Two little books by Mrs. A. Kennard--contributions to the ‘Eminent
Women’ series--give with much tact and grace of treatment all that
the ordinary reader, if not quite all the special student, needs to
know about the two great tragic actresses of England and of France.
With regard to both, the special student may ask, perhaps, for more
of theatrical criticism, for an analysis more elaborate of that which
was accomplished in sight of the public, by the two famous artists.
Yet, as regards Sarah Siddons--a tragedian removed from us now by the
space of three generations--there may well have been difficulties.
Rachel, of course, lived in a period of criticism more diffuse and
systematic; Jules Janin filling, in her day, to some extent, the place
since filled by Vitu and Sarcey; and, indeed, the published records
of her performances, though scattered, are elaborate and abundant.
Turning from the public achievement to the private character, little
else remains to be told of Mrs. Siddons; but of Rachel there might
have been produced many a scandalous chronicle. Wrong from one point of
view, Mrs. Kennard, in this matter, was certainly right from another.
Of the ‘Dichtung’ and the ‘Wahrheit,’ which meet in the life of the
artist, she has taken, in some respects, chiefly the ‘Dichtung.’ ‘We
have tried,’ she says herself, in her preface, ‘to extract the poetry
and romance there is to be found in this life, rejecting what is base
and unworthy.’ Nor must it, after all, be supposed that in Rachel’s
life--outside her art--all was unworthy or base. Always she was a
dutiful daughter; always a devoted mother; sometimes a generous, and
once or twice a constant, friend. But her life was a fever. And, in her
maddened demand for excitement, it ran its course rapidly.
How different all this matter was with Mrs. Siddons! Rachel was a
Jewess, born in an inn in Switzerland, and bred in France; a Bohemian
who, after twenty-four hours of enforced respectability at Windsor,
‘_avait besoin de s’encanailler_’--thirsted to be a cad again. Mrs.
Siddons was an Englishwoman; even the Irish blood, not quite absent
from her veins, was without influence on her personal life--we are far
from saying it did not prompt her to be an artist. And not only was
she an Englishwoman; she was a Kemble besides, and rigid self-control
was the very watchword of the Kembles, in art and life. We are told
she had ‘the gift of tears.’ It may be. Certainly she roused in others
pity and passion. But when one recognises this, one may remember, too,
how the methods acceptable to one age may be ineffective in another.
Mrs. Siddons’s epoch was the epoch of the acceptability of Claude’s
and David’s art. It was the age of firm contour in draughtsmanship,
of composition in painting, of deportment in manners. In manhood,
the age admired as ideal what Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards,
only unwittingly burlesqued. The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of
Rachel would speak to us to-day. Rachel gave to the most artificial
of tragedy--to the tragedy which was ‘so Greek’ to its admirers, so
full of Louis xiv. to ourselves--that truth which Desclée, after
her, bestowed upon an incident in the Avenue du Roi de Rome--upon
a passion of this morning. Should we be equally sensible to the
favourite effects of Mrs. Siddons? Should we--who have passed not only
through Romanticism, but into Naturalism, since her day--be impressed,
genuinely or profoundly, by her Lady Macbeth, her Hermione?
As regards the outer life of the two women--Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’
and the Phèdre whom even Sarah Bernhardt, who has so much in common
with her, has not been able to surpass--it was, as may be expected,
essentially different. Mrs. Kennard owes something, but cannot owe very
much, to the _Life_ of Mrs. Siddons by Campbell, the inefficient friend
of her later years, to whom she bequeathed her memoranda, letters, and
diary. Boaden’s _Life_, of which Crabb Robinson spoke as ‘one of the
most worthless books of biography in existence,’ cannot have helped
Mrs. Kennard much more; but she acknowledges handsomely her obligations
to Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. About Rachel a whole literature has been
written; yet much of it is hardly serviceable. At least one biography
is avowedly hostile. Arsène Houssaye does not mean to be ill-natured,
but will at all costs be amusing. Jules Janin--a man of words, so much
more than of thoughts--is hopelessly fluent. He betrays the essential
worthlessness of the mere ready writer.
On the whole, perhaps, it is the letters of Rachel that are the truest
guide. Letters to her parents, to her sister, to her friends--if
not to her lovers--to her master, Samson, on the conditions and the
problems of her work--letters of gratitude, letters of regret, letters
making a small gift, though refusing a great loan--these things build
up gradually, on a pretty sure foundation, the edifice of Rachel’s
character, as it is fitting that we should see it. Rachel’s life
was in the Present. After excitement, was to come, not rest, but
_le néant_. She acted in bad health as in good, chiefly to satisfy
one of the deepest needs of her nature, reckless what might follow.
Mrs. Siddons, when youth and impulse had left her, dragged herself
somewhat unwillingly from town to town, to repair the losses of her
husband--the honest and somewhat incapable gentleman who sought a
refuge for rheumatism at Bath--and she undertook yet another round of
engagements in order that she might provide herself with a carriage on
her retirement: ‘a carriage, now become a necessity.’
As regards the society the two women cultivated and enjoyed, Mrs.
Siddons liked the intellectual and ‘the great world,’ and visited it
as its equal. But Rachel, in her loftiest social flights, was not so
much an artist as a show. Exhibited to the mighty, and encouraged by
them, and bound to behave herself in their presence--for the success of
eccentricity had not then been established--she was really most at home
with a few Bohemians, and with her kith and kin who lived on her. Mrs.
Siddons cared for the stage much more than did Fanny Kemble. She had
for it a respect which was wanting, it would seem, even in Macready’s
feeling for it; yet, in a measure, she acted to live, rather than lived
to act. Rachel--with the capacity for unnamed odiousness, and supported
in her private life by no fine example and no noble tradition--did yet,
in the main, live for the practice of her art; though its practice can
hardly have been furthered by her moral deterioration, and the chaos of
her later days.
(_Academy_, 3rd September 1887.)