I allude of course in particular here to the aesthetic clue in general,
with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled,
without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such
rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us,
involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, for
my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre
for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly
dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half
explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was
perceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether
definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we
gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange
and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so
little native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American and
English had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d'Ete, the
Cirque d'Hiver, the Theatre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted--we
had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a
safety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it,
the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous
_feerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes,
into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I
recall Le Diable d'Argent as in particular a radiant revelation--kept
before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which
was quite right for the _donnee_, the gradual shrinkage of the Shining
One, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive
degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has
originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at
last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw
through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man,
however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn't in the least
been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever
this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a
much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the
Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come
in for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of
the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the
richest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised that
braver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public,
forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive,
but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still in
the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had
withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we
missed Dejazet and Frederic Lemaitre and Melingue and Samson; to say
nothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood that
actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and
polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave
Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption of
judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and
actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain.
I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art--no
particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier
and rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a _spectacle coupe_,
with Mesdames Rose Cheri, Melanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards
Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my
brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial
Madame de Girardin's Une Femme qui Deteste son Mari; the thrilling
story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist
husband, during the Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions,
represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the
more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almost
greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a
secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a
fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture
is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's
_tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the
invading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but
successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her
husband's mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in the
secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone
with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and
who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her,
in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One's sense
of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for
others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Cheri's fine play just as I
trust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd and
positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging
forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs of
produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of
the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence
of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old
dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's
company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce
qui Plait aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success,
but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible,
I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than
Mademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rival
lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please
her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fete, a little play within a
play, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of an
attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just
in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being
ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a
prowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which so
pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted
young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens
for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which
flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most
is the exercise of charity.
Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage,
Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later
generations, to the Theatre Francais, the span of whose career thus
strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in
the small _feerie_ or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She has
been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and still
indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however,
pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire
Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given
all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when
she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--not
less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as a
bridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of
melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of
modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the
old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material
resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and
such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given
various other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was the
quality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personal
resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which
almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere
starved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, a
more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more and
more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so
much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ the
picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the
play from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with our
immediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does half
the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the
maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and
sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short
an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old
masterful _assouplissement_ of its victims--who were not the expert
spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material
suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only
material, they found the aesthetic reward, the critical relish of the
essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of
large application. Everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in
the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and
futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly
impatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at
the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger
on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical
torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add
to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness
of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till
modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its
counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious
prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic
and melodramatic "output." It _paid_ apparently, in the golden age of
acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--since
to assume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (for
which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the
patience of the public. With the public the _actors_ were, according to
their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as
in the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laid
on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the
parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; not
least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All of
which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth,
the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity--intensity
worthy of the name--at once. The intensity of the golden age of the
histrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. The intensity of our
period is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add even
that of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind of
that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it
would appear that you have absolutely to choose.