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
Cæsar, 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 Cæsar_ 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.