A ROUND of applause greeted the rise of the curtain upon the first
scene of “The Bells.” The audience thus testified their desire to be
kindly; but, as the first part of the story was told, there was a
certain impatience even in their recognition of the artistic simplicity
of the scene. “The Bells” opens more like a novel than a play; and yet
the suggestiveness of the narrative at the table, as the topers chat
and drink, is singularly dramatic. On this first night the play seemed
to drag, and the audience were on the tiptoe of expectation. Those who
were comfortably seated were anxious for the appearance of Irving;
those who poured in to fill vacant seats at the back, and the hundreds
who pushed in to stand behind them, created an uncomfortable sensation
of disquiet. Had the Star been a London theatre, the patience of the
people who were seated would have been so seriously taxed that they
would hardly have permitted the play to proceed until order had been
secured in all parts of the house.
At last the door of the burgomaster’s homelike inn is flung open, and
Irving stands there in his snow-sprinkled furs, his right hand raised
above his head in the action of greeting his family, his left hand
grasping his whip. His entrance was never more natural, never more
picturesque. The audience hardly heard his opening words,—“It’s I!”
They greeted him with thunders of applause, and shouts of welcome. He
presently stepped forward from the door. Those who knew him would not
fail to detect an effort to control his emotions, when he bowed his
acknowledgments of a greeting as spontaneous as it was hearty. I had
seen him in his dressing-room only a short time before. He was anxious,
but firm as a rock; not in doubt of his own powers, but impressed, as
any man might be, under similar circumstances, with the knowledge of
how high the expectations of the people had been raised; how great the
task of even approaching the standard of their excited hopes.
And now that the audience, touched by the artistic novelty of his
appearance, and moved by their sentiments of hospitality, had given
vent to their feelings, they settled down to allow the actor, of whose
methods they had heard so much, to conquer their favorable opinion if
he could. Despite the prejudices of some, and the annoyance of those
who had been victimized by the speculators, auditors were willing to be
captured,—nay, were desirous, if they could honestly do so, to endorse
the verdict of their cousins of England, as to the place which Henry
Irving holds in dramatic art.
“The Bells” is a weird play. Its lines are simple; it never halts.
Mathias is an inn-keeper. He murders his guest, a Polish Jew, murders
him on the highway for his gold, and is forever haunted by his crime.
The jangle of the sleigh-bells, as the Jew’s horse gallops away after
its master’s death, is continually in the assassin’s ears. Their sad
music trickles through the story like the ripple of a rising stream
through stubble-fields in autumn. It sweeps over the dramatic narrative
like the sighing of the wind in “chill October.” Remorse takes
possession of the criminal; he dreams he is being tried for his life.
This scene affords special opportunities for illustrating Irving’s
dramatic magnetism. The judicial court of his dreamland forces him
to submit to the operations of a mesmerist. Under this influence he
makes confession of his crime by reënacting it. Nothing more weirdly
suggestive can be imagined. Before an audience as breathless as the
court, the actor went through the pantomime of stopping the Jew’s
horse, cutting down the Jew with an axe, plundering the body and
thrusting it into a lime-kiln. Then, convicted and condemned, the
murderer dies under the violent shock to his nerves of this retributive
force of imagination,—dies while the church-bells are ringing for his
daughter’s marriage,—his last agonizing words, “Take the rope from my
throat!”
Only a daring artist would undertake such a part; only a great one
could succeed in it. Most of the second and last acts is a monologue;
and, in a country like America, which is accustomed to rapidity of
thought and action, Irving was courageous in risking the result of
so serious a strain upon the mind of a highly strung audience. The
experiment, however, was entirely a triumph, notwithstanding the
previously-mentioned discomforts attending an overcrowded house, and
the rain that stormed without.