THE distinguished artist whose name is prefixed to these remarks purposes
to leave England for a professional tour in the United States. A few
words from me, in reference to his merits as an actor, I hope may not be
uninteresting to some readers, in advance of his publicly proving them
before an American audience, and I know will not be unacceptable to my
intimate friend. I state at once that Mr. Fechter holds that relation
towards me; not only because it is the fact, but also because our
friendship originated in my public appreciation of him. I had studied
his acting closely, and had admired it highly, both in Paris and in
London, years before we exchanged a word. Consequently my appreciation
is not the result of personal regard, but personal regard has sprung out
of my appreciation.
The first quality observable in Mr. Fechter’s acting is, that it is in
the highest degree romantic. However elaborated in minute details, there
is always a peculiar dash and vigour in it, like the fresh atmosphere of
the story whereof it is a part. When he is on the stage, it seems to me
as though the story were transpiring before me for the first and last
time. Thus there is a fervour in his love-making—a suffusion of his
whole being with the rapture of his passion—that sheds a glory on its
object, and raises her, before the eyes of the audience, into the light
in which he sees her. It was this remarkable power that took Paris by
storm when he became famous in the lover’s part in the _Dame aux
Camélias_. It is a short part, really comprised in two scenes, but, as
he acted it (he was its original representative), it left its poetic and
exalting influence on the heroine throughout the play. A woman who could
be so loved—who could be so devotedly and romantically adored—had a hold
upon the general sympathy with which nothing less absorbing and complete
could have invested her. When I first saw this play and this actor, I
could not in forming my lenient judgment of the heroine, forget that she
had been the inspiration of a passion of which I had beheld such profound
and affecting marks. I said to myself, as a child might have said: “A
bad woman could not have been the object of that wonderful tenderness,
could not have so subdued that worshipping heart, could not have drawn
such tears from such a lover”. I am persuaded that the same effect was
wrought upon the Parisian audiences, both consciously and unconsciously,
to a very great extent, and that what was morally disagreeable in the
_Dame aux Camélias_ first got lost in this brilliant halo of romance. I
have seen the same play with the same part otherwise acted, and in exact
degree as the love became dull and earthy, the heroine descended from her
pedestal.
In Ruy Blas, in the Master of Ravenswood, and in the Lady of Lyons—three
dramas in which Mr. Fechter especially shines as a lover, but notably in
the first—this remarkable power of surrounding the beloved creature, in
the eyes of the audience, with the fascination that she has for him, is
strikingly displayed. That observer must be cold indeed who does not
feel, when Ruy Blas stands in the presence of the young unwedded Queen of
Spain, that the air is enchanted; or, when she bends over him, laying her
tender touch upon his bloody breast, that it is better so to die than to
live apart from her, and that she is worthy to be so died for. When the
Master of Ravenswood declares his love to Lucy Ashton, and she hers to
him, and when in a burst of rapture, he kisses the skirt of her dress, we
feel as though we touched it with our lips to stay our goddess from
soaring away into the very heavens. And when they plight their troth and
break the piece of gold, it is we—not Edgar—who quickly exchange our half
for the half she was about to hang about her neck, solely because the
latter has for an instant touched the bosom we so dearly love. Again, in
the Lady of Lyons: the picture on the easel in the poor cottage studio is
not the unfinished portrait of a vain and arrogant girl, but becomes the
sketch of a Soul’s high ambition and aspiration here and hereafter.
Picturesqueness is a quality above all others pervading Mr. Fechter’s
assumptions. Himself a skilled painter and sculptor, learned in the
history of costume, and informing those accomplishments and that
knowledge with a similar infusion of romance (for romance is inseparable
from the man), he is always a picture,—always a picture in its right
place in the group, always in true composition with the background of the
scene. For picturesqueness of manner, note so trivial a thing as the
turn of his hand in beckoning from a window, in Ruy Blas, to a personage
down in an outer courtyard to come up; or his assumption of the Duke’s
livery in the same scene; or his writing a letter from dictation. In the
last scene of Victor Hugo’s noble drama, his bearing becomes positively
inspired; and his sudden assumption of the attitude of the headsman, in
his denunciation of the Duke and threat to be his executioner, is, so far
as I know, one of the most ferociously picturesque things conceivable on
the stage.
The foregoing use of the word “ferociously” reminds me to remark that
this artist is a master of passionate vehemence; in which aspect he
appears to me to represent, perhaps more than in any other, an
interesting union of characteristics of two great nations,—the French and
the Anglo-Saxon. Born in London of a French mother, by a German father,
but reared entirely in England and in France, there is, in his fury, a
combination of French suddenness and impressibility with our more slowly
demonstrative Anglo-Saxon way when we get, as we say, “our blood up”,
that produces an intensely fiery result. The fusion of two races is in
it, and one cannot decidedly say that it belongs to either; but one can
most decidedly say that it belongs to a powerful concentration of human
passion and emotion, and to human nature.
Mr. Fechter has been in the main more accustomed to speak French than to
speak English, and therefore he speaks our language with a French accent.
But whosoever should suppose that he does not speak English fluently,
plainly, distinctly, and with a perfect understanding of the meaning,
weight, and value of every word, would be greatly mistaken. Not only is
his knowledge of English—extending to the most subtle idiom, or the most
recondite cant phrase—more extensive than that of many of us who have
English for our mother-tongue, but his delivery of Shakespeare’s blank
verse is remarkably facile, musical, and intelligent. To be in a sort of
pain for him, as one sometimes is for a foreigner speaking English, or to
be in any doubt of his having twenty synonymes at his tongue’s end if he
should want one, is out of the question after having been of his
audience.
A few words on two of his Shakespearian impersonations, and I shall have
indicated enough, in advance of Mr. Fechter’s presentation of himself.
That quality of picturesqueness, on which I have already laid stress, is
strikingly developed in his Iago, and yet it is so judiciously governed
that his Iago is not in the least picturesque according to the
conventional ways of frowning, sneering, diabolically grinning, and
elaborately doing everything else that would induce Othello to run him
through the body very early in the play. Mr. Fechter’s is the Iago who
could, and did, make friends, who could dissect his master’s soul,
without flourishing his scalpel as if it were a walking-stick, who could
overpower Emilia by other arts than a sign-of-the-Saracen’s-Head
grimness; who could be a boon companion without _ipso facto_ warning all
beholders off by the portentous phenomenon; who could sing a song and
clink a can naturally enough, and stab men really in the dark,—not in a
transparent notification of himself as going about seeking whom to stab.
Mr. Fechter’s Iago is no more in the conventional psychological mode than
in the conventional hussar pantaloons and boots; and you shall see the
picturesqueness of his wearing borne out in his bearing all through the
tragedy down to the moment when he becomes invincibly and consistently
dumb.
Perhaps no innovation in Art was ever accepted with so much favour by so
many intellectual persons pre-committed to, and preoccupied by, another
system, as Mr. Fechter’s Hamlet. I take this to have been the case (as
it unquestionably was in London), not because of its picturesqueness, not
because of its novelty, not because of its many scattered beauties, but
because of its perfect consistency with itself. As the animal-painter
said of his favourite picture of rabbits that there was more nature about
those rabbits than you usually found in rabbits, so it may be said of Mr.
Fechter’s Hamlet, that there was more consistency about that Hamlet than
you usually found in Hamlets. Its great and satisfying originality was
in its possessing the merit of a distinctly conceived and executed idea.
From the first appearance of the broken glass of fashion and mould of
form, pale and worn with weeping for his father’s death, and remotely
suspicious of its cause, to his final struggle with Horatio for the fatal
cup, there were cohesion and coherence in Mr. Fechter’s view of the
character. Devrient, the German actor, had, some years before in London,
fluttered the theatrical doves considerably, by such changes as being
seated when instructing the players, and like mild departures from
established usage; but he had worn, in the main, the old nondescript
dress, and had held forth, in the main, in the old way, hovering between
sanity and madness. I do not remember whether he wore his hair crisply
curled short, as if he were going to an everlasting dancing-master’s
party at the Danish court; but I do remember that most other Hamlets
since the great Kemble had been bound to do so. Mr. Fechter’s Hamlet, a
pale, woebegone Norseman with long flaxen hair, wearing a strange garb
never associated with the part upon the English stage (if ever seen there
at all) and making a piratical swoop upon the whole fleet of little
theatrical prescriptions without meaning, or, like Dr. Johnson’s
celebrated friend, with only one idea in them, and that a wrong one,
never could have achieved its extraordinary success but for its animation
by one pervading purpose, to which all changes were made intelligently
subservient. The bearing of this purpose on the treatment of Ophelia, on
the death of Polonius, and on the old student fellowship between Hamlet
and Horatio, was exceedingly striking; and the difference between
picturesqueness of stage arrangement for mere stage effect, and for the
elucidation of a meaning, was well displayed in there having been a
gallery of musicians at the Play, and in one of them passing on his way
out, with his instrument in his hand, when Hamlet, seeing it, took it
from him, to point his talk with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
This leads me to the observation with which I have all along desired to
conclude: that Mr. Fechter’s romance and picturesqueness are always
united to a true artist’s intelligence, and a true artist’s training in a
true artist’s spirit. He became one of the company of the Théâtre
Français when he was a very young man, and he has cultivated his natural
gifts in the best schools. I cannot wish my friend a better audience
than he will have in the American people, and I cannot wish them a better
actor than they will have in my friend.