her grave, on which the myrtle grows dense
+and dark, and over which the small birds swirl and twitter in the breezy
+silence, remembrance of the busy scenes of brilliant life wherein she
+used to move--the pictured stage, the crowded theatre, the wild plaudits
+of a delighted multitude--came strongly on the mind, and asked, in
+perplexity and sadness, what was the good of it all. To her but little.
+Fame and wealth were her cold rewards, after much privation and labour;
+but she found neither love nor happiness, and the fullest years of her
+life were blighted with the shadow of fatal disease and impending death.
+To the world, however, her career was of great and enduring benefit. She
+was a noble interpreter of the noble minds of the past, and thus she
+helped to educate the men and women of her time--to ennoble them in
+mood, to strengthen them in duty, to lift them up in hope of
+immortality. She did not live in vain. It is not likely that the
+American people will ever suffer her name to drift quite out of their
+remembrance: it is a name that never can be erased from the rolls of
+honourable renown.
+
+Charlotte Cushman was born on July 23, 1816, and she died on February
+12, 1876. Boston was the place of her birth and of her death. She lived
+till her sixtieth year and she was for forty years an actress. Her youth
+was one of poverty and the early years of her professional career were
+full of labour, trouble, heart-ache, and conflict. The name of Cushman
+signifies "cross-bearer," and certainly Charlotte Cushman did indeed
+bear the cross, long before and long after, she wore the crown. At first
+she was a vocalist, but, having broken her voice by misusing it, she
+was compelled to quit the lyric and adopt the dramatic stage, and when
+nineteen years old she came out, at New Orleans, as Lady Macbeth. After
+that she removed to New York and for the next seven years she battled
+with adverse fortune in the theatres of that city and of Albany and
+Philadelphia. From 1837 to 1840 she was under engagement at the old Park
+as walking lady and for general utility business. "I became aware," she
+wrote, "that one could never sail a ship by entering at the cabin
+windows; he must serve and learn his trade before the mast. This was the
+way that I would henceforth learn mine."
+
+Her first remarkable hits were made in Emilia, Meg Merrilies, and
+Nancy--the latter in _Oliver Twist_. But it was not till she met with
+Macready that the day of her deliverance from drudgery really dawned.
+They acted together in New York in 1842 and 1843, and in Boston in 1844,
+and in the autumn of the latter year Miss Cushman went to England,
+where, after much effort, she obtained an opening in London, at the
+Princess's, and in 1845 made her memorable success as Bianca. "Since the
+first appearance of Edmund Kean, in 1814," said a London journal of
+that time, "never has there been such a _debut_ on the stage of an
+English theatre." Her engagement lasted eighty-four nights (it was an
+engagement to act with Edwin Forrest), and she recorded its result in a
+letter to her mother, saying: "All my successes put together since I
+have been upon the stage would not come near my success in London, and I
+only wanted some one of you here to enjoy it with me, to make it
+complete." She acted Bianca, Emilia, Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Haller, and
+Rosalind. A prosperous provincial tour followed, and then, in December,
+1845, she came out at the Haymarket, as Romeo, her sister Susan
+appearing as Juliet. Her stay abroad lasted till the end of the summer
+of 1849, and to that period belongs her great achievement as Queen
+Katharine.
+
+From the fall of 1849 till the spring of 1852 Miss Cushman was in
+America, and she was everywhere received with acclamation, gathering
+with ease both laurels and riches. When she first reappeared, October 8,
+1849, at the old Broadway theatre, New York--as Mrs. Haller--she
+introduced Charles W. Couldock to our stage, on which he has ever since
+maintained his rank as a powerful and versatile actor. He acted the
+Stranger and subsequently was seen in the other leading characters
+opposite to her own. Miss Cushman's repertory then included Lady
+Macbeth, Queen Katharine, Meg Merrilies, Beatrice, Rosalind, Bianca,
+Julia, Mariana, Katharine, the Countess, Pauline, Juliana, Lady Gay
+Spanker, and Mrs. Simpson. Her principal male characters then, or later,
+were Romeo, Wolsey, Hamlet, and Claude Melnotte. In 1852 she announced
+her intention of retiring from the stage, and from that time till the
+end of her days she wavered between retirement and professional
+occupation. The explanation of this is readily divined, in her
+condition. There never was a time, during all those years, when she was
+not haunted by dread of the disease that ultimately destroyed her life.
+From 1852 to 1857 she lived in England, and in the course of that period
+she acted many times, in different cities. In December 1854, when dining
+with the Duke of Devonshire, at Brighton, she read _Henry VIII._ to the
+Duke and his guests, and in that way began her experience as a reader.
+In the autumn of 1857 she acted at Burton's theatre, New York, and was
+seen as Cardinal Wolsey, and in the early summer of 1858 she gave a
+series of "farewell" performances at Niblo's Garden--after which she
+again crossed the Atlantic and established her residence in Rome. In
+June 1860 the great actress came home again and passed a year in
+America. _Oliver Twist_ was given at the Winter Garden in the spring of
+1861, when Miss Cushman acted Nancy, and J.W. Wallack, Jr., J.B.
+Studley, William Davidge, and Owen Marlowe were in the company. In 1863,
+having come from Rome for that purpose, Miss Cushman acted in four
+cities, for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission, and
+earned for it $8267. The seven ensuing years were passed by her in
+Europe, but in October 1870 she returned home for the last time, and the
+brief remainder of her life was devoted to public readings, occasional
+dramatic performances, and the society of friends. She built a villa at
+Newport, which still bears her name. She gave final farewell
+performances, in the season of 1874-1875, in New York, Philadelphia, and
+Boston. Her final public appearance was made on June 2, 1875, at Easton,
+Pennsylvania, where she gave a reading. Her death occurred at the Parker
+House, in Boston, February 18, 1876, and she was buried from King's
+chapel.
+
+There is a mournful pleasure in recalling the details of Miss Cushman's
+life and meditating upon her energetic, resolute, patient, creative
+nature. She was faithful, throughout her career, to high principles of
+art and a high standard of duty. Nature gave her great powers but
+fettered her also with great impediments. She conquered by the spell of
+a strange, weird genius and by hard, persistent labour. In this latter
+particular she is an example to every member of the dramatic profession,
+present or future. In what she was as a woman she could not be
+imitated--for her colossal individuality dwelt apart, in its loneliness,
+as well of suffering that no one could share as of an imaginative life
+that no one could fathom. Without the stage she would still have been a
+great woman, although perhaps she might have lacked an entirely suitable
+vehicle for the display of her powers. With the stage she gave a body to
+the soul of some of Shakespeare's greatest conceptions, and she gave
+soul and body both to many works of inferior origin. There is no
+likelihood that we shall ever see again such a creation as her Meg
+Merrilies. Her genius could embody the sublime, the beautiful, the
+terrible, and with all this the humorous; and it was saturated with
+goodness. If the love of beauty was intensified by the influence of her
+art, virtue was also strengthened by the force of her example and the
+inherent dignity of her nature.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+ON THE DEATH OF LAWRENCE BARRETT.
+
+[Obiit March 20, 1891.]
+
+
+The death of Lawrence Barrett was the disappearance of one of the
+noblest figures of the modern stage. During the whole of his career, in
+a public life of thirty-five years, he was steadily and continuously
+impelled by a pure and fine ambition and the objects that he sought to
+accomplish were always the worthiest and the best. His devotion to the
+dramatic art was a passionate devotion, and in an equal degree he was
+devoted to a high ideal of personal conduct. Doctrines of expediency
+never influenced him and indeed were never considered by him. He had
+early fixed his eyes on the dramatic sceptre. He knew that it never
+could be gained except by the greatest and brightest of artistic
+achievements, and to them accordingly he consecrated his life. Whenever
+and wherever he appeared the community was impressed with a sense of
+intellectual character, moral worth, and individual dignity. Many other
+dramatic efforts might be trivial. Those of Lawrence Barrett were always
+felt to be important. Most of the plays with which his name is
+identified are among the greatest plays in our language, and the spirit
+in which he treated them was that of exalted scholarship, austere
+reverence, and perfect refinement. He was profoundly true to all that is
+noble and beautiful, and because he was true the world of art everywhere
+recognised him as the image of fidelity and gave to him the high tribute
+of its unwavering homage. His coming was always a signal to arouse the
+mind. His mental vitality, which was very great, impressed even
+unsympathetic beholders with a sense of fiery thought struggling in its
+fetters of mortality and almost shattering and consuming the frail
+temple of its human life. His stately head, silvered with graying hair,
+his dark eyes deeply sunken and glowing with intense light, his thin
+visage pallid with study and pain, his form of grace and his voice of
+sonorous eloquence and solemn music (in compass, variety, and sweetness
+one of the few great voices of the current dramatic generation), his
+tremendous earnestness, his superb bearing, and his invariable authority
+and distinction--all those attributes united to announce a ruler and
+leader in the realm of the intellect. The exceeding tumult of his spirit
+enhanced the effect of this mordant personality. The same sleepless
+energy that inspired Loyola and Lanfranc burned in the bosom of this
+modern actor; and it was entirely in keeping with the drift of his
+character and the tenor of his life that the last subject that occupied
+his thoughts should have been the story of Becket, the great
+prelate--whom he intended to represent, and to whom in mental qualities
+he was nearly allied. In losing Lawrence Barrett the American stage lost
+the one man who served it with an apostle's zeal because he loved it
+with an apostle's love.
+
+The essential attributes that Lawrence Barrett did not possess were
+enchantment for the public and adequate and philosophic patience for
+himself. He gained, indeed, a great amount of public favour, and,--with
+reference to an indisputable lack of universal sympathy and
+enthusiasm,--he was learning to regard that as a natural consequence of
+his character which formerly he had resented as the injustice of the
+world. Men and women of austere mind do not fascinate their
+fellow-creatures. They impress by their strangeness. They awe by their
+majesty. They predominate by their power. But they do not involuntarily
+entice. Lawrence Barrett,--although full of kindness and gentleness,
+and, to those who knew him well, one of the most affectionate and
+lovable of men,--was essentially a man of austere intellect; and his
+experience was according to his nature. To some persons the world gives
+everything, without being asked to give at all. To others it gives only
+what it must, and that with a kind of icy reluctance that often makes
+the gift a bitter one. Lawrence Barrett, who rose from an obscure and
+humble position,--without fortune, without friends, without favouring
+circumstances, without education, without help save that of his talents
+and his will,--was for a long time met with indifference, or frigid
+obstruction, or impatient disparagement. He gained nothing without
+battle. He had to make his way by his strength. His progress involved
+continual effort and his course was attended with continual controversy
+and strife. When at last it had to be conceded that he was a great
+actor, the concession was, in many quarters, grudgingly made. Even then
+detraction steadily followed him, and its voice--though impotent and
+immeasurably trivial--has not yet died away. There came a time when his
+worth was widely recognised, and from that moment onward he had much
+prosperity, and his nature expanded and grew calmer, sweeter, and
+brighter under its influence. But the habit of warfare had got into his
+acting, and more or less it remained there to the last. The assertive
+quality, indeed, had long since begun to die away. The volume of
+needless emphasis was growing less and less. Few performances on the
+contemporary stage are commensurate with his embodiments of Harebell and
+Gringoire, in softness, simplicity, poetic charm, and the gentle
+tranquillity that is the repose of a self-centred soul. But his deep and
+burning desire to be understood, his anxiety lest his effects should not
+be appreciated, his inveterate purpose of conquest,--that overwhelming
+solicitude of ambition often led him to insist upon his points, to
+over-elaborate and enforce them, and in that way his art to some extent
+defeated itself by the excess of its eager zeal. The spirit of beauty
+that the human race pursues is the spirit that is typified in Emerson's
+poem of _Forerunners_--the elusive spirit that all men feel and no man
+understands. This truth, undiscerned by him at first, had become the
+conviction of his riper years; and if his life had been prolonged the
+autumn of his professional career would have been gentle, serene, and
+full of tranquil loveliness.
+
+The achievement of Lawrence Barrett as an actor was great, but his
+influence upon the stage was greater than his achievement. Among the
+Shakespearian parts that he played were Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear,
+Othello, Iago, Shylock, Leontes, Cassius, Wolsey, Richard III., Romeo,
+and Benedick. Outside of Shakespeare (to mention only a few of his
+impersonations) he acted Richelieu, Evelyn, Aranza, Garrick, Claude
+Melnotte, Rienzi, Dan'l Druce, Lanciotto, Hernani, King Arthur, and
+Ganelon. The parts in which he was superlatively fine,--and in some
+respects incomparable,--are Cassius, Harebell, Yorick, Gringoire, King
+Arthur, Ganelon, and James V., King of the Commons. In his time he had
+played hundreds of parts, ranging over the whole field of the drama, but
+as the years passed and the liberty of choice came more and more within
+his reach, he concentrated his powers upon a few works and upon a
+specific line of expression. The aspect of human nature and human
+experience that especially aroused his sympathy was the loneliness of
+beneficent intellectual grandeur, isolated by its supremacy and pathetic
+in its isolation. He loved the character of Richelieu, and if he had
+acted Becket, as he purposed to do, in Tennyson's tragedy, he would have
+presented another and a different type of that same ideal--lonely,
+austere, passionate age, defiant of profane authority and protective of
+innocent weakness against wicked and cruel strength. His embodiment of
+Cassius, with all its intensity of repressed spleen and caustic
+malevolence, was softly touched and sweetly ennobled with the majesty of
+venerable loneliness,--the bleak light of pathetic sequestration from
+human ties, without the forfeiture of human love,--that is the natural
+adjunct of intellectual greatness. He loved also the character of
+Harebell, because in that he could express his devotion to the
+beautiful, the honest impulses of his affectionate heart, and his ideal
+of a friendship that is too pure and simple even to dream that such a
+thing as guile can exist anywhere in the world. Toward the expression,
+under dramatic conditions, of natures such as those, the development of
+his acting was steadily directed; and, even if he fell short, in any
+degree, of accomplishing all that he purposed, it is certain that his
+spirit and his conduct dignified the theatrical profession, strengthened
+the stage in the esteem of good men, and cheered the heart and fired the
+energy of every sincere artist that came within the reach of his
+example. For his own best personal success he required a part in which,
+after long repression, the torrent of passion can break loose in a
+tumult of frenzy and a wild strain of eloquent words. The terrible
+exultation of Cassius, after the fall of Caesar, the ecstasy of Lanciotto
+when he first believes himself to be loved by Francesca, the delirium of
+Yorick when he can no longer restrain the doubts that madden his jealous
+and wounded soul, the rapture of King James over the vindication of his
+friend Seyton, whom his suspicions have wronged--those were among his
+distinctively great moments, and his image as he was in such moments is
+worthy to live among the storied traditions and the bright memories of
+the stage.
+
+Censure seems to be easy to most people, and few men are rated at their
+full value while they are yet alive. Just as mountains seem more sublime
+in the vague and hazy distance, so a noble mind looms grandly through
+the dusk of death. So it will be with him. Lawrence Barrett was a man of
+high principle and perfect integrity. He never spoke a false word nor
+knowingly harmed a human being, in all his life. Although sometimes he
+seemed to be harsh and imperious, he was at heart kind and humble.
+Strife with the world, and in past times uncertainty as to his position,
+caused in him the assumption of a stern and frigid manner, but beneath
+that haughty reserve there was a great longing for human affection and a
+sincere humility of spirit. He never nurtured hostility. He had no
+memory for injuries; but a kindness he never forgot. His good deeds were
+as numerous as his days--for no day rolled over his head without its act
+of benevolence in one direction or another. He was as impulsive as a
+child. He had much of the woman in his nature, and therefore his views
+were impetuous, strong, and often strongly stated; but his sense of
+humour kept pace with his sensibility and so maintained the equilibrium
+of his mind. In temperament he was sad, pensive, introspective, almost
+gloomy; but he opposed to that tendency an incessant mental activity and
+the force of a tremendous will. In his lighter moods he was not only
+appreciative of mirth but was the cause of it. His humour was elemental
+and whatever aspect of life he saw in a comic light he could set in that
+light before the eyes of others. He had been a studious reader for many
+years and his mind was stored with ample, exact, and diversified
+information. He had a scholar's knowledge of Roman history and his
+familiar acquaintance with the character and career of the first
+Napoleon was extraordinary. In acting he was largely influenced by his
+studies of Edmund Kean and by his association with Charlotte Cushman.
+For a few years after 1864 his art was especially affected by that of
+Edwin Booth; but the style to which he finally gravitated was his own.
+He was not so much an impersonator as he was an interpreter of
+character, and the elocutionary part of acting was made more conspicuous
+and important by him than by any other tragedian since the days of
+Forrest and Brooke.
+
+It was a beautiful life prematurely ended. It was a brave, strong
+spirit suddenly called out of the world. To the dramatic profession the
+loss is irreparable. In the condition of the contemporary theatre there
+are not many hopeful signs. No doubt there will be bright days in the
+future, as there have been in the past. They go and they return. The
+stage declines and the stage advances. At present its estate is low. Few
+men like Lawrence Barrett remain for it to lose. Its main hope is in the
+abiding influence of such examples as he has left. The old theatrical
+period is fast passing away. The new age rushes on the scene, with
+youthful vigour and impetuous tumult. But to some of us,--who perhaps
+have not long to stay, and to whom, whatever be their fortune, this
+tumult is unsympathetic and insignificant,--the way grows darker and
+lonelier as we lay our garlands of eternal farewell upon the coffin of
+Lawrence Barrett.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN RAVENSWOOD.
+
+
+Merivale's play of _Ravenswood_, written in four acts, was acted in six.
+The first act consists of a single scene--an exterior, showing the
+environment of the chapel which is the burial place of the House of
+Ravenswood. A rockbound coast is visible, at some distance, together
+with the ruinous tower of Wolf's Crag--which is Ravenswood's sole
+remaining possession. This act presents the interrupted funeral of Alan
+Ravenswood, the father of Edgar,--introducing ten of the seventeen
+characters that are implicated in the piece, and skilfully laying the
+basis of the action by exhibiting the essential personalities of the
+story in strong contrast, and denoting their relations to each other.
+Each character is clearly and boldly drawn and with a light touch. The
+second act consists of three scenes--an antique library in the ancient
+manor-house of Ravenswood, a room in a roadside ale-house, and a room in
+the dilapidated tower of Wolf's Crag. This act rapidly develops the
+well-known story, depicting the climax of antagonism between the Lord
+Keeper Ashton and Edgar of Ravenswood and their subsequent
+reconciliation. The third act passes in a lovely, romantic, rural scene,
+which is called "the Mermaiden's Well,"--a fairy-like place in the
+grounds of Ravenswood,--and in this scene Edgar and Lucy Ashton, who
+have become lovers, are plighted by themselves and parted by Lucy's
+mother, Lady Ashton. The fourth and last act shows a room at Ravenswood,
+wherein is portrayed the betrothal of Lucy to Bucklaw, culminating in
+Edgar's sudden irruption; and finally, it shows the desolate seaside
+place of the quicksand in which, after he has slain Bucklaw, Edgar of
+Ravenswood is engulfed. The house that Scott, when he wrote the novel,
+had in his mind as that of Sir William Ashton is the house of Winston,
+which still is standing, not many miles from Edinburgh. The tower of
+Wolf's Crag was probably suggested to him by Fast Castle, the ruin of
+which still lures the traveller's eye, upon the iron-ribbed and gloomy
+coast of the North Sea, a few miles southeast of Dunbar--a place,
+however, that Scott never visited, and never saw except from the ocean.
+There is a beach upon that coast, just above Cockburnspath, that might
+well have suggested to him the quicksand and the final catastrophe. I
+saw it when the morning sun was shining upon it and upon the placid
+waters just rippling on its verge; and even in the glad glow of a summer
+day it was grim with silent menace and mysterious with an air of
+sinister secrecy. In the preparation of this piece for the stage all the
+sources and associations of the subject were considered; and the
+pictorial setting, framed upon the right artistic principle--that
+imagination should transfigure truth and thus produce the essential
+result of poetic effect--was elaborate and magnificent. And the play is
+the best one that ever has been made upon this subject.
+
+The basis of fact upon which Sir Walter Scott built his novel of the
+_Bride of Lammermoor_ is given in the introduction that he wrote for it
+in 1829. Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair and of his
+wife Margaret Ross, had privately plighted herself to Lord Rutherford.
+Those lovers had broken a piece of gold together, and had bound
+themselves by vows the most solemn and fervent that passion could
+prompt. But Lord Rutherford was objectionable to Miss Dalrymple's
+parents, who liked not either his family or his politics. Lady Stair,
+furthermore, had selected a husband for her daughter, in the person of
+David Dunbar, of Baldoon; and Lady Stair was a woman of formidable
+character, set upon having her own way and accustomed to prevail. As
+soon as she heard of Janet's private engagement to Lord Rutherford she
+declared the vow to be undutiful and unlawful and she commanded that it
+should be broken. Lord Rutherford, a man of energy and of spirit,
+thereupon insisted that he would take his dismissal only from the lips
+of Miss Dalrymple herself, and he demanded and obtained an interview
+with her. Lady Stair was present, and such was her ascendency over her
+daughter's mind that the young lady remained motionless and mute,
+permitting her betrothal to Lord Rutherford to be broken, and, upon her
+mother's command, giving back to him the piece of gold that was the
+token of her promise. Lord Rutherford was deeply moved, so that he
+uttered curses upon Lady Stair, and at the last reproached Janet in
+these words: "For you, madam, you will be a world's wonder." After this
+sad end of his hopes the unfortunate gentleman went abroad and died in
+exile. Janet Dalrymple and David Dunbar meanwhile were married--the lady
+"being absolutely passive in everything her mother commanded or
+advised." As soon, however, as the wedded pair had retired from the
+bridal feast hideous shrieks were heard to resound through the house,
+proceeding from the nuptial chamber. The door was thereupon burst open
+and persons entering saw the bridegroom stretched upon the floor,
+wounded and bleeding, while the bride, dishevelled and stained with
+blood, was grinning in a paroxysm of insanity. All she said was, "Take
+up your bonny bridegroom." About two weeks later she died. The year of
+those events was 1669. The wedding took place on August 24. Janet died
+on September 12. Dunbar recovered, but he would never tell what occurred
+in that chamber of horror, nor indeed would he permit any allusion to
+the subject. He did not long survive the tragic event,--having been
+fatally injured, by a fall from his horse, when riding between Leith
+and Holyrood. He died on March 28, 1682. The death of Lord Rutherford
+is assigned to the year 1685. Such is the melancholy story as it may be
+gathered from Scott's preface. In writing his novel that great master of
+the art of fiction,--never yet displaced from his throne or deprived of
+his sceptre,--adopted fictitious names, invented fresh circumstances,
+amplified and elevated the characters, judiciously veiled the
+localities, and advanced the period of those tragical incidents to about
+the beginning of the eighteenth century. The delicate taste with which
+he used his materials has only been surpassed, in that beautiful
+composition, by the affluent genius with which he vitalised every part
+of his narrative. In no other of his many books has he shown a deeper
+knowledge than is revealed in that one of the terrible passion of love
+and of the dark and sinuous ways of political and personal craft. When
+_The Bride of Lammermoor_ was first published no mention was made in it
+of the true story upon which remotely it had been based; but by the time
+Scott came to write the preface of 1829 other writers had been less
+reticent, and some account of the Dalrymple tragedy had got into print,
+so that no reason existed for further silence on that subject.
+
+Sir Robert H.D. Elphinstone, writing in 1829, gave the tradition as
+follows: "When, after the noise and violent screaming in the bridal
+chamber comparative stillness succeeded and the door was forced, the
+window was found open, and it was supposed by many that the lover, Lord
+Rutherford, had, by the connivance of some of the servants, found means,
+during the bustle of the marriage feast, to secrete himself within the
+apartment, and that soon after the entry of the married pair, or at
+least as soon as the parents and others retreated and the door was made
+fast, he had come out from his concealment, attacked and desperately
+wounded the bridegroom, and then made his escape, by the window, through
+the garden. As the unfortunate bride never spoke after having uttered
+the words mentioned by Sir Walter, no light could be thrown on the
+matter by them. But it was thought that Dunbar's obstinate silence on
+the subject favoured the supposition of the chastisement having been
+inflicted by his rival. It is but fair to give the unhappy victim (who
+was, by all accounts, a most gentle and feminine creature) the benefit
+of an explanation on a doubtful point."
+
+Merivale, in dealing with this story, gave a conspicuous illustration
+of the essential dramatic faculty. The first act is the adroit expansion
+of a few paragraphs, in the second chapter of the novel, which are
+descriptive of the bleak, misty November morning when Alan Ravenswood
+was borne to the grave; but by the introduction of the Lord Keeper and
+of the village crones into that funeral scene he opened the whole
+subject, indicated all the essential antecedents of the story, and
+placed his characters in a posture of lively action. That the tone is
+sombre must be conceded, and people who think that the chief end of man
+is to grin might condemn the piece for that reason; but _Ravenswood_ is
+a tragedy and not a farce, and persons who wish that their feelings may
+not be affected should avoid tragedies.
+
+In the second act Ravenswood seeks Ashton at Ravenswood manor, intending
+to kill him in a duel, but his hand is stayed when he catches sight of
+Lucy Ashton's portrait. The incident of Edgar's rescue of Lucy is used
+in this scene. In a later scene Sir William Ashton and his daughter take
+refuge in Wolf's Crag, and the bewitchment of Ravenswood is
+accomplished. The quarrel between Edgar and Bucklaw is then given, as a
+basis for the ensuing rivalry and deadly conflict between them. In the
+third act there is a beautiful love-scene between Edgar and Lucy, the
+dialogue being especially felicitous in tenderness and grace and fraught
+with that reverential quality, that condition of commingled ecstasy and
+nobleness, which is always characteristic of the experience of this
+passion in pure natures. Lady Ashton's interruption of their happiness
+and the subsequent parting have a vigorous dramatic effect. The
+character of Lucy has been much strengthened, so that it differs from
+that of the original precisely as Desdemona differs from Ophelia; and
+the change is an improvement. The fourth act opens with "a song of
+choristers heard outside." The letters of Lucy and Edgar have been
+intercepted. The lady has been told that her lover is false. The suit of
+Bucklaw has been urged. The authority of the stern mother has prevailed
+over her daughter's will. It is the old story. "The absent are always
+wrong"--and Ravenswood is absent. Lucy Ashton yields to her fate. The
+marriage contract between Lucy and Bucklaw has just been signed when
+Ravenswood bursts into the group. From that point the action is
+animated equally with celerity and passion. The misery of Ravenswood
+utters itself in a swift stream of burning words. The grief of Lucy ends
+tragically in a broken heart and sudden death. The fight between Bucklaw
+and Ravenswood clashes for a moment but is abruptly finished on the
+moonlit sands, and Edgar is seen to leap down from a rock and rush away
+toward the manor, where, as his dying foe has told him, the faithful and
+innocent Lucy lies dead. He disappears and comes no more; but his old
+servant takes up from the beach a single black plume--the feather of a
+raven--which the tide has washed ashore, and which is the last relic and
+emblem of the vanished master of Ravenswood.
+
+The tragedy is kindred, as to its spirit, with _Romeo and Juliet_, and
+like that representative poem of love and death it is intensely
+passionate, sombre, and lamentable. The first and second acts of it pass
+in almost unrelieved shadow. It begins with a funeral; it incorporates
+the ingredients of misery, madness, and death; it culminates in a fatal
+duel; and it ends in a picture of mortal desolation, qualified only by a
+mute suggestion of spiritual happiness conveyed by the pictorial emblem
+of the promise of immortality. It is a poetical tragedy, conceived in
+the spirit and written in the manner of the old masters of the poetic
+art. The treatment of Scott's novel is marked by scrupulous fidelity,
+not indeed to every detail of that noble book, but to its essential
+quality and tone. The structure of the play reproduces in action
+substantially the structure of the original story. The scene in which
+Edgar and Lucy avow their love and pledge themselves to each other is
+written with exquisite grace and profound tenderness. The picture
+presented upon the stage when the lovers are parted was one of
+astonishing animation. The scene of the interrupted wedding and of Lucy
+Ashton's agony, distraction, and death was one of intense power and
+dramatic effect. The duel of Ravenswood and Bucklaw upon the desolate,
+moon-lit sands was invested with the excitement of suspense and with
+weird horror. And the final exposition of dramatic contrast,--when upon
+the wide, bleak beach, with the waste of vacant sea beyond and the
+eastern heaven lit with the first splendour of sunrise, the old man
+stooped to take up the raven's feather, the last relic of
+Ravenswood--was so entirely beautiful that the best of words can but
+poorly indicate its loveliness. For an audience able to look seriously
+at a serious subject, and not impatient of the foreground of gloom in
+which, necessarily, the story is enveloped at its beginning, this was a
+perfect work. The student of drama must go back many years to find a
+parallel to it, in interest of subject, in balance, in symmetry, and in
+sympathetic interpretation of character.
+
+There is a quality of Hamlet in the character of Ravenswood. He is by
+nature a man of a sad mind, and under the pressure of afflicting
+circumstances his sadness has become embittered. He takes life
+thoughtfully and with passionate earnestness. He is a noble person,
+finely sensitive and absolutely sincere, full of kindness at heart, but
+touched with gloom; and his aspect and demeanour are those of pride,
+trouble, self-conflict--of an individuality isolated and constrained by
+dark thoughts and painful experience. That is the mood in which Henry
+Irving conceived and portrayed him. You saw a picturesque figure, dark,
+strange, romantic--the gravity engendered by thought and sorrow not yet
+marring the bronzed face and the elastic movement of youth--and this
+personality, in itself fascinating, was made all the more pictorial by
+an investiture of romance, alike in the scenery and the incidents
+through which it moved. Around such a figure funereal banners well might
+wave, and under dark and lowering skies the chill wind of the sea might
+moan through monastic ruins and crumbling battlements. Edgar of
+Ravenswood, standing by his lonely hearth, beneath the groined arches of
+his seaside tower, revealed by the flickering firelight, looked the
+ideal of romantic manhood; the incarnation of poetic fancy and of
+predestinate disaster. Above the story of _Ravenswood_ there is steadily
+and continuously impending, and ever growing darker and coming nearer,
+the vague menace of terrible calamity. This element of mystery and dread
+was wrought into the structural fibre of Henry Irving's performance of
+the part, and consistently coloured it. The face of Edgar was made to
+wear that haunted look which,--as in the countenance of Charles the
+First, in Vandyke's portraits,--may be supposed, and often has been
+supposed, to foreshadow a violent and dreadful death. His sudden tremor,
+when at the first kiss of Lucy Ashton the thunder is heard to break
+above his ruined home, was a fine denotement of that subtle quality; and
+even through the happiness of the betrothal scene there was a hint of
+this black presentiment--just as sometimes on a day of perfect sunshine
+there is a chill in the wind that tells of approaching storm. All this
+is warranted by the prophetic rhymes which are several times spoken,
+beginning--"When the last lord of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride."
+A crone, Ailsie Gourlay by name, embodied with grim and grisly vigour by
+Alice Marriott,--whose ample voice and exact elocution, together with
+her formidable stature and her faculty of identification with the
+character that she assumes and with the spirit of the story, made her of
+great value to this play--hovered around Ravenswood, and aided to keep
+this presage of evil doom fitfully present in the consciousness of its
+victim. Henry Irving gave to the part its perfectly distinct
+individuality, and in that respect made as fine a showing as he has ever
+made of his authority as an actor. There was never the least doubt as to
+what Ravenswood is and what he means. The peculiar elocution of Henry
+Irving, when he is under the influence of great excitement, is not
+effective upon all persons; but those who like it consider it far more
+touching than a more level, more sonorous, and more accurate delivery.
+He wrought a great effect in the scene of the marriage-contract. Indeed,
+so powerful, sincere, and true was the acting upon all sides, at this
+point, that not until the curtain began to descend was it remembered
+that we were looking upon a fiction and not upon a fact. This points to
+the peculiar power that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry conspicuously
+possess--of creating and maintaining a perfect illusion.
+
+During the earlier scenes the character of Lucy Ashton is chiefly marked
+by the qualities of sweetness and of glee. No one acquainted with the
+acting of Ellen Terry would need to be told how well and with what
+charming grace those qualities were expressed by her. In the scene of
+the wooing, at the Mermaiden's Well, Lucy Ashton was not a cold woman
+trying to make herself loved,--which is what most actresses habitually
+proffer upon the stage,--but a loving woman, radiant with the
+consciousness of the love that she feels and has inspired. Nothing could
+be imagined more delicate, more delicious, more enchanting than the
+high-bred distinction and soft womanlike tone of that performance. The
+character, at the climax of this scene, is made to manifest decision,
+firmness, and force; and the superb manner in which she set the
+maternal authority at naught and stood by her lover might seem to denote
+a nature that no tyranny could subdue. Subdued, however, she is, and
+forced to believe ill of her absent lover, and so the fatal marriage
+contract is signed and the crash follows. When Ellen Terry came on for
+that scene the glee had all vanished; the face was as white as the
+garments that enswathed her; and you saw a creature whom the hand of
+death had visibly touched. The stage has not at any time heard from any
+lips but her own such tones of pathos as those in which she said the
+simple words:--
+
+    "May God forgive you, then, and pity me--
+    If God can pity more than mothers do."
+
+It is not a long scene, and happily not,--for the strain upon the
+emotion of the actress was intense. The momentary wild merriment, the
+agony of the breaking heart, the sudden delirium and collapse, were not
+for an instant exaggerated. All was nature--or rather the simplicity,
+fidelity, and grace of art that make the effect of nature.
+
+Beautiful scenery, painted by Craven, framed the piece with appropriate
+magnificence. The several seaside pictures were admirably
+representative of the grandeur, the gaunt loneliness, and the glorious
+colour for which Scotland is so much loved.
+
+The public gain in that production was a revival of interest in one of
+the most famous novels in the language; the possession of a scenical
+pageant that filled the eye with beauty and strongly moved the
+imagination; a play that is successful in the domain of romantic poetry;
+a touching exemplification of the great art of acting; and once again
+the presentment of that vast subject,--the relation of heart to heart,
+under the dominion of love, in human society,--that more absorbs the
+attention, affects the character, and controls the destiny of the human
+race than anything else that is beneath the sun.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+THE MERRY WIVES AND FALSTAFF.
+
+
+Shakespeare wrote _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ in 1601, and during the
+Christmas holidays of that year it was presented upon the stage, before
+Queen Elizabeth and her court, at Windsor Castle. In 1602 it was
+published in London in quarto form, and in 1619 a reprint of that quarto
+was published there. The version that appears in the two quartos is
+considered by Shakespeare scholars to be spurious. The authentic text,
+no doubt, is that of the comedy as it stands in the first folio (1623).
+Shakespeare had written _Henry IV._--both parts of it--and also _Henry
+V._, when this comedy was acted, and therefore he had completed his
+portrait of Falstaff, whose life is displayed in the former piece and
+whose death is described in the latter. _Henry IV._ was first printed in
+1598 (we know not when it was first acted), and it passed through five
+quarto editions prior to the publication of it in the folio of 1623. In
+the epilogue to the second part of that play a promise is made that the
+story shall be continued, "with Sir John in it," but it is gravely
+doubted whether that epilogue was written by Shakespeare. The
+continuation of the story occurs in _Henry V._, in which Falstaff does
+not figure, although he is mentioned in it. Various efforts have been
+made to show a continuity between the several plays in which Falstaff is
+implicated, but the attempt always fails. The histories contain the real
+Falstaff. The Falstaff of the comedy is another and less important man.
+If there really were a sequence of story and of time in the portraiture
+of this character plays would stand in the following order: 1, _Henry
+IV., Part First_; 2, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_; 3, _Henry IV., Part
+Second_; 4, _Henry V._ As no such sequence exists, or apparently was
+intended, the comedy should be viewed by itself. Its texture is
+radically different from that of the histories. One of the best
+Shakespeare editors, Charles Knight, ventures the conjecture that _The
+Merry Wives of Windsor_ was written first. Shakespeare invented the
+chief part of the plot, taking, however, a few things from Tarlton's
+_Newes out of Purgatorie_, which in turn was founded on a story called
+The _Lovers of Pisa_. It is possible also that he may have derived
+suggestions from a German play by Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick--a
+contemporary, who died in 1611--to which _The Merry Wives of Windsor_
+bears some resemblance, and of which he may have received an account
+from English actors who had visited Germany, as the actors of his time
+occasionally did.
+
+Tradition declares that he wrote this comedy at the command of Queen
+Elizabeth, who had expressed a wish to see Falstaff in love. This was
+first stated by John Dennis, in the preface to an alteration of _The
+Merry Wives of Windsor_ which was made by him, under the name of _The
+Comical Gallant, or the Amours of Sir John Falstaff_, and was
+successfully acted at Drury Lane theatre. That piece, which is paltry
+and superfluous, appeared in 1702. No authority was given by Dennis for
+his statement about Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare's play. The
+tradition rests exclusively on his word. Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and other
+Shakespeare editors, have transmitted it to the present day, but it
+rests on nothing but supposition and it is dubious. Those scholars who
+accept the story of Dennis, and believe that Shakespeare wrote the piece
+"to order" and within a few days, usually fortify their belief by the
+allegation that the comedy falls short of Shakespeare's poetical
+standard, being written mostly in prose; that it degrades his great
+creation of Falstaff; that it is, for him, a trivial production; and
+that it must have been written in haste and without spontaneous impulse.
+If judgment were to be given on the quarto version of _The Merry Wives_,
+that reasoning would commend itself as at least plausible; but it is
+foolish as applied to the version in the folio, where the piece is found
+to be remarkable for nimbleness of invention, strength and variety of
+natural character, affluent prodigality of animal spirits, delicious
+quaintness, exhilarating merriment, a lovely pastoral tone, and many
+touches of the transcendent poetry of Shakespeare. Dennis probably
+repeated a piece of idle gossip that he had heard, the same sort of
+chatter that in the present day constantly follows the doings of
+theatrical people,--and is not accurate more than once in a thousand
+times. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ is a brilliant and delightful
+comedy, quite worthy of its great author (though not in his most
+exalted mood), who probably wrote it because his mind was naturally
+impelled to write it, and no doubt laboured over it exactly as he did
+over his other writings: for we know, upon the testimony of Ben Jonson,
+who personally knew him and was acquainted with his custom as a writer,
+that he was not content with the first draught of anything, but wrote it
+a second time, and a third time, before he became satisfied with it. Dr.
+Johnson, who had studied Shakespeare as carefully as any man ever
+studied him, speaking of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, says that "its
+general power--that power by which all works of genius should finally be
+tried--is such that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator who did
+not think it too soon at an end." A comedy that deserves such praise as
+this--which assuredly is not misplaced--need not be dismissed as a
+pot-boiler.
+
+Knight's conjecture that _The Merry Wives_ was written before the
+histories were written is a plausible conjecture, and perhaps worthy of
+some consideration. It is not easy to believe that Shakespeare, after he
+had created Falstaff and thoroughly drawn him, was capable of lessening
+the character and making it almost despicable with paltriness--as
+certainly it becomes in _The Merry Wives_. That is not the natural way
+of an artistic mind. But it is easier to credit the idea that the
+Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ was the first study of the character,
+although not first shown, which subsequently expanded into the
+magnificent humorous creation of the histories. Falstaff in the comedy
+is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled,
+victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women,
+who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely
+bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his
+sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous
+light or made more contemptible,--in a kindly, good-humoured way. The
+hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere
+seen the averted face of shocked propriety. The two wives are bent on a
+frolic, and they will merrily punish this presumptuous sensualist--this
+silly, conceited, gross fellow, "old, cold, withered, and of intolerable
+entrails." If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of
+him we should by no means treasure him as we do now; but it is through
+the histories that we learn to know and appreciate him, and it is of the
+man portrayed there that we always unconsciously think when, in his
+humiliating discomfiture, we hear him declare that "wit may be made a
+Jack-a-lent when 'tis upon ill employment." For the Falstaff of the
+histories is a man of intellect, wisdom, and humour, thoroughly
+experienced in the ways of the world, fascinating in his drollery,
+human, companionable, infinitely amusing, and capable of turning all
+life to the favour of enjoyment and laughter--a man who is passionate in
+the sentiment of comradeship, and who, with all his faults (and perhaps
+because of some of them, for faultless persons are too good for this
+world), inspires affection. "Would I were with him," cries the wretched
+Bardolph, "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." It is not
+Bardolph only whose heart has a warm corner for the memory of the poor
+old jovial sinner, wounded to death by the falling off of
+friendship--the implacable hardness of new-born virtue in the
+regenerated royal mind.
+
+A comprehensive view of Falstaff--a view that includes the afflicting
+circumstances of his humiliation and of his forlorn and pathetic death
+not less than the roistering frolics and jocund mendacity of his life
+and character--is essential to a right appreciation of the meaning of
+him. Shakespeare is never a prosy moralist, but he constantly teaches
+you, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the moral law of the
+universe, working continually for goodness and not for evil, operates in
+an inexorable manner. Yet it is not of any moral consideration that the
+spectator of Falstaff upon the stage ever pauses to think. It is the
+humour of the fat knight that is perceived, and that alone. The
+thoughtful friends of Falstaff, however, see more in him than this, and
+especially they like not to think of him in a deplorable predicament.
+The Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ is a man to laugh at; but he is not a
+man to inspire the comrade feeling, and still less is he a man to
+impress the intellect with the sense of a stalwart character and of
+illimitable jocund humour. Falstaff's friends--whose hearts are full of
+kindness for the old reprobate--have sat with him "in my Dolphin
+chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire," and "have heard the
+chimes at midnight" in his society, and they know what a jovial
+companion he is--how abundant in knowledge of the world; how radiant
+with animal spirits; how completely inexhaustible in cheerfulness; how
+copious in comic invective; how incessantly nimble and ludicrous in wit
+and in waggery; how strange a compound of mind and sensuality,
+shrewdness and folly, fidelity and roguery, brazen mendacity, and comic
+selfishness! They do not like to think of him as merely a fat old fool,
+bamboozled by a pair of sprightly, not over-delicate women, far inferior
+to him in mental calibre, and made a laughing-stock for Fenton and sweet
+Anne Page, and the lads and lassies of Windsor, and the chattering Welsh
+parson. "Have I lived," cried Falstaff, in the moment of his
+discomfiture, "to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of
+English?" He is a hard case, an inveterate sinner, as worthless as any
+man well could be, in the eyes of decorum and respectability; but those
+who know him well grow to be fond of him, even if they feel that they
+ought to be ashamed of it, and they do not quite forgive the poet for
+making him contemptible.
+
+You can find many other figures that will make you laugh, but you can
+find no other figure that makes you laugh with such good reason. It
+seems incredible that Shakespeare, with his all-embracing mind and his
+perfect instinct of art, should deliberately have chosen to lessen his
+own masterpiece of humour. For Shakespeare rejoiced in Falstaff, even
+while he respected and recorded the inexorable justice of the moral law
+that decrees and eventually accomplishes his destruction. There is no
+one of his characters whose history he has traced with such minute
+elaboration. The conception is singularly ample. You may see Falstaff,
+as Shallow saw him, when he was a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke
+of Norfolk; you may see him all along the current of his mature years;
+his highway robberies on Gadshill; his bragging narrative to Prince
+Henry; his frolicsome, paternal, self-defensive lecture to the prince;
+his serio-comic association with the ragamuffin recruits at Coventry;
+his adroit escape from the sword of Hotspur; his mendacious
+self-glorification over the body of Harry Percy; his mishaps as a
+suitor to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; his wonderfully humorous interviews
+with the Chief-Justice and with Prince John of Lancaster; his junketings
+with Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, and his rebuff and
+consternation at his first and last meeting with King Henry V.; and
+finally you may see him, as Mrs. Quickly saw him, on his death-bed, when
+"'a cried out God! God! God! three or four times," and when "his nose
+was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled o' green fields."
+
+A good and faithful study of _King Henry IV._, and especially of the
+second part of that play, is essential for a right appreciation of
+Falstaff. Those scenes with the Chief-Justice are unmatched in
+literature. The knight stands royally forth in them, clothed with his
+entire panoply of agile intellect, robust humour, and boundless comic
+effrontery. But the arrogant and expeditious Falstaff of _The Merry
+Wives_--so richly freighted with rubicund sensuality, so abundant in
+comic loquacity, and so ludicrous in his sorry plights--is a much less
+complex person, and therefore he stands more level than the real
+Falstaff does with the average comprehension of mankind. The American
+stage, accordingly, by which more than by the printed book he has
+become known to our people, has usually given its preference to the
+Falstaff of the comedy. _The Merry Wives_ was first acted in New York on
+October 5, 1788 at the John Street theatre, with Harper as Falstaff. On
+April 1, 1807 it was produced at the old Park, and the Falstaff then was
+John E. Harwood. The same stage offered it again on January 16, 1829,
+with Hilson as Falstaff. A little later, about 1832, James H. Hackett
+took up the character of Falstaff, and from that time onward
+performances of _The Merry Wives_ occurred more frequently in different
+cities of America. Nor was the historical play neglected. On August 7,
+1848 a remarkably fine production of the comedy was accomplished at the
+Astor Place Operahouse, New York, with Hackett as Falstaff, who never in
+his time was equalled in that character, and has not been equalled
+since. Another Falstaff, however, and a remarkably good one, appeared at
+Burton's theatre on August 24, 1850, in the person of Charles Bass. On
+March 14, 1853 _The Merry Wives_ was again given at Burton's theatre,
+and Burton himself played Falstaff, with characteristic humour; but
+Burton never acted the part as it stands in _Henry IV._ Hackett, who
+used both the history (Part I.) and the comedy, continued to act
+Falstaff almost to the end of his life and Hackett did not die till
+1871. A distinguished representative of Falstaff in the early days of
+the American theatre--the days of the renowned Chestnut in
+Philadelphia--was William Warren (1767-1832), who came from England in
+1796. In recent years the part has been acted by Benedict De Bar and by
+John Jack. The latest Falstaff in America was that embodied by Charles
+Fisher, who first assumed the character on November 19, 1872, at Daly's
+theatre, and whose performance was picturesque and humorous.
+
+On the English stage the historical play of _Henry IV._ was exceedingly
+popular in Shakespeare's time. The first Falstaff, according to Malone,
+whom everybody has followed as to this point, was John Heminge
+(1555-1630). After him came John Lowin (1572-1654), who is thought to
+have acted the part in the presence of Charles I. His successor seems to
+have been Lacy, who died in 1681. Next came Cartwright, and in 1699 or
+1700 the great Betterton (1635-1710) assumed the fat knight, acting him
+in both parts of the history and in the comedy. Genest records
+twenty-two revivals of the first part of _Henry IV._ upon the London
+stage, at five different theatres, between 1667 and 1826; fifteen
+revivals of the second part between 1720 and 1821; and sixteen revivals
+of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ between 1667 and 1811. Many English
+actors have played Falstaff since Betterton's time, an incomplete though
+sufficiently ample list of them comprising Estcourt, 1704; F. Bullock,
+1713; J. Evans and J. Hall, 1715; Mills, 1716; Quin, "dignity and
+declamation," 1738; Berry, 1747; Love (whose true name was James Dance),
+1762; Shuter, 1774; John Henderson, one of the greatest actors that ever
+lived, 1774; Mrs. Webb (once only), 1776; Ryder, 1786; Palmer, 1788;
+King, 1792; Fawcett, 1795; Stephen Kemble, who was so fat that he could
+play it without stuffing or bladder, 1802; Blissett, 1803; George
+Frederick Cooke, 1804; Bartley, 1812; Charles Kemble, 1824; Dowton,
+1824; Elliston, 1826; and Samuel Phelps, 1846. The latest representative
+of Falstaff in England was H. Beerbohm-Tree, who, although a man of
+slender figure, contrived to simulate corpulence, and who manifested in
+his acting a fine instinct as to the meaning of the character and
+considerable resources of art in its expression, although the
+predominant individuality and the copious luxuriance of Falstaff's rosy
+and juicy humour were not within his reach. Upon the American stage the
+part is practically disused; and this is a pity, seeing that a source of
+great enjoyment and one of the most suggestive and fruitful topics that
+exist in association with the study of human nature are thus in a great
+degree sequestered from the public mind. Still it is better to have no
+Falstaff on the stage than to have it encumbered with a bad one; and
+certainly for the peculiar and exacting play of _Henry IV._ there are
+now no actors left: at least they are not visible in America.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+ADA REHAN.
+
+
+In browsing over the fragrant evergreen pages of Cibber's delightful
+book about the stage, and especially in reflecting upon the beautiful
+and brilliant women who, drawn by his magic pencil, dwell there,
+perpetual, in life, colour, and charm, the reflective reader may perhaps
+be prompted to remember that the royal line of stage beauties is not
+extinct, and that stage heroines exist in the present day who are quite
+as well worthy of commemoration as any that graced the period of Charles
+the Second or of good Queen Anne. Our age, indeed, has no Cibber to
+describe their loveliness and celebrate their achievements; but surely
+if he were living at this hour that courtly, characteristic, and
+sensuous writer--who saw so clearly and could portray so well the
+peculiarities of the feminine nature--would not deem the period of Ellen
+Terry and Marie Wilton, of Ada Rehan and Sarah Bernhardt and Genevieve
+Ward, of Clara Morris and Jane Hading, unworthy of his pen. As often as
+fancy ranges over those bright names and others that are kindred with
+them--a glittering sisterhood of charms and talents--the regret must
+arise that no literary artist with just the gallant spirit, the
+chivalry, the sensuous appreciation, the fine insight, and the pictorial
+touch of old Cibber is extant to perpetuate their glory. The hand that
+sketched Elizabeth Barry so as to make her live forever in a few brief
+lines, the hand that drew the fascinating and memorable portrait of
+Susanna Mountfort ("Down goes her dainty diving body to the ground, as
+if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own
+attractions")--what might it not have done to preserve for the knowledge
+of future generations the queens of the theatre who are crowned and
+regnant to-day! Cibber could have caught and reflected the elusive charm
+of such an actress as Ada Rehan. No touch less adroit and felicitous
+than his can accomplish more than the suggestion of her peculiar
+allurement, her originality, and her fascinating because sympathetic and
+piquant mental and physical characteristics.
+
+Ada Rehan, born at Limerick, Ireland, on April 22, 1860, was brought to
+America when five years old, and at that time she lived and went to
+school in Brooklyn. No one of her progenitors was ever upon the stage,
+nor does it appear that she was predisposed to that vocation by early
+reading or training. Her elder sisters had adopted that pursuit, and
+perhaps she was impelled toward it by the force of example and domestic
+association, readily affecting her innate latent faculty for the
+dramatic art. Her first appearance on the stage was made at Newark, New
+Jersey, in 1873, in a play entitled _Across the Continent_, in which she
+acted a small part, named Clara, for one night only, to fill the place
+of a performer who had been suddenly disabled by illness. Her readiness
+and her positive talent were clearly revealed in that effort, and it was
+thereupon determined in a family council that she should proceed; so she
+was soon regularly embarked upon the life of an actress. Her first
+appearance on the New York stage was made a little later, in 1873, at
+Wood's museum (it became Daly's theatre in 1879), when she played a
+small part in a piece called _Thorough-bred_. During the seasons of
+1873-74-75 she was associated with the Arch Street theatre,
+Philadelphia,--that being her first regular professional engagement.
+(John Drew, with whom, professionally, Ada Rehan has been long
+associated, made his first appearance in the same season, at the same
+house.) She then went to Macaulay's theatre, Louisville, where she acted
+for one season. From Louisville she went to Albany, as a member of John
+W. Albaugh's company, and with that manager she remained two seasons,
+acting sometimes in Albany and sometimes in Baltimore. After that she
+was for a few months with Fanny Davenport. The earlier part of her
+career involved professional endeavours in company with the wandering
+stars, and she acted in a variety of plays with Edwin Booth, Adelaide
+Neilson, John McCullough, Mrs. Bowers, Lawrence Barrett, John Brougham,
+Edwin Adams, Mrs. Lander, and John T. Raymond. From the first she was
+devotedly fond of Shakespeare, and all the Shakespearian characters
+allotted to her were studied and acted by her with eager interest and
+sympathy. While thus employed in the provincial stock she enacted
+Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Celia, Olivia, and Lady Anne, and in each
+of those parts she was conspicuously good. The attention of Augustin
+Daly was first attracted to her in December 1877, when she was acting at
+Albaugh's theatre in Albany, the play being _Katharine and Petruchio_
+(Garrick's version of the _Taming of the Shrew_), and Ada Rehan
+appearing as Bianca; and subsequently Daly again observed her as an
+actress of auspicious distinction and marked promise at the Grand Opera
+House, New York, in April 1879. Fanny Davenport was then acting in that
+theatre in Daly's strong American play of _Pique_--one of the few dramas
+of American origin that aptly reflect the character of American domestic
+life--and Ada Rehan appeared in the part of Mary Standish. She was
+immediately engaged under Daly's management, and in May 1879 she came
+forth at the Olympic theatre, New York, as Big Clemence in that author's
+version of _L'Assommoir_. On September 17, 1879, Daly's theatre (which
+had been suspended for about two years) was opened upon its present
+site, the southwest corner of Thirtieth Street and Broadway, and Ada
+Rehan made her first appearance there, enacting the part of Nelly Beers
+in a play called _Love's Young Dream_. The opening bill on that
+occasion comprised that piece, together with a comedy by Olive Logan,
+entitled _Newport_. On September 30 a revival of _Divorce_, one of
+Daly's most fortunate plays, was effected, and Ada Rehan impersonated
+Miss Lu Ten Eyck--a part originally acted (1873) by Fanny Davenport.
+From that time to this (1892) Ada Rehan has remained the leading lady at
+Daly's theatre; and there she has become one of the most admired figures
+upon the contemporary stage. In five professional visits to Europe,
+acting in London, Paris, Edinburgh, Dublin, Berlin, and other cities,
+she pleased judicious audiences and augmented her renown. Daly took his
+company of comedians to London for the first time in 1884, where they
+fulfilled an engagement of six weeks at Toole's theatre, beginning July
+19. The second visit to London was made two seasons later, when they
+acted for nine weeks at the Strand theatre, beginning May 27, 1886. At
+that time they also played in the English provinces, and they visited
+Germany--acting at Hamburg and at Berlin, where they were much liked and
+commended. They likewise made a trip to Paris. Their third season abroad
+began at the Lyceum theatre, London, May 3, 1888, and it included
+another expedition to the French capital, which was well rewarded. Ada
+Rehan at that time impersonated Shakespeare's Shrew. It was in that
+season also that she appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon, where Daly gave a
+performance (August 3, 1888) in the Shakespeare Memorial theatre, for
+the benefit of that institution. The fourth season of Daly's comedians
+in London began on June 10, 1890, at the Lyceum theatre, and lasted ten
+weeks; and this was signalised by Ada Rehan's impersonation of Rosalind.
+The fifth London season extended from September 9 to November 13, 1891.
+
+This is an outline of her professional story; but how little of the real
+life of an actor can be imparted in a record of the surface facts of a
+public career! Most expressive, as a comment upon the inadequacy of
+biographical details, is the exclamation of Dumas, about Aimee Desclee:
+"Une femme comme celle-la n'a pas de biographie! Elle nous a emus, et
+elle en est morte. Voila toute son historie!" Ada Rehan, while she has
+often and deeply moved the audience of her riper time, is happily very
+far from having died of it. There is deep feeling beneath the luminous
+and sparkling surface of her art; but it is chiefly with mirth that she
+has touched the public heart and affected the public experience. Equally
+of her, however, as of her pathetic sister artist of the French stage,
+it may be said that such a woman has no history. In a civilisation and
+at a period wherein persons are customarily accepted for what they
+pretend to be, instead of being seen and understood for what they are,
+she has been content to take an unpretentious course, to be original and
+simple, and thus to allow her faculties to ripen and her character to
+develop in their natural manner. She has not assumed the position of a
+star, and perhaps the American community, although favourable and
+friendly toward her, may have been somewhat slow to understand her
+unique personality and her superlative worth. The moment a thoughtful
+observer's attention is called to the fact, however, he perceives how
+large a place Ada Rehan fills in the public mind, how conspicuous a
+figure she is upon the contemporary stage, and how difficult it is to
+explain and classify her whether as an artist or a woman. That blending
+of complexity with transparency always imparts to individual life a
+tinge of piquant interest, because it is one denotement of the
+temperament of genius.
+
+The poets of the world pour themselves through all subjects by the use
+of their own words. In what manner they are affected by the forces of
+nature--its influences of gentleness and peace or its vast pageants of
+beauty and terror--those words denote; and also those words indicate the
+action, upon their responsive spirits, of the passions that agitate the
+human heart. The actors, on the other hand, assuming to be the
+interpreters of the poets, must pour themselves through all subjects by
+the use of their own personality. They are to be estimated accordingly
+by whatever the competent observer is able to perceive of the nature and
+the faculties they reveal under the stress of emotion, whether tragic or
+comic. Perhaps it is not possible--mind being limited in its
+function--for any person to form a full, true, and definite summary of
+another human creature. To view a dramatic performance with a
+consciousness of the necessity of forming a judicial opinion of it is
+often to see one's own thought about it rather than the thing itself.
+Yet, when all allowance is made for difficulty of theme and for
+infirmity of judgment, the observer of Ada Rehan may surely conclude
+that she has a rich, tender, and sparkling nature, in which the
+dream-like quality of sentiment and the discursive faculty of
+imagination, intimately blended with deep, broad, and accurate
+perceptions of the actual, and with a fund of keen and sagacious sense,
+are reinforced with strong individuality and with affluent and
+extraordinary vital force. Ada Rehan has followed no traditions. She
+went to the stage not because of vanity but because of spontaneous
+impulse; and for the expression of every part that she has played she
+has gone to nature and not to precept and precedent. The stamp of her
+personality is upon everything that she has done; yet the thinker who
+looks back upon her numerous and various impersonations is astonished at
+their diversity. The romance, the misery, and the fortitude of Kate
+Verity, the impetuous passion of Katharine, the brilliant raillery of
+Hippolyta, the enchanting womanhood of Rosalind--how clear-cut, how
+distinct, how absolutely dramatic was each one of those
+personifications! and yet how completely characteristic each one was of
+this individual actress! Our works of art may be subject to the
+application of our knowledge and skill, but we ourselves are under the
+dominance of laws which operate out of the inaccessible and indefinable
+depths of the spirit. Alongside of most players of this period Ada Rehan
+is a prodigy of original force. Her influence, accordingly, has been
+felt more than it has been understood, and, being elusive and strange,
+has prompted wide differences of opinion. The sense that she diffuses of
+a simple, unselfish, patient nature, and of impulsive tenderness of
+heart, however, cannot have been missed by anybody with eyes to see. And
+she crowns all by speaking the English language with a beauty that has
+seldom been equalled.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+TENNYSON'S COMEDY OF THE FORESTERS.
+
+
+"Besides, the King's name is a tower of strength." Thousands of people
+all over the world honour, and ought to honour, every word that falls
+from the pen of Alfred Tennyson. He is a very great man. No poet since
+the best time of Byron has written the English language so well--that is
+to say, with such affluent splendour of imagination; such passionate
+vigour; such nobility of thought; such tenderness of pathos; such
+pervasive grace, and so much of that distinctive variety, flexibility,
+and copious and felicitous amplitude which are the characteristics of an
+original style. No poet of the last fifty years has done so much to
+stimulate endurance in the human soul and to clarify spiritual vision in
+the human mind. It does not signify that now, at more than fourscore,
+his hand sometimes trembles a little on the harp-strings, and his touch
+falters, and his music dies away. It is still the same harp and the
+same hand. This fanciful, kindly, visionary, drifting, and altogether
+romantic comedy of _Robin Hood_ is not to be tried by the standard that
+is author reared when he wrote _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus_ and _The Passing
+of Arthur_--that imperial, unapproachable standard that no other poet
+has satisfied.
+
+    "Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day."
+
+But though the passion be subdued and the splendour faded, the deep
+current of feeling flows on and the strong and tender voice can still
+touch the heart and charm the ear. That tide of emotion and that tone of
+melody blend in this play and make it beautiful. The passion is no
+longer that of _Enone_ and _Lucretius_ and _Guinevere_ and _Locksley
+Hall_ and _Maud_ and _The Vision of Sin_. The thought is no longer that
+of _In Memoriam_, with its solemn majesty and infinite pathos. The music
+is no longer that of _The May Queen_ and the _Talking Oak_ and _Idle
+Tears_. But why should these be expected? He who struck those notes
+strikes now another; and as we listen our wonder grows, and cannot help
+but grow, that a bard of fourscore and upward should write in such
+absolute sympathy with youth, love, hope, happiness, and all that is
+free and wandering and martial and active in the vicissitudes of
+adventure, the exploits of chivalry, and the vagabondish spirit of gypsy
+frolic. The fact that he does write in that mood points to the one
+illuminative truth now essential to be remembered. The voice to which we
+are privileged to listen, perhaps for the last time, is the voice of a
+great poet--by which is meant a poet who is able, not through the medium
+of intellect but through the medium of emotion, to make the total
+experience of mankind his own experience, and to express it not only in
+the form of art but with the fire of nature. The element of power, in
+all the expressions of such a mind, will fluctuate; but every one of its
+expressions will be sincere and in a greater or less degree will be
+vital with a universal and permanent significance. That virtue is in
+Alfred Tennyson's comedy of _Robin Hood_, and that virtue will insure
+for it an abiding endurance in affectionate public esteem.
+
+The realm into which this play allures its auditor is the realm of
+_Ivanhoe_--the far-off, romantic region of Sherwood forest, in the
+ancient days of stout king Richard the First. The poet has gone to the
+old legends of Robin Hood and to the ballads that have been made upon
+them, and out of those materials--using them freely, according to his
+fancy--he has chosen his scene and his characters and has made his
+story. It is not the England of the mine and the workshop that he
+represents, and neither is it the England of the trim villa and the
+formal landscape; it is the England of the feudal times--of gray castle
+towers, and armoured knights, and fat priests, and wandering minstrels,
+and crusades and tournaments; England in rush-strewn bowers and under
+green boughs; the England in which Wamba jested and Blondel sung. To
+enter into that realm is to leave the barren world of prose; to feel
+again the cool, sweet winds of summer upon the brow of youth; to catch,
+in fitful glimpses, the shimmer of the Lincoln green in the sunlit,
+golden glades of the forest, and to hear the merry note of the huntsman
+commingled, far away, with "horns of Elfland faintly blowing." The
+appeal is made to the primitive, elemental, poetical instinct of
+mankind; and no detail of realism is obtruded, no question of
+probability considered, no agony of the sin-tortured spirit subjected to
+analysis, no controversy promoted and no moral lesson enforced. For once
+the public is favoured with a serious poetical play, which aims simply
+to diffuse happiness by arousing sympathy with pleasurable scenes and
+picturesque persons, with virtue that is piquant and humour that is
+refined, with the cheerful fortitude that takes adversity with a smile,
+and with that final fortunate triumph of good over evil which is neither
+ensanguined with gore nor saddened with tears, nor made acrid with
+bitterness. The play is pastoral comedy, written partly in blank verse
+and partly in prose, and cast almost wholly out of doors--in the open
+air and under the greenwood tree--and, in order to stamp its character
+beyond doubt or question, one scene of it is frankly devoted to a
+convocation of fairies around Titania, their queen.
+
+The impulse that underlies this piece is the old, incessant, undying
+aspiration, that men and women of the best order feel, for some avenue
+of escape, some relief, some refuge, from the sickening tyranny of
+convention and the commonplace, and from the overwhelming mystery with
+which all human life is haunted and oppressed. A man who walks about in
+a forest is not necessarily free. He may be as great a slave as anybody.
+But the exalted imagination dwells upon his way of life as emancipated,
+breezy, natural, and right. That way, to the tired thinker, lie peace
+and joy. There, if anywhere--as he fancies--he might escape from all the
+wrongs of the world, all the problems of society, all the dull business
+of recording, and analysing, and ticketing mankind, all the clash of
+selfish systems that people call history, and all the babble that they
+call literature. In that retreat he would feel the rain upon his face,
+and smell the grass and the flowers, and hear the sighing and whispering
+of the wind in the green boughs; and there would be no need to trouble
+himself any more, whether about the past or the future. Every great
+intellect of the world has felt that wild longing, and has recorded
+it--the impulse to revert to the vast heart of Nature, that knows no
+doubt, and harbours no fear, and keeps no regret, and feels no sorrow,
+and troubles itself not at all. Matthew Arnold dreamily and perhaps
+austerely expressed it in _The Scholar Gypsy_. Byron more humanly
+uttered it in four well-remembered lines, of _Childe Harold_:
+
+    "Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place,
+      With one fair spirit for my minister,
+    That I might all forget the human race,
+      And, hating nothing, love but only her."
+
+_Robin Hood_, as technical drama, is frail. Its movement, indeed, is not
+more indolent than that of its lovely prototypes in Shakespeare, _As You
+Like It_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. With all the pastorals Time
+ambles. But, on the other hand, Tennyson's piece is not a match for
+either of those Shakespearean works, in massiveness of dramatic
+signification or in the element of opportunity for the art of acting.
+Character, poetry, philosophy, humour, and suggestion it contains; but
+it contains no single scene in which its persons can amply put forth
+their full histrionic powers with essentially positive dramatic effect.
+Its charm resides more in being than in doing, and therefore it is more
+a poem than a play, and perhaps more a picture than a poem. It is not
+one of those works that arouse, agitate, and impel. It aims only to
+create and sustain a pleased condition; and that aim it has
+accomplished. No spectator will be deeply moved by it, but no spectator
+will look at it without delight. While, however, _Robin Hood_ as a drama
+is frail, it is not destitute of the dramatic element. It depicts a
+central character in action, and it tells a representative love story--a
+story in which the oppressive persecutor of impoverished age is foiled
+and discomfited, in which faithful affection survives the test of trial,
+and in which days of danger end at last in days of blissful peace.
+Traces of the influence of Shakespeare--exerted by his pastoral comedies
+and by the _Merry Wives of Windsor_--are obvious in it. There is no
+imitation; there is only kinship. The sources that Scott explored for
+some of the material used in _Ivanhoe_ also announce themselves. Many
+stories could be derived from the old Robin Hood ballads. The poet has
+only chosen and rearranged such of their incidents as would suit his
+purpose--using those old ballads with perfect freedom, but also using
+them with faultless taste.
+
+Robin Hood was born at Locksley, in the county of Nottingham, about
+1160, when Henry the Second was king. His true name was Robert
+Fitzooth--a name that popular mispronunciation converted into Robin
+Hood--and he was of noble lineage. Old records declare him to have been
+the Earl of Huntingdon. He was extravagant and adventurous, and for
+reasons that are unknown he preferred to live in the woods. His haunts
+were chiefly Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire, and Barnsdale, in
+Yorkshire. Among his associates were William Scadlock, commonly called
+Scarlet; Much, a miller's son; Friar Tuck, a vagabond monk; and Little
+John, whose name was Nailor. Robin Hood and his band were kind to the
+poor; but they robbed the rich and they were specially hard on the
+clergy. There is a tradition that a woman named Maid Marian went with
+Robin into the forest, but nothing is known about her. Robin lived till
+the age of eighty-seven, and he might have lived longer but that a
+treacherous relative, the prioress of Kirkley--to whose care he had
+entrusted himself in order that he might be bled--allowed him to bleed
+to death. At the time indicated in Tennyson's comedy--the year 1194,
+which was the year of King Richard's return from captivity in
+Germany--he was thirty-four years old. It is the year of _Ivanhoe_, and
+in the play as in the novel, the evil agent is the usurper Prince John.
+
+Fifteen characters take part in this comedy. Act first is called "The
+Bond and the Outlawry." The action begins in a garden before Sir Richard
+Lea's castle--or rather the dialogue begins there, by which the basis of
+the action is revealed. Maid Marian is Marian Lea, the daughter of Sir
+Richard. Walter Lea, the son of Sir Richard, has been captured by the
+Moors, and in order to pay the boy's ransom Sir Richard has borrowed a
+large sum of money from the Abbot of York. That debt must presently be
+paid; but Sir Richard does not see his way clear to its payment, and if
+he does not pay it he must forfeit his land. The Sheriff of Nottingham,
+a wealthy suitor for the hand of Marian, is willing to pay that debt, in
+case the girl will favour his suit. But Marian loves the Earl of
+Huntingdon and is by him beloved; and all would go well with those
+lovers, and with Sir Richard, but that the Earl of Huntingdon is poor.
+Poor though he be, however, he makes a feast, to celebrate his birthday,
+and to that festival Sir Richard and his daughter are bidden. Act first
+displays the joyous proceedings of that good meeting and the posture of
+those characters toward each other. The Sheriff of Nottingham intrudes
+himself upon the scene, accompanied by Prince John, who is disguised as
+a friar. The Prince has cast a covetous eye upon Marian, and, although
+he outwardly favours the wish of the Sheriff, he is secretly determined
+to seize her for himself. The revellers at Huntingdon's feast, unaware
+of the Prince's presence, execrate his name, and at length he retires,
+in a silent fury. Robin gives to Marian a remarkable ring that he has
+inherited from his mother. Later a herald enters and reads a
+proclamation from Prince John, declaring the Earl of Huntingdon to be a
+felon, and commanding his banishment. Robin cannot forcibly oppose that
+mandate, and he therefore determines to cast in his lot with Scarlet and
+Friar Tuck and other "minions of the moon," and thenceforward to live a
+free and merry life under the green boughs of Sherwood Forest. A year is
+supposed to pass. Act second, called "The Flight of Marian," begins with
+a song of the Foresters, in the deep wood--"There is no land like
+England." That is a scene of much gentle beauty, enhanced by Robin
+Hood's delivery of some of the finest poetry in the play, and also by
+the delicious music of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Robin descants upon
+freedom, and upon the advantage of dwelling beneath the sky rather than
+beneath a groined roof that shuts out all the meaning of heaven. There
+is a colloquy between Little John, who is one of Robin's men, and Kate,
+who is Marian's maid. Those two are lovers who quarrel and make it up
+again, as lovers will. Kate has come to the forest, bringing word of the
+flight of her mistress. Prince John has tried to seize Marian, and that
+brave girl has repulsed and struck him; and she and her father have
+fled--intending to make for France, in which land the old knight expects
+to find a friend who will pay his debt and save his estate. While Robin
+is considering these things he perceives the approach of Prince John and
+the Sheriff of Nottingham, and, thereupon, he takes refuge in the hut of
+an old witch and disguises himself in some of her garments. Prince John
+and the Sheriff, who are in pursuit of Sir Richard and Marian, find
+Robin in this disguise, and for a time they are deceived by him; but
+soon they penetrate his masquerade and assail him--whereupon some of his
+people come to his assistance, and he is reinforced by Sir Richard Lea.
+Prince John and his party are beaten and driven away. Sir Richard is
+exhausted, and Robin commits him to the care of the Foresters. Marian,
+arrayed as a boy, and pretending to be her brother Walter, has been
+present at this combat, as a spectator, and a sparkling scene of
+equivoke, mischief, and sentiment ensues between Marian and Robin. That
+scene Tennyson wrote and inserted for Ada Rehan, to whose vivacious
+temperament it is fitted, and whose action in it expressed with equal
+felicity the teasing temper of the coquette and the propitious fondness
+of the lover. Robin discovers Marian's identity by means of the ring
+that he gave her, and, after due explanation, it is agreed that she and
+her father will remain under his protection. Act third is called "The
+Crowning of Marian," and is devoted to pictures, colloquies, and
+incidents, now serious and now comical, showing the life of the
+Foresters and the humorous yet discriminative justice of their gypsy
+chief. Sir Richard Lea is ill and he cannot be moved. The outlaws crown
+Marian, with an oaken chaplet, and declare her to be their queen. Robin
+Hood vindicates his vocation, and in a noble speech on
+freedom--deriving his similes from the giant oak tree, as Tennyson has
+ever loved to do--declares himself the friend of the poor and the
+servant of the king; the absent Richard of the Lion Heart, for whose
+return all good men are eager. Various beggars, friars, and other
+travellers are halted on the road, in practical illustration of Robin's
+doctrine; comic incidents from the old ballads are reproduced; and so
+the episode ends merrily of these frolics in the wood. At that point a
+delicious fairy pageant is introduced, presenting Queen Titania and her
+elves and illustrating at once the grievance of the fairies against the
+men whose heavy feet have crushed their toads and bats and flowers and
+mystic rings, and Marian's dream of love. Sir Arthur Sullivan's music is
+here again used, and again it is felt to be characteristic, melodious,
+and uncommonly sweet and tender. Act fourth begins in a forest bower at
+sunrise. Marian and Robin meet there and talk of Sir Richard and of his
+bond to the Abbot of York--soon to fall due and seemingly to remain
+unpaid. Robin has summoned the Abbot and his justiciary to come into the
+forest and to bring the bond. King Richard, unrecognised, now arrives,
+and in submission to certain laws of the woodland he engages in an
+encounter of buffets, and prevails over all his adversaries. At the
+approach of the Abbot, however, fearing premature recognition, the
+monarch will flit away; but his gypsy friends compel him to accept a
+bugle, upon which he is to blow a blast when in danger. The Abbot and
+his followers arrive, and Robin Hood offers the money to redeem Sir
+Richard's bond; but, upon a legal quibble, the Abbot declines to receive
+it--preferring to seize the forfeited land. Prince John and the Sheriff
+of Nottingham appear, and Robin and his Foresters form an ambuscade. Sir
+Richard Lea has been brought in, upon his litter, and Marian stays
+beside him. Prince John attempts to seize her, but this time he is
+frustrated by the sudden advent of King Richard--from whose presence he
+slinks away. The myrmidons of John, however, attack the King, who would
+oppose them single-handed; but Friar Tuck snatches the King's bugle and
+blows a blast of summons--whereupon the Foresters swarm into the field
+and possess it. John's faction is dispersed, Marian is saved, the absent
+Walter Lea reappears, Sir Richard is assured of his estate, the Abbot
+and the Sheriff are punished, and Robin Hood and Maid Marian may
+wed--for now the good King Richard has come again to his own.
+
+The lyrics in the piece possess the charm of fluent and unaffected
+sweetness, and of original, inventive, and felicitous fancy, and some of
+them are tenderly freighted with that indescribable but deeply affecting
+undertone of pathetic sentiment which is a characteristic attribute of
+Tennyson's poetry.
+
+The characters in the comedy were creatures of flesh and blood to the
+author, and they come out boldly, therefore, on the stage. Marian Lea is
+a woman of the Rosalind order--handsome, noble, magnanimous,
+unconventional, passionate in nature, but sufficient unto herself,
+humorous, playful, and radiant with animal spirits. Ada Rehan embodied
+her according to that ideal. The chief exaction of the part is
+simplicity--which yet must not be allowed to degenerate into tameness.
+The sweet affection of a daughter for her father, the coyness yet the
+allurement of a girl for her lover, the refinement of high birth, the
+blithe bearing and free demeanour of a child of the woods, and the
+predominant dignity of purity and honour--those are the salient
+attributes of the part. Ada Rehan struck the true note at the
+outset--the note of buoyant health, rosy frolic, and sprightly
+adventure--and she sustained it evenly and firmly to the last. Every eye
+was pleased with the frank, careless, cheerful beauty of her presence,
+and every ear was soothed and charmed with her fluent and expressive
+delivery of the verse. In this, as in all of the important
+representations that Ada Rehan has given, the delightful woman-quality
+was conspicuously present. She can readily impersonate a boy. No actress
+since Adelaide Neilson has done that so well. But the crowning
+excellence of her art was its expression of essential womanhood. Her
+acting was never trivial and it never obtruded the tedious element of
+dry intellect. It refreshed--and the spectator was happier for having
+seen her. Many pleasant thoughts were scattered in many minds by her
+performance of Maid Marian, and no one who saw it will ever part with
+the remembrance of it.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+ELLEN TERRY: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
+
+
+It was perhaps an auspicious portent, it certainly is an interesting
+fact, that the first play that was ever acted in America at a regular
+theatre and by a regular theatrical company was Shakespeare's comedy of
+_The Merchant of Venice_. Such at least is the record made by William
+Dunlap, the first historian of the American theatre, who names
+Williamsburg, Virginia, as the place and September 5, 1752 as the date
+of that production. It ought to be noted, however (so difficult is it to
+settle upon any fact in this uncertain world), that the learned
+antiquarian Judge C.P. Daly, fortified likewise by the scrupulously
+accurate Ireland, dissents from Dunlap's statement and declares that
+Cibber's alteration of Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_ was acted by a
+regular company in a large room in Nassau Street, New York, at an
+earlier date, namely, on March 5, 1750. All the same, it appears to
+have been Shakespeare's mind that started the dramatic movement in
+America. The American stage has undergone great changes since that time,
+but both _The Merchant of Venice_ and _Richard the Third_ are still
+acted, and in the _Merchant_, if not in _Richard_, the public interest
+is still vital. In New York, under Edwin Booth's management, at the
+Winter Garden theatre, January 28, 1867, and subsequently at Booth's
+theatre, and in London, under Henry Irving's management, at the Lyceum
+theatre, November 1, 1879, sumptuous productions of the _Merchant_ have
+brilliantly marked the dramatic chronicle of our times. Discussion of
+the great character of Shylock steadily proceeds and seems never to
+weary either the disputants or the audience. The sentiment, the fancy,
+and the ingenuity of artists are often expended not only upon the
+austere, picturesque, and terrible figure of the vindictive Jew, but
+upon the chief related characters in the comedy--upon Bassanio and
+Portia, Gratiano and Nerissa, Lorenzo and Jessica, the princely and
+pensive Antonio, the august Duke and his stately senators, and the
+shrewd and humorous Gobbo. More than one painting has depicted the
+ardent Lorenzo and his fugitive infidel as they might have looked on
+that delicious summer night at Belmont when they saw "how the floor of
+heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," and when the
+blissful lover, radiant with happiness and exalted by the sublime,
+illimitable, unfathomable spectacle of the star-strewn firmament,
+murmured, in such heaven-like cadence, of the authentic music of heaven.
+
+It is not to be denied that lovely words are spoken to Jessica, and that
+almost equally lovely words are spoken by her. Essayists upon the
+_Merchant_ have generally accepted her without a protest--so much do
+youth and beauty in a woman count in the scale when weighed against duty
+and integrity. There is no indication that Shylock was ever unjust or
+unkind to Jessica. Whatever he may have been to others he seems always
+to have been good to her; and she was the child of that lost Leah of his
+youthful devotion whom he passionately loved and whom he mourned to the
+last. Yet Jessica not only abandoned her father and his religion, but
+robbed him of money and jewels (including the betrothal ring, the
+turquoise, that her mother had given to him), when she fled with the
+young Christian who had won her heart. It was a basely cruel act; but
+probably some of the vilest and cruelest actions that are done in this
+world are done by persons who are infatuated by the passion of love.
+Mrs. Jameson, who in her beautiful essay on Portia extenuates the
+conduct of Jessica, would have us believe that Shylock valued his
+daughter far beneath his wealth, and therefore deserved to be deserted
+and plundered by her; and she is so illogical as to derive his
+sentiments on this subject from his delirious outcries of lamentation
+after he learned of her predatory and ignominious flight. The argument
+is not a good one. Fine phrases do not make wrong deeds right. It were
+wiser to take Jessica for the handsome and voluptuous girl that
+certainly she is, and to leave her rectitude out of the question.
+Shakespeare in his drawing of her was true to nature, as he always is;
+but the student who wants to know where Shakespeare's heart was placed
+when he drew women must look upon creatures very different from Jessica.
+The women that Shakespeare seems peculiarly to have loved are Imogen,
+Cordelia, Isabella, Rosalind, and Portia--Rosalind, perhaps, most of
+all; for although Portia is finer than Rosalind, it is extremely
+probable that Shakespeare resembled his fellow-men sufficiently to have
+felt the preference that Tom Moore long afterward expressed:
+
+    "Be an angel, my love, in the morning,
+    But, oh! be a woman to-night."
+
+When Ellen Terry embodied Portia--in Henry Irving's magnificent revival
+of _The Merchant of Venice_--the essential womanhood of that character
+was for the first time in the modern theatre adequately interpreted and
+conveyed. Upon many play-going observers indeed the wonderful wealth of
+beauty that is in the part--its winsome grace, its incessant sparkle,
+its alluring because piquant as well as luscious sweetness, its
+impetuous ardour, its enchantment of physical equally with emotional
+condition, its august morality, its perfect candour, and its noble
+passion--came like a surprise. Did the great actress find those
+attributes in the part (they asked themselves), or did she infuse them
+into it? Previous representatives of Portia had placed the emphasis
+chiefly, if not exclusively, upon morals and mind. The stage Portia of
+the past has usually been a didactic lady, self-contained, formal,
+conventional, and oratorical. Ellen Terry came, and Portia was figured
+exactly as she lives in the pages of Shakespeare--an imperial and yet an
+enchanting woman, dazzling in her beauty, royal in her dignity, as
+ardent in temperament as she is fine in brain and various and splendid
+in personal peculiarities and feminine charm. After seeing that
+matchless impersonation it seemed strange that Portia should ever have
+been represented in any other light, and it was furthermore felt that
+the inferior, mechanical, utilitarian semblance of her could not again
+be endured. Ellen Terry's achievement was a complete vindication of the
+high view that Shakespearean study has almost always taken of that
+character, and it finally discredited the old stage notion that Portia
+is a type of decorum and declamation.
+
+Aside from Hazlitt, who thought that Portia is affected and pedantic,
+and who did not like her because he did not happen to appreciate her,
+the best analytical thinkers about Shakespeare's works have taken the
+high view of that character. Shakespeare himself certainly took it; for
+aside from her own charming behaviour and delightful words it is to be
+observed that everybody in the play who speaks of her at all speaks her
+praise. It is only upon the stage that she has been made artificial,
+prim, and preachy. That misrepresentation of her has, perhaps, been
+caused, in part, by the practice long prevalent in our theatre of
+cutting and compressing the play so as to make Shylock the chief figure
+in it. In that way Portia is shorn of much of her splendour and her
+meaning. The old theatrical records dwell almost exclusively upon
+Shylock, and say little if anything about Portia. In Shakespeare's time,
+no doubt, _The Merchant of Venice_ was acted as it is written, the
+female persons in it being played by boys, or by men who could "speak
+small." Alexander Cooke (1588-1614) played the light heroines of
+Shakespeare while the poet was alive. All students of the subject are
+aware that Burbage was the first Shylock, and that when he played the
+part he wore a red wig, a red beard, and a long false nose. No record
+exists as to the first Portia. The men who were acting female characters
+upon the London stage when that institution was revived immediately
+after the Restoration were Kynaston, James Nokes, Angel, William
+Betterton, Mosely, and Floid. Kynaston, it is said, could act a woman so
+well that when at length women themselves began to appear as actors it
+was for some time doubted whether any one of them could equal him. The
+account of his life, however, does not mention Portia as one of his
+characters.
+
+Indeed the play of _The Merchant of Venice_, after it languished out of
+sight in that decadence of the stage which ensued upon the growth of the
+Puritan movement in England, did not again come into use until it was
+revived in Lord Landsdowne's alteration of it produced at the theatre in
+Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1701, and even then it was grossly perverted.
+Forty years later, however, on St. Valentine's Day 1741, at Drury Lane,
+when Macklin regenerated the character of Shylock, the original piece
+was restored to the theatre. Women in the meantime had come upon the
+stage. The garrulous and delightful Pepys, who had seen Kynaston play a
+female part, records in his marvellous Diary that he first saw women as
+actors on January 3, 1661. Those were members of Killigrew's company,
+which preceded that of Davenant by several months, if not by a year; and
+therefore the common statement in theatrical books that the first woman
+that ever appeared on the English stage was Mrs. Sanderson, of
+Davenant's company, at Lincoln's Inn Fields, is erroneous: and indeed
+the name of the first English actress is as much unknown as the name of
+the first Portia. When Macklin restored Shakespeare's _Merchant of
+Venice_ to the stage it is not likely that the character of Portia was
+dwarfed, for its representative then was Kitty Clive, and that actress
+was a person of strong will. With Clive the long list begins of the
+Portias of the stage. She was thirty years old when she played the part
+with Macklin, and it is probable that she played it with dignity and
+certain that she played it with sparkling animation and piquant grace.
+The German Ulrici, whose descriptive epithets for Portia are "roguish
+and intellectual," would doubtless have found his ideal of the part
+fulfilled in Clive. The Nerissa that night was Mrs. Pritchard, then also
+thirty years old, but not so famous as she afterward became.
+
+The greatest actress on the British stage in the eighteenth century
+undoubtedly was Margaret Woffington (1719-1760). Sarah Siddons, to whom
+the sceptre passed, was only five years old when Woffington died. Both
+those brilliant names are associated with Portia. Augustin Daly's _Life
+of Woffington_--the best life of her that has been written, and one of
+the most sumptuous books that have been made--contains this reference to
+her performance of that part: "All her critics agree that her
+declamation was accurate and her gesture grace and nature combined; but
+in tragic or even dramatic speeches her voice probably had its limits,
+and in such scenes, being overtaxed, told against her. As Portia she
+appeared to great advantage; but when Lorenzo says, 'This is the voice,
+or I am much deceived, of Portia,' and Portia replies, 'He knows me, as
+the blind man knows the cuckoo, by the bad voice,' the audience laughed
+outright, and Woffington, conscious of her deficiency, with great
+good-humour joined with them in their merriment." The incident is
+mentioned in the _Table Talk_ (1825) of Richard Ryan, to which book Daly
+refers. Mrs. Siddons made her first appearance on the London stage as
+Portia December 29, 1775, and conspicuously failed in the part on that
+occasion, but she became distinguished in it afterward; yet it is
+probable that Mrs. Siddons expressed its nobility more than its
+tenderness, and much more than its buoyant and glittering glee, which
+was so entirely and beautifully given by Ellen Terry. After Peg
+Woffington and before Mrs. Siddons the most conspicuous Portia was Mrs.
+Dancer, whom Hugh Kelley, in his satirical composition of _Thespis_,
+calls a "moon-eyed idiot,"--from which barbarous bludgeon phrase the
+reader derives a hint as to her aspect. Some of the tones of Mrs.
+Dancer's voice were so tender that no one could resist them. Spranger
+Barry could not, for he married her, and after his death she became Mrs.
+Crawford. Miss Maria Macklin, daughter of the first true Shylock of the
+stage, acted Portia, April 13, 1776, with her father. She is recorded as
+an accomplished woman but destitute of genius--in which predicament she
+probably was not lonesome. On June 11, 1777 Portia was acted at the
+Haymarket by Miss Barsanti, afterward Mrs. Lister, an actress who, since
+she excelled in such parts as were customarily taken by Fanny Abington
+(the distinct opposite of Portia-like characters), must have been
+unsuited for it. The names of Miss Younge, Miss Farren, Miss E. Kemble,
+Miss Ryder, Mrs. Pope, Miss De Camp, and Miss Murray are in the record
+of the stage Portias that comes down to 1800. Probably the best of all
+those Portias was Mrs. Pope.
+
+The beautiful Mrs. Glover played Portia in 1809 at the Haymarket
+theatre. Mrs. Ogilvie played it, with Macready as Shylock (his first
+appearance in that part), on May 13, 1823. Those figures passed and left
+no shadow. Two English actresses of great fame are especially associated
+with Portia--Ellen Tree, afterward Mrs. Charles Kean, and Helen Faucit,
+now Lady Martin; and no doubt their assumptions of the part should be
+marked as exceptions from the hard, didactic, declamatory, perfunctory
+method that has customarily characterised the Portia of the stage. Lady
+Martin's written analysis of Portia is noble in thought and subtle and
+tender in penetration and sympathy. Charlotte Cushman read the text
+superbly, but she was much too formidable ever to venture on assuming
+the character. Portia is a woman who deeply loves and deeply rejoices
+and exults in her love, and she is never ashamed of her passion or of
+her exultation in it; and she says the finest things about love that are
+said by any of Shakespeare's women; the finest because, while supremely
+passionate, the feeling in them is perfectly sane. It is as a lover that
+Ellen Terry embodied her, and while she made her a perfect woman, in all
+the attributes that fascinate, she failed not, in the wonderful trial
+scene, to invest her with that fine light of celestial anger--that
+momentary thrill of moral austerity--which properly appertains to the
+character at the climax of a solemn and almost tragical situation.
+
+On the American stage there have been many notable representatives of
+the chief characters in _The Merchant of Venice_. In New York, when the
+comedy was done at the old John Street theatre in 1773, Hallam was
+Shylock and Mrs. Morris Portia. Twenty years afterward, at the same
+house, Shylock was played by John Henry, and Portia by Mrs. Henry, while
+the brilliant Hodgkinson appeared as Gratiano. Cooper, whose life has
+been so well written by that ripe theatrical scholar Joseph N. Ireland,
+in one of the books of the Dunlap Society, assumed Shylock in 1797 at
+the theatre just then opened in Greenwich Street. The famous Miss
+Brunton (then Mrs. Merry), was the Portia, and the cast included Moreton
+as Bassanio, Warren as Antonio, Bernard as Gratiano, and Blissett as
+Tubal. How far away and how completely lost and forgotten those once
+distinguished and admired persons are! Yet Cooper in his day was
+idolised: he had a fame as high, if not as widely spread, as that of
+Henry Irving or Edwin Booth at present. William Creswick--lately dead at
+an advanced age in London--was seen upon the New York stage as Shylock
+in 1840; Macready in 1841; Charles Kean in 1845. With the latter, Ellen
+Tree played Portia. Charles W. Couldock enacted Shylock on September 6,
+1852, at the Castle Garden theatre, in a performance given to
+commemorate the alleged centenary of the introduction of the drama into
+America. The elder Wallack, the elder Booth, Edwin Forrest, G.V. Brooke,
+George Vandenhoff, Wyzeman Marshall, and E.L. Davenport are among the
+old local representatives of the Jew. Madam Ponisi used to play Portia,
+and so did Mrs. Hoey.
+
+In December 1858, when _The Merchant of Venice_ was finely revived at
+Wallack's theatre, with the elder Wallack as Shylock, the cast included
+Lester Wallack as Bassanio, John Brougham as Gratiano, A. W. Young--a
+quaintly comic actor, too soon cut off--as Launcelot Gobbo, Mary
+Gannon--the fascinating, the irresistible--as Nerissa, and handsome Mrs.
+Sloan as Jessica. The eminent German actor Davison played Shylock, in
+New York, in his own language; and many German actors, no one of them
+comparable with him, have been seen in it since. Lawrence Barrett often
+played it, and with remarkable force and feeling. The triumphs won in it
+by Edwin Booth are within the remembrance of many playgoers of this
+generation. When he last acted the Jew Helena Modjeska was associated
+with him as Portia. Booth customarily ended the piece with the trial
+scene, omitting the last act; and indeed that was long the stage custom;
+but with the true Portia of Ellen Terry and a good cast in general the
+last act went blithely and with superb effect. The comedy was not
+written for Shylock alone. He is a tremendous identity, but he is not
+the chief subject. The central theme is Portia and her love. That theme
+takes up a large part of the play,--which is like a broad summer
+landscape strewn with many-coloured flowers that flash and glitter in
+the sun, while slowly a muttering thunder-storm gathers and lowers, and
+presently sweeps overhead, casting one black shadow as it passes, and
+leaving the fragrant and glistening plain all the brighter and sweeter
+for the contrast with its defeated menace and vanishing gloom.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+RICHARD MANSFIELD AS RICHARD THE THIRD.
+
+
+The ideal of Richard that was expressed by this actor did not materially
+differ from that which has been manifested by great tragic actors from
+Garrick to Booth. He embodied a demoniac scoffer who, nevertheless, is a
+human being. The infernal wickedness of Richard was shown to be impelled
+by tremendous intellect but slowly enervated and ultimately thwarted and
+ruined by the cumulative operation of remorse--corroding at the heart
+and finally blasting the man with desolation and frenzy. That,
+undoubtedly, was Shakespeare's design. But Richard Mansfield's
+expression of that ideal differed from the expression to which the stage
+has generally been accustomed, and in this respect his impersonation was
+distinctive and original.
+
+The old custom of playing Richard was to take the exaggerated statements
+of the opening soliloquy in a literal sense, to provide him with a big
+hump, a lame leg, and a fell of straight black hair, and to make him
+walk in, scowling, with his lower lip protruded, and declare with
+snarling vehemence and guttural vociferation his amiable purpose of
+specious duplicity and miscellaneous slaughter. The opening speech,
+which is in Shakespeare's juvenile manner--an orotund, verbose manner,
+which perhaps he had caught from Marlowe, and which he outgrew and
+abandoned--was thus utilised for displaying the character in a massed
+aspect, as that of a loathsome hypocrite and sanguinary villain; and,
+that being done, he was made to advance through about two-thirds of the
+tragedy, airily yet ferociously slaying everybody who came in his way,
+until at some convenient point, definable at the option of the actor, he
+was suddenly smitten with a sufficient remorse to account for his
+trepidation before and during the tent-scene; and thereafter he was
+launched into combat like a meteoric butcher, all frenzy and all gore,
+and killed, amid general acclamation, when he had fenced himself out of
+breath.
+
+That treatment of the character was, doubtless, in part a necessary
+consequence of Shakespeare's perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine
+that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was
+the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece. The
+actual character of the king,--who seems to have been one of the ablest
+and wisest monarchs that ever reigned in England--has never recovered,
+and it never will recover, from the odium that was heaped upon it by the
+Tudor historians and accepted and ratified by the great genius of
+Shakespeare. The stage character of the king has been almost as
+effectually damned by the ingenious theatrical claptrap with which
+Cibber misrepresented and vulgarised Shakespeare's conception, assisted
+by the efforts of a long line of blood-and-thunder tragedians, only too
+well pleased to depict a gory, blathering, mugging miscreant, such as
+their limited intelligence enabled them to comprehend. The stage
+Richard, however, may possibly be redeemed. In Cibber he is everything
+that Queen Margaret calls him, and worse than a brute. In Shakespeare,
+although a miscreant, he is a man. The return to Shakespeare,
+accordingly, is a step in the right direction. That step was taken some
+time ago, although not maintained, first by Macready, then by Samuel
+Phelps, then by Edwin Booth, and then by Henry Irving. Their good
+example was followed by Richard Mansfield. He used a version of the
+tragedy, made by himself,--a piece indicative of thoughtful study of the
+subject as well as a keen intuitive grasp of it. He did not stop short
+at being a commentator. Aiming to impersonate a character he treated
+Shakespeare's prolix play in such a manner as to make it a practicable
+living picture of a past age. The version was in five acts, preserving
+the text of the original, much condensed, and introducing a few lines
+from Cibber. It began with a bright processional scene before the Tower
+of London, in which Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., was conspicuous, and
+against that background of "glorious summer" it placed the dangerous
+figure of the Duke of Gloster. It comprised the murder of Henry VI., the
+wooing of Lady Anne,--not in a London street, but in a rural place, on
+the road to Chertsey; the lamentation for King Edward IV.; the episode
+of the boy princes; the condemnation of Hastings,--a scene that
+brilliantly denotes the mingled artifice and savagery of Shakespeare's
+Gloster; the Buckingham plot; the priest and mayor scene; the
+temptation of Tyrrel; the fall of Buckingham; the march to battle; the
+episode of the spectres; and the fatal catastrophe on Bosworth Field.
+Enough of the story was thus related to satisfy the Shakespeare scholar.
+
+The notable peculiarity was the assumption that there are considerable
+lapses of time at intervals during the continuance of the story. The
+effort to reconcile poetry with history produced little if any
+appreciable practical result upon the stage,--seeing that an audience
+would not think of lapses of time unless those lapses were mentioned in
+the play-bill. An incessant continuity of action, a ceaseless rush and
+whirl of events, is the essential life of the play. No auditor can feel
+that Richard has waited twelve years before making any movement or
+striking any blow, after his aspiration that heaven will take King
+Edward and leave the world for him "to bustle in." That word "bustle" is
+a favourite word with Richard. And furthermore there is no development
+of his character in Shakespeare's play: there is simply the presentation
+of it, complete and rounded at the outset, and remaining invariably and
+inflexibly the same to the close.
+
+Mansfield, however, deduced this effect from his consideration of the
+flight of time: a contrast between Richard at nineteen and Richard at
+thirty-three, a contrast strongly expressive of the reactionary
+influence that an experience of evil deeds has produced upon a man who
+at first was only a man of evil thoughts and evil will. This imported
+into the performance a diversity of delineation without, however,
+affecting the formidable weight of the figure of Richard, or its
+brilliancy, or its final significance. The embodiment was splendid with
+it, and would be just as splendid without it. The presence of heart and
+conscience in that demoniac human creature is denoted by Shakespeare and
+must be shown by the actor. Precisely at what point his heaven-defying
+will should begin to waver is not defined. Mansfield chose to indicate
+the operation of remorse and terror in Richard's soul as early as the
+throne scene and before yet the king has heard that the royal boys have
+been murdered. The effect of his action, equally with the method of it,
+was magnificent. You presently saw him possessed of the throne for which
+he had so terribly toiled and sinned, and alone upon it, bathed in
+blood-red light, the pitiable personification of gorgeous but haunted
+evil, marked off from among mankind and henceforth desolate. Throughout
+that fine scene Mansfield's portrayal of the fearful struggle between
+wicked will and human weakness was in a noble vein of imagination,
+profound in its sincerity, affecting in its pathos, and pictorial in its
+treatment. In the earlier scenes his mood and his demeanour had been
+suffused with a cool, gay, mockery of elegant cynicism. He killed King
+Henry with a smile, in a scene of gloomy mystery that might have come
+from the pencil of Gustave Dore. He looked upon the mourning Lady Anne
+with cheerful irony and he wooed her with all the fervour that passion
+and pathos can engender in the behaviour of a hypocrite. His
+dissimulation with the princes and with the mayor and the nobles was to
+the last degree specious. One of his finest points was the temptation of
+Buckingham to murder the princes. There, and indeed at all points, was
+observed the absence of even the faintest reminiscence of the ranting,
+mouthing, flannel-jawed king of clubs who has so generally strutted and
+bellowed as Shakespeare's Gloster. All was bold and telling in the
+manner, and yet the manner was reticent with nature and fine with
+well-bred continence.
+
+With the throne scene began the spiritual conflict. At least it then
+began to be disclosed; and from that moment onward the state of Richard
+was seen to be that of Orestes pursued by the furies. But Mansfield was
+right, and was consistent, in making the monarch faithful in his
+devotion to evil. Richard's presentiments, pangs, and tremors are
+intermittent. In the great, empty, darkening throne-room, with its
+shadowy nooks and dim corners, shapeless and nameless spectres may
+momentarily come upon him and shake his strong spirit with the sinister
+menace of hell. Along the dark plains, on the fateful night before the
+battle, the sad ghosts may drift and wander, moaning and wailing in the
+ghastly gloom; and in that hour of haunted desolation the doomed king
+may feel that, after all, he is but mortal man, and that his pre-ordered
+destruction is close at hand and not to be averted; but Richard never
+deceives himself; never palters with the goodness that he has scorned.
+He dies as he has lived, defiant and terrible.
+
+Mansfield's treatment of the ghost scenes at Bosworth was novel,
+original, and poetic, and his death scene was not only a display of
+personal prowess but a reproduction of historical fact. With a detail
+like this the truth of history becomes useful, but in general the actor
+cannot safely go back of the Shakespearean scheme. To present Richard as
+he probably was would be to present a man of some virtue as well as
+great ability. Mansfield's acting revealed an amiable desire to infuse
+as much goodness as possible into the Shakespearean conception, but he
+obtained his chief success by acting the part substantially according to
+Shakespeare and by setting and dressing the play with exceptional if not
+altogether exact fidelity to the time, the places, and the persons that
+are implicated in the story.
+
+Shakespeare's Richard is a type of colossal will and of restless,
+inordinate, terrific activity. The objects of his desire and his effort
+are those objects which are incident to supreme power; but his chief
+object is that assertion of himself which is irresistibly incited and
+steadfastly compelled by the overwhelming, seething, acrid energy of his
+feverish soul, burning and raging in his fiery body. He can no more help
+projecting himself upon the affairs of the world than the malignant
+cobra can help darting upon its prey. He is a vital, elemental force,
+grisly, hectic, terrible, impelled by volcanic heat and electrified and
+made lurid and deadly by the infernal purpose of restless wickedness. No
+actor can impersonate Richard in an adequate manner who does not possess
+transcendent force of will, combined with ambitious, incessant, and
+restless mental activity. Mansfield in those respects is qualified for
+the character, and out of his professional resources he was able to
+supply the other elements that are requisite to its constitution and
+fulfilment. He presented as Richard a sardonic, scoffing demon, who
+nevertheless, somewhere in his complex nature, retains an element of
+humanity. He embodied a character that is tragic in its ultimate effect,
+but his method was that of the comedian. His portrayal of Richard,
+except at those moments when it is veiled with craft and dissimulation,
+or at those other and grander moments, infrequent but awful and
+agonising, when it is convulsed with terror or with the anguish of
+remorse, stood forth boldly in the sunshine, a crystallised and deadly
+sarcasm, equally trenchant upon itself and all the world, equally
+scornful of things human and things divine. That deadly assumption of
+keen and mordant mockery, that cool, glittering, malignant lightness of
+manner, was consistently sustained throughout the performance, while the
+texture of it was made continuously entertaining by diversity of colour
+and inflection, sequent on changing moods; so that Richard was shown as
+a creature of the possible world of mankind and not as a fiction of the
+stage.
+
+The part was acted by him: it was not declaimed. He made, indeed, a
+skilful use of his uncommon voice--keeping its tones light, sweet, and
+superficial during the earlier scenes (while yet, in accordance with his
+theory of development, Gloster is the personification of evil purpose
+only beginning to ripen into evil deed), and then permitting them to
+become deeper and more significant and thrilling as the man grows old in
+crime and haggard and convulsed in self-conflict and misery. But it was
+less with vocal excellence that the auditor was impressed than with the
+actor's identification with the part and his revelation of the soul of
+it. When first presented Gloster was a mocking devil. The murder of
+King Henry was done with malice, but the malice was enwrapped with glee.
+In the wooing of Lady Anne there was both heart and passion, but the
+mood was that of lightsome duplicity. It is not until years of scheming
+and of evil acts, engendering, promoting, and sustaining a condition of
+mental horror and torture, have ravaged his person and set their seal
+upon him, in sunken cheek and hollow eye, in shattered nerves and deep
+and thrilling voice, surcharged at once with inveterate purpose and with
+incessant agony, that this light manner vanishes, and the demeanour and
+action of the wicked monarch becomes ruthless, direct, and terrible.
+Whether, upon the basis of a play so discursive, so episodical, so
+irresolutely defined as Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_, that theory
+of the development of its central character is logically tenable is a
+dubious question. In Shakespeare the character is presented full-grown
+at the start, and then, through a confused tangle of historical events,
+is launched into action. Nevertheless in his practical application of it
+Mansfield made his theory effective by a novel, powerful, interesting
+performance. You could not help perceiving in Mansfield's embodiment
+that Gloster was passing through phases of experience--that the man
+changed, as men do change in life, the integral character remaining the
+same in its original fibre, but the condition varying, in accordance
+with the reaction of conduct upon temperament and conscience.
+
+Mansfield deeply moved his audience in the repulse of Buckingham, in the
+moody menace of the absent Stanley, in the denunciation of Hastings, and
+in the awakening from the dream on the night before the battle.
+Playgoers have seldom seen a dramatic climax so thrilling as his
+hysterical recognition of Catesby, after the moment of doubt whether
+this be not also a phantom of his terrific dream. It was not so much by
+startling theatrical effects, however, as by subtle denotements, now of
+the tempest and now of the brooding horror in the king's heart, that the
+actor gained his victory. The embodiment lacked incessant fiery
+expedition--the explosive, meteoric quality that astounds and dazzles.
+Chief among the beauties was imagination. The attitude of the monarch
+toward his throne--the infernal triumph, and yet the remorseful agony
+and withering fear--in the moment of ghastly loneliness when he knows
+that the innocent princes have been murdered and that his imperial
+pathway is clear, made up one of the finest spectacles of dramatic
+illumination that the stage has afforded. You saw the murderer's hideous
+exultation, and then, in an instant, as the single ray of red light from
+the setting sun streamed through the Gothic window and fell upon his
+evil head, you saw him shrink in abject fear, cowering in the shadow of
+his throne; and the dusky room was seemingly peopled with gliding
+spectres. That treatment was theatrical, but in no derogatory sense
+theatrical--for it comports with the great speech on conscience; not the
+fustian of Cibber, about mutton and short-lived pleasure, but the speech
+that Shakespeare has put into Richard's mouth; the speech that inspired
+Mansfield's impersonation--the brilliant embodiment of an intellectual
+man, predisposed to evil, who yields to that inherent impulse, and
+thereafter, although intermittently convulsed with remorse, fights with
+tremendous energy against the goodness that he scorns and defies, till
+at last he dashes himself to pieces against the adamant of eternal law.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+GENEVIEVE WARD: FORGET ME NOT.
+
+
+In the season of 1880-81 Genevieve Ward made a remarkably brilliant hit
+with her embodiment of Stephanie De Mohrivart, in the play of _Forget Me
+Not_, by Herman Merivale, and since then she has acted that part
+literally all round the world. It was an extraordinary
+performance--potent with intellectual character, beautiful with
+refinement, nervous and steel-like with indomitable purpose and icy
+glitter, intense with passion, painfully true to an afflicting ideal of
+reality, and at last splendidly tragic: and it was a shining example of
+ductile and various art. Such a work ought surely to be recorded as one
+of the great achievements of the stage. Genevieve Ward showed herself to
+possess in copious abundance peculiar qualities of power and beauty upon
+which mainly the part of Stephanie is reared. The points of assimilation
+between the actress and the part were seen to consist in an imperial
+force of character, intellectual brilliancy, audacity of mind, iron
+will, perfect elegance of manners, a profound self-knowledge, and
+unerring intuitions as to the relation of motive and conduct in that
+vast network of circumstance which is the social fabric. Stephanie
+possesses all those attributes; and all those attributes Genevieve Ward
+supplied, with the luxuriant adequacy and grace of nature. But Stephanie
+superadds to those attributes a bitter, mocking cynicism, thinly veiled
+by artificial suavity and logically irradiant from natural hardness of
+heart, coupled with an insensibility that has been engendered by cruel
+experience of human selfishness. This, together with a certain mystical
+touch of the animal freedom, whether in joy or wrath, that goes with a
+being having neither soul nor conscience, the actress had to supply--and
+did supply--by her art. As interpreted by Genevieve Ward the character
+was reared, not upon a basis of unchastity but upon a basis of
+intellectual perversion. Stephanie has followed--at first with
+self-contempt, afterward with sullen indifference, finally with the bold
+and brilliant hardihood of reckless defiance--a life of crime. She is
+audacious, unscrupulous, cruel; a consummate tactician; almost sexless,
+yet a siren in knowledge and capacity to use the arts of her sex;
+capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to
+have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social
+recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked;
+but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of
+momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the
+glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the
+pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,--in everything visible and
+audible,--the ideal of grace and melody.
+
+In the presence of an admirable work of art the observer wishes that it
+were entirely worthy of being performed and that it were entirely clear
+and sound as to its applicability--in a moral sense, or even in an
+intellectual sense--to human life. Art does not go far when it stops
+short at the revelation of the felicitous powers of the artist; and it
+is not altogether right when it tends to beguile sympathy with an
+unworthy object and perplex a spectator's perceptions as to good and
+evil. Genevieve Ward's performance of Stephanie, brilliant though it
+was, did not redeem the character from its bleak exile from human
+sympathy. The actress managed, by a scheme of treatment exclusively her
+own, to make Stephanie, for two or three moments, piteous and forlorn;
+and her expression of that evanescent anguish--occurring in the appeal
+to Sir Horace Welby, her friendly foe, in the strong scene of the second
+act--was wonderfully subtle. That appeal, as Genevieve Ward made it,
+began in artifice, became profoundly sincere, and then was stunned and
+startled into a recoil of resentment by a harsh rebuff, whereupon it
+subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and
+gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer
+were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less
+detestable. The blight remains upon it--and always must remain--that it
+repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon
+it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is
+burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to
+Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable or disastrous than vicious
+conduct in a man: the woman, equally with the man, should have a social
+license to sow the juvenile wild oats and effect the middle-aged
+reformation; and it is only because there are gay young men who indulge
+in profligacy that women sometimes become adventurers and moral
+monsters. All this is launched forth in speeches of singular terseness,
+eloquence, and vigour; but all this is specious and mischievous
+perversion of the truth--however admirably in character from Stephanie's
+lips. Every observer who has looked carefully upon the world is aware
+that the consequences of wrongdoing by a woman are vastly more
+pernicious than those of wrongdoing by a man; that society could not
+exist in decency, if to its already inconvenient coterie of reformed
+rakes it were to add a legion of reformed wantons; and that it is innate
+wickedness and evil propensity that makes such women as Stephanie, and
+not the mere existence of the wild young men who are willing to become
+their comrades--and who generally end by being their dupes and victims.
+It is natural, however, that this adventurer--who has kept a
+gambling-hell and ruined many a man, soul and body, and who now wishes
+to reinstate herself in a virtuous social position--should thus strive
+to palliate her past proceedings. Self-justification is one of the
+first laws of life. Even Iago, who never deceives himself, yet announces
+one adequate motive for his fearful crimes. Even Bulwer's Margrave--that
+prodigy of evil, that cardinal type of infernal, joyous, animal
+depravity--can yet paint himself in the light of harmless loveliness and
+innocent gayety.
+
+_Forget Me Not_ tells a thin story, but its story has been made to yield
+excellent dramatic pictures, splendid moments of intellectual combat,
+and affecting contrasts of character. The dialogue, particularly in the
+second act, is as strong and as brilliant as polished steel. In that
+combat of words Genevieve Ward's acting was delicious with trenchant
+skill and fascinating variety. The easy, good-natured, bantering air
+with which the strife began, the liquid purity of the tones, the
+delicate glow of the arch satire, the icy glitter of the thought and
+purpose beneath the words, the transition into pathos and back again
+into gay indifference and deadly hostility, the sudden and terrible mood
+of menace, when at length the crisis had passed and the evil genius had
+won its temporary victory--all those were in perfect taste and
+consummate harmony. Seeing that brilliant, supple, relentless,
+formidable figure, and hearing that incisive, bell-like voice, the
+spectator was repelled and attracted at the same instant, and thoroughly
+bewildered with the sense of a power and beauty as hateful as they were
+puissant. Not since Ristori acted Lucretia Borgia has the stage
+exhibited such an image of imperial will, made radiant with beauty and
+electric with flashes of passion. The leopard and the serpent are fatal,
+terrible, and loathsome; yet they scarcely have a peer among nature's
+supreme symbols of power and grace. Into the last scene of _Forget Me
+Not_,--when at length Stephanie is crushed by physical fear, through
+beholding, unseen by him, the man who would kill her as a malignant and
+dangerous reptile,--Genevieve Ward introduced such illustrative
+"business," not provided by the piece, as greatly enhanced the final
+effect. The backward rush from the door, on seeing the Corsican avenger
+on the staircase, and therewithal the incidental, involuntary cry of
+terror, was the invention of the actress: and from that moment to the
+final exit she was the incarnation of abject fear. The situation is one
+of the strongest that dramatic ingenuity has invented: the actress
+invested it with a colouring of pathetic and awful truth.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+EDWARD S. WILLARD IN THE MIDDLEMAN AND JUDAH.
+
+
+E.S. Willard accomplished his first appearance upon the American stage
+(at Palmer's theatre, November 10, 1890), in the powerful play of _The
+Middleman_, by Henry Arthur Jones. A representative audience welcomed
+the modest and gentle stranger and the greeting that hailed him was that
+of earnest respect. Willard had long been known and esteemed in New York
+by the dramatic profession and by those persons who habitually observe
+the changeful aspects of the contemporary stage on both sides of the
+ocean; but to the American public his name had been comparatively
+strange. The sentiment of kindness with which he was received deepened
+into admiration as the night wore on, and before the last curtain fell
+upon his performance of Cyrus Blenkarn he had gained an unequivocal and
+auspicious victory. In no case has the first appearance of a new actor
+been accompanied with a more brilliant exemplification of simple worth;
+and in no case has its conquest of the public enthusiasm been more
+decisive. Not the least impressive feature of the night was the steadily
+increasing surprise of the audience as the performance proceeded. It was
+the actor's way to build slowly, and at the opening of the piece the
+poor inventor's blind ignorance of the calamity that is impending is
+chiefly trusted to create essential sympathy. Through those moments of
+approaching sorrow the sweet unconsciousness of the loving father was
+expressed by Willard with touching truth. In this he astonished even as
+much as he pleased his auditors; for they were not expecting it.
+
+One of the most exquisite enjoyments provided by the stage is the advent
+of a new actor who is not only new but good. It is the pleasure of
+discovery. It is the pleasure of contact with a rich mind hitherto
+unexplored. The personal appearance, the power of the eye, the variety
+of the facial expression, the tones of the voice, the carriage of the
+person, the salient attributes of the individual character, the altitude
+of the intellectual development, the quality of the spirit, the extent
+and the nature of those artistic faculties and resources that constitute
+the professional equipment,--all those things become the subject first
+of interested inquiry and next of pleased recognition. Willard is
+neither of the stately, the weird, the mysterious, nor the ferocious
+order of actor. There is nothing in him of either Werner, Manfred, or
+Sir Giles Overreach. He belongs not to either the tradition of John
+Kemble or of Edmund Kean. His personality, nevertheless, is of a
+distinctive and interesting kind. He has the self-poise and the exalted
+calm of immense reserve power and of tender and tremulous sensibility
+perfectly controlled. His acting is conspicuously marked by two of the
+loveliest attributes of art--simplicity and sincerity. He conceals
+neither the face nor the heart. His figure is fine and his demeanour is
+that of vigorous mental authority informed by moral purity and by the
+self-respect of a manly spirit. Goodness, although a quality seldom
+taken into the critical estimate, nevertheless has its part in spiritual
+constitution and in consequent effect. It was, for instance, an element
+of artistic potentiality in the late John McCullough. It operated
+spontaneously; and just so it does in the acting of Willard, who, first
+of all, gives the satisfying impression of being genuine. A direct and
+thorough method of expression naturally accompanies that order of mind
+and that quality of temperament. Every movement that Willard makes upon
+the stage is clear, free, open, firm, and of an obvious significance.
+Every tone of his rich and resonant voice is distinctly intended and is
+distinctly heard. There are no "flaws and starts." He has formed a
+precise ideal. He knows exactly how to embody and to utter it, and he
+makes the manifestation of it sharp, defined, positive, and cogent. His
+meaning cannot be missed. He has an unerring sense of proportion and
+symmetry. The character that he represents is shown, indeed, all at
+once, as a unique identity; but it is not all at once developed, the
+manifestation of it being made gradually to proceed under the stress of
+experience and of emotion. He rises with the occasion. His feelings are
+deep, and he is possessed of extraordinary power for the utterance of
+them--not simply vocal power, although that, in his case, is
+exceptional, but the rare faculty of becoming convulsed, inspired,
+transfigured, by passion, and of being swept along by it, and of
+sweeping along his hearers. His manner covers, without concealing, great
+intensity. This is such a combination of traits as must have existed--if
+the old records are read aright--in that fine and famous actor, John
+Henderson, and which certainly existed in the late Benjamin Webster. It
+has, however, always been rare upon the stage, and, like all rare
+jewels, it is precious. The actor who, from an habitual mood of sweet
+gravity and patient gentleness, can rise to the height of delirious
+passion, and there sustain himself at a poise of tempestuous
+concentration which is the fulfilment of nature, and never once seem
+either ludicrous or extravagant, is an actor of splendid power and
+extraordinary self-discipline. Such an actor is Willard. The blue eyes,
+the slightly olive complexion, the compact person, the picturesque
+appearance, the melodious voice, the flexibility of natural action, and
+the gradual and easy ascent from the calm level of domestic peace to the
+stormy summit of passionate ecstasy recall personal peculiarities and
+artistic methods long passed away. The best days of Edwin L. Davenport
+and the younger James Wallack are brought to mind by them.
+
+In the drama of _The Middleman_ Willard had to impersonate an inventor,
+of the absorbed, enthusiastic, self-regardless, fanatical kind. Cyrus
+Blenkarn is a potter. His genius and his toil have enriched two persons
+named Chandler, father and son, who own and conduct a porcelain factory
+in an English town of the present day. Blenkarn has two daughters, and
+one of them is taken from him by the younger Chandler. The circumstances
+of that deprivation point at disgrace, and the inventor conceives
+himself to have suffered an odious ignominy and irreparable wrong. Young
+Chandler has departed and so has Mary Blenkarn, and they are eventually
+to return as husband and wife; but Cyrus Blenkarn has been aroused from
+his reveries over the crucible and furnace,--wherein he is striving to
+discover a lost secret in the potter's art that will make him both rich
+and famous,--and he utters a prayer for vengeance upon these Chandlers,
+and he parts from them. A time of destitution and of pitiful struggle
+with dire necessity, sleepless grief, and the maddening impulse of
+vengeance now comes upon him, so that he is wasted almost to death. He
+will not, however, abandon his quest for the secret of his art. He may
+die of hunger and wretchedness; he will not yield. At the last moment
+of his trial and his misery--alone--at night--in the alternate lurid
+blaze and murky gloom of his firing-house--success is conquered: the
+secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries gradually and
+artfully lead, affords a great opportunity to an actor; and Willard
+greatly filled it. The old inventor has been bowed down almost to
+despair. Grief and destitution, the sight of his remaining daughter's
+poverty, and the conflict of many feelings have made him a wreck. But
+his will remains firm. It is not, however, until his last hope has been
+abandoned that his success suddenly comes--and the result of this is a
+delirium. That situation, one of the best in modern drama, has been
+treated by the author in such a manner as to sustain for a long time the
+feeling of suspense and to put an enormous strain upon the emotion and
+the resources of an actor. Willard's presentment of the gaunt,
+attenuated figure of Cyrus Blenkarn--hollow-eyed, half-frantic,
+hysterical with grief and joy--was the complete incarnation of a
+dramatic frensy; and this, being sympathetic, and moving to goodness and
+not to evil, captured the heart. It was a magnificent exhibition, not
+alone of the physical force that sometimes is so essential in acting but
+of that fervour of the soul without which acting is a mockery.
+
+The skill with which Willard reserved his power, so that the
+impersonation might gradually increase in strength, was one of the best
+merits of his art. Blenkarn's prayer might readily be converted into the
+climax of the piece, and it might readily be spoken in such a way that
+no effect would be left for the culmination in the furnace-room. Those
+errors were avoided, and during three out of the four acts the movement
+of the piece was fluent, continuous, and cumulative. In this respect
+both the drama and the performance were instructive. Henry Arthur Jones
+has diversified his serious scenes with passages of sportive humour and
+he has freighted the piece with conventional didacticism as to the
+well-worn question of capital and labour. The humour is good: the
+political economy need not detain attention. The value of the play does
+not reside in its teaching but in its dramatic presentation of strong
+character, individual experience, and significant story. The effect
+produced by _The Middleman_ is that of moral elevation. Its auditor is
+touched and ennobled by a spectacle of stern trial, pitiable suffering,
+and stoical endurance. In the purpose that presides over human
+destiny--if one may accept the testimony equally of history and of
+fiction--it appears to be necessary first to create strong characters
+and then to break them; and the manner in which they are broken usually
+involves the elements alike of dramatic effect and of pathos. That
+singular fact in mortal experience may have been noticed by this author.
+His drama is a forcible exposition of it. _The Middleman_ was set upon
+Palmer's stage in such a way as to strengthen the dramatic illusion by
+the fidelity of scenery. The firing-house, with its furnaces in
+operation, was a copy of what may be seen at Worcester. The picture of
+English life was excellent.
+
+When Willard played the part of Judah Llewellyn for the first time in
+America (December 29, 1890), he gained from a sympathetic and judicious
+audience a verdict of emphatic admiration. Judah Llewellyn is a good
+part in one of the most striking plays of the period--a play that tells
+an interesting and significant story by expressive, felicitous, and
+incessant action; affects the feelings by situations that are vital
+with dramatic power; inspires useful thought upon a theme of
+psychological importance; cheers the mind with a fresh breeze of
+satirical humour; and delights the instinct of taste by its crisp and
+pungent style. Alike by his choice of a comparatively original subject
+and his deft method in the treatment of it Henry Arthur Jones has shown
+a fine dramatic instinct; and equally in the evolution of character and
+the expression of experience and emotion he has wrought with feeling and
+vigour. Most of the plays that are written, in any given period, pass
+away with the period to which they appertain. _Judah_ is one of the
+exceptions; for its brilliantly treated theme is one of perennial
+interest, and there seems reason to believe, of a work so vital, that
+long after the present generation has vanished it still will keep its
+place in the theatre, and sometimes be acted, not as a quaint relic but
+as a living lesson.
+
+That theme is the psychic force in human organism. The author does not
+obtrude it; does not play the pedant with it; does not lecture upon it;
+and above all does not bore with it. He only uses it; and he has been so
+true to his province as a dramatist and not an advocate that he never
+once assumes to decide upon any question of doctrine that may be
+involved in the assertion of it. His heroine is a young woman who thinks
+herself to be possessed of a certain inherent restorative power of
+curing the sick. This power is of psychic origin and it operates through
+the medium of personal influence. This girl, Vashti Dethick, has exerted
+her power with some success. Other persons, having felt its good effect,
+have admitted its existence. The father of Vashti, an enterprising
+scamp, has thereupon compelled the girl to trade upon her peculiar
+faculty; little by little to assume miraculous powers; and finally to
+pretend that her celestial talent is refreshed and strengthened by
+abstinence from food, and that her cures are wrought only after she has
+fasted for many days. He has thus converted her into an impostor; yet,
+as her heart is pure and her moral principle naturally sound, she is ill
+at ease in this false position, and her mental distress has suddenly
+become aggravated, almost to the pitch of desperation, by the arrival of
+love. She has lost her heart to a young clergyman, Judah Llewellyn, the
+purity of whose spirit and the beauty of whose life are a bitter and
+burning rebuke to her enforced deceitfulness of conduct. Here is a woman
+innocently guilty, suddenly aroused by love, made sensitive and noble
+(as that passion commonly makes those persons who really feel it), and
+projected into a condition of aggrieved excitement. In this posture of
+romantic and pathetic circumstances the crisis of two lives is suddenly
+precipitated in action.
+
+Judah Llewellyn also is possessed of spiritual sensibility and psychic
+force. In boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his
+native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks
+and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the
+bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a
+preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence,
+invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her.
+It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his
+devotion to his Master's work. The attraction between these creatures is
+human; and yet it is more of heaven than of earth. It is a tie of
+spiritual kindred that binds them. They are beings of a different order
+from the common order--and, as happens in such cases, they will be
+tried by exceptional troubles and passed through a fire of mortal
+anguish. For what reason experience should take the direction of misery
+with fine natures in human life no philosopher has yet been able to
+ascertain; but that it does take that direction all competent
+observation proves. To Vashti and Judah the time speedily comes when
+their love is acknowledged, upon both sides--the preacher speaking
+plainly; the girl, conscious of turpitude, shrinking from a spoken
+avowal which yet her whole personality proclaims. Yielding to her
+father's malign will she has consented to make one more manifestation of
+curative power, to go through once more,--and for the last time,--the
+mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the
+patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter--an only child, cursed with
+constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline.
+This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires
+and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a
+golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation test shall be
+thoroughly made. Lord Asgarby, willing to do anything for his idolised
+daughter, assents to the plan, and his scientific friend, cynical
+Professor Jopp, agrees, with the assistance of his erudite daughter, to
+supervise the experiment. Vashti will fast for several days, and the
+heir of Asgarby will then be healed by her purified and exalted
+influence.
+
+The principal scene of the play shows the exterior of an ancient, unused
+tower of Asgarby House, in which Vashti is detained during the fast. The
+girl is supposed to be starving. Her scampish father will endeavour to
+relieve her. Miss Jopp is vigilant to prevent fraud. The patient is
+confident. Judah, wishful to be near to the object of his adoration, has
+climbed the outer wall and is watching, beneath the window, unseen, in
+the warder's seat. The time is summer, the hour midnight, and the
+irrevocable vow of love has been spoken. At that supreme instant, and
+under conditions so natural that the picture seems one of actual life,
+the sin of Vashti is revealed and the man who had adored her as an angel
+knows her for a cheat. With a difference of circumstances that
+situation--in the fibre of it--is not new. Many a lover, male and
+female, has learned that every idol has its flaw. But the situation is
+new in its dramatic structure. For Judah the discovery is a terrible
+one, and the resultant agony is convulsive and lamentable. He takes,
+however, the only course he could be expected to take: he must vindicate
+the integrity of the woman whom he loves, and he commits the crime of
+perjury in order to shield her reputation from disgrace.
+
+What will a man do for the woman whom he loves? The attributes of
+individual character are always to be considered as forces likely to
+modify passion and to affect conduct. But in general the answer to that
+question may be given in three words--anything and everything! The
+history of nations, as of individuals, is never rightly read until it is
+read in the light of knowledge of the influence that has been exerted
+over them by women. Cleopatra, in ancient Egypt, changed the history of
+Rome by the ruin of Marc Antony. Another heroine recently toppled
+Ireland down the fire-escape into the back-yard. So goes the world. In
+Judah, however, the crime that is done for love is pursued to its
+consequence of ever-accumulative suffering, until at length, when it has
+been expiated by remorse and repentance, it is rectified by confession
+and obliterated by pardon. No play ever taught a lesson of truth with
+more cogent dramatic force. The cynical, humorous scenes are
+delightful.
+
+Willard's representation of Cyrus Blenkarn stamped him as one of the
+best actors of the age. His representation of Judah Llewellyn deepened
+that impression and reinforced it with a conviction of marked
+versatility. In his utterance of passion Willard showed that he has
+advanced far beyond the Romeo stage. The love that he expressed was that
+of a man--intellectual, spiritual, noble, a moral being and one
+essentially true. Man's love, when it is real, adores its object;
+hallows it; invests it with celestial attributes; and beholds it as a
+part of heaven. That quality of reverence was distinctly conveyed by the
+actor, and therefore to observers who conceive passion to be delirious
+abandonment (of which any animal is capable), his ardour may have seemed
+dry and cold. It was nevertheless true. He made the tempestuous torrent
+of Judah's avowal the more overwhelming by his preliminary
+self-repression and his thoughtful gentleness of reserve; for thus the
+hunger of desire was beautiful with devotion and tenderness; and while
+the actor's feelings seemed borne away upon a whirling tide of
+irresistible impulse his exquisite art kept a perfect control of face,
+voice, person, demeanour, and delivery, and not once permitted a lapse
+into extravagance. The character thus embodied will long be remembered
+as an image of dignity, sweetness, moral enthusiasm, passionate fervour,
+and intellectual power; but, also, viewed as an effort in the art of
+acting, it will be remembered as a type of consummate grace in the
+embodiment of a beautiful ideal clearly conceived. The effect of
+spiritual suffering, as conveyed in the pallid countenance and ravaged
+figure, in the last act, was that of noble pathos. The delivery of all
+the speeches of the broken, humiliated, haunted minister was deeply
+touching, not alone in music of voice but in denotement of knowledge of
+human nature and human suffering and endurance. The actor who can play
+such a part in such a manner is not an experimental artist. Rather let
+him be called--in the expressive words of one of his country's poets--
+
+    "Sacred historian of the heart
+    And moral nature's lord."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+SALVINI AS KING SAUL AND KING LEAR.
+
+
+Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment
+that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with
+affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its
+grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering
+physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen
+of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His
+tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in
+depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of
+action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness--all
+these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent
+reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his
+personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the
+stage pantheon of kings and heroes.
+
+Alfieri's tragedy of _Saul_ was written in 1782-83, when the haughty,
+impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the
+suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a
+bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to
+console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative
+of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work
+was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his
+autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little
+labour. _Saul_ is in five acts and it contains 1567 lines--of that
+Italian _versi sciolti_ which inadequately corresponds to the blank
+verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's
+army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel,
+Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the
+action--or rather, by the suffering--of the piece is a single day, the
+last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed
+in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act
+second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken
+him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he
+relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that
+the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man,
+and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David--whom he at once
+loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction
+and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the
+harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence
+of Israel--so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king
+and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the
+music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts
+fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of
+the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease;
+the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent
+recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and
+finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy,
+massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end
+with the fire of a sublime imagination.
+
+Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of ranking _Saul_ with
+_Lear_. The claim is natural but it is not valid. In _Lear_--not to
+speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast
+philosophy of human life--there is a tremendous scope of action, through
+which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and
+there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of
+afflicted goodness. In _Saul_ there is simply--upon a limited canvas,
+without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the
+relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a
+dramatic background--the portraiture of a condition; and, because the
+man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging
+the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are
+akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that
+shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after
+them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul
+should be deemed the greatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian
+language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with
+the severe simplicity of the Bible narrative on which it is founded. It
+depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust
+character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and
+regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the
+consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world
+and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It
+would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state.
+Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and
+dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the
+imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and
+thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of
+great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is
+a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his
+presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens
+by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by
+spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury
+makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the
+damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness
+of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs
+the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted
+by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain
+struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The
+gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss
+of misery--a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off
+from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity
+him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he
+diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of
+desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him
+save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears
+to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the
+Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini
+embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor
+presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and
+chastened.
+
+Salvini's embodiment of King Lear was a remarkable manifestation of
+physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the
+ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent
+elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic
+movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and
+embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and
+diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific
+and positive limitations--spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has
+proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet,
+was unspiritual--giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to
+its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative,
+obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean
+character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal
+displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in
+Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he
+interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were
+terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a
+magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not
+command the judgment.
+
+His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations.
+During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric,
+disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and
+especially destitute of inherent personal fascination--of the
+suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin--but he
+has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of
+all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent,
+overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The
+cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves
+signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the
+spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments
+and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself"
+were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle
+significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia--as in "No more of
+that, I have noted it well"--and he gave, at the beginning, no
+intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of
+lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first
+mad scene.
+
+Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a
+table, in the first scene--which had the effect of preparation for a
+lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the
+upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted
+crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment
+was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear:
+it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the
+character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two
+daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action,
+seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its
+due effect.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+HENRY IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM.
+
+
+Henry Irving's impersonation of Eugene Aram--given in a vein that is
+distinctly unique--was one of strange and melancholy grace and also of
+weird poetical and pathetic power.
+
+More than fifty years ago, just after Bulwer's novel on the subject of
+Eugene Aram was published, that character first came upon the stage, and
+its first introduction to the American theatre occurred at the Bowery,
+where it was represented by John R. Scott. Aram languished, however, as
+a dramatic person, and soon disappeared. He did not thrive in England,
+neither, till, in 1873, Henry Irving, who had achieved great success in
+_The Bells_, prompted W.G. Wills to effect his resuscitation in a new
+play, and acted him in a new manner. The part then found an actor who
+could play it,--investing psychological subtlety with tender human
+feeling and romantic grace, and making an imaginary experience of
+suffering vital and heartrending in its awful reality. The performance
+ranks with the best that Henry Irving has given--with _Mathias_,
+_Lesurques_, _Dubosc_, _Louis XI._, and _Hamlet_; those studies of the
+night-side of human nature in which his imagination and intellect and
+his sombre feeling have been revealed and best exemplified.
+
+Eugene Aram was born at Ramsgill, in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, in 1704. His
+father, Peter Aram, was a man of good family but becoming reduced in
+circumstances he took service as a gardener on the estate of Sir Edward
+Blackett, of Newby Hall. In 1710 Peter Aram and his family were living
+at Bondgate, near Ripon, and there Eugene went to school and learned to
+read the New Testament. At a considerably later period he was
+instructed, during one month, by the Rev. Mr. Alcock, of Burndall. This
+was the extent of the tuition that he ever received from others. For the
+rest he was self-taught. He had a natural passion for knowledge and he
+displayed wonderful industry in its acquisition. When sixteen years old
+he knew something of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later he made himself
+acquainted with Chaldaic and Arabic. His occupation, up to this time,
+was that of assistant to his father, the gardener; but about 1720 he was
+employed in London as a clerk to a merchant, Mr. Christopher Blackett, a
+relative to his father's patron, Sir Edward. He did not remain there
+long. A serious illness prostrated him, and on recovering he returned to
+Nidderdale, with which romantic region his fate was to be forever
+associated. He now became a tutor, and not long after he was employed as
+such at a manor-house, near Ramsgill, called Gowthwaite Hall, a
+residence built early in the seventeenth century by Sir John Yorke, and
+long inhabited by his descendants. While living there he met and courted
+Anna Spance, the daughter of a farmer, at the lonely village of
+Lofthouse, and in 1731 he married her. The Middlesmoor registry contains
+the record of this marriage, and of the baptism and death of their first
+child. In 1734 Eugene Aram removed to Knaresborough, where he kept a
+school. He had, all this while, sedulously pursued his studies, and he
+now was a scholar of extraordinary acquirements, not only in the
+languages but in botany, heraldry, and many other branches of learning.
+His life seemed fair and his future bright: but a change was at hand.
+He had not resided long at Knaresborough before he became acquainted
+with three persons most unlike himself in every way. These men were
+Henry Terry, Richard Houseman, and Daniel Clarke. Houseman was a
+flax-dresser. Clarke was a travelling jeweller. All of them were
+intemperate; and it is supposed that the beginning of Eugene Aram's
+downfall was the appetite for drink. The confederacy that he formed with
+these men is not easily explicable, and probably it never has been
+rightly explained. The accepted statement is that it was a confederacy
+for fraud and theft. Clarke was reported to be the heir presumptive to a
+large fortune. He purchased goods, was punctual in his payments, and
+established his credit. He was supposed to be making purchases for a
+merchant in London. He dealt largely in gold and silver plate and in
+watches, and soon he made a liberal use of his credit to accumulate
+valuable objects. In 1744 he disappeared, and he never was seen or heard
+of again. His frauds became known, and the houses of Aram and Houseman,
+suspected as his associates, were searched, but nothing was found to
+implicate either of them.
+
+Soon after this event Aram left Knaresborough--deserting his wife--and
+proceeded to London, where for two years he had employment as a teacher
+of Latin. He was subsequently an usher at the boarding school of the
+Rev. Anthony Hinton, at Hayes, in Middlesex, and there it was observed
+that he displayed an extraordinary and scrupulous tenderness and
+solicitude as to the life and safety of even worms and insects--which he
+would remove from the garden walks and put into places of security. At a
+later period he found employment as a transcriber of acts of Parliament,
+for registration in chancery. Still later he became an usher at the Free
+School of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, among other labours, he undertook to
+make a comparative lexicon, and with this purpose collated over 3000
+words in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic. He had ample
+opportunity to leave England but he never did so. At length, in 1759, a
+labourer who was digging for limestone, at a place known as St. Robert's
+Cave, Thistle Hill, near Knaresborough, came upon a human skeleton, bent
+double and buried in the earth. Suspicion was aroused. These bones, it
+was surmised, might be those of Daniel Clarke. His mysterious
+disappearance and his associates were remembered. The authorities sent
+forth and arrested Terry, Houseman, and Eugene Aram, and those persons
+were brought to their trial at York. A bold front would have saved them,
+for the evidence against them was weak. Aram stood firm, but Houseman
+quailed, and presently he turned "state's evidence" and denounced Aram
+as the murderer of Clarke. The accused scholar spoke in his own defence,
+and with astonishing skill, but he failed to defeat the direct and
+decisive evidence of his accomplice. Houseman declared that on the day
+of the murder Clarke, Aram, and himself were in company, and were
+occupied in disposing of the property which they had obtained; that Aram
+proposed to walk in the fields, and that they proceeded, thereupon, at
+nightfall, to the vicinity of St. Robert's Cave. Clarke and Aram, he
+said, went over the hedge and advanced toward the cave, and Aram struck
+Clarke several times upon the breast and head, and so killed him. It was
+a dark night, and in the middle of winter, but the moon was shining
+through drifting clouds, and Houseman said he could see the movement of
+Aram's hand but not the weapon that it held. He was about twelve yards
+from the spot of the murder. He testified that the body of Clarke was
+buried in the cave. The presiding justice charged against the prisoner
+and Eugene Aram was convicted and condemned. He subsequently, it is
+said, confessed the crime, alleging to the clergyman by whom he was
+attended that his wife had been led into an intrigue by Clarke, and that
+this was the cause of the murder. Here, doubtless, is the indication of
+the true nature of this tragedy. Aram, prior to his execution, was
+confined in York Castle, where he wrote a poem of considerable length
+and some merit, and also several shorter pieces of verse. On the morning
+of his execution it was found that he had opened a vein in his arm, with
+the intent to bleed to death, but the wound was staunched, and he was
+taken to Knaresborough and there hanged, and afterward his body was hung
+in chains in Knaresborough Forest. His death occurred on August 13,
+1759, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. On the night before his
+execution he wrote a rhythmical apostrophe to death:--
+
+    "Come, pleasing rest! eternal slumber fall!
+    Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all!
+    Calm and composed my soul her journey takes;
+    No guilt that troubles and no heart that aches."
+
+Such is the story of Eugene Aram--a story that has furnished the basis
+of various fictions, notably of Bulwer's famous novel, and which
+inspired one of the best of the beautiful poems of Thomas Hood. Wills
+gathered hints from it, here and there, in the making of his play; but
+he boldly departed from its more hideous and repulsive incidents and
+from the theory of the main character that might perhaps be justified by
+its drift. In the construction of the piece Henry Irving made many
+material suggestions. The treatment of the character of Aram was devised
+by him, and the management of the close of the second act denotes his
+felicity of invention.
+
+The play opens in the rose-garden of a rural rectory in the sweet, green
+valley of the shining Nidd. The time is twilight; the season summer; and
+here, in a haven of peace and love, the repentant murderer has found a
+refuge. Many years have passed since the commission of his crime, and
+all those years he has lived a good life, devoted to study, instruction,
+and works of benevolence. He has been a teacher of the young, a helper
+of the poor, and he has gained respect, affection, and honourable
+repute. He is safe in the security of silence and in the calm self-poise
+of his adamantine will. His awful secret sleeps in his bosom and is at
+rest forever. He has suffered much and he still suffers; yet, lulled
+into a false security by the uneventful lapse of years and by that
+drifting, desolate, apathetic recklessness which is sequent on the
+subsiding storm of passionate sorrow, he has allowed himself to accept a
+woman's love and to love her in return, and half to believe that his
+long misery has expiated his sin and that even for him there may be a
+little happiness yet possible on earth. Eugene Aram, the village
+school-master, and Ruth Meadows, the vicar's daughter, are betrothed
+lovers; and now, on the eve of their wedding morning, they stand
+together among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet
+summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church
+close by a solemn strain of music--the vesper hymn--floats out upon the
+stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence,
+and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by
+long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness,
+is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme
+moment, when now it seems that everything is surely well, the one man in
+the world who knows Eugene Aram's secret has become, by seeming chance,
+a guest in the vicarage; and even while Ruth places her hand upon her
+lover's heart and softly whispers, "If guilt were there, it still should
+be my pillow," the shadow of the gathering night that darkens around
+them is deepened by the blacker shadow of impending doom. The first act
+of the play is simply a picture. It involves no action. It only
+introduces the several persons who are implicated in the experience to
+be displayed, denotes their relationship to one another, and reveals a
+condition of feeling and circumstance which is alike romantic, pathetic,
+and perilous, and which is soon to be shattered by the disclosure of a
+fatal secret. The act is a preparation for a catastrophe.
+
+In the second act the opposed characters clash: the movement begins,
+and the catastrophe is precipitated. The story opens at nightfall,
+proceeds the same evening, and ends at the dawn of the ensuing day. The
+scene of act second is a room in the vicarage. Aram and Parson Meadows
+are playing chess, and Ruth is hovering about them and roguishly
+impeding their play. The purpose accomplished here is the exhibition of
+domestic comfort and content, and this is further emphasised by Ruth's
+recital of a written tribute that Aram's pupils have sent to him, on the
+eve of his marriage. Wounded by this praise the conscience-stricken
+wretch breaks off abruptly from his pastime and rushes from the room--an
+act of desperate grief which is attributed to his modesty. The parson
+soon follows, and Ruth is left alone. Houseman, their casual guest,
+having accepted the vicar's hospitable offer of a shelter for the night,
+has now a talk with Ruth, and he is startled to hear the name of Eugene
+Aram, and thus to know that he has found the man whose fatal secret he
+possesses, and upon whose assumed dread of exposure his cupidity now
+purposes to feed. In a coarsely jocular way this brutish creature
+provokes the indignant resentment of Ruth, by insinuations as to her
+betrothed lover's past life; and when, a little later, Ruth and Aram
+again meet, she wooingly begs him to tell her of any secret trouble that
+may be weighing upon his mind. At this moment Houseman comes upon them,
+and utters Aram's name. From that point to the end of the act there is a
+sustained and sinewy exposition, strong in spirit and thrilling in
+suspense,--of keen intellect and resolute will standing at bay and
+making their last battle for life, against the overwhelming odds of
+heaven's appointed doom. Aram defies Houseman and is denounced by him;
+but the ready adroitness and iron composure of the suffering wretch
+still give him supremacy over his foe--till, suddenly, the discovery is
+announced of the bones of Daniel Clarke in St. Robert's Cave, and the
+vicar commands Aram and Houseman to join him in their inspection. Here
+the murderer suffers a collapse. There has been a greater strain than
+even he can bear; and, left alone upon the scene, he stands petrified
+with horror, seeming, in an ecstasy of nameless fear, to look upon the
+spectre of his victim. Henry Irving's management of the apparition
+effect was such as is possible only to a man of genius, and such as
+words may record but never can describe.
+
+The third act passes in the churchyard. Aram has fled from the sight of
+the skeleton, and has fallen among the graves. It is almost morning. The
+ghastly place is silent and dark. The spirit of the murderer is broken,
+and his enfeebled body, long since undermined by the grief of remorse
+and now chilled by the night dews, is in the throes of death. The
+incidents of the closing scene are simple, but they are heart-breaking
+in their pathos and awful in their desolation. The fugitive Houseman
+finds Aram here, and spurns him as a whimpering lunatic. Then, in this
+midnight hour and this appalling place, alone in the presence of God,
+the murderer lifts his hands toward heaven, confesses his crime, and
+falls at the foot of the cross. Here Ruth finds him, and to her, with
+dying lips, he tells the story of the murder and of all that he has
+since endured. And just as his voice falters into silence and his heart
+ceases to beat, the diamond light of morning gleams in the eastern sky
+and the glad music of an anthem floats softly from the neighbouring
+church. Upon that beautifully significant picture the final curtain
+fell.
+
+Wills's literary framework for the display of character and experience
+is scarcely to be considered a perfect play. It begins by assuming on
+the part of its auditor a knowledge of the mystery upon which it is
+based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in
+presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from
+remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat
+irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual
+neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his
+character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly
+apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised
+woman to misery and shame by making her his wife. And it mars its most
+pathetic scene--the awful scene of the midnight confession in the
+churchyard--by making Eugene Aram declare, to the woman of his love, the
+one human being who comforts and sustains him on the brink of eternity,
+that he has loved another woman for whose sake he did the murder. Since
+the whole story was to be treated in a fanciful manner, a still wider
+license in the play of fancy would, perhaps, have had a more entirely
+gracious and satisfying effect. The language is partly blank verse and
+partly prose; and, while its tissue is rightly and skilfully diversified
+by judicious allowance for the effect of each character upon the garment
+of individual diction, and while its strain, here and there, rises to
+eloquence of feeling and beauty of imagery, there is a certain lack of
+firmness in its verbal fibre. The confession speech that has to be
+spoken by Aram comprises upward of ninety lines--and that is a severe
+and perilous strain upon an actor's power of holding the public
+interest. The beauties of the play, however, are many and strong. Its
+crowning excellence is that it gives dramatic permanence to a strangely
+interesting character.
+
+The knowledge of human nature that Henry Irving revealed in this part
+and the manner in which he revealed it were nothing less than wonderful.
+The moment he walked upon the scene you saw the blighted figure of a man
+who has endured, and is enduring, spiritual torment. The whole
+personality was suffused with a mournful strangeness. The man was
+isolated and alone. It was a purely ideal view of the character that
+the actor denoted; for he made Eugene Aram a noble, tender, gentle
+person, whom ungovernable passion, under circumstances of overwhelming
+provocation, had once impelled to an act of half-justifiable homicide,
+and who had for years been slowly dying with remorse. He touched no
+chord of terror, but only the chord of pity. Like his portrayal of
+Mathias, the picture showed the reactionary effect of hidden sin in the
+human soul; but the personality of the sufferer was entirely different.
+Each of those men has had experience of crime and of resultant misery,
+but no two embodiments could possibly be more dissimilar, alike in
+spiritual quality and in circumstances. Mathias is dominated by paternal
+love and characterised by a half-defiant, ever-vigilant, and often
+self-approbative pride of intellect, in being able to guard and keep a
+terrible and dangerous secret. Eugene Aram is dominated by a saint-like
+tenderness toward a sweet woman who loves him, and characterised by a
+profound, fitful melancholy, now humble and submissive, now actively
+apprehensive and almost frenzied. Only once does he stand at bay and
+front his destiny with a defiance of desperate will; and even then it is
+for the woman's sake rather than for his own. Henry Irving's acting
+made clear and beautiful that condition of temperament. A noble and
+affectionate nature, shipwrecked, going to pieces, doomed, but making
+one last tremendous though futile effort to avert the final and
+inevitable ruin--this ideal was made actual in his performance. The
+intellectual or spiritual value of such a presentment must depend upon
+the auditor's capacity to absorb from a tragedy its lessons of insight
+into the relations of the human soul to the moral government of the
+world. Many spectators would find it merely morbid and gloomy; others
+would find it superlatively illuminative and eloquent. Its artistic
+value the actor himself made evident to every comprehension. There is a
+moment of the performance when the originally massive and passionate
+character of Eugene Aram is suddenly asserted above his meekness,
+contrition, and sorrow; when, at the sound of his enemy's voice, he
+first becomes petrified with the sense of peril, and then calmly gathers
+all his powers to meet and conquer the danger. The splendid
+concentration, the perfect poise, the sustained intensity, the copious
+and amazing variety and force of emotion, and the positive, unerring,
+and brilliant art with which Henry Irving met that emergency and
+displayed that frightful and piteous aspect of assailed humanity,
+desperate and fighting for life, made up such an image of genius as
+seldom is seen and never will be forgotten. Rapid transition has ever
+been one of the commonest and most effective expedients used in
+histrionic art. This, on the contrary, was an example of sustained,
+prolonged, cumulative, artistic expression of the most harrowing and
+awful emotions with which the human soul can be convulsed; and it was a
+wonder of consummate acting. The same thoroughness of identification and
+the same astonishing adequacy of feeling pervaded the scene in the
+churchyard. At first, in the dusky starlight, only a shapeless figure,
+covered with a black cloak, was seen among the gravestones, crouched
+upon a tomb; but the man that rose, as if out of the grave, pallid,
+emaciated, ghastly, the spectre of himself, was the authentic image of
+majestic despair, not less sublime than pitiable, and fraught with a
+power that happiness could never attain. Not in our time upon the stage
+has such a lesson been taught, with such overwhelming pathos, of the
+utter helplessness of even the strongest human will, when once the soul
+has been vitiated by sin and the eternal law of right defied by mortal
+passion. In the supplication to his astonished accomplice the actor
+seemed like one transfigured, and there the haunted effect was extremely
+awful.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+CHARLES FISHER.
+
+
+In old times Charles Fisher often figured in the old comedies, and he
+was one of the last of the thin and rapidly lessening group of actors
+capable of presenting those pieces--wherein, although the substance be
+human nature, the manner is that of elaborate and diversified artifice.
+When he played Lieutenant Worthington, in _The Poor Gentleman_, he was a
+gentleman indeed--refined, delicate, sensitive, simply courageous,
+sustained by native integrity, and impressive with a dignity of manner
+that reflected the essential nobility of his mind; so that when he
+mistook Sir Robert Bramble for a bailiff, and roused that benevolent
+baronet's astonishment and rage, he brought forth all the comic humour
+of a delightful situation with the greatest ease and nature. He played
+Littleton Coke, Sir Harcourt Courtly, old Laroque--in which he gave a
+wonderful picture of the working of remorse in the frail and failing
+brain of age--and Nicholas Rue, in _Secrets worth Knowing_, a sinister
+and thrilling embodiment of avarice and dotage. He played Dr. Bland, the
+elegant medical cynic of _Nos Intimes_; De la Tour, the formidable,
+jealous husband of Henriette, in _Le Patte de Mouche_; Horace, in _The
+Country Squire_; Goldfinch, in which he was airy, sagacious, dashing,
+and superb, in _The Road to Ruin_; and Captain Cozzens, the nonchalant
+rascal of _The Knights of the Round Table_, which he embodied in a style
+of easy magnificence, gay, gallant, courageous, alert, imperturbable,
+and immensely comic. He was the original Matthew Leigh in Lester
+Wallack's romantic play of _Rosedale_ (1863). He acted Joseph Surface in
+the days when Lester Wallack used to play Charles, and he always held
+his own in that superior part. He was equally fine in Sir Peter and Sir
+Oliver. When the good old play of _The Wife's Secret_ was revived in New
+York, in 1864, he gave a dignified and impetuous performance of Sir
+Walter Amyott. I remember him in those parts, with equal wonder at his
+comprehensive variety of talent and admiration for his always adequate
+skill. I saw him as the volatile Ferment, in _The School of Reform_,
+and nothing could be more comic than his unwitting abuse of General
+Tarragon, in that blustering officer's presence, or his equally
+ludicrous scene of cross purposes with Bob Tyke. He was a perfect type,
+as Don Manuel Velasco, in _The Compact_, of the gallant, stately Spanish
+aristocrat. He excelled competition when, in a company that included
+George Holland, W. Holston, A.W. Young, Mark Smith, Frederick C.P.
+Robinson, and John Gilbert, he enacted the convict in _Never Too Late to
+Mend_. He was equally at home whether as the King in _Don Caesar de
+Bazan_ or as Tom Stylus the literary hack, in _Society_. He passed
+easily from the correct and sentimental Sir Thomas Clifford, of _The
+Hunchback_, to the frivolous Mr. Willowear, of _To Marry or Not to
+Marry_. No one could better express than he did, when playing Wellborn,
+both pride of birth and pride of character. One of his most
+characteristic works was Hyssop, in _The Rent Day_. His scope and the
+rich resources of his experience are denoted in those citations. It is
+no common artist who can create and sustain a perfect illusion, and
+please an audience equally well, whether in such a part as Gilbert
+Featherstone, the villain, in _Lost in London_, or old Baptista, in _The
+Taming of the Shrew_. The playgoer who never saw Charles Fisher as
+Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint
+figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty
+and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the
+profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of
+mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed
+wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack--who that ever laughed and
+wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and
+hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of a true
+and touching embodiment? His fine skill in playing the violin was
+touchingly displayed in that part, and gave it an additional tone of
+reality. I once saw him acting Mercutio, and very admirable he was in
+the guise of that noble, brave, frolicsome, impetuous young gentleman.
+The intense vitality, the glancing glee, the intrepid spirit--all were
+preserved; and the brilliant text was spoken with faultless fluency. It
+is difficult to realise that the same actor who set before us that
+perfect image of comic perplexity, the bland and benevolent Dean, in
+_Dandy Dick_, could ever have been the bantering companion of Romeo and
+truculent adversary of fiery Tybalt. Yet this contrast but faintly
+indicates the versatile character of his mind. Fisher was upon the
+American stage for thirty-eight years, from August 30, 1852, when he
+came forth at Burton's theatre as Ferment. Later he went to Wallack's,
+and in 1872 he joined Daly's company, in which he remained till 1890. It
+may be conjectured that in some respects he resembled that fine comedian
+Thomas Dogget, to whom Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter, said, "I can
+only copy Nature from the originals before me, while you vary them at
+pleasure and yet preserve the likeness." Like Dogget he played, in a
+vein of rich, hearty, jocose humour, and with great breadth of effect
+and excellent colour, the sailor Ben, in _Love for Love_. The
+resemblance was in mental characteristics, not physique--for Dogget was
+a slight and sprightly man, whereas Fisher could represent majesty as
+well as frolic. After he went to Daly's theatre he manifested a
+surprising range of faculty. He first appeared there on October 28,
+1872, as Mr. Dornton, in _The Road to Ruin_, and on November 19,
+following, he acted Falstaff for the first time. He presented there the
+other Shakespearean parts of Leonatus, Armado, and Malvolio--the last of
+these being a model of fidelity to the poet, and now a classic in
+reputation. He also assumed Adam and Jaques. He presented the living
+image of Shakespeare himself, in _Yorick_, and his large, broad, stately
+style gave weight to Don Manuel, in _She Would and She Wouldn't_; to
+that apt type of the refined British aristocrat, Sir Geoffrey Champneys,
+in _Our Boys_; and to many a noble father or benevolent uncle of the
+adapted French society drama. Just as Dogget was supreme in such parts
+as Fondlewife, so was Fisher superb in the uxorious husband whom the
+demure child-wife bamboozles, in the comedies of Moliere. No man has
+ever better depicted than he did a sweet nature shocked by calamity and
+bowed down with grief, or, as in Joe Chirrup, in _Elfie_, manliness
+chastened by affliction and ennobled by true love: yet his impersonation
+of Fagin was only second to that of J.W. Wallack, Jr.; his Moody, in
+_The Country Girl_, was almost tragic in its grim and grizzled
+wretchedness and snarling wrath; and I have seen him assume to
+perfection the gaunt figure and crazy mood of Noah Learoyd, in _The Long
+Strike_, and make that personality a terrible embodiment of menace. From
+the time he first acted the comic Major Vavasour, in _Henry Dunbar_, no
+actor of equal quaintness has trod our stage. He died on June 11, 1891,
+and was buried at Woodlawn.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+MRS. G.H. GILBERT.
+
+
+Students of the English stage find in books on that subject abundant
+information about the tragedy queens of the early drama, and much
+likewise, though naturally somewhat less (because comedy is more
+difficult to discuss than tragedy), about the comedy queens. Mrs. Cibber
+still discomfits the melting Mrs. Porter by a tenderness even greater
+than the best of Belvideras could dispense. Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs.
+Oldfield still stand confronted on the historic page, and still their
+battle continues year after year. All readers know the sleepy voice and
+horrid sigh of Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth's awful scene of haunted
+somnambulism; the unexampled and unexcelled grandeur of Mrs. Yates in
+Medea; the infinite pathos of Mrs. Dancer (she that became in succession
+Mrs. Spranger Barry and Mrs. Crawford) and her memorable scream, as Lady
+Randolph, at "Was he alive?"; the comparative discomfiture of both
+those ladies by Mrs. Siddons, with her wonderful, wailing cry, as
+Isabella, "O, my Biron, my Biron," her overwhelming Lady Macbeth and her
+imperial Queen Katharine. The brilliant story of Peg Woffington and the
+sad fate of Mrs. Robinson, the triumphant career of Mrs. Abington and
+the melancholy collapse of Mrs. Jordan--all those things, and many more,
+are duly set down in the chronicles. But the books are comparatively
+silent about the Old Women of the stage--an artistic line no less
+delightful than useful, of which Mrs. G.H. Gilbert is a sterling and
+brilliant representative. Mrs. Jefferson, the great-grandmother of the
+comedian Joseph Jefferson, who died of laughter, on the stage (1766-68),
+might fitly be mentioned as the dramatic ancestor of such actresses as
+Mrs. Gilbert. She was a woman of great loveliness of character and of
+great talent for the portrayal of "old women," and likewise of certain
+"old men" in comedy. "She had," says Tate Wilkinson, "one of the best
+dispositions that ever harboured in a human breast"; and he adds that
+"she was one of the most elegant women ever beheld." Mrs. Gilbert has
+always suggested that image of grace, goodness, and piquant ability.
+Mrs. Vernon was the best in this line until Mrs. Gilbert came; and the
+period which has seen Mrs. Judah, Mrs. Vincent, Mrs. Germon, Mary Carr,
+Mrs. Chippendale, Mrs. Stirling, Mrs. Billington, Mrs. Drew, Mrs.
+Phillips, and Madam Ponisi, has seen no superior to Mrs. Gilbert in her
+special walk. She was in youth a beautiful dancer, and all her motions
+have spontaneous ease and grace. She can assume the fine lady, without
+for an instant suggesting the parvenu. She is equally good, whether as
+the formal and severe matron of starched domestic life, or the genial
+dame of the pantry. She could play Temperance in _The Country Squire_,
+and equally she could play Mrs. Jellaby. All varieties of the
+eccentricity of elderly women, whether serious or comic, are easily
+within her grasp. Betsy Trotwood, embodied by her, becomes a living
+reality; while on the other hand she suffused with a sinister horror her
+stealthy, gliding, uncanny personation of the dumb, half-insane Hester
+Dethridge. That was the first great success that Mrs. Gilbert gained,
+under Augustin Daly's management. She has been associated with Daly's
+company since his opening night as a manager, August 16, 1869, when, at
+the Fifth Avenue theatre, then in Twenty-fourth Street, she took part in
+Robertson's comedy of _Play_. The first time I ever saw her she was
+acting the Marquise de St. Maur, in _Caste_, on the night of its first
+production in America, August 5, 1867, at the Broadway theatre, the
+house near the southwest corner of Broadway and Broome Street, that had
+been Wallack's but now was managed by Barney Williams. The assumption of
+that character, perfect in every particular, was instinct with pure
+aristocracy; but while brilliant with serious ability it gave not the
+least hint of those rich resources of humour that since have diffused so
+much innocent pleasure. Most of her successes have been gained as the
+formidable lady who typifies in comedy the domestic proprieties and the
+Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct
+demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of _A Night Off_.
+From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent
+for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from
+Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has
+never failed to impress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant
+identification with every type of character that she has assumed; and,
+back of this, she has denoted a kind heart and a sweet and gentle yet
+never insipid temperament--the condition of goodness, sympathy,
+graciousness, and cheer that is the flower of a fine nature and a good
+life. Scenes in which Mrs. Gilbert and Charles Fisher or James Lewis
+have participated, as old married people, on Daly's stage, will long be
+remembered for their intrinsic beauty--suggestive of the touching lines:
+
+    "And when with envy Time, transported,
+      Shall think to rob us of our joys,
+    You'll in your girls again be courted,
+      And I'll go wooing with my boys."
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+JAMES LEWIS.
+
+
+A prominent representative type of character is "the humorous man," and
+that is Shakespeare's phrase to describe him. Wit is a faculty; humour
+an attribute. Joseph Addison, Laurence Sterne, Washington
+Irving--whatever else they might have been they were humourists. Sir
+Roger de Coverley, Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby, Diedrich Knickerbocker,
+Ichabod Crane--these and other creations of their genius stand forth
+upon their pages to exemplify that aspect of their minds. But the
+humourist of the pen may, personally, be no humourist at all. Addison's
+character was austere. Irving, though sometimes gently playful, was
+essentially grave and decorous.
+
+Comical quality in the humorous man whom nature destines for the stage
+must be personal. His coming brings with it a sense of comfort. His
+presence warms the heart and cheers the mind. The sound of his voice,
+"speaking oft," before he emerges upon the scene, will set the theatre
+in a roar. This was notably true of Burton and of William Warren. The
+glance, motion, carriage, manner, and the pause and stillness of such a
+man, instil merriment. Cibber says that Robert Nokes had a palpable
+simplicity of nature which was often as unaccountably diverting in his
+common speech as on the stage, John E. Owens, describing the conduct of
+a big bee in an empty molasses barrel, once threw a circle of his
+hearers, of whom I was one, almost into convulsions of laughter. Artemas
+Ward made people laugh the moment they beheld him, by his wooden
+composure and indescribable sapience of demeanour. The lamented Daniel
+E. Setchell, a comedian who would have been as famous as he was funny
+had he but lived longer, presented a delightful example of spontaneous
+humour. It is ludicrous to recall the simple gravity, not demure but
+perfectly solemn, with which, on the deck of a Hudson River steamboat,
+as we were passing West Point, he indicated to me the Kosciuszko
+monument, saying briefly, "That's the place where Freedom shrieked." It
+was the quality of his temperament that made his playfulness delicious.
+Setchell was the mental descendant of Burton, as Burton was of Reeve and
+as Reeve was of Liston. Actors illustrate a kind of heredity. Each
+species is distinct and discernible. Lester Wallack maintained the
+lineage of Charles Kemble, William Lewis, Elliston, and Mountfort--a
+line in which John Drew has gained auspicious distinction. John
+Gilbert's artistic ancestry could be traced back through Farren and
+Munden to King and Quin, and perhaps still further, to Lowin and Kempe.
+
+The comedian intrinsically comical, while in his characteristic quality
+eccentric and dry, has been exemplified by Fawcett, Blisset, Finn, and
+Barnes, and is conspicuously presented by James Lewis. No one ever saw
+him without laughter--and it is kindly laughter, with a warm heart
+behind it. The moment he comes upon the stage an eager gladness diffuses
+itself throughout the house. His refined quaintness and unconscious
+drollery capture all hearts. His whimsical individuality never varies;
+yet every character of the many that he has portrayed stands clearly
+forth among its companions, a distinct, unique embodiment. The graceful
+urbanity, the elaborate yet natural manner, the brisk vitality, the
+humorous sapience of Sir Patrick Lundy--how completely and admirably he
+expressed them! How distinct that fine old figure is in the remembrance
+of all who saw it! But he has never played a part that he did not make
+equally distinct. A painter might fill a gallery with odd,
+characteristic creations by merely copying his compositions of
+"make-up." The amiable professor in _A Night Off_, the senile Gunnion in
+_The Squire_, Lissardo in _The Wonder_, Grumio in _The Shrew_--those and
+many more he has made his own; while in the actor's province of making
+comic characters really comical to others there is no artist who better
+fulfils the sagacious, comprehensive injunction of Munden (imparted to a
+youthful actor who spoke of being "natural" in order to amuse), "Nature
+be d----d! Make the people laugh!" That, aside from all subtleties, is
+not a bad test of the comic faculty, and that test has been met and
+borne by the acting of James Lewis.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+A LEAF FROM MY JOURNAL.
+
+
+[November 23, 1867.]
+
+Thirty years hereafter many who are now active and honoured in dramatic
+life will be at rest--their work concluded, their achievements a fading
+tradition. But they will not be wholly forgotten. The same talisman of
+memory that has preserved to our time the names and the deeds of the
+actors of old will preserve to future times the names and the deeds that
+are distinguished now in the mimic world of the stage. Legend, speaking
+in the voice of the veteran devotee of the drama, will say, for example,
+that of all the actors of this period there was no light comedian
+comparable with Lester Wallack; that he could thoroughly identify
+himself with character,--though it did not always please him to do so;
+that his acting was so imaginative and so earnest as to make reality of
+the most gossamer fiction; and that his vivacity--the essential element
+and the crown of comedy-acting--was like the dew on the opening rose.
+And therewithal the veteran may quaff his glass to the memory of another
+member of the Wallack family, and speak of James Wallack as Cassius, and
+Fagin, and the Man-in-the-Iron-Mask, and the King of the Commons, and
+may say, with truth, that a more winning embodiment of bluff manliness
+and humour was never known to our stage than the versatile actor who
+made himself foremost in those characters. It will be impossible to
+remember him without recalling his intimate professional associate,
+Edwin L. Davenport. He was the only Brutus of his time, our old friend
+will say, and in his prime the best Macbeth on the American stage; and
+he could play almost any part in the drama, from the loftiest tragedy to
+mere trash; and he was an admirable artist in all that he did. There
+will be plenty of evidence to fortify that statement; and if the veteran
+shall also say that Wallack's company contained, at the same time, the
+best "old men" in the profession, no dissentient voice, surely, will
+challenge the names of George Holland, John Gilbert, James H. Stoddart,
+and Mark Smith. Cibber could play Lord Foppington at seventy-three; but
+George Holland played Tony Lumpkin at seventy-seven. A young part,--but
+the old man was as joyous as a boy and filled it with a boisterous,
+mischievous humour at once delightful and indescribable. You saw him to
+the best advantage, though, in Mr. Sulky, Humphrey Dobbin, and kindred
+parts, wherein the fineness of his temperament was veiled under a
+crabbed exterior and some scope was allowed for his superb skill in
+painting character. So the discourse will run; and, when it touches upon
+John Gilbert, what else than this will be its burden?--that he was
+perfection as the old fop; that his Lord Ogleby had no peer; that he was
+the oddest conceivable compound of dry humour, quaint manners,
+frolicsome love of mischief, honest, hearty mirth, manly dignity, and
+tender pathos. To Mark Smith it will render a kindred tribute. Squire
+Broadlands, Old Rapid, Sir Oliver Surface--they cannot be forgotten.
+Extraordinary truthfulness to nature, extraordinary precision of method,
+large humanity, strong intellect, and refined and delicate humour that
+always charmed and never offended--those were the qualities that
+enrolled him among the best actors of his time. And it will not be
+strange if Old Mortality passes then into the warmest mood of eulogium,
+as he strives to recall the admirable, the incomparable "old woman" Mrs.
+Vernon. She was a worthy mate of those worthies, he will exclaim. She
+could be the sweet and loving mother, gentle and affectionate; the
+stately lady, representative of rank and proud of it and true to it; and
+the most eccentric of ludicrous old fools. She was the ideal Mrs.
+Malaprop, and she surpassed all competitors in the character of Mrs.
+Hardcastle. Mary Gannon was her stage-companion and her foil, he will
+add--the merriest, most mischievous, most bewitching player of her time,
+in her peculiar line of art. As Hester, in _To Marry or Not to Marry_,
+and as Sophia, in _The Road to Ruin_, she was the incarnation of girlish
+grace and delicious ingenuousness, and also of crisp, well-flavoured
+mirth. No taint of tameness marred her acting in those kindred
+characters, and no air of effort made it artificial. Nor was Fanny
+Morant less remarkable for the glitter of comedy and for an almost
+matchless precision of method. So will our friend of the future prose
+on, in a vein that will be tedious enough to matter-of-fact people; but
+not tedious to gentle spirits who love the stage, and sympathise with
+its votaries, and keep alive its traditions--knowing that this mimic
+world is as real and earnest as the strife that roars and surges around
+it; that there as everywhere else humanity plays out its drama, whereof
+the moral is always the same--that whether on the stage or in the mart,
+on the monarch's throne or in the peasant's cot,
+
+                    "We are such stuff
+    As dreams are made on, and our little life
+    Is rounded with a sleep."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF
+
+WILLIAM WINTER.
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. Second Series. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+OLD SHRINES AND IVY. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+Also a Small Limited LARGE PAPER EDITION. 4 Vols. Uniform. $8.00.
+
+WANDERERS: A Collection of Poems. NEW EDITION. WITH A PORTRAIT. 18MO,
+CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+"The supreme need of this age in America is a practical conviction that
+progress does not consist in material prosperity, but in spiritual
+advancement. Utility has long been exclusively worshipped. The welfare
+of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To that worship these pages
+are devoted, with all that implies of sympathy with the higher
+instincts, and faith in the divine destiny of the human race."--_From
+the Preface to Gray Days and Gold_.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+WANDERERS;
+
+BEING
+
+A Collection of the Poems of William Winter.
+
+New Edition, Revised and Enlarged. With a Portrait of the Author.
+
+18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+Also a Limited LARGE PAPER EDITION, printed on English Hand-made Paper.
+Price $2.50.
+
+
+"But it has seemed to the author of these poems--which of course are
+offered as absolutely impersonal--that they are the expression of
+various representative moods of human feeling and various representative
+aspects of human experience, and that therefore they may possibly
+possess the inherent right to exist."--_From the Preface_.
+
+"The verse of Mr. Winter is dedicated mainly to love and wine, to
+flowers and birds and dreams, to the hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted
+repertory of the old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative;
+his confessed aim is to belong to 'that old school of English Lyrical
+Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and simplicity the
+garment.'"--_Saturday Review_.
+
+"The poems have a singular charm in their graceful spontaneity."--_Scots
+Observer_.
+
+"Free from cant and rant--clear cut as a cameo, pellucid as a mountain
+brook. It may be derided as trite, _borne_, unimpassioned; but in its
+own modest sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful,
+and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing which receives
+the seal of over-hasty approbation."--_Athenaeum_.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.
+
+18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+
+"The fame of the actor more than that of any other artist is an
+evanescent one--a 'bubble reputation'--indeed, and necessarily so from
+the conditions under which his genius is exercised. While the impression
+it makes is often more vivid and inspiring for the moment than that of
+the poet and the painter, it vanishes almost with the occasion which
+gave it birth, and lives only as a tradition in the memory of those to
+whom it had immediately appealed. 'Shadows they are, and shadows they
+pursue.'
+
+"The writer, therefore, who, gifted with insight and a poetic enthusiasm
+which enables him to discern on the one hand the beauties in a dramatic
+work not perceived by the many, and on the other the qualities in the
+actor which have made him a true interpreter of the poet's thought, at
+the same time possessing the faculty of revealing to us felicitously the
+one, and the other is certainly entitled to our grateful recognition.
+
+"Such a writer is Mr. William Winter, easily the first,--for we know of
+none other living in this country, or in the England he loves so much,
+in whose nature the critic's vision is united with that of the poet so
+harmoniously....
+
+"Over and above all this, there is in these writings the same charm of
+style, poetic glamour and flavor of personality which distinguish
+whatever comes to us from Mr. Winter's pen, and which make them unique
+in our literature."--_Home Journal_, New York
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+OLD SHRINES AND IVY.
+
+18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+       _SHRINES OF HISTORY._
+
+    I. Storied Southampton.
+
+   II. Pageantry and Relics.
+
+  III. The Shakespeare Church.
+
+   IV. A Stratford Chronicle.
+
+    V. From London to Dover.
+
+   VI. Beauties of France.
+
+  VII. Ely and its Cathedral.
+
+ VIII. From Edinburgh to Inverness.
+
+   IX. The Field of Culloden.
+
+    X. Stormbound Iona.
+
+       _SHRINES OF LITERATURE._
+
+   XI. The Forest of Arden: As You Like It.
+
+  XII. Fairy Land: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
+
+ XIII. Will o' the Wisp: Love's Labour Lost.
+
+  XIV. Shakespeare's Shrew.
+
+   XV. A Mad World: Anthony and Cleopatra.
+
+  XVI. Sheridan, and the School for Scandal.
+
+ XVII. Farquhar, and the Inconstant.
+
+XVIII. Longfellow.
+
+  XIX. A Thought on Cooper's Novels.
+
+   XX. A Man of Letters: John R.G. Hassard.
+
+"Whatever William Winter writes is marked by felicity of diction and by
+refinement of style, as well as by the evidence of culture and wide
+reading. 'Old Shrines and Ivy' is an excellent example of the charm of
+his work."--_Boston Courier_.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND.
+
+18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+
+"... It was the author's wish, in dwelling thus upon the rural
+loveliness, and the literary and historical associations of that
+delightful realm, to afford sympathetic guidance and useful suggestion
+to other American travellers who, like himself, might be attracted to
+roam among the shrines of the mother-land. Temperament is the
+explanation of style; and he has written thus of England because she has
+filled his mind with beauty and his heart with mingled joy and sadness;
+and surely some memory of her venerable ruins, her ancient shrines, her
+rustic glens, her gleaming rivers, and her flower-spangled meadows will
+mingle with the last thoughts that glimmer through his brain when the
+shadows of the eternal night are falling and the ramble of life is
+done."--_From the Preface_.
+
+"He offers something more than guidance to the American traveller. He is
+a convincing and eloquent interpreter of the august memories and
+venerable sanctities of the old country."--_Saturday Review_.
+
+"The book is delightful reading."--_Scribner's Monthly_.
+
+"Enthusiastic and yet keenly critical notes and comments on English life
+and scenery."--_Scotsman_.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+GRAY DAYS AND GOLD.
+
+18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+Classic Shrines.
+  Haunted Glens and Houses.
+    Old York.
+The Haunts of Moore.
+  Beautiful Bath.
+    The Lakes and Fells of Wordsworth.
+Shakespeare Relics at Worcester.
+  Byron and Hucknall Torkard.
+    Historic Nooks and Corners.
+      Shakespeare's Town.
+Up and Down the Avon.
+  Rambles in Arden.
+    The Stratford Fountain.
+      Bosworth Field.
+        The Home of Dr. Johnson.
+From London to Edinburgh.
+  Into the Highlands.
+    Highland Beauties.
+      The Heart of Scotland.
+        Sir Walter Scott.
+Elegiac Memorials.
+  Scottish Pictures.
+    Imperial Ruins.
+      The Land of Marmion.
+        At Vesper Time.
+
+This book, which is intended as a companion to _Shakespeare's England_,
+relates to the gray days of an American wanderer in the British Isles,
+and to the gold of thought and fancy that can be found there.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+GRAY DAYS AND GOLD.
+
+18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.
+
+
+PRESS NOTICES.
+
+"Mr. Winter's graceful and meditative style in his English sketches has
+recommended his earlier volume upon (Shakespeare's) England to many
+readers, who will not need urging to make the acquaintance of this
+companion book, in which the traveller guides us through the quiet and
+romantic scenery of the mother-country with a mingled affection and
+sentiment of which we have had no example since Irving's day."--_The
+Nation_.
+
+"As friendly and good-humoured a book on English scenes as any American
+has written since Washington Irving."--_Daily News_, _London_.
+
+"Much that is bright and best in our literature is brought once more to
+our dulled memories. Indeed, we know of but few volumes containing so
+much of observation, kindly comment, philosophy, and artistic weight as
+this unpretentious little book."--_Chicago Herald_.
+
+"They who have never visited the scenes which Mr. Winter so charmingly
+describes will be eager to do so in order to realize his fine
+descriptions of them, and they who have already visited them will be
+incited by his eloquent recital of their attractions to repeat their
+former pleasant experiences."--_Public Ledger_, _Philadelphia_.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO.,
+
+66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+THE NOVEL: WHAT IT IS.
+
+
+By F. MARION CRAWFORD,
+
+AUTHOR OF "CHILDREN OF THE KING," "A ROMAN SINGER," "SARACINESCA," ETC.
+
+With Photogravure Portrait of the Author.
+
+_18mo. Cloth. 75 cents._
+
+
+THE CHOICE OF BOOKS, AND OTHER LITERARY PIECES.
+
+By FREDERIC HARRISON,
+
+AUTHOR OF "OLIVER CROMWELL," ETC.
+
+_18mo. Cloth. 75 cents._
+
+
+"Mr. Harrison is an able and conscientious critic, a good logician, and
+a clever man; his faults are superficial, and his book will not fail to
+be valuable."--_N.Y. Times_.
+
+Mr. JOHN MORLEY, in his speech on the study of literature at the Mansion
+House, 26th February, 1887, said:
+
+"Those who are curious as to what they should read in the region of pure
+literature will do well to peruse my friend Frederic Harrison's volume
+called _The Choice of Books_. You will find there as much wise thought,
+eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume of its size."
+
+"Mr. Harrison furnishes a valuable contribution to the subject. It is
+full of suggestiveness and shrewd analytical criticism. It contains the
+fruits of wide reading and rich research."--_London Times_.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO., Publishers,
+
+NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Shadows of the Stage, by William Winter
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