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Title: Shadows of the Stage

Author: William Winter

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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 p