The bounteous hand, that loved to give relief,
The honest smile, that blessed where'er it lit,
The dew of pathos and the sheen of wit,
The sweet, blue eyes, the voice of melting tone,
That made all hearts as gentle as his own,
The Actor's charm, supreme in royal thrall,
That ranged through every field and shone in all--
For these must Sorrow make perpetual moan,
Bereaved, benighted, hopeless, and alone?
Ah, no; for Nature does no act amiss,
And Heaven were lonely but for souls like this.
XI.
HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
In his beautiful production of _The Merchant of Venice_ Henry Irving
restored the fifth act, the jailer scene, and the casket scenes in full,
and the piece was acted with strict fidelity to Shakespeare. With Ellen
Terry for Portia that achievement became feasible. With an ordinary
actress in that character the comedy might be tedious--notwithstanding
its bold and fine contrasts of character, its fertility of piquant
incident, and its lovely poetry. Radiant with her fine spirit and
beautiful presence, and animated and controlled in every fibre by his
subtle and authoritative intellect, judiciously cast and correctly
dressed and mounted, Henry Irving's revival of _The Merchant of Venice_
captured the public fancy; and in every quarter it was sincerely felt
and freely proclaimed that here, at last, was the perfection of stage
display. That success has never faded. The performance was round,
symmetrical, and thorough--every detail being kept subordinate to
intelligent general effect, and no effort being made toward overweening
individual display.
Shakespeare's conception of Shylock has long been in controversy.
Burbage, who acted the part in Shakespeare's presence, wore a red wig
and was frightful in form and aspect. The red wig gives a hint of low
comedy, and it may be that the great actor made use of low comedy
expedients to cloak Shylock's inveterate malignity and sinister purpose.
Dogget, who played the part in Lord Lansdowne's alteration of
Shakespeare's piece, turned Shylock into farce. Macklin, when he
restored the original play to the stage--at Drury Lane, February 14,
1741--- wore a red hat, a peaked beard, and a loose black gown, playing
Shylock as a serious, almost a tragic part, and laying great emphasis
upon a display of revengeful passion and hateful malignity. So terrible
was he, indeed, that persons who saw him on the stage in that character
not infrequently drew the inference and kept the belief that he was
personally a monster. His look was iron-visaged; the cast of his
manners was relentless and savage. Quin said that his face contained not
lines but cordage. In portraying the contrasted passions of joy for
Antonio's losses and grief for Jessica's elopement he poured forth all
his fire. When he whetted his knife, in the trial scene, he was silent,
grisly, ominous, and fatal. No human touch, no hint of race-majesty or
of religious fanaticism, tempered the implacable wickedness of that
hateful ideal. Pope, who saw that Shylock, hailed it as "the Jew that
Shakespeare drew"--and Pope, among other things, was one of the editors
of Shakespeare. Cooke, who had seen Macklin's Shylock, and also those of
Henderson, King, Kemble, and Yates, adopted, maintained, and transmitted
the legend of Macklin. Edmund Kean, who worshipped Cooke, was
unquestionably his imitator in Shylock; but it seems to have been Edmund
Kean who, for the first time, gave prominence to the Hebraic majesty and
fanatical self-consecration of that hateful but colossal character.
Jerrold said that Kean's Shylock was like a chapter of Genesis.
Macready--whose utterance of "Nearest his heart" was the blood-curdling
keynote of his whole infernal ideal--declared the part to be "composed
of harshness," and he saw no humanity in the lament for the loss of
Leah's ring, but only a lacerated sense of the value of that jewel.
Brooke, a great Shylock, concurred with Kean's ideal and made the Jew
orientally royal, the avenger of his race, having "an oath in heaven,"
and standing on the law of "an eye for an eye." Edwin Forrest, the elder
Wallack, E.L. Davenport, Edwin Booth, Bogumil Davison, and Charles Kean
steadily kept Shylock upon the stage,--some walking in the religious
track and some leaving it. But the weight of opinion and the spirit and
drift of the text would justify a presentment of the Jew as the
incarnation not alone of avarice and hate, but of the stern, terrible
Mosaic law of justice. That is the high view of the part, and in
studying Shakespeare it is safe to prefer the high view.
There must be imagination, or pathos, or weirdness, or some form of
humour, or a personal charm in the character that awakens the soul of
Henry Irving and calls forth his best and finest powers. There is little
of that quality in Shylock. But Henry Irving took the high view of him.
This Jew "feeds fat the ancient grudge" against Antonio--until the law
of Portia, more subtle than equitable, interferes to thwart him; but
also he avenges the wrongs that his "sacred nation" has suffered. His
ideal was right, his grasp of it firm, his execution of it flexible with
skill and affluent with intellectual power. If memory carries away a
shuddering thought of his baleful gaze upon the doomed Antonio and of
his horrid cry of the summons "Come, prepare!" it also retains the image
of a father convulsed with grief--momentarily, but sincerely--and of a
man who at least can remember that he once loved. It was a most austere
Shylock, inveterate of purpose, vindictive, malignant, cruel, ruthless;
and yet it was human. No creature was ever more logical and consistent
in his own justification. By purity, sincerity, decorum, fanaticism, the
ideal was aptly suggestive of such men as Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes,
and John Felton--persons who, with prayer on their lips, were
nevertheless capable of hideous cruelty. The street scene demands
utterance, not repression. The Jew raves there, and no violence would
seem excessive. Macklin, Kean, Cooke, and the elder Booth, each must
have been terrific at that point. Henry Irving's method was that of the
intense passion that can hardly speak--the passion that Kean is said to
have used so grandly in giving the curse of Junius Brutus upon Tarquin.
But, there was just as much of Shylock's nature in Henry Irving's
performance as in any performance that is recorded. The lack was
overwhelming physical power--not mentality and not art. At "No tears but
of my shedding" Henry Irving's Shylock took a strong clutch upon the
emotions and created an effect that will never be forgotten.
Ellen Terry's Portia long ago became a precious memory. The part makes
no appeal to the tragic depths of her nature, but it awakens her fine
sensibility, stimulates the nimble play of her intellect, and cordially
promotes that royal exultation in the affluence of physical vitality and
of spiritual freedom that so often seems to lift her above the common
earth. There have been moments when it seemed not amiss to apply
Shakespeare's own beautiful simile to the image of queen-like
refinement, soft womanhood, and spiritualised intellect that this
wonderful actress presented--"as if an angel dropped down from the
clouds." Her Portia was stately, yet fascinating; a woman to inspire awe
and yet to captivate every heart. Nearer to Shakespeare's meaning than
that no actress can ever go. The large, rich, superb manner never
invalidated the gentle blandishments of her sex. The repressed ardour,
the glowing suspense, the beautiful modesty and candour with which she
awaited the decision of the casket scene, showed her to be indeed all
woman, and worthy of a true man's love. Here was no paltering of a puny
nature with great feelings and a great experience. And never in our day
has the poetry of Shakespeare fallen from human lips in a strain of such
melody--with such teeming freedom of felicitous delivery and such dulcet
purity of diction.
XII.
JOHN McCULLOUGH IN SEVERAL CHARACTERS.
There is no greater gratification to the intellect than the sense of
power and completeness in itself or the perception of power and
completeness in others. Those attributes were in John McCullough's
acting and were at the heart of its charm. His repertory consisted of
thirty characters, but probably the most imposing and affecting of his
embodiments was Virginius. The massive grandeur of adequacy in that
performance was a great excellence. The rugged, weather-beaten plainness
of it was full of authority and did not in the least detract from its
poetic purity and ideal grace. The simplicity of it was like the lovely
innocence that shines through the ingenuous eyes of childhood, while its
majesty was like the sheen of white marble in the sunlight. It was a
very high, serious, noble work; yet,--although, to his immeasurable
credit, the actor never tried to apply a "natural" treatment to
artificial conditions or to speak blank verse in a colloquial
manner,--it was made sweetly human by a delicate play of humour in the
earlier scenes, and by a deep glow of paternal tenderness that suffused
every part of it and created an almost painful sense of sincerity.
Common life was not made commonplace life by McCullough, nor blank verse
depressed to the level of prose. The intention to be real--the intention
to love, suffer, feel, act, defend, and avenge, as a man of actual life
would do--was obvious enough, through its harmonious fulfilment; yet the
realism was shorn of all triteness, all animal excess, all of those
ordinary attributes which are right in nature, and wrong because
obstructive in the art that is nature's interpretation.
Just as the true landscape is the harmonious blending of selected
natural effects, so the true dramatic embodiment is the crystallization
of selected attributes in any given type of human nature, shown in
selected phases of natural condition. McCullough did not present
Virginius brushing his hair or paying Virginia's school-bills; yet he
suggested him, clearly and beautifully, in the sweet domestic repose
and paternal benignity of his usual life--making thus a background of
loveliness, on which to throw, in lines of living light, the terrible
image of his agonising sacrifice. And when the inevitable moment came
for his dread act of righteous slaughter it was the moral grandeur, the
heart-breaking paternal agony, and the overwhelming pathos of the deed
that his art diffused--not the "gashed stab," the blood, the physical
convulsion, the revolting animal shock. Neither was there druling, or
dirt, or physical immodesty, or any other attribute of that class of the
natural concomitants of insanity, in the subsequent delirium.
A perfect and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see
than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and
for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred
exaltation,--the love of the parent for the child,--is so fair a mark
for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of
apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in McCullough's
embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was
imparted by its presence,--even before the tragedian, with an exquisite
intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not
admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and
agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting
than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural"
school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic
grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that
McCullough did and said, in the forum scene--the noble severity of the
poise, the grace of the outlines, the terrible intensity of the mood,
the heartrending play of the emotions, the overwhelming delirium of the
climax. Throughout the subsequent most difficult portraiture of
shattered reason the actor never, for an instant, lost his steadfast
grasp upon sympathy and inspiration. Every heart knew the presence of a
nature that could feel all that Virginius felt and suffer and act all
that Virginius suffered and acted; and, beyond this, in his wonderful
investiture of the mad scenes with the alternate vacancy and lamentable
and forlorn anguish of a special kind of insanity, every judge of the
dramatic art recognised the governing touch of a splendid intellect,
imperial over all its resources and instruments of art.
Virginius as embodied by McCullough was a man of noble and refined
nature; lovely in life; cruelly driven into madness; victorious over
dishonour, by a deed of terrible heroism; triumphant over crime, even in
forlorn and pitiable dethronement and ruin; and, finally, released by
the celestial mercy of death. And this was shown by a poetic method so
absolute that Virginius, while made an actual man to every human heart,
was kept a hero to the universal imagination, whether of scholar or
peasant, and a white ideal of manly purity and grace to that great
faculty of taste which is the umpire and arbiter of the human mind.
The sustained poetic exaltation of that embodiment, its unity as a grand
and sympathetic personage, and its exquisite simplicity were the
qualities that gave it vitality in popular interest, and through those
it will have permanence in theatrical history. There were many subtle
beauties in it. The illimitable tenderness, back of the sweet dignity,
in the betrothal of Virginia to Icilius; the dim, transitory, evanescent
touch of presentiment, in the forecasting of the festival joys that are
to succeed the war; the self-abnegation and simple homeliness of grief
for the dead Dentatus; the alternate shock of freezing terror and cry of
joy, in the camp scene--closing with that potent repression and
thrilling outburst, "Prudence, but no patience!"--a situation and words
that call at once for splendid manliness of self-command and an ominous
and savage vehemence; the glad, saving, comforting cry to Virginia, "Is
she here?"--that cry which never failed to precipitate a gush of joyous
tears; the rapt preoccupation and the exquisite music of voice with
which he said, "I never saw thee look so like thy mother, in all my
life"; the majesty of his demeanour in the forum; the look that saw the
knife; the mute parting glance at Servia; the accents of broken reason,
but unbroken and everlasting love, that called upon the name of the poor
murdered Virginia; and then the last low wail of the dying father,
conscious and happy in the great boon of death--those, as McCullough
gave them, were points of impressive beauty, invested with the
ever-varying light and shadow of a delicate artistic treatment, and all
the while animated with passionate sincerity. The perfect finish of the
performance, indeed, was little less than marvellous, when viewed with
reference to the ever-increasing volume of power and the evident reality
of afflicting emotion with which the part was carried. If acting ever
could do good the acting of McCullough did. If ever dramatic art
concerns the public welfare it is when such an ideal of manliness and
heroism is presented in such an image of nobility.
In Lear and in Othello,--as in Virginius,--the predominant quality of
McCullough's acting was a profound and beautiful sincerity. His
splendidly self-poised nature--a solid rock of truth, which enabled him,
through years of patient toil, to hold a steadfast course over all the
obstacles that oppose and amid all the chatter that assails a man who is
trying to accomplish anything grand and noble in art--bore him bravely
up in those great characters, and made him, in each of them, a stately
type of the nobility of the human soul. As the Moor, his performance was
well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in
the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the
display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes.
The tendency of that sort of ornamentation--however consonant it may be
deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor--is to suggest him as
heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience
to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to
the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and
McCullough, in his treatment of the part, testified to his practical
appreciation of that truth. His ideal of Othello combined manly
tenderness, spontaneous magnanimity, and trusting devotion, yet withal a
volcanic ground-swell of passion, that early and clearly displayed
itself as capable of delirium and ungovernable tempest. His method had
the calm movement of a summer cloud, in every act and word by which this
was shown. For intensity and for immediate, adequate, large, and
overwhelming response of action to emotion, that performance has not
been surpassed. There were points in it, though, at which the massive
serenity of the actor's temperament now and then deadened the glow of
feeling and depressed him to undue calmness; he sometimes recovered too
suddenly and fully from a tempest of emotion--as at the agonising appeal
to Iago, "Give me a living reason she's disloyal"; and he was not
enough delirious in the speech about the sybil and the handkerchief. On
the other hand, once yielded to the spell of desecrated feeling, his
mood and his expression of it were immeasurably pathetic and noble.
Those two great ebullitions of despair, "O, now forever," and "Had it
pleased heaven," could not be spoken in a manner more absolutely
heart-broken or more beautifully simple than the manner that was used by
him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and
dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his
more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of
his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet
fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness
for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of
soft, romantic affection--always spiritualised, never sensual--that his
deep and loving sincerity diffused throughout the work, was shown the
grand unity of the embodiment; a unity based on the simple passion of
love. To hear that actor say the one supreme line to Iago, "I am bound
to thee forever," was to know that he understood and felt the meaning
of the character, to its minutest fibre and its profoundest depth.
There were touches of fresh and aptly illustrative "business" in the
encounter of Othello and Iago, in the great scene of the third act. The
gasping struggles of Iago heightened the effect of the Moor's fury, and
the quickly suppressed impulse and yell of rage with which he finally
bounded away made an admirable effect of nature. In the last scene
McCullough rounded his performance with a solemn act of sacrifice. There
was nothing animal, nothing barbaric, nothing insane, in the slaughter
of Desdemona. It was done in an ecstasy of justice, and the atmosphere
that surrounded the deed was that of awe and not of horror.
For the character of King Lear McCullough possessed the imposing
stature, the natural majesty, the great reach of voice, and the human
tenderness that are its basis and equipment. No actor of Lear can ever
satisfy a sympathetic lover of the part unless he possesses a greatly
affectionate heart, a fiery spirit, and,--albeit the intellect must be
shown in ruins,--a regal mind. Within that grand and lamentable image of
shattered royalty the man must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is
puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal
sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in
mind--already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution;
not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all
about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses
disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him
with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit but he will soon break;
and the spectator loves him and is sorry for him and would avert the
destiny of woe that is darkly foreshadowed in his condition. McCullough
gave the invectives--as they ought to be given--with the impetuous rush
and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of
agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages
is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of
government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls
them forth from a breaking heart and a distracted mind. He loves, and he
loathes himself for loving: every fibre of his nature is in horrified
revolt against such lack of reverence, gratitude, and affection toward
such a monarch and such a father as he knows himself to have been. The
feeling that McCullough poured through those moments of splendid yet
pitiable frenzy was overwhelming in its intense glow and in its towering
and incessant volume. There was remarkable subtlety, also, in the manner
in which that feeling was tempered. In Lear's meeting with Goneril after
the curse you saw at once the broken condition of an aged, infirm, and
mentally disordered man, who had already forgotten his own terrible
words. "We'll no more meet, no more see one another" is a line to which
McCullough gave its full eloquence of abject mournfulness and forlorn
desolation. Other denotements of subtlety were seen in his sad
preoccupation with memories of the lost Cordelia, while talking with the
Fool. "I did her wrong" was never more tenderly spoken than by him. They
are only four little words; but they carry the crushing weight of
eternal and hopeless remorse. It was in this region of delicate,
imaginative touch that McCullough's dramatic art was especially
puissant. He was the first actor of Lear to discriminate between the
agony of a man while going mad and the careless, volatile, fantastic
condition--afflicting to witness, but no longer agonising to the lunatic
himself--of a man who has actually lapsed into madness. Edwin
Forrest--whose Lear is much extolled, often by persons who, evidently,
never saw it--much as he did with the part, never even faintly suggested
such a discrimination as that.
To one altitude of Lear's condition it is probably impossible for
dramatic art to rise--the mood of divine philosophy, warmed with human
tenderness, in which the dazed but semi-conscious vicegerent of heaven
moralises over human life. There is a grandeur in that conception so
vast that nothing short of the rarest inspiration of genius can rise to
it. The deficiences of McCullough's Lear were found in the analysis of
that part of the performance. He had the heart of Lear, the royalty, the
breadth; but not all of either the exalted intellect, the sorrow-laden
experience, or the imagination--so gorgeous in its disorder, so
infinitely pathetic in its misery.
His performance of Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of
passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment
of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the
low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and
then--and rightly broken--with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness
never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's
utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of
the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not
weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply
tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting in
tragic climax.