physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the
ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent
elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic
movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and
embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and
diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific
and positive limitations--spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has
proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet,
was unspiritual--giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to
its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative,
obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean
character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal
displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in
Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he
interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were
terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a
magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not
command the judgment.
His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations.
During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric,
disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and
especially destitute of inherent personal fascination--of the
suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin--but he
has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of
all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent,
overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The
cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves
signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the
spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments
and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself"
were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle
significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia--as in "No more of
that, I have noted it well"--and he gave, at the beginning, no
intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of
lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first
mad scene.
Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a
table, in the first scene--which had the effect of preparation for a
lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the
upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted
crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment
was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear:
it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the
character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two
daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action,
seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its
due effect.
XXIV.
HENRY IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM.
Henry Irving's impersonation of Eugene Aram--given in a vein that is
distinctly unique--was one of strange and melancholy grace and also of
weird poetical and pathetic power.
More than fifty years ago, just after Bulwer's novel on the subject of
Eugene Aram was published, that character first came upon the stage, and
its first introduction to the American theatre occurred at the Bowery,
where it was represented by John R. Scott. Aram languished, however, as
a dramatic person, and soon disappeared. He did not thrive in England,
neither, till, in 1873, Henry Irving, who had achieved great success in
_The Bells_, prompted W.G. Wills to effect his resuscitation in a new
play, and acted him in a new manner. The part then found an actor who
could play it,--investing psychological subtlety with tender human
feeling and romantic grace, and making an imaginary experience of
suffering vital and heartrending in its awful reality. The performance
ranks with the best that Henry Irving has given--with _Mathias_,
_Lesurques_, _Dubosc_, _Louis XI._, and _Hamlet_; those studies of the
night-side of human nature in which his imagination and intellect and
his sombre feeling have been revealed and best exemplified.
Eugene Aram was born at Ramsgill, in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, in 1704. His
father, Peter Aram, was a man of good family but becoming reduced in
circumstances he took service as a gardener on the estate of Sir Edward
Blackett, of Newby Hall. In 1710 Peter Aram and his family were living
at Bondgate, near Ripon, and there Eugene went to school and learned to
read the New Testament. At a considerably later period he was
instructed, during one month, by the Rev. Mr. Alcock, of Burndall. This
was the extent of the tuition that he ever received from others. For the
rest he was self-taught. He had a natural passion for knowledge and he
displayed wonderful industry in its acquisition. When sixteen years old
he knew something of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later he made himself
acquainted with Chaldaic and Arabic. His occupation, up to this time,
was that of assistant to his father, the gardener; but about 1720 he was
employed in London as a clerk to a merchant, Mr. Christopher Blackett, a
relative to his father's patron, Sir Edward. He did not remain there
long. A serious illness prostrated him, and on recovering he returned to
Nidderdale, with which romantic region his fate was to be forever
associated. He now became a tutor, and not long after he was employed as
such at a manor-house, near Ramsgill, called Gowthwaite Hall, a
residence built early in the seventeenth century by Sir John Yorke, and
long inhabited by his descendants. While living there he met and courted
Anna Spance, the daughter of a farmer, at the lonely village of
Lofthouse, and in 1731 he married her. The Middlesmoor registry contains
the record of this marriage, and of the baptism and death of their first
child. In 1734 Eugene Aram removed to Knaresborough, where he kept a
school. He had, all this while, sedulously pursued his studies, and he
now was a scholar of extraordinary acquirements, not only in the
languages but in botany, heraldry, and many other branches of learning.
His life seemed fair and his future bright: but a change was at hand.
He had not resided long at Knaresborough before he became acquainted
with three persons most unlike himself in every way. These men were
Henry Terry, Richard Houseman, and Daniel Clarke. Houseman was a
flax-dresser. Clarke was a travelling jeweller. All of them were
intemperate; and it is supposed that the beginning of Eugene Aram's
downfall was the appetite for drink. The confederacy that he formed with
these men is not easily explicable, and probably it never has been
rightly explained. The accepted statement is that it was a confederacy
for fraud and theft. Clarke was reported to be the heir presumptive to a
large fortune. He purchased goods, was punctual in his payments, and
established his credit. He was supposed to be making purchases for a
merchant in London. He dealt largely in gold and silver plate and in
watches, and soon he made a liberal use of his credit to accumulate
valuable objects. In 1744 he disappeared, and he never was seen or heard
of again. His frauds became known, and the houses of Aram and Houseman,
suspected as his associates, were searched, but nothing was found to
implicate either of them.
Soon after this event Aram left Knaresborough--deserting his wife--and
proceeded to London, where for two years he had employment as a teacher
of Latin. He was subsequently an usher at the boarding school of the
Rev. Anthony Hinton, at Hayes, in Middlesex, and there it was observed
that he displayed an extraordinary and scrupulous tenderness and
solicitude as to the life and safety of even worms and insects--which he
would remove from the garden walks and put into places of security. At a
later period he found employment as a transcriber of acts of Parliament,
for registration in chancery. Still later he became an usher at the Free
School of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, among other labours, he undertook to
make a comparative lexicon, and with this purpose collated over 3000
words in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic. He had ample
opportunity to leave England but he never did so. At length, in 1759, a
labourer who was digging for limestone, at a place known as St. Robert's
Cave, Thistle Hill, near Knaresborough, came upon a human skeleton, bent
double and buried in the earth. Suspicion was aroused. These bones, it
was surmised, might be those of Daniel Clarke. His mysterious
disappearance and his associates were remembered. The authorities sent
forth and arrested Terry, Houseman, and Eugene Aram, and those persons
were brought to their trial at York. A bold front would have saved them,
for the evidence against them was weak. Aram stood firm, but Houseman
quailed, and presently he turned "state's evidence" and denounced Aram
as the murderer of Clarke. The accused scholar spoke in his own defence,
and with astonishing skill, but he failed to defeat the direct and
decisive evidence of his accomplice. Houseman declared that on the day
of the murder Clarke, Aram, and himself were in company, and were
occupied in disposing of the property which they had obtained; that Aram
proposed to walk in the fields, and that they proceeded, thereupon, at
nightfall, to the vicinity of St. Robert's Cave. Clarke and Aram, he
said, went over the hedge and advanced toward the cave, and Aram struck
Clarke several times upon the breast and head, and so killed him. It was
a dark night, and in the middle of winter, but the moon was shining
through drifting clouds, and Houseman said he could see the movement of
Aram's hand but not the weapon that it held. He was about twelve yards
from the spot of the murder. He testified that the body of Clarke was
buried in the cave. The presiding justice charged against the prisoner
and Eugene Aram was convicted and condemned. He subsequently, it is
said, confessed the crime, alleging to the clergyman by whom he was
attended that his wife had been led into an intrigue by Clarke, and that
this was the cause of the murder. Here, doubtless, is the indication of
the true nature of this tragedy. Aram, prior to his execution, was
confined in York Castle, where he wrote a poem of considerable length
and some merit, and also several shorter pieces of verse. On the morning
of his execution it was found that he had opened a vein in his arm, with
the intent to bleed to death, but the wound was staunched, and he was
taken to Knaresborough and there hanged, and afterward his body was hung
in chains in Knaresborough Forest. His death occurred on August 13,
1759, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. On the night before his
execution he wrote a rhythmical apostrophe to death:--
"Come, pleasing rest! eternal slumber fall!
Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all!
Calm and composed my soul her journey takes;
No guilt that troubles and no heart that aches."
Such is the story of Eugene Aram--a story that has furnished the basis
of various fictions, notably of Bulwer's famous novel, and which
inspired one of the best of the beautiful poems of Thomas Hood. Wills
gathered hints from it, here and there, in the making of his play; but
he boldly departed from its more hideous and repulsive incidents and
from the theory of the main character that might perhaps be justified by
its drift. In the construction of the piece Henry Irving made many
material suggestions. The treatment of the character of Aram was devised
by him, and the management of the close of the second act denotes his
felicity of invention.
The play opens in the rose-garden of a rural rectory in the sweet, green
valley of the shining Nidd. The time is twilight; the season summer; and
here, in a haven of peace and love, the repentant murderer has found a
refuge. Many years have passed since the commission of his crime, and
all those years he has lived a good life, devoted to study, instruction,
and works of benevolence. He has been a teacher of the young, a helper
of the poor, and he has gained respect, affection, and honourable
repute. He is safe in the security of silence and in the calm self-poise
of his adamantine will. His awful secret sleeps in his bosom and is at
rest forever. He has suffered much and he still suffers; yet, lulled
into a false security by the uneventful lapse of years and by that
drifting, desolate, apathetic recklessness which is sequent on the
subsiding storm of passionate sorrow, he has allowed himself to accept a
woman's love and to love her in return, and half to believe that his
long misery has expiated his sin and that even for him there may be a
little happiness yet possible on earth. Eugene Aram, the village
school-master, and Ruth Meadows, the vicar's daughter, are betrothed
lovers; and now, on the eve of their wedding morning, they stand
together among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet
summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church
close by a solemn strain of music--the vesper hymn--floats out upon the
stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence,
and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by
long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness,
is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme
moment, when now it seems that everything is surely well, the one man in
the world who knows Eugene Aram's secret has become, by seeming chance,
a guest in the vicarage; and even while Ruth places her hand upon her
lover's heart and softly whispers, "If guilt were there, it still should
be my pillow," the shadow of the gathering night that darkens around
them is deepened by the blacker shadow of impending doom. The first act
of the play is simply a picture. It involves no action. It only
introduces the several persons who are implicated in the experience to
be displayed, denotes their relationship to one another, and reveals a
condition of feeling and circumstance which is alike romantic, pathetic,
and perilous, and which is soon to be shattered by the disclosure of a
fatal secret. The act is a preparation for a catastrophe.
In the second act the opposed characters clash: the movement begins,
and the catastrophe is precipitated. The story opens at nightfall,
proceeds the same evening, and ends at the dawn of the ensuing day. The
scene of act second is a room in the vicarage. Aram and Parson Meadows
are playing chess, and Ruth is hovering about them and roguishly
impeding their play. The purpose accomplished here is the exhibition of
domestic comfort and content, and this is further emphasised by Ruth's
recital of a written tribute that Aram's pupils have sent to him, on the
eve of his marriage. Wounded by this praise the conscience-stricken
wretch breaks off abruptly from his pastime and rushes from the room--an
act of desperate grief which is attributed to his modesty. The parson
soon follows, and Ruth is left alone. Houseman, their casual guest,
having accepted the vicar's hospitable offer of a shelter for the night,
has now a talk with Ruth, and he is startled to hear the name of Eugene
Aram, and thus to know that he has found the man whose fatal secret he
possesses, and upon whose assumed dread of exposure his cupidity now
purposes to feed. In a coarsely jocular way this brutish creature
provokes the indignant resentment of Ruth, by insinuations as to her
betrothed lover's past life; and when, a little later, Ruth and Aram
again meet, she wooingly begs him to tell her of any secret trouble that
may be weighing upon his mind. At this moment Houseman comes upon them,
and utters Aram's name. From that point to the end of the act there is a
sustained and sinewy exposition, strong in spirit and thrilling in
suspense,--of keen intellect and resolute will standing at bay and
making their last battle for life, against the overwhelming odds of
heaven's appointed doom. Aram defies Houseman and is denounced by him;
but the ready adroitness and iron composure of the suffering wretch
still give him supremacy over his foe--till, suddenly, the discovery is
announced of the bones of Daniel Clarke in St. Robert's Cave, and the
vicar commands Aram and Houseman to join him in their inspection. Here
the murderer suffers a collapse. There has been a greater strain than
even he can bear; and, left alone upon the scene, he stands petrified
with horror, seeming, in an ecstasy of nameless fear, to look upon the
spectre of his victim. Henry Irving's management of the apparition
effect was such as is possible only to a man of genius, and such as
words may record but never can describe.
The third act passes in the churchyard. Aram has fled from the sight of
the skeleton, and has fallen among the graves. It is almost morning. The
ghastly place is silent and dark. The spirit of the murderer is broken,
and his enfeebled body, long since undermined by the grief of remorse
and now chilled by the night dews, is in the throes of death. The
incidents of the closing scene are simple, but they are heart-breaking
in their pathos and awful in their desolation. The fugitive Houseman
finds Aram here, and spurns him as a whimpering lunatic. Then, in this
midnight hour and this appalling place, alone in the presence of God,
the murderer lifts his hands toward heaven, confesses his crime, and
falls at the foot of the cross. Here Ruth finds him, and to her, with
dying lips, he tells the story of the murder and of all that he has
since endured. And just as his voice falters into silence and his heart
ceases to beat, the diamond light of morning gleams in the eastern sky
and the glad music of an anthem floats softly from the neighbouring
church. Upon that beautifully significant picture the final curtain
fell.
Wills's literary framework for the display of character and experience
is scarcely to be considered a perfect play. It begins by assuming on
the part of its auditor a knowledge of the mystery upon which it is
based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in
presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from
remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat
irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual
neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his
character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly
apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised
woman to misery and shame by making her his wife. And it mars its most
pathetic scene--the awful scene of the midnight confession in the
churchyard--by making Eugene Aram declare, to the woman of his love, the
one human being who comforts and sustains him on the brink of eternity,
that he has loved another woman for whose sake he did the murder. Since
the whole story was to be treated in a fanciful manner, a still wider
license in the play of fancy would, perhaps, have had a more entirely
gracious and satisfying effect. The language is partly blank verse and
partly prose; and, while its tissue is rightly and skilfully diversified
by judicious allowance for the effect of each character upon the garment
of individual diction, and while its strain, here and there, rises to
eloquence of feeling and beauty of imagery, there is a certain lack of
firmness in its verbal fibre. The confession speech that has to be
spoken by Aram comprises upward of ninety lines--and that is a severe
and perilous strain upon an actor's power of holding the public
interest. The beauties of the play, however, are many and strong. Its
crowning excellence is that it gives dramatic permanence to a strangely
interesting character.
The knowledge of human nature that Henry Irving revealed in this part
and the manner in which he revealed it were nothing less than wonderful.
The moment he walked upon the scene you saw the blighted figure of a man
who has endured, and is enduring, spiritual torment. The whole
personality was suffused with a mournful strangeness. The man was
isolated and alone. It was a purely ideal view of the character that
the actor denoted; for he made Eugene Aram a noble, tender, gentle
person, whom ungovernable passion, under circumstances of overwhelming
provocation, had once impelled to an act of half-justifiable homicide,
and who had for years been slowly dying with remorse. He touched no
chord of terror, but only the chord of pity. Like his portrayal of
Mathias, the picture showed the reactionary effect of hidden sin in the
human soul; but the personality of the sufferer was entirely different.
Each of those men has had experience of crime and of resultant misery,
but no two embodiments could possibly be more dissimilar, alike in
spiritual quality and in circumstances. Mathias is dominated by paternal
love and characterised by a half-defiant, ever-vigilant, and often
self-approbative pride of intellect, in being able to guard and keep a
terrible and dangerous secret. Eugene Aram is dominated by a saint-like
tenderness toward a sweet woman who loves him, and characterised by a
profound, fitful melancholy, now humble and submissive, now actively
apprehensive and almost frenzied. Only once does he stand at bay and
front his destiny with a defiance of desperate will; and even then it is
for the woman's sake rather than for his own. Henry Irving's acting
made clear and beautiful that condition of temperament. A noble and
affectionate nature, shipwrecked, going to pieces, doomed, but making
one last tremendous though futile effort to avert the final and
inevitable ruin--this ideal was made actual in his performance. The
intellectual or spiritual value of such a presentment must depend upon
the auditor's capacity to absorb from a tragedy its lessons of insight
into the relations of the human soul to the moral government of the
world. Many spectators would find it merely morbid and gloomy; others
would find it superlatively illuminative and eloquent. Its artistic
value the actor himself made evident to every comprehension. There is a
moment of the performance when the originally massive and passionate
character of Eugene Aram is suddenly asserted above his meekness,
contrition, and sorrow; when, at the sound of his enemy's voice, he
first becomes petrified with the sense of peril, and then calmly gathers
all his powers to meet and conquer the danger. The splendid
concentration, the perfect poise, the sustained intensity, the copious
and amazing variety and force of emotion, and the positive, unerring,
and brilliant art with which Henry Irving met that emergency and
displayed that frightful and piteous aspect of assailed humanity,
desperate and fighting for life, made up such an image of genius as
seldom is seen and never will be forgotten. Rapid transition has ever
been one of the commonest and most effective expedients used in
histrionic art. This, on the contrary, was an example of sustained,
prolonged, cumulative, artistic expression of the most harrowing and
awful emotions with which the human soul can be convulsed; and it was a
wonder of consummate acting. The same thoroughness of identification and
the same astonishing adequacy of feeling pervaded the scene in the
churchyard. At first, in the dusky starlight, only a shapeless figure,
covered with a black cloak, was seen among the gravestones, crouched
upon a tomb; but the man that rose, as if out of the grave, pallid,
emaciated, ghastly, the spectre of himself, was the authentic image of
majestic despair, not less sublime than pitiable, and fraught with a
power that happiness could never attain. Not in our time upon the stage
has such a lesson been taught, with such overwhelming pathos, of the
utter helplessness of even the strongest human will, when once the soul
has been vitiated by sin and the eternal law of right defied by mortal
passion. In the supplication to his astonished accomplice the actor
seemed like one transfigured, and there the haunted effect was extremely
awful.
XXV.
CHARLES FISHER.