On their arrival at the theatre armed with Miss Bretherton's order, Mrs.
Stuart's party found themselves shown into a large roomy box close to the
stage--too close, indeed, for purposes of seeing well. The house was
already crowded, and Kendal noticed, as he scanned the stalls and boxes
through his opera-glass, that it contained a considerable sprinkling of
notabilities of various kinds. It was a large new theatre, which hitherto
had enjoyed but a very moderate share of popular favour, so that the
brilliant and eager crowd with which it was now filled was in itself a
sufficient testimony to the success of the actress who had wrought so
great a transformation.
'What an experience this is for a girl of twenty-one,' whispered Kendal
to Mrs. Stuart, who was comfortably settled in the farther corner of the
box, her small dainty figure set off by the crimson curtains behind it.
'One would think that an actor's life must stir the very depths of a man
or woman's individuality, that it must call every power into action, and
strike sparks out of the dullest.'
'Yes; but how seldom it is so!'
'Well, in England, at any rate, the fact is, their training is so
imperfect they daren't let themselves go. It's only when a man possesses
the lower secrets of his art perfectly that he can aim at the higher. But
the band is nearly through the overture. Just tell me before the curtain
goes up something about the play. I have only very vague ideas about it.
The scene is laid at Berlin?'
'Yes; in the Altes Schloss at Berlin. The story is based upon the legend
of the White Lady.'
'What? the warning phantom of the Hohenzollerns?'
Mrs. Stuart nodded. 'A Crown-Prince of Prussia is in love with the
beautiful Countess Hilda von Weissenstein. Reasons of State, however,
oblige him to throw her over and to take steps towards marriage with a
Princess of Würtemberg. They have just been betrothed when the Countess,
mad with jealousy, plays the part of the White Lady and appears to the
Princess, to try and terrify her out of the proposed marriage.'
'And the Countess is Miss Bretherton?'
'Yes. Of course the malicious people say that her get-up as the White
Lady is really the _raison d'etre_ of the piece. But hush! there is the
signal. Make up your mind to be bored by the Princess; she is one of the
worst sticks I ever saw!'
The first scene represented the ballroom at the Schloss, or rather the
royal anteroom, beyond which the vista of the ballroom opened. The
Prussian and Würtemberg royalties had not yet arrived, with the exception
of the Prince Wilhelm, on whose matrimonial prospects the play was to
turn. He was engaged in explaining the situation to his friend, Waldemar
von Rothenfels, the difficulties in which he was placed, his passion for
the Countess Hilda, the political necessities which forced him to marry a
daughter of the House of Würtemberg, the pressure brought to bear upon
him by his parents, and his own despair at having to break the news to
the Countess.
The story is broken off by the arrival of the royalties, including the
pink-and-white maiden who is to be Prince Wilhelm's fate, and the royal
quadrille begins. The Prince leads his Princess to her place, when it is
discovered that another lady is required to complete the figure, and an
_aide-de-camp_ is despatched into the ballroom to fetch one. He returns,
ushering in the beautiful Hilda von Weissenstein.
For this moment the audience had been impatiently waiting, and when the
dazzling figure in its trailing, pearl-embroidered robes appeared in the
doorway of the ballroom, a storm of applause broke forth again and again,
and for some minutes delayed the progress of the scene.
Nothing, indeed, could have been better calculated than this opening to
display the peculiar gifts of the actress. The quadrille was a stately
spectacular display, in which splendid dress and stirring music and the
effects of rhythmic motion had been brought freely into play for the
delight of the beholders. Between the figures there was a little
skilfully-managed action, mostly in dumb show. The movements of the
jealous beauty and of her faithless lover were invested throughout with
sufficient dramatic meaning to keep up the thread of the play. But it was
not the dramatic aspect of the scene for which the audience cared, it was
simply for the display which it made possible of Isabel Bretherton's
youth and grace and loveliness. They hung upon her every movement, and
Kendal found himself following her with the same eagerness of eye as
those about him, lest any phase of that embodied poetry should escape
him.
In this introductory scene, the elements which went to make up the spell
she exercised over her audience were perfectly distinguishable. Kendal's
explanation of it to himself was that it was based upon an exceptional
natural endowment of physical perfection, informed and spiritualised by
certain moral qualities, by simplicity, frankness, truth of nature. There
was a kind of effluence of youth, of purity, of strength, about her which
it was impossible not to feel, and which evidently roused the
enthusiastic sympathy of the great majority of those who saw her.
Forbes was sitting in the front of the box with Mrs. Stuart, his shaggy
gray head and keen lined face attracting considerable attention in their
neighbourhood. He was in his most expansive mood; the combativeness of an
hour before had disappeared, and the ardent susceptible temperament of
the man was absorbed in admiration, in the mere sensuous artist's delight
in a stirring and beautiful series of impressions. When the white dress
disappeared through the doorway of the ballroom, he followed it with a
sigh of regret, and during the scene which followed between the Prince
and his intended bride, he hardly looked at the stage. The Princess,
indeed, was all that Mrs. Stuart had pronounced her to be; she was
stiffer and clumsier than even her Teutonic _rôle_ could justify, and she
marched laboriously through her very proper and virtuous speeches,
evidently driven on by an uneasy consciousness that the audience was only
eager to come to the end of them and of her.
In the little pause which followed the disappearance of the
newly-betrothed pair into the distant ballroom, Mrs. Stuart leant
backward over her chair and said to Kendal:
'Now then, Mr. Kendal, prepare your criticisms! In the scene which is
just coming Miss Bretherton has a good deal more to do than to look
pretty!'
'Oh, but you forget our compact!' said Kendal. 'Remember you are to be
the judge of our behaviour at the end. It is not the part of a judge to
tempt those on whom he is to deliver judgment to crime.'
'Don't put too much violence on yourselves!' said Mrs. Stuart, laughing.
'You and Edward can have the back of the box to talk what heresy you like
in, so long as you let Mr. Forbes perform his devotions undisturbed.'
At this Forbes half turned round, and shook his great mane, under which
gleamed a countenance of comedy menace, at the two men behind him. But in
another instant the tones of Isabel Bretherton's voice riveted his
attention, and the eyes of all those in the box were once more turned
towards the stage.
The scene which followed was one of the most meritorious passages in the
rather heavy German play from which the _White Lady_ had been adapted. It
was intended to show the romantic and passionate character of the
Countess, and to suggest that vein of extravagance and daring in her
which was the explanation of the subsequent acts. In the original the
dialogue had a certain German force and intensity, which lost nothing of
its occasional heaviness in the mouth of Hawes, the large-boned
swaggering personage who played the Prince. An actress with sufficient
force of feeling, and an artistic sense subtle enough to suggest to her
the necessary modulations, could have made a great mark in it. But the
first words, almost, revealed Isabel Bretherton's limitations, and before
two minutes were over Kendal was conscious of a complete collapse of that
sympathetic relation between him and the actress which the first scene
had produced. In another sentence or two the spell had been irrevocably
broken, and he seemed to himself to have passed from a state of
sensitiveness to all that was exquisite and rare in her to a state of
mere irritable consciousness of her defects. It was evident to him that
in a scene of great capabilities she never once rose beyond the tricks of
an elementary elocution, that her violence had a touch of commonness in
it which was almost vulgarity, and that even her attitudes had lost half
their charm. For, in the effort--the conscious and laboured effort of
acting--her movements, which had exercised such an enchantment over him
in the first scene, had become mere strides and rushes, never indeed
without grace, but often without dignity, and at all times lacking in
that consistency, that unity of plan which is the soul of art.
The sense of chill and disillusion was extremely disagreeable to him,
and, by the time the scene was half-way through, he had almost ceased to
watch her. Edward Wallace, who had seen her some two or three times in
the part, was perfectly conscious of the change, and had been looking out
for it.
'Not much to be said for her, I am afraid, when she comes to business,'
he said to Kendal in a whisper, as the two leant against the door of the
box. 'Where did she get those tiresome tricks she has, that see-saw
intonation she puts on when she wants to be pathetic, and that absurd
restlessness which spoils everything? It's a terrible pity. Sometimes I
think I catch a gleam of some original power at the bottom, but there is
such a lack of intelligence--in the artist's sense. It is a striking
instance of how much and how little can be done without education.'
'It is curiously bad, certainly,' said Kendal, while the actress's
denunciations of her lover were still ringing through the theatre. 'But
look at the house! What folly it is ever to expect a great dramatic art
in England. We have no sense for the rudiments of the thing. The French
would no more tolerate such acting as this because of the beauty of the
actress than they would judge a picture by its frame. However, if men
like Forbes leave their judgment behind them, it's no wonder if commoner
mortals follow suit.'
'There!' said Wallace, with a sigh of relief as the curtain fell on the
first act, 'that's done with. There are two or three things in the second
act that are beautiful. In her first appearance as the White Lady she is
as wonderful as ever, but the third act is a nuisance--'
'No whispering there,' said Forbes, looking round upon them. 'Oh, I know
what you're after, Edward, perfectly. I hear it all with one ear.'
'That,' said Wallace, moving up to him, 'is physically impossible. Don't
be so pugnacious. We leave you the front of the box, and when we appear
in your territory our mouths are closed. But in our own domain we claim
the rights of free men.'
'Poor girl!' said Forbes, with a sigh. 'How she manages to tame London as
she does is a marvel to me! If she were a shade less perfect and
wonderful than she is, she would have been torn to pieces by you critics
long ago. You have done your best as it is, only the public won't listen
to you. Oh, don't suppose I don't see all that you see. The critical
poison's in my veins just as it is in yours, but I hold it in check--it
shan't master me. I will have my pleasure in spite of it, and when I come
across anything in life that makes me _feel_, I will protect my feeling
from it with all my might.'
'We are dumb,' said Kendal, with a smile; 'otherwise I would pedantically
ask you to consider what are the feelings to which the dramatic art
properly and legitimately appeals.'
'Oh, hang your dramatic art,' said Forbes, firing up; 'can't you take
things simply and straightforwardly? She is there--she is doing her best
for you--there isn't a movement or a look which isn't as glorious as that
of a Diana come to earth, and you won't let it charm you and conquer you,
because she isn't into the bargain as confoundedly clever as you are
yourselves! Well, it's your loss, not hers.'
'My dear Mr. Forbes,' said Mrs. Stuart, with her little judicial
peace-making air, 'we shall all go away contented. You will have had your
sensation, they will have had their sense of superiority, and, as for me,
I shall get the best of it all round. For, while you are here, I see Miss
Bretherton with your eyes, and yet, as Edward will get hold of me on the
way home, I shan't go to bed without having experienced all the joys of
criticism! Oh! but now hush, and listen to this music. It is one of the
best things in the evening, and we shall have the White Lady directly.'
As she spoke, the orchestra, which was a good one, and perhaps the most
satisfactory feature in the performance, broke into some weird
Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had
been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the
castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and
masses of faintly gleaming steel. The scene which followed, in which the
Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the
Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who
behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of
driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror from the
castle and from Berlin, had been poetically conceived, and it furnished
Miss Bretherton with an admirable opportunity. As the White Lady, gliding
between rows of armed and spectral figures on either hand, and startling
the Princess and her companion by her sudden apparition in a gleam of
moonlight across the floor, she was once more the representative of all
that is most poetical and romantic in physical beauty. Nay, more than
this; as she flung her white arms above her head, or pointed to the
shrinking and fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing
traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested
with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and
violent scene with the Prince. It was as though she was in some sort
capable of expressing herself in action and movement, while in all the
arts of speech she was a mere crude novice. At any rate, there could be
no doubt that in this one scene she realised the utmost limits of the
author's ideal, and when she faded into the darkness beyond the moonlight
in which she had first appeared, the house, which had been breathlessly
silent during the progress of the apparition, burst into a roar of
applause, in which Wallace and Kendal heartily joined.
'Exquisite!' said Kendal in Mrs. Stuart's ear, as he stood behind her
chair. 'She was romance itself! Her acting should always be a kind of
glorified and poetical pantomime; she would be inimitable so.'
Mrs. Stuart looked up and smiled agreement. 'Yes, that scene lives with
one. If everything else in the play is poor, she is worth seeing for that
alone. _Remember it_!'
The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too
many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made. In the
great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has
to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of
the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a
force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the
Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition. In the two or three
fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress
showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same
powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker
and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term
'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of
long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald,
plain fact--the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her
lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was
evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all
technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air,
which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had
been of the poorest type. And in all other respects--when it came to
interpretation or creation--she was spoilt by her entire want of that
inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the
present. For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge: she
must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training--in
itself the outcome of a long tradition--or she must have the knowledge
which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought
and experience. Miss Bretherton had neither. She had extraordinary beauty
and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness. He
was not inclined to go so far as to call it 'power.' But this quickness,
which would have been promising in a _debutante_ less richly endowed on
the physical side, seemed to him to have no future in her. 'It will be
checked,' he said to himself, 'by her beauty and all that flows from it.
She must come to depend more and more on the physical charm, and on that
only. The whole pressure of her success is and will be that way.'
Miss Bretherton's inadequacy, indeed, became more and more visible as the
play was gradually and finely worked up to its climax in the last act. In
the final scene of all, the Prince, who by a series of accidents has
discovered the Countess Hilda's plans, lies in wait for her in the
armoury, where he has reason to know she means to try the effect of a
third and last apparition upon the Princess. She appears; he suddenly
confronts her; and, dragging her forward, unveils before himself and the
Princess the death-like features of his old love. Recovering from the
shock of detection, the Countess pours out upon them both a fury of
jealous passion, sinking by degrees into a pathetic, trance-like
invocation of the past, under the spell of which the Prince's anger melts
away, and the little Princess's terror and excitement change into eager
pity. Then, when she sees him almost reconquered, and her rival weeping
beside her, she takes the poison phial from her breast, drinks it, and
dies in the arms of the man for whose sake she has sacrificed beauty,
character, and life itself.
A great actress could hardly have wished for a better opportunity. The
scene was so obviously beyond Miss Bretherton's resources that even the
enthusiastic house, Kendal fancied, cooled down during the progress of
it. There were signs of restlessness, there was even a little talking in
some of the back rows, and at no time during the scene was there any of
that breathless absorption in what was passing on the stage which the
dramatic material itself amply deserved.
'I don't think this will last very long,' said Kendal in Wallace's ear.
'There is something tragic in a popularity like this; it rests on
something unsound, and one feels that disaster is not far off. The whole
thing impresses me most painfully. She has some capacity, of course; if
only the conditions had been different--if she had been born within a
hundred miles of the Paris Conservatoire, if her youth had been passed in
a society of more intellectual weight,--but, as it is, this very applause
is ominous, for the beauty must go sooner or later, and there is nothing
else.'
'You remember Desforêts in this same theatre last year in _Adrienne
Lecouvreur_?' said Wallace. 'What a gulf between the right thing and the
wrong! But come, we must do our duty;' and he drew Kendal forward towards
the front of the box, and they saw the whole house on its feet, clapping
and shouting, and the curtain just being drawn back to let the White Lady
and the Prince appear before it. She was very pale, but the storm of
applause which greeted her seemed to revive her, and she swept her
smiling glance round the theatre, until at last it rested with a special
gleam of recognition on the party in the box, especially on Forbes, who
was outdoing himself in enthusiasm. She was called forward again and
again, until at last the house was content, and the general exit began.
The instant after her white dress had disappeared from the stage, a
little page-boy knocked at the door of the box with a message that 'Miss
Bretherton begs that Mrs. Stuart and her friends will come and see her.'
Out they all trooped, along a narrow passage, and up a short staircase,
until a rough temporary door was thrown open, and they found themselves
in the wings, the great stage, on which the scenery was being hastily
shifted, lying to their right. The lights were being put out; only a few
gas-jets were left burning round a pillar, beside which stood Isabel
Bretherton, her long phantom dress lying in white folds about her, her
uncle and aunt and her manager standing near. Every detail of the
picture--the spot of brilliant light bounded on all sides by dim,
far-reaching vistas of shadow, the figures hurrying across the back of
the stage, the moving ghost-like workmen all around, and in the midst
that white-hooded, languid figure--revived in Kendal's memory whenever in
after days his thoughts went wandering back to the first moment of real
contact between his own personality and that of Isabel Bretherton.