of a new actor who is not only new but good. It is the pleasure of
discovery. It is the pleasure of contact with a rich mind hitherto
unexplored. The personal appearance, the power of the eye, the variety
of the facial expression, the tones of the voice, the carriage of the
person, the salient attributes of the individual character, the altitude
of the intellectual development, the quality of the spirit, the extent
and the nature of those artistic faculties and resources that constitute
the professional equipment,--all those things become the subject first
of interested inquiry and next of pleased recognition. Willard is
neither of the stately, the weird, the mysterious, nor the ferocious
order of actor. There is nothing in him of either Werner, Manfred, or
Sir Giles Overreach. He belongs not to either the tradition of John
Kemble or of Edmund Kean. His personality, nevertheless, is of a
distinctive and interesting kind. He has the self-poise and the exalted
calm of immense reserve power and of tender and tremulous sensibility
perfectly controlled. His acting is conspicuously marked by two of the
loveliest attributes of art--simplicity and sincerity. He conceals
neither the face nor the heart. His figure is fine and his demeanour is
that of vigorous mental authority informed by moral purity and by the
self-respect of a manly spirit. Goodness, although a quality seldom
taken into the critical estimate, nevertheless has its part in spiritual
constitution and in consequent effect. It was, for instance, an element
of artistic potentiality in the late John McCullough. It operated
spontaneously; and just so it does in the acting of Willard, who, first
of all, gives the satisfying impression of being genuine. A direct and
thorough method of expression naturally accompanies that order of mind
and that quality of temperament. Every movement that Willard makes upon
the stage is clear, free, open, firm, and of an obvious significance.
Every tone of his rich and resonant voice is distinctly intended and is
distinctly heard. There are no "flaws and starts." He has formed a
precise ideal. He knows exactly how to embody and to utter it, and he
makes the manifestation of it sharp, defined, positive, and cogent. His
meaning cannot be missed. He has an unerring sense of proportion and
symmetry. The character that he represents is shown, indeed, all at
once, as a unique identity; but it is not all at once developed, the
manifestation of it being made gradually to proceed under the stress of
experience and of emotion. He rises with the occasion. His feelings are
deep, and he is possessed of extraordinary power for the utterance of
them--not simply vocal power, although that, in his case, is
exceptional, but the rare faculty of becoming convulsed, inspired,
transfigured, by passion, and of being swept along by it, and of
sweeping along his hearers. His manner covers, without concealing, great
intensity. This is such a combination of traits as must have existed--if
the old records are read aright--in that fine and famous actor, John
Henderson, and which certainly existed in the late Benjamin Webster. It
has, however, always been rare upon the stage, and, like all rare
jewels, it is precious. The actor who, from an habitual mood of sweet
gravity and patient gentleness, can rise to the height of delirious
passion, and there sustain himself at a poise of tempestuous
concentration which is the fulfilment of nature, and never once seem
either ludicrous or extravagant, is an actor of splendid power and
extraordinary self-discipline. Such an actor is Willard. The blue eyes,
the slightly olive complexion, the compact person, the picturesque
appearance, the melodious voice, the flexibility of natural action, and
the gradual and easy ascent from the calm level of domestic peace to the
stormy summit of passionate ecstasy recall personal peculiarities and
artistic methods long passed away. The best days of Edwin L. Davenport
and the younger James Wallack are brought to mind by them.
In the drama of _The Middleman_ Willard had to impersonate an inventor,
of the absorbed, enthusiastic, self-regardless, fanatical kind. Cyrus
Blenkarn is a potter. His genius and his toil have enriched two persons
named Chandler, father and son, who own and conduct a porcelain factory
in an English town of the present day. Blenkarn has two daughters, and
one of them is taken from him by the younger Chandler. The circumstances
of that deprivation point at disgrace, and the inventor conceives
himself to have suffered an odious ignominy and irreparable wrong. Young
Chandler has departed and so has Mary Blenkarn, and they are eventually
to return as husband and wife; but Cyrus Blenkarn has been aroused from
his reveries over the crucible and furnace,--wherein he is striving to
discover a lost secret in the potter's art that will make him both rich
and famous,--and he utters a prayer for vengeance upon these Chandlers,
and he parts from them. A time of destitution and of pitiful struggle
with dire necessity, sleepless grief, and the maddening impulse of
vengeance now comes upon him, so that he is wasted almost to death. He
will not, however, abandon his quest for the secret of his art. He may
die of hunger and wretchedness; he will not yield. At the last moment
of his trial and his misery--alone--at night--in the alternate lurid
blaze and murky gloom of his firing-house--success is conquered: the
secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries gradually and
artfully lead, affords a great opportunity to an actor; and Willard
greatly filled it. The old inventor has been bowed down almost to
despair. Grief and destitution, the sight of his remaining daughter's
poverty, and the conflict of many feelings have made him a wreck. But
his will remains firm. It is not, however, until his last hope has been
abandoned that his success suddenly comes--and the result of this is a
delirium. That situation, one of the best in modern drama, has been
treated by the author in such a manner as to sustain for a long time the
feeling of suspense and to put an enormous strain upon the emotion and
the resources of an actor. Willard's presentment of the gaunt,
attenuated figure of Cyrus Blenkarn--hollow-eyed, half-frantic,
hysterical with grief and joy--was the complete incarnation of a
dramatic frensy; and this, being sympathetic, and moving to goodness and
not to evil, captured the heart. It was a magnificent exhibition, not
alone of the physical force that sometimes is so essential in acting but
of that fervour of the soul without which acting is a mockery.
The skill with which Willard reserved his power, so that the
impersonation might gradually increase in strength, was one of the best
merits of his art. Blenkarn's prayer might readily be converted into the
climax of the piece, and it might readily be spoken in such a way that
no effect would be left for the culmination in the furnace-room. Those
errors were avoided, and during three out of the four acts the movement
of the piece was fluent, continuous, and cumulative. In this respect
both the drama and the performance were instructive. Henry Arthur Jones
has diversified his serious scenes with passages of sportive humour and
he has freighted the piece with conventional didacticism as to the
well-worn question of capital and labour. The humour is good: the
political economy need not detain attention. The value of the play does
not reside in its teaching but in its dramatic presentation of strong
character, individual experience, and significant story. The effect
produced by _The Middleman_ is that of moral elevation. Its auditor is
touched and ennobled by a spectacle of stern trial, pitiable suffering,
and stoical endurance. In the purpose that presides over human
destiny--if one may accept the testimony equally of history and of
fiction--it appears to be necessary first to create strong characters
and then to break them; and the manner in which they are broken usually
involves the elements alike of dramatic effect and of pathos. That
singular fact in mortal experience may have been noticed by this author.
His drama is a forcible exposition of it. _The Middleman_ was set upon
Palmer's stage in such a way as to strengthen the dramatic illusion by
the fidelity of scenery. The firing-house, with its furnaces in
operation, was a copy of what may be seen at Worcester. The picture of
English life was excellent.
When Willard played the part of Judah Llewellyn for the first time in
America (December 29, 1890), he gained from a sympathetic and judicious
audience a verdict of emphatic admiration. Judah Llewellyn is a good
part in one of the most striking plays of the period--a play that tells
an interesting and significant story by expressive, felicitous, and
incessant action; affects the feelings by situations that are vital
with dramatic power; inspires useful thought upon a theme of
psychological importance; cheers the mind with a fresh breeze of
satirical humour; and delights the instinct of taste by its crisp and
pungent style. Alike by his choice of a comparatively original subject
and his deft method in the treatment of it Henry Arthur Jones has shown
a fine dramatic instinct; and equally in the evolution of character and
the expression of experience and emotion he has wrought with feeling and
vigour. Most of the plays that are written, in any given period, pass
away with the period to which they appertain. _Judah_ is one of the
exceptions; for its brilliantly treated theme is one of perennial
interest, and there seems reason to believe, of a work so vital, that
long after the present generation has vanished it still will keep its
place in the theatre, and sometimes be acted, not as a quaint relic but
as a living lesson.
That theme is the psychic force in human organism. The author does not
obtrude it; does not play the pedant with it; does not lecture upon it;
and above all does not bore with it. He only uses it; and he has been so
true to his province as a dramatist and not an advocate that he never
once assumes to decide upon any question of doctrine that may be
involved in the assertion of it. His heroine is a young woman who thinks
herself to be possessed of a certain inherent restorative power of
curing the sick. This power is of psychic origin and it operates through
the medium of personal influence. This girl, Vashti Dethick, has exerted
her power with some success. Other persons, having felt its good effect,
have admitted its existence. The father of Vashti, an enterprising
scamp, has thereupon compelled the girl to trade upon her peculiar
faculty; little by little to assume miraculous powers; and finally to
pretend that her celestial talent is refreshed and strengthened by
abstinence from food, and that her cures are wrought only after she has
fasted for many days. He has thus converted her into an impostor; yet,
as her heart is pure and her moral principle naturally sound, she is ill
at ease in this false position, and her mental distress has suddenly
become aggravated, almost to the pitch of desperation, by the arrival of
love. She has lost her heart to a young clergyman, Judah Llewellyn, the
purity of whose spirit and the beauty of whose life are a bitter and
burning rebuke to her enforced deceitfulness of conduct. Here is a woman
innocently guilty, suddenly aroused by love, made sensitive and noble
(as that passion commonly makes those persons who really feel it), and
projected into a condition of aggrieved excitement. In this posture of
romantic and pathetic circumstances the crisis of two lives is suddenly
precipitated in action.
Judah Llewellyn also is possessed of spiritual sensibility and psychic
force. In boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his
native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks
and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the
bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a
preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence,
invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her.
It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his
devotion to his Master's work. The attraction between these creatures is
human; and yet it is more of heaven than of earth. It is a tie of
spiritual kindred that binds them. They are beings of a different order
from the common order--and, as happens in such cases, they will be
tried by exceptional troubles and passed through a fire of mortal
anguish. For what reason experience should take the direction of misery
with fine natures in human life no philosopher has yet been able to
ascertain; but that it does take that direction all competent
observation proves. To Vashti and Judah the time speedily comes when
their love is acknowledged, upon both sides--the preacher speaking
plainly; the girl, conscious of turpitude, shrinking from a spoken
avowal which yet her whole personality proclaims. Yielding to her
father's malign will she has consented to make one more manifestation of
curative power, to go through once more,--and for the last time,--the
mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the
patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter--an only child, cursed with
constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline.
This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires
and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a
golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation test shall be
thoroughly made. Lord Asgarby, willing to do anything for his idolised
daughter, assents to the plan, and his scientific friend, cynical
Professor Jopp, agrees, with the assistance of his erudite daughter, to
supervise the experiment. Vashti will fast for several days, and the
heir of Asgarby will then be healed by her purified and exalted
influence.
The principal scene of the play shows the exterior of an ancient, unused
tower of Asgarby House, in which Vashti is detained during the fast. The
girl is supposed to be starving. Her scampish father will endeavour to
relieve her. Miss Jopp is vigilant to prevent fraud. The patient is
confident. Judah, wishful to be near to the object of his adoration, has
climbed the outer wall and is watching, beneath the window, unseen, in
the warder's seat. The time is summer, the hour midnight, and the
irrevocable vow of love has been spoken. At that supreme instant, and
under conditions so natural that the picture seems one of actual life,
the sin of Vashti is revealed and the man who had adored her as an angel
knows her for a cheat. With a difference of circumstances that
situation--in the fibre of it--is not new. Many a lover, male and
female, has learned that every idol has its flaw. But the situation is
new in its dramatic structure. For Judah the discovery is a terrible
one, and the resultant agony is convulsive and lamentable. He takes,
however, the only course he could be expected to take: he must vindicate
the integrity of the woman whom he loves, and he commits the crime of
perjury in order to shield her reputation from disgrace.
What will a man do for the woman whom he loves? The attributes of
individual character are always to be considered as forces likely to
modify passion and to affect conduct. But in general the answer to that
question may be given in three words--anything and everything! The
history of nations, as of individuals, is never rightly read until it is
read in the light of knowledge of the influence that has been exerted
over them by women. Cleopatra, in ancient Egypt, changed the history of
Rome by the ruin of Marc Antony. Another heroine recently toppled
Ireland down the fire-escape into the back-yard. So goes the world. In
Judah, however, the crime that is done for love is pursued to its
consequence of ever-accumulative suffering, until at length, when it has
been expiated by remorse and repentance, it is rectified by confession
and obliterated by pardon. No play ever taught a lesson of truth with
more cogent dramatic force. The cynical, humorous scenes are
delightful.
Willard's representation of Cyrus Blenkarn stamped him as one of the
best actors of the age. His representation of Judah Llewellyn deepened
that impression and reinforced it with a conviction of marked
versatility. In his utterance of passion Willard showed that he has
advanced far beyond the Romeo stage. The love that he expressed was that
of a man--intellectual, spiritual, noble, a moral being and one
essentially true. Man's love, when it is real, adores its object;
hallows it; invests it with celestial attributes; and beholds it as a
part of heaven. That quality of reverence was distinctly conveyed by the
actor, and therefore to observers who conceive passion to be delirious
abandonment (of which any animal is capable), his ardour may have seemed
dry and cold. It was nevertheless true. He made the tempestuous torrent
of Judah's avowal the more overwhelming by his preliminary
self-repression and his thoughtful gentleness of reserve; for thus the
hunger of desire was beautiful with devotion and tenderness; and while
the actor's feelings seemed borne away upon a whirling tide of
irresistible impulse his exquisite art kept a perfect control of face,
voice, person, demeanour, and delivery, and not once permitted a lapse
into extravagance. The character thus embodied will long be remembered
as an image of dignity, sweetness, moral enthusiasm, passionate fervour,
and intellectual power; but, also, viewed as an effort in the art of
acting, it will be remembered as a type of consummate grace in the
embodiment of a beautiful ideal clearly conceived. The effect of
spiritual suffering, as conveyed in the pallid countenance and ravaged
figure, in the last act, was that of noble pathos. The delivery of all
the speeches of the broken, humiliated, haunted minister was deeply
touching, not alone in music of voice but in denotement of knowledge of
human nature and human suffering and endurance. The actor who can play
such a part in such a manner is not an experimental artist. Rather let
him be called--in the expressive words of one of his country's poets--
"Sacred historian of the heart
And moral nature's lord."
XXIII.
SALVINI AS KING SAUL AND KING LEAR.
Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment
that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with
affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its
grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering
physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen
of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His
tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in
depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of
action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness--all
these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent
reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his
personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the
stage pantheon of kings and heroes.
Alfieri's tragedy of _Saul_ was written in 1782-83, when the haughty,
impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the
suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a
bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to
console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative
of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work
was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his
autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little
labour. _Saul_ is in five acts and it contains 1567 lines--of that
Italian _versi sciolti_ which inadequately corresponds to the blank
verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's
army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel,
Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the
action--or rather, by the suffering--of the piece is a single day, the
last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed
in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act
second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken
him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he
relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that
the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man,
and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David--whom he at once
loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction
and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the
harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence
of Israel--so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king
and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the
music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts
fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of
the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease;
the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent
recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and
finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy,
massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end
with the fire of a sublime imagination.
Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of ranking _Saul_ with
_Lear_. The claim is natural but it is not valid. In _Lear_--not to
speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast
philosophy of human life--there is a tremendous scope of action, through
which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and
there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of
afflicted goodness. In _Saul_ there is simply--upon a limited canvas,
without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the
relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a
dramatic background--the portraiture of a condition; and, because the
man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging
the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are
akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that
shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after
them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul
should be deemed the greatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian
language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with
the severe simplicity of the Bible narrative on which it is founded. It
depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust
character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and
regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the
consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world
and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It
would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state.
Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and
dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the
imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and
thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of
great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is
a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his
presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens
by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by
spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury
makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the
damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness
of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs
the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted
by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain
struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The
gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss
of misery--a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off
from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity
him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he
diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of
desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him
save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears
to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the
Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini
embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor
presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and
chastened.