CHAPTER VIII.LADY MACBETH.
Contemporaneous critics are unanimous in declaring Lady Macbeth to be Mrs. Siddons’s finest impersonation, and it is with thisrôlethat 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 passionof 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 tendernessthat 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 appearedin 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 theFair Penitentshe “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, theagonizing 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 “Métiermust now and then take the place ofLe 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 herRemarks, 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.
Fair as the forms that, wove in Fancy’s loom,Float in light visions round the poet’s head.
Fair as the forms that, wove in Fancy’s loom,Float in light visions round the poet’s head.
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 accostedhim 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 blueeyes. 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 knowHow tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,
I have given suck, and knowHow tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,
I have given suck, and knowHow tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,
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, persuadesone 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, sawher 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 remainan 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 asparticeps 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 satisfyher. 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 herAutograph Recollectionsthat 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 thiswe 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 theaccuracy 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 herand 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.