SIDDONS AND RACHEL
Twolittle 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 elseremains 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 bean 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 theLifeof Mrs. Siddons by Campbell, the inefficient friend of her later years, to whom she bequeathed her memoranda, letters, and diary. Boaden’sLife, 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, lettersof 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, butle 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 andkin 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.)