LADY MACBETH.
Contemporaneous critics are unanimous in declaring Lady Macbeth to be
Mrs. Siddons’s finest impersonation, and it is with this _rôle_ that
we always connect the Great Actress. She made the part her own, and
identified herself with it in the memories of all who saw her. It is
essentially in Lady Macbeth that Shakespeare proves himself so thoroughly
Anglo-Saxon; the whole conception of the person is Teutonic. The idea
of the remorse-haunted murderess, with her despairing fatalism and
unswerving ambition, is more nearly allied to “Vala,” in the Scandinavian
mythology, than anything in the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides, and
this it is that rendered Mrs. Siddons so perfect an embodiment of the
character. She was essentially Teutonic in her grandeur, her stateliness,
and, at the same time, sustained energy and vitality. Rachel had moments
of superhuman grandeur and ferocity, but they only flashed for a moment;
hers was the turning-point of passion of the Latin race, but not the
voluminous grandeur, gaining strength, like a mighty river, as it rolls
along, which distinguishes the heroic emotions of the Teuton.
In studying the annals of genius, it is interesting to observe how
circumstances working from within force it on and bring it to completion,
how circumstances working from without mould it into form, tempering the
fine metal until it is supple and adaptable, but breaking the inferior
metal by the sheer weight of their inexorable pressure.
Had Mrs. Siddons remained the brilliant, beautiful girl, with life
undimmed by clouds, without experience of the bitterness and sorrow
of life, she never could have acted Lady Macbeth. In her impetuous
indignation at first, she herself said that never again would “she
present herself before that audience that had treated her so savagely”;
but the greater spirit within reasserted itself, and her genius emerged
from the trial strengthened and expanded by a larger range of emotion and
experience.
With her increased knowledge of life, the actress was enabled to form
a more vivid conception of the character. She was naturally intensely
masterful, determined, and ambitious, undaunted in peril. She had
toiled, and attained the highest point of her ambition. She had known
the incentives of distinction, worldly power, applause, yet she remained
a woman, passionate and wayward in her affections to the last; and this
is the view, seen through the medium of her own character, that she took
of Lady Macbeth, and it was through her lofty impersonation of ambition
in its highest and most sublimated form that she moved her audience to
terror, and by this womanly tenderness that she moved them to sympathy
and pity for the murderess of Banquo.
Mrs. Siddons had studied the part of Lady Macbeth when little more than a
girl. She gives us a graphic account of the first time she learnt it for
the purposes of stage representation:—
“It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic
care and business were over. On the night preceding that in which I
was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up as
usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of
Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon
accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many
others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words
into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development
of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my
imagination. But to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in the
silence of the night (a night I never can forget), till I came to the
assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that
made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and
hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk,
and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to
my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last
I reached my chamber, where I found my husband fast asleep. I clapt my
candlestick down upon the table, without the power of putting the candle
out, and I threw myself on my bed without daring to stay even to take
off my clothes. At peep of day I rose to resume my task; but so little
did I know of my part when I appeared in it at night, that my shame and
confusion cured me of procrastinating my business for the remainder of my
life.”
People afterwards were inclined to find her formal and sententious, and
even denied her sensibility off the stage; but it is impossible to read
the account of the manner in which she entered into her parts, and how
they took hold of her in her early days of work, without feeling that she
had depths of pathos and sympathy in her disposition undreamt of by those
who met her later when, under a dignified tragic manner, she had hidden
her youthful spontaneity of feeling. We have only need of the evidence of
the actors she acted with to see how deeply she entered into her part.
Miss Kelly said that when, as Constance, Mrs. Siddons wept over her,
her collar was wet with her tears. Tom Davies is said to have declared
that in the third act of the _Fair Penitent_ she “turned pale under her
rouge.” She tells us herself that “when called upon to personate the
character of Constance, I never, from the beginning of the play to the
end of my part in it, once suffered my dressing-room door to be closed,
in order that my attention might be constantly fixed on those distressing
events which, by this means, I could plainly hear going on upon the
stage, the terrible effects of which progress were to be represented by
me. Moreover, I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to
hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they
enter the gates of Angiers to ratify the contract of marriage between the
Dauphin and the Lady Blanche, because the sickening sounds of that march
would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed
confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of
maternal affection to gush into my eyes.”
As a set-off against the above statement, we have Cumberland’s
description of Mrs. Siddons coming off the stage in the full flush of
triumph—having harrowed her audience with emotion—and walking up to the
mirror in the green room to survey herself with perfect composure.
We imagine there is no law to be laid down on the subject of the amount
of feeling an actor really puts into the part he is enacting. It must
vary. Conventionality must, with the greatest of them, now and then take
the place of emotion; or, as Talma expresses it, the “_Métier_ must now
and then take the place of _Le vrai_.”
We know the story of how once, when Garrick was playing King Lear,
Johnson and Murphy kept up an animated conversation at the side-wing
during one of his most important scenes. When Garrick came over the
stage, he said, “You two talk so loud you destroy all my feelings.”
“Prithee,” replied Johnson, “do not talk of feelings; Punch has no
feeling”—a remark which is borne out by another account of Garrick as
Lear rising from the dead body of his daughter Cordelia, where he had
been convulsing the audience with sobs, running into the green-room
gobbling like a turkey to amuse Kitty Clive and Mrs. Abington.
Mrs. Siddons is said to have made the statement that, after playing the
part of Lady Macbeth for thirty years, she never read it over without
discovering in it something new. In her _Remarks_, however, on the
character, left amongst her memoranda, we do not find any particular
depth or originality in her conception, and we doubt if she ever improved
much on her first ideal. As to her notion that Lady Macbeth was a
small, fair, blue-eyed woman, delicate and fragile, it could have been
but a “caprice” of later days, originating in her endeavour to find new
readings and impressions.
A short analysis of some of her opinions on the character may be
interesting.
“In this astonishing creature,” she says, “one sees a woman in
whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the
characteristics of human nature; in whose composition are associated all
the subjugating powers of intellect, and all the charms and graces of
personal beauty. You will probably not agree with me as to the character
of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion will be entirely
attributable to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging itself
from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been
so long accustomed to contemplate. According to my notion, it is of that
character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating
to the other sex—fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile—
Fair as the forms that, wove in Fancy’s loom,
Float in light visions round the poet’s head.
“Such a combination only—respectable in energy and strength of mind, and
captivating in feminine loveliness—could have composed a charm of such
potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character
so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth, to seduce him to brave all the
dangers of the present and all the terrors of a future world; and we are
constrained, even whilst we abhor his crimes, to pity the infatuated
victim of such a thraldom.
“His letters, which have informed her of the predictions of those
preternatural beings who accosted him on the heath, have lighted up
into daring and desperate determinations all those pernicious slumbering
fires which the enemy of man is ever watchful to awaken in the bosoms
of his unwary victims. To his direful suggestions she is so far from
offering the least opposition, as not only to yield up her soul to them,
but, moreover, to invoke the sightless ministers of remorseful cruelty
to extinguish in her breast all those compunctious visitings of nature
which otherwise might have been mercifully interposed to counteract, and,
perhaps, eventually to overcome, their unholy instigations. But, having
impiously delivered herself up to the excitement of hell, the pitifulness
of heaven itself is withdrawn from her, and she is abandoned to the
guidance of the demons whom she invoked. Lady Macbeth, thus adorned with
every fascination of mind and person, enters for the first time, reading
a part of those portentous letters from her husband.
“‘They met me in the day of success; and I have learnt by the perfectest
report they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burnt with
desire to question them further, they made themselves into thin air,
into which they vanished. Whilst I stood wrapt in the wonder of it, came
missives from the King, who all-hailed me “Thane of Cawdor,” by which
title before these sisters had saluted me, and referred me to the coming
on of time with “Hail, King that shall be!” This I have thought good
to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightest
not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is
promised. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.’
“Now vaulting ambition and intrepid daring, rekindle in a moment all the
splendours of her dark blue eyes. She fatally resolves that Glamis and
Cawdor shall be also that which the mysterious agents of the Evil One
have promised.”
Lady Macbeth then gives the wonderful analysis of her husband’s
character, “Yet I do fear thy nature is too full of the milk of human
kindness to catch the nearest way”; proving him to be of a temper so
irresolute as to require “all the efforts, all the excitement, which her
uncontrollable spirit and her unbounded influence over him can perform.”
“When Macbeth appears, she seems so insensible to everything but the
horrible design which has probably been suggested to her by his letters,
as to have entirely forgotten both the one and the other. It is very
remarkable that Macbeth is frequent in expressions of tenderness to his
wife, while she never betrays one symptom of affection towards him, till,
in the fiery furnace of affliction, her iron heart is melted down to
softness.” This was the side by which Mrs. Siddons had taken such a grasp
of the character of Lady Macbeth. It was by bringing into prominence this
softer side of her character that, while thrilling her audience with
horror, she at the same time brought tears to their eyes with an immense
awe-struck pity. She always held their interest by the human touches
which she brought into as much prominence as possible.
Alluding to the lines:—
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,
she says: “Even here, horrified as she is, she shows herself made by
ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of
such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades
one unequivocally that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of
a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the
most enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its
perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that
guilt could use. It is only in soliloquy that she invokes the powers of
hell to unsex her. To her husband she avows, and the naturalness of her
language makes us believe her, that she had felt the instinct of filial
as well as maternal love. But she makes her very virtues the means of a
taunt to her lord: ‘You have the milk of human kindness in your heart,’
she says (in substance) to him, ‘but ambition, which is my ruling
passion, would be also yours if you had courage. With a hankering desire
to suppress, if you could, all your weaknesses of sympathy, you are too
cowardly to will the deed, and can only dare to wish it. You speak of
sympathies and feelings. I, too, have felt with a tenderness which your
sex cannot know; but I am resolute in my ambition to trample on all that
obstructs my way to a crown. Look to me, and be ashamed of your weakness.”
“In the tremendous suspense of these moments” (when Duncan sleeps), Mrs.
Siddons again tells us, “while she recollects her habitual humanity, one
trait of tender feelings is expressed: ‘Had he not resembled my father as
he slept, I had done it.’”
Through many pages Mrs. Siddons thus gives us her views of the character
of Lady Macbeth; sometimes verging on a pomposity that is almost
Johnsonese. Her later criticisms of the parts in which she acted,
bear out the statement that hers was not an intellectual power that
strengthened or expanded after the “middle of the road of life.” This
year, 1785, saw her great triumph. But we doubt if she had not already
mastered the idea of chilling and terrifying her audience when, as
she describes, she worked herself into a paroxysm of terror on first
studying the part as a young girl. The physical power and confidence to
communicate that terror were hers now, but the intellectual comprehension
had been there before, and certainly did not increase; on the contrary,
it deteriorated with years. The power of fresh comprehension passed away,
and with it the elasticity and variety of her earlier effects; and from
being singularly simple and direct, she became stagey and artificial. An
artist gets certain words to utter; he gets the skeleton sketch, as it
were, of the character he has to portray, but the emphasis and passion
he puts into them, which go direct from his heart to the heart of his
audience, must be his, and his alone, and must be as little as possible
the effect of study or deliberation. Thus the ingredients of terror,
ambition, and wifely and maternal love, were the uncomplex emotions at
first impressed on Mrs. Siddons’s brain by the study of the part; and
those were the predominating influences by which she swayed her audience
to the last day she acted it.
Many are the records that we have of this great performance—all the world
has heard of the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons—but, alas! how insufficient
are they to give us an idea of the wondrous reality. The weird-like
tones, that sent an involuntary shudder through the house; the bewildered
melancholy; and, lastly, the piteous cry of the strong heart broken,
have come down to us as traditions; but the grandeur of her majesty, the
earnest accents as the demon of the character took possession of her,
must ever remain an unknown sensation to us. One who saw her once act it
from the side scenes, with the disillusion of red ochre, that was daubed
on by her maid under his eyes; her whisper, which Christopher North
eloquently termed “the escaping sighs and moans of the bared soul”; her
face, the terrible mixture of hope, apprehension, and resolution, gave
him a sickly feeling of reality. His tongue clave to the roof of his
mouth, in spite of the evidence of his eyes that the assassination was a
piece of mechanical trickery in which the paint-pot played a conspicuous
part. If a detective had made his appearance at the moment, he declares
he would immediately have given himself up as _particeps criminis_,
accessory before and after the event. The whole fiction, so inimitably
played and so powerfully described, had kicked fact and reason off the
throne.
But we must return to the first night. It was the 2nd of February. All
the intellect and fashion of the town were present: Burke, Fox, Wyndham,
Gibbon, in the front row, and, above all, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who took
a particular interest in her performance of the character. He had a
seat in the orchestra, where he was privileged to sit on account of his
deafness. He had constantly urged her to act Lady Macbeth before, and had
designed her dress for the sleep-walking scene. Needless to say that her
usual nervousness was magnified tenfold. All had declared her incapable
of rendering the grander plays of Shakespeare. She had reached, they
maintained, the highest point which she was capable of attaining, and her
straining higher was simply presumption. She knew, therefore, that if
she had been criticised before, the observations now would be much more
severe. The representation of the other parts also did not satisfy her.
Smith, popularly known as “Gentleman Smith” because he generally did the
light and airy part of lover in comedy parts, was the Macbeth, Brereton
the Macduff, and Bensley the Banquo; and the memory of the popularity of
Mrs. Pritchard in the part, seemed to stand between her and her audience.
She had already begged Dr. Johnson to let her know his opinion of Mrs.
Pritchard, whom she had never seen, and she tells us in her _Autograph
Recollections_ that he answered:—
“‘Madam, she was a vulgar idiot; she used to speak of her “gownd,” and
she never read any part in a play in which she acted except her own.
She no more thought of the play out of which her part was taken than
a shoemaker thinks of the skin out of which the piece of leather of
which he is making a pair of shoes is cut.’ Is it possible, thought
I, that Mrs. Pritchard, the greatest of all the Lady Macbeths, should
never have read the play? and I concluded that the Doctor must have
been misinformed; but I was afterwards assured by a gentleman, a friend
of Mrs. Pritchard, that he had supped with her one night after she had
acted Lady Macbeth, and that she declared she had never perused the whole
tragedy. I cannot believe it.”
It would seem difficult to such a worker as Mrs. Siddons to conceive the
possibility of a woman not mastering the whole play if she had to act the
part of Lady Macbeth, but we think Dr. Johnson must have been too severe
when he called an actress who for years had held the stage with Garrick
“a vulgar idiot.” And there is little doubt that the tradition of her
acting in the part of Lady Macbeth still had a firm hold on the memory
of the audience. As a proof of this we will here quote an incident that
occurred the first night:—
“Just as I had finished my toilette, and was pondering with fearfulness
my first appearance in the grand fiendish part, comes Mr. Sheridan
knocking at my door, and insisting, in spite of all my entreaties not to
be interrupted at this tremendous moment, to be admitted. He would not be
denied admittance, for he protested he must speak to me on a circumstance
which so deeply concerned my own interest, that it was of the most
serious nature. Well, after much squabbling I was compelled to admit him,
that I might dismiss him the sooner, and compose myself before the play
began.
“But what was my distress and astonishment when I found that he wanted
me, even at this moment of anxiety and terror, to adopt another mode of
acting the sleeping scene! He told me that he had heard with the greatest
surprise and concern that I meant to act it without holding the candle
in my hand; and when I argued the impracticability of washing out that
‘damned spot’ that was certainly implied by both her own words and those
of her gentlewoman, he insisted that if I did put the candle out of my
hand it would be thought a presumptuous innovation, as Mrs. Pritchard
had always retained it in hers. My mind, however, was made up, and it
was then too late to make me alter it, for I was too agitated to adopt
another method. My deference for Mr. Sheridan’s taste and judgment was,
however, so great, that, had he proposed the alteration whilst it was
possible for me to change my own plan, I should have yielded to his
suggestion; though even then it would have been against my own opinion,
and my observation of the accuracy with which somnambulists perform all
the acts of waking persons.
“The scene, of course, was acted as I had myself conceived it, and the
innovation, as Mr. Sheridan called it, was received with approbation.
Mr. Sheridan himself came to me after the play, and most ingenuously
congratulated me on my obstinacy.”
Let us try to recall the vision of Mrs. Siddons as she acted Lady Macbeth
that night. It was in 1785. She was thirty years of age. The “timid
tottering girl,” who had first appeared as Portia on that stage, was now
a queenly woman, in the full meridian of her stately beauty. Success had
developed her intellectually and physically, and she walked the stage in
the plenitude of her power, almost like some superhuman being.
Her dress in the first and second acts was a heavy black robe, with a
broad border, which ran from her shoulders down to her feet, of the
most vivid crimson, over which fell a long white veil. In the third she
changed this costume for another black dress, with great gold bands
lacing it across, and gold ornaments round her neck and in her hair. Both
of these dresses strike us as being “stagey,” but she never had the art
of dressing herself; so great, however, was her power, that all minor
accessories of dress and scenery were forgotten. For the sleep-walking
scene Sir Joshua had designed clouds of white drapery swathing the pale
drawn face; they lent an appalling weirdness to her appearance, whilst
the glassy stare she managed to throw into her eyes completed the horror.
The audience were spellbound; they only saw that woe-worn face, and heard
that voice, broken with agony and remorse. It was a night of nights,
for her and them, and yet no applause, no success, turned her from
concentration on the purpose and issue of her art.
“While standing up before my glass,” she tells us, “and taking off my
mantle, a diverting circumstance occurred to chase away the feelings of
the anxious night, for, _while I was repeating, and endeavouring to call
to mind the appropriate tone and action to the following words_, ‘Here’s
the smell of blood still,’ my dresser innocently exclaimed, ‘Dear me,
Ma’am, how very hysterical you are to-night! I protest and vow, Ma’am, it
was not blood, but rose-pink and water; for I saw the property-man mix it
up with my own eyes.’”
These were, indeed, the palmy days of the English stage. With a
self-collected, courageous energy, artists then saw and recognised
the greatest, and strained every nerve to attain it. Scenic effect
was of minor importance; the development of mental action, the
portrayal of passion, were the end and aim of the actor’s art, to which
everything else was subsidiary. They spent years upon the evolving of
one heroic conception, not with regard to its details of upholstery
and scene-painting, but with regard to the presentment of the poet’s
imagination which they undertook to represent.