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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 æternos 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.