of a playhouse. To escape from life in order to rediscover it in mimic
form, would seem to rank among the earliest of human impulses. We are
all born actors, though some of us--and this is true even of those
who adopt the stage as a profession--would seem occasionally to part
with this primitive instinct in later life. But an average child has
no sooner entered this world than he finds himself pursued by the
longing to create another: he has scarcely had time to recognise his
own identity before he seeks to hide it beneath the mask of an alien
personality. How far the youthful histrion believes himself to be a
lion when he crawls across the drawing-room carpet on all fours, and
roars from behind the sofa, is perhaps open to argument. My own belief
is that he is already so much of an artist as to be in no way deceived,
but of his desire to impose upon the credulity of others there can, I
think, be no question. But the limits of histrionic enjoyment are even
here sometimes overstepped, as, for example, when a maturer rival in
the art, boasting a louder roar, approaches too closely to the confines
of absolute illusion. The enjoyment of the art as an art is then rudely
disturbed, and, shaken with sudden terror, the infant Roscius is once
more driven back upon that actual world from which it had been his
pride and desire to escape.
This may be cited as an early instance of the intemperate employment of
the resources of realism, which in later life, when sitting at a play,
we have so often just reason to deplore. Again, the sudden assumption
by a too eager elder of a woolly hearth-rug may ruin at a stroke the
child’s purely imaginative vision that he is in the society of a bear.
Natural terror expels in an instant that higher emotion which the
drama is designed to create. The child recognises that the irrefutable
laws of the art have been rudely broken, to his own discomfort; and
it is always interesting to note on such occasions with what quick
and easy resource he will suddenly change the whole subject and scope
of the mimic performance, imperiously demanding that the bear shall
be exchanged for a horse, or some other domestic animal, whose milder
tendencies may be the more readily endured, even when the actor is
forgetful of the proper restraints of his art.
It is what survives of the child in us that makes us all playgoers,
although in the early days of our playgoing the unsuspected resources
of illusion which the theatre can command are often hard to endure.
It is, I suppose, the experience of most children--it certainly was
mine--that certain critical moments in drama, clearly foreseen and
eagerly anticipated, nevertheless prove in realisation too thrilling
and too intense for pure delight; and I can recall occasions, such
desired moments being clearly in view, when I would address a whispered
request to one of my elders that I might be permitted to watch the
ensuing scene from the safe vantage ground of the corridor at the back
of the dress circle. The small glass window in the red baize door
provided just that added veil of distance which rendered the sufferings
of the persons on the stage artistically tolerable. But the crisis once
past--a crisis generally signalised by the explosion of a pistol--I
was eager to return to my seat in order to appreciate with unabated
enjoyment the consequences of an act of violence I had not had the
courage to witness.
It is remarkable how little, in those very early days of playgoing,
we are at all concerned with the personality of the actor. The story
is all-absorbing, and in the poignant interest in the persons of the
story, all memory of the performer as a separate entity is submerged
and effaced. I had no thought at that time whether the actor was good
or bad. His performance appeared to me to be inevitable and inevitably
perfect. The day when he takes separate existence, apart from the
character he is presenting, marks a revolution in the life of the
playgoer, a revolution that is destined henceforward to complicate his
emotions, with never again any possible return to that earlier and
more confiding attitude when the illusion of the scene is absolute and
complete. It is difficult even to recall the names of the actors who
first greatly stirred me. They hardly stain my memory, for in my mind
they had no separate existence. But with this revolution is born a new
kind of enjoyment, that carries richer recollections. The limitless
world of illusion shrinks to a narrower kingdom, but its triumphs are
more vivid and more enduring: the sense of assumption and disguise is
no longer so complete or so convincing, but the message of revelation,
when it comes, brings with it a higher pleasure.
Nothing lives longer in remembrance, or pictures itself more vividly,
than the first impression of the performance of a great actor. Phelps
was the earliest of my heroes of this more sophisticated time, and
the first of his performances I can recall was that of Falstaff in
_King Henry IV._ produced at Drury Lane. Walter Montgomery was the
Hotspur of the occasion, and young Edmund Phelps figured as Prince Hal.
First impressions are hard to supplant, and the visual presentment
of Falstaff even now always takes the form and shape assigned to him
by the elder Phelps on that memorable evening. I saw him many times
afterwards--in _Othello_ and _King John_, in Mephistopheles, in
Bayle Bernard’s version of Goethe’s play, in Wolsey, in Sir Pertinax
M‘Sycophant, and in John Bull; and, although the more critical spirit
of a later hour left him shorn of some part of that perfection I
thought was his when I first saw him upon the stage, he ranks even
now in my recollection as a great and gifted exponent of a great
tradition. In his personality there was little to allure. It was rugged
and bereft of many of the lighter graces that are calculated to win
an audience; but his voice was incomparable, and the earnestness of
the artist beyond reproach. Nor could variety of resource be denied
him: he seemed equally equipped for his task as King John, Wolsey, or
Falstaff, or as Bottom in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. He fought his
way to a front rank in the profession at a time when older playgoers
were full of memories of men who were perhaps his superiors--of Kemble,
Kean, and, more recently, of Macready. But whatever he owed to any of
them--and I do not suppose he was ever tempted to deny his debt--it is
impossible not to concede to him a rare measure of individual power
that must always leave him his due rank among the English interpreters
of Shakespeare.
It must have been my first vision of Charles Fechter which enabled me
to realise as by a flash how much Phelps suffered by lack of personal
charm and grace. In those days I had not seen Fechter in Shakespeare.
I knew him only as the victorious lover and the conquering hero of
romantic drama. But, however conventional the material upon which
his talent was employed, the glamour of his personality exercised an
overpowering fascination.
To the youth of both sexes Fechter’s foreign accent constituted a charm
in itself. The rising cadence of his voice struck heroically on the
ear, and the swifter and freer gesture which came of his Gallic origin
added something of extra fascination to the unquestionably great gifts
with which he was endowed. In those days of the old Lyceum, when he was
acting in melodramas like _The Duke’s Motto_ and _Bel Demonio_, Miss
Kate Terry was constantly his partner and the two together seemed to
embody for the time the whole spirit of romance. But the moment of
Fechter’s acting which is stamped most firmly in my recollection was
in the last act of _Ruy Blas_. It was not till long afterwards when
growing stoutness had robbed him of that grace of form which belonged
to his earlier days, that I saw him in the part of _Hamlet_, and it is
perhaps hardly fair to test his fitness as a Shakespearean actor by
such later impressions. To me, however, that foreign cadence, which
linked itself so well with the impersonation of romantic heroism,
left a jarring note when it was yoked with the statelier measure of
English verse; and it was not till long afterwards, when I saw Irving’s
_Hamlet_, that I realised for the first time how much of the subtlety
of the character and beauty of the play could be realised within the
walls of a theatre.
The playgoer’s memories refuse to obey any strict chronological order.
They are rather governed by vividness of impression, which summons with
equal distinctness things seen long ago and triumphs of a more recent
date. My first vision of Sarah Bernhardt retains always a foremost
place in my playgoing experience. It was in Paris in the spring of
1876, and the play was _L’Étrangère_. She was surrounded by a company
of rare distinction--Coquelin, Croisette, and Mounet-Sully amongst
them. But I remember, as she came upon the stage, that a creature
almost of another race seemed suddenly to have invaded, and, at a
single stroke, to be dominating, the scene. Her personality appeared
at once to announce a new dialect in the language of Art. Her mode of
speech and her method of acting left almost unregarded and unremembered
the particular language in which the play was written. In virtue of
her genius she became at once an international possession, leaving,
by comparison, the artists around her almost provincial in style
and method. I had previously seen Ristori, and had marvelled at the
wonders of her art in Lucrezia Borgia and in Mary Stuart, an art that
was struck in a larger mould than Sarah Bernhardt could claim; and I
afterwards had to acknowledge the superb force and matchless physical
resource which Salvini brought to the theatre. But in neither case does
the first impression stand out so vividly in recollection as that first
impression of Sarah Bernhardt in Dumas’ play. And yet I remember Sir
Frederick Leighton, whose recollections of the theatre went back to an
earlier day, telling me that the effect produced by Rachel left Sarah
Bernhardt’s art by comparison almost in the region of the commonplace.
I have mentioned the name of Coquelin, whose talent in the region
of comedy was consummate, and even in this very performance of
_L’Étrangère_ his impersonation of the Duc de Septmonts leaves an
ineffaceable recollection. But I had already seen him in Molière, and
it was the endless resource with which he furnished the creations
of the master dramatist of France that gives him, I think, his
unapproachable place in the modern theatre. His own rich enjoyment of
every discovered detail of the carefully constructed portrait carried
with it the magic of infection, and, as the work grew under his hand,
the spectator was left with a pitiful consciousness of his own dulness
in having gathered from the written page so small a part of the
author’s manifest intention. In so far as the actor’s art seeks for the
triumphs of assumption and disguise, Coquelin was, indeed, beyond the
reach of rivalry, and it was perhaps pardonable, in view of his own
splendid achievement, that he should have been disposed to question the
claims of those whose mastery in this particular direction was not so
complete as his own. Coquelin to the last was intolerant of all acting
which allowed the personality of the performer to override the identity
of the particular character to be presented. He could be admiring, and
even enthusiastic, over the art of Irving, but always with an implied
reservation--the English actor never, to his thinking, sufficiently
effaced himself in his part; the performance, however brilliant in
intellectual force, was marred, in Coquelin’s judgment, by an imperfect
surrender of personality, and by a corresponding incompleteness of
assumption. And that was an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the French
artist.
It was agreeable to discuss these matters with Coquelin, for he was
a brilliant talker, quick in insight, and ever ready with the terse
and fit phrase to illustrate his meaning. And it was peculiarly
interesting to me, because the argument touched upon problems in the
actor’s art that I have always thought to be profoundly significant.
How far may the personality of the performer intrude itself in the
presentation of the chosen character, and to what extent are assumption
and disguise part of the indispensable equipment of the artist? These
are questions which every generation is apt to raise in regard to its
popular favourites upon the stage. And the answer is not easy to find.
To very many it will seem indisputable that versatility carries with
it the hall-mark of perfection, and that no actor can claim absolute
victory in any individual achievement unless we are allowed completely
to forget the person in the impersonation. Such critics are the avowed
champions of the art of disguise, and yet, to me at least, they leave
out of account the most profound and most memorable impressions which
the theatre is able to yield. The scenes which have most deeply
moved me, the performers whose art has stirred me to the strongest
emotion, are hardly associated in memory with any particular triumph
of characterisation. It is, in short, not disguise, but revelation,
which evokes and demands the highest histrionic gifts. The ingenuity
and resource that can distinguish and exhibit the markings of varying
personality must, of course, always count for much, but the imaginative
power which can recreate upon the scene the simpler and deeper emotions
that are common to us all must surely count for more; and in the
exercise of this higher power the lighter accessories employed to
achieve completeness of disguise must often be discarded and forgotten,
as the actor’s personality, impatient of all lesser fetters that impede
its utterance, becomes wholly engaged in the task of communicating
to his audience the deeper and more enduring passions of our common
humanity.
Of course, some may dream that these opposite qualities may be
combined. I have never seen them combined in any measure of
completeness. I remember thinking, when I first saw Sarah Bernhardt
in _Frou-Frou_, that her portraiture fell far short of that of
Desclée, the original creator of the rôle. And so, in fact, it did.
The countless subtleties, by means of which the earlier performer
had established the identity of the frivolous heroine of one of the
most masterly of modern French plays, were all lacking in the work
of her successor; but in the great scene in the third act, where
the tensity of the situation sounds a deeper note of drama, I felt
disposed to forget that any other _Frou-Frou_ had ever existed. Another
illustration pointing in the same direction may be found in the
exquisite art of the Italian actress, Eleanora Duse. When I saw her in
the _Dame aux camélias_ it was impossible to believe even for a moment
that this perfect embodiment of all that is beautiful in feminine
nature owned even the remotest relationship to the courtesan whom Dumas
had set himself to present upon the stage. The unconquerable purity
of her artistic personality left her helpless in the presence of her
chosen task. As mere assumption the performance counted for next to
nothing, and yet in its exquisite power to reveal the ever-deepening
emotions of a suffering human soul it was incomparable and superb.
It chanced that only three nights afterwards I saw Sarah Bernhardt
in this same play, and the contrast was striking and instructive. It
might have been another story; it certainly was another and a widely
different character. Possibly neither artist rendered faithfully the
author’s intention, and yet both had produced an impression of intense
enjoyment, such as the theatre is rarely able to confer.
On both of these evenings I had the good fortune to sit beside Miss
Ellen Terry, whose presence in the theatre I think contributed in
no small degree to the almost inspired performances of her comrades
upon the stage. I am not indiscreet enough to reveal her comparative
judgment of their competing claims, but I remember considering at the
time how far her own presentation of Marguerite Gauthier, if she had
ever undertaken the part, would have compared with the conception
of either. Here, again, is an instance of an artist who has never
sought, or who has sought in vain, to hide her own identity; and
yet of those who have felt the magic of her influence in the ideal
figure of Ophelia, in the exquisite raillery of Beatrice, or in the
tender sentiment of Olivia, who is there who would deny her right to
the foremost place in her profession? With her most surely the final
effect and impression rest upon powers of revelation--upon the ability
to realise and to interpret the simplest and the subtlest phases of
emotion, far more than upon those artifices of deception that make for
the more obvious triumphs of disguise.
It may, of course, be conceded that in his critical and discriminating
judgment of Irving’s acting Coquelin had before him an extreme
example of marked personal idiosyncrasy. The English actor, and no
one was better aware of the fact than himself, was partly hampered
in the exercise of his art by physical peculiarities that for many
years proved a serious hindrance in his career. But, even if he could
have shaken himself wholly free of them, he could never have effaced
the personality that lay behind them. It is, indeed, impossible to
conceive a more striking contrast than was presented by the two men as
I used often to see them in those intimate little supper-parties at the
Lyceum. Coquelin, despite his alert and agile intelligence, remained in
outward appearance almost defiantly bourgeois, and this indelible stamp
of his origin, which art had done nothing to refashion or refine, never
showed so clearly as when he stood beside the English actor, who, with
no better social title than his own, nevertheless carried about him a
nameless sense of race and breeding. I remember one night when they
stood up side by side towards the close of a long evening, Coquelin’s
silhouette bulging in somewhat rotund line as it traversed his ample
waistcoat, the comedian was enlarging in earnest and eager tones as to
his plans for the future. “I have the intention,” he said to Irving,
in his halting English, “I have the intention next year to assume the
rôle of _Richard III._” Irving seemed thoughtful for a moment, and then
his long, slender fingers lightly tapping that protuberant outline, he
murmured, as though half to himself, “Would you? I wonder!”
SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN
Arthur Sullivan’s final claims as a composer can only be settled by
time. It is not allowed, even to the expert, to hasten the judgment
of posterity, for, as we know from experience, that judgment does not
always accord with the verdict even of the most learned of the living.
But there is one fact which in Sullivan’s case time cannot dispute,
and that is the extraordinary influence which he exercised over his
generation. There is possibly no Englishman in any realm of art who,
during the same period, won the admiration of so many of his fellows:
none assuredly whose genius entered with so sweet a welcome into so
many English homes.
The art of the musician where it is destined to win any form of
popular response has indeed this peculiar prerogative. The processes
of its production are hedged around with special technicalities that
can be comprehended only by the few, but its completed message owns a
universal language that no other art can command. And those of us who
know of music no more than the pleasure it confers ought not on that
account to withhold our tribute of praise from a master who has charmed
us all. It is not only the super-subtle or the obscure which merits
respect, and we need not, therefore, be too timorous in confessing our
love of that which we are permitted to understand, resting assured that
there will remain critics enough to deliver the sterner judgment of
the higher courts. And amongst such critics there is a certain section
in music, as in literature, or in painting, whose ears are so finely
tuned to catch the first whisper of the moderating voice of the time
to come, that they are apt to lose their nerve for praise of their
contemporaries: others again so beset with the cant of categories that
they must needs deplore in the case of every gifted artist who chances
also to be popular that his gifts are not engaged in other and loftier
employment. We need not, however, be too greatly concerned with censure
of this sort; for the accepted formulas of criticism are after all but
the reflex of past achievement, and are liable to be recast or enlarged
in accordance with the needs and resources of those who have the power
to remodel them. Genius, indeed, takes little account of the accepted
classifications of the schools, and forms of art that were deemed
capable of holding only so much as they have hitherto contained are
suddenly transformed at the touch of new invention, which, in its turn,
forges new fetters doomed again to be shattered by the advent of some
later individuality.
But it is the personality of the artist rather than the quality of his
work that now chiefly concerns us. Of the latter, indeed, the present
writer has no title to speak save in terms of grateful admiration, and
although it is true of every man of genius that the finest attributes
of his nature lie surely enshrined in the fruit of his life’s labour,
yet those who enjoyed the privilege of Arthur Sullivan’s friendship
may be pardoned for thinking that the art with which he charmed the
world still left unrevealed a deeper fascination in the man himself.
So much at least is certain, that only those who knew him well were
able to realise the perfect accord that existed between the artist
and his work. This, as we know, is not always easy to discover. Life
sometimes refuses to surrender any hint of the subtler graces that
stand confessed in the artistic record given to the world for its
enjoyment; and, on the other hand, it will as often happen that the
product of hand or brain seems sternly to exclude some more intimate
charm that friendship alone can claim to have discovered. It was not so
in Sullivan’s case. The man and the artist were woven of one fabric
throughout, and those who have enjoyed the varied phases of his music,
from its graver to its lighter strains, may be said to have possessed a
faithful index to the purely personal qualities that won the affection
of his friends. In the unstudied converse of daily life he exhibited
in himself that same swift grace of alternating mood that is so
characteristic of his art. He was never afraid of the sudden entry of
humour into a discussion of the most serious theme, or of sounding a
deeper and graver note, however closely it may have followed upon the
heels of recent laughter. It was this that made him the most delightful
of companions. His instinct was so sure, his sympathy so finely tuned,
that he never missed his footing: his sense of harmony in friendship,
as in art, so absolutely irreproachable, that he never struck a jarring
note.
A great simplicity and generosity of nature lay, I think, at the root
of the rare social charm he possessed. In all my recollections of
our companionship I cannot recall a single ill-natured word towards
friend or acquaintance, or any bitter criticism of a comrade in art. In
another man such restraint might have seemed insipid: in his case it
was instinctive and obviously sincere. He was naturally endowed with
the genius of friendship, and what he had to say in the way of serious
criticism was delivered with such generous understanding of the claims
of other arts with which he was brought into association, that it could
never give offence. It was my good fortune more than once to be closely
allied with him in the execution of a common task, and those who have
written for music will know how constant are the opportunities for
friction between the author and the composer. The conflicting claims of
music and drama must needs breed keen discussion, and sometimes even
marked divergence of view, but with Arthur Sullivan the sense of what
was essential in the requirements he had to meet was so quick and so
true that it was rarely possible to withhold any concession he might
finally see fit to demand.