In the season of 1880-81 Genevieve Ward made a remarkably brilliant hit with her embodiment of Stephanie De Mohrivart, in the play ofForget Me Not, by Herman Merivale, and since then she has acted that part literally all round the world. It was an extraordinary performance—potent with intellectual character, beautiful with refinement, nervous and steel-like with indomitable purpose and icy glitter, intense with passion, painfully true to an afflicting ideal of reality, and at last splendidly tragic: and it was a shining example of ductile and various art. Such a work ought surely to be recorded as one of the great achievements of the stage. Genevieve Ward showed herself to possess in copious abundance peculiar qualities of power and beauty upon which mainly the part of Stephanie is reared. The points of assimilation between the actress and the part were seen to consistin an imperial force of character, intellectual brilliancy, audacity of mind, iron will, perfect elegance of manners, a profound self-knowledge, and unerring intuitions as to the relation of motive and conduct in that vast network of circumstance which is the social fabric. Stephanie possesses all those attributes; and all those attributes Genevieve Ward supplied, with the luxuriant adequacy and grace of nature. But Stephanie superadds to those attributes a bitter, mocking cynicism, thinly veiled by artificial suavity and logically irradiant from natural hardness of heart, coupled with an insensibility that has been engendered by cruel experience of human selfishness. This, together with a certain mystical touch of the animal freedom, whether in joy or wrath, that goes with a being having neither soul nor conscience, the actress had to supply—and did supply—by her art. As interpreted by Genevieve Ward the character was reared, not upon a basis of unchastity but upon a basis of intellectual perversion. Stephanie has followed—at first with self-contempt, afterward with sullen indifference, finally with the bold and brilliant hardihood of reckless defiance—a life of crime. She is audacious, unscrupulous,cruel; a consummate tactician; almost sexless, yet a siren in knowledge and capacity to use the arts of her sex; capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked; but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,—in everything visible and audible,—the ideal of grace and melody.
In the presence of an admirable work of art the observer wishes that it were entirely worthy of being performed and that it were entirely clear and sound as to its applicability—in a moral sense, or even in an intellectual sense—to human life. Art does not go far when it stops short at the revelation of the felicitous powers of the artist; and it is not altogether right when it tends to beguile sympathy with an unworthy object and perplex a spectator's perceptions as to good and evil. Genevieve Ward's performance of Stephanie, brilliantthough it was, did not redeem the character from its bleak exile from human sympathy. The actress managed, by a scheme of treatment exclusively her own, to make Stephanie, for two or three moments, piteous and forlorn; and her expression of that evanescent anguish—occurring in the appeal to Sir Horace Welby, her friendly foe, in the strong scene of the second act—was wonderfully subtle. That appeal, as Genevieve Ward made it, began in artifice, became profoundly sincere, and then was stunned and startled into a recoil of resentment by a harsh rebuff, whereupon it subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less detestable. The blight remains upon it—and always must remain—that it repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable or disastrous than vicious conduct in a man: the woman, equally with the man, should have a social license to sowthe juvenile wild oats and effect the middle-aged reformation; and it is only because there are gay young men who indulge in profligacy that women sometimes become adventurers and moral monsters. All this is launched forth in speeches of singular terseness, eloquence, and vigour; but all this is specious and mischievous perversion of the truth—however admirably in character from Stephanie's lips. Every observer who has looked carefully upon the world is aware that the consequences of wrongdoing by a woman are vastly more pernicious than those of wrongdoing by a man; that society could not exist in decency, if to its already inconvenient coterie of reformed rakes it were to add a legion of reformed wantons; and that it is innate wickedness and evil propensity that makes such women as Stephanie, and not the mere existence of the wild young men who are willing to become their comrades—and who generally end by being their dupes and victims. It is natural, however, that this adventurer—who has kept a gambling-hell and ruined many a man, soul and body, and who now wishes to reinstate herself in a virtuous social position—should thus strive to palliate her past proceedings. Self-justification is one of the first laws of life. Even Iago, who never deceives himself, yet announces one adequate motive for his fearful crimes. Even Bulwer's Margrave—that prodigy of evil, that cardinal type of infernal, joyous, animal depravity—can yet paint himself in the light of harmless loveliness and innocent gayety.
Forget Me Nottells a thin story, but its story has been made to yield excellent dramatic pictures, splendid moments of intellectual combat, and affecting contrasts of character. The dialogue, particularly in the second act, is as strong and as brilliant as polished steel. In that combat of words Genevieve Ward's acting was delicious with trenchant skill and fascinating variety. The easy, good-natured, bantering air with which the strife began, the liquid purity of the tones, the delicate glow of the arch satire, the icy glitter of the thought and purpose beneath the words, the transition into pathos and back again into gay indifference and deadly hostility, the sudden and terrible mood of menace, when at length the crisis had passed and the evil genius had won its temporary victory—all those were in perfect taste and consummate harmony. Seeing that brilliant, supple, relentless, formidable figure, and hearing thatincisive, bell-like voice, the spectator was repelled and attracted at the same instant, and thoroughly bewildered with the sense of a power and beauty as hateful as they were puissant. Not since Ristori acted Lucretia Borgia has the stage exhibited such an image of imperial will, made radiant with beauty and electric with flashes of passion. The leopard and the serpent are fatal, terrible, and loathsome; yet they scarcely have a peer among nature's supreme symbols of power and grace. Into the last scene ofForget Me Not,—when at length Stephanie is crushed by physical fear, through beholding, unseen by him, the man who would kill her as a malignant and dangerous reptile,—Genevieve Ward introduced such illustrative "business," not provided by the piece, as greatly enhanced the final effect. The backward rush from the door, on seeing the Corsican avenger on the staircase, and therewithal the incidental, involuntary cry of terror, was the invention of the actress: and from that moment to the final exit she was the incarnation of abject fear. The situation is one of the strongest that dramatic ingenuity has invented: the actress invested it with a colouring of pathetic and awful truth.
E.S. Willard accomplished his first appearance upon the American stage (at Palmer's theatre, November 10, 1890), in the powerful play ofThe Middleman, by Henry Arthur Jones. A representative audience welcomed the modest and gentle stranger and the greeting that hailed him was that of earnest respect. Willard had long been known and esteemed in New York by the dramatic profession and by those persons who habitually observe the changeful aspects of the contemporary stage on both sides of the ocean; but to the American public his name had been comparatively strange. The sentiment of kindness with which he was received deepened into admiration as the night wore on, and before the last curtain fell upon his performance of Cyrus Blenkarn he had gained an unequivocal and auspicious victory. Inno case has the first appearance of a new actor been accompanied with a more brilliant exemplification of simple worth; and in no case has its conquest of the public enthusiasm been more decisive. Not the least impressive feature of the night was the steadily increasing surprise of the audience as the performance proceeded. It was the actor's way to build slowly, and at the opening of the piece the poor inventor's blind ignorance of the calamity that is impending is chiefly trusted to create essential sympathy. Through those moments of approaching sorrow the sweet unconsciousness of the loving father was expressed by Willard with touching truth. In this he astonished even as much as he pleased his auditors; for they were not expecting it.
One of the most exquisite enjoyments provided by the stage is the advent of a new actor who is not only new but good. It is the pleasure of discovery. It is the pleasure of contact with a rich mind hitherto unexplored. The personal appearance, the power of the eye, the variety of the facial expression, the tones of the voice, the carriage of the person, the salient attributes of the individual character, the altitude of the intellectual development, thequality of the spirit, the extent and the nature of those artistic faculties and resources that constitute the professional equipment,—all those things become the subject first of interested inquiry and next of pleased recognition. Willard is neither of the stately, the weird, the mysterious, nor the ferocious order of actor. There is nothing in him of either Werner, Manfred, or Sir Giles Overreach. He belongs not to either the tradition of John Kemble or of Edmund Kean. His personality, nevertheless, is of a distinctive and interesting kind. He has the self-poise and the exalted calm of immense reserve power and of tender and tremulous sensibility perfectly controlled. His acting is conspicuously marked by two of the loveliest attributes of art—simplicity and sincerity. He conceals neither the face nor the heart. His figure is fine and his demeanour is that of vigorous mental authority informed by moral purity and by the self-respect of a manly spirit. Goodness, although a quality seldom taken into the critical estimate, nevertheless has its part in spiritual constitution and in consequent effect. It was, for instance, an element of artistic potentiality in the late John McCullough. It operated spontaneously; and justso it does in the acting of Willard, who, first of all, gives the satisfying impression of being genuine. A direct and thorough method of expression naturally accompanies that order of mind and that quality of temperament. Every movement that Willard makes upon the stage is clear, free, open, firm, and of an obvious significance. Every tone of his rich and resonant voice is distinctly intended and is distinctly heard. There are no "flaws and starts." He has formed a precise ideal. He knows exactly how to embody and to utter it, and he makes the manifestation of it sharp, defined, positive, and cogent. His meaning cannot be missed. He has an unerring sense of proportion and symmetry. The character that he represents is shown, indeed, all at once, as a unique identity; but it is not all at once developed, the manifestation of it being made gradually to proceed under the stress of experience and of emotion. He rises with the occasion. His feelings are deep, and he is possessed of extraordinary power for the utterance of them—not simply vocal power, although that, in his case, is exceptional, but the rare faculty of becoming convulsed, inspired, transfigured, by passion, and of being swept along by it, and ofsweeping along his hearers. His manner covers, without concealing, great intensity. This is such a combination of traits as must have existed—if the old records are read aright—in that fine and famous actor, John Henderson, and which certainly existed in the late Benjamin Webster. It has, however, always been rare upon the stage, and, like all rare jewels, it is precious. The actor who, from an habitual mood of sweet gravity and patient gentleness, can rise to the height of delirious passion, and there sustain himself at a poise of tempestuous concentration which is the fulfilment of nature, and never once seem either ludicrous or extravagant, is an actor of splendid power and extraordinary self-discipline. Such an actor is Willard. The blue eyes, the slightly olive complexion, the compact person, the picturesque appearance, the melodious voice, the flexibility of natural action, and the gradual and easy ascent from the calm level of domestic peace to the stormy summit of passionate ecstasy recall personal peculiarities and artistic methods long passed away. The best days of Edwin L. Davenport and the younger James Wallack are brought to mind by them.
In the drama ofThe MiddlemanWillard had to impersonate an inventor, of the absorbed, enthusiastic, self-regardless, fanatical kind. Cyrus Blenkarn is a potter. His genius and his toil have enriched two persons named Chandler, father and son, who own and conduct a porcelain factory in an English town of the present day. Blenkarn has two daughters, and one of them is taken from him by the younger Chandler. The circumstances of that deprivation point at disgrace, and the inventor conceives himself to have suffered an odious ignominy and irreparable wrong. Young Chandler has departed and so has Mary Blenkarn, and they are eventually to return as husband and wife; but Cyrus Blenkarn has been aroused from his reveries over the crucible and furnace,—wherein he is striving to discover a lost secret in the potter's art that will make him both rich and famous,—and he utters a prayer for vengeance upon these Chandlers, and he parts from them. A time of destitution and of pitiful struggle with dire necessity, sleepless grief, and the maddening impulse of vengeance now comes upon him, so that he is wasted almost to death. He will not, however, abandon his quest for the secret of his art. He may die ofhunger and wretchedness; he will not yield. At the last moment of his trial and his misery—alone—at night—in the alternate lurid blaze and murky gloom of his firing-house—success is conquered: the secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries gradually and artfully lead, affords a great opportunity to an actor; and Willard greatly filled it. The old inventor has been bowed down almost to despair. Grief and destitution, the sight of his remaining daughter's poverty, and the conflict of many feelings have made him a wreck. But his will remains firm. It is not, however, until his last hope has been abandoned that his success suddenly comes—and the result of this is a delirium. That situation, one of the best in modern drama, has been treated by the author in such a manner as to sustain for a long time the feeling of suspense and to put an enormous strain upon the emotion and the resources of an actor. Willard's presentment of the gaunt, attenuated figure of Cyrus Blenkarn—hollow-eyed, half-frantic, hysterical with grief and joy—was the complete incarnation of a dramatic frensy; and this, being sympathetic, and moving to goodness and not to evil, captured theheart. It was a magnificent exhibition, not alone of the physical force that sometimes is so essential in acting but of that fervour of the soul without which acting is a mockery.
The skill with which Willard reserved his power, so that the impersonation might gradually increase in strength, was one of the best merits of his art. Blenkarn's prayer might readily be converted into the climax of the piece, and it might readily be spoken in such a way that no effect would be left for the culmination in the furnace-room. Those errors were avoided, and during three out of the four acts the movement of the piece was fluent, continuous, and cumulative. In this respect both the drama and the performance were instructive. Henry Arthur Jones has diversified his serious scenes with passages of sportive humour and he has freighted the piece with conventional didacticism as to the well-worn question of capital and labour. The humour is good: the political economy need not detain attention. The value of the play does not reside in its teaching but in its dramatic presentation of strong character, individual experience, and significant story. The effect produced byThe Middlemanis that ofmoral elevation. Its auditor is touched and ennobled by a spectacle of stern trial, pitiable suffering, and stoical endurance. In the purpose that presides over human destiny—if one may accept the testimony equally of history and of fiction—it appears to be necessary first to create strong characters and then to break them; and the manner in which they are broken usually involves the elements alike of dramatic effect and of pathos. That singular fact in mortal experience may have been noticed by this author. His drama is a forcible exposition of it.The Middlemanwas set upon Palmer's stage in such a way as to strengthen the dramatic illusion by the fidelity of scenery. The firing-house, with its furnaces in operation, was a copy of what may be seen at Worcester. The picture of English life was excellent.
When Willard played the part of Judah Llewellyn for the first time in America (December 29, 1890), he gained from a sympathetic and judicious audience a verdict of emphatic admiration. Judah Llewellyn is a good part in one of the most striking plays of the period—a play that tells an interesting and significant story by expressive, felicitous, and incessant action;affects the feelings by situations that are vital with dramatic power; inspires useful thought upon a theme of psychological importance; cheers the mind with a fresh breeze of satirical humour; and delights the instinct of taste by its crisp and pungent style. Alike by his choice of a comparatively original subject and his deft method in the treatment of it Henry Arthur Jones has shown a fine dramatic instinct; and equally in the evolution of character and the expression of experience and emotion he has wrought with feeling and vigour. Most of the plays that are written, in any given period, pass away with the period to which they appertain.Judahis one of the exceptions; for its brilliantly treated theme is one of perennial interest, and there seems reason to believe, of a work so vital, that long after the present generation has vanished it still will keep its place in the theatre, and sometimes be acted, not as a quaint relic but as a living lesson.
That theme is the psychic force in human organism. The author does not obtrude it; does not play the pedant with it; does not lecture upon it; and above all does not bore with it. He only uses it; and he has been so true to his province as a dramatist and not an advocate that he never once assumes to decide upon any question of doctrine that may be involved in the assertion of it. His heroine is a young woman who thinks herself to be possessed of a certain inherent restorative power of curing the sick. This power is of psychic origin and it operates through the medium of personal influence. This girl, Vashti Dethick, has exerted her power with some success. Other persons, having felt its good effect, have admitted its existence. The father of Vashti, an enterprising scamp, has thereupon compelled the girl to trade upon her peculiar faculty; little by little to assume miraculous powers; and finally to pretend that her celestial talent is refreshed and strengthened by abstinence from food, and that her cures are wrought only after she has fasted for many days. He has thus converted her into an impostor; yet, as her heart is pure and her moral principle naturally sound, she is ill at ease in this false position, and her mental distress has suddenly become aggravated, almost to the pitch of desperation, by the arrival of love. She has lost her heart to a young clergyman, Judah Llewellyn, the purity of whose spirit and the beauty of whose lifeare a bitter and burning rebuke to her enforced deceitfulness of conduct. Here is a woman innocently guilty, suddenly aroused by love, made sensitive and noble (as that passion commonly makes those persons who really feel it), and projected into a condition of aggrieved excitement. In this posture of romantic and pathetic circumstances the crisis of two lives is suddenly precipitated in action.
Judah Llewellyn also is possessed of spiritual sensibility and psychic force. In boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence, invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her. It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his devotion to his Master's work. The attraction between these creatures is human; and yet it is more of heaven than of earth. It is a tie of spiritual kindred that binds them. They are beings of a different order from the common order—and, ashappens in such cases, they will be tried by exceptional troubles and passed through a fire of mortal anguish. For what reason experience should take the direction of misery with fine natures in human life no philosopher has yet been able to ascertain; but that it does take that direction all competent observation proves. To Vashti and Judah the time speedily comes when their love is acknowledged, upon both sides—the preacher speaking plainly; the girl, conscious of turpitude, shrinking from a spoken avowal which yet her whole personality proclaims. Yielding to her father's malign will she has consented to make one more manifestation of curative power, to go through once more,—and for the last time,—the mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter—an only child, cursed with constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline. This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation test shall be thoroughly made. Lord Asgarby, willing to do anything for his idolised daughter, assentsto the plan, and his scientific friend, cynical Professor Jopp, agrees, with the assistance of his erudite daughter, to supervise the experiment. Vashti will fast for several days, and the heir of Asgarby will then be healed by her purified and exalted influence.
The principal scene of the play shows the exterior of an ancient, unused tower of Asgarby House, in which Vashti is detained during the fast. The girl is supposed to be starving. Her scampish father will endeavour to relieve her. Miss Jopp is vigilant to prevent fraud. The patient is confident. Judah, wishful to be near to the object of his adoration, has climbed the outer wall and is watching, beneath the window, unseen, in the warder's seat. The time is summer, the hour midnight, and the irrevocable vow of love has been spoken. At that supreme instant, and under conditions so natural that the picture seems one of actual life, the sin of Vashti is revealed and the man who had adored her as an angel knows her for a cheat. With a difference of circumstances that situation—in the fibre of it—is not new. Many a lover, male and female, has learned that every idol has its flaw. But the situation is new in its dramatic structure. For Judah thediscovery is a terrible one, and the resultant agony is convulsive and lamentable. He takes, however, the only course he could be expected to take: he must vindicate the integrity of the woman whom he loves, and he commits the crime of perjury in order to shield her reputation from disgrace.
What will a man do for the woman whom he loves? The attributes of individual character are always to be considered as forces likely to modify passion and to affect conduct. But in general the answer to that question may be given in three words—anything and everything! The history of nations, as of individuals, is never rightly read until it is read in the light of knowledge of the influence that has been exerted over them by women. Cleopatra, in ancient Egypt, changed the history of Rome by the ruin of Marc Antony. Another heroine recently toppled Ireland down the fire-escape into the back-yard. So goes the world. In Judah, however, the crime that is done for love is pursued to its consequence of ever-accumulative suffering, until at length, when it has been expiated by remorse and repentance, it is rectified by confession and obliterated by pardon. No play ever taught a lesson of truth with more cogent dramaticforce. The cynical, humorous scenes are delightful.
Willard's representation of Cyrus Blenkarn stamped him as one of the best actors of the age. His representation of Judah Llewellyn deepened that impression and reinforced it with a conviction of marked versatility. In his utterance of passion Willard showed that he has advanced far beyond the Romeo stage. The love that he expressed was that of a man—intellectual, spiritual, noble, a moral being and one essentially true. Man's love, when it is real, adores its object; hallows it; invests it with celestial attributes; and beholds it as a part of heaven. That quality of reverence was distinctly conveyed by the actor, and therefore to observers who conceive passion to be delirious abandonment (of which any animal is capable), his ardour may have seemed dry and cold. It was nevertheless true. He made the tempestuous torrent of Judah's avowal the more overwhelming by his preliminary self-repression and his thoughtful gentleness of reserve; for thus the hunger of desire was beautiful with devotion and tenderness; and while the actor's feelings seemed borne away upon a whirling tide of irresistible impulse hisexquisite art kept a perfect control of face, voice, person, demeanour, and delivery, and not once permitted a lapse into extravagance. The character thus embodied will long be remembered as an image of dignity, sweetness, moral enthusiasm, passionate fervour, and intellectual power; but, also, viewed as an effort in the art of acting, it will be remembered as a type of consummate grace in the embodiment of a beautiful ideal clearly conceived. The effect of spiritual suffering, as conveyed in the pallid countenance and ravaged figure, in the last act, was that of noble pathos. The delivery of all the speeches of the broken, humiliated, haunted minister was deeply touching, not alone in music of voice but in denotement of knowledge of human nature and human suffering and endurance. The actor who can play such a part in such a manner is not an experimental artist. Rather let him be called—in the expressive words of one of his country's poets—
"Sacred historian of the heartAnd moral nature's lord."
"Sacred historian of the heartAnd moral nature's lord."
Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness—all these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the stage pantheon of kings and heroes.
Alfieri's tragedy ofSaulwas written in 1782-83, when the haughty, impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little labour.Saulis in five acts and it contains 1567 lines—of that Italianversi scioltiwhich inadequately corresponds to the blank verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel, Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the action—or rather, by the suffering—of the piece is a single day, the last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act second presents the distracted monarch, who knows thatGod has forsaken him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man, and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David—whom he at once loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence of Israel—so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease; the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy, massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end with the fire of a sublime imagination.
Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of rankingSaulwithLear. The claim is natural but it is not valid. InLear—not to speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast philosophy of human life—there is a tremendous scope of action, through which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of afflicted goodness. InSaulthere is simply—upon a limited canvas, without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a dramatic background—the portraiture of a condition; and, because the man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul should be deemed the greatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with the severe simplicity of theBible narrative on which it is founded. It depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state. Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdenedwith the frightful consciousness of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery—a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and chastened.
Salvini's embodiment of King Lear was a remarkable manifestation of physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific and positive limitations—spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet, was unspiritual—giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative, obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not command the judgment.
His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations. During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric, disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and especially destitute of inherent personal fascination—of the suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin—but he has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent, overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself" were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia—as in "No more of that, I have noted it well"—and he gave, at the beginning, no intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first mad scene.
Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a table, in the first scene—which had the effect of preparation for a lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear: it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action, seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its due effect.
Henry Irving's impersonation of Eugene Aram—given in a vein that is distinctly unique—was one of strange and melancholy grace and also of weird poetical and pathetic power.
More than fifty years ago, just after Bulwer's novel on the subject of Eugene Aram was published, that character first came upon the stage, and its first introduction to the American theatre occurred at the Bowery, where it was represented by John R. Scott. Aram languished, however, as a dramatic person, and soon disappeared. He did not thrive in England, neither, till, in 1873, Henry Irving, who had achieved great success inThe Bells, prompted W.G. Wills to effect his resuscitation in a new play, and acted him in a new manner. The part then found an actor who could play it,—investing psychological subtlety with tender human feeling and romantic grace, andmaking an imaginary experience of suffering vital and heartrending in its awful reality. The performance ranks with the best that Henry Irving has given—withMathias,Lesurques,Dubosc,Louis XI., andHamlet; those studies of the night-side of human nature in which his imagination and intellect and his sombre feeling have been revealed and best exemplified.
Eugene Aram was born at Ramsgill, in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, in 1704. His father, Peter Aram, was a man of good family but becoming reduced in circumstances he took service as a gardener on the estate of Sir Edward Blackett, of Newby Hall. In 1710 Peter Aram and his family were living at Bondgate, near Ripon, and there Eugene went to school and learned to read the New Testament. At a considerably later period he was instructed, during one month, by the Rev. Mr. Alcock, of Burndall. This was the extent of the tuition that he ever received from others. For the rest he was self-taught. He had a natural passion for knowledge and he displayed wonderful industry in its acquisition. When sixteen years old he knew something of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later he made himself acquainted with Chaldaic and Arabic.His occupation, up to this time, was that of assistant to his father, the gardener; but about 1720 he was employed in London as a clerk to a merchant, Mr. Christopher Blackett, a relative to his father's patron, Sir Edward. He did not remain there long. A serious illness prostrated him, and on recovering he returned to Nidderdale, with which romantic region his fate was to be forever associated. He now became a tutor, and not long after he was employed as such at a manor-house, near Ramsgill, called Gowthwaite Hall, a residence built early in the seventeenth century by Sir John Yorke, and long inhabited by his descendants. While living there he met and courted Anna Spance, the daughter of a farmer, at the lonely village of Lofthouse, and in 1731 he married her. The Middlesmoor registry contains the record of this marriage, and of the baptism and death of their first child. In 1734 Eugene Aram removed to Knaresborough, where he kept a school. He had, all this while, sedulously pursued his studies, and he now was a scholar of extraordinary acquirements, not only in the languages but in botany, heraldry, and many other branches of learning. His life seemed fair and his futurebright: but a change was at hand. He had not resided long at Knaresborough before he became acquainted with three persons most unlike himself in every way. These men were Henry Terry, Richard Houseman, and Daniel Clarke. Houseman was a flax-dresser. Clarke was a travelling jeweller. All of them were intemperate; and it is supposed that the beginning of Eugene Aram's downfall was the appetite for drink. The confederacy that he formed with these men is not easily explicable, and probably it never has been rightly explained. The accepted statement is that it was a confederacy for fraud and theft. Clarke was reported to be the heir presumptive to a large fortune. He purchased goods, was punctual in his payments, and established his credit. He was supposed to be making purchases for a merchant in London. He dealt largely in gold and silver plate and in watches, and soon he made a liberal use of his credit to accumulate valuable objects. In 1744 he disappeared, and he never was seen or heard of again. His frauds became known, and the houses of Aram and Houseman, suspected as his associates, were searched, but nothing was found to implicate either of them.
Soon after this event Aram left Knaresborough—deserting his wife—and proceeded to London, where for two years he had employment as a teacher of Latin. He was subsequently an usher at the boarding school of the Rev. Anthony Hinton, at Hayes, in Middlesex, and there it was observed that he displayed an extraordinary and scrupulous tenderness and solicitude as to the life and safety of even worms and insects—which he would remove from the garden walks and put into places of security. At a later period he found employment as a transcriber of acts of Parliament, for registration in chancery. Still later he became an usher at the Free School of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, among other labours, he undertook to make a comparative lexicon, and with this purpose collated over 3000 words in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic. He had ample opportunity to leave England but he never did so. At length, in 1759, a labourer who was digging for limestone, at a place known as St. Robert's Cave, Thistle Hill, near Knaresborough, came upon a human skeleton, bent double and buried in the earth. Suspicion was aroused. These bones, it was surmised, might be those of DanielClarke. His mysterious disappearance and his associates were remembered. The authorities sent forth and arrested Terry, Houseman, and Eugene Aram, and those persons were brought to their trial at York. A bold front would have saved them, for the evidence against them was weak. Aram stood firm, but Houseman quailed, and presently he turned "state's evidence" and denounced Aram as the murderer of Clarke. The accused scholar spoke in his own defence, and with astonishing skill, but he failed to defeat the direct and decisive evidence of his accomplice. Houseman declared that on the day of the murder Clarke, Aram, and himself were in company, and were occupied in disposing of the property which they had obtained; that Aram proposed to walk in the fields, and that they proceeded, thereupon, at nightfall, to the vicinity of St. Robert's Cave. Clarke and Aram, he said, went over the hedge and advanced toward the cave, and Aram struck Clarke several times upon the breast and head, and so killed him. It was a dark night, and in the middle of winter, but the moon was shining through drifting clouds, and Houseman said he could see the movement of Aram's handbut not the weapon that it held. He was about twelve yards from the spot of the murder. He testified that the body of Clarke was buried in the cave. The presiding justice charged against the prisoner and Eugene Aram was convicted and condemned. He subsequently, it is said, confessed the crime, alleging to the clergyman by whom he was attended that his wife had been led into an intrigue by Clarke, and that this was the cause of the murder. Here, doubtless, is the indication of the true nature of this tragedy. Aram, prior to his execution, was confined in York Castle, where he wrote a poem of considerable length and some merit, and also several shorter pieces of verse. On the morning of his execution it was found that he had opened a vein in his arm, with the intent to bleed to death, but the wound was staunched, and he was taken to Knaresborough and there hanged, and afterward his body was hung in chains in Knaresborough Forest. His death occurred on August 13, 1759, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. On the night before his execution he wrote a rhythmical apostrophe to death:—